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Lot Essay
JANIS JOPLIN’S 1953 GIBSON J-45 ACOUSTIC GUITAR, USED ON STAGE TO PERFORM WHAT WOULD BECOME HER SIGNATURE SONG ‘ME AND BOBBY MCGEE' IN DECEMBER 1969, AND LATER USED BY BOB NEUWIRTH DURING BOB DYLAN’S ROLLING THUNDER REVUE, 1975-76.
One of only two acoustic guitars in Janis Joplin’s possession at the time of her death, this well-loved Gibson J-45 served as Joplin’s primary instrument until the last months of her life and is believed to be the only personally owned guitar that she played on stage during the height of her fame. Joplin first learnt the song that would become her number one hit ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ on this guitar and performed it live on stage at both Nashville’s Fairgrounds Coliseum and New York City’s Madison Square Garden in December 1969. After Joplin’s death, the J-45 was given to her close friend and musical collaborator Bob Neuwirth, who had first taught her the song ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ and received a co-writing credit on Joplin’s ‘Mercedez Benz’.
Joplin first met East Coast musician and painter Bob Neuwirth at Berkeley coffeehouse The Cabale in 1964, when she performed a song before his set. She stood up and sang a couple, a cappella, Neuwirth told music historian and memorabilia dealer Jeff Gold. I don't remember what the tunes were, some old blues, but it was great, knocked everybody out. She was completely unknown, just arrived from Texas very, very recently. I thought she was just a great raw folk singer. And I didn't see her again until Monterey. Next time I saw her she was a star. By then acting as Bob Dylan’s aide-de-camp, Neuwirth reconnected with Joplin when she made her breakout appearance with Big Brother and the Holding Company at the legendary Monterey International Pop Festival in June 1967. At Monterey to assist filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker with shooting the concert documentary that would become Monterey Pop, Neuwirth and good friend John Byrne Cooke were blown away by Joplin’s performance. When Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman took over management of Big Brother and the Holding Company later that year, Neuwirth arranged for Cooke to act as the road manager for the group.
Although initially based on opposite coasts, Joplin and Neuwirth became friends. It was an off and on thing, recalled Neuwirth. We were partners, hang out partners, drinking partners... asshole buddies. We had both worked the same North Beach folk clubs. We'd scuffled... whenever she’d come to New York, we’d hang out, drink, have dinner. By 1969, Joplin had left Big Brother and was performing with her new group, the Kosmic Blues Band. At Grossman’s office one day that fall, Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot turned Neuwirth on to a then-unknown song he’d just learned from Nashville songwriter Kris Kristofferson. Gordon pulled out a guitar and sang this song that he’d heard in Nashville by this great songwriter that he'd met, recounted Neuwirth. And it was ‘Me and Bobby McGee’. It was a great song, so I made him teach it to me, right on the spot. Later that evening I had a dinner date with Janis and her girlfriend. And I was in their hotel room waiting for them to get dressed, so I played that song on her guitar, and Janis fell in love with it. That was the first time I'd seen this guitar. She’d told me she had an acoustic guitar at home, a beautiful Gibson J-45. I'd heard about it for a couple of years, but I'd never seen it. We know that Joplin must have acquired the guitar by 1967, when photographer Steve Schapiro shot her strumming the J-45 at her Haight-Ashbury home. Janis loved the acoustic guitar, Neuwirth continues, she was a folk singer at heart. She used to hang out at [Austin club] Threadgill's and sing folk songs. And she’d been looking for a song in the folk sort of realm that wasn't beat to death that she could perform as part of her show, just to leaven her show. And so, she seized on it, and she learned it on the spot, wrote it down. And very soon after that, a couple of days later she sang it on stage.
In her 2019 biography Janis: Her Life and Music, Holly George Warren writes: Janis began practicing ‘Bobby McGee’ on her acoustic guitar, and by the time she and the band played Nashville’s Fairgrounds Coliseum on December 16, she felt the time was right. Without warning, she started strumming the captivating song, and the band fell in behind her. When she told the audience that ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ was by a Nashville songwriter, the applause was thunderous. Road manager John Byrne Cooke recalled in his 2014 memoir: The song wasn’t on the set list but Janis decided to do it on the spur of the moment, a spontaneous decision that had the best possible outcome: The band found the groove and Janis’s first public performance of ‘Bobby McGee’ got a rousing reception in the capital of country music. Joplin’s performance of the song on her Gibson J-45 inspired a front-page review in The Nashville Tennessean, which read Janis Joplin sprang catlike from behind a wall of amplifiers last night and from a Nashville stage sang a country song for the first time in her career as America’s foremost white blues singer. “Freedom’s just another word...for nothin’ left to lose,” she sang from the song ‘Me And Bobby McGee’, a hobo balled written by Nashville songwriter Kris Kristofferson... “Where’s my pick boys,” she drawled, strapping on an unamplified country guitar after an hour of wailing and squalling the uncompromising sound of Joplin… Then she introduced the song and began to pick the guitar in her hands in the style that is so familiar on Nashville syndicated country music television. She sang the song with apparent respect, even lilting it with some of the typical country twang.
As seen in photographs by Michael Friedman and Steve Banks, Joplin played the J-45 again just three nights later when she performed ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ during her sold-out show at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on 19 December 1969, her last appearance with the Kosmic Blues Band. Joplin would play the song once more the following July during the jubilee celebration for her old mentor Kenneth Threadgill at the Party Barn in her hometown of Austin, Texas, although Cooke’s memoir indicates that she borrowed a guitar from local musician Chuck Joyce for the occasion. After being introduced by Neuwirth, Joplin began a short-lived relationship with ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ songwriter Kris Kristofferson in spring 1970, who would later say that he would always rather hear Janis sing ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ than his own version. Joplin would eventually record her version of the song in Los Angeles just a few days before her tragic death that October, at age 27. Kristofferson only found out that Joplin had recorded the song the day after she died. Released as a posthumous single a few months later, ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ became her first and only number one hit and endures as her signature song. Joplin’s version was later ranked No. 148 on Rolling Stone's 2004 list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
At some point in 1970, Joplin acquired a second acoustic guitar. Janis was in love with her J-45, Neuwirth recalled, and wanted to get a Gibson Hummingbird too, which I had been using in my shows. Sam Andrew, her guitar player, located a decent one, and at that point, she had two guitars in her stable. There are no known photographs of Joplin with the Gibson Hummingbird. After Joplin’s death in October 1970, her Gibson J-45 was given to her close friend Bob Neuwirth, while the Hummingbird was given to her guitarist Sam Andrew. The accompanying letter from John Byrne Cooke attests: I was Janis Joplin’s road manager from 1967 until 1970. In that capacity I was involved in the decision about what to do with her two Gibson acoustic guitars after her death in October 1970. With the consent of Robert E. Gordon, Janis’s attorney and the executor of her estate, Janis’s Gibson model J-45 guitar, serial number Y4897-18, which she owned for many years, and which I had personally witnessed her play many times, both in her residences and onstage, was given to her friend Bob Neuwirth.
Neuwirth went on to play Joplin’s J-45 on stage with Bob Dylan as part of the backing band during the latter’s 1975-76 Rolling Thunder Revue tour. A longtime Dylan sidekick, Neuwirth was instrumental in putting the Rolling Thunder band together and helped shape the freewheeling, carnival-like nature of the tour. Neuwirth was pictured playing the guitar alongside Dylan – both clad in custom rhinestone-studded Nudie’s jackets – during the 'Night of the Hurricane II' benefit concert for imprisoned boxer Rubin Carter at the Houston Astrodome on 25 January 1976, which bridged the two legs of the tour. According to the tour tech and showrunner Arthur Rosato, who managed the 36 guitars that were brought on the tour, it’s very possible that Dylan may have played this J-45: Bobby Neuwirth's guitar was always around the dressing room so anybody could pick it up and play. Being that Bob and Bobby were tighter than most they probably swapped guitars on numerous occasions. Neuwirth owned the guitar until his death in 2022. In his 2004 memoir Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan said of Neuwirth: Like Kerouac had immortalized Neal Cassady in ‘On the Road’, someone should have immortalized Neuwirth. He was that kind of character… Nobody knew what to make of him. If there was ever a renaissance man leaping in and out of things, he would have to be it.
REFERENCES:
J. Hurst, ‘Joplin ‘Springs’ on Country Music Lyrics’, The Nashville Tennessean, 17 December 1969.
B. Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One, New York, 2004.
H. George-Warren, Janis: Her Life and Music, New York, 2019.
B. Neuwirth, interviewed by Jeff Gold, RecordMecca, early 2022.
One of only two acoustic guitars in Janis Joplin’s possession at the time of her death, this well-loved Gibson J-45 served as Joplin’s primary instrument until the last months of her life and is believed to be the only personally owned guitar that she played on stage during the height of her fame. Joplin first learnt the song that would become her number one hit ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ on this guitar and performed it live on stage at both Nashville’s Fairgrounds Coliseum and New York City’s Madison Square Garden in December 1969. After Joplin’s death, the J-45 was given to her close friend and musical collaborator Bob Neuwirth, who had first taught her the song ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ and received a co-writing credit on Joplin’s ‘Mercedez Benz’.
Joplin first met East Coast musician and painter Bob Neuwirth at Berkeley coffeehouse The Cabale in 1964, when she performed a song before his set. She stood up and sang a couple, a cappella, Neuwirth told music historian and memorabilia dealer Jeff Gold. I don't remember what the tunes were, some old blues, but it was great, knocked everybody out. She was completely unknown, just arrived from Texas very, very recently. I thought she was just a great raw folk singer. And I didn't see her again until Monterey. Next time I saw her she was a star. By then acting as Bob Dylan’s aide-de-camp, Neuwirth reconnected with Joplin when she made her breakout appearance with Big Brother and the Holding Company at the legendary Monterey International Pop Festival in June 1967. At Monterey to assist filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker with shooting the concert documentary that would become Monterey Pop, Neuwirth and good friend John Byrne Cooke were blown away by Joplin’s performance. When Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman took over management of Big Brother and the Holding Company later that year, Neuwirth arranged for Cooke to act as the road manager for the group.
Although initially based on opposite coasts, Joplin and Neuwirth became friends. It was an off and on thing, recalled Neuwirth. We were partners, hang out partners, drinking partners... asshole buddies. We had both worked the same North Beach folk clubs. We'd scuffled... whenever she’d come to New York, we’d hang out, drink, have dinner. By 1969, Joplin had left Big Brother and was performing with her new group, the Kosmic Blues Band. At Grossman’s office one day that fall, Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot turned Neuwirth on to a then-unknown song he’d just learned from Nashville songwriter Kris Kristofferson. Gordon pulled out a guitar and sang this song that he’d heard in Nashville by this great songwriter that he'd met, recounted Neuwirth. And it was ‘Me and Bobby McGee’. It was a great song, so I made him teach it to me, right on the spot. Later that evening I had a dinner date with Janis and her girlfriend. And I was in their hotel room waiting for them to get dressed, so I played that song on her guitar, and Janis fell in love with it. That was the first time I'd seen this guitar. She’d told me she had an acoustic guitar at home, a beautiful Gibson J-45. I'd heard about it for a couple of years, but I'd never seen it. We know that Joplin must have acquired the guitar by 1967, when photographer Steve Schapiro shot her strumming the J-45 at her Haight-Ashbury home. Janis loved the acoustic guitar, Neuwirth continues, she was a folk singer at heart. She used to hang out at [Austin club] Threadgill's and sing folk songs. And she’d been looking for a song in the folk sort of realm that wasn't beat to death that she could perform as part of her show, just to leaven her show. And so, she seized on it, and she learned it on the spot, wrote it down. And very soon after that, a couple of days later she sang it on stage.
In her 2019 biography Janis: Her Life and Music, Holly George Warren writes: Janis began practicing ‘Bobby McGee’ on her acoustic guitar, and by the time she and the band played Nashville’s Fairgrounds Coliseum on December 16, she felt the time was right. Without warning, she started strumming the captivating song, and the band fell in behind her. When she told the audience that ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ was by a Nashville songwriter, the applause was thunderous. Road manager John Byrne Cooke recalled in his 2014 memoir: The song wasn’t on the set list but Janis decided to do it on the spur of the moment, a spontaneous decision that had the best possible outcome: The band found the groove and Janis’s first public performance of ‘Bobby McGee’ got a rousing reception in the capital of country music. Joplin’s performance of the song on her Gibson J-45 inspired a front-page review in The Nashville Tennessean, which read Janis Joplin sprang catlike from behind a wall of amplifiers last night and from a Nashville stage sang a country song for the first time in her career as America’s foremost white blues singer. “Freedom’s just another word...for nothin’ left to lose,” she sang from the song ‘Me And Bobby McGee’, a hobo balled written by Nashville songwriter Kris Kristofferson... “Where’s my pick boys,” she drawled, strapping on an unamplified country guitar after an hour of wailing and squalling the uncompromising sound of Joplin… Then she introduced the song and began to pick the guitar in her hands in the style that is so familiar on Nashville syndicated country music television. She sang the song with apparent respect, even lilting it with some of the typical country twang.
As seen in photographs by Michael Friedman and Steve Banks, Joplin played the J-45 again just three nights later when she performed ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ during her sold-out show at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on 19 December 1969, her last appearance with the Kosmic Blues Band. Joplin would play the song once more the following July during the jubilee celebration for her old mentor Kenneth Threadgill at the Party Barn in her hometown of Austin, Texas, although Cooke’s memoir indicates that she borrowed a guitar from local musician Chuck Joyce for the occasion. After being introduced by Neuwirth, Joplin began a short-lived relationship with ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ songwriter Kris Kristofferson in spring 1970, who would later say that he would always rather hear Janis sing ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ than his own version. Joplin would eventually record her version of the song in Los Angeles just a few days before her tragic death that October, at age 27. Kristofferson only found out that Joplin had recorded the song the day after she died. Released as a posthumous single a few months later, ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ became her first and only number one hit and endures as her signature song. Joplin’s version was later ranked No. 148 on Rolling Stone's 2004 list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
At some point in 1970, Joplin acquired a second acoustic guitar. Janis was in love with her J-45, Neuwirth recalled, and wanted to get a Gibson Hummingbird too, which I had been using in my shows. Sam Andrew, her guitar player, located a decent one, and at that point, she had two guitars in her stable. There are no known photographs of Joplin with the Gibson Hummingbird. After Joplin’s death in October 1970, her Gibson J-45 was given to her close friend Bob Neuwirth, while the Hummingbird was given to her guitarist Sam Andrew. The accompanying letter from John Byrne Cooke attests: I was Janis Joplin’s road manager from 1967 until 1970. In that capacity I was involved in the decision about what to do with her two Gibson acoustic guitars after her death in October 1970. With the consent of Robert E. Gordon, Janis’s attorney and the executor of her estate, Janis’s Gibson model J-45 guitar, serial number Y4897-18, which she owned for many years, and which I had personally witnessed her play many times, both in her residences and onstage, was given to her friend Bob Neuwirth.
Neuwirth went on to play Joplin’s J-45 on stage with Bob Dylan as part of the backing band during the latter’s 1975-76 Rolling Thunder Revue tour. A longtime Dylan sidekick, Neuwirth was instrumental in putting the Rolling Thunder band together and helped shape the freewheeling, carnival-like nature of the tour. Neuwirth was pictured playing the guitar alongside Dylan – both clad in custom rhinestone-studded Nudie’s jackets – during the 'Night of the Hurricane II' benefit concert for imprisoned boxer Rubin Carter at the Houston Astrodome on 25 January 1976, which bridged the two legs of the tour. According to the tour tech and showrunner Arthur Rosato, who managed the 36 guitars that were brought on the tour, it’s very possible that Dylan may have played this J-45: Bobby Neuwirth's guitar was always around the dressing room so anybody could pick it up and play. Being that Bob and Bobby were tighter than most they probably swapped guitars on numerous occasions. Neuwirth owned the guitar until his death in 2022. In his 2004 memoir Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan said of Neuwirth: Like Kerouac had immortalized Neal Cassady in ‘On the Road’, someone should have immortalized Neuwirth. He was that kind of character… Nobody knew what to make of him. If there was ever a renaissance man leaping in and out of things, he would have to be it.
REFERENCES:
J. Hurst, ‘Joplin ‘Springs’ on Country Music Lyrics’, The Nashville Tennessean, 17 December 1969.
B. Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One, New York, 2004.
H. George-Warren, Janis: Her Life and Music, New York, 2019.
B. Neuwirth, interviewed by Jeff Gold, RecordMecca, early 2022.