The Address on Her Driver's License

The building on your left, one twenty two Lyon Street, is unremarkable to look at, which is part of why it works as a landmark. It is simply the address Janis Joplin listed on her driver's license in nineteen sixty seven, at the exact moment she went from a singer known around the Haight Ashbury clubs to one of the most recognized voices in the country.

Joplin had joined a local band called Big Brother and the Holding Company the year before, in June of nineteen sixty six, debuting with them at the Avalon Ballroom. For months she was a rising local act, good enough to draw a following around San Francisco's psychedelic ballroom scene alongside bands like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, but not yet a national name. Some in the crowd at first struggled to accept her, since her raw, blues shouting style was a sharp departure from the loose, experimental sound Big Brother had built its reputation on.

That changed in June of nineteen sixty seven, when Big Brother played the Monterey International Pop Festival. One witness in the audience, the singer Michelle Phillips, later said she was simply astounded by what she was hearing. The performance was electric enough that it led directly to a new recording contract with Columbia Records, and within weeks Joplin's voice was reaching an audience far beyond San Francisco.

During this same period, she shared the Lyon Street apartment for a few months with Country Joe McDonald, of the band Country Joe and the Fish, another fixture of the same Haight Ashbury scene.

So the plain apartment building ahead held, for one brief season, a woman who was still mostly a local secret, in the last months before Monterey made sure she never would be again.