PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), July 30, 2008:
By L.A. Johnson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Singer-songwriter Janis Ian's autobiography is titled "Society's Child: My Autobiography."
Janis Ian has lived a rich and wonderful, painful and uplifting life.
In 1966 at age 15, the gifted and precocious folksinger-songwriter had a nationwide hit with the controversial "Society's Child," a song about society's reaction to an interracial teenage couple.
Walk me down to school, baby/ Everybody's acting deaf and blind/ Until they turn and say/ "Why don't you stick to your own kind"/ My teachers all laugh, their smirking stares/ cutting deep down in our affairs/ preachers of equality/ think they believe it/ then why won't they just let us be?/ They say I can't see you any more, baby/ Can't see you any more ...
With the civil rights movement as a backdrop, the song so outraged some, Ian received hate mail and had people heckle her, calling her a "nigger lover" during live performances, she writes in her new book,
"Society's Child: My Autobiography" (Tarcher/Penguin; $26.95).
Many radio stations banned the song. DJs were fired for playing it. Someone even burned down an Atlanta radio station that aired it. A Pittsburgh radio station was one of the first to give the song airplay its first six months.
Ian, who'll be signing copies of her book at 7 p.m. Friday in Joseph-Beth Booksellers on the South Side, enjoyed whirlwind fame and infamy with the success of "Society's Child." As a celebrated newcomer to the '60s music scene in her teens, she ran with an older, exciting and dangerous crowd of musical geniuses. She did cocaine with Jimi Hendrix in a Los Angeles recording studio, and Janis Joplin once sent her home from a party when people started to shoot up heroin.
"... I fell in with a group of outsiders who were also unacceptable to the mainstream," writes Ian in her book. "They didn't care how old I was, or what my opinions were about the generation gap. They just cared about making music. I loved Jimi. To him, I was always, 'That girl who wrote that song, man, you know.'"
Her extremely candid autobiography details in engaging, page-turning prose the soul-soaring joys and profound hardships of a personal and professional life well and fully lived, from the Grammy Award-winning success of her landmark hit, "At Seventeen," to $850,000-plus worth of trouble with the IRS for years, courtesy of an unscrupulous bookkeeper.
The FBI monitored her liberal parents' phone lines and activities in the 1950s, suspecting them of Communist ties. She suffered physical and emotional abuse at the hands of male and female partners and describes feeling like a piece of meat the second time she auditioned for famed music producer Clive Davis. She learned of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination at a B.B. King concert with Hendrix and studied with legendary acting coach Stella Adler for nine years to improve her stage presence. "I had lived through some fairly interesting times that a lot of people didn't live through, and I thought I might have a different view than my contemporaries because I was 10 years younger," said Ian in a telephone interview from Nashville, her home of 20 years, in explaining why she wrote the book.
Janis Ian by Peter Cunningham. (Courtesy Wall Street Journal).
She quite matter-of-factly recounts performances, friendships and encounters with almost everyone who was/is anyone in music -- Odetta, Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, Joan Baez, Billy Joel, Mel Torme and Dolly Parton, to name a few.
When teased that it seems she knows everyone in the business, she says, simply: "It was a smaller industry in those days."
She also has a new CD, a greatest hits compilation of sorts and a companion to the book, titled "Best of Janis Ian: The Autobiography Collection." Each of the book's 20 chapters has an Ian song as its title and each song is included in the 29-cut CD set, which also has some never-before-released songs and her very first demo recording made when she was about 13.
A wonderful storyteller, Ian covers a vast amount of ground in 348 pages, from coming to terms with her sexual orientation to seeing the backside of fame and love, to enjoying a resurgence in her popularity to battling one life-threatening health crisis after another, to meeting the love of her life and partner of 19 years, Pat Snyder.
"I guess the story of meeting Pat, that would probably be a personal favorite" she says of countless stories she shares in the book. "It's just because it's a happy ending."
Ian's appearance as a musical guest on the very first episode of "Saturday Night Live" re-aired about a month ago as a tribute to recently deceased comedian George Carlin, who hosted the very first "SNL."
"I had forgotten how funny the show was and how good Carlin was, and I actually wondered why I'd thought I was so ugly," she said of seeing her 1975 "SNL" performance, back when she was a 24-year-old, raven-haired beauty.
Although book signings and concerts are consuming her time these days, she points to singer-songwriter Sarah Bettens as one of the contemporary artists she enjoys when she has time to listen to other music.
"I think she's pretty cool," Ian says.
In June 2004, Ian taped performances for her DVD "Janis Ian Live at Club Cafe" at the South Side venue.
She won't be performing publicly in Pittsburgh this visit, but a concert is slated for tonight in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, at Evans Amphitheater in Cain Park. She also is scheduled to perform Tuesday at Musikfest 2008 in Bethlehem.
"You don't have to buy anything to say 'Hello' at the book signing," she said of her appearance here Friday. "You can bring your own CDs or your old stuff. I don't want people to feel they have to spend $25 or $30 just to stop by."
L.A. Johnson
ljohnson@post-gazette.com
Copyright ©1997 - 2008 PG Publishing Co., Inc
PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), July 30, 2008:
By L.A. Johnson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Singer-songwriter Janis Ian's autobiography is titled "Society's Child: My Autobiography."
Janis Ian has lived a rich and wonderful, painful and uplifting life.
In 1966 at age 15, the gifted and precocious folksinger-songwriter had a nationwide hit with the controversial "Society's Child," a song about society's reaction to an interracial teenage couple.
Walk me down to school, baby/ Everybody's acting deaf and blind/ Until they turn and say/ "Why don't you stick to your own kind"/ My teachers all laugh, their smirking stares/ cutting deep down in our affairs/ preachers of equality/ think they believe it/ then why won't they just let us be?/ They say I can't see you any more, baby/ Can't see you any more ...
With the civil rights movement as a backdrop, the song so outraged some, Ian received hate mail and had people heckle her, calling her a "nigger lover" during live performances, she writes in her new book, "Society's Child: My Autobiography" (Tarcher/Penguin; $26.95).
Many radio stations banned the song. DJs were fired for playing it. Someone even burned down an Atlanta radio station that aired it. A Pittsburgh radio station was one of the first to give the song airplay its first six months.
Ian, who'll be signing copies of her book at 7 p.m. Friday in Joseph-Beth Booksellers on the South Side, enjoyed whirlwind fame and infamy with the success of "Society's Child." As a celebrated newcomer to the '60s music scene in her teens, she ran with an older, exciting and dangerous crowd of musical geniuses. She did cocaine with Jimi Hendrix in a Los Angeles recording studio, and Janis Joplin once sent her home from a party when people started to shoot up heroin.
"... I fell in with a group of outsiders who were also unacceptable to the mainstream," writes Ian in her book. "They didn't care how old I was, or what my opinions were about the generation gap. They just cared about making music. I loved Jimi. To him, I was always, 'That girl who wrote that song, man, you know.'"
Her extremely candid autobiography details in engaging, page-turning prose the soul-soaring joys and profound hardships of a personal and professional life well and fully lived, from the Grammy Award-winning success of her landmark hit, "At Seventeen," to $850,000-plus worth of trouble with the IRS for years, courtesy of an unscrupulous bookkeeper.
The FBI monitored her liberal parents' phone lines and activities in the 1950s, suspecting them of Communist ties. She suffered physical and emotional abuse at the hands of male and female partners and describes feeling like a piece of meat the second time she auditioned for famed music producer Clive Davis. She learned of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination at a B.B. King concert with Hendrix and studied with legendary acting coach Stella Adler for nine years to improve her stage presence. "I had lived through some fairly interesting times that a lot of people didn't live through, and I thought I might have a different view than my contemporaries because I was 10 years younger," said Ian in a telephone interview from Nashville, her home of 20 years, in explaining why she wrote the book.
Janis Ian by Peter Cunningham. (Courtesy Wall Street Journal).
She quite matter-of-factly recounts performances, friendships and encounters with almost everyone who was/is anyone in music -- Odetta, Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, Joan Baez, Billy Joel, Mel Torme and Dolly Parton, to name a few.
When teased that it seems she knows everyone in the business, she says, simply: "It was a smaller industry in those days."
She also has a new CD, a greatest hits compilation of sorts and a companion to the book, titled "Best of Janis Ian: The Autobiography Collection." Each of the book's 20 chapters has an Ian song as its title and each song is included in the 29-cut CD set, which also has some never-before-released songs and her very first demo recording made when she was about 13.
A wonderful storyteller, Ian covers a vast amount of ground in 348 pages, from coming to terms with her sexual orientation to seeing the backside of fame and love, to enjoying a resurgence in her popularity to battling one life-threatening health crisis after another, to meeting the love of her life and partner of 19 years, Pat Snyder.
"I guess the story of meeting Pat, that would probably be a personal favorite" she says of countless stories she shares in the book. "It's just because it's a happy ending."
Ian's appearance as a musical guest on the very first episode of "Saturday Night Live" re-aired about a month ago as a tribute to recently deceased comedian George Carlin, who hosted the very first "SNL."
"I had forgotten how funny the show was and how good Carlin was, and I actually wondered why I'd thought I was so ugly," she said of seeing her 1975 "SNL" performance, back when she was a 24-year-old, raven-haired beauty.
Although book signings and concerts are consuming her time these days, she points to singer-songwriter Sarah Bettens as one of the contemporary artists she enjoys when she has time to listen to other music.
"I think she's pretty cool," Ian says.
In June 2004, Ian taped performances for her DVD "Janis Ian Live at Club Cafe" at the South Side venue.
She won't be performing publicly in Pittsburgh this visit, but a concert is slated for tonight in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, at Evans Amphitheater in Cain Park. She also is scheduled to perform Tuesday at Musikfest 2008 in Bethlehem.
"You don't have to buy anything to say 'Hello' at the book signing," she said of her appearance here Friday. "You can bring your own CDs or your old stuff. I don't want people to feel they have to spend $25 or $30 just to stop by."
L.A. Johnson
ljohnson@post-gazette.com
Copyright ©1997 - 2008 PG Publishing Co., Inc
