September 1968. Beverly Hills, the Estes Zipper Motor Company on Wilshire Boulevard. Cheap Thrills had just gone to number one. Janis Joplin had money for the first time in her life. Real money. The kind of money where you could walk into a car dealership and buy something without checking your account first.

She walked in with her attorney Bob Gordon. The car she wanted was a 1964 Porsche 356C Cabriolet, used. 17 coats of oyster lacquer, each rubbed down separately. The color, pearl white. The price, $3,500. She bought it. Then she drove it home and looked at it in the driveway. Pearl white, she decided, would not do.

Dave Richards was Big Brother’s former equipment manager and a part-time artist. He had painted things before, not cars, but things. He had an eye and a hand and a willingness to try. Janis called him. She told him she wanted the car painted. All of it. Something psychedelic. Something that looked like what it felt like to be her in 1968 in San Francisco with a number one album and more energy than the world knew what to do with.

He said yes. She paid him $500. He started with a base coat of candy apple red. Then he picked up a brush. Then he started painting. He painted for weeks. Every surface, every panel, the hood, the doors, the trunk, the fenders. Under the gas flap, he painted a man’s face spewing his guts. Butterflies, jellyfish, the eye of God, Janis’s astrological sign, Capricorn, portraits of the Big Brother band members, the green valleys of northern California, the Marin County landscape on one door, the cosmos on another, floating skulls,

psychedelic mushrooms, a bloodied American flag. He called it the history of the universe. He used house paint. Regular house paint from a hardware store. Not automotive paint. Not professional materials. House paint on a German sports car. Then he covered the entire thing in clear coat to protect it.

 The clear coat would turn out to be one of the most important decisions in the story. By the end of 1968, Janis Joplin was driving the most recognizable car in San Francisco, possibly in all of California. Her sister Laura wrote about it later. Janis drove the car everywhere, all around San Francisco and down to Los Angeles when she was recording there.

Fans could see Janis’s automobile wherever she went. There was always at least one note under the wipers when she parked it and came back. David Niehaus, the man from Brazil, the one who had known her as just a girl on a beach, remembered, “I’d park the Porsche and by the time we came back, there’d be 150 people around the car.

It got old pretty quick. The car was more famous than most people. It was impossible to be anonymous in it, which was partly the point and partly a problem.” She had written “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz in a bar on a napkin.” She wrote it about wanting things that don’t come, about the gap between what you ask for and what you get.

 And all the while she was driving a Porsche, which was exactly the car her friends drove, the car that was supposed to symbolize having arrived. Except hers was painted with the history of the universe in house paint by a roadie for $500. She was her own punchline. She knew it. The car proved it. Then someone stole it. 1969, a gig at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco.

 Janis came out after the show. The car was gone. The thief made one critical mistake. He tried to repaint it. He covered the history of the universe in primer gray. Just sprayed right over Dave Richards’s butterflies and jellyfish and the eye of God. But the clear coat held. The police recovered the car before the thief could finish the job.

 Janis took it back to Dave Richards. He peeled away the primer. Beneath it, protected by the clear coat, the original artwork was almost entirely intact. House paint, a clear coat, a roadie with a brush. They had built something that a thief couldn’t destroy. On October 1st, 1970, Janis Joplin drove the Porsche to Sunset Sound Recording Studio and recorded Mercedes-Benz.

Then she drove to Barney’s Beanery. She had a vodka orange juice. She talked to her friends about how good the album was. She carved her name into a table. Then she drove back to the Landmark Motor Hotel. She parked the Porsche. She went to her room. Three days later, October 4th, 1970, John Cooke walked across the parking lot of the Landmark Motor Hotel.

He was looking for Janis. She hadn’t shown up at the studio. The Porsche was still there. That was the first sign. The most recognizable car in California sitting in a hotel parking lot unmoved. The car that went everywhere she went, parked and silent. He went inside. He came out knowing what he had found. The Porsche stayed in the parking lot for a while after that.

 Nobody moved it right away. After Janis’s death, the car went to her manager Albert Grossman, who kept it in Bearsville, New York. Visiting musicians drove it. It spent years being used and then less used and then not used and then slowly falling apart. By the time her family got the car back in 1973, the famous paint job was flaking off.

Michael Joplin, her brother, said, “I would drive along and big chips of paint would fly off. It was an old car and it started falling apart.” After much anguish, we decided to take the paint off to save the car. The history of the universe was removed to save the Porsche. And for a while after that, with the psychedelic mural gone and the fame of the 1960s fading, the car was just an old Porsche.

More valuable as an antique than as Janis Joplin’s car. Michael said, “10 years after her death, she was an old star. It took a while for her to achieve iconic status. Then in the early 1990s, the family produced a play called Love, Janis. Her memory came back. The icon status arrived. And they made a decision.

Restore the Porsche. Bring back the history of the universe.” They commissioned two artists, Jana Mitchell and Amber Owen, to recreate Dave Richards’s original work from stacks of period photographs. The two women studied every photograph they could find of the car. They replicated the imagery.

 They replicated the brush strokes. They completed the restoration in 1995. The car went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. It stayed there for 20 years. In December 2015, the Joplin family decided to sell. The proceeds would go to charity, to programs in Janis’s name. The car that she had bought for $3,500 and had painted for $500 went to auction at RM Sotheby’s in New York.

Expected to sell for 4 to 600,000 dollars, the winning bid came in at 1,760,000 dollars. A record for any Porsche 356 ever sold at public auction. A woman in Michigan bought it as a gift for her own 60th birthday. The car that Janis Joplin drove to the Landmark Motor Hotel on October 1st, 1970 and never came back for, sold 50 years later for 1.

76 million dollars. House paint, a clear coat, a roadie named Dave Richards, $500, the history of the universe. Here is what this story asks you. What is the thing you own that tells the story of who you are more honestly than anything else? Not the thing you bought to impress people. Not the thing you display.

 The thing that if someone looked at it carefully, would show them something true about you. Janis Joplin had a Porsche, a German sports car, a status symbol. The exact thing her friends drove. And she covered it in the history of the universe, painted in house paint by a roadie for $500. And drove it everywhere until it was the most recognizable car in California.

The car that was supposed to say, “I have arrived.” became the car that said, “I am too much and I know it and I am driving it down Wilshire Boulevard anyway.” She sang about wanting a Mercedes. She drove the Porsche. Both things were true. She understood both things were true. She found the whole thing very funny.

The car still exists. Someone in Michigan drives it sometimes. $1.76 million, house paint, $500, the history of the universe, and a parking lot in Los Angeles where the car sat unmoved on a Sunday morning in October 1970, which was the first sign that something had gone wrong. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you before.