October 4th, [music] 1970, Sunday morning, Los Angeles. The Full Tilt Boogie Band was [music] at Sunset Sound, ready to record. Janis was supposed to be there. She didn’t come. Producer Paul Rothschild waited an hour, two hours. He called her road [music] manager, John Cooke. Cooke walked across the parking lot.

 The Porsche was still there. He knocked on the [music] door of room 105. No answer. He went to the front desk, requested a key. I’m not going >> He opened the door. This is the last time I’m going to >> was on the floor, wedged between the bed and the nightstand. She had been there for 18 hours.

 In her hand, four dollar bills and two quarters, the change from the cigarette machine. A pack of cigarettes on the side table. She was 27 years old. But this story does not start on October 4th. It starts six months earlier, with a beach in Brazil, and a man who didn’t recognize her. February 1970, Janis Joplin got on a plane to Brazil.

She was done. The Cosmic Blues Band had broken up. The reviews had been bad. The drugs had been bad. Everything had been bad. She went with her friend Linda Gravenites, someone who lived clean and wanted Janis to try. In Brazil, Janis stopped. Stopped the heroin, stopped the drinking, stopped performing. On a beach, she met David Niehaus, a school teacher traveling around the world. He had no idea who she was.

 For the first time in years, she was just a girl on a beach. He doesn’t know. He’s talking to me like I’m just someone he met. Not Janis Joplin, not the voice, not the bottle and the boa, just me. When did anyone last do that? They spent weeks together. Carnival in Rio, photographs that show two happy people having a tremendously good time.

 Janis came back clean and stayed clean through the spring, through the summer. Six months. John Cooke confirmed it. Clean for six months. I know that for a fact. She formed the Full Tilt Boogie Band. Paul Rothschild as producer. Sunset Sound. Pearl. She told people the new band was the best she’d ever had. She meant it.

 And in September, she got engaged to Seth Morgan. Seth Morgan was 21 years old, a UC Berkeley dropout, the son of a wealthy New York literary family. He had gotten into the drug trade. He was delivering cocaine when he met Janis, to her home in Marin County in July 1970. He was charming. He was present when he wanted to be. By September, they were engaged.

Morgan’s former lawyer told the Washington Post, “He fell in love with her because she was a star. Every time I saw them, they were wrapped up in each other. But they had mutual doubts about each other’s fidelity.” Morgan himself said later, “Everybody wanted to know what Janis saw in me. She was at the studio every day.

” He attended just eight of her many rehearsals. He appeared occasionally. He was simply absent in the particular way he had always been absent when it mattered. The Landmark Motor Hotel was the worst possible place for Janis Joplin to stay. David Crosby described it convenient for its proximity to the street dealers.

Musicians called it the Landmine. Janis had checked in on August 24th, during the Pearl sessions. During the sessions, Peggy Caserta had also checked in. They had agreed in April to stay away from each other to avoid enabling. Now, they were in the same hotel. Janis asked Caserta for heroin. Caserta refused.

 Janis said, “Don’t think if you can get it, I can’t get it.” She was right. She had been dabbling again for about two weeks before she died. “It was characteristic of her,” Peter Albin said, “to go from an evangelistic point back to that thing again.” October 2nd, the Friday before she died, both Seth Morgan and Peggy Caserta had promised to come to the Landmark.

 Both of them failed to show up. Seth Morgan spent that Friday evening at Janis’s house in San Francisco, entertaining other women. He didn’t get on the flight. He didn’t call. He was simply absent. Janis waited in room 105. Neither of them came. She called her regular dealer, George, the one she trusted, the one who always had the product checked.

He was out of town. She called another dealer, one she didn’t know as well. According to her sister, Laura, the heroin George usually sold had been checked by a chemist. For this batch, the chemist had been out of town. George had sold it without checking. The dope was four to 10 times stronger than normal street heroin, 40 to 50% pure.

That weekend, several other customers of the same dealer overdosed. Janis didn’t know. Nobody told her. Nobody could have known. Because of the technique she preferred, the drug entered her system more slowly. She had time. She went downstairs to the cigarette machine. She asked the receptionist for change. They exchanged a few words.

 That was the last conversation Janis Joplin ever had with a hotel receptionist who gave her change for a cigarette machine. She went back to room 105. She closed the door. At some point during the night, she fell. She hit the nightstand as she went down. Her nose broke from the impact. She came to rest wedged between the bed and the nightstand.

 In her hand, four dollar bills and two quarters, the change from the machine. Beside her, the cigarettes she had just bought. She had been lying there for 18 hours before anyone found her. At the front desk that morning, a telegram had arrived from David Niehaus, the man from Brazil, the one who had known her as just a girl on a beach.

Nobody got to read it to her. Here is what this story is really about. The official cause of death was an accidental heroin overdose. That is true. But the overdose was the last event in a chain that went back much further. It went back to Seth Morgan not getting on the plane, and Peggy Caserta not coming, and the Landmark being the Landmark, and the regular dealer being out of town, and the chemist being out of town, too.

Any one of those things being different, and she would have recorded her vocals for Buried Alive in the Blues on Sunday morning. She was clean for six months. She had the best band she’d ever had, the best album she’d ever made. She was engaged. She told Robert Rauschenberg, her Port Arthur classmate who had dinner with her two nights before she died, that things were going well.

She didn’t leave a suicide note. She didn’t want to go. She was a woman who made a mistake with a batch of drugs that were stronger than she knew. During a week when she was finally getting everything she had ever wanted. That is the real tragedy. Not that she lived the way she did, but that she was in the process of changing, and the change was almost complete.

Pearl was released in January 1971. Me and Bobby McGee went to number one. Buried Alive in the Blues was released as an instrumental, the only track without her voice, because she was going to record it the next day. Seth Morgan’s engagement to Janis became public in her obituary in Time. He died in a motorcycle accident in 1990.

 He was 41. David Niehaus’s telegram sat at the front desk, unread. We tell the story of Janis Joplin’s death as though it was inevitable, as though someone like her was always going to end up that way. But she was clean for six months. She was happy. She had done the work. The chain that ended her life was made of small things, an unanswered phone, a missed flight, a chemist who was out of town.

None of those things were inevitable. Every single one of them could have gone differently, and Pearl would have had a vocal on Buried Alive in the Blues, and Janis Joplin would have read David Niehaus’s telegram, and the painted Porsche would have moved from the parking lot. Subscribe.

 The next story is already waiting.