Jimi Hendrix had just died. Dick Cavett asked Janis Joplin about it on live television. >> [clears throat] >> What she said in the next 40 seconds left the studio completely silent. 10 days later, Janis was gone, too. And the tape of that conversation, which anyone can watch right now, which has been sitting in the archive for 50 years, contains something that nobody in that studio understood at the time.

Something that only became visible afterward when it was too late for it to matter. September 18th, 1970. Jimi Hendrix died in London at the age of 27. The cause was asphyxiation. He had taken too many sleeping pills and aspirated in his sleep. He was found in the morning. He was gone before anyone could reach him.

The news traveled fast in the way that news about the deaths of enormous people travels. Suddenly, without preparation, arriving in rooms where people were in the middle of ordinary things and stopping everything. Janis Joplin was in Los Angeles when she heard. Janis Joplin was in Los Angeles when she heard. She was recording Pearl at Sunset Sound, the album she believed would be the best work of her career.

She heard about Jimmy, and she went quiet in the specific way she went quiet when something was too large for her usual vocabulary. She did not make a public statement. She went back into the studio. She kept working. To understand what Jimi Hendrix’s death meant to Janis Joplin, you have to understand what they were to each other.

They were not close in the way of people who spent significant time together. They were close in the way of people who recognized something in each other that almost nobody else in the world contains. They had both come from outside the system. Jimmy from Seattle, black and poor and largely self-taught, playing guitar left-handed on an instrument strung for right-handed players because nobody had told him there was another way.

Janis from Port Arthur, Texas, a white girl who had absorbed the blues from the roadhouses along the Gulf Coast, and who sang with an authority that people spent years trying to explain and never quite could. They had both arrived at Monterey in 1967 and changed the same room on the same weekend.

 Janis on the first night, Jimmy on the last. Two performances that people who were present described in the same terms. I did not know this was possible. I have never seen anything like it. I will never forget this as long as I live. They were both 27 years old in September of 1970. They were both in the middle of what looked, from the outside, like the most productive period of their respective careers.

They had both been burning at both ends for years, and now one of them was gone. And the other one had a television interview scheduled for the following week. The Dick Cavett Show was the place where musicians and artists and writers went in 1970 to be taken seriously. Cavett was not the kind of host who softened his questions to protect his guests.

He was curious in the way that good interviewers are curious. Not performing interest, but genuinely wanting to know what the person in the chair actually thought. Janis had appeared on his show before. Their conversations had produced some of the most revealing footage of her that exists. The Dick Cavett interviews are, for people who want to understand who Janis Joplin actually was underneath the performance, some of the most essential documents available.

She was sharper on camera than people expected. She was funnier. She was more precise. She had a way of answering questions that contained more honesty than the question had room for. And watching Cavett receive those answers is watching a host recalibrate in real time. On September 25th, 1970, Janis Joplin sat down across from Dick Cavett for the last time.

She did not know it was the last time. Nobody did. The show that night also featured Catherine Hahn and comic Henny Youngman. It was a normal evening of television by the standards of 1970. Janis came out in her usual style. The feather boa, the beads, the oversized rings, the frizzed hair, the Southern Comfort that she carried as a prop and a companion.

She was funny from the first moment. The audience responded to her immediately in the way that live audiences always responded to Janis. With the specific warmth of people who feel that someone has walked into the room and decided to actually be there. She talked about Pearl. She talked about the Full Tilt Boogie Band.

She talked about San Francisco and about touring and about the exhaustion and the exhilaration of spending your life on stages. And then Cavett asked about Jimmy. He asked it carefully. Not as an ambush, not as a provocation. As a genuine question from someone who understood that the person sitting across from him had just lost a peer and wanted to know what that meant to her.

Janis was quiet for a moment. The studio audience, which had been laughing and responsive throughout, went still. She looked at her hands briefly. And then she looked up at Cavett, and she said something that the tape has preserved exactly. She said, “The thing is, we all might not outlive our own fame.” Cavett let that sit for a moment.

Then she said, “Jimmy was burning so hard that something had to give eventually.” She paused again. Then she said, very quietly, almost to herself, “I wonder if it’s possible to burn that hard and not burn out.” The studio was silent. Not the silence of people who are bored or distracted. The silence of people who have just heard something that has landed somewhere they were not expecting it to land.

Cavett held it for a beat longer than television usually allows. Then he moved the conversation forward. The way you do when you are sitting across from someone and you have just realized, without being able to say why, that something important has just happened. I wonder if it’s possible to burn that hard and not burn out.

Read that sentence again. She was talking about Jimi Hendrix. She was also, in the way that people sometimes speak about themselves through the vehicle of someone else, talking about herself. Ah, she had been burning at exactly that intensity since 1967. Three years of performances that left audiences describing the same things.

The giving of everything. The holding of nothing back. The specific quality of a person who has decided that the distance between what they feel and what they show is a distance not worth maintaining. Three years of that. And in September of 1970, sitting across from Dick Cavett in a television studio in New York, she looked at what had happened to Jimmy, and she asked the question out loud.

The question she had perhaps been asking herself for a while. Not rhetorically, genuinely. The way you ask a question when you actually want to know the answer and are not sure you are going to like it. There is another moment from that interview that people who have watched it closely talk about. Cavett asked her what she planned to do after Pearl was finished.

She brightened immediately. She talked about plans. A vacation she wanted to take. A place she wanted to go. Things she wanted to do that had nothing to do with recording or performing or being Janis Joplin the rock star. She talked about wanting to slow down just for a while. Just long enough to remember what it felt like to move through the world at normal speed.

 And that is the part that stays with you. She flew back to Los Angeles after the taping. She went back to Sunset Sound. She went back to Pearl. The recording sessions continued through the end of September and into early October. The band remembered her as focused and professional and fully present. The most organized she had ever been in a studio, they said.

She was drinking after hours, but not during sessions. She was using heroin, but keeping it separate from the work. The work was what mattered. The work was almost done. On October 1st, she recorded Me and Bobby McGee in a single take. On October 3rd, she He out for the evening with members of the band and road crew.

Ah. [sighs] She came back to the Landmark Motor Hotel late. She went to her room. On October 4th, John Cooke came to find her when she did not appear for a scheduled session. She was 27 years old. She had been gone for some hours. The batch of heroin she had taken was unusually pure. There was no way she could have known.

The Dick Cavett interview aired on October 5th, 1970, one day after Janis died. Millions of people watched it, not knowing she was already gone. Some of them found out during the broadcast. Some of them found out after, and all of them had the same experience, watching a woman who did not know what was coming describe her plans for a future she was not going to have.

>> [sighs] >> Watch her laugh. Watch her be funny and sharp and alive in all the ways she was always alive. And here, underneath the laughter, the question she had asked about Jimmy. I wonder if it’s possible to burn that hard and not burn out. She had answered her own question, not intentionally, not in words, but in the nine days between the taping and October 4th.

 The answer was no. For Jimmy, it was no. For Janis, it was no. For the people who burn at that specific intensity, who give everything every time and hold nothing in reserve, who decide that the distance between what they feel and what they show is a distance not worth maintaining, for those people, the candle does not last as long, but the light it puts out, that is a different question entirely.

Jimi Hendrix died on September 18th, 1970. Janis Joplin died on October 4th, 1970. 16 days apart. Both 27 years old. Both at the peak of what they were capable of producing. Both in the middle of work that their respective teams described as the best they had ever done. Both gone before the work was finished. Jim Morrison died in Paris in July of 1971, also 27.

 The pattern had a name by then, though the name came later. The 27 Club, a name that is both accurate and insufficient, because it describes the age, but not the thing that connects them. The thing that connects them is simpler and harder to name than an age. It is the decision made early, made completely, never fully reconsidered, to give everything, to burn at the temperature that produces the light people are still watching 50 years later, to answer the question of what you are capable of by finding out exactly how far the capable extends.

And sometimes the answer to that question costs everything. Janis Joplin sat across from Dick Cavett on September 25th, 1970, and asked about Jimi Hendrix whether it was possible to burn that hard and not burn out. She was asking for both of them. She did not know the answer yet. Nine days later, she found it.

And the tape of that question, which anyone can watch right now, which has been sitting in the archive for 50 years, contains everything that was about to happen, >> [clears throat] >> already there, already visible, if you know where to look.