August 17th, 1969. 2:00 a.m. Janis Joplin walked onto the Woodstock stage in front of 400,000 people.  She had been backstage for 10 hours. She had been waiting since the afternoon. The festival was running impossibly behind. She had passed the time the way she always passed time when there was too much of it.

 She was high when they finally called her name. She walked out anyway. Cameras were rolling. Michael Wadleigh’s documentary crew had been filming for 3 days. Now, they captured Janis. Sweating, slurring, pushing through one of the most physically demanding performances of her life through a haze of exhaustion and substance and the wrong kind of anticipation.

The audience cheered. They didn’t know. Janis knew. 5 months later, when Wadleigh started cutting the documentary together, she came to his editing room and asked him to do something no other artist had ever asked. “Take me out of the film.” This is the story of that night and the 24 years of silence that followed it.

Janis arrived at Woodstock on Saturday afternoon, August 16th, 1969. Helicopter. She was scheduled to perform that evening. Early evening, prime slot before the night got crazy. She was excited. She was happy. People who saw her backstage that afternoon described her as bright, talkative, present. Then the festival schedule started slipping.

The crowd had been three times larger than expected. The traffic was paralyzed 20 miles in every direction. Janis’s evening slot moved to late evening, then to night, then to early morning. She waited backstage. She drank. She used. She talked to other musicians who were also waiting. Hours passed, then more hours.

 “Where is the stage time? When am I going on? The crowd is out there waiting. They’re still waiting. Every hour that passes, I’m becoming someone who can’t do this. The version of me that flew in this afternoon is leaving the building. By 1:00 a.m. Sunday morning, 10 hours after she had arrived, she finally got the call. Time to go. Sam Andrew looked at her anew.

Everyone backstage knew. She wasn’t ready. She had been ready 10 hours ago, but the festival had eaten the original schedule. The crowd had been told she was coming. She had to go on. She walked out at 2:00 a.m. She sang “Work Me, Lord”, “Try”, “Piece of My Heart”, “Ball and Chain”, 11 songs. The footage exists. We can watch it now.

To the casual observer, it looks like Janis Joplin doing what Janis Joplin did. The hair, the boa, the voice going huge in places, the crowd losing its mind. But Janis was not a casual observer. She knew her own voice the way a master pianist knows their own hands. Sam Andrew said later, “The band knew. We could feel it.

 She was not at her best. She knew it. We knew it. The crowd didn’t know it because 400,000 people in a muddy field at 2:00 in the morning will cheer for almost anything.” After the set, Janis came off stage. She didn’t celebrate. She went back to her trailer. She knew. “That wasn’t me. That was someone else wearing my clothes.

 The crowd was happy because they didn’t know what me sounds like at full strength. They got the half version. They cheered for the half version. And that’s what was on tape. That’s what those cameras have. The half version. The wrong version. The version I would never put on a record. The version I would never sell to anyone.

” 5 months later, January 1970, Los Angeles. Michael Wadleigh and his editor Thelma Schoonmaker had spent 4 months going through 120 miles of raw footage. They had a young assistant editor named Martin Scorsese helping them. The team was assembling what would become one of the most important documentary films ever made.

Janis came to the editing room. Wadleigh ran the footage for her. She watched. She didn’t say anything for a long time. Then she said, “Take me out.” Wadleigh later remembered, “I didn’t expect that. Most artists wanted more time, more songs. Janis wanted out.” She told him, “This isn’t me. This is me on the wrong night. The crowd was great.

The festival was historic. But what I gave them isn’t what I would have given them at any other show that summer. And if this film is going to last forever, I don’t want this version to be the one that lasts. This footage will outlive me. Whatever ends up in this film will be what people see when they think Janis Joplin and Woodstock for the next 50 years, 100 years, forever.

They’ll think that’s me. That’s what I sound like. They will be wrong. And I won’t be here to correct them. So take it out. Let me be remembered for what I actually do, not for what I did at 2:00 in the morning at Woodstock.” And then there was Albert Grossman, Janis’s manager, Bob Dylan’s manager. Grossman saw the Woodstock film as a business opportunity.

 As Wadleigh and Warner Brothers were trying to clear the rights to use each artist’s footage, Grossman called all the other major managers and made them an offer. “Let’s all hold out for a much bigger amount of money. If they don’t pay what we want, we walk together.” It was a coordinated extortion attempt.

 Most of the other managers caved. Grossman lost the bigger play. As a result, Janis Joplin and the band, both managed by Grossman, were not in the original 1970 Woodstock film or on the soundtrack album. So when the film came out, Janis was not in it. Not because Wadleigh removed her at her request, because her own manager had overplayed his hand and walked her out of the building.

In a strange way, Janis got what she had asked for. The universe, through Grossman, by accident, did exactly that. “It’s gone. The half version is not in the movie. I asked for it. The universe gave it to me. Whatever the reason, it is gone.” The film came out in March 1970. Best Documentary Oscar.

 6 months later, Janis Joplin was dead. And the footage of her Woodstock performance went into a film can on a shelf at Warner Brothers, where it would stay for 24 years. 24 years passed. In 1994, for the 25th anniversary of Woodstock, Warner Brothers asked Michael Wadleigh to restore his original director’s cut. And in the archive, in those film cans on those shelves where they had been waiting for a quarter of a century, was 44 minutes of footage that had never been seen by the public, including Janis Joplin’s complete Woodstock set.

Wadleigh had a decision to make. Janis was dead. The original request had been hers. And the half version that Janis had not wanted to be remembered by was now the only version of her at Woodstock that had ever been documented on film. If he didn’t include it now, it would never be seen. He chose to include it.

 He chose “Work Me, Lord”, the most musically forgiving piece in her set. He felt he was doing right by the artist by showing her at Woodstock at all, by preserving the footage. The director’s cut came out in 1994. Janis Joplin appears for one song, “Work Me, Lord”. Some thought it was beautiful. Some thought it was diminished. Both reactions were correct.

Both were irrelevant because Janis Joplin was not there to confirm or deny anything. If you knew you were having one of your worst days and someone was filming it for posterity, would you have the right to ask them to destroy it? Janis Joplin asked. She asked clearly. She asked once.

 She asked the person who could grant the request. And the world said no. Through Albert Grossman first, accidentally, and through Michael Wadleigh later, deliberately. Now, her Woodstock performance is part of every retrospective, every anniversary, every documentary about the festival. The version she did not want to be remembered by is the only version we have.

And she is not here to argue. There is something that hurts about that. And there is something that also feels right. Because the half version of Janis Joplin is still Janis Joplin. The voice is still the voice. Even on the wrong night, at the wrong hour, after the wrong wait. She was so much that even her half version is more than most artists at their best.

 She just didn’t get to make that decision herself. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you before.