October 1st, 1970. Sunset Sound Recording Studio, Los Angeles. Thursday afternoon. The Pearl sessions are almost done. Janis Joplin steps into Studio [music] 1 and asks producer Paul Rothschild to roll tape. She has a song she’d like to sing. She looks at Full Tilt Boogie, her band, ready, instruments in hand.

She doesn’t need them. Just her. Just the microphone. Just the voice. She leans into the mic and says, “I’d like to do a song of great social and political import.” There’s a twinkle in her eye when she says it. A joke. The kind only she could make. Then she sings. One take. No band. No overdubs. No second chances.

 1 minute and 46 seconds. When it ends, she says two words. “That’s it.” And it was. Three days later, Janis Joplin was dead. Mercedes Benz was the last song she ever recorded. To understand Mercedes Benz, you have to understand Port Arthur. Her father Seth was an engineer at Texaco. They had a house, a car, the things you were supposed to want.

And Port Arthur taught Janis Joplin, from the moment she was old enough to understand it, that having the things you were supposed to want did not make you happy. It did not make you belong. It did not fill the particular kind of silence that had settled into her chest somewhere around the age of 13. The Port Arthur church women drove Cadillacs.

 The Port Arthur men had boats. The Port Arthur kids had the right clothes and went to the right parties. Janis watched all of it. She understood none of it. If things fixed things, everyone here would be fixed. They have everything they’re supposed to have and they’re all exactly the same kind of empty. What does it mean when the Lord gives you what you asked for and it doesn’t help? She left.

 San Francisco, the bars, the voice, Monterey. And then the success came, fast and large. She bought a Porsche. 1965 Porsche 356 C. She had it painted by a friend for $500. Psychedelic colors, flowers, a rolling piece of hippie art. “My friends all drive Porsches. I must make amends.” She was her own punchline. She knew it. That was the joke.

August 8th, 1970. Port Chester, New York. A bar called Vasan’s. Janis is with her friend Bob Neuwirth, two others, actors Rip Torn and Geraldine Page. Janis starts reciting a line from a Michael McClure poem she’d heard, “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz?” She says it again and again. Something about it.

They start banging beer mugs on the table. Neuwirth pulls out a napkin and a ballpoint pen. Janis improvises verses. 1 hour later, she walked on stage at the Capitol Theatre and introduced it. “I just wrote this at the bar on the corner.” She called Michael McClure after, sang it to him on the phone. He said, “I like my song better.

” She asked, “Do you mind if I use it?” He said, “No, go ahead. No contracts. Just go ahead.” Neuwirth kept that napkin for years. She performed it live through August. Harvard Stadium on August 12th, her last public concert. She sang it there, too. Then September, Sunset Sound, Pearl almost done. One more thing to record.

October 1st was not just about Mercedes Benz. In the morning, she revised her will with her legal team. That afternoon, while the band was at Sunset Sound, Janis was at the hotel, alone, making phone calls. One of them was to the municipal offices in San Francisco. She was trying to find out about a marriage license.

 She was engaged to Seth Morgan. The offices were closed. She called Seth at her house. He didn’t answer. He was apparently spending time with other women. The silence on the line. The unanswered phone. The Port Arthur feeling. The birthday cake feeling. The nobody came feeling. Not again. Not now. Not when everything is finally right.

“The album is the best thing I’ve ever made. The band is the best band I’ve ever had. I was clean. I was happy.” She called a local dealer. Not her regular one. Someone she didn’t know well. The heroin he brought was unusually pure. She arrived at Sunset Sound that evening sober.

 She listened to the Buried Alive instrumental. She didn’t record vocals for it. She would do that tomorrow. Instead, she stepped into Studio 1. Told Rothschild to roll tape. She had a song. “I’d like to do a song of great social and political import.” The band laughed. The engineer started the tape. One verse, two, three, four.

 1 minute and 46 seconds. “That’s it.” The tape stopped. The booth was quiet. Afterward, they went to Barney’s Beanery. Janis had a vodka orange juice. She talked about how happy she was with what they’d recorded. She had etched her name into a table at Barney’s. The bar preserved it. It still hangs on the ceiling above her favorite booth.

That was the last night. October 4th, Sunday. The Full Tilt Boogie band was at Sunset Sound, ready to record. Buried Alive in the Blues was waiting. Janis was supposed to add vocals today. She didn’t come. Rothschild called the Landmark Motor Hotel. John Cooke, Janis’s road manager, walked across the parking lot.

 Janis’s psychedelically painted Porsche was still there. He knocked. No answer. He went to the front desk, requested a key. He opened the door. She was on the floor, wedged between the bed and the nightstand. She had been there for 18 hours. The heroin the unknown dealer had brought was unusually pure. She was 27 years old.

 At the front desk that morning, a telegram had arrived from David Niehaus, the man from Brazil, the one who had known her without knowing who she was. Nobody got to read it to her. Rothschild and the band worked for 2 weeks to complete Pearl. Buried Alive in the Blues was released as an instrumental, the only track on the album without Janis’s voice, because she was supposed to add it the next day.

Pearl was released in January 1971. Me and Bobby McGee went to number one. Mercedes Benz became her most recognized final recording. Had she lived, Rothschild later said, it might not have even made the album. Too short. Too informal. Too unfinished. But here is what Mercedes Benz is really about. Not cars. Not materialism.

 Not even the counterculture. It’s about Port Arthur. It’s about a middle-class Texas town where people had the things they were supposed to want and still weren’t happy. Where Janis Joplin sat in her bedroom listening to Bessie Smith records and understood, at 13, that the whole premise was broken. The song is a prayer. A real one.

“Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz?” She’s not asking for a car. She’s asking the same question she’d been asking since Port Arthur. Why doesn’t having things work? She had come a long way from Port Arthur. The fame. The album. The Porsche. A fiance. A band she loved. A record she was proud of.

 And she still called a dealer when Seth didn’t answer the phone. Because the silence was still there. The Port Arthur silence. The nobody came to the birthday party silence. She knew. She was singing about knowing it doesn’t work. And laughing anyway. Because the singing is the only thing that comes close. That was the whole song.

 That was the whole life. Janis Joplin recorded her final song on a Thursday afternoon in October 1970. One take. No band. 1 minute and 46 seconds. And then she said, “That’s it.” And went to Barney’s and raised a glass. Here is what this story asks you. What is the thing you keep asking for that hasn’t come? The Mercedes.

 The phone call that gets answered. The birthday where people came. The silence that finally fills. Janis Joplin asked for all of it. God didn’t deliver. She sang about it anyway. In one take. In 1 minute and 46 seconds. In a vocal booth in Hollywood on a Thursday afternoon. And then she said, “That’s it.” And she was right. The last word was hers.

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