Throat Clearing at Work + the Majesty of Janis Joplin

For tonight's installment of "Remember! Work!" something that I've noticed from the first days that I went to work at the local, now more than two years past. The ladies -- not all, but a few -- are always clearing their throats in the morning. I have come to the conclusion that it's something dietary, maybe some type of starch in a pastry or fat in a meat they eat for breakfast. The other thing I notice is that people are always gulping for air when they talk in the morning. This I've concluded is due to the fact that most -- and I'm as guilty of this as the next person -- are over-caffeinated. Acidic coffee, no longer solely the preserve of the college-town bohemian, is now everyone's pleasure.

This weekend I watched the music documentary Festival Express (2003) about the train trip across Canada in 1970 with Janis Joplin, The Band, Grateful Dead, Buddy Guy, and others. Concert stops were in Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary in early summer. The promoters lost money; they were dogged by protests intended to make the shows free to the public. This is an oft elided aspect of mega-festivals from of the Age of Aquarius -- hostility between scurrilous concert promoters and the idealistic audiences that they supposedly catered to. The resulting clashes between youth and security forces often masked the root causes of the violence -- ticket gouging and misrepresentation. Big-name bands like Led Zeppelin and the Jimi Hendrix Experience were often advertised but never actually booked.

Janis Joplin, backed by the Full Tilt Boogie Band, is easily the best act featured in Festival Express. Her performances are on a whole different level. The Dead and The Band really don't even come close. After seeing her do "Tell Mama," I thought, "Jesus! She must have terrified white people." Make sure you get to minute four of the above six-minute video. That's when Janis goes into her rap about what a woman needs, and what the teenage boy wants, etc. J. Edgar Hoover probably had Special Agents thinking of ways to take her down. Too radical.