Janis Ian

The iconic singer-songwriter talks about her autobiography and how she became known as a music-industry outlaw long after the uproar died down

By Tara Murtha
Published: March 20th, 2009 | 8:30am

“People had been asking me since I was 15, 16 years old but it never made sense until I hit my 50s and I realized it really was a good time to just look back and reflect on things,” explains Janis Ian about writing Society’s Child, Ian’s long anticipated autobiography. “You look up one day and you’re singing to your third and fourth generation and you realize, ‘Wow, some of these people have never even seen Hendrix live, they don’t know what that was like,’” she laughs.

That awareness — writing for several generations at once — makes Ian’s book succeed where so many autobiographies fail. By framing personal recollections against a backdrop punctuated with iconic, climactic moments of the zeitgeist — Martin Luther King’s assassination, Jimi Hendrix’s overdose, an unknown Bruce Springsteen wringing out a three-hour set at the legendary Main Point in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania — Ian carves a three-dimensional world for the reader, heavy tales that breeze by with the ease of a beach read (all while popping with scandalous tabloid-ready bits, too).

It makes sense that the 57-year-old songwriter who first rose to fame with “Society’s Child (Baby I’ve Been Thinking),” a song about a white girl who dates a black boy, has written a book that captures the forgotten era when popular music chronicled the zeitgeist instead of just being a symptom of it, when counterculture wasn’t readily bought and sold across the counter. In many ways, the stories of Ian’s life trace the rise of the civil rights movement and the beginning — or end, depending on how you look at it — of halcyon days in America.

For Ian, a seasoned writer of prose (she has authored many science fiction books, short stories, and countless columns for Performing Songwriter magazine), crafting the book from her vantage point within the wider berth of history was the only way to go. “If I could tell it more as a story of the times and try to hit the universal in my own life than that would make sense rather than just: ‘Aren’t I cool’ and then I wrote it,” says Ian over the phone from her home in Nashville, Tennessee, where she’s lived for the last 20 years.

The earliest performance of “Society’s Child” — a song that earned Ian sacks of hate mail, protest chants of “Nigger lover!”, countless death threats, and her first bona fide hit — surfaced on YouTube a few years ago. In the clip, 16-year-old Ian, dressed in a simple green mod dress, somberly sings the ballad into the spotlight with precocious confidence, searing a haunting vulnerability into each high note of the chorus, “They say I can’t see you anymore, baby / can’t see you anymore.”

Though she says she doesn’t pay much attention to YouTube clips, Ian has watched some clips of these early performances as friends sent them along. “It’s weird to me, because I never saw any of that stuff because it was all live,” she says. “These past few years I’ve gotten to see myself on Saturday Night Live (About being the first musical guest on Saturday Night Live, Ian laughs, saying it was the strangest thing to see Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog since no one had seen them much before), The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, and with Leonard Bernstein (on his TV special, Inside Pop: the Rock Revolution). It’s kind of cool to see but it’s really a different person, it’s so long ago now.” It’s clear that Ian has lived many lives between the one starring the New Jersey–raised, awkward, songwriting preteen who spent summers at a campground with other “red diaper babies” and the bad-ass folk singer, music-industry outlaw she is today.

Though Ian assures readers that she believes everything happens for a reason, some of her earliest lifetimes include episodes that could have been lifted right out of late-night horror movies: like when her absurdly intelligent, charming, and misogynist husband — who she met through an awkward and bizarre sexual tryst years earlier — held Ian hostage at gunpoint, too hopped up on scotch and pills to listen to reason and pleas. Or the time a trusted confidant and business manager took her to the cleaners, leaving her destitute. Then there are the episodes where her personal life, the zeitgeist, and the music industry crystallize into one moment so achingly powerful that it should be studied along with the Big Bang theory, a turning point that serves as the axis for everything that happened before and everything that could happen after.

“B.B. King was opening at the Generation Club for Big Brother & the Holding Company … Jimi finished his own gig early, and came to watch B.B.’s set with me,” wrote Ian. Then a man walked onstage and handed the legendary blues guitarist a note: Martin Luther King, Jr. was dead. “Time stopped. We’d been through Kennedy’s assassination a scant five years before. That had been shocking enough. But Dr. King? Who would want to assassinate the most famous pacifist on Earth?” wrote Ian. “B.B. began to play, rocking Lucille back and forth. He clutched her to his chest and the guitar moaned as tears streamed down his face. Tears streamed down all our faces. With Kennedy, we had lost a president. With King, we’d lost a future.”

On the way home, Ian was dosed with what she presumes is LSD. It wasn’t the groovy kind of trip cartoonishly rendered in movies. It took Ian years to recover — years that chart the emancipated teen star’s descent into an emotional void so deep that at one point it drove her to attempt suicide. Ian, of course, came back to live a long life with enough insight and anecdotes to fill a long autobiography.

Yet at first, Ian was intimidated to write the book. “It was hard to contemplate coming up with that many words when the most I ever wrote was 8 – 10,000 [words] for an article. Then my friend, author Mike Resnick, said if I could write three letters a day then I could turn in 1,000 words a day, and in 120 days I’d have my book. That made a lot of sense,” she says, laughing. In the end, Ian turned the draft around with three months to spare. “I spent the first three months of 2007 researching myself. Once I decided to make it all chronological and start each chapter with a song it just — I hate to say this — but it just fell into place.”

Ian holed up and worked on the manuscript for the rest of 2007, taking a break only for a few special trips: playing bass for Marie Knight, going on a family vacation, and performing at a tribute to Odetta, the folk singer known as “The Voice of the Civil Rights Movement,” who died in December 2008 at 77 years old, just short of her goal of singing at President Obama’s inauguration. As with love and career, all things come full circle: it was watching Odetta appear on Harry Belafonte’s show Tonight with Belafonte when Ian was 12 years old that first inspired Ian to sing.

“I was born into the crack that split America” Ian begins her book. “I was born into a country that would soon divide. In my parents’ America, life was light and easy, and Mitch Miller ruled the airwaves. In my America, we lost all innocence, and pop music was king.”

Ian has long been respected as a music-industry outlaw. Screwed by music managers and lost within and without the music industry one too many times, Ian’s been a progressive when it comes to cutting out the middleman. She and her business partner run Ian’s industries hands on. Fans can order books and records directly off her Web site, where an active fan community regularly hangs out on the boards. She works at home, at a desk that overlooks some trees, interrupted only by her two dogs looking for a scratch and when inspiration demands that Business Janis bounce into the music-writing room to give Artist Janis a few minutes to play. While Ian spent 2007 writing her autobiography, this past January kept Business Janis busy negotiating the deals for her masters. Then in February, she got to “turn back into a writer again.” “I’d really like to get out of doing business and back to being,” Ian says, before snapping herself off mid-stream. “I mean, that’s whiny, because business is what earns me a living, but it’d be nice to have more creative time in the day. It’s a lot of work to carve that out.”

Ian is also famous for penning the prophetic manifesto “The Internet Debacle: An Alternative View,” which was originally published in Performing Songwriter in 2002, before iTunes was omnipresent and when the majority of artists and labels were bemoaning downloading music as the death knell of the Music Industry As We Knew It. Of course, digitization and electronic music did radically change the landscape, but Ian’s point was that it was death to not look at downloading music as a good thing. “The premise of all this ballyhoo is that the industry (and its artists) are being harmed by free downloading. Nonsense,” Ian wrote to the dismay — and wrath — of the reigning industry folks. Seven years and many music-industry capsizes later, Ian’s still ahead of the curve, surprised at exactly how stubborn a notoriously stubborn industry can be. “They’re just now beginning to get it. [I’m surprised that] it’s taken this long,” she says. “But they are beginning to get it; there are some very hopeful signs. Everything from downloads to the iPod to how artists need to be treated to what the world expects to how to keep your audience’s trust.”

How does Ian keep her audiences trust? “That’s easy,” she laughs. “I don’t lie to them and I try not to take advantage of them. The CDs are priced reasonably. We were charging $15 when everybody else was charging $20 and $25. Try and keep prices down and treat them like valued customers, because that’s what they are.”

Right now, Ian’s treating her customers to a string of live dates, where she’ll perform her classics — “Society’s Child,” “At Seventeen,” “Jesse,” “Stars” — for the fan base that’s still growing at third and fourth generations. The tour started in Nashville in early March and rolls all over the country before ending up at the little old Bluebird Café in Nashville, her hometown spot. Switching gears from Business Janis to Artist Janis, from playing sold-out huge festivals to tiny little coffeehouses, Ian no longer breaks a sweat. “I like playing and I like writing, so it doesn’t matter to me where I’m playing or what I’m writing, as long as I can do it,” she says. “I’ve reached that fortunate age where I trust my talent and I know it’s there when I need it so I don’t worry too much about it beyond that, really.”

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