Janis Joplin Gave Everything to Her Audience — And Died Completely Alone

On the night of October 3rd 1970, Janis Joplin finished a recording session at Sunset Sound in Hollywood, stopped with her band for food and drinks at a bar called Barney's Beanery, and returned alone to Room 105 of the Landmark Motor Hotel. She bought a pack of cigarettes from the vending machine in the lobby on her way up. Sometime after that, in the privacy of a hotel room with nobody else inside it, she injected a dose of heroin roughly ten times more potent than what she was used to buying from her usual dealer, and she died almost instantly, falling between the bed and the nightstand with a half-smoked cigarette still sitting in the ashtray. Nobody found her for close to a day. Her producer only grew concerned when she failed to show up for a recording session the following afternoon. She was twenty-seven years old, one of the most electrifying performers of her generation, a woman capable of standing in front of tens of thousands of strangers and giving them every ounce of emotional intensity she had inside her body. And in the final hours of her life, there was not one single other person in the room to notice that anything was wrong.