title: McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle

text: On 11 November 1990, a Royal Saudi Air Force (RSAF) pilot defected to Sudan with an F-15C fighter during Operation Desert Shield. Saudi Arabia paid US$40 million for return of the aircraft three months later. RSAF F-15s shot down two Iraqi Mirage F1s during the Operation Desert storm. One Saudi Arabian F-15C was lost to a crash during the Persian Gulf War in 1991. The IQAF claimed this fighter was part of two USAF F-15Cs that engaged two Iraqi MiG-25PDs, and was hit by an R-40 missile before crashing.


title: McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle

text: They have since been deployed to support Operation Southern Watch, the patrolling of the Iraqi no-fly zones in Southern Iraq; Operation Provide Comfort in Turkey; in support of NATO operations in Bosnia, and recent air expeditionary force deployments. In 1994, two U.S. Army Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawks were mistakenly downed by USAF F-15Cs in northern Iraq in a friendly-fire incident. USAF F-15Cs shot down four Yugoslav MiG-29s using AIM-120 and AIM-7 Radar guided missiles during NATO's 1999 intervention in Kosovo, Operation Allied Force.


title: McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle

text: All F-15s were grounded by the USAF after a Missouri Air National Guard F-15C came apart in flight and crashed on 2 November 2007. The newer F-15E fleet was later cleared for continued operations. The USAF reported on 28 November 2007 that a critical location in the upper longerons on the F-15C was the failure's suspected cause, causing the fuselage forward of the air intakes, including the cockpit and radome, to separate from the airframe.


title: McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle

text: F-15A through D-model aircraft were grounded until the location received detailed inspections and repairs as needed. The grounding of F-15s received media attention as it began to place strains on the nation's air-defense efforts. The grounding forced some states to rely on their neighboring states' fighters for air-defense protection, and Alaska to depend on Canadian Forces' fighter support.


title: McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle

text: On 8 January 2008, the USAF Air Combat Command (ACC) cleared a portion of its older F-15 fleet for return to flying status. It also recommended a limited return to flight for units worldwide using the affected models. The accident review board report, which was released on 10 January 2008, stated that analysis of the F-15C wreckage determined that the longeron did not meet drawing specifications, which led to fatigue cracks and finally a catastrophic failure of the remaining support structures and breakup of the aircraft in flight. In a report released on 10 January 2008, nine other F-15s were identified to have similar problems in the longeron. As a result, General John D. W. Corley stated, "the long-term future of the F-15 is in question". On 15 February 2008, ACC cleared all its grounded F-15A/B/C/D fighters for flight pending inspections, engineering reviews, and any needed repairs. ACC also recommended release of other U.S. F-15A/B/C/Ds.


title: McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle

text: The F-15 has a combined air-to-air combat record of 104 kills to no losses . The F-15's air superiority versions, the A/B/C/D models, have not suffered any losses to enemy action. Over half of F-15 kills have been achieved by Israeli Air Force pilots.


title: McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle

text: On 16 September 2009, the last F-15A, an Oregon Air National Guard aircraft, was retired, marking the end of service for the F-15A and F-15B models in the United States.


title: McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle

text: With the retirement of the F-15A and B models, the F-15C and D models are supplemented in US service by the newer F-22 Raptor. During the 2010s, USAF F-15C/Ds were regularly based overseas with the Pacific Air Forces at Kadena AB in Japan and with the U.S. Air Forces in Europe at RAF Lakenheath in the United Kingdom. Other regular USAF F-15s are operated by ACC as adversary/aggressor platforms at Nellis AFB, Nevada, and by Air Force Materiel Command in test and evaluation roles at Edwards AFB, California, and Eglin AFB, Florida. All remaining combat-coded F-15C/Ds are operated by the Air National Guard.


title: McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle

text: As of 2006, the USAF was upgrading 178 F-15C/Ds with the AN/APG-63(V)3 AESA radar, and equipping other F-15s with the Joint Helmet Mounted Cueing System. In 2007, the USAF planned to keep 178 F-15C/Ds along with 224 F-15Es in service beyond 2025.


title: McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle

text: As part of the USAF's FY 2015 budget, the F-15C faced cuts or retirement in response to sequestration. In April 2017, USAF officials announced plans to retire the F-15C/D in the mid-2020s and press more F-16s into roles occupied by the F-15. In December 2018, Bloomberg Government reported that the Pentagon, not the USAF, in its 2020 budget request, would likely request US$1.2 billion for 12 new-built F-15Xs to replace older F-15Cs operated by Air National Guard units. Newly built Eagle IIs will replace F-15C/Ds, as the older airframes had an average age of 37 years by 2021; 75% were beyond their certified service lives leading to groundings from structural issues, and life extensions were deemed too expensive. In 2021, 144 Eagle IIs were planned to primarily fly ANG homeland defense missions, as well as carry outsized standoff weapons in combat. In 2022, it was announced the USAF plan to retire their fleet of F-15C/Ds by 2026.


title: McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle

text: The Air Force Magazine stated in 2007 that the F-15E was projected to remain in service for many years because of the model's primary air-to-ground role and the low number of hours on the variant's airframes.


title: McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle

text: During the Yemeni Civil War (2015-present), Houthis have used R-27T missiles modified to serve as surface-to-air missiles. A video released on 7 January 2018 also shows a modified R-27T hitting a Saudi F-15 on a forward-looking infrared camera. Houthi sources claim to have downed the F-15, although this has been disputed, as the missile apparently proximity detonated, though the F-15 continued to fly in its trajectory seemingly unaffected. Rebels later released footage showing an aircraft wreck, but serial numbers on the wreckage suggested the aircraft was a Panavia Tornado, also operated by Saudi forces. On 8 January, the Saudi admitted the loss of an aircraft but due to technical reasons.


title: McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle

text: On 21 March 2018, Houthi rebels released a video where they hit and possibly shot down a Saudi F-15 in Saada province. In the video a R-27T air-to-air missile adapted for surface-to-air use was launched and appeared to hit a jet. As in the video of the previous similar hit recorded on 8 January, the target, while clearly hit, did not appear to be downed. Saudi forces confirmed the hit, while saying the jet landed at a Saudi base. Saudi official sources confirmed the incident, reporting that it happened at 3:48 pm local time after a surface-to-air defense missile was launched at the fighter jet from inside Saada airport.


title: McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle

text: After the Houthi attack on Saudi oil infrastructure on 14 September 2019, Saudi Arabia tasked F-15 fighters armed with missiles to intercept low flying drones, difficult to intercept with ground-based high altitude missile systems like the MIM-104 Patriot with several drones being downed since then. On 2 July 2020, a Saudi F-15 shot down two Houthi Shahed 129 drones above Yemen. On 7 March 2021, during a Houthi attack at several Saudi oil installations, Saudi F-15s shot down several attacking drones using heatseeking AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles, with video evidence showing at least two Samad-3 UAVs and one Qasef-2K downed. On 30 March 2021, a video made by Saudi border guards showed a Saudi F-15 shooting down a Houthi Quasef-2K drone with an AIM-120 AMRAAM fired at short range.


title: McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle

text: Twelve prototypes were built and used for trials by the F-15 Joint Test Force at Edwards Air Force Base using McDonnell Douglas and United States Air Force personnel. Most prototypes were later used by NASA for trials and experiments.


title: McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle

text: This article only covers the F-15A, B, C, D, and related variants. For the operators of other F-15E-based variants, like the F-15E, F-15I, F-15S, F-15K, F-15SG, or F-15EX, see McDonnell Douglas F-15E Strike Eagle.


title: McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle

text: A total of 175 F-15s have been lost to non-combat causes as of June 2016. However, the F-15 aircraft is very reliable with only 1 loss per 50,000 flight hours.


title: McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle

text: Although the F-15 continues to be a front-line fighter, a number of older USAF and IAF models have been retired, with several placed on outdoor display or in museums.


title: McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle

text: The F-15 was the subject of the IMAX movie "", about the RED FLAG exercises. In Tom Clancy's nonfiction book, "" (1995), a detailed analysis of the Air Force's premier fighter aircraft, the F-15 Eagle and its capabilities are showcased.


title: McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle

text: The F-15 has also been a popular subject as a toy, and a fictional likeness of an aircraft similar to the F-15 has been used in cartoons, books, video games, animated television series, and animated films.


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: Mark Alan Ruffalo (; born November 22, 1967) is an American actor and producer. He began acting in the early 1990s and first gained recognition for his work in Kenneth Lonergan's play "This Is Our Youth" (1998) and drama film "You Can Count on Me" (2000). He went on to star in the romantic comedies "13 Going on 30" (2004) and "Just like Heaven" (2005) and the thrillers "In the Cut" (2003), "Zodiac" (2007) and "Shutter Island" (2010). He received a Tony Award nomination for his supporting role in the Broadway revival of "Awake and Sing!" in 2006. Ruffalo gained international recognition for playing Bruce Banner / Hulk in superhero films set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, including "The Avengers" (2012), "" (2018), and "" (2019).


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: Ruffalo gained nominations for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for playing a sperm-donor in the comedy-drama "The Kids Are All Right" (2010), Dave Schultz in the biopic "Foxcatcher" (2014), and Michael Rezendes in the drama "Spotlight" (2015). He won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Actor in a TV Movie for playing a gay writer and activist in the television drama film "The Normal Heart" (2015), and the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series or Movie for his dual role as identical twins in the miniseries "I Know This Much Is True" (2020). Ruffalo is one of the few performers to receive all four EGOT nominations.


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: Mark Alan Ruffalo was born on November 22, 1967, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. His mother, Marie Rose (), is a hairdresser and stylist and his father, Frank Lawrence Ruffalo Jr., worked as a construction painter. He has two sisters, Tania and Nicole, and a brother, Scott (died 2008). His father is of Italian descent, from Girifalco and his mother is of half French Canadian and half Italian ancestry.


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: Ruffalo attended both Catholic and progressive schools throughout his education. Ruffalo has described himself as having been a "happy kid", although he struggled with undiagnosed dyslexia and ADHD as a child and a young adult.


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: Ruffalo spent his teen years in Virginia Beach, Virginia, where his father worked. He competed in wrestling in junior high and high school in Wisconsin and Virginia. Ruffalo graduated from First Colonial High School in Virginia Beach, where he acted for the Patriot Playhouse. He moved with his family to San Diego, California and later to Los Angeles, where he took classes at the Stella Adler Conservatory and co-founded the Orpheus Theatre Company. With the theater company, he wrote, directed and starred in a number of plays. He also spent close to a decade working as a bartender.


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: He made his screen debut in an episode of "CBS Summer Playhouse" (1989), followed by minor film roles, and was part of the original cast of "This Is Our Youth" (1996).


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: Ruffalo played 'Vinnie Webber', a minor character in Series 1 Episode 9 of "Due South", first broadcast in Canada in 1994.


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: Ruffalo had minor roles in films including "The Dentist" (1996), the low-key crime comedy "Safe Men" (1998) and Ang Lee's Civil War Western "Ride with the Devil" (1999). Through a chance meeting with writer Kenneth Lonergan, Ruffalo began collaborating with him and appeared in several of his plays, including the original cast of "This is Our Youth" (1996), which led to Ruffalo's role as Laura Linney's character's brother in Lonergan's Academy Award-nominated 2000 film "You Can Count on Me". He received favorable reviews for his performance in this film, often earning comparisons to the young Marlon Brando, and won awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and Montreal World Film Festival.


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: His next role was in 2001 in Rod Lurie's "The Last Castle" playing a bookie in a military prison alongside Robert Redford. This led to other significant roles, including the films "XX/XY" (2002), Isabel Coixet's "My Life Without Me", John Woo's "Windtalkers" (2003), Jane Campion's "In the Cut" (2003), Michel Gondry's "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (2004), and "We Don't Live Here Anymore" (2004), which is based on two short stories written by Andre Dubus. He appeared opposite Jamie Foxx and Tom Cruise as a narcotics detective in Michael Mann's crime thriller "Collateral" (2004).


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: In the mid-2000s, Ruffalo appeared as a romantic lead in "View From the Top" (2002), "13 Going on 30" (2004), "Just Like Heaven" (2005) and "Rumor Has It" (2005). In 2006, Ruffalo starred in Clifford Odets's "Awake and Sing!" at the Belasco Theatre in New York, for which he was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play. In March 2007, he appeared in "Zodiac" as SFPD homicide inspector Dave Toschi, who ran the investigation to find and apprehend the Zodiac killer from 1969 through most of the 1970s. In 2007, Ruffalo played divorced lawyer Dwight Arno, who accidentally kills a child and speeds away, in Terry George's film "Reservation Road", based on the novel by John Burnham Schwartz.


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: In 2008, Ruffalo starred as a con man in "The Brothers Bloom" with Adrien Brody and Rachel Weisz and co-starred with Julianne Moore in "Blindness". 2008 also saw Ruffalo in Brian Goodman's "What Doesn't Kill You" with Ethan Hawke and Amanda Peet, which was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival. In 2009, he played a brief role in the film "Where the Wild Things Are" as Max's mother's boyfriend. In 2010, he co-starred in the Martin Scorsese thriller "Shutter Island" as U.S. Marshal Chuck Aule, the partner of Leonardo DiCaprio's character Teddy Daniels.


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: In 2010, he starred in Lisa Cholodenko's "The Kids Are All Right", with Annette Bening and Julianne Moore. Ruffalo stated in an interview that he approached Cholodenko after watching "High Art" and said he would love to work with her. Years later, she called Ruffalo and said she wrote a script and had him in mind for the part. His performance earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: In March 2010, Ruffalo signed with the Creative Artists Agency (CAA); in June 2010, he signed on with the United Talent Agency (UTA).


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: Ruffalo starred in "The Avengers" (2012), the sixth installment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, replacing Edward Norton as Dr. Bruce Banner / Hulk. He reprised the role again in "" (2015), "" (2017), "" (2018), and "" (2019). He has been noted for spoiling the endings of "Avengers: Infinity War" a year ahead of theatrical release, as well as "Avengers: Endgame" a few weeks ahead of release. Ruffalo also made cameo appearances as Banner in "Iron Man 3", "Captain Marvel", and "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings," and he reprised the role in "".""


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: In 2014, Ruffalo starred as Ned Weeks in a television adaptation of Larry Kramer's AIDS-era play, "The Normal Heart"; his performance earned him an Emmy nomination. He says he has had an outpouring of support for his performance: I've never had so sincere and vulnerable a response from people for anything that I've ever done. ... And of everything that I've done since I've been on social media, which hasn't been that long, by the way, I haven't had such an overwhelmingly positive response as I have from "The Normal Heart" directly to me. And it's a blessing, man. If this is it, if I have a piano dropped on me tomorrow, then I would go down thinking, "You know what, I did okay as far as my career goes, because that's a gift. That's rare."


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: Also in 2014, Ruffalo received his second Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of wrestler Dave Schultz in the biographical drama "Foxcatcher". The next year in 2015, he starred as a father of two with bipolar disorder in the independent comedy film "Infinitely Polar Bear", for which he earned a Golden Globe Award nomination, and he also appeared as journalist Michael Rezendes in the drama film "Spotlight", for which he earned his third Academy Award nomination and a BAFTA Award nomination.


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: He directed a number of plays during his time at the Orpheus Theatre Company, and made his feature film directorial debut with 2010 indie film "Sympathy for Delicious", which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and won the Special Jury Prize.


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: Ruffalo is pro-choice. He has explained his opinion by saying: "I don't want to turn back the hands of time to when women shuttled across state lines in the thick of night to resolve an unwanted pregnancy, in a cheap hotel room."


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: He has shown support for the LGBT community; however, he has received backlash from the transgender community for supporting the casting of a man, Matt Bomer, to play a trans woman in the film "Anything", on which Ruffalo was an executive producer.


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: Ruffalo was interviewed by "We Are Change" at an anti-war rally in 2007. Ruffalo expressed views in line with the 9/11 truth movement when he stated: "I'm baffled by the way all three buildings came down. My first reaction was that buildings don't fall down like that".


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: In 2008, Ruffalo expressed concern that gas companies were eyeing his family's land in Callicoon, New York. After doing his own investigation, "New York" magazine wrote, he became "anti-fracking's first famous face." On October 4, 2010, Ruffalo appeared on "The Rachel Maddow Show" to discuss hydraulic fracturing and the FRAC Act of 2009. He claimed in the December 2010 issue of "GQ" that after he organized screenings in Pennsylvania of a documentary about natural-gas-drilling called "Gasland", he was placed on a terror advisory list. The Pennsylvania Governor's Office of Homeland Security denied the claim.


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: In 2015, Ruffalo supported "Education Is Not a Crime" campaign among a lot of artists and intellectuals including Nazanin Boniadi, Abbas Milani, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Azar Nafisi, Omid Djalili, Eva LaRue, Mohammad Maleki, former president of the University of Tehran and Nobel Peace laureates such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Shirin Ebadi, Tawakkol Karman, Jody Williams, and Mairead Maguire to draw attention to the Iranian government's systematic denial of university education to young Baha'is.


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: In February 2016, Ruffalo tweeted a "Tech Times" article in which a group of Argentinian doctors attributed the cause of a microcephaly outbreak in Brazil to the use of a larvicide chemical added to reservoirs of drinking water to combat dengue fever, rather than the Zika virus. "The New York Times" described the claim as "dubious" and stated that those "sounding the alarm", did not mention that the larvicide did not work through the central nervous system and that it has been approved by the World Health Organization.


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: In the 2016 election, Ruffalo supported Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders. In March 2016, Ruffalo narrated and produced "Dear President Obama: The Clean Energy Revolution Is Now", a documentary by director Jon Bowermaster which looks at President Barack Obama's environmental tenure and legacy concerning the massive expansion of oil and natural gas drilling.


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: In June 2017, Ruffalo posted a petition on Twitter urging NBC to stop hiring white conservative commentators. The same month, Ruffalo endorsed Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn in the 2017 UK general election. He tweeted: "Because @jeremycorbyn offers people an alternative to the Corporate status quo, which never ends well for them, I humbly endorse Corbyn." In October, Ruffalo actively supported the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in their opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline project.


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: In October 2019, Ruffalo tweeted that "until George W. Bush is brought to justice for the crimes of the Iraq War, (including American-led torture, Iraqi deaths & displacement, and the deep scars—emotional & otherwise—inflicted on our military that served his folly), we can’t even begin to talk about kindness." In November, while on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert", Ruffalo endorsed Senator Bernie Sanders for president, stating "you know when he gets in the office, he is going to be fighting for us". The same month, along with other public figures, Ruffalo signed a letter supporting Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn describing him as "a beacon of hope in the struggle against emergent far-right nationalism, xenophobia and racism in much of the democratic world" and endorsed him for in the 2019 UK general election.


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: Also in 2019, Ruffalo starred in and co-produced "Dark Waters", which spotlighted another one of his environmental concerns with its true-life depiction of a corporate lawyer's relentless pursuit of justice to expose poisonous pollution by chemical behemoth DuPont. In June 2020, Ruffalo appeared in a webinar conference for the Irish Green Party to encourage members to accept the recently negotiated programme for government, agreed between the party, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil.


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: In December 2019, Ruffalo called for an economic revolution, saying that "capitalism today is failing us, killing us, and robbing from our children's future."


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: In October 2020, speaking to Mehdi Hasan, Ruffalo condemned what he called Israel's "asymmetrical warfare" against the Palestinians, stating, "There is no reason that an ally of America should not be held to the same standards as any other nation in the world." Ruffalo also related that he had been called an antisemite for his views, saying, "[It's] really tough to hear. And the fact that so many people will take it to that extreme, when you're talking about that kind of inequality, that kind of oppression, that kind of apartheid." In 2021, he said it was "inflammatory" and "disrespectful" to suggest Israel is committing genocide.


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: In November 2021, Ruffalo criticized the not guilty ruling in the case of Kyle Rittenhouse in his hometown of Kenosha, Wisconsin and said the people shot by Rittenhouse were murdered.


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: In April 2022, Ruffalo urged voters to check voter ID requirements in their states through posts to his social media. Ruffalo cited VoteRiders as a source of assistance for voter ID requirements across the United States .


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: Ruffalo married Sunrise Coigney in 2000. They have three children: son Keen (b. 2001) and daughters Bella Noche (b. 2005) and Odette (b. 2007).


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: After completing work on the film "The Last Castle", Ruffalo was diagnosed with a vestibular schwannoma, a type of brain tumor also known as an acoustic neuroma. The tumor was found to be benign; however, the surgery to remove the mass resulted in partial facial paralysis and affected his hearing. The paralysis subsided after a year, but Ruffalo remains deaf in his left ear.


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: On December 1, 2008, Ruffalo's younger brother, Scott, was found outside his home on North Palm Drive in Beverly Hills with an execution-style bullet wound to the head. Scott was taken to a hospital, but died the following week. The case remains unsolved.


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: Ruffalo and his family live in Sullivan County, New York, describing the Catskill Mountains as his "home". Ruffalo also owns two apartments in New York City, one for business and another for investment. Ruffalo's mother and stepfather live in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, where he and his family occasionally spend their summers.


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: In May 2022, Ruffalo was sued by residents of Ellenville, New York for not cleaning up a fire that broke out on the set of a car dealership that was used as a location for "I Know This Much Is True". The lawsuit claims that the residents suffered physical and emotional injuries and added that the fire caused damage to their homes and exposed them to toxic fumes.


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: Ruffalo has had a range of credits on screen and stage, including several performances of varying genresmostly as a supporting actor. Ruffalo has been nominated three times for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the comedy-drama "The Kids Are All Right" (2010), the biopic "Foxcatcher" (2014), and the drama "Spotlight" (2015). He has also received two Primetime Emmy Awards; Outstanding Television Movie for "The Normal Heart" (2014) and Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series or Movie for his role in "I Know This Much Is True" (2020). In 2018, he received a nomination for the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for the political audiobook "" (2016). For his work on stage, Ruffalo has been once nominated for the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play for his role in a 2006 production of the dramatic play "Awake and Sing!".


title: Mark Ruffalo

text: With nominations for the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony, Ruffalo is one of a selected few performers to be nominated for the four major entertainment awards in the US (EGOT). His EGOT recognitions are listed below:


title: Axolotl

text: The axolotl (; from ), Ambystoma mexicanum, is a paedomorphic salamander closely related to the tiger salamander. Axolotls are unusual among amphibians in that they reach adulthood without undergoing metamorphosis. Instead of taking to the land, adults remain aquatic and gilled. The species was originally found in several lakes underlying what is now Mexico City, such as Lake Xochimilco and Lake Chalco. These lakes were drained by Spanish settlers after the conquest of the Aztec Empire, leading to the destruction of much of the axolotl’s natural habitat.


title: Axolotl

text: Axolotls should not be confused with the larval stage of the closely related tiger salamander ("A. tigrinum"), which are widespread in much of North America and occasionally become paedomorphic. Neither should they be confused with mudpuppies ("Necturus" spp.), fully aquatic salamanders from a different family that are not closely related to the axolotl but bear a superficial resemblance.


title: Axolotl

text: , wild axolotls were near extinction due to urbanization in Mexico City and consequent water pollution, as well as the introduction of invasive species such as tilapia and perch. They are listed as critically endangered in the wild, with a decreasing population of around 50 to 1,000 adult individuals, by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) and are listed under Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). Axolotls are used extensively in scientific research due to their ability to regenerate limbs, gills and parts of their eyes and brains. Axolotls were also sold as food in Mexican markets and were a staple in the Aztec diet.


title: Axolotl

text: A sexually mature adult axolotl, at age 18–27 months, ranges in length from , although a size close to is most common and greater than is rare. Axolotls possess features typical of salamander larvae, including external gills and a caudal fin extending from behind the head to the vent. External gills are usually lost when salamander species mature into adulthood, although the axolotl maintains this feature. This is due to their neoteny evolution, where axolotls are much more aquatic than other salamander species.


title: Axolotl

text: Their heads are wide, and their eyes are lidless. Their limbs are underdeveloped and possess long, thin digits. Males are identified by their swollen cloacae lined with papillae, while females are noticeable for their wider bodies full of eggs. Three pairs of external gill stalks (rami) originate behind their heads and are used to move oxygenated water. The external gill rami are lined with filaments (fimbriae) to increase surface area for gas exchange. Four-gill slits lined with gill rakers are hidden underneath the external gills, which prevent food from entering and allow particles to filter through.


title: Axolotl

text: Axolotls have barely visible vestigial teeth, which develop during metamorphosis. The primary method of feeding is by suction, during which their rakers interlock to close the gill slits. External gills are used for respiration, although buccal pumping (gulping air from the surface) may also be used to provide oxygen to their lungs. Buccal pumping can occur in a two-stroke manner that pumps air from the mouth to the lungs, and with four-stroke that reverses this pathway with compression forces.


title: Axolotl

text: Axolotls have four pigmentation genes; when mutated they create different color variants. The normal wild-type animal is brown/tan with gold speckles and an olive undertone. The five more common mutant colors are leucistic (pale pink with black eyes), golden albino (golden with gold eyes), xanthic (grey with black eyes), albino (pale pink/white with red eyes) which is more common in axolotls than some other creatures, and melanoid (all black/dark blue with no gold speckling or olive tone). In addition, there is wide individual variability in the size, frequency, and intensity of the gold speckling and at least one variant that develops a black and white piebald appearance on reaching maturity. Because pet breeders frequently cross the variant colors, double homozygous mutants are common in the pet trade, especially white/pink animals with pink eyes that are double homozygous mutants for both the albino and leucistic trait. Axolotls also have some limited ability to alter their color to provide better camouflage by changing the relative size and thickness of their melanophores.


title: Axolotl

text: The axolotl is native only to the freshwater of Lake Xochimilco and Lake Chalco in the Valley of Mexico. Lake Chalco no longer exists, having been drained as a flood control measure, and Lake Xochimilco remains a remnant of its former self, existing mainly as canals. The water temperature in Xochimilco rarely rises above , although it may fall to in the winter, and perhaps lower.


title: Axolotl

text: Surveys in 1998, 2003, and 2008 found 6,000, 1,000, and 100 axolotls per square kilometer in its Lake Xochimilco habitat, respectively. A four-month-long search in 2013, however, turned up no surviving individuals in the wild. Just a month later, two wild ones were spotted in a network of canals leading from Xochimilco.


title: Axolotl

text: The wild population has been put under heavy pressure by the growth of Mexico City. The axolotl is currently on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's annual Red List of threatened species. Non-native fish, such as African tilapia and Asian carp, have also recently been introduced to the waters. These new fish have been eating the axolotls' young, as well as their primary source of food.


title: Axolotl

text: Axolotls are members of the tiger salamander, or "Ambystoma tigrinum", species complex, along with all other Mexican species of "Ambystoma". Their habitat is like that of most neotenic species—a high-altitude body of water surrounded by a risky terrestrial environment. These conditions are thought to favor neoteny. However, a terrestrial population of Mexican tiger salamanders occupies and breeds in the axolotl's habitat.


title: Axolotl

text: The axolotl is carnivorous, consuming small prey such as mollusks, worms, insects, other arthropods, and small fish in the wild. Axolotls locate food by smell, and will "snap" at any potential meal, sucking the food into their stomachs with vacuum force.


title: Axolotl

text: Today, the axolotl is still used in research as a model organism, and large numbers are bred in captivity. They are especially easy to breed compared to other salamanders in their family, which are rarely captive-bred due to the demands of terrestrial life. One attractive feature for research is the large and easily manipulated embryo, which allows viewing of the full development of a vertebrate. Axolotls are used in heart defect studies due to the presence of a mutant gene that causes heart failure in embryos. Since the embryos survive almost to hatching with no heart function, the defect is very observable. The axolotl is also considered an ideal animal model for the study of neural tube closure due to the similarities between human and axolotl neural plate and tube formation; the axolotl's neural tube, unlike the frog's, is not hidden under a layer of superficial epithelium. There are also mutations affecting other organ systems some of which are not well characterized and others that are. The genetics of the color variants of the axolotl have also been widely studied.


title: Axolotl

text: The feature of the axolotl that attracts most attention is its healing ability: the axolotl does not heal by scarring and is capable of the regeneration of entire lost appendages in a period of months, and, in certain cases, more vital structures, such as tail, limb, central nervous system, and tissues of the eye and heart. They can even restore less vital parts of their brains. They can also readily accept transplants from other individuals, including eyes and parts of the brain—restoring these alien organs to full functionality. In some cases, axolotls have been known to repair a damaged limb, as well as regenerating an additional one, ending up with an extra appendage that makes them attractive to pet owners as a novelty. In metamorphosed individuals, however, the ability to regenerate is greatly diminished. The axolotl is therefore used as a model for the development of limbs in vertebrates. There are three basic requirements for regeneration of the limb: the wound epithelium, nerve signaling, and the presence of cells from the different limb axes. A wound epidermis is quickly formed by the cells to cover up the site of the wound. In the following days, the cells of the wound epidermis divide and grow quickly forming a blastema, which means the wound is ready to heal and undergo patterning to form the new limb.


title: Axolotl

text: It is believed that during limb generation, axolotls have a different system to regulate their internal macrophage level and suppress inflammation, as scarring prevents proper healing and regeneration. However, this belief has been questioned by other studies. Axolotl’s regenerative properties leave the species as the perfect model to study the process of stem cells and its own neoteny feature. Current research can record specific examples of these regenerative properties through tracking cell fates and behaviors, lineage tracing skin triploid cell grafts, pigmentation imaging, electroporation, tissue clearing and lineage tracing from dye labeling. The newer technologies of germline modification and transgenesis are better suited for live imaging the regenerative processes that occur for axolotls.


title: Axolotl

text: The 32 billion base pair long sequence of the axolotl's genome was published in 2018 and was the largest animal genome completed at the time. It revealed species-specific genetic pathways that may be responsible for limb regeneration. Although the axolotl genome is about 10 times as large as the human genome, it encodes a similar number of proteins, namely 23,251 (the human genome encodes about 20,000 proteins). The size difference is mostly explained by a large fraction of repetitive sequences, but such repeated elements also contribute to increased median intron sizes (22,759 bp) which are 13, 16 and 25 times that observed in human (1,750 bp), mouse (1,469 bp) and Tibetan frog (906 bp), respectively.


title: Axolotl

text: When most amphibians are young, they live in water, and they use gills that can breathe in the water. When they become adults, they go through a process called metamorphosis, in which they lose their gills and start living on land. However, the axolotl is unusual in that it has a lack of thyroid stimulating hormone, which is needed for the thyroid to produce thyroxine in order for the axolotl to go through metamorphosis; therefore, it keeps its gills and lives in water all its life, even after it becomes an adult and is able to reproduce. Its body has the capacity to go through metamorphosis if given the necessary hormone, but axolotls do not produce it, and must be exposed to it from an external source, after which an axolotl undergoes an artificially-induced metamorphosis and begins living on land. One method of artificial metamorphosis induction is through an injection of iodine, which is used in the production of thyroid hormones.


title: Axolotl

text: An axolotl undergoing metamorphosis experiences a number of physiological changes that help them adapt to life on land. These include increased muscle tone in limbs, the absorption of gills and fins into the body, the development of eyelids, and a reduction in the skin's permeability to water, allowing the axolotl to stay more easily hydrated when on land. The lungs of an axolotl, though present alongside gills after reaching non-metamorphosed adulthood, develop further during metamorphosis.


title: Axolotl

text: An axolotl that has gone through metamorphosis resembles an adult plateau tiger salamander, though the axolotl differs in its longer toes. The process of artificially inducing metamorphosis can often result in death during or even following a successful attempt, and so casual hobbyists are generally discouraged from attempting to induce metamorphosis in pet axolotls.


title: Axolotl

text: Neoteny is the term for reaching sexual maturity without undergoing metamorphosis. Many other species within the axolotl's genus are also either entirely neotenic or have neotenic populations. Sirens and "Necturus" are other neotenic salamanders, although unlike axolotls, they cannot be induced to metamorphose by an injection of iodine or thyroxine hormone.


title: Axolotl

text: The genes responsible for neoteny in laboratory animals may have been identified; however, they are not linked in wild populations, suggesting artificial selection is the cause of complete neoteny in laboratory and pet axolotls.


title: Axolotl

text: Six adult axolotls (including a leucistic specimen) were shipped from Mexico City to the "Jardin des Plantes" in Paris in 1863. Unaware of their neoteny, Auguste Duméril was surprised when, instead of the axolotl, he found in the vivarium a new species, similar to the salamander. This discovery was the starting point of research about neoteny. It is not certain that "Ambystoma velasci" specimens were not included in the original shipment. Vilem Laufberger in Prague used thyroid hormone injections to induce an axolotl to grow into a terrestrial adult salamander. The experiment was repeated by Englishman Julian Huxley, who was unaware the experiment had already been done, using ground thyroids. Since then, experiments have been done often with injections of iodine or various thyroid hormones used to induce metamorphosis.


title: Axolotl

text: Neoteny has been observed in all salamander families in which it seems to be a survival mechanism, in aquatic environments only of mountain and hill, with little food and, in particular, with little iodine. In this way, salamanders can reproduce and survive in the form of a smaller larval stage, which is aquatic and requires a lower quality and quantity of food compared to the big adult, which is terrestrial. If the salamander larvae ingest a sufficient amount of iodine, directly or indirectly through cannibalism, they quickly begin metamorphosis and transform into bigger terrestrial adults, with higher dietary requirements. In fact, in some high mountain lakes there live dwarf forms of salmonids that are caused by deficiencies in food and, in particular, iodine, which causes cretinism and dwarfism due to hypothyroidism, as it does in humans.


title: Axolotl

text: The axolotl is a popular exotic pet like its relative, the tiger salamander ("Ambystoma tigrinum"). As for all poikilothermic organisms, lower temperatures result in slower metabolism and a very unhealthily reduced appetite. Temperatures at approximately to are suggested for captive axolotls to ensure sufficient food intake; stress resulting from more than a day's exposure to lower temperatures may quickly lead to disease and death, and temperatures higher than may lead to metabolic rate increase, also causing stress and eventually death. Chlorine, commonly added to tapwater, is harmful to axolotls. A single axolotl typically requires a tank. Axolotls spend the majority of the time at the bottom of the tank.


title: Axolotl

text: In captivity, axolotls eat a variety of readily available foods, including trout and salmon pellets, frozen or live bloodworms, earthworms, and waxworms. Axolotls can also eat feeder fish, but care should be taken as fish may contain parasites.


title: Axolotl

text: Substrates are another important consideration for captive axolotls, as axolotls (like other amphibians and reptiles) tend to ingest bedding material together with food and are commonly prone to gastrointestinal obstruction and foreign body ingestion. Some common substrates used for animal enclosures can be harmful for amphibians and reptiles. Gravel (common in aquarium use) should not be used, and is recommended that any sand consists of smooth particles with a grain size of under 1mm. One guide to axolotl care for laboratories notes that bowel obstructions are a common cause of death, and recommends that no items with a diameter below 3 cm (or approximately the size of the animal's head) should be available to the animal.


title: Axolotl

text: There is some evidence that axolotls might seek out appropriately-sized gravel for use as gastroliths based on experiments conducted at the University of Manitoba axolotl colony, but these studies are outdated and not conclusive. As there is no conclusive evidence pointing to gastrolith use, gravel should be avoided due to the high risk of impaction.


title: Axolotl

text: The species is named after the Aztec deity Xolotl, who transformed himself into an axolotl. They continue to play an outsized cultural role in Mexico, and have appeared in cartoons and murals.


title: Axolotl

text: In 2020, it was announced that the axolotl will be featured on the new design for Mexico's 50-peso banknote, along with images of maize and chinampas.


title: John Wick: Chapter 4

text: John Wick: Chapter 4 (alternatively stylized as JW4) is an upcoming American neo-noir action thriller film directed by Chad Stahelski and written by Shay Hatten and Michael Finch. The sequel to "" (2019), it is the fourth installment in the "John Wick" film series. Starring Keanu Reeves returning as the title character, filming took place in Berlin, Paris, Osaka and New York City from June to October 2021.


title: John Wick: Chapter 4

text: The film will be theatrically released in the United States on March 24, 2023, by Lionsgate. Originally set for release on May 21, 2021, the film was delayed due to both the COVID-19 pandemic and Reeves's commitments with "The Matrix Resurrections".


title: John Wick: Chapter 4

text: On May 20, 2019, Lionsgate announced "John Wick: Chapter 4" via their opt-in "John Wick" text update service, writing, "You have served. You will be of service. "John Wick: Chapter 4" is coming – May 21, 2021".


title: John Wick: Chapter 4

text: Before the third film's release, director Chad Stahelski confirmed on a Reddit "AMA" thread that there had been discussion for another film, and that he would be involved with the project should the threequel be successful. Despite this announcement back then, it was not confirmed if star Keanu Reeves would return for a new installment. However, he told "GQ" that he would carry on the role as long as the audience wanted it, saying, "As far as my legs can take me, as far as the audience wants to go."


title: John Wick: Chapter 4

text: Stahelski later teased the fourth film on an interview with IndieWire by saying Wick would not end the fourth film in "a happy ending", saying, "John may survive all this shit but at the end of it, there's no happy ending. He's got nowhere to go. Honestly, I challenge you right now, here's a question to you: How do you fucking want me to end it? Do you think he's going to ride off into the fucking sunset? He's killed 300 fucking people and he's just going to [walk away], everything's okay? He's just going to fall in love with a love interest? If you're this fucking guy, if this guy really exist[ed], how is this guy's day going to end? He's fucked for the rest of his life. It's just a matter of time." Additionally, Stahelski teased Winston's fate in the fourth film, saying, "He meant to shoot him. Did he mean to kill him? That's open for interpretation, you can take it one of two ways, and that's kind of where we pick up some of the unanswered questions in "John Wick 4"." The studio opted to move on from series creator Derek Kolstad and instead hired Shay Hatten to write the script in May 2020. In March 2021, screenwriting duties were passed onto "Predators" screenwriter Michael Finch.


title: John Wick: Chapter 4

text: On May 1, 2020, IndieWire revealed that the fourth film had been delayed to a May 2022 release date following the COVID-19 pandemic and Reeves' commitments to "The Matrix Resurrections", which was slated to be released on the same original date window with "Wick 4". ""The Matrix 4" was only four weeks in when this all happened [production of "The Matrix 4" halted]," Stahelski said, "So, Keanu's gotta go finish his commitment up on "The Matrix", which is a big deal and which I think will probably take him until the end of the year. Then we have to go into our prep mode and then we'll start. So release dates ... who knows right now."


title: John Wick: Chapter 4

text: When the fourth film was announced, Reeves was reportedly revealed to have begun his training course for "John Wick 4" and "The Matrix Resurrections".


title: John Wick: Chapter 4

text: In early August 2020, Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer stated during an earnings call, "We're also busy preparing scripts for the next two installments of our "John Wick" action franchise, with "John Wick 4" slated to hit theaters Memorial Day weekend 2022. We hope to shoot both "John Wick 4" and "5" back to back when Keanu becomes available early next year."


title: John Wick: Chapter 4

text: In May 2021, it was announced that Rina Sawayama would make her feature film debut in "John Wick Chapter 4". She was selected due to the role requiring someone who can do choreography, and Stahelski had seen her music videos for "XS" and "Bad Friend" that feature dance and fighting, respectively. The following month, Laurence Fishburne, Hiroyuki Sanada, Donnie Yen, Bill Skarsgård, Shamier Anderson, and Scott Adkins were cast in the film. Sanada was initially courted to portray Zero in "Chapter 3", but dropped out in favor of appearing in "". In July 2021, Lance Reddick was confirmed to be reprising his role as Charon, and Ian McShane was confirmed to be reprising his role as Winston. Clancy Brown joined the cast that August.


title: John Wick: Chapter 4

text: Production began on June 28, 2021, in Berlin and Paris, with additional filming to take place in Japan and New York City. On October 27, 2021, principal photography had officially wrapped.


title: John Wick: Chapter 4

text: "John Wick: Chapter 4" is scheduled to be released on March 24, 2023. Lionsgate officially announced the film during "Parabellum"s opening week, with a scheduled release date of May 21, 2021. The film's release date was delayed to May 27, 2022, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and then further to March 24, 2023, in part to avoid opening against "".


title: John Wick: Chapter 4

text: In August 2020, Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer confirmed that a fifth film was being developed alongside "John Wick: Chapter 4". While it was initially intended to be shot back-to-back with the fourth installment, in March 2021 Lionsgate opted to delay production and move forward with "Chapter 4" first. Keanu Reeves has stated that he will continue making sequels, as long as the films are successful. Reeves and Ian McShane will reprise their respective roles as John Wick and Winston Scott in the upcoming spin-off film "Ballerina", starring Ana de Armas as ballerina-assassin Rooney Brown (replacing Unity Phelan from "Parabellum").


title: Janis Joplin

text: Janis Lyn Joplin (January 19, 1943 – October 4, 1970) was an American singer and musician. One of the most successful and widely known rock stars of her era, she was noted for her powerful mezzo-soprano vocals and "electric" stage presence.


title: Janis Joplin

text: In 1967, Joplin rose to fame following an appearance at Monterey Pop Festival, where she was the lead singer of the then little-known San Francisco psychedelic rock band Big Brother and the Holding Company. After releasing two albums with the band, she left Big Brother to continue as a solo artist with her own backing groups, first the and then the Full Tilt Boogie Band. She appeared at the Woodstock festival and on the "Festival Express" train tour. Five singles by Joplin reached the "Billboard" Hot 100, including a cover of the Kris Kristofferson song "Me and Bobby McGee", which reached number one in March 1971. Her most popular songs include her cover versions of "Piece of My Heart", "Cry Baby", "Down on Me", "Ball and Chain", "Summertime", and her original song "Mercedes Benz", her final recording.


title: Janis Joplin

text: Joplin died of a heroin overdose in 1970, at the age of 27, after releasing three albums (two with Big Brother and the Holding Company and one solo album). A second solo album, "Pearl", was released in January 1971, just over three months after her death. It reached number one on the "Billboard" charts. She was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995. "Rolling Stone" ranked Joplin number 46 on its 2004 list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time and number 28 on its 2008 list of 100 Greatest Singers of All Time. She remains one of the top-selling musicians in the United States, with Recording Industry Association of America certifications of 18.5 million albums sold.


title: Janis Joplin

text: Janis Joplin was born in Port Arthur, Texas, on , to Dorothy Bonita East (1913–1998), a registrar at a business college, and her husband, Seth Ward Joplin (1910–1987), an engineer at Texaco. She had two younger siblings, Laura and Michael. The family attended First Christian Church of Port Arthur, a church belonging to the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) denomination.


title: Janis Joplin

text: Her parents felt that Janis needed more attention than their other children. As a teenager, Joplin befriended a group of outcasts, one of whom had albums by blues artists Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Lead Belly, which Joplin later credited with influencing her decision to become a singer. She began singing blues and folk music with friends at Thomas Jefferson High School. In high school, she was a classmate of Pro Football Hall of Fame coach Jimmy Johnson.


title: Janis Joplin

text: Joplin stated that she was ostracized and bullied in high school. As a teen, she became overweight and suffered from acne, leaving her with deep scars that required dermabrasion. Other kids at high school would routinely taunt her and call her names like "pig," "freak," "nigger lover," or "creep." She stated, "I was a misfit. I read, I painted, I thought. I didn't hate niggers."


title: Janis Joplin

text: Joplin graduated from high school in 1960 and attended Lamar State College of Technology in Beaumont, Texas, during the summer and later the University of Texas at Austin (UT), though she did not complete her college studies. The campus newspaper, "The Daily Texan", ran a profile of her in the issue dated July 27, 1962, headlined "She Dares to Be Different." The article began, "She goes barefooted when she feels like it, wears Levi's to class because they're more comfortable, and carries her autoharp with her everywhere she goes so that in case she gets the urge to break into song, it will be handy. Her name is Janis Joplin." While at UT she performed with a folk trio called the Waller Creek Boys and frequently socialized with the staff of the campus humor magazine "The Texas Ranger". According to Freak Brothers cartoonist Gilbert Shelton, who befriended her, she used to sell "The Texas Ranger", which contained some of Shelton's early comic books, on the campus.


title: Janis Joplin

text: Joplin cultivated a rebellious manner and styled herself partly after her female blues heroines and partly after the Beat poets. Her first song, "What Good Can Drinkin' Do", was recorded on tape in December 1962 at the home of a fellow University of Texas student.


title: Janis Joplin

text: She left Texas in January 1963 ("Just to get away," she said, "because my head was in a much different place"), hitchhiking with her friend Chet Helms to North Beach, San Francisco. Still in San Francisco in 1964, Joplin and future Jefferson Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen recorded a number of blues standards, which incidentally featured Kaukonen's wife Margareta using a typewriter in the background. This session included seven tracks: "Typewriter Talk", "Trouble in Mind", "Kansas City Blues", "Hesitation Blues", "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out", "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy", and "Long Black Train Blues", and was released long after Joplin's death as the bootleg album "The Typewriter Tape".


title: Janis Joplin

text: In 1963, Joplin was arrested in San Francisco for shoplifting. During the two years that followed, her drug use increased and she acquired a reputation as a "speed freak" and occasional heroin user. She also used other psychoactive drugs and was a heavy drinker throughout her career; her favorite alcoholic beverage was Southern Comfort.


title: Janis Joplin

text: In May 1965, Joplin's friends in San Francisco, noticing the detrimental effects on her from regularly injecting methamphetamine (she was described as "skeletal" and "emaciated"), persuaded her to return to Port Arthur. During that month, her friends threw her a bus-fare party so she could return to her parents in Texas. Five years later, Joplin told "Rolling Stone" magazine writer David Dalton the following about her first stint in San Francisco: "I didn't have many friends and I didn't like the ones I had."


title: Janis Joplin

text: Back in Port Arthur in the spring of 1965, after Joplin's parents noticed her weight of , she changed her lifestyle. She avoided drugs and alcohol, adopted a beehive hairdo, and enrolled as an anthropology major at Lamar University in nearby Beaumont, Texas. Her sister Laura said in a 2016 interview that social work was her major during her year at Lamar. During her time at Lamar University, she commuted to Austin to sing solo, accompanying herself on acoustic guitar. One of her performances was at a benefit by local musicians for Texas bluesman Mance Lipscomb, who was suffering with ill health.


title: Janis Joplin

text: Joplin became engaged to Peter de Blanc in the fall of 1965. She had begun a relationship with him toward the end of her first stint in San Francisco. Now living in New York where he worked with IBM computers, he visited her to ask her father for her hand in marriage. Joplin and her mother began planning the wedding. De Blanc, who traveled frequently, ended the engagement soon afterward.


title: Janis Joplin

text: In 1965 and 1966, Joplin commuted from her family's Port Arthur home to Beaumont, Texas, where she had regular sessions with a psychiatric social worker named Bernard Giarritano at a counseling agency that was funded by the United Fund, which after her death changed its name to the United Way. Interviewed by biographer Myra Friedman after his client's death, Giarritano said Joplin had been baffled by how she could pursue a professional career as a singer without relapsing into drugs, and her drug-related memories from immediately prior to returning to Port Arthur continued to frighten her. Joplin sometimes brought an acoustic guitar with her to her sessions with Giarritano, and people in other offices within the building could hear her singing.


title: Janis Joplin

text: Giarritano tried to reassure her that she did not have to use narcotics in order to succeed in the music business. She also said that if she were to avoid singing professionally, she would have to become a keypunch operator (as she had done a few years earlier) or a secretary, and then a wife and mother, and she would have to become very similar to all the other women in Port Arthur.


title: Janis Joplin

text: Approximately a year before Joplin joined Big Brother and the Holding Company, she recorded seven studio tracks with her acoustic guitar. Among the songs she recorded were her original composition of the song "Turtle Blues" and an alternate version of "Cod'ine" by Buffy Sainte-Marie. These tracks were later issued as a new album in 1995, titled "This is Janis Joplin 1965" by James Gurley.


title: Janis Joplin

text: In 1966, Joplin's bluesy vocal style attracted the attention of the San Francisco-based psychedelic rock band Big Brother and the Holding Company, which had gained some renown among the nascent hippie community in Haight-Ashbury. She was recruited to join the group by Chet Helms, a promoter who was managing Big Brother and with whom she had hitchhiked from Texas to San Francisco a few years earlier. Helms sent his friend Travis Rivers to find her in Austin, Texas, where she had been performing with her acoustic guitar, and to accompany her to San Francisco.


title: Janis Joplin

text: Aware of her previous nightmare with drug addiction in San Francisco, Rivers insisted that she inform her parents face-to-face of her plans, and he drove her from Austin to Port Arthur (he waited in his car while she talked with her startled parents) before they began their long drive to San Francisco. Joplin joined Big Brother on June 4, 1966. Her first public performance with them was at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco.


title: Janis Joplin

text: In June, Joplin was photographed at an outdoor concert in San Francisco that celebrated the summer solstice. The image, which was later published in two books by David Dalton, shows her before she relapsed into drugs. Due to persistent persuading by keyboardist and close friend Stephen Ryder, Joplin avoided drugs for several weeks. She made Travis Rivers, with whom she shared an apartment upon their arrival in San Francisco, promise that using needles would not be allowed there. When bandmate Dave Getz accompanied her from a rehearsal to her home, Rivers was not there, but "two or three" (according to Getz' recollection 25 years later) guests whom Rivers had invited were in the process of injecting drugs. "One of them was about to tie off," recalled Getz. ""Janis went nuts!" I had never seen anybody explode like that. She was screaming and crying and Travis walked in. She screamed at him: 'We had a pact! You promised me! There wouldn't be any of that in front of me!' I was over my head and I tried to calm her down. I said, 'They're just doing mescaline,' because that's what I thought it was. She said, 'You don't understand! I can't see that! I just can't stand to see that!'"


title: Janis Joplin

text: A San Francisco concert from that summer (1966) was recorded and released on the 1984 album "Cheaper Thrills". In July, all five bandmates and guitarist James Gurley's wife Nancy moved to a house in Lagunitas, California, where they lived communally. The band often partied with the Grateful Dead, the members of whom lived less than two miles away. She had a short relationship and longer friendship with founding member Ron "Pigpen" McKernan.


title: Janis Joplin

text: The band went to Chicago for a four-week engagement in August 1966, then found itself stranded after the promoter ran out of money when its concerts did not attract the expected audience levels, and he was unable to pay them. In the circumstances the band signed with Bob Shad's record label Mainstream Records; recordings for the label took place in Chicago in September, but these were not satisfactory, and the band returned to San Francisco, continuing to perform live, including at the Love Pageant Rally. The band recorded two tracks, "Blindman" and "All Is Loneliness", in Los Angeles, and these were released by Mainstream as a single that did not sell well. After playing at a happening in Stanford in early December 1966, the band traveled back to Los Angeles to record ten tracks between December 12 and 14, 1966, produced by Bob Shad, which appeared on the band's debut album in August 1967.


title: Janis Joplin

text: In late 1966, Big Brother switched managers from Chet Helms to Julius Karpen. One of Joplin's earliest major performances in 1967 was at the Mantra-Rock Dance, a musical event held on January 29 at the Avalon Ballroom by the San Francisco Hare Krishna temple. Janis Joplin and Big Brother performed there along with the Hare Krishna founder Bhaktivedanta Swami, Allen Ginsberg, Moby Grape, and the Grateful Dead, donating proceeds to the Krishna temple. In early 1967, Joplin met Country Joe McDonald of the group Country Joe and the Fish. The pair lived together as a couple for a few months in her Lyon Street apartment. A driver's license, issued to Joplin in 1967, shows her residence as 122 Lyon Street #3, in San Francisco.


title: Janis Joplin

text: Joplin and Big Brother began playing clubs in San Francisco, at the Fillmore West, Winterland, and the Avalon Ballroom. They also played at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, as well as in Seattle, Washington; Vancouver, British Columbia; the Psychedelic Supermarket in Boston, Massachusetts; and the Golden Bear Club in Huntington Beach, California.


title: Janis Joplin

text: The band's debut studio album, "Big Brother & the Holding Company", was released by Mainstream Records in August 1967, shortly after the group's breakthrough appearance in June at the Monterey Pop Festival. Two tracks, "Coo Coo" and "The Last Time," were released separately as singles, while the tracks from the previous single, "Blindman" and "All Is Loneliness", were added to the remaining eight tracks. When Columbia Records took over the band's contract and re-released the album, they included "Coo Coo" and "The Last Time", and put "featuring Janis Joplin" on the cover. The debut album spawned four minor hits with the singles "Down on Me", a traditional song arranged by Joplin, "Bye Bye Baby", "Call On Me" and "Coo Coo", on all of which Joplin sang lead vocals.


title: Janis Joplin

text: Two songs from the second of Big Brother's two sets at Monterey, which they played on Sunday, were filmed (their first set, which was on Saturday, was not filmed, though it was audio-recorded). Some sources, including a Joplin biography by Ellis Amburn, claim that she was dressed in thrift store hippie clothes or second-hand Victorian clothes during the band's Saturday set, but still photographs do not appear to have survived. Digitized color film of two songs in the Sunday set, "Combination of the Two" and a version of Big Mama Thornton's "Ball and Chain," appear in the DVD and Blu-ray boxed set of D. A. Pennebaker's documentary "Monterey Pop" released by The Criterion Collection. She is seen wearing an expensive gold tunic dress with matching pants. They were created for her by San Francisco clothing designer Colin Rose.


title: Janis Joplin

text: Documentary filmmaker Pennebaker inserted two cutaway shots of Cass Elliot of the Mamas & the Papas seated in the audience during Joplin's performance of "Ball and Chain", one in the middle of the song as her eyes, covered by sunglasses, are fixed on Joplin, and also a shot during the applause as she silently mouths "Oh, wow!" and looks at the person seated next to her. Elliot and the audience are seen in sunlight, but Sunday's Big Brother performance was filmed in the evening. An explanation came from Big Brother's road manager John Byrne Cooke, who remembers that Pennebaker discreetly filmed the audience (including Elliot) during Big Brother's Saturday performance when he was not allowed to point a camera at the band.


title: Janis Joplin

text: The prohibition of Pennebaker from filming on Saturday afternoon came from Big Brother's manager Julius Karpen. The band had a bitter argument with Karpen and overruled him as they prepared for their second set that the festival organizers had added on the spur of the moment. Backstage at the festival, the band became acquainted with New York-based talent manager Albert Grossman but did not sign with him until several months later, firing Karpen at that time.


title: Janis Joplin

text: Only "Ball and Chain" was included in the "Monterey Pop" film that was released to theaters throughout the United States in 1969 and shown on television in the 1970s. Those who did not attend the Monterey Pop Festival saw the band's performance of "Combination of the Two" for the first time in 2002 when The Criterion Collection released the boxed set.


title: Janis Joplin

text: For the remainder of 1967, even after Big Brother signed with Albert Grossman, the band performed mainly in California. On February 16, 1968, the group began its first East Coast tour in Philadelphia, and the following day gave their first performance in New York City at the Anderson Theater. On April 7, 1968—three days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the last day of their East Coast tour—Joplin and Big Brother performed with Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Guy, Joni Mitchell, Richie Havens, Paul Butterfield, and Elvin Bishop at the Wake for Martin Luther King Jr. concert in New York.


title: Janis Joplin

text: "Live at Winterland '68", recorded at the Winterland Ballroom on April 12 and 13, 1968, features Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company at the height of their mutual career working through a selection of tracks from their albums. A recording became available to the public for the first time in 1998 when Columbia/Sony Music Entertainment released the compact disc. One month after the Winterland concert, Owsley Stanley recorded them at the Carousel Ballroom, released in 2012 as "Live at the Carousel Ballroom 1968".


title: Janis Joplin

text: On July 31, 1968, Joplin made her first nationwide television appearance when the band performed on "This Morning", an ABC daytime 90-minute variety show that was hosted by Dick Cavett. Shortly thereafter, network employees wiped the videotape, though the audio survives. (In 1969 and 1970, Joplin made three appearances on Cavett's prime-time program. Audio of her 1968 appearance has not been used since then.)


title: Janis Joplin

text: Sometime in 1968, the band's billing was changed to "Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company," and the media coverage given to Joplin generated resentment within the band. The other members of Big Brother thought that Joplin was on a "star trip", while others were telling Joplin that Big Brother was a terrible band and that she ought to dump them. "Time" magazine called Joplin "probably the most powerful singer to emerge from the white rock movement", and Richard Goldstein wrote for the May 1968 issue of "Vogue" magazine that Joplin was "the most staggering leading woman in rock...she slinks like tar, scowls like war...clutching the knees of a final stanza, begging it not to leave... Janis Joplin can sing the chic off any listener."


title: Janis Joplin

text: For her first major studio recording, Joplin played a major role in the arrangement and production of the songs that would comprise Big Brother and the Holding Company's second album, "Cheap Thrills". Producer John Simon tried recording the band in concert, to capture their energy in a live album, but several attempts showed the band was prone to mistakes. Their imprecision was not helped by moving the sessions to a recording studio. Joplin sang take after take of the same song, with her performances consistently good, and she grew frustrated with the band's sloppiness. Simon was replaced by Elliot Mazer who fixed the songs by overdubbing certain parts. The album featured a cover design by counterculture cartoonist Robert Crumb.


title: Janis Joplin

text: Although "Cheap Thrills" sounded as if it consisted of concert recordings, like on "Combination of the Two" and "I Need a Man to Love", only "Ball and Chain" was actually recorded in front of a paying audience; the rest of the tracks were studio recordings. The album had a raw quality, including the sound of a drinking glass breaking and the broken shards being swept away during the song "Turtle Blues". "Cheap Thrills" produced very popular hits with "Piece of My Heart" and "Summertime". Together with the premiere of the documentary film "Monterey Pop" at New York's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts on December 26, 1968, the album launched Joplin as a star. "Cheap Thrills" reached number one on the "Billboard" 200 album chart eight weeks after its release, and was number one for eight (nonconsecutive) weeks. The album was certified gold at release and sold over a million copies in the first month of its release. The lead single from the album, "Piece of My Heart", reached number 12 on the "Billboard" Hot 100 in the fall of 1968.


title: Janis Joplin

text: The band made another East Coast tour during July–August 1968, performing at the Columbia Records convention in Puerto Rico and the Newport Folk Festival. After returning to San Francisco for two hometown shows at the Palace of Fine Arts Festival on August 31 and September 1, Joplin announced that she would be leaving Big Brother. On September 14, 1968, culminating a three-night engagement together at Fillmore West, fans thronged to a concert that Bill Graham publicized as the last official concert of Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company. The opening acts on this night were Chicago (then still called Chicago Transit Authority) and Santana.


title: Janis Joplin

text: Despite Graham's announcement that the Fillmore West gig was Big Brother's last concert with Joplin, the band—with Joplin still as lead vocalist—toured the U.S. that fall. Reflecting Joplin's crossover appeal, two October 1968 performances at a roller rink in Alexandria, Virginia, were reviewed by John Segraves of the conservative "Washington Evening Star" at a time when the Washington metropolitan area's hard rock scene was in its infancy. An opera buff at the time, he wrote:


title: Janis Joplin

text: Later that month (October 1968), Big Brother performed at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and played at the Syracuse War Memorial as part of Syracuse University's Fall Homecoming on October 11, with Janis joining openers the Butterfield Blues Band for their closing song. Aside from two 1970 reunions, Joplin's last performance with Big Brother was at a Chet Helms benefit in San Francisco on December 1, 1968.


title: Janis Joplin

text: After splitting from Big Brother and the Holding Company, Joplin formed a new backup group, the Kozmic Blues Band, composed of session musicians like keyboardist Stephen Ryder and saxophonist Cornelius "Snooky" Flowers, as well as former Big Brother and the Holding Company guitarist Sam Andrew and future Full Tilt Boogie Band bassist Brad Campbell. The band was influenced by the Stax-Volt rhythm and blues (R&B) and soul bands of the 1960s, as exemplified by Otis Redding and the Bar-Kays. The Stax-Volt R&B sound was typified by the use of horns and had a funky, pop-oriented sound in contrast to many of the psychedelic/hard rock bands of the period.


title: Janis Joplin

text: By early 1969, Joplin was allegedly shooting at least $200 worth of heroin per day (equivalent to $1300 in 2016 dollars) although efforts were made to keep her clean during the recording of "I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama!" Gabriel Mekler, who produced the album, told publicist-turned-biographer Myra Friedman after Joplin's death that she had lived in his Los Angeles house during the June 1969 recording sessions at his insistence so he could keep her away from drugs and her drug-using friends.


title: Janis Joplin

text: Joplin's appearances with the Kozmic Blues Band in Europe were released in theaters, in multiple documentaries. "Janis", which was reviewed by "The Washington Post" on March 21, 1975, shows Joplin arriving in Frankfurt by plane and waiting inside a bus next to the Frankfurt venue, while an American female fan who is visiting Germany expresses enthusiasm to the camera (no security was used in Frankfurt, so by the end of the concert, the stage was so packed with people the band members could not see each other). "Janis" also includes interviews with Joplin in Stockholm and from her visit to London, for her gig at Royal Albert Hall. The London interview was dubbed with a voiceover in the German language for broadcast on German television. John Byrne Cooke, road manager for Joplin and the Kozmic Blues Band, wrote a book published in 2014 in which he discussed her knowledge of the risks of her ongoing use of narcotics, particularly when she was outside the United States.


title: Janis Joplin

text: On the episode of "The Dick Cavett Show" that was telecast in the United States on the night of July 18, 1969, Joplin and her band performed "Try (Just a Little Bit Harder)" as well as "To Love Somebody".


title: Janis Joplin

text: Released in September 1969, the "Kozmic Blues" album was certified gold later that year but did not match the success of "Cheap Thrills". Reviews of the new group were mixed.


title: Janis Joplin

text: Some music critics, however, including Ralph J. Gleason of the "San Francisco Chronicle", were negative. Gleason wrote that the new band was a "drag" and Joplin should "scrap" her new band and "go right back to being a member of Big Brother ... (if they'll have her)."


title: Janis Joplin

text: Other reviewers, such as reporter Carl Bernstein of "The Washington Post", devoted entire articles to celebrating the singer's magic. Bernstein's review said that Joplin "has finally assembled a group of first-rate musicians with whom she is totally at ease and whose abilities complement the incredible range of her voice."


title: Janis Joplin

text: Columbia Records released "Kozmic Blues" as a single, which peaked at number 41 on the "Billboard" Hot 100, and a live rendition of "Raise Your Hand" was released in Germany and became a top ten hit there. Containing other hits like "Try (Just a Little Bit Harder)", "To Love Somebody", and "Little Girl Blue", "I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama!" reached number five on the "Billboard" 200 soon after its release.


title: Janis Joplin

text: Joplin appeared at Woodstock starting at approximately 2:00 a.m., on Sunday, August 17, 1969. Joplin informed her band that they would be performing at the concert as if it were just another gig. On Saturday afternoon, when she and the band were flown by helicopter with the pregnant Joan Baez and Baez's mother from a nearby motel to the festival site and Joplin saw the enormous crowd, she instantly became extremely nervous and giddy. Upon landing and getting off the helicopter, Joplin was approached by reporters asking her questions. She referred them to her friend and sometime lover Peggy Caserta as she was too excited to speak. Initially, Joplin was eager to get on the stage and perform but was repeatedly delayed as bands were contractually obliged to perform ahead of Joplin. Faced with a ten-hour wait after arriving at the backstage area, Joplin spent some of that time shooting heroin and drinking alcohol with Caserta in a tent. The director's cut of the Woodstock movie shows Joplin and Jefferson Airplane singer Grace Slick standing together near amplifiers watching the band Canned Heat's performance, which started at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, and Caserta does not appear within camera range. When Joplin finally reached the stage at approximately 2:00 a.m. Sunday, she was "three sheets to the wind", according to biographer Alice Echols. During her performance, Joplin's voice became slightly hoarse and wheezy, and she struggled to dance.


title: Janis Joplin

text: Joplin pulled through, however, and engaged frequently with the crowd, asking them if they had everything they needed and if they were staying stoned. The audience cheered for an encore, to which Joplin replied and sang "Ball and Chain". Pete Townshend, who performed with the Who later in the same morning after Joplin finished, witnessed her performance and said the following in his 2012 memoir: "She had been amazing at Monterey, but tonight she wasn't at her best, due, probably, to the long delay, and probably, too, to the amount of booze and heroin she'd consumed while she waited. But even Janis on an off-night was incredible."


title: Janis Joplin

text: Janis remained at Woodstock for the remainder of the festival. Starting at approximately 3:00 a.m. on Monday, August 18, Joplin was among many Woodstock performers who stood in a circle behind Crosby, Stills & Nash during their performance, which was the first time anyone at Woodstock ever had heard the group perform. This information was published by David Crosby in 1988. Later in the morning of August 18, Joplin and Joan Baez sat in Joe Cocker's van and witnessed Hendrix's close-of-show performance, according to Baez's memoir "And a Voice to Sing With" (1989).


title: Janis Joplin

text: Still photographs in color show Joplin backstage with Grace Slick the day after Joplin's performance, wherein Joplin appears to be very happy. She was ultimately unhappy with her performance, however, and blamed Caserta. Her singing was not included (by her own insistence) in the 1970 documentary film or the soundtrack for "", although the 25th anniversary director's cut of "Woodstock" includes her performance of "Work Me, Lord". The documentary film of the festival that was released in theaters during 1970 includes, on the left side of a split screen, 37 seconds of footage of Joplin and Caserta walking toward Joplin's dressing room tent.


title: Janis Joplin

text: In addition to Woodstock, Joplin also had problems at Madison Square Garden, in 1969. Biographer Myra Friedman said she had witnessed a duet Joplin sang with Tina Turner during the Rolling Stones concert at the Garden on Thanksgiving Day. Friedman said Joplin was "so drunk, so stoned, so out of control, that she could have been an institutionalized psychotic rent by mania." During another Garden concert where she had solo billing on December 19, some observers believed Joplin tried to incite the audience to riot. For part of this concert she was joined onstage by Johnny Winter and Paul Butterfield.


title: Janis Joplin

text: Joplin told rock journalist David Dalton that Garden audiences watched and listened to "every note [she sang] with 'Is she gonna make it?' in their eyes." In her interview with Dalton she added that she felt most comfortable performing at small, cheap venues in San Francisco that were associated with the counterculture.


title: Janis Joplin

text: At the time of the June 1970 interview with Dalton, she had already performed in the Bay Area for what turned out to be the last time. Sam Andrew, the lead guitarist who had left Big Brother with Joplin in December 1968 to form her back-up band, quit in late summer 1969 and returned to Big Brother. At the end of the year, the Kozmic Blues Band broke up. Their final gig with Joplin was the one at Madison Square Garden with Winter and Butterfield.


title: Janis Joplin

text: In February 1970, Joplin traveled to Brazil, where she stopped her drug and alcohol use. She was accompanied on vacation there by her friend Linda Gravenites (wife of songwriter Nick Gravenites), who had designed Janis's stage costumes from 1967 to 1969.


title: Janis Joplin

text: In Brazil, Joplin was romanced by a fellow American tourist named David (George) Niehaus, who was traveling around the world. A Joplin biography written by her sister Laura said, "David was an upper-middle-class Cincinnati kid who had studied communications at Notre Dame. ... [and] had joined the Peace Corps after college and worked in a small village in Turkey. ... He tried law school, but when he met Janis he was taking time off."


title: Janis Joplin

text: Niehaus and Joplin were photographed by the press at Rio Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. Gravenites also took color photographs of the two during their Brazilian vacation. According to Joplin biographer Ellis Amburn, in Gravenites' snapshots they "look like a carefree, happy, healthy young couple having a tremendously good time."


title: Janis Joplin

text: "Rolling Stone" magazine interviewed Joplin during an international phone call, quoting her: "I'm going into the jungle with a big bear of a beatnik named David Niehaus. I finally remembered I don't have to be on stage twelve months a year. I've decided to go and dig some other jungles for a couple of weeks." Amburn added in 1992, "Janis was trying to kick heroin in Brazil, and one of the nicest things about David was that he wasn't into drugs."


title: Janis Joplin

text: When Joplin returned to the U.S., she began using heroin again. Her relationship with Niehaus soon ended because he witnessed her shooting drugs at her new home in Larkspur, California. The relationship was also complicated by her ongoing romantic relationship with Peggy Caserta, who also was an intravenous addict, and Joplin's refusal to take some time off and travel the world with him.


title: Janis Joplin

text: Around this time, she formed her new band, known for a short time as Main Squeeze, then renamed the Full Tilt Boogie Band. The band comprised mostly young Canadian musicians previously associated with Ronnie Hawkins and featured an organ, but no horn section. Joplin took a more active role in putting together the Full Tilt Boogie band than she had with her prior group. She was quoted as saying, "It's "my" band. Finally it's "my" band!" In May 1970, after performing under the name Main Squeeze at a Hell's Angels event, the renamed Full Tilt Boogie Band began a nationwide tour. Joplin became very happy with her new group, which eventually received mostly positive feedback from both her fans and the critics.


title: Janis Joplin

text: Prior to beginning a summer tour with Full Tilt Boogie, she performed in a reunion with Big Brother at the Fillmore West, in San Francisco, on April 4, 1970. Recordings from this concert were included in an in-concert album released posthumously in 1972. She again appeared with Big Brother on April 12 at Winterland, where she and Big Brother were reported to be in excellent form. She performed with the band, billed as Main Squeeze, at a party for the Hells Angels at a venue in San Rafael, California on May 21, 1970, according to a web site maintained by Big Brother guitarist Sam Andrew. Andrew's web site quotes him as saying, "This will be the first time that Janis' old band and her new band will be at the same venue, so everyone is a little on edge."


title: Janis Joplin

text: According to Joplin's biographer Ellis Amburn, Big Brother with its lead singer Nick Gravenites was the opening act at the party that was attended by 2,300 people. The Hells Angels, who had known Joplin since 1966, paid her a fee of 240 dollars to perform. Gravenites and Sam Andrew (who had resumed playing guitar with Big Brother) differed in their opinions of her performance and how substance abuse affected it. Gravenites described her singing as "stupendous," according to Amburn. Amburn quoted Andrew twenty years later: "She was visibly deteriorating and she looked bloated. She was like a parody of what she was at her best. I put it down to her drinking too much and I felt a tinge of fear for her well-being. Her singing was real flabby, no edge at all."


title: Janis Joplin

text: Shortly thereafter, Joplin began wearing multi-colored feather boas in her hair. (She had not worn them at the May 21 Hell's Angels party / concert in San Rafael). By the time she began touring with Full Tilt Boogie, Joplin told people she was drug-free, but her drinking increased.


title: Janis Joplin

text: From June 28 to July 4, 1970, during the Festival Express tour, Joplin and Full Tilt Boogie performed alongside Buddy Guy, the Band, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Ten Years After, the Grateful Dead, Delaney & Bonnie, Eric Andersen, and Ian & Sylvia. They played concerts in Toronto, Winnipeg, and Calgary. Joplin jammed with the other performers on the train, and her performances on this tour are considered to be among her greatest.


title: Janis Joplin

text: Joplin headlined the festival on all three nights. At the last stop in Calgary, she took to the stage with Jerry Garcia while her band was tuning up. Film footage shows her telling the audience how great the tour was and shows her and Garcia presenting the organizers with a case of tequila. She then burst into a two-hour set, starting with "Tell Mama". Throughout this performance, Joplin engaged in several banters about her love life. In one, she reminisced about living in a San Francisco apartment and competing with a female neighbor in flirting with men on the street. She finished the Calgary concert with long versions of "Get It While You Can" and "Ball and Chain".


title: Janis Joplin

text: Footage of her performance of "Tell Mama" in Calgary became an MTV video in the early 1980s, and the audio from the same film footage was included on the "Farewell Song" (1982) album. The audio of other "Festival Express" performances was included on Joplin's "In Concert" (1972) album. Video of the performances was also included on the "Festival Express" DVD.


title: Janis Joplin

text: In the "Tell Mama" video shown on MTV in the 1980s, Joplin wore a psychedelically colored, loose-fitting costume and feathers in her hair. This was her standard stage costume in the spring and summer of 1970. She chose the new costumes after her friend and designer, Linda Gravenites (whom Joplin had praised in "Vogue"s profile of her in its May 1968 edition), cut ties with Joplin shortly after their return from Brazil, due largely to Joplin's continued use of heroin.


title: Janis Joplin

text: Among Joplin's last public appearances were two broadcasts of "The Dick Cavett Show". In her June 25, 1970 appearance, she announced that she would attend her ten-year high school class reunion. When asked if she had been popular in school, she admitted that when in high school, her schoolmates "laughed me out of class, out of town and out of the state" (during the year she had spent at the University of Texas at Austin, Joplin had been voted "Ugliest Man on Campus" by frat boys). In the subsequent "Cavett Show" broadcast, on August 3, 1970, and featuring Gloria Swanson, Joplin discussed her upcoming performance at the Festival for Peace to be held at Shea Stadium in Queens, New York, three days later.


title: Janis Joplin

text: On July 11, 1970, Full Tilt Boogie and Big Brother and the Holding Company both performed at the same concert in the San Diego Sports Arena, which was decades later renamed the Valley View Casino Center. Joplin sang with Full Tilt Boogie and appeared briefly onstage with Big Brother without singing, according to a July 13 review of the concert in the "San Diego Union".


title: Janis Joplin

text: On August 7, 1970, a tombstone—jointly paid for by Joplin and Juanita Green, who as a child had done housework for Bessie Smith—was erected at Smith's previously unmarked grave. The following day, the Associated Press circulated this news, and the August 9 edition of "The New York Times" carried it. The lead paragraph of the AP story said Joplin and Green had "shared the cost of a stone for the 'Empress of the Blues,'" but, according to publicist/biographer Myra Friedman, the two women never met. Joplin had been at home in Larkspur, California when she had received a long-distance phone call with an explanation of the need to finance a gravestone for Bessie Smith, whom Joplin had frequently cited as a musical influence. Joplin immediately wrote a check and mailed it to the name and address provided by the phone caller.


title: Janis Joplin

text: On August 8, 1970, as the Associated Press circulated the news about Smith's new gravestone, Joplin performed at the Capitol Theatre (Port Chester, New York). It was there that she first performed "Mercedes Benz", a song (partially inspired by a Michael McClure poem) that she had composed with fellow musician and friend Bob Neuwirth a very short time earlier. According to Myra Friedman's account, Joplin performed two shows at the Capitol Theatre, the first of which was attended by actors Geraldine Page and her husband Rip Torn. Between the shows, at a "gin mill" [Friedman's words] very close to this concert venue, Joplin and Neuwirth penned the lyrics to the song and she performed it at the second show, according to Friedman. Neuwirth was quoted by "The Wall Street Journal" in 2015: "Around 7 p.m., after the Capitol sound check, we had a couple of hours to kill before [acts that opened for Joplin] Seatrain and Runt finished their sets. So the four of us [Joplin, Neuwirth, Geraldine Page, Rip Torn] walked to a bar about three minutes away called Vahsen’s [at 30 Broad Street in Port Chester]." While in Vahsen's, "Janis came up with words for the first verse. I was in charge of writing them down on bar napkins with a ballpoint pen. She came up with the second verse, too, about a color TV. I suggested words here and there, and came up with the third verse—about asking the Lord to buy us a night on the town and another round."


title: Janis Joplin

text: Joplin's last public performance with the Full Tilt Boogie Band took place on August 12, 1970, at the Harvard Stadium in Boston. "The Harvard Crimson" gave the performance a positive, front-page review, despite the fact that Full Tilt Boogie had performed with makeshift amplifiers after their regular sound equipment was stolen in Boston.


title: Janis Joplin

text: Joplin attended her high school reunion on August 14, accompanied by Neuwirth, road manager John Cooke, and sister Laura, but it was reportedly an unhappy experience for her. Joplin held a press conference in Port Arthur during her reunion visit. When asked by a reporter if she ever entertained at Thomas Jefferson High School when she was a student there, Joplin replied, "Only when I walked down the aisles." Joplin denigrated Port Arthur and the classmates who had humiliated her a decade earlier.


title: Janis Joplin

text: During late August, September, and early October 1970, Joplin and her band rehearsed and recorded a new album in Los Angeles with producer Paul A. Rothchild, best known for his lengthy relationship with The Doors. Although Joplin died before all the tracks were fully completed, there was enough usable material to compile an LP.


title: Janis Joplin

text: The posthumous "Pearl" (1971) became the biggest-selling album of her career and featured her biggest hit single, a cover of Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster's "Me and Bobby McGee" (Kristofferson had previously been one of Joplin's lovers). The opening track, "Move Over", was written by Joplin, reflecting the way that she felt men treated women in relationships. Also included was the social commentary of "Mercedes Benz", presented in an "a cappella" arrangement; the track on the album features the first and only take that Joplin recorded. A cover of Nick Gravenites's "Buried Alive in the Blues", to which Joplin had been scheduled to add her vocals on the day she was found dead, was included as an instrumental.


title: Janis Joplin

text: Joplin checked into the Landmark Motor Hotel in Hollywood on August 24, 1970, near Sunset Sound Recorders, where she began rehearsing and recording her album. During the sessions, Joplin continued a relationship with Seth Morgan, a 21-year-old UC Berkeley student, cocaine dealer, and future novelist who had visited her new home in Larkspur in July and August. She and Morgan were engaged to be married in early September, although he visited Sunset Sound Recorders for just eight of Joplin's many rehearsals and sessions.


title: Janis Joplin

text: Morgan later told biographer Myra Friedman that, as a non-musician, he had felt excluded whenever he had visited Sunset Sound Recorders. Instead, he stayed at Joplin's Larkspur home while she stayed alone at the Landmark, although several times she visited Larkspur to be with him and to check the progress of renovations she was having done on the house. She told her construction crew to design a carport to be shaped like a flying saucer, according to biographer Ellis Amburn, the concrete foundation for which was poured the day before she died.


title: Janis Joplin

text: Peggy Caserta claimed in her book, "Going Down With Janis" (1973), that she and Joplin had decided mutually in April 1970 to stay away from each other to avoid enabling each other's drug use. Caserta, a former Delta Air Lines stewardess and owner of one of the first clothing boutiques in the Haight Ashbury, said in the book that by September 1970, she was smuggling cannabis throughout California and had checked into the Landmark Motor Hotel because it attracted drug users.


title: Janis Joplin

text: For approximately the first two weeks of Joplin's stay at the Landmark, she did not know Caserta was in Los Angeles. Joplin learned of Caserta's presence at the Landmark from a heroin dealer who made deliveries there. Joplin begged Caserta for heroin, and when Caserta refused to provide it, Joplin reportedly admonished her by saying, "Don't think if you can get it, I can't get it." Joplin's publicist Myra Friedman was unaware during Joplin's lifetime that this had happened. Later, while Friedman was working on her book "Buried Alive", she determined that the time frame of the Joplin-Caserta encounter was one week before Jimi Hendrix's death.


title: Janis Joplin

text: Within a few days, Joplin became a regular customer of the same heroin dealer who had been supplying Caserta.


title: Janis Joplin

text: Joplin's manager Albert Grossman and his assistant/publicist Friedman had staged an intervention with Joplin the previous winter while Joplin was in New York. In September 1970, Grossman and Friedman, who worked out of a New York office, knew Joplin was staying at a Los Angeles hotel, but were unaware it was a haven for drug users and dealers.


title: Janis Joplin

text: Grossman and Friedman knew during Joplin's lifetime that her friend Caserta, whom Friedman met during the New York sessions for "Cheap Thrills" and on later occasions, used heroin. During the many long-distance telephone conversations that Joplin and Friedman had in September 1970 and on October 1, Joplin never mentioned Caserta, and Friedman assumed Caserta had been out of Joplin's life for a while. Friedman, who had more time than Grossman to monitor the situation, never visited California. She thought Joplin sounded on the phone like she was less depressed than she had been over the summer.


title: Janis Joplin

text: When Joplin was not at Sunset Sound Recorders, she liked to drive her Porsche over the speed limit "on the winding part of Sunset Blvd.", according to a statement made by her attorney Robert Gordon in 1995 at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Friedman wrote that the only Full Tilt Boogie member who rode as her passenger, Ken Pearson, often hesitated to join her, though he did on the night she died. He was not interested in using hard drugs.


title: Janis Joplin

text: On September 26, 1970, Joplin recorded vocals for "Half Moon" and "Cry Baby". The session ended with Joplin, organist Ken Pearson, and drummer Clark Pierson making a special one-minute recording as a birthday gift to John Lennon. Joplin was among several singers who had been contacted by Yoko Ono with a request for a taped greeting for Lennon's 30th birthday, on October 9. Joplin, Pearson, and Pierson chose the Dale Evans composition "Happy Trails" as part of the greeting. Lennon told Dick Cavett on-camera the following year that Joplin's recorded birthday wishes arrived at his home after her death.


title: Janis Joplin

text: On October 1, 1970, Joplin completed her last recording, "Mercedes Benz", which was recorded in a single take. On Saturday, October 3, Joplin visited Sunset Sound Recorders to listen to the instrumental track for Nick Gravenites's song "Buried Alive in the Blues", which the band had recorded earlier that day. She and Paul Rothchild agreed she would record the vocal the following day.


title: Janis Joplin

text: At some point on Saturday, she learned by telephone, to her dismay, that Seth Morgan had met other women at a Marin County, California, restaurant, invited them to her home, and was shooting pool with them using her pool table. People at Sunset Sound Recorders overheard Joplin expressing anger about the state of her relationship with Morgan, as well as joy about the progress of the sessions.