Me and Bobby McGee

Me and Bobby McGee

Janis Joplin took the song Me and Bobby McGee to number one on the Billboard charts in 1971 with her posthumous album named Pearl. It was the second such posthumous success after Otis Redding put out The Dock of the Bay, days before his death in 1967. Of course, Janis died of a heroin overdose and Otis died in a plane crash going to a gig, but they both have their places in Rock and Roll Heaven with Janis taking a piece of our hearts and Otis taking us with him to the dock of the Bay. The Righteous Brothers immortalized them in their 1974 classic hit and they proved themselves every bit a helluva a band, even while on this earth. The interesting backstory about the Janis hit was that it was co-written by her boyfriend Kris Kristofferson and while first recorded by the iconic Roger Miller (the King of King of the Road, the ultimate down and out roadie song). The song was written about a woman named Bobbie McKee and was to be song by a man who was suffering from unrequited love (probably the most popular country music ballad theme), but somewhere along the way, Kristofferson changed it to Bobby McGee and adjusted the lyrics for Janis to sing about her lost roadie love Bobby (probably Kristofferson). I find it fascinating that Kristofferson turned it into a roadie love song after Roger Miller swung and missed with it. Do you think the whole King of the Road thing was in his head in doing so?

Whatever motivated this successful song that is listed as the #11 hit of 1971, the year of my high school graduation, it has one of the most important lines in it of any song I have ever heard. “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose” speaks to me of so many things that we are now faced with as a world, much more so than we were in 1971. That soulful ballad by Janis says that being free of entanglements is a ruse because we have lost something and can easily find that the price of freedom is that we end up with nothing. And we learn too late in life that “feelin’ good was good enough for me”, and no amount of pleading is likely to bring that back, once lost. So, Janis went off to Rock and Roll Heaven with the thought that “If you believe in forever, then life is just a one-night stand…”, but might well have understood the importance of connections versus the abstraction of freedom, by virtue of Kris and Bobby McGee.

It’s also interesting the amount of overlap in these songs beyond the roadie theme. While Arlo was Riding on the City of New Orleans (published by Guthrie in 1972, but first recorded by its writer, Steve Goodman in 1971), Janis (and presumably Kris) were “Busted flat in Baton Rouge, waitin’ for a train…to New Orleans”. Janis says she let Bobby go somewhere up near Salinas where Nobel Laureate John Steinbeck wrote and set many of his great and powerful stories like Of Mice and Men, Cannery Row, Tortilla Flats and East of Eden, as well as the Pulitzer Prize-winning Grapes of Wrath. Giving up on love in favor of freedom has a perfect place in Salinas, a place also memorialized by Arlo’s father Woody in his Dust Bowl Ballads. This is a place where one can hear the reverberations of Tom Joad’s famous lines at the end of the story in Grapes of Wrath, strangely enough, set in a boxcar, “Wherever there’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there.” Well, in 1971, John Steinbeck had been dead for three years, but Caesar Chavez, starting up his United Farm Workers union was busily working the Lettuce Strike in Salinas, getting very familiar with the inside of the Monterrey County Jail while activists on campus (including the Ithaca Friends of the Farmworkers at Cornell, organized by my fraternity-mate Oliver) were listening to Janis and her ballad of Bobby McGee.

I’ve always liked Kris Kristofferson and I was surprised to learn that he was touring the Rock and Roll scene after serving as an Army Ranger Captain who wanted to go to Vietnam, but was sent instead to West Point Military Academy to teach literature (but he quit his commission instead). Hmm. He was also a Rhodes Scholar who attended Oxford where he played world-class collegiate rugby and was an accomplished boxer, so to say he has a lot going on in his head and in his soul would not be an understatement. That all makes his lines in Bobby McGee all that more poignant to me.

Whenever I challenge friends who fall on the other side of the aisle as me politically, they always say they are about libertarianism and freedom and that this is what this country is supposed to be about. But that is a very narrow definition of our country’s mantra if you ask me. To me, this country is more about the Tom Joad’s, John Steinbeck’s and Kris Kristofferson’s of the world than the abstract notion that we are all about me more than we are about we. It is John Steinbeck who captures that sentiment best in Grapes of Wrath when Joad says “If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into ‘I’, and cuts you off forever from the ‘we’.” If that makes me a socialist, call me a socialist. The type of socialism that I espouse is what makes Canada, Australia and most of Western Europe great and what went a long, long way towards making America great from 1932 to 1982. We have gradually fallen off that wagon over the last forty years and now find ourselves at a point where we have made ourselves not into the great nation we were, but a disgrace to the rest of the world. Even the early days of Reagan coincided with (most decidedly NOT the cause of) the fall of the extreme version of Soviet Communism and led us to believe we were on the right track, but what we were doing was refining the program of ‘I’ and not ‘we’.

We are all like Janis, thinking about Bobby McGee. We all want to trade all our tomorrows for one single yesterday, but our yesterdays are remembered so differently. I remember a world that Janis, Otis, Kris, Roger, Arlo, Woody and the Righteous Brothers sang about and a world that John Steinbeck wrote about. Maybe I have to stop listening to the oldies stations on Sirius, or maybe listening to them is supposed to remind me of the way the world is supposed to be and might be again soon if we can break the back of this false idol of freedom and get back to connecting with people.