The book is a fine read, even in the company of other rock n' roll history books. But the cover is strikingly gaudy. The photo is iconic but low resolution and the conflict between the low-contrast gray image and the pink and yellow spine and borders remains genuinely unpleasant. But the price was right as they say.
David Dalton was a founding editor of Rolling Stone and perhaps more in a position to rick rock history than many others. But even among Rolling Stone alumni he stands alone for his real journalistic accomplishments. He won the Columbia School of Journalism Award and the Ralph J. Gleason Best Rock Book of the Year. (Though neither was for this book) But he's written 24 books, you can't win an award every time.
But this book stands out because he write it twice and the result is more pancake than pastiche to paraphrase Adam Sternbergh. In 1972 Dalton published Janis, a mishmash of transcribed interview fragments, photographs, sheet music, lyrics, prose, and Dalton's own Rolling Stone Clippings... Piece Of My Heart takes that core and remixes it with additional content including some of his other writings on Joplin and some bits he nicked from Antonin Artaud. The resulting text is a bit bloated and even less coherent than the original. But oddly Dalton's occasional self-indulgent florid phrases function well in their context, and are not diminished the the scale and scope of the book. In particular...
It serves to remind us that greats like Hunter S. Thompson, Lester Bangs, and Nick Tosches once wrote for that once iconic and now hopelessly out of touch magazine.
"There are some for whom the night holds no terrors. Among them all these figures―criminals, insomniacs, whores, alcoholics, the inconsolable, the dreamers, and lovers―Janis was the queen."
