Between The Lines

She s got a resumi to die for, penning At 17 , while still a disgracefully young woman; swapping guitar licks with Jimi Hendrix and being sent home to bed early so she wouldn t partake of the little candies that were freely available at Janis Joplin s soiries. There s a lot more to Janis Ian than that one dimensional cardboard cutout figure so beloved of record companies in the sixties. They might have preferred her to be that soft-toned curly-haired, acoustic guitar-wielding peacenik, but these days she s hummin in full 3D.

Seventeen albums and nine Grammy nominations on, Janis Ian doesn t need to tread lightly not that she ever really did anyway. Most people get angry in their teens and twenties and get bloated and diffident thereafter. At 17, Ian was angry and now in her fifties she s even angrier. Her latest CD, called God And The FBI, is a stark reminder that the land of the free and the brave isn t all it s cracked up to be.
This was something I d wanted to do for a while, and I m just glad that not only did I get it out there, but the record company (BMG) didn t put any reins on me while I was doing it , she says with a barely stifled sigh of relief. The FBI put us under surveillance when I was very young. They didn t like the fact that my parents ran summer camps where black and white kids could play together. And at that time, my dad was a chicken farmer in New Jersey!
It took Ian nine years long years before she siphoned the family s FBI file out of their vaults, and what she found horrified her. Constant surveillance, stymieing of her father s subsequent teaching career and all because he was actively involved in the civil rights movement. This was Hoover s FBI at the height of its paranoia.
As a songwriter, does it get easier or harder for her to write of such personal traumas?
Both! she insists, without hesitation. I think as you get older, you re conscious of what you ve already done, and you re listening to other songwriters too, and seeing what they can do. Also, when you get labelled a child prodigy as I was, you get the feeling of well, what am I gonna do next? But then, my audiences have taught me that there are a lot of people who really care, and who will listen to my songs, so that helps me cross that hurdle, I guess.
Ian s not all po-faced issue writer either, as Boots Like Emmylou s (on her current album) proves. This is a woman who eschews the preciousness that so often attaches itself to singer/songwriters. Less mystique and more straight talking is what she s after, she says.
You know there s a lot to be said for sticking a pin in it all every now and again. I ve always admired Emmylou s boots, so I hope she ll like that song. She knows I ve always wanted her boots too!
Janis Ian s been swimming against the tide recently
in her outright support of Napster. Downloading
music from the web for free is precisely the kind
of democratic opportunity that she lauds in an age
of increasing corporatisation and profiteering in the music industry.
I ve come in for a lot of criticism for my stance on Napster , she admits, and I ended up having quite an argument with Jimmy Webb a couple of months ago on stage in New York. I think there s a whole generation of kids out there who don t know what it is to go to a free concert. With tickets costing $60 and more, that pretty much excludes a lot of people. We all know that even though CD s cost a dollar fifty to produce, they still cost $18 in the stores. I just can t see why the music industry is let get away with that. If Napster puts music in the hands of people who love music, well, why not?
Willie Nelson and Chet Atkins make low key appearances on God And The FBI with little of the pomp and ceremony we might expect. It was a job of work that both took on with gusto, and with little concern for the bank balance:
You know, I tentatively got in touch with Willie Nelson s people, and didn t really think he d do it , she says, but his management called and said he d always known my music and was happy to do it. Then when it came to being paid, we were worried that the budget wouldn t stretch, but he was happy with something
close to $400, which is what Chet got paid too. This
was not a project that was going to fatten anyone s
bank balance!