They nonetheless managed to sign a record deal with Mainstream Records and recorded various tracks for it while still in Chicago that September, before returning to California. In August, Big Brother and the Holding Company embarked on a disastrous tour of Chicago, where they were not well-enough known to sell enough seats to pay for their upkeep. They frequently met local band The Grateful Dead socially and Joplin had a brief love affair with Grateful Dead member Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan (1945-1973). In July, the whole band moved into a house within the small community of Lagunitas, in Marin County, California. Joplin first performed with the band Big Brother and the Holding Company that June. She was also noted for associating with those involved in producing a comical campus magazine called The Texas Ranger, showing a diversity to her range of creative interests. She also joined a folk band called the Walter Creek Boys, and in December 1962 she recorded one of her early songs, ‘What Good Can Drinkin’ Do’. She gained a reputation while there for carrying with her a type of stringed instrument called an autoharp everywhere she went. Upon graduating in 1960, Joplin moved to Lamar State College of Technology in the larger nearby city of Beaumont, before heading inland to the rapidly growing state capital of Austin to attend the University of Texas, where she continued to sing. Her atypically positive attitude towards racial integration was sadly compounded by the severe acne from which she suffered, as well as her being somewhat overweight, in precipitating her victimisation by school bullies. She later recalled that she was a victim of bullying at the same school, where she was studious and favoured artistic pursuits such as painting, and, unlike many of her white classmates, freely associated with black students. In her teen years, Janis discovered a variety of female blues singers through the record collection of a friend, and subsequently took up singing in a similar style, performing together with friends of hers at Thomas Jefferson High School. They were the children of Seth Joplin, an employee of oil corporation The Texas Company, which rebranded as Texaco in 1959 and Dorothy East, a college registrar. The eldest of three siblings, she had a younger sister called Laura and a younger brother called Michael. Joplin grew up in a Protestant Christian family in her birthplace of Port Arthur, a small city in south-East Texas. Janis Joplin (1943-1970) was an American blues and rock singer, who upon her untimely death in 1970, became the fourth prominent member of the notorious ‘Club of 27’ comprising popular musicians who died at the age of 27, after the deaths of Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, Alan Wilson of Canned Heat and Jimi Hendrix (q.
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