Interview: Janis Ian, singer, on life, music and the power of song

Janis Ian started her career in a storm of publicity but has no illusions about her legacy,finds Jonathan Wingate

IT WOULD be something of an understatement to say that Janis Ian’s initiation into the world of rock and roll was both early and dramatic. In 1966, at the age of 15, she released Society’s Child, a song she had written about a forbidden inter-racial romance. It had already been rejected by numerous record companies before composer Leonard Bernstein championed it and booked Ian to perform on his television show, Inside Pop – The Rock Revolution. The song immediately ignited huge controversy in America and she was thrust headfirst into the sort of storm that would completely finish off most teenagers.

“I think I just dealt with it in the way that any adolescent deals with something that they can’t cope with,” she says now, with a shrug. “I just tried to ignore it. But that didn’t work very well when people were spitting at me in the street and sending me death threats in the mail. There was a radio station in Atlanta that actually got burned down for playing that song. It was all pretty scary, but I’d already seen We Shall Overcome really unite a whole movement, so by that point I suppose I sort of understood the power a song could have.”

Ian was nominated for a Grammy award for her debut album and was soon hanging out with some of the most iconic rock stars of the era such as Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. What were they like? “Janis was funny, shy … sweet. I knew her enough to hang out with, but I don’t know whether I’d say I really knew her well. Jimi was the same… just sweet, quiet, very softly spoken. I never found him wild… I just liked talking to him and making music with him. Music absolutely consumed Jimi. Looking back now, I wish I had some pictures or mementos of those days, but it just wasn’t the done thing back then.

“The drug stuff was usually kept away from me,” she adds, “but I really don’t know whether that was because of my age or whether they just knew that it would be too confusing for me. I was so naïve. Having said that, I did try cocaine with Jimi one time in a studio in Los Angeles. I had wanted to try it for a year, so he finally gave in. I remember thinking I was having a heart attack…It turned out I was allergic to coke, which was very fortunate, because I watched a lot of my friends die from drugs.”

Despite the fact that she had established herself as a major star, Janis Ian buckled under the pressure and attempted suicide at the age of 18. “I don’t think I really wanted to die,” she says sadly, “I just wanted to sleep for a while and get away from all of the pressure.

“If you couple being an adolescent with the pressure of having a career and being a songwriter, that’s a lot of load. Eventually, I walked off stage one night and told my manager I was retiring because it was f***ing up my writing. She just laughed and said, ‘Well, they all say that.’ I moved out of New York, got some therapy and I put myself back together and became a songwriter.”

Looking back, what advice would she give her teenage self now? “Oh, nothing that she would listen to,” she says with a laugh. “I think we all took things too seriously, but you need some perspective before you realise just how silly and how fleeting it all is.”

After a three-year hiatus, she returned with a run of career-defining albums that made her into one of the biggest selling artists in the world. Ella Fitzgerald described her as “the best young singer in America”, and everyone from Cher to Nina Simone queued up to cover achingly beautiful songs such as Stars, Jesse and her signature tune, At Seventeen, one of the most painfully honest and articulate appraisals of teenage loneliness ever written.

“Seventeen was incredibly hard to write because it was so painfully honest. It was like unzipping. For the first year it was really hard to sing it on stage, because I thought the audience would laugh at me. I had no idea everybody felt that way.

“I remember this incredibly handsome guy who was the captain of the football team coming backstage once, and he told me how much that song meant to him. I said I couldn’t see how he could possibly relate to it, because he must have had a date every Friday night. He just said, ‘Yeah, but imagine the talk when I don’t.’ Everyone relates to Seventeen on some level, because everybody is outside looking in.

“In the penultimate verse, the lyric goes: ‘When dreams were all they gave for free / To ugly duckling girls like me.’ The whole idea is that an ugly duckling becomes a swan. I think a lot of people miss that line and the whole point in the song, which is that the girl is going to win through in the end. It really is truly universal, and I think you are tremendously lucky as a writer if you hit the universal a couple of times in your lifetime.”

In the early 1980s, Janis Ian’s life started to unravel. Her marriage to a Portuguese film-maker broke down, she was made bankrupt after it emerged that her manager had neglected to pay any tax on her behalf throughout her career, and her mother developed multiple sclerosis. Once more she quit the music business and relocated from New York to Nashville, “penniless and desperate to write”.

But she resurfaced in 1992 and received her ninth Grammy nomination for her comeback album, Breaking Silence – which, among other themes, dealt with her recent coming out as a lesbian.

“My tilt is towards women, but that doesn’t mean it precludes falling in love with a man,” she says now. “Coming out was very scary, but it was the right thing to do. I knew when I met Pat that I was going to spend the rest of my life with her, so I wasn’t going to diminish the relationship by pretending that it didn’t exist. We got married a few years ago, although we have actually been together for 23 years now.

“Coming out means that you take a stand and say to everyone who didn’t know but who may have loved famous songs of mine like At Seventeen or Stars, ‘You know what? I’m also gay’. I felt like it might do some good to actually say that.”

Looking back on her career, how important is the concept of her own musical legacy? “I had a lover whose father represented Picasso, and she told me this classic story,” Ian chuckles. “One day when she was about four, she was sitting on Picasso’s knee. He’d draw a sketch and she would tear it up and they’d both laugh like crazy. Her father was screaming, ‘Stop, stop, it’s a Picasso!’ And Picasso just shrugged and said, ‘And it’s just a piece of paper too.’ I’m precious about my work, but in terms of what it’ll be worth in 100 years? Ever since I turned 50, people have been asking me how I want to be remembered. Who gives a shit? I’ll be dead, so why should I care?”

• Janis Ian plays the Carnegie Hall, Dunfermline, 27 October, Strathpeffer Pavilion, Strathpeffer, 28 October, and the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, 30 October.