In 1967, Joplin rose to prominence following an appearance at the Monterey Pop Festival, where she was the lead singer of the then little-known San Francisco psychedelic rock band Big Brother and the Holding Company.

"[24] While at UT she performed with a folk trio called the Waller Creek Boys with her strong mezzo-soprano vocals,[25] and frequently socialized with the staff of the campus humor magazine The Texas Ranger.

[12] Interviewed by biographer Myra Friedman after his client's death, Giarritano said Joplin had been baffled by how she could pursue a professional career as a singer without relapsing into drugs, and her drug-related memories from immediately prior to returning to Port Arthur continued to frighten her.

In 1966, Joplin's bluesy vocal style attracted the attention of the San Francisco-based psychedelic rock band Big Brother and the Holding Company, which had gained some renown among the nascent hippie community in Haight-Ashbury.

[41][42] The band went to Chicago for a four-week engagement in August 1966, then found itself stranded after the promoter ran out of money when its concerts did not attract the expected audience levels, and he was unable to pay them.

[50] Joplin and Big Brother played at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, as well as in Seattle, Washington; Vancouver, British Columbia; the Psychedelic Supermarket in Boston, Massachusetts; and the Golden Bear Club in Huntington Beach, California.

[31] The band's debut studio album, Big Brother & the Holding Company, was released by Mainstream Records in August 1967, shortly after the group's breakthrough appearance in June at the Monterey Pop Festival.

[12][15][22] By early 1969, Joplin was allegedly shooting at least $200 worth of heroin per day (equivalent to $1,662 in 2023)[21] although efforts were made to keep her clean during the recording of I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama!

[15][65] Prior to beginning a summer tour with a newly formed band, she performed in final appearances with Big Brother in a reunion at the Fillmore West, in San Francisco, on April 4, 1970.

[12] She performed with the band, billed as Main Squeeze, at a party for the Hells Angels at a venue in San Rafael, California on May 21, 1970, according to a web site maintained by Big Brother guitarist Sam Andrew.

[15] From June 28 to July 4, 1970, during the Festival Express tour, Joplin and Full Tilt Boogie performed alongside Buddy Guy, The Band, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Ten Years After, the Grateful Dead, Delaney & Bonnie, Eric Andersen, and Ian & Sylvia.

[67][68] On July 11, 1970, Full Tilt Boogie and Big Brother and the Holding Company both performed at the same concert in the San Diego Sports Arena,[69] which was decades later renamed the Valley View Casino Center.

Joplin sang with Full Tilt Boogie and appeared briefly onstage with Big Brother without singing, according to a July 13 review of the concert in the San Diego Union.

[22] Neuwirth was quoted by The Wall Street Journal in 2015: "Around 7 p.m., after the Capitol sound check, we had a couple of hours to kill before [acts that opened for Joplin] Seatrain and Runt finished their sets.

[22] Joplin attended her high school reunion on August 14, accompanied by Neuwirth, road manager John Cooke, and sister Laura, but it was reportedly an unhappy experience for her.

During the sessions, Joplin continued a relationship with Seth Morgan, a 21-year-old UC Berkeley student, cocaine dealer, and future novelist who had visited her new home in Larkspur in July and August.

[15] During late August, September, and early October 1970, Joplin and her band rehearsed and recorded a new album in Los Angeles with producer Paul A. Rothchild, best known for his lengthy relationship with The Doors.

[21] Caserta, a former Delta Air Lines flight attendant[21] and owner of Mnasidika,[77][78] one of the first clothing boutiques in the Haight Ashbury,[21] said in the book that by September 1970, she was smuggling cannabis throughout California[21] and had checked into the Landmark Motor Hotel because it attracted drug users.

[80] The session ended with Joplin, organist Ken Pearson, and drummer Clark Pierson making a special one-minute recording as a birthday gift to John Lennon[80][81] with the Dale Evans composition "Happy Trails" as part of the greeting.

[22] On Sunday evening, October 4, 1970, Joplin was found dead on the floor of her room at the Landmark Motor Hotel by her road manager and close friend John Byrne Cooke.

[21] Caserta admitted to waiting until late Saturday night to dial the Landmark Motel switchboard, only to learn that Joplin had instructed the desk clerk not to accept any incoming calls for her after midnight.

[15] She used a phone at Sunset Sound Recorders where her colleagues ("there were perhaps twenty to twenty-five people present," wrote biographer Myra Friedman)[22] noticed that whatever Morgan said to her made her very angry.

[22][15] Peggy Caserta has insisted Joplin's death was not an accidental overdose, but rather a result of a head gash suffered after the "hourglass heel" of her slingback sandal caught in the shag carpet, causing her to lose her balance.

[15][21] Biographer Myra Friedman commented in her original version of Buried Alive (1973):[102] Given the near-infinite potentials of infancy, it is really impossible to make generalizations about what lies behind sexual practices.

The ridicule and the humiliation that took place at that most delicate period in [Joplin's] early teens, her own inability to surmount the obstacles to regular growth, devastated her a great deal more than most people comprehended.

She was, as [the psychiatric social worker she saw regularly in Beaumont, Texas in 1965 and 1966] Mr. [Bernard] Giarritano put it [in an interview with Friedman], "diffused" -- spewing, splattering, splaying all over, without a center to hold.

[22]Kim France reported in her May 2, 1999, The New York Times article, "Nothin' Left to Lose" : "Once she became famous, Joplin cursed like a truck driver, did not believe in wearing undergarments, was rarely seen without her bottle of Southern Comfort and delighted in playing the role of sexual predator.

The description provided by Dan Knapp, Caserta's co-author whom she denounced decades later,[91][100] repelled many people in 1973 when few books or filmed interviews of Joplin or her loved ones were accessible to the public.

A Serge Gainsbourg-penned French language song by English singer Jane Birkin, "Ex fan des sixties" (1978), references Joplin along with other disappeared "idols", such as Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones and Marc Bolan.

In November 2009, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum honored her as part of its annual American Music Masters Series;[120] among the artifacts at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum exhibition are Joplin's scarf and necklaces, her psychedelically painted 1965 Porsche 356 Cabriolet and a sheet of LSD blotting paper designed by Robert Crumb, designer of the Cheap Thrills cover.