The recording sessions for what would be the final Janis Joplin album, Pearl, were nearly finished by October of 1970. Joplin and her group, the Full Tilt Boogie Band, had fully recorded eight tracks and were preparing for Joplin to lay down the final vocal for ‘Buried Alive in the Blues’. Everything had been coming together smoothly, but an impromptu songwriting session during the album’s recording led to one final song showing up in the tracklisting.
Pearl was Joplin at her creative peak. For what she felt was the first time, Joplin was able to call all the shots on her sessions and final album. She hand-selected the songs (including one, ‘Move Over’, that she wrote herself), approved the arrangements, chose the musicians, and personally picked producer Paul A. Rothchild to work on the LP. Pearl was crafted meticulously by Joplin, and if she had completed it on her own terms, it would have been her most polished album.
But Joplin died on October 4th, 1970, just as the album’s sessions were coming to a close. Three days before, the singer had recorded a vocal take (or possibly a demo) of a song that she had written two months prior with folk singer Bob Neuwirth. The two were hanging out in Vahsen’s, a bar in Port Chester, New York, when Joplin began riffing on the line “Come on, God, and buy me a Mercedes Benz.” The lyric originated from a song written by San Francisco singer-songwriter Michael McClure, and Joplin was kicking around some new ideas while Neuwirth added his own.
Joplin had a concert scheduled that night, and when she took the stage, she premiered the first version of what eventually became ‘Mercedes Benz’. The song was a sarcastic rally against the rampant consumerism that had started to eclipse the modest living styles of the hippie movement – almost all of Joplin’s peers in the San Francisco psychedelic rock scene had become major concert draws and wealthy rock stars by 1970. That included Joplin, who had an expensive heroin habit.
For his part, soul pioneer Bobby Womack (whose song ‘Trust Me’ was recorded by Joplin for Pearl) insisted in his autobiography Midnight Mover that Joplin had composed the song while riding in his recently-purchased Mercedes-Benz 600. “We rode a couple of blocks while she fixed a tune in her head and then started singing,” Womack wrote. “A line just spilled out. ‘Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz. ‘My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends.’”
When Joplin made it back into the recording booth on October 1st, the song had evolved into a three-verse track. Joplin beckoned for God to buy her a new car, a colour TV, and a night on the town, ominously calling for the Lord to prove his love for her by “buying the next round.” Whether she was simply trying to get the first cut of the vocal down or was truly taping the master track, Joplin was the only musician on ‘Mercedes Benz’, howling out the lyrics accompanied only by her own foot stomping on the studio floor.
Just before the one and only take of the song started, Joplin humoursly called out that she would “like to do a song of great social and political import.” Before the final chorus, she calls out for “everybody” to join in singing the final go-around. These elements, plus the raw nature of the recording (Joplin occasionally loses the beat and stops stomping), makes it seem as though ‘Mercedes Benz’ would later get a more complete arrangement. Joplin’s death three days later made that impossible, so the song stood as a tongue-in-cheek a capella ode to cashing out.
Chec out ‘Mercedes Benz’ down below.
