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The first two words of the prologue to Janis Ian's autobiography are "Nigger lover!"-- repeated three times for additional effect. It's an eyebrow-raiser of a way to begin a book, and that's why Ian does it: it's important that the reader know, right away, what she was up against, from the start. She gets your attention, fast, that's for sure.
The caustic taunt had been shouted at Ian one night in 1967 as she performed in California, early in her career. She was all of 16 at the time, riding a wave of attention she'd generated with "Society's Child," a folk-rock song that condemned opposition to interracial dating. The Civil Rights movement was in full boil, and not everyone in the country agreed with what Ian had to say; they wanted to make sure--even though her record had risen into the national Top 20 and garnered praises from the likes of Leonard Bernstein and The New York Times--that she knew that.
The incident was neither the first nor the last time that Janis Ian would have to overcome forces conspiring against her--not even for that song, which put her on the receiving end of death threats and, once, a piece of mail with razor blades inside. Her life and career have been a push and pull of artistic successes and disappointments, battles both emotional and physical: a music business that exploited her and kicked her when she was down, a nervous breakdown, an unfaithful female lover and an abusive husband, a debilitating surgery and other illnesses, near destitution, a dentist who molested her when she was a child. Good stuff, too: hit records and Grammys, the admiration of her peers, a successful same-sex marriage.
Throughout, Ian makes clear, she's stood up for what she believes, for what feels right, whatever the consequences. "I was raised to think for myself," she writes early in the book, and whatever suffering that independence has brought her, it's also kept her art pure. This is a woman who, when Barbra Streisand called and asked her to write music for A Star is Born, then insisted on having "input" into said songs, turned down the gig.
Janis Eddy Fink (Ian was her brother's middle name) was a precocious and intelligent New Jersey farm girl when, at age two, she demanded that her father, who taught the instrument, give her piano lessons--he said she needed to learn the alphabet first, so she mastered it. She was writing songs before she reached 10 and, after seeing Odetta on a television program, knew what she wanted to do with her life. Music became a quick and faithful friend: her parents--atheists who nonetheless celebrated the Jewish holidays--moved often, due to a mistaken notion among J. Edgar Hoover's FBI that Ian's father, a teacher by profession, was a Commie.
Once the family settled into a Manhattan apartment (her folks later divorced), the future Janis Ian's world opened up. She attended the prestigious High School of Music and Art but it was her discovery of the Greenwich Village folk scene--and its discovery of her--that set her life's course. She published her first song in Broadside magazine at 13 and befriended some of the greats, among them Dave Van Ronk and the Rev. Gary Davis, and wowed them with her mature writing and singing. Verve Forecast Records and producer Shadow Morton took the chance on "Society's Child" and a handful of brave DJs, particularly New York's Murray the K, pushed it. Its ascension made her a star despite the contingent of detractors, and she rode out the '60s befriending Hendrix and Joplin, sitting on Dylan's lap in the back of a limo and dining with Laura Nyro, who was, Ian says, "strange, and oddly inarticulate for a songwriter."
The highs of the '60s gave way for Ian--as for so many veterans of the era--to a time of confusion and regrouping. Her early notoriety dissipated quickly, as did whatever money she'd earned, and although she knew her writing was gaining in depth and sophistication, the same music industry that had heralded her arrival was now indifferent: Ian describes an audition for Clive Davis at which the exec listened to her sing, said not a word, and left the room. Only when Davis was fired from Columbia Records shortly thereafter did the label's new president recognize Ian's potential. His hunch paid off: Her second album for the company, 1975's Between the Lines, bolted to number one and gave Ian her greatest single success with "At Seventeen," a Grammy-winning story of an ugly duckling girl close to Ian's own heart.
With her renewed success, however, came a heightened fishbowl existence she was no longer accustomed to and didn't desire. The Village Voice, ostensibly writing a feature profile on Ian, instead outed her as a lesbian; Ian had known since childhood that she was gay, and her relationship was no secret among her inner circle and family, but she hadn't wished to make it public in such a way. Later, when that relationship soured, she fell in love with and married a man, Portuguese filmmaker Tino Sargo, who hit her and once held a gun to her head. Her career, despite the second run of hits, had, she writes, "settled into a routine. Make a record, tour, stop for a few weeks and write, then begin another record...I felt I'd lost touch with the very things that fed my writing. I wasn't growing."
Come the '80s, Ian had had enough. She left recording and performing for a decade, moved from L.A., where she'd spent several years, to Nashville, and started a new life as a staff songwriter for MCA, honing her craft in relative obscurity. "Living in Nashville...I began finding it hard to believe that I was ever that famous," she writes.
Eventually, in 1993, after a 12-year hiatus, she returned to performing and recording, on her own terms, to largely glowing reviews. A decade later, in Canada, where gay marriage had become legal, she traded vows with Patricia Snyder, a single-mother attorney she'd met in Nashville in the late '80s.
So Ian's story has a happy ending, which is good because you find yourself rooting for her all the way. She's likable and unpretentious and has been through a lot and deserves good things. There are no big-star airs about her and no oversized displays of ego. Like her songs, Society's Child is confessional, open and honest, packed with substance and never fluffy. When she says, in the final sentence, that just being alive is, for her, "the greatest gift of all," you've got to agree, because this story needed to be told.
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