ROCK 'n ROLL LANDMARKS
Unfinished History
Janis Joplin lived here at 112 Lyon, between Page and Oak (the house with the white railing on the steps).
Photos: Chris Carlsson
Janis lived here at the height of her career. As Myra Friedman puts it in Buried Alive: The Biography of Janis Joplin: Janis's Lyon Street apartment had a quaintly curved balcony that soaked up the rays of the afternoon sun ... A tiny kitchen jagged off to one side of a long entry hall, and in the back was Janis's bedroom, all dark and draped with the emblems of seduction, the final enrichment to Janis's image. Velvet and satin swathed her bed; her windows were veiled with lace and silk. With her appetite for men (and sometimes women) matched only by her thirst for Southern Comfort, Janis's boudoir must have been put to very good use.
Grateful Dead House
710 Ashbury Street at Waller. America's first and longest-lived purveyors of musical psychedelia reportedly experimented with mind-expanding substances while living here.
Jefferson Airplane/Starship Mansion 2400 Fulton St. at Willard North.
The site of legendary parties, where chemical and sexual excess was legion. (Drug-war brainwashees, take note: It was alcohol, a vastly more dangerous drug than LSD, marijuana, cocaine, opiates, or just about anything else except tobacco, that nearly killed lead singer Grace Slick.)
--Dr. Weirde