Societys child my autobiography studienet

I just thought of it as a good song. Now here I was, a year later, with a single that was banned from virtually every radio station in the country, and a career that was turning into a war zone. People got crazy. A radio station in Atlanta dared to put "Society's Child" in rotation, and someone burned the station down. Strangers walked up to me in restaurants and spit in my food.

Sometimes, when I tried to walk onstage from the audience, a person would deliberately put their foot out to trip me. The mail I got spanned the gap between heaven and hell; one letter would thank me for bravely speaking out, the next would have razor blades taped to the envelope so I'd shred my fingers opening it. The irony of it all was, I wasn't especially brave.

At least, I didn't think so. The song was just in keeping with the times, and the times were volatile indeed. A few minutes after I'd begun to weep, the concert promoter came rushing in. You've got to go back out there! The thought of a thousand people demanding their money back must have been horrifying to him. I splashed water on my reddened nose, dried my face, then turned to look at him.

The tears welled up again when I saw pity in his eyes. I couldn't hear myself. I didn't know what else to do. They were starting to move toward the stage.

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So I left. The promoter wrung his hands. You've got to. We have a thousand people who paid good money to attend this show, and you're talking about a few troublemakers bothering you enough to stop a performance? You can't do that. You've got to go back and finish the show! I was appalled, and it showed in my face. Just the thought of going back on stage with those people still in the audience was enough to put me in a state of panic.

I can't. What if they start throwing things? What if somebody takes a shot at me? I'd finally said it, the secret dread I hadn't admitted to anyone. What if someone takes a shot at me? What if someone really does try to kill me? I would never have believed a simple song could provoke such violence, but I believed it now. Oh, yeah, you bet I believed it.

And I truly did not want to die. Onstage or off. I wasn't exaggerating my fear. Based on the hate mail I was getting from the Southern states, my manager and agents had decided not to book me within fifty miles of the Mason-Dixon line.

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It wasn't just me, either. No one was exempt; the record company and everyone else who worked with me was in trouble over this record. Even Shadow Morton, my producer, was taken aback by the virulence. He'd been producing the Shangri-Las, and the only mail they got was requests for autographed photos and marriage proposals. Now he was getting postcards with his photo in the center of a bull's-eye.

Everyone, from the record company secretaries to my manager, was being attacked. Yet stubbornly, Verve Forecast president Jerry Schoenbaum kept re-releasing it, kept publicizing it, kept demanding that radio play the song. It helped that the reviews were astounding. It helped that the most respected radio tip sheet of the day said, Magnificently done, but will probably never see the light of day.

Too bad. It helped that The New York Times gave me rave reviews. But nothing anyone wrote changed the death threats that came regularly, with my name on the envelope. And no one had any idea of what to do about it; this was all new to my team. When we cut the single, I didn't have anything resembling a "team. Shadow had listened to the dozen or so songs I'd finished, picked one, and a few weeks later I was in the studio for my first recording session.

I remember Shadow, myself, and a friend talking on a busy side street during a break. Shadow turned to me and said very seriously, "Janis, if you'll change just one word in the song - just one word - I can guarantee you a number one record. She received her most recent Grammy nomination intotaling ten in her career. Hair of Spun Gold.

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God the FBI. Silly Habits. Societys Child. Stolen Fire. Love Is Blind. I bought her first album back in and liked it well enough, but didn't buy another Ian record until "At Seventeen" hit the charts some years later. After that I lost track of her. Her early success as a teen pop singer-songwriter certainly didn't bring instant happiness.

In fact that first song, "Society's Child, " sometimes brought scorn and hate, dealing as it did with the taboo topic of interracial dating and love. But it did make her famous before she was even sixteen. Too much too soon maybe. Her family life went south, however, when her parents divorced and she was left pretty much on her own. It didn't help that she was conflicted about her sexual identity.

After a gay relationship, she was in an abusive marriage that left her fearful, broke and unhappy. And there was clinical depression and other serious health problems, including Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which plagued her intermittently for years. A couple failed relationships exacerbated her depression. Her music career had definite ups and downs, and a crooked accountant landed her in IRS trouble which took years to straighten out, and reduced her to abject penury.

You see? Joyless stuff. And I almost gave up on it because of the unremitting sadness of her story. But there is a lot of interesting trivia about the music industry here that kept me reading. And she finally did meet a woman who loved her, and, as far as I know, they're still together, after nearly thirty years. As a writer, I find Ian only okay.

I cringed every time she misused lay, when she meant lie. She only finished tenth grade, but claims to be an avid reader. A decent editor should have fixed that. I was especially moved by her description of the final days of her mother, who suffered from MS. It brought back my own mother's last days. Despite her overwhelming success in Japan and Australia, behind the scenes Janis was used and abused by a series of friends, lovers and colleagues.

And then in came her Grammy winning song…At Seventeen…a song that brings tears to my eyes every time I hear it. I lived the pain in that song…. By the age of 37, Janis Ian had been robbed, drugged, physically abused by her husband and eventually lost everything she owned to the IRS when her accountant who was stealing from her failed to inform her for 7 years about several IRS inquiries.

And yet, she endured. This tiny, fragile little woman chose to live on. This page autobiography published in is a real page turner. There is honestly never a dull moment throughout, making it hard to put down when it was well past my bedtime because I had to work the next day. And for those who are concerned about whether this review is on-topic for a Beatles blog, Janis does mention the Beatles twice.