Janis Ian Comes To Town
Janis Ian plays at a folk festival in 1975.
Janis Ian today
While many fans of Janis Ian immediately associate the singer/songwriter with her 1975 number one hit, “At Seventeen,” or maybe some of her oft-covered album tracks like “Jesse” or “Stars,” they may not be aware that her career began with a daring, banned single that elicited death threats.
Ian was barely in her teens when Broadside Magazine, known for publishing songs by some of the most notable folk figures of the Sixties, introduced her to its readers.
“The first song I submitted was actually ‘Hair Of Spun Gold,’ and I was thirteen,” recalled Ian, speaking from Nashville. “My dad had a subscription to Broadside, so I read it every month and learned the songs, practiced the guitar, read the articles, based what records I would save my money up for, in large part, on Broadside. When I finished the song it just seemed like the logical thing to do.”
Ian had mailed “Hair Of Spun Gold” to the magazine and promptly forgot about it. Before she was aware that Broadside planned to publish the song, the magazine’s staff invited her to perform in New York with some of the folk notables of the day.
“They called to ask if I would play live before I got the magazine, so that just sticks out in my head. I wound up doing a hootenanny for them with a lot of my heroes, and that was amazing.”
Ian realized at an early age that she wanted a career in music, and once she learned her way around the guitar she wasted no time working at song craft. It helped that her parents were open-minded to folk music (her father had an association with Pete Seeger), though, in the early Sixties, her considered vocation was generally given a dim view by the public.
“If you were going to be a musician or be a songwriter, particularly then – now it’s not so weird - people just thought that you were crazy, because the only famous people that most of them knew were beautiful, and they were from the movies,” said Ian. “So, when I announced that I was going to be a famous songwriter, pretty much everybody I knew laughed at me, so it was very affirming to be able to work with ‘Broadside’ and just be immediately accepted, it sort of said to me, well, everybody else is wrong, then. Here’s the proof. It’s a great thing. It’s a great confidence builder.”
“You really didn’t hear about songwriters. Not like you did once Dylan had really achieved a certain level, and once the New York Times started actually writing about rock & roll and groups like the Beatles, and folk music as being lyric-driven. It was a different time, and in that sense it was very affirming to be taken seriously.”
Though the Broadside exposure attracted immediate interest, the teen found herself racked by mixed signals that led her to retreat to consider her next steps.
“I did the Broadside hoot, Elektra offered me a contract, and then, in the same day, (music manager) Harold Leventhal told me that I couldn’t write but I should sing, and Elektra said I couldn’t sing but I could write. And so I just walked away from both of them and went back to New Jersey.”
After her family moved to New York, Ian came into contact with producer George “Shadow” Morton (best-known for his work with The Shangri-Las). A deal followed with Atlantic Records, leading to the recording of the single “Society’s Child.”
Unfortunately, upon considering the potential reaction to a song that focused on a doomed interracial romance, Atlantic got cold feet and bailed out, leaving Ian with the master recording. Eventually released by Vanguard Records, “Society’s Child” was released three times between 1965 and 1967, and when Ian was championed in a TV special called “Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution,” the single went on to peak at #14 in the summer of ’67.
Though Ian was only a teenager and had written about a couple that she’d noticed in passing, the subject matter was pure tinder for a segment of the listening public, and the singer received hate mail and death threats for “Society’s Child.” Some radio stations banned the single, and Ian even recalls an Atlanta station being burned down for playing it.
Ian’s new book, “Society’s Child: My Autobiography,” deals with the experience in detail.
“That’s pretty much the first chapter. It was pretty terrifying times. I was so naïve that it didn’t occur to me that people would get that upset over a song.
It’s just a song… three minutes… three and a quarter. It was a really good lesson to me in the power of song to make people think and to unite them and to make them angry. Just the power, the sheer power, of the song. Pretty amazing.”
“I don’t think anybody in my camp thought about it that way until the ships started to fire. I know Shadow (Morton), the producer, didn’t. He just thought that it had the best shot at being a hit because of the chorus.”
Over the next few years, Ian continued to release albums while seeing gradually less radio airplay. It was the 1975 #1 album, “Between The Lines,” and its #3 single, “At Seventeen,” that abruptly changed her fortunes, providing her career with a boost that carried her through the rest of the decade.
In the early Eighties, Ian began a decade-long break from the music business, resuming in 1993 with the album “Breaking Silence” and continuing to work to the present. Now releasing her recordings on her own label, Rude Girl, Ian seems entirely content with her life in music and with the level of respect among her songwriting peers. Even at this stage of her career, and over the peaks she has experienced, she still marvels at having seen what the heights of fame can provide.
”It’s amazing the doors that are opened for you when you’re famous. Just the contacts, that you can pick up the phone and say, ‘Get me Barbra Streisand’ and suddenly be talking to Barbra Streisand - it’s extraordinary. If there’s anything that I miss about that, it’s the access it buys. It buys access to the best engineers, the best graphics people.”
“Now I can pick up the phone and get Dolly Parton on the strength of my songwriting, my reputation as a writer, but I certainly couldn’t pick up the phone and get Radiohead.”
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