Acid, Mushrooms and Mary Jane...oh my!...throw in a spoon full of heroin and you have an icon of the hippie 60's...Janis Joplin's Porsche...just what you need to make the medicine go down...
Janice Joplin was the poster girl for the "Woodstock" generation, a talent that could only come from a backwater, coastal town in Texas known as Port Arthur, a spokesperson for that "happening" engulfing an America swallowed by War and singing a new anthem that proclaimed the times are a changin'. She had a reasonable middle class upbringing, she experienced the educational system's trial by fire by being bullied over her weight and her kind soul prevailed by rejecting the notion of hating someone simply because they were Black. Janice had talent, and moving West to California landed her in the epicenter of sex, drugs the and rock and roll Revolution. Her singing career bloomed and blossomed, and with that she needed a "ride" fitting of a folk singing princess. Her choice was not a Mercedes-Benz (which is odd because she's begging for that in one of her most famous songs) but a Porsche speedster, the 1964 356C Cabriolet.
It was painted Dolphin Grey...not very fitting for her new persona. To remedy the conundrum, Janice paid her roadie, Dan Richards, five hundred bucks to create something special, something fitting, something unusual, a paint job that could be iconic. The vehicle became the canvas and he created The History of the Universe, a work befitting a drug-soaked rock queen in her California kingdom. When Janice drove around town, everyone knew it was her...the car was that famous and that well known. It was even stolen at one point, and the thief tried to paint over the the artwork once he realized what he had taken. It didn't work. The Porsche was recovered and restored due to Richard's use of a thick clear coat over the original masterpiece.
The car itself still exists. Eventually, Janis' two siblings decided to commission a re-paint, albeit not by the original artist. The History of the Universe was re-done using a multitude of period photos, and "voila", a star was re-born...presumably to fetch well over a million bucks when it was sold to a private party at auction.
