The Night Leonard Bernstein Introduced Janis Ian To America
Singer-Songwriter Janis Ian, 72, who graduated from East Orange High School, started young. She began writing “Society’s Child,” a protest song equal to anything from Bob Dylan or Phil Ochs, when she was 13. It had been out for a year when on April 25, 1967, she was a guest at 15 of Maestro Leonard Bernstein on “Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution.” But America didn’t know how profound…how newsworthy…how brilliant and how universally true the song was in depicting an inter-racial romance in 1967. Why? Because no radio station would dare touch it. “I received tons of hate mail and death threats because of that song, and a radio station in Atlanta got burned to the ground for playing it,” she told The Jewish Chronicle years later.
Then “At 17” won her a Grammy Award. At 18, she was a rock star, snorting coke with Jimi Hendrix. Shortly after leaving her teens, she attempted suicide. She knew she had to get off the merry-go-round. So she did. It took three years. But she left Jersey in her rear-view mirror and drove south, ending up in Tennessee, got some therapy, and started life anew as a Nashville songwriter.
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In 1981, at 30, she walked away for a second time from her career, telling CBS to shove it. The label was promoting the hell out of Leonard Cohen and Billy Joel. The girl who sang “At 17” every time for the first six months of the song’s life with her eyes closed because it was just too painful a song was being ignored. So she up and walked, disappearing from public view for three whole years. Got married. Got divorced. Lost all her money and her home to the thief she hired as her business manager.
In 1992, she hit again with Breaking Silence. It’s the album where she came out as gay. She could care less about her legacy. “I care that my music touches people,” she once said, “but what do I care what happens once I’m dead?”
Janis Ian retired early last year upon the release of her 23rd and last album, The Light At The End Of The Line. She had lost her voice, decades after learning “the truth at 17/that love was meant for beauty queens and high school girls with clear-skinned smiles…the valentines I never knew…,and those of us with ravaged faces lacking in the social graces desperately remained at home inventing lovers on the phone.”
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Janis Ian always told the unvarnished truth. Watch her groundbreaking episode here: