Woodstock was supposed be just another gig for Janis Joplin.
But when she arrived by helicopter at the muddy field in tiny Bethel, N.Y., and looked out at the crowd of more than 400,000 people, she and everyone around her that day knew that they were part of something extraordinary.
"It was a true happening," said Tucson artist Michael Joplin, the late blues/rock singer's younger brother. "They didn't know it was going to be the event that it was until it started."
Michael Joplin was 17 and living in Texas when his sister headlined day two of the three-day festival. He recalled that his sister hadn't really expected much of Woodstock beyond that it was yet another in a string of festival invites that started coming in after her 1967 appearance at the Monterey Pop Festival.
"It was just kind of an event, a groove," he said last week.
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Joplin has been getting a lot of interview requests these days from reporters wanting to know what his sister thought of Woodstock. He said Janis Joplin would be "interested, amused and surprised" by the festival's iconic place in pop culture.
"There's been a lot of retrospection on this thing. At the time it was just mind-boggling, but nobody knew what it was going to be," said Michael Joplin, a father of two who has called Tucson home for nearly 30 years. "It grew in hindsight even more than it did at the time."
Woodstock's lineup represented some of the biggest names of the day, from Jimi Hendrix and Richie Havens to The Who and Joplin, who graced the cover of Rolling Stone months earlier, in March.
Havens was the first to take the stage at 5 p.m. Friday, Aug. 15. Day one stretched into day two before the opening day's lineup — almost a dozen acts — finished. Rain delays throughout the weekend pushed performances back by hours. Joplin reportedly waited 10 hours after she arrived at the festival grounds to perform with her Kozmic Blues Band. Hendrix, who closed the festival, was to have taken the stage at midnight Sunday; he didn't begin his two-hour set until 9 a.m. Monday morning, and performed before a crowd that had dwindled to about 35,000.
Joplin's hour-long set covered 10 songs, most of them from her 1969 debut solo album, "I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama!," including her self-penned "Kozmic Blues," which she co-wrote with her producer, Gabriel Mekler.
The highlights, according to many reviewers, were her jazzy, bluesy cover of Gershwin's "Summertime," arranged by her old band Big Brother & the Holding Company, and an emotional turn on Nick Gravenites' bluesy lament "Work Me, Lord."
"I think she found it incredibly interesting and fun," her brother said of Joplin's impressions from that weekend. "Her quote was that it was wild. And the party atmosphere was going."
Janis Joplin died of a heroin overdose in October 1970, 14 months after Woodstock. She was 27.
Several retrospective CDs feature Janis Joplin and others.
• "Woodstock: 40 Years On: Back to Yasgur's Farm," a six-CD set, came out Tuesday.
• "The Woodstock Experience" captures the live festival performances of five of the acts, including Joplin's.
• "Woodstock," the soundtrack from the 1970 movie, includes original performances.
