Janis Ian Is a Living, Breathing Trailblazer. Let’s Listen to Her
It’s easy to get tongue-tied when you’re on the phone talking to Janis Ian. This is the woman whose introduction to the cultural zeitgeist as a guitar-toting child of liberal Jewish atheists was met with death threats; the prolific writer who gave voice to girls who yearn for a friend, freedom, or a face unravaged; and the icon for queer singer-songwriters too often treated by the mainstream as mere protestors. Just face it: Nothing you say will ever be quite as penetrating as “Tattoo” or “Stars” or “At Seventeen.” It’s best not to try.
Since adolescence, Ian has shared genre-defining stories, starting with “Hair of Spun Gold,” which was first published by Broadside, the magazine that launched the careers of fellow folk legends Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan. Now, at 73, Ian’s own story is being told in Varda Bar-Kar’s Breaking Silence, a documentary currently making the rounds at U.S. festivals (including the 25th annual Atlanta Jewish Film Festival).
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Aided by archival footage, photographs, and reenactments of Ian’s recollections, the 111-minute film charts Ian’s decades-spanning career — from formative summers at “peace and love, Woodstock” camps in upstate New York, to coming up alongside the likes of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Joan Baez (who offers her testimony to the film), to, quite sadly, suffering vocal fold scarring while touring her final album in 2022. Bar-Kar tells this tale of love, loss, and life-altering lyricism with the same tenderness of Ian’s songwriting. Even if you’re not a fan, you might be moved to tears. In fact, Ian’s aware that many have done so at recent screenings in New York City and Miami. She’s gracious even if she doesn’t totally get the waterworks just yet.
“I’m not sure why that happens,” she tells me matter-of-factly. “My wife tried to explain it to me but she couldn’t really make me understand it.”
By Ian’s account, Breaking Silence was a long time coming. There had been other offers before Bar-Kar reached out during the Covid-19 pandemic, including a potential project that Ian chose to walk away from after her “bullshit detector” sounded. By the time Bar-Kar contacted her with the hopes of portraying her life onscreen, Ian put her through the paces and asked her to make a 20-minute film as a pitch.
“The first time somebody wanted to write my biography, I was 16,” Ian says. “I’ve had a lot of offers over the years and it’s not something that’s ever interested me. When you’re well-known as a young person and you get so much press over the years, you stop being an object of interest to yourself.”
In addition to Baez, a number of Ian’s former collaborators, colleagues, and friends offer their memories to the film — though it was crucial to Ian that Bar-Kar not just ask people who she was in good standing with to participate.
“I had two requests for Varda: I told her I wanted to focus on the times as much as on the songs, because I thought it was the times that were important. And I wanted her to speak with people who didn’t like me, and unfortunately, most of those are dead,” she says with a laugh.
Still, Ian, who has seen the film three times already, was surprised to hear from some of the people who clearly do like her (or at the very least, respect her), like composer and drummer Arti Dixon, and songwriter Kye Fleming. As for those who aren’t here to say either way, there’s still plenty to learn — even if only from Ian’s own plain-spoken narration.
In Breaking Silence, Ian recalls her first meeting with the late producer and songwriter George “Shadow” Morton when she was just a 15-year-old gigging on the New York folk circuit and overlapping with many of the artists who make cameos in the current Oscar contender A Complete Unknown. (Ian hasn’t seen the film yet and likens commenting on it to “slitting [her] own throat.”) Ian played Morton two to three songs in his office, but he never turned his attention away from the New York Times on his desk. Furious at the snub, Ian took out her cigarette lighter, set the newspaper on fire, and walked out. Morton’s foot, she remembers in the film, was in the elevator with her before the doors could close.
“As far as I was concerned, I had really put all my heart into what I had just done and he ignored it,” Ian says. “You have to remember, I was 15. I was going to school, I had friends, I was getting to sing in clubs. I had what I wanted.”
Morton agreed to produce Ian’s debut, Society’s Child, the album that would simultaneously propel her to stardom and sacrifice her to bigoted attacks. In response to the title track’s lyrics — a story about an interracial couple ripped apart by racism and societal constraints — Ian was subjected to backlash most adult artists wouldn’t be able to make sense of, let alone a teenager. For a time, her performances were interrupted by hecklers, threats to her life were constant, her food was spat in, and the song was basically banned from radio.
If a precedent for this kind of public treatment of a young girl exists now, it certainly didn’t in the Sixties and Seventies. As seen in the film, intense scrutiny and invasions of privacy, too, became more common as her star began to rise.
After performing “Society’s Child” on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, Ian received a call from her manager informing her that “no one else on TV” was willing to invite her to perform. As she recalled in a 2015 Facebook post, Bill Cosby, a guest of the show, had seen her asleep in her chaperone’s lap while on set and called other programs to inform them that Ian was not “suitable family entertainment” and “was probably a lesbian, and shouldn’t be on television.” She was just 16 years old at the time.
“I was, in some ways, leading a very insulated life, so it wasn’t on my radar except that I knew I was attracted to women,” Ian says of her sexuality at the time. “But I also knew I was attracted to men. Being bisexual was not a general concept.”
She adds: “My mom always said, ‘You should never sleep with somebody you didn’t love,’ and years and years later, I said, ‘Well, I never slept with anybody I didn’t love. You just forgot to specify gender.’”
By the Seventies, Ian had been outed by the Village Voice, though for years, her queerness largely remained rumor to those who didn’t know her personally — perhaps because she later married a man, Portuguese filmmaker Tino Sargo. It wasn’t until her marriage to Sargo had ended and her fourteenth album, also titled Breaking Silence, had arrived in 1993 that Ian actually consented to this becoming a part of the public’s conversation. By 2003, she had married her current partner, Patricia Snyder, a criminal defense attorney (and her former chess partner) in Canada, where same-sex marriage was legal.
“It’s a funny thing,” Ian says. “I didn’t think it was as important. But when I met Pat, I knew that it was forever, and there was no question.” Watching the film, it’s impossible not to compare Ian’s ascent to queer-icon status to that of her successors; to recognize that her presence helped make that of out-and-proud artists like Brandi Carlile, Tegan and Sara, and Chappell Roan and innumerable others possible.
“That’s what we gave them,” Ian says. “That’s why people like me dealt with being called names. Once you normalize something, everybody should be able to enjoy the normalcy of it.”
In the end, it’s not Ian’s most lauded performances (not even as the first musical guest of Saturday Night Live) or the many trials, tribulations, and triumphs of her personal life that linger as long as her extraordinary observations about the ordinary: a pair of lovers holding hands on the bus, a lonely teenager, or a waitress fresh out of hope.
Even now, as she continues to release music despite her diagnosis, Ian can’t say where it all came from. If she knew, she humbly jests that she would bottle it for sale.
“I really don’t know, and I don’t look at it very closely,” she says. “I feel like that’s talent and I was born with that. People think that artists have all this control over their work, and part of my job is to control my work. But there’s a point where you write what you write, and your talent is what it is.”
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