Peggy Caserta, a friend and onetime lover of Janis Joplin who wrote a pair of memoirs about the singer and their relationship, died at 84 on Thursday, Nov. 21. Caserta’s death was reported by Deadline, who, per Caserta’s book publisher, said the author died of “natural causes at her cabin on the Tillamook River” in Oregon.
In 1973, Caserta, a fixture of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury scene where she befriended Joplin and the Grateful Dead, published the book Going Down With Janis, which detailed her friendship and eventual romance with the Sixties rock & roll singer. According to the book, they both slept together and got high. Later, however, Caserta would claim the memoir was written by her co-author and that she only contributed to fuel a drug habit.
“I didn’t write that smut about Janis,” she told Rolling Stone in 2018. “I would never talk like that about our close association. But I lost control because I was strung out and making awful decisions.” That same year, she said that just thinking of Going Down With Janis made her want to use drugs. “I’m not going to make excuses for using, because a drug addict really needs no excuse, but every time that I thought I could get clean or tried to get clean, I would think about that book, and all I’d want to do is numb out again,” Caserta told Vulture. “Nothing good came of it. I hate that book.”
Caserta attempted to set the record straight with another memoir, 2018’s I Ran Into Some Trouble. The book also included some wild claims, most notably Caserta’s theory that Joplin didn’t die from a drug overdose in Los Angeles in 1970. Rather, she said the “Me and Bobby McGee” vocalist tripped, broke her nose on the nightstand, and asphyxiated on her blood. “I saw her foot sticking out at the end of the bed,” Caserta told RS. “She was lying with cigarettes in one hand and change in the other. For years it bothered me. How could she have overdosed and then walked out to the lobby and walked back. … I let it go for years, but I always thought, ‘Something is wrong here.’”
Despite Caserta’s repudiation of Going Down With Janis, the book has often been cited as important among the LGBTQ community for the way it depicted Joplin’s sexuality. For her part, Caserta said Joplin was bisexual. “She was fun and outspoken and uninhibited,” she told RS in 2018. “I always thought she was pretty, but she was considered not pretty, and a lot of women thought, ‘I have a chance too.’”
