Before Janis Joplin sadly entered the “27 Club” with her untimely death in 1970, she was a member of a de-facto clubhouse called Mnasidika, a boutique clothing store in Haight-Ashbury. Its owner, and Joplin’s ex-lover, Peggy Caserta, seemed to dress every San Francisco-based band (Santana, the Grateful Dead, Blue Cheer, etc.) that played at the Fillmore West. Fillmore’s owner, Bill Graham, even worked out a mutually profitable relationship with Mnasidika whereby customers who’d come in to buy Peggy’s clothes could purchase a concert ticket, too—and vice versa.
To Peggy’s chagrin, word got out of her friendship with Bill. In a 2021 interview on the Haight Street Voice podcast, Peggy recalled a British man named “Chas” and a shy guitarist who stopped by her shop. Chas announced he was managing the greatest guitarist in the world and asked if she could get him a meeting with Graham. Peggy replied, “’I’m a jean pusher. Why would you be asking a jean pusher and say you have the best guitar player in the world?’ I looked at this Chas [Chandler, ex-bassist for the Animals] guy and the guitarist and told them ‘Sorry. I can’t.’ It turned out the guitarist was Jimi Hendrix and he was the best guitar player in the world.”
When musicians weren’t using Peggy for her perceived pull, Peggy was pulling the wool over the clothing industry—namely Levi Strauss. Peggy remembered, “One of the early hippie-ish type girls had split the side seam on her boyfriend’s Levi’s and inserted a paisley triangle.” Loving how the flared bottoms looked, Peggy’s mother agreed to sew a slew of flared jeans that San Franciscans ate up faster than Owsley’s acid. Peggy realized she needed a mass producer to satisfy the demand and ventured to Levi’s corporate office in San Francisco. However, her meeting with a highbrow higher-up did not go well. Peggy remembered, “He turned me away and said, ‘You know we have the best-selling jeans in the world and you come here and think you have a better idea?’ And when he was showing me the door, the old man who ran that place, this 90-year-old guy, came walking down the hall and I was in a mini-skirt and fifteen pairs of beads around my neck and he yelled at me, ‘Girly girl!’ And today you couldn’t get away with that and I thought, ‘Hey. I’m a girly.” And I said, ‘Yes sir?’ And he asked me what did I want and the rest is bellbottom history. I thought ‘Wow. That man took a chance on me but then I thought, ‘He was 90. What did he have to lose?’”
Levi’s gave her a six-month exclusive on the new line which made Peggy a millionaire. Alas, most of the money went to heroin—as it did with her new friend, Janis Joplin. In her aptly named 2018 autobiography, I Ran Into Some Trouble, Peggy wrote how they met. “The Grateful Dead lived at 710 Ashbury Street, I lived at 635 and Janis lived at 634. I had opened my window and she was opening hers at the same time. She happened to notice me, hung her head out the window, and said, ‘Hiya honey!’ with her southern inflection. I said, ‘Hiya!’ back. Seeing and hearing Janis sing later that night with Big Brother and the Holding Company was mind-altering.”
Looking back at their four-year relationship, Peggy revealed to New York Magazine’s Vulture blog in 2018: “I loved her. But to be her lover was to resign yourself to being invisible and as hard as it may be for people to understand now, I thought I was as groovy as her.”
Unfortunately, the couple cut a wide swath of self-destruction. On October 3, 1970, Peggy and Janis’ boyfriend, Seth Morgan, didn’t show up for a planned sex and drug-filled night with Janis at the Landmark Motor Hotel. The next day, Janis was found dead.
Peggy, who insisted in her autobiography that Janis died from breaking her nose and suffocating on her blood after falling in her room, continued running into self-made trouble that included agreeing to write with Dan Knapp Going Down With Janis (A Raw and Scathing Portrait of Janis Joplin by Her Female Lover). During that project, Peggy shot up in a restroom then groggily answered Knapp’s questions which resulted in a tawdry memoir that she never lived down. Peggy admitted, “I sold out [$2,000] for drug money and I’ve lived in the shadow of it for 40-some-odd years. That book scandalized my family. My mother and father were devastated. I lost my friends. The ‘collaborator’ filled in what he didn’t know and the editors bypassed showing me the final text. Or at least that is how I remember it. Perhaps I had signed away that right in my drugged haze.”
Her haze lasted until she was 53, culminating in a two-year prison stint for possessing heroin. When Peggy wasn’t cooking smack in a spoon, she cooked up a pot smuggling scheme. Two of her seedy crew wound up in a prison that allowed conjugal visits, so Peggy joined them in the jail where she helped her pals dig a tunnel and escape.
“The End” of Peggy’s cinematic-like life occurred on November 21, 2024 when she died at 83. She left behind a cabin in Tillamook County, Oregon and enough entertaining anecdotes to fill a TV series. The pilot episode should open with Janis driving her friend through Hollywood. Janis parked in front of Frederick’s of Hollywood and dashed in to buy lingerie only to return and tell Peggy the store wouldn’t accept a check from the singer because she wasn’t carrying any form of I.D. Problem-solving Peggy pointed to a newsstand that featured Joplin on the cover of Newsweek’s May 26, 1969 issue. Janis presented the magazine to the sales staff and bought a bagful of lingerie then got an earful from Peggy because she was stoned and driving without a license—but at least Janis created a novel and new form of identification.
-Mark Daponte
Photo: Janis Joplin (public domain)
Great piece ~ thank you! I have always found Caserta daunting, baffling & compelling.
Peggy doesn’t sound like the gal you’d take home to meet the parents. Amazing that she lived that long. And Jimi Hendrix wasn’t the greatest guitarist in the world…nobody ever knows who that is.