In the summer of 1969, two of the most significant and most self-destructive figures in American rock music were living parallel lives in Los Angeles — not parallel in the sense of similar circumstances, because Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison had genuinely different relationships with their own pain and their own talent and their own destruction, but parallel in the sense of being in the same city at the same time, moving in overlapping social circles, sharing a relationship with performance and with excess that gave them a specific understanding of each other that the people around them did not share.
They knew each other. This is documented — the accounts of people who were present at various gatherings where both were in attendance are consistent about the fact of their acquaintance and ambiguous about its depth. Morrison was with Pamela Courson. Joplin was between relationships. The specific occasion and circumstances of their interactions have been pieced together from multiple sources with the imprecision that characterizes the documentation of events from this period and this social world.
The phone call — late at night, Joplin to Morrison, in the summer or possibly the autumn of 1969 — has been described in the most detail by people who knew Morrison and who heard his account of it afterward. Joplin has not left a direct account, which is not surprising given that she died in October 1970 before the period when such accounts might have been systematically recorded.
What Morrison told people he was close to — told them in the immediate aftermath of the call and returned to in subsequent conversations — was that Joplin called him at approximately two in the morning and said something that he found difficult to characterize. The accounts of what she said, filtered through Morrison’s telling and then through the accounts of the people he told, converge on a specific quality rather than specific words — that she said something about the performance of destruction, about the difference between using the darkness as material and being consumed by it, about whether either of them understood that the two things were becoming harder to tell apart.
Morrison’s reaction to the call has been described by the people he subsequently spoke to as something that stayed with him — not in the sense of changing his behavior, which it did not, but in the sense of articulating something he had been thinking about and had not previously heard said from outside. He has been described as quieter than usual in the days following the conversation. He told at least one person that Joplin had understood something about what they were both doing that most people around them did not understand.
Joplin died on October 4, 1970. Morrison died on July 3, 1971. Between those two deaths — in the eight months after Joplin’s — the people closest to Morrison have described him as changed in a way that they have characterized differently in different accounts. Some say he was more serious. Some say he was more resigned. Some say the specific quality of recklessness that had characterized his behavior since the Doors’ peak had shifted into something quieter and more deliberate.
Whether the phone call at 2am contributed to this change, or whether the change was the product of other factors entirely, is not something that can be established from the available evidence. What is established is that two people at the same specific edge of the same specific experience spoke to each other one night about something they understood together, and that both of them were gone within the following year.