The Story of ‘Mercedes Benz’, Janis Joplin's Final Recording
Updated: 2 days ago
The last song Janis Joplin ever recorded lasts about one minute and 47 seconds, has no instruments on it and was written on bar napkins between two shows in a small town north of New York City. She sang it once, in a studio in Hollywood on 1 October 1970, mostly to lighten the mood while a piece of equipment was being fixed. Three days later she was dead at 27.
That's how ‘Mercedes Benz’ ended up as the closing statement of one of rock's great voices: a joke about asking God for a car, sung by a woman who already owned a Porsche. The story of where it came from involves a Beat poet with an autoharp, a pool table, Rip Torn banging a beer mug and, 25 years later, the car company itself.
Quick Answers
When was ‘Mercedes Benz’ recorded? On Thursday 1 October 1970 at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, in a single unaccompanied take.
Who wrote it? Janis Joplin and Bob Neuwirth, building on a song by the Beat poet Michael McClure. All three are credited.
Where was it written? At Vahsen's, a bar in Port Chester, New York, on 8 August 1970, between Joplin's two shows at the Capitol Theatre.
Was it her last recording? It was the last song she recorded. On the same day she also taped a birthday greeting for John Lennon.
Did she ever sing it live? Twice that we know of: the night she wrote it and at her last concert, at Harvard Stadium on 12 August 1970.
When did she die? In the early hours of 4 October 1970 at the Landmark Motor Hotel in Hollywood, of an accidental heroin overdose.
Did Mercedes-Benz ever use the song? Yes. The company licensed it for a US television advert in 1995.
It Started With a Beat Poet and an Autoharp
The song's first line wasn't Joplin's. It belonged to Michael McClure, a San Francisco poet who had been one of the readers at the Six Gallery in 1955, the night Allen Ginsberg first performed Howl. By the 1960s McClure was riding motorbikes with Hells Angels, writing plays that got raided by the police and palling around with Bob Dylan, who gave him an autoharp. He was also a close friend of Jim Morrison and did more than anyone to push the Doors singer to publish his poetry.
McClure used the autoharp to write songs for his own amusement, and one of them opened with a mock prayer asking God to buy him a Mercedes. He hadn't released it. It just went round his circle of friends, sung at parties by people who mostly couldn't remember past the first line.
That's how Joplin heard it. Performing Songwriter's account has her shooting pool in New York with the actor Rip Torn and Emmett Grogan, a founder of the San Francisco Diggers, while the two of them sang the bit of McClure's song they knew. Joplin loved the line and started singing along.
Four People, Some Napkins and a Bar in Port Chester
On Saturday 8 August 1970, Joplin and her Full Tilt Boogie Band were booked for two shows at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, a commuter town about 25 miles from Manhattan. Between sets she took the short walk to a bar called Vahsen's on Broad Street with her friend Bob Neuwirth, Rip Torn and Torn's wife, the actress Geraldine Page.
Neuwirth was the sort of person who turns up in the corner of other people's stories. He's the man in the striped shirt behind Dylan on the cover of Highway 61 Revisited, he's all over the film Dont Look Back and it was Neuwirth who taught Joplin a Kris Kristofferson song called ‘Me and Bobby McGee’.
At the bar Joplin started singing McClure's line over and over. Neuwirth later described the moment, in a recollection quoted by American Songwriter: “It was like a sea shanty.” Torn and Page thumped their beer mugs on the table to keep time. Joplin came up with a first verse about the car and her friends' Porsches, then a second about wanting a colour television. Neuwirth supplied a third, about a night on the town, and wrote the whole thing down on bar napkins with a ballpoint pen.
The whole process took about as long as a couple of rounds. There's a rival claim, from the soul singer Bobby Womack, that the idea came to Joplin after a ride in his new Mercedes, but that doesn't square with the accounts of the people who were at the table.
The First Performance Was an Hour Later
Joplin didn't wait. Back at the Capitol for the late show, she told the band she was going to do a new song and that she'd play guitar on it herself. In the event she just sang, and the musicians, who had never heard it, made up an accompaniment as they went. She introduced it to the audience as a number she'd perform “Acapulco”, which was her word for a cappella. Nobody in the room quite knew what to make of it.
At some point she rang McClure in San Francisco to ask whether he minded. She sang him her version down the phone. He listened, picked up the autoharp and sang his version back, then told her he preferred his own. They agreed that both could exist. It was probably the most profitable phone call of his life.
Four Days Later She Sang It at Her Last Concert
She had very few chances to try it again. On Wednesday 12 August Joplin and Full Tilt Boogie played Harvard Stadium in Boston, part of a summer series with tickets at $2. It went wrong before it started. Thieves made off with the band's sound equipment that afternoon, and while replacements were found the crowd waited for hours. One reviewer who was there has her finally walking on at about half past ten in wine-red velvet trousers, a black lace blouse and a gold vest, with a feather in her hair and a paper cup in her hand.
She played for under an hour. The setlist shows the four-day-old song in third place, straight after ‘Half Moon’, ahead of ‘Summertime’ and the rest. Neither ‘Piece of My Heart’ nor ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ got an airing. Accounts of the crowd vary wildly, from the 10,000 the series was supposed to be capped at to a figure of 40,000 that's often repeated.
She was off stage by about half past eleven with a police escort. Nobody knew it was the last time she'd ever sing in front of an audience. As far as the record shows, ‘Mercedes Benz’ was performed in public twice: once on the day it was written and once at her final show.
What the Song Is Actually Saying
On the page it's three requests to the Almighty: a luxury car, a colour TV and a night out with the drinks paid for. The joke is the tone. It borrows the shape of a gospel plea and uses it to ask for consumer goods, from a narrator who has worked hard all her life, gets no help from her friends and has decided that only divine intervention will get her the stuff everyone else seems to have.
The second verse has a reference that's lost on most listeners now. Dialing for Dollars was a franchised local TV show that ran on American stations for decades. The host rang a number picked from the phone book, and if you answered and knew that day's password and “count”, you won the jackpot. You had to be watching to know the answer, which is the whole point of the verse: she's stuck at home waiting for the phone to ring with free money.
Joplin was clear about what she meant. She introduced the studio take with a line that's on the record: “I'd like to do a song of great social and political import.” It's delivered deadpan, and the cackle at the end of the track tells you how seriously to take it. She was sending up the idea that buying things makes you happy, and sending up herself too, because she liked nice things as much as anyone.
1 October 1970: One Take at Sunset Sound
By the autumn Joplin was in Los Angeles making what would become Pearl. She'd checked into the Landmark Motor Hotel on Franklin Avenue on 24 August and the sessions at Sunset Sound were going better than any she'd done before. The producer was Paul Rothchild, the man behind the Doors' records, who called Joplin a producer's dream and who, a few weeks later, would walk out on the L.A. Woman sessions.
On Thursday 1 October there was a technical hold-up. While the band waited, Joplin stepped up to the microphone and announced she had a new hit. Rothchild kept a quarter-inch two-track machine running for exactly this sort of thing, and he caught the lot: the mock-solemn introduction, three verses sung dead straight with her foot tapping time and a closing “That's it!” followed by a laugh. Full Tilt Boogie sat it out. It was one take and nobody suggested a second.
It wasn't meant for the album at that point. It was a bit of fun on a work tape.
The Other Thing She Recorded That Day
Most tellings stop there, but ‘Mercedes Benz’ wasn't the only thing Joplin put on tape on 1 October. Yoko Ono had been asking musicians to record birthday messages for John Lennon, who was turning 30 on 9 October. Joplin and the band cut a loose, jokey version of the old Roy Rogers and Dale Evans sign-off ‘Happy Trails’ with a spoken greeting on the front that began: “John, this is Janis.” She'd never met him, but she was a Beatles fan of long standing.
The tape went in the post. Lennon later told Dick Cavett that he and Joplin had never met and that the tape reached him after she had died. He spent the birthday itself at Abbey Road, working on his first solo album. So the claim that ‘Mercedes Benz’ was her final recording needs a small footnote. It was the last song she recorded for release. Which of the two came last on the day isn't something the surviving accounts settle.
Three Days Later
On Saturday 3 October Joplin went to Sunset Sound to hear the finished backing track for ‘Buried Alive in the Blues’, a song by her friend Nick Gravenites. She was pleased with it and arranged with Rothchild to sing the vocal the next day. That evening she had a couple of drinks at Barney's Beanery with her organist Ken Pearson and was back at the Landmark by about half past midnight.
When she didn't turn up at the studio on Sunday, her road manager John Cooke drove to the hotel. Her psychedelic Porsche was still in the car park. He found her on the floor of room 105. The coroner put the time of death at around 1.40am and the cause as acute heroin intoxication. The batch she'd bought is thought to have been far stronger than usual, and other customers of the same dealer are reported to have overdosed that weekend.
She was the second of three. Jimi Hendrix had died in London 16 days earlier and Jim Morrison would die in Paris the following July, all of them 27. It's a pattern that would be remarked on again in 1994 with Kurt Cobain.
Days before her death Joplin had updated her will to set aside up to $2,500 so her friends could have a party once she was gone. They did. Around 200 people gathered at the Lion's Share in San Anselmo that month, on invitations that told them the drinks were on Pearl.
How a Studio Joke Ended Up on Pearl
Rothchild was left with an almost finished album and a hole in it. ‘Buried Alive in the Blues’ had no vocal, and Gravenites turned down the offer to sing it himself, so it went on the record as an instrumental. To fill out the running time Rothchild reached for the work tape and put ‘Mercedes Benz’ on side two, third track in, exactly as she'd sung it.
Pearl came out on 11 January 1971 and spent nine weeks at number one in America. ‘Me and Bobby McGee’, the song Neuwirth had taught her, went to number one as a single. ‘Mercedes Benz’ was never a hit in its own right, although a cover by the country-rock band Goose Creek Symphony scraped into the Billboard Hot 100 in 1972. It didn't need to be. It became the track everybody knew, partly because anybody can sing it and partly because of when it was made.
The tapes kept giving. A 2003 compilation carried a remix that bolted her vocal on to a beat and stretched it to nearly four minutes, and The Pearl Sessions, released in 2012, added a disc of outtakes and studio chatter from those weeks: in-jokes, banter with Rothchild and the band generally mucking about between takes. It's the nearest thing there is to being in the room.
The Porsche in the Car Park
The line about her friends driving Porsches was a private joke, because the Porsche driver was Joplin. In 1968 she'd paid $3,500 for a used 1964 Porsche 356 C cabriolet from a Beverly Hills dealer. It was dolphin grey, which wouldn't do, so she gave Dave Richards, a roadie for Big Brother and the Holding Company, $500 to paint it. He covered every panel in a mural he called The History of the Universe, with butterflies, landscapes, an eye of God on the bonnet and portraits of the band.
It was probably the most recognisable car in San Francisco. Her sister Laura said that whenever Janis parked it there'd be a fan's note under the wipers when she got back. It was stolen once, and the thief got as far as spraying over part of the mural before the police recovered it. The damage was put right.
After her death the car passed to her manager and then to her brother and sister. Michael Joplin rebuilt the engine and had it resprayed grey, and in the 1990s the family commissioned two artists to recreate the mural from photographs. It spent about twenty years on show at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. On 10 December 2015 it sold at auction in New York for $1.76 million, roughly three times the top estimate.
She never owned a Mercedes.
Mercedes Buys the Song
In early 1995 American television viewers saw a new Mercedes-Benz commercial: shots of the C-Class and E-Class saloons, and over them Joplin's voice asking the Lord for one. The agency, Lowe and Partners/SMS in New York, had a specific problem to solve. The typical Mercedes buyer in the US was 51, and the company wanted people in their late thirties and forties who had grown up with Pearl.
The song was licensed for a year from Strong Arm Music, the publishing company run by Joplin's siblings Laura and Michael. The fee wasn't disclosed. An Associated Press report at the time found the people closest to the song relaxed about it. Neuwirth pointed out that it had never been meant seriously. John Cooke thought Janis would have laughed. Laura Joplin's verdict was three words long: “It's a hoot.”
Others were less amused. Critics argued that a satire on consumerism had been turned into the thing it was mocking, and that a dead woman couldn't object. Time magazine managed to hold both views at once, naming it one of the ten best adverts of 1995 while saying it “prostitutes the spirit of the 1960s”. McClure is said to have refused to watch it.
It worked, for what that's worth. Mercedes's American sales rose by nearly a fifth in the first eight months of 1996, and the company kept coming back to the song. It turned up in an online campaign a decade later and again on 6 February 2011, when Mercedes ran it during the Super Bowl, the most expensive advertising slot on American television.
What It Did for the Three Writers
For Joplin the song became an epitaph she hadn't intended. For Neuwirth, who died in 2022 aged 82, it was the best-known thing he ever wrote.
For McClure it was a pension. He died in 2020 at 87 with a shelf of poetry, plays and essays behind him, very little of which had made him any money. Songfacts records that the royalties from his third of a throwaway song paid for his house in the Oakland hills. A mock prayer for material wealth had delivered some.
FAQ
How long is ‘Mercedes Benz’?
About one minute and 47 seconds, including the spoken introduction. It's the shortest track on Pearl.
How many times did Joplin sing ‘Mercedes Benz’ live?
Twice, as far as anyone can document: at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester on 8 August 1970 and at Harvard Stadium on 12 August 1970, her last concert.
Is there a version with instruments?
Not from Joplin. The band improvised behind her at the Capitol Theatre in August 1970, but the studio take is voice only. A remix with an added beat and backing was released on The Essential Janis Joplin in 2003.
Where is Vahsen's bar now?
Vahsen's was on Broad Street in Port Chester, a short walk from the Capitol Theatre, and later traded under other names. The Capitol is still a working music venue.
Did Joplin play ‘Mercedes Benz’ at Woodstock?
No. Her Woodstock set was in August 1969, a year before the song existed.
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Sources
Ultimate Classic Rock: The Day Janis Joplin Recorded Her Final Song, 'Mercedes Benz'
American Songwriter: The Meaning Behind 'Mercedes Benz' by Janis Joplin
Performing Songwriter: The Story Behind Janis Joplin's Song 'Mercedes Benz'
Westchester Magazine: Janis Joplin's 'Mercedes Benz' Has Roots in Westchester
JamBase: John Lennon's Connection to Janis Joplin's Last Recording
Associated Press via The Roanoke Times, 12 March 1995: Mercedes Dusts Off Janis Joplin Song for Ad
Rolling Stone: Janis Joplin's Psychedelic Porsche Brings $1.76 Million at Auction
Heacock Classic: The Janis Joplin 1964 Porsche 356 Cabriolet
American Songwriter: Janis Joplin's Final Performance in 1970
