SILENT SHOUT

With an acclaimed final album on the shelves, Janis Ian was on one last lap of glory, with a lifetime achievement award and the European leg of her farewell tour to look forward to. Then everything changed. She tells Charles Donovan what happened…

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There’s a passage in Janis Ian’s 2008 memoir, Society’s Child, that is unforgettably stark. It comes in the late 80s when, having survived childhood fame, psychological collapse at the end of her teens and an abusive marriage at the height of her 70s comeback, she discovers that, through the fraud of an accountant, she has lost everything, along, seemingly, with any possibility of being solvent again.

Her properties are sold, her equipment, pianos and most guitars. Her royalties go straight to the IRS, and she can’t tour. She goes from wealth to penury in a split second and, just when the IRS show clemency and permit her a bank account, provided the balance doesn’t exceed $1,500, they swoop in for that jackpot, too. Then her tawdry rented room above a car park is burgled.

“I have never been so depressed in my life. I hung up the phone and leaned against the wall, trying not to cry. I’d been a fool to think I could turn things around. I couldn’t. I’d stay where I was, watching drunks careen through the parking lot all night long. I’d fall asleep to the sound of lovers arguing in their cars while the radio blared. I’d stay in this cheap furnished room, with the couch full of holes, and the carpet that would never look clean again, until the day I died.