I am new to Joplin’s recordings. Can you provide me with some interpretation of her last song “Me and Bobby McGee”? My real problem is with the sentence “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” Can you help me?Thanks!
I don’t know, but that line reminds me of another song called Round Here by Counting Crowes.It goes: “Round here I got lots of time. Round here we’re never sent to bed early, Nobody makes us wait, Round here we stay up very very very very late.” The person that’s singing that has lots of freedom too. No money, no possessions and so probably nothing to lose but lots of leisure time and freedom to do what ever they want.
Song written by Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster. Roger Miller had a county version of this song in 1969. But the Janis version, IMO, is much better. The link goes to the lyrics the way she sang them. (Google is our friend.)
G.Nome is pretty much on target about the meaning. If you ain’t got nuthin’ to lose, you’re free to do just about anything. If you have a corporate job, you gotta watch what you say and do. Remember, this was the late 60’s, when Youth were rebelling against the uptight corporate America suits.
When you don’t have anything (committments, possessions, emotional attachments etc.)to tie you down (lose) you are free from everything and can do whatever you want. Written by Kris Kristofferson by the way. Now appearing in Planet of the Apes, but see Heaven’s Gate to join a really exclusive club.
I’m thinking this might be a thread for IMHO, actually, since it involves interpretation rather than hard fact.
This is just me talking out of my nether orifice, but I always took “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose” to mean that freedom sounds good as a concept, but translates into loneliness in real life. Although I do not have my Janis Joplin albums with me, and making out what she was saying was never easy, I recall the words as “one day down by Salinas, I let him slip away. He’s lookin’ for that home, and I hope he finds it. But I’d trade all my tomorrows for one single yesterday, to be holdin’ Bobby’s body next to mine.” In other words, Bobby is looking for a home to settle down in, while the singer is staying out on the road. She is free, but she is alone. The only thing she had worth keeping was Bobby, and he is gone. She now has “nothing left to lose.”
Although Janis Joplin’s version of the song is the most well known, I believe it was written by Glen Campbell.
Although the two are very different, I put “Me and My Bobby McGee” in the same category as “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” (Tina Turner) in which an independent woman finds out that the life she has chosen comes at a great cost in terms of lost emotional fulfillment. Sex roles in popular music being what they are, contrast this with “Freebird” (Lynrd Skynrd) and “Travelin’ Man,” (Marshall Tucker, I think) in which vagabond men cast off women and emotional ties with carefree abandon. Of course, if you are only now getting into Janis Joplin, there is an excellent chance that you aren’t particularly familiar with those oldies, either.
Boy, do I feel like a nincompoop! Of course it was Kris Kristofferson, not Glen Campbell, who wrote it. Sorry.
I have a Bruce Springsteen video which contains stuff he did before the mid-eighties. Before he sings an acoustic version of Born to Run he gives a speech (which he must have done at a lot of his shows) about how the people in his songs who are roaring transcendentally through the night on motorcycles and in cars would, in fact, be lost if they didn’t have a connection to some kind of community. Without a friend or two the biggest Harley in the world will become meaningless. I could get the video out again and find the track and give a more accurate translation but it’s too much hassle right now. I believe it’s relevant, though.
Is that the People Who Have Clawed Their Own Eyes Out From Sheer Unmitigated Boredom Club? 
Kris said in an interview on ‘Fresh Air’ that the line in question isn’t meant to be as deep as it sounds. He was just being full of himself and trying to sound philosophical. It falls in the ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’ and ‘Glass Onion’ catagory. His friends on Tin Pan Alley tried to get him to change the line, which he almost did, but decided to leave it in at the last moment. The rest is history.