Interracial

Janis Ian (born April 7, 1951) is a Grammy Award-winning American songwriter, singer, multi-instrumental musician, columnist, and science fiction fan-turned-author.At the age of fifteen, Ian wrote and sang her first hit single, “Society’s Child (Baby I’ve Been Thinking),” about an interracial romance forbidden by a girl’s mother and frowned upon by her peers and teachers; the girl ultimately decides to end the relationship, claiming the societal norms of the day have left her no other choice.
In 1966, while many teens were trying to decide which one of The Beatles to marry, 15-year-old Janis Ian had a hit song on the radio.
While banned by a few radio stations, the single failed to attract much notice until conductor Leonard Bernstein invited its writer to perform the song on his television.
A song about interracial dating, no less. “Society’s Child,” a tune she composed while on a school bus after passing a white girl and a black boy necking on a park bench, promised the emergence of a great American songwriter.

Forty-two years later, Ian has more than lived up to that promise and, at age 57, has many more tales to tell.

To say Ian is a veritable museum of rock history is an understatement. This is, after all, a woman who snorted coke with Jimi Hendrix and was friends with Janis Joplin.

“Society’s Child,” the interracial dating song titled after the song that started it all, is Ian’s autobiography in words. “Best of Janis Ian: The Autobiography Collection,” a new two-disc retrospective, is her autobiography in songs.
The ensuing publicity and furor over its subject matter pushed “Society’s Child” about interracial love into the upper rungs of the pop charts, and made Ian an overnight sensation.
Ian says having her career in a retrospective package was “pretty cool”: “I think if I’d done it even 10 years ago, it would have felt pretty premature.”

Granted, writing a book isn’t the same thing as writing a song. “With a song you’ve got a lot to hide behind. You’ve got music, you’ve got rhymes. With a book, it’s just words,” she continues. “There’s not much to hide behind, unless you’re being not truthful. I deliberately made a choice to write a truthful book.”
Apparently “Society’s Child” was too hot for Atlantic Records as well at the time. Ian relates on her website that although the song was originally intended for Atlantic and the label paid for her recording session, the label subsequently returned the master to her and quietly refused to release it. Years later, Ian says, Atlantic’s president at the time, Jerry Wexler, publicly apologized to her for this

And she does. In “Society’s Child,” Ian writes about the first time she fell in love with a woman. “I was 21. We met at a health club in Los Angeles. It was scary wonderful, I think, like any kind of big first love.”

She also writes that she realized she was gay in fourth grade. “My classmates were interracial dating, making out, talking about boyfriends and dreaming of marriage. I was dreaming of saving Joan Baez from drowning, of her eternal gratitude as she kissed me chastely on the lips and adopted me into her life. I was a late starter; my sexual fantasies ended at the neck. But they were always about women,” she writes.

She is no less candid when writing about her abusive marriage, being seduced by her therapist, her IRS trouble, and her decade-long absence from the music world. She’s open and honest, much as she was when she wrote “At Seventeen,” a song that appears on her 1975 album “Between the Lines.”