Several Janis Joplin songs will make WXPN’s Greatest Songs by Women Countdown next month. This, the last one she ever recorded, got my vote.
Joplin recorded the tune in one take on Oct. 1, 1970, three days before she died. She wrote it two months earlier in a bar in Port Chester, N.Y., by riffing with songwriter Bob Neuwirth on a line by beat poet Michael McClure, “Come on, God, and buy me a Mercedes Benz.” As she ad-libbed lines, Neuwirth scribbled them on napkins, which he kept for years.
Is the song anti-materialist? Bobby Womack said in his autobiography that the lyric was inspired when Joplin rode in his Mercedes-Benz 600, and the company used it in its advertising, so it’s an open question.
The impromptu poetry jam in the bar did not produce a definitive version of the song. Neuwirth recorded his own take on it his 1974 solo album. Mercedes Benz did not use it in their advertising.
