Re -Train Your Brain To Happiness: Janis Joplin’s Porsche Fetches $2.45m At Sotheby’s Auction

December 14, 2015

Janis Joplin, the pop star famous for singing about wanting to own a Mercedes Benz car, would have been astonished to know what her actual car was worth now.

At an auction in New York this weekend, her 1965 Porsche 356c 1600 Cabriolet fetched $US1.76 million ($2.45m).

She bought the car secondhand for $3500 in 1968, and paid road manager Dave Roberts $500 to paint it with distinctive 1960s-era imagery.

She died two years later of a drug overdose, aged 27.

The car was acquired by her family. For the past 20 years, it has been on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, Ohio.

The auction was expected to yield about $US400,000. However, the vehicle headed to the auction block at Sotheby’s New York on Thursday where it sold for more than three times the expected amount of $US400,000.

Motoring columnist John Connolly last month wrote about the colourful car’s imagery, saying
Roberts was a carpenter, sculptor and self-taught tattoo artiste whose work was influenced by cult cartoonist Robert Crumb.

“Dave spent 30 days painting butterflies, meandering meadows, the eye of god, Capricorn (Janis’s star sign) and other colourful things that could have come to him only while examining the inner recesses of his mind to create what he called, modestly, ‘The history of the universe’.”

CNN Money reports the price is a record for a Porsche 356 at auction. The price was attributed to the fact that the car was so closely associated with Joplin, who drove it everywhere. Joplin’s siblings were planning to give the money to social programs, CNN said.