For the Littlest Ones : Janis Ian to Sing in Benefit for Babies With AIDS

When she was just 15, Janis Ian wrote her first hit, “Society’s Child.”

Earlier this week, the singer-songwriter held society’s child, a tiny newborn who has been exposed to the deadly AIDS virus.

Ian, who lived in Santa Monica until a few years ago, was back in Los Angeles for a concert tonight to benefit a Westside facility that houses babies infected with the acquired immune deficiency syndrome virus or at high risk of infection. Called Caring for Babies with AIDS, the group home, located in Los Angeles, near Culver City, is the first such facility west of the Mississippi.

In recent years, Ian explained, her only public appearances except for two brief concert tours have been at AIDS benefits. It is the cause in which Ian, best known for the achingly insightful “At Seventeen,” chooses to wield her celebrity clout.

So when a photographer began to snap pictures of her cuddling a sleepy AIDS baby, Ian wanted to make sure people would be able to see that she was holding the infant against her bare skin.

“People tend to see me as credible,” she said. “The person who wrote and sings ‘At Seventeen’ can be trusted. I know that sounds weird, but people come and tell me their lives.” She said she hoped her willingness to touch the child may convince others that it is safe to have the casual contact that people with AIDS need so much.

“It’s such a mess,” said Ian of the epidemic that has already taken the lives of almost 110,000 people in the United States. AIDS, she said, “is such an unjust disease. A lot of the people I’ve been losing are the best and the brightest.”

Filled with shelf upon shelf of donated toys and bright baby furniture, the Caring for Babies with AIDS home currently has six babies in residence, the oldest, 2 1/2-year-old twin boys. All the children have been referred by the California Department of Children’s Services. The organization hopes to raise enough money to renovate the property next door to make room for eight more infants.

As Ian reluctantly handed the tiny bundle back to a volunteer, she said she thought speaking out is especially important in the case of AIDS because it is an infectious disease “and so much of what is going on with it has to do with ignorance.”

Under the general rubric of ignorance, Ian would include not only misinformation and prejudice, but such related issues as the impact illiteracy is having on the spread of the disease. Ian, who now lives in Nashville, Tenn., said finding ways to get AIDS information to the functionally illiterate is an especially urgent concern in the rural South and one that has enlisted the help of such down-home AIDS activists as Minnie Pearl.

When she isn’t singing to benefit people with AIDS, Ian is writing songs. A star when she was in her teens, Ian is now 40. Tiny (4-foot-10 1/2) but durable, she has survived considerable personal turbulence, including a failed marriage, trouble with the Internal Revenue Service and a burst intestine that almost killed her in 1986.

At 22, she also survived the revelation by a journalist, whom she describes with a laugh as a pioneer of “outing,” that she had been sexually involved with other women. “The bad thing about people knowing too much about your private life is that it feeds their fantasies instead of their imaginations,” she said.

Moving to Nashville has allowed her to become a respected member of a genuine community of music, she said. An almost archetypal loner in her early work, she has begun collaborating with other songwriters in recent years, particularly Rhonda Kye Fleming, whose hits include “I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Cool.”

In recent years, Ian said, she has devoted much of her time to her craft. Her best early work, including the love song “Jessie,” was a product of a gift for making poetry out of pain and discovering the haunting musical line. But she has learned, she said, notably from acting teacher Stella Adler, that you reach an age “where talent is no longer enough.”

Inspiration is still better than craft, she said, but she thinks she is now producing more consistently good work than ever before. Others appear to agree. With Fleming, she wrote the title track on Bette Midler’s album, “Other People’s Lives.” She also contributed to forthcoming albums from John Cougar Mellencamp and Joan Baez. “And I’m supposedly making an album this summer,” she says, alluding to the uncertainty of the music business.

Although she will do mostly new material in tonight’s concert, she also plans to include her unforgettable anthem of anguished adolescence, “At Seventeen.” For more than 15 years now, people have been coming up to her, telling her that her confession of the pain “of valentines that never came” helped them get through their own searing teen years.

It is the constant in Ian’s repertoire. And she says, “I can’t tell you how cool it is to look into an audience and see a mother and daughter both singing it.”

The Second Annual Mother in Us All Concert to benefit Caring for Babies with AIDS is at 7:30 tonight at the Wilshire Ebell Theater, 4401 W. 8th St., Los Angeles, (213) 939-1128. It features Ian and the Los Angeles Women Singer/Songwriters.