by Lily Brett
‘I have a beautiful old Singer sewing machine that I bought in a second-hand shop,’ Janis Joplin said.
‘One of the ones with gold filigree on the black machine?’ said Lola.
‘Yes,’ said Janis Joplin. ‘Aren’t they beautiful? Do you sew, too?’
‘No,’ said Lola. ‘I wish I could.’
‘The first thing I made on the sewing machine was a blue velvet dress to wear on stage,’ said Janis Joplin. ‘I also made a dress out of a Madras bedspread.’
Lola was impressed that Janis Joplin could sew. It was such a domestic thing to be able to do. Janis Joplin, with her rough edges and grazed and bruised parts, didn’t look like a picture of domesticity.
‘I’ll have to think about what to wear,’ Janis Joplin said.
‘That was heavy, man,’ Mama Cass called out to Janis Joplin. Mama Cass stood up and clapped in Janis Joplin’s direction. Janis Joplin grinned and beamed.
Jefferson Airplane was performing. Hundreds of people had joined the band onstage and were dancing. Grace Slick’s strong voice rang out over the arena. The light show that engulfed the group gave Grace Slick’s long pale-blue dress an incantational, otherworldly lustre. The group played ‘The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil’. Marty Balin sang the song’s poignant refrain, in which he wondered whether the moon would still hang in the sky if he died, over and over again. They were haunting lines. But Lola knew that the moon would still hang in the sky. The moon seemed to keep hanging in there, regardless of whatever else was happening.
Thinking of the moon still hanging in the sky made Lola feel sad and hungry. She decided to go and get something to eat. She had two apples and a boiled egg in her bag, but she didn’t feel like eating the boiled egg or the apples. She bought a pastrami sandwich and an orange.
She got back to her seat just as Otis Redding, in an impeccably tailored bluish-green suit, stepped on to the stage fully charged. The audience roared in applause. Otis Redding danced and shook and sang. He moved with small, lightning-quick, high-speed steps and taps and nods. Every nerve in his body, every part of his heart was present and pumping. He started off with ‘Shake’ and never stopped his high-octane, high-voltage performance. His energy and his intensity were contagious. He looked as though he was having a very good time.
There was a maturity about Otis Redding, Lola thought. He looked as though he knew exactly who he was and what he was doing. There was nothing scruffy or unfinished about him. There was no long hair, no moustache, no embroidered anything. His maturity stood out in a rock world where everyone was trying to look youthful and radical.
Otis Redding was twenty-five. He was serious. Serious about his work. And serious about his life. He’d met his wife, Zelma, when he was eighteen, and they were married when Otis Redding was twenty. They had four children and lived in a two-storey brick home on a 300-acre farm in Round Oak, Georgia.
Otis Redding wrote many of his own songs. He owned his own record label and he used the money he made to invest in real estate, and stocks and bonds. He also had his own plane, a twin-engine Beechcraft.
Lola was very impressed by Otis Redding’s business acumen. She herself had just under a hundred dollars in the bank and didn’t know anything about stocks and bonds or where and how or why you bought them.
Otis Redding had big ideas. He thought that music could be a unifying force and bring different races and cultures together. He had a white manager and a racially mixed band. Otis Redding’s appearance in Monterey in front of a very large, largely white audience was a breakthrough for a black artist.
Otis closed his set with ‘Try a Little Tenderness’. He began the song very, very slowly, every syllable saturated with tenderness, then he sped up and revved up until he himself was almost a blur and the audience was in a frenzy.
It was Sunday afternoon and Ravi Shankar was about to start playing the sitar. He sat on the stage adjusting a few strings. Before he began playing, he explained to the audience that the work he was going to play was very spiritual, and he asked that no photographs be taken. He also thanked the audience, in advance, for not smoking. ‘I love you all,’ he said. ‘And how grateful I am for your love of me.’
In India, music concerts could last for over ten hours. Four or five hours was not an uncommon length of time for a concert. In Monterey, Ravi Shankar played for three hours. The audience was transfixed, mesmerised. Lola was restless, fidgety and bored. Three hours of sitar playing was a long time. She shifted in her seat, looked at her watch and studied the audience. She felt a little guilty for not being able to partake in this exchange of love.
Years later, to Lola’s horror, she saw herself in the outtakes of D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary of the Monterey International Pop Festival. The audience was still, engrossed and transported. And there was Lola. Looking to her right and to her left unmoved by Ravi Shankar.
Lola was utterly alert later that night when Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company took the stage again. Janis Joplin had bought a new outfit. She was wearing a tunic top made out of a gold lamé knitted fabric and matching gold lamé knitted bell-bottom pants. She wore delicate, pointed-toe, slip-on shoes with a low heel. She had what looked like pancake make-up on her face, which Lola thought she didn’t need. It emphasised the marks on her skin. Although Lola knew that no one watching Janis Joplin sing would be examining her skin.
Again, Janis Joplin began ‘Ball and Chain’ slowly. Two minutes later, all of her intensity was evident. On stage, Janis Joplin changed into someone else. Someone who had no girlishness, no awkwardness, no gaiety. On stage, she turned into someone who was charged with pain. Filled with longing. Someone with a lot of love. And a heart that had been tilted. In the middle of the pain and the longing was a piercing sexuality. It punctured and penetrated every syllable she sang. The audience went crazy. Something about Janis Joplin’s pain and her ability to open herself up, to feel so much, moved Lola deeply. But Janis Joplin’s burning sexuality disturbed her. Lola thought she probably envied Janis Joplin, her ability to be so in touch with that part of herself. It was the opposite of plotting diets.
While The Group With No Name and then Buffalo Springfield played, Lola made notes to herself. Notes about trying to think more about her sexuality. Although when she’d filled less than a page of her notebook, she realised she wasn’t at all sure how to even begin to put this plan into action. And it wasn’t something you could easily ask other people’s advice about.
Seeing Pete Townshend brought Lola back to earth. She stopped thinking about herself or the more carnal, libidinous aspects of Janis Joplin. She looked at Pete Townshend on stage with the rest of The Who and could still feel the discomfort of him yelling at her. The group was dressed as though they were dandies from another century. A cascade of white frills ran down the front of Pete Townshend’s shirt. His jacket looked as though it was made from patterned satin-brocade upholstery fabric. A dandy was defined as ‘a man unduly concerned with a stylish and fashionable appearance’. Lola didn’t know why the description fitted Pete Townshend so well. Probably because of the wilful arrogance of his expression.
Roger Daltrey wore a gold floral cape fastened around his neck. Long black fringing hung from the edges of the cape. He looked like a capricious prince from the hinterlands of Czechoslovakia. Halfway through the first song, Keith Moon, The Who’s drummer, already looked demented. He shook his head ferociously to the beat, his mouth was wide open in a huge O, his face was almost a blur, and his hair was flying everywhere. Lola didn’t know how his head could survive all that banging and crashing and nodding.
‘This is where it all ends,’ John Entwistle, the bass player, said to the audience before the band launched into ‘My Generation’, with its stuttering and stammering and angry repetitive utterings. Roger Daltrey sang. In a firm, fervent voice, he declared his hope that he would die before he got old, again and again, before swinging his handheld microphone in a wide and carefree circle over his head.
Pete Townshend upped the action. He swung his guitar around and slammed it into the floor, repeatedly. Lola saw a few of the young men in the audience beginning to look anxious. Pete Townshend continued to smash his guitar into everything he could see. The rest of the band kept playing. A nervous stagehand dashed onto the stage and removed a microphone and a microphone stand. More and more parts were flying off the guitar. Roger Daltrey was whirling round and round, his fringed cape following him, until Pete Townshend walked off the stage. Roger Daltrey, almost meekly, stopped whirling and followed him, like an obedient, younger, shorter brother.
Keith Moon kept drumming for another half a minute before he kicked his whole drum kit over with his feet. Smoke billowed around the stage from a smoke bomb Pete Townshend had lit. It looked as though an amplifier had exploded. The smashing and breaking and wrecking had been carried out with remarkable detachment. There was no anger, no passion, no outrage, no feeling and, Lola thought, no meaning. Lola had seen The Who perform before and had been just as puzzled by what they were doing.
She thought it was a mistake for the group to have John Entwistle walk up to the microphone and say, ‘This is where it all ends.’ Not much was ending, she thought. Was the ending a broken guitar and some possibly dented drums? People who had known real endings would know this was just a performance. Lola thought the statement, which was clearly meant to sound portentous, had simply sounded pretentious.
Lola hoped her reception to The Who wasn’t clouded by Pete Townsend’s rudeness. She didn’t think it was. There was something disturbing about the detachment and sterility of the vandalism. ‘In England they’ve reached a dead end in destruction,’ Lola heard Brian Jones say to someone. That was the sort of quote from Brian Jones Lola had been hoping for.
Lola decided to give The Grateful Dead a miss. A short walk, she thought, would do her good. She needed to clear her head. She walked over to the Temple Beth El stand and bought herself a pastrami sandwich on rye bread. She’d never had pastrami, a highly seasoned, smoked and thinly sliced beef, before Monterey. In New York the Jewish delis she’d been to had all served hot pastrami sandwiches. She’d never seen pastrami in Melbourne.
Lola looked at her sandwich. It was a big sandwich. She thought there were probably about fifteen to twenty slices of pastrami in the sandwich. They were paper thin, but there were a lot of them. She thought that this sandwich probably contained well over five hundred calories. She could have had five or six apples for that. Or five or six boiled eggs. Or four ounces of chocolate.
Lola got back in time for Jimi Hendrix. Brian Jones, looking clear-eyed and fresh, introduced Jimi Hendrix as ‘The most exciting guitar player I’ve ever heard.’ Jimi Hendrix came onstage. He was smiling and looked happy to be there. He was wearing very tight red trousers and a bright yellow shirt with ruffles down the front and around the cuffs. A metal belt with a medallion hanging from the buckle and a brightly coloured scarf were tied around his waist. He wore a black-and-white vest over the yellow shirt. Somehow the outfit, like all of Jimi Hendrix’s outfits, worked. Jimi looked as wild as his clothes. Only his smile was wide and slow.
Just before he started playing, he looked down at his guitar with unadulterated tenderness. The sort of tenderness you mostly saw in movies. Lola noticed that Jimi Hendrix had gum in his mouth. She had no idea how he could chew gum and sing. But he did. He played ‘Wild Thing’. He sang as his guitar wailed alongside him. He looked as though he was hardly touching the guitar, as though it were just another part of his body as easy to move and manipulate as his fingers or toes or tongue. In between notes he chewed his gum with a palpable sensuality. Every chew looked like a sexual manoeuvre. ‘Sock it to me one more time,’ he sang, elongating the S until that formerly innocent S resembled a prolonged seduction.
‘Wild Thing,’ he sang, while he played his guitar behind his back and above his head, and his guitar whined and cried and strutted and sang. Jimi Hendrix walked and squatted and twisted and, without warning, bent down and somersaulted over the stage, all the while playing his guitar. Lola felt he could brush his teeth, eat a meal, do anything and never let go of a note on his guitar.
In the middle of a chorus of ‘Wild Thing’ he played a few bars of ‘Strangers in the Night’ with one hand while he held his other arm up in the air, in front of his face, as though he were shielding himself from something. Maybe his own passion? Or maybe he was having a brief shy moment.
‘Wild Thing,’ he sang, as he humped his guitar against an amplifier before walking to the front of the stage and dropping to his knees. He put the guitar on the floor and played it, kneeling and with one hand, while his body jerked and throbbed to the music. You could almost hear the audience gasping.
With the rest of the band still playing, Jimi held up both of his hands, looked at the guitar lying on the stage and beckoned it to him. But the guitar didn’t move. It remained on stage. Jimi kept trying. He was communing with his guitar. Summoning it to him. As though the guitar could feel the connection between them as powerfully as he did. Was he trying to see if it would respond without being caressed, Lola wondered. Jimi played the instrument again, with one hand, while his pelvis and his trunk thrusted and quivered and rocked. This was a love scene as torrid and tempestuous as any Lola had seen.
Jimi Hendrix stood up. He was holding a small can of lighter fluid in his hand. He started squirting the lighter fluid onto the guitar. The fluid squirted out in a thin line as though Jimi was urinating or ejaculating. Jimi knelt down and kissed the guitar in a prayer-like movement. He lit a match and threw it onto the guitar. The guitar was alight. Jimi, still on his knees, and with his hands cupped, beckoned the fire to rise. It looked like a religious rite. A climax to a complex ritual of worship. A burning and a returning to the earth.
Jimi Hendrix sprayed the remainder of the lighter fluid onto the guitar. He then picked it up and started wildly smashing it against the floor until it was in pieces. The audience looked stunned before bursting into feverish applause.
There was a short break, too short, Lola thought, before The Mamas and the Papas came onto the stage. The Mamas and the Papas with their clear voices and lilting melodies had a Californian wholesomeness about them. Mama Cass introduced one of their big hits, ‘California Dreamin”. ‘We’re gonna do this song because we like it and because it is responsible for our great wealth,’ she said, laughing.
Mama Cass looked at ease on the stage. Her voice was strong and unencumbered. There was no hint that this voice might have had to struggle through a lot of fat. Maybe, Lola thought, vocal chords were completely detached from any excess weight their owners carried. Mama Cass was wearing a voluminous dress with short, wide sleeves. Gathered just below the bust, it contained yards and yards of fabric. Lola felt pained looking at all the fabric it took to cover Mama Cass’s body.
Mamas Cass’s voice soared and floated. She swayed from side to side to the music. Her body’s separate parts, which were too big to move in unison, followed a few seconds behind the beat. Lola wanted to cry. She felt sad seeing how much of herself Mama Cass had to haul and heave for every move.
Michelle Phillips was moving effortlessly. At one point she looked adoringly at Denny Doherty as he sang a couple of solo lines. Michelle had been in love with Denny. Mama Cass was still in love with Denny. Mama Cass had been in love with Denny for a long time. Denny flirted with Mama Cass, but for Denny there was no real intention beyond the flirting, Lola had been told.
Denny and Michelle had had an affair. Michelle had tried to tell her husband John Phillips that she found Denny very attractive but John had dismissed as ridiculous the notion that anything could happen between Michelle and Denny.
Mama Cass had wept when she had been told about the affair between Michelle and Denny. It had been Denny who told her. He also told John. John and Michelle had separated, temporarily. John had moved out and shared a house with Denny, who had sort of apologised to him. John and Michelle had briefly reconciled, but it d
idn’t last. Michelle got fired from the group. John had composed the letter telling her she was out of the group and Denny and Mama Cass had also signed it. Three months later Michelle was asked to rejoin.
John and Michelle got back together, again, too. They were together now, and the strains of ‘California Dreamin” and ‘Monday, Monday’ and ‘Dream A Little Dream of Me’ could be heard all over the Monterey County Fairground, where people were coming together, with love, to be happy, be free and wear flowers.
Lola caught a plane from Monterey to Los Angeles. She had interviews arranged with The Mamas and the Papas and Sonny and Cher. She was also hoping to interview The Byrds. The plane was a very small plane. It was a short flight but Lola really didn’t like small planes. They felt tinny, to her. Like large saucepans or stockpots rattling through the troposphere.
She had been on a small plane once before, in Melbourne. All the passengers had had to be weighed on industrial scales before anyone was allowed to board. Lola had been horrified at the thought of being put on the scales in front of all the other passengers. She’d been even more horrified at the thought that she might be too heavy to be allowed to board.
‘I haven’t got any luggage,’ she’d said, in an effort to appear lighter to the man doing the weighing. ‘Please don’t tell me what I weigh,’ she’d added.
‘The plane isn’t full,’ he’d said. Lola took that to mean that if the plane had been full, she might not have made it onto the flight. To her relief, no one was told they had to be weighed for this flight from Monterey to Los Angeles.
The only other passengers on this very small plane were Eric Burdon and the Animals and Ravi Shankar. Ravi Shankar was very quiet. And not overly friendly to Lola. She wondered if he could possibly have known that she was impatient and agitated when he was playing. He looked very spiritual, the sort of person who might know things without having to have actually witnessed them. The sort of person who might have a sixth sense. Lola decided that she didn’t really believe in sixth senses and that Ravi Shankar was either tired or just wanted to be private. She adjusted her sunglasses. She was wearing a new pair of sunglasses she’d bought in Monterey. She thought they made her look interesting. She kept them on in the plane despite the fact that the interior of the plane was already quite dimly lit.
