Sam Andrew
—
NOW THAT THE members of the band are living in individual pads in the city, the only time they’re all together and not playing music is when we’re driving to a gig in the Valley, heading to SFO to catch a flight, or hanging out backstage at a gig while the opening act is on. They take these opportunities to discuss band business that comes up, anything from the set list to whether to play a benefit for some cause or other, or whether the guys’ old ladies can come on road trips. Janis would prefer not, but sometimes, if we’re going to be in one place for several days or a week, the old ladies travel with us or fly in separately. Peter is married to Cindy. Dave Getz has an old lady, Nancy Parker. James has an old lady also named Nancy, whom I hear about but rarely see.
Big Brother is a democratic band. Everyone is equal. Everyone has a say, and they say it at length. Janis and Peter and Dave are the most forceful in stating their positions when there’s a disagreement within the group. Sam and James are a little more laid-back, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have opinions. The band’s decisions are made by voting. Good thing there are five people. If it were an even number, they’d be deadlocked all the time. Sam and Dave are the most flexible, the most willing to try something new. Peter and James usually resist change. Janis is the swing vote. She’s very articulate, and amenable to reason until she makes up her mind. Then her opinion is carved in stone. Until she changes it.
Janis and Peter like to press for a vote early in any discussion. “C’mon, let’s vote!” As one who observes the passionate disputes from a dispassionate remove, I see that most of the arguments are about small stuff. On the whole, the band shares a similar outlook on the world and its problems. They’re proud to be among the founders of the San Francisco rock scene. They’re proud to represent San Francisco and the counterculture at large when we play the straight towns of the San Joaquin Valley and farther afield. They delight in the scene that repeats itself almost daily when we’re on the freeways, as we’re passed by a big American station wagon with an American flag decal pasted to the window, driven by a crew-cut businessman or ex-military father, and the kids in the rear-facing backseat flash us the peace sign.
After a couple of band arguments leave someone feeling sour for the rest of the day, I begin to stick my two cents into the conversations, initiating what will be an ongoing effort to persuade the band that in a group of five people it’s possible to govern by consensus. Voting creates winners and losers. Talking over a problem until everyone’s willing to go along with what the majority wants takes a little longer, but it’s worth it. It’s like singing in harmony, even if it’s not your favorite song.
As I begin to get a sense of the band members as distinct individuals, it seems to me all the more remarkable that they have come together in this band they believe in so passionately.
Janis, of course, is one of a kind. Born in Port Arthur, Texas, on the Gulf coast, dropped out of college in Austin, played music, traveled around the country, but never really felt she belonged until June last year, when she came to San Francisco to join Big Brother. There’s a vortex of energy churning inside her. It manifests itself in her laughter, in her sometimes rapid shifts of mood, in the way she breaks into a conversation with a rap that nails the issues and states her position in a flurry of fast sentences. Some of the time she’s like a chain reaction on the verge of going critical. She is quick, smart, and often funny. She’s given to delivering lines with a W. C. Fields accent. So am I—we become dueling W. C. Fieldses.
Janis reads a lot. Her intellect isn’t disciplined or academically trained like Sam’s; it’s wilder, and it fires at will. The breadth and sometimes the depth of her interests is startling. She’s got an opinion about everything and states it forcefully, astutely, originally. When she really gets going she can weave her sentences into a stunning cascade of words that overwhelms anyone who disagrees with her, often winding up with a capper, a knockout blow that’s so neat it delights her as much as her listeners, and she’ll burst into a cackle of laughter at her own achievement. When the discussion settles on a subject that just flat doesn’t interest her, she drops out and acts bored until the talk moves on to something else.
Janis and Sam like plays on words, and the others sometimes join the verbal game. Favorites within the band include “Sam and Janis evening” to the tune of “Some Enchanted Evening,” and a variation on the band’s name: “Big Bother and the Folding Company.”
David Getz is an artist, taking time out to be a rock drummer. He showed exceptional talent for art early on. From Cooper Union in New York he was going to Yale, but a friend diverted him to San Francisco, where he attended and taught at the San Francisco Art Institute. He’s got a BFA and an MFA. He spent a year in Poland on a Fulbright fellowship. It’s an unusual pedigree for a rock-and-roller, but no more unusual than Sam’s. Dave forms rock-solid positions on the issues in the band, which he rarely changes, but he is slow to anger. Janis and Peter are far more volatile. When Dave’s ire is aroused, he can match them in intensity.
Dave was not Big Brother’s first drummer. When he first heard Big Brother, he thought the band was fantastic—except for the drummer. He had met Peter Albin, and every time he saw Peter, he’d say, “I can drum better than that guy with one hand tied behind my back. Why don’t you fire that guy and hire me?” Dave’s persistence got him a chance on a night when the band was short a drummer, and that gig got him the job.
Peter Albin is more typical of what I expect in a California rocker. He’s the group’s only folkie. He played folk music in college, then switched to amplified sounds. He’s been in half a dozen bands. Maybe this rather bland bio is what allows him to masquerade as the straight member of the group.
Bob Seidemann, a photographer who knew the members of Big Brother from the early days of the burgeoning arts scene in San Francisco, has a vivid memory of James at this time: “One day Nancy [later James’s wife] and I took LSD together and we were going back to my apartment to make love, and as we were walking up Grant Avenue and passed the Coffee Gallery, she looked in and said, ‘Just a minute, I’ll be right out,’ and walked in and came out and said, ‘There’s something I’ve gotta take care of. This guy here, rah, rah, rah, James,’ and ‘I’ll see ya later.’ Left me on the street. And the guy she walked away from me for was James Gurley. That was my first encounter with James, and he had his head shaved and was calling himself the Arch Fiend of the Universe.”
Bob Seidemann
Somehow I never learn much about James’s origins, or the information evaporates from memory because it doesn’t fit the here-and-now that he projects. He’s from Detroit, for what it’s worth, but James belongs in this time and place. It’s impossible to imagine him in khakis and a button-down shirt and a short haircut, looking like the other kids in a 1950s Detroit high school. It’s much easier to believe that he appeared fully grown in San Francisco in 1965, hair to his shoulders, with beads and jeans and boots, hung about with American Indian totems, sprung from the earth in Golden Gate Park, or risen, on the half shell, like Botticelli’s Venus, from the surf at Ocean Beach, and walking—on the water—to shore. A fanciful picture that becomes only a little skewed when I learn that in the folk days, when he played regularly at Leo Rigler’s Coffee Gallery in North Beach, James’s head was shaved bald.
James and I share a familiarity with Spanish. I take to calling him Jaime and he calls me Juan. Perfecto Garcia is a prominent brand of premium cigars. James has turned the name into an expression of approval. “Ah,” he says, “Perfecto, Garcia,” as if he’s addressing Jerry, of the Dead.
—
I COME HOME from the road trips with thousands of dollars in small bills in my briefcase. On Monday morning I separate the bills by denomination and “face” them, sorting them with the portrait right side up. This saves time at the bank, where I turn the cash into a cashier’s check that I send to Albert’s offi
ce along with my gig report. Often I keep back a thousand dollars or so for the road fund, out of which each member of the band draws pocket money of $125 a week and from which I pay our expenses on the road. I’ve got credit cards from Albert’s office for Hertz and Avis, but I pay for our meals and most of our lodging in cash, and I have to account for it all down to the last red cent. Nobody told me part of being a road manager was being a banker and an accountant.
On my days off I look for an apartment and I spend some of my money. My salary is $150 a week. It’s more than enough for a single guy to live comfortably, not enough to buy a Porsche.
Since Dick died, Mimi Fariña has moved to San Francisco. She lives on Telegraph Hill. We go out for dinner often when I’m in town. Mimi is an incomparable dinner companion. We dine mostly in North Beach, home ground of the Beats and the folkies. We eat on lower Broadway at Enrico’s sidewalk café, where live jazz harks back a short historical hop to the heyday of the Beats, when the café opened, or at Vanessi’s restaurant, where the waiters whip up sweet foamy zabaglione in copper bowls right at the table. Mimi goes into gales of laughter at my expression of bliss when I taste the zabaglione. (Time spent laughing with Mimi is added to the span of one’s life.) Sometimes we hop a cable car downtown for a fancy meal at a French restaurant.
For the first time in my life I’m feeling flush. On the road, all my expenses are covered—travel, lodging, food. The balance in my checking account rises steadily, offset by the occasional splurge. I feel like the sailor played by the character actor Edgar Buchanan in a World War II movie I saw on late-night TV. Back in Hawaii after a long stretch of sea duty, Buchanan tells the girl he’s dancing with that he’s got three months of back pay coming. “How are you going to spend all that money, sailor?” she asks suggestively. “Oh,” he says, “some on whiskey, some on women, and the rest frivolously.”
Recently, Mimi has decided to share the gift of laughter with a wider audience. She has joined the Committee, San Francisco’s resident satirical-improvisational comedy revue. The troupe was founded by Alan Myerson and Irene Riordan (later Jessica Myerson), two former members of Second City in Chicago. The company holds forth nightly from the Committee Theater on Broadway, San Francisco’s benign imitation of a sin strip, which divides North Beach from Chinatown. Unlike its New York namesake, this Broadway sports no movie palaces. It has restaurants, bars and pool halls, a few topless shows, and, since 1963, the Committee, just to keep everything in perspective.
Many of Mimi’s new colleagues lived through the Beat era in America’s artsy-intellectual ghettos, and most are connected in one way or another to the San Francisco music scene. One of the actors, Howard Hesseman, emigrated from Oregon to San Francisco for the jazz and lucked into a job taking money at the door for the Coffee Gallery on Grant Avenue in North Beach. It was a jazz and poetry joint at the time, but within a year of Howard’s arrival it had become a folk music club. A year after that, in walks a twenty-year-old girl from Texas named Janis Joplin, but she won’t sleep with the owner, Leo Rigler, who exercises his own version of a Hollywood casting couch to audition female singers, so he won’t hire her. Besides, she’s underage. Unlike the East Coast folk music coffeehouses, the Coffee Gallery serves alcohol, and the legal age is twenty-one. Howard, by now the bartender and night manager, lets Janis play when Leo’s in his apartment across the street.
“I would let her sing at the Coffee Gallery if whoever’s set it was would let her sit in, and most of these people were not silly enough to say, ‘No, thanks, I’d rather go it on my own.’ To play, to sing harmony, to share a stage with somebody who had so much going on was obviously a sort of a gift.”
Howard Hesseman
That trip was Janis’s first real foray beyond her native Texas, and Jack Kerouac was her guide. It was a pilgrimage to the Lourdes of the Beat scene, the city where the brightest lights of the Beat Generation started a renaissance, where Dean Moriarty, the alter ego of Kerouac’s pal Neal Cassady, ended up after his travels in On the Road. Frisco, Ferlinghetti, City Lights bookstore, the Six Gallery—where Allen Ginsberg premiered “Howl”—this was Janis’s destination, but it was the budding folk music scene, less celebrated at the time, where she made connections that would bring her back.
On that first visit, she played and sang on The Midnight Special, a broadcast hootenanny put on weekly by radio station KPFA-FM. One of the other performers on that show was a kid named Peter Albin. Peter remembers Janis singing in a Bessie Smith kind of style, and he remembers, vividly, that she was one of the first girls he had seen who didn’t wear a bra.
Janis was long gone when Bob Neuwirth and I visited the Coffee Gallery in November 1964, after driving a friend’s AC Cobra across the country from Cambridge at a high rate of speed, and it was Howard Hesseman we sat and chatted and drank with. Neuwirth stayed the winter in California and he became a regular on the Coffee Gallery’s stage. He sometimes managed to play simultaneous gigs on the same night at the Coffee Gallery and across the Bay at the Cabale, Berkeley’s answer to the Club 47, cruising across the Bay Bridge in the Cobra between sets.
After her first exploration of San Francisco, Janis crossed the country to New York, went home to Port Arthur, Texas, briefly, and came back to San Francisco, where she settled for a time and got badly enough strung out on speed that it gave her a real scare and sent her back home to Port Arthur to make a stab at being the good daughter her parents hoped she would be. It was this effort that Chet Helms interrupted by summoning Janis back to California to sing with Big Brother.
As Mimi’s friend and Janis’s road manager, I am doubly welcome at the Committee Theater. Soon I become a regular, passed through the door with a wave and a smile. (Shades of the Club 47.) Reconnecting with Howard among Mimi’s friends at the Committee and learning how the strands of coincidence weave together Cambridge and California, folk and jazz and Janis and Bobby and Mimi, is a minor marvel, akin to the many small-world connections I’ve experienced in the East Coast folk scene. It helps me see that San Francisco’s creative fraternities are parts of an extended family, an amalgam of hippies and beatniks, musicians and actors and artists who share a fellowship like the one I experienced in Cambridge. Here, it’s more broadly based, limited only by the line dividing the hip from the square, the freaks from the straights. Within the kinship of the arts, the connections are close and personal, maintained by intercourse both social and sexual.
When Janis learns that I know Mimi and Howard and I’m hanging out at the Committee on our nights off, she takes a new interest in me. Not that she’s been indifferent. After her dismissive comment about Libras at our first meeting, I didn’t expect a lot of attention from Janis, but of course I was wrong. She’s curious about everything new, especially guys, within her orbit. She flirts with me. Coming on to a new man is her way of checking him out. When I see that the flirting is real, I try to deflect her advances without offending her. She knows full well how much power she can exert over a man. I know just as surely that I’ll never maintain the authority I need to have as Janis’s road manager if I let myself become the latest notch in her spangled belt.
She doesn’t push it. Maybe she knows we have to get along as friends if this thing is going to work. Maybe I passed the test.
We’re still engaged in this dance when we head to L.A. for two nights at the Whisky a Go Go. From Baghdad by the Bay to Sodom in the Southland.
“I just remember that when I actually heard her, man, it was stunning. Stunning. Because again, there was all this kind of not-so-much world beat as world bend that Gurley and Sam and Peter and—those cats all, I mean it was such a weird fucking blend of stuff. And a lot of it was familiar to me. . . . It just wasn’t R and B and it wasn’t electric folk. It was something else going on. And then there was this just flat-out, balls-of-the-universe chick. Just singing her ass off.”
Howard Hesseman
CHAPTER EIGHT
Hooray for Hollywood
FROM THE SAN Francisco viewpoint, Los Angeles is another planet. An entertaining place to visit, but we wouldn’t want to live here.
L.A. is gaudy and commercial. It’s tacky. It lacks a neighborhood like the Haight to give cohesiveness to the music scene. The Haight, like Greenwich Village in New York, became a haven for artists and musicians because the rents are cheap. In L.A. the cheap-rent zones are scattered hither and yon—Venice, parts of Santa Monica, certain reaches of West Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley. And, for those with good luck or a little more loot, the canyons in the Hollywood Hills. Laurel Canyon is a favorite, but the roads are all up and down and twisty-turny. There are no sidewalks and no street life. Strictly residential. The street life is on the Sunset Strip, the section of Sunset Boulevard that begins on the western edge of old Hollywood and ends at the eastern border of Beverly Hills.
In the late fifties the Strip got a boost from the TV series 77 Sunset Strip, when private eyes were pushing Westerns off the tube. More recently it has become the gathering place for the L.A. counterculture. Since the folk-rock scene started hopping in ’65, the focus has shifted away from the Ash Grove and the other hangouts of the folk days to the rock clubs on the Strip, where the Whisky a Go Go is the centerpiece, and to the Troubadour, a music club down on Santa Monica Boulevard that bridges the gap between folk and rock.
As we cruise the sun-bathed streets in our air-conditioned band wagon, I urge the guys to be a little less obvious about passing joints around. In satisfying Big Brother’s curiosity about me, I have let them know that I was at the center of the dope-smoking folkies in Cambridge. I’m the guy who always had a stash, often Lebanese hash I smuggled home from Paris. Janis and the boys were duly impressed when I told them I took acid for the first time when Tim Leary and Richard Alpert were still employed by Harvard University. (Alpert is now Baba Ram Dass, a countercultural guru, and Leary is, well, he’s Tim Leary, famous for advising our generation to “Tune in, turn on, drop out,” which has not endeared him to parents or higher authorities. Leary and Alpert were let go by Harvard in 1963 for getting too far out.)
On the Road with Janis Joplin Page 10
