With Big Brother, it’s my job to be the straight guy, the one who keeps them out of trouble. I suggest that getting busted for pot is just plain dumb, beside the fact that it would create an unnecessary hassle for all of us—cops, jails, judges, courts, dollars.
Backstage at the Whisky a Go Go, the walls are coated with cannabis resin and no one blinks at the pungent scent of pot in the dressing rooms.
For a rock band emerging on the national scene, playing the Whisky is a rite of passage. It’s the proving ground for up-and-coming acts. Big Brother’s appearance here is a test run for bigger gigs to come, and a chance to get some notice from the L.A. rock press.
The Whisky has go-go dancers in fringed dresses and white boots in hanging cages. (Try to imagine go-go dancers in the Fillmore or the Avalon.) When I comment on the weirdness of the Southern California scene, Sam Andrew says he thinks of me as an L.A. kind of guy. The abuse I have to take on this job.
On opening night the house is packed. Musicians from other bands are on hand. So are some representatives of the movie business. They’ve seen Big Brother in Petulia and they’re here to check out the further cinematic potential.
On the band’s first song, Sam Andrew hits the opening chord and breaks his sixth string, the low E. The loss of tension on the fattest string throws the guitar out of tune. Unwilling to cause the anticlimax of a false start, Sam keeps playing, while trying, with limited luck, to retune the remaining strings. Sam sees this as an attack of Big Brother’s curse, a persistent jinx that strikes every time it’s important for the band to play well. They beat it at Monterey, twice in a row, and Sam hoped the jinx was gone for good.
The other band members are aware of the discord, but they recover, and the audience is focused on Janis’s astonishing vocal power. Janis holds the song together with her total dedication to her singing. On the whole, the set goes well enough, but Janis drinks more than usual in reaction to the disruption.
Drinking onstage is part of an image that Janis likes to cultivate. Often she swigs directly from a bottle of Southern Comfort, her signature booze. From the start, I’ve worked to moderate this image. In the San Fernando Valley, where our audiences are mostly made up of teenagers and college students, Janis has been willing, most of the time, to drink onstage from a coffee cup instead of her bottle. When we’re playing at a college, California law reinforces my pitch: Alcohol can’t be sold within a mile of college campuses; inciting the students to drink could get Big Brother banned from college gigs. In San Francisco or L.A., or anywhere Janis feels that the audience is made up of her people, the hip rather than the square, her impulse is to flaunt the bottle. It’s an ongoing contest between us, one in which I will have some effect but will never finally win. In part, her onstage behavior is a public image Janis wants to cultivate, but she also maintains that drinking is essential preparation for performing at her best.*
Our Los Angeles lodgings are at the Hollywood Sunset Motel, a seedy hostelry farther east on Sunset, on the long straightaway that crosses Vine Street in the heart of Hollywood. Big Brother found this dump when they were starving musicians. Sticking to it now, doubling up in the small rooms, is a measure of their cautionary view of the music business.
One thing I have established at the outset is that I get a room of my own. The boys can double up if they want to, but I get to have a place where I won’t be kept up by a roommate watching TV or coming in late or playing music or talking on the phone. I’m the road manager. I get a room of my own, a phone of my own, peace and quiet of my own. Janis and the boys have accepted this declaration of independence with only token resistance.
This early in the job, I hold off on suggesting an upgrade in accommodation, although I think of L.A. as a place to indulge oneself in lavish style.
In the summer after my first year of college, before I discovered the byways of folk music, I was visiting my uncle’s family in Berkeley. I flew down to Los Angeles because my father was there (he and my mother long divorced, he long remarried), and I stayed for two dollars at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Not that you could get a room, any room, at the Beverly Hills for anything close to two dollars. Two bucks wouldn’t buy you an hour in an linen closet. We’re talking here about the rambling, palm-shaded, pink stucco palace on the western, residential part of Sunset Boulevard that Hollywood movies use as an establishing shot to evoke the glamorous life in La-La Land. The same hotel where Grace Kelly was said to enjoy the company of the cabana boys, before she became a princess.
One of my father’s few extravagances is staying in first-class hotels. At the time of our L.A. rendezvous, he had hosted Omnibus for several years, and it was still on the air. He was entitled. In L.A., he stayed at the Beverly Hills. When I came to see him, he ordered up a rollaway bed and I slept in his room for an extra two dollars. It’s a story he loves to tell: “My son stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel for two dollars.”
The Hollywood Sunset Motel is a place you don’t brag about, no matter how little you pay. Which makes the contrast all the more striking when we go out to Bel Air to visit John and Michelle Phillips and see the final cut of Pennebaker’s movie, Monterey Pop.
The mid-December weather is sunny and warm, all the better for us to admire the umpty-room shack that formerly belonged to Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. The luxuriant, rambling gardens and grounds, measured in acres, evoke an earlier era when movie stars were expected to live in a style emulating that of European royalty. The grounds are extensive enough to contain an acid trip, if you don’t mind being screamed at by the free-roaming peacocks.
For our weekend in L.A., Dave Richards has brought along a candidate for a position as assistant equipment man. With an East Coast tour coming up in the new year, Dave figures a second guy is justified, and the band approves the idea. Mark Braunstein is barely twenty, with an impressive head of dark hair that stands out in all directions. He met Janis in the Haight, on the street, not long after she joined Big Brother, and they became friends. Mark graduated from working in an all-night doughnut shop to managing equipment for the outfit that put on free concerts in the Panhandle. When Dave Richards suggested it might be a good idea to have two guys handling Big Brother’s equipment when we went east, Janis thought of Mark. This weekend, he is just along for the ride, to check out the scene.
“Before I was working with the band, I remember going to see Kurosawa films with Janis, at her suggestion. . . . She was always less hedonistic and out of control than other people might see her.”
Mark Braunstein
Judging by Mark’s goggle-eyed reaction to the Phillips mansion, he is in the process of deciding that this is the life for him. (When the weekend is over, he will sign on board our rock-and-roll caravan.)
John and Michelle’s success is recent enough that they still have the air of kids in a candy store to find themselves living in Jeanette MacDonald’s pad. Not expecting a stern parent to come fetch them home, but still a little wide-eyed at what they’ve managed to achieve, and working hard to appear blasé about it. The enormous Christmas tree in one of the downstairs rooms is merely in proportion to its surroundings, not ostentatious at all.
John is a gregarious host, while Michelle nods in our direction and after that mostly keeps to herself. To see Monterey Pop, we adjourn to a recording studio in the attic—a large attic—that doubles as a screening room, where we raise the cannabis content of the air to a self-sustaining level. Big Brother’s lawyer, Bob Gordon, is with us for the screening. He isn’t aghast at the goings-on, and I begin to understand that his short hair and proper dress are in the nature of a disguise.
Lights go down in the room, and the screen lights up.
I’ve seen much of the footage, but not the edited film. For Big Brother, it’s all new. Janis’s eyes are wide as the scenes unreel—the Mamas & the Papas, Canned Heat, Hugh Masakela. Jefferson Airplane gets two songs in the movie. Janis is waiting to see hersel
f on-screen. Audio from an abbreviated version of Big Brother’s “Combination of the Two” ran under the opening titles, but there was no glimpse of the band.
Fifteen minutes into the film I can barely contain my reaction, but I remain outwardly calm. Inside, I’m exultant. Pennebaker has done it. He has captured the feeling of the Pop Festival, intercutting shots of happy hippies arriving, camping, dancing, and grooving to the music, with song after song from the best performances on the big stage. Papa John is proud as punch because the movie makes the festival look like a brilliant accomplishment, a once-in-a-lifetime event, which it was. But his self-satisfaction can’t hold a candle to Big Brother’s, once they see “Ball and Chain.”
The song begins twenty-five minutes into the film, on the heels of Grace Slick and Marty Balin’s lovely duet, “Today.” The last chord has barely died away when four ascending notes from James Gurley’s guitar kick off the intro to “Ball and Chain.” We see Dave Getz first, then Peter Albin. Peter is looking up, mouthing the beats, nodding his head in time with the music. Sam and James are on-screen as James’s guitar intro winds toward its peak—and now Janis’s face fills the screen in left profile as she sings the first words.
In the studio–cum–screening room, Janis breathes, “Far out.”
She cackles when she sees Mama Cass’s “Wow! That’s really heavy!” reaction at the end of the song. “How’d he get that, man?” Janis wants to know.
How indeed? Pennebaker was onstage, filming Janis, during the Sunday evening performance, and it was also Penny who got the shot of Mama Cass—on Saturday. During Big Brother’s first appearance, when he was forbidden to film the band, Penny stood in front of the stage and sneaked a few shots of the audience. In the editing room he spliced Cass’s Saturday afternoon response at the end of Sunday evening’s “Ball and Chain,” and with that simple coda he has managed to include in the film the festival audience’s first mind-blown reaction to hearing Janis sing.
After the movie, Janis repairs to the pool table with a bottle, Papa John, and a couple of the boys. With a pool table and a few companions, Janis can be happy for hours. In San Francisco she used to hang out with a bunch of tough women, all Capricorns, like her. They frequented the pool halls, and Janis won a reputation for wielding a mean stick.
“She could play the roles that men were playing really well. She knew how important a good pool stick was, in the blues.”
Nick Gravenites
While the rest of us gravitate to the end of the house that contains the kitchen and pool table, Peter Albin hangs out in the big living room and ends up being the only one to have a conversation with Michelle.
I venture outside to survey the grounds. There’s an elegant swimming pool with a flagstone terrace and four guesthouses. Four. Count ’em.
The movie, the mansion, the sunny day—we’re in dreamland. For Janis and Big Brother it’s a glimpse of what success in the music business can bring. When we return to the funky part of Hollywood, that kind of success is a world away. Janis and the boys are playing music clubs and dance halls and college gyms for $2,500 to $3,500 a night. More when the percentage kicks in, but this kind of bread isn’t about to buy any mansions in Bel Air. Still, Albert Grossman is booking the gigs, they’ve got a road manager, and Monterey Pop has reminded them that they’re on a roll.
So they’re unprepared for the shock that Albert delivers during a weeklong club date at the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach, thirty-five miles south of L.A. The Bear is a folk outpost on the southern coast that has turned to amplified music as the folk boom fades. The night Albert comes to hear the band, James is so stoned that he’s almost falling off the stage, and it’s obvious to Albert that he’s stoned on something stronger than grass and booze.
When Albert agreed to manage Big Brother, he made it clear that he wanted nothing to do with anyone who was involved with hard drugs. “No shmeez,” he said, using a slang term that none of the guys in Big Brother had heard before. “No what?” they asked. No smack, no skag, no horse. No heroin. The Electric Flag had become a vexation to Albert in that regard. He wanted to acquire no more bands that were road wrecks waiting to happen. There are no junkies in this band, right? Oh, right! Big Brother assured him.
This response was not fully honest. Janis and the boys like to call Big Brother the only “alcodelic” or “psycheholic” band in rock. On the road, alcohol is the drug of choice. They all smoke dope, except for Janis, who says it makes her think too much. They don’t perform on acid. Conventional wisdom has it that the Grateful Dead play on acid, which may or may not be true. The Dead are known for dosing others, which is true. Big Brother is more conservative, and more private, about their drug use. Janis got heavily into speed when she lived briefly in San Francisco in the midsixties, on her second visit to the Bay. By the time the band signed with Albert, Janis had acquired more than a passing acquaintance with heroin. With her boyfriend at the time, she was shooting speedballs, a combination of smack and speed.
Sam is a former speed freak as well. He is acquainted with smack but trifles with it rarely. For Sam, the lure of exploring heroin is to follow in the footsteps of musicians he reveres—Charlie Parker and other jazz greats. Because of that association, for Sam it has almost the mystique of Holy Communion about it. Later on, this fascination will get Sam in trouble, but for now he holds it at bay.
Dave Getz and Peter Albin are the only ones who told Albert the truth, the only members of the band who don’t have at least a nodding acquaintance with heroin. James was the first in the band to try it, and the most serious about it, well before Albert came along. He’s into pills too.
At the Golden Bear, Albert contrives to speak with the other members of the band while James is elsewhere occupied. He suggests to them that James be replaced. Maybe not permanently, but at least for now. The real reason behind Albert’s request is that he believes the band will improve musically if James is replaced by another guitar player. Albert hopes that if James takes an enforced leave, Janis and Sam and Peter and Dave will come to realize that the band is better without James, but he keeps these hopes to himself for now. If James cleans himself up he can come back later on, Albert says. Let’s give him $10,000 and send him away to think about it.
Albert may not know of James’s importance among the creators of the San Francisco Sound. He may not recognize how unusual the dissonance of twin guitars that James and Sam have developed is in the constellation of San Francisco bands and in the wider world of rock. But even if Albert knows these things, it doesn’t matter. How a musician is regarded by his community or his contemporaries, however unusual his style, how important his innovations—these things don’t affect Albert’s opinions. His opinions are his own, and his concern is here and now. He doesn’t like James’s music and he believes that James’s drug use is a danger to the band.
Janis and the boys refuse to consider replacing James, even temporarily. James has been in this band from the beginning, they tell Albert. We’re a family. We’re going to make it or break it together.*
Albert accepts their refusal stoically. It is his first attempt to influence the band’s musical development, but not the last.
It rattles the band’s confidence when an L.A. rock critic who hears Big Brother at the Golden Bear puts his opinion of the band in the headline of his review: “Janis Joplin Too Full of Soul for Holding Company Partners.”
—
WHEN WE’RE DONE at the Golden Bear, Janis flies home to Port Arthur for a Christmas visit with her family. In my stucco motel in San Francisco, I’m a long way from my own family, but I join a Christmas dinner in Berkeley. In the sunny week between Christmas and New Year’s the temperature in San Francisco reaches seventy each day, which seems like an unseasonal miracle.
On the weekend, Janis is back in San Francisco and we go into Winterland to wind up 1967 with three nights playing for Bill Graham.
For the first two nights, Chuck Berry is the headliner. Big Brother gets second billing, over Quicksilver Messenger Service. On New Year’s Eve, Jefferson Airplane tops the bill, followed by Big Brother, Quicksilver, and Freedom Highway. There will be nonstop music from 9:00 P.M. until 9:00 A.M. the next morning, when Graham and his staff will serve breakfast to the survivors. A ticket to this all-night extravaganza costs six dollars.
Peter Albin arrives backstage on New Year’s Eve dressed in a silver lamé jumpsuit. His hair is teased and sprayed into a fright wig that’s strung with tiny white Christmas tree lights that wink on and off, powered by a battery pack on his belt. The band has an informal rule that they can’t wear anything onstage that they won’t wear on the street. To accommodate this custom, Peter walks around the block in his costume before coming into Winterland.
This is nothing, Sam tells me. You should have seen him on Halloween. Peter dressed as a penis. The show was called “Trip or Freak.” Peter wrapped himself in a sheath of pink cloth, which he draped over a pith helmet he wore on his head. He tied string around the sheath at his neckline to create the (circumcised) head. He attached two pink balloons, painted with black hair, to his feet. Et voilà, a walking erection. He cut eye holes to see through and holes in the sides of the shaft for his arms, and he played in this costume onstage. He’s the straight one, mind you, the band’s businessman, the one who signs the contracts.
For the Halloween show, Janis dressed as Salome.
This is my first gig for Bill Graham, who has become the dominant force in the local rock scene. The Fillmore and Winterland—bigger than the Fillmore, two blocks away—are his, and his success threatens the survival of the Avalon, where Big Brother was once the de facto house band. Some in the local music community resent Graham’s hardheaded style, but he has brought a new professionalism to concert promotion around the Bay and he forces others to meet the standards he sets. Some don’t, and some fail.
On the Road with Janis Joplin Page 11
