Graham hires and trains his own security guards. They dress in T-shirts instead of uniform jackets, and they treat the audience like “us” instead of “them.” Bill’s goal is to create a welcoming environment for the musicians and the audience alike. At the top of the stairs, where the audience enters the hall, there’s a box of free apples.
Tonight the dressing rooms are provided with a lavish spread of food and drink for the bands, which creates an almost Rabelaisian atmosphere backstage. Why bother to go onstage and play? The party is here.
I meet Bill early in the evening, before the hall is full, before the music starts. He’s a high-intensity New York type that’s familiar to me. He has done a lot of business with Albert, and he is evidently pleased that Albert is managing Big Brother. The last thing I want to do is screw up Bill’s good relations with Albert, so we both have incentives to get along. Bill can be a charmer when he wants to, and I find myself liking him.
Before midnight, while Big Brother is onstage, Bill takes me to his office and gives me a check. Big Brother gets a flat fee when they play for Bill, so my job is a snap. No percentage to work out, no worries about how many hippies may get into Winterland free. The professionalism of the operation puts me at ease. From what I’ve heard about Bill and what I learn from my early experiences with him, I figure if he’s going to rip off Big Brother, he’s going to do it by negotiating a tough deal with Albert, and I trust Albert to handle him.
At the stroke of the new year, I’m pouring Graham’s on-the-house champagne in the backstage dressing room for Janis. A few days later, I’m almost fired.
CHAPTER NINE
New York, New York
IN THE FIRST week of January I find a second-floor walk-up in North Beach. My pad-to-be is on Powell Street, on the west side of the block that houses Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church, which presides grandly over Washington Square Park. The rent is $155 a month. It’s less than a ten-minute walk to the Committee Theater on Broadway, and handy to the Embarcadero Freeway for quick trips to Berkeley. I tell Signora Andoni, the rental agent, that I’ll move in at the end of the week.
How come you didn’t look in the Haight? Janis and the boys want to know, but they admit the Haight is changing. It’s overrun by runaways and would-be hippies and tour busses full of straight people who stop to gawk in front of the Grateful Dead’s house.
I have other reasons to prefer North Beach. I like the Italian grocery stores, full of olive oil and handmade pasta. On Columbus Avenue, a broad thoroughfare that separates Telegraph Hill from Russian Hill, I hear Chinese and Italian spoken within the same block. I like the lingering vibe of the Beats and the beatniks and the proximity to the Committee. I’m a beatnik, not a hippie, and settling here keeps me at a certain remove from the band. It preserves my independence.
Maybe this is what makes the band decide I’m not the right guy for them.
I’m dead asleep in my motel when Albert phones at midmorning. I had a late night, but he’s wide-awake on Eastern Time. He’s had a call from the band. “They don’t think it’s working,” he says. “Incompatible lifestyles,” is the complaint. This jolts me wide-awake. I have had no clue from anyone in Big Brother that they aren’t satisfied.
I tell Albert, “I’ll call you back.”
I phone every member of the band and reach four out of five, Janis and all the guys except James. “Meeting at the Warehouse,” I tell them. “Right now.” On the way across town I’m feeling betrayed and pissed off. If they’ve got a problem, how about talking to me before they call Albert?
The possibility of failure hasn’t crossed my mind. I might quit this job in six months if I find my own work to do, but I’m damned if I’ll lose it because my hair isn’t long enough. If they’ll just give me a chance, I’ll be the best damn road manager anybody ever saw. I like it here. What’s more, I like them. They’re interesting. In my wildest dreams, I couldn’t have come up with five more divergent personalities to stick in a rock-and-roll band, and yet they are truly a band. They’re united in the music and they believe in what they’re doing.
It occurs to me, as I park the car, that maybe Janis is behind the effort to get rid of me. What if the problem, at least on her part, is my refusal to yield to her sexual advances? Did she instigate the call to Albert as her way of getting back at me for not going to bed with her?
When we’re gathered in the rehearsal loft, seated around the table by the window, I ask them what’s the problem, as if I haven’t a clue. Well, you don’t hang out with us, Peter says. This is a family, and you don’t feel like one of the family, Janis says with a petulant edge.
This I can deal with. The band is put out because I didn’t rent an apartment in the Haight and outfit myself from the hippie clothing stores and I don’t drop by their pads on our days off to hang out and smoke dope. I respond with the short speech I rehearsed in my head on the way across town: If you want some long-haired fan to hang out day and night, to smoke dope with you, to fetch cigarettes and carry your guitars, we can hire a grateful hippie to do that for fifty bucks a week. But I’ve got a job to do.
“Well, what exactly is your job?” The question comes from Dave Getz, and I realize that they truly don’t know. They know I drive the rent-a-car and handle the plane tickets and register them at the motels, because they see all that. But they don’t see the rest of it, the dozens of phone calls on our days off, and what I do while they’re onstage. So I tell them about booking the travel and talking with the promoters beforehand, and I remind them about the gig in the Valley where the third roll of tickets was sold under the counter. My job is to spot that kind of shit, I tell them. I get you to the gig on time, I handle the logistics, I make sure you get paid. I keep the promoter happy. I make sure you don’t get ripped off. I try to make it possible for you to think about nothing but the music. While you’re onstage, I’m checking the box office and the ticket takers. I check the sound. I talk to the soundman if it needs adjusting. Then I check the doors again.
I’m fighting to save my new job and my new life, but I know it can’t sound like fighting or begging. I like getting stoned and hanging out as much as you do, I tell them. But when I’m stoned I can’t do the job. I lose my motivation. I remind them that I was a bluegrass musician for six years and made two record albums before Big Brother was formed. I loved the life of a beatnik bluegrass picker, but I gave it up to work for you, I tell them. With you, my job is to be the straight guy who keeps it all together.
I’m just a little older than them and I make it sound like more. By implication, I’m beyond being an adoring fan and hangout partner. I don’t tell them how blown away I am by their music and the whole San Francisco trip, how much I like the band and being on the road.
Janis reveals no hint of having a stake in the outcome beyond the concerns that she and the guys have expressed. It’s all about their gig and my gig, and what’s best for the band. She gives no sign of a hidden agenda.
They hear me out and they don’t argue. Fine, they say. We’ll try it a little longer.
“You were very distant. The impression, mine and the band’s, especially when you first came on board, you know: patrician, East Coaster, snobbish, removed, no fun. . . . As time went on, everybody saw that you had a good sense of humor, weren’t judgmental, especially, were interested in keeping things together on the road, which was what your job was. We all could let our jobs slide a little bit. There was a lot of sloppiness in the musicians’ job, a lot of sloppiness in my job, we could get away with a lot. You really couldn’t get away with very much in having to keep track of seven or eight or ten people like that. That describes you to an extent, especially when you were working. You gotta get these eight freaks out of there.”
Mark Braunstein
I have survived the first crisis. And, as it turns out, the only one that ever threatens my employment. I’ve done it by trusting my instincts about ho
w to handle it, which encourages me to believe that maybe I really am cut out for this job. Back at the motel, I call Albert and tell him everything is under control. I try to sound cool about it, but my relief is my high for the day, and it’s probably audible through the cross-country phone line.
—
I PUT A foam mattress on the bedroom floor at 1856 Powell Street. I build some bookshelves out of bricks and planks; I buy a few pieces of furniture at secondhand stores. I spend a week’s pay on a big Scandinavian rug, all dark greens and blues. I buy a compact KLH FM-stereo record player that packs up into a suitcase, and my new home is open for business.
I go down to Monterey and buy back the white Volvo sedan I sold to an architect there two years before. I shipped the car back from Europe in ’62 and later drove it to California in pursuit of the Wrong Girl. I worked for the Monterey architect as a carpenter while waiting in vain for her to realize I was the love of her life. Having the Volvo back now connects my past to the future. It pleases me to think that by selling the car to the architect when I bailed out of that futile quest I was stashing it, keeping it in reserve against my eventual return to the coast. Now I’m back. I’ve got wheels. I’m a California resident. I’m ready for the next summer of love.
With the road-managing crisis behind us, Janis and the boys accept me more fully, and there appear to be no lingering concerns. Janis, in particular, takes a new interest in me. This isn’t renewed flirting to see if she can lure me into bed. She has learned that the Wrong Girl I was pursuing a couple of years ago in Carmel is a girl named Kim whom Janis knows from Haight Street, where Kim’s San Francisco lover, Peggy Caserta, runs a hip clothing store called Mnasidika. This discovery intrigues Janis, because her perception of me up to this point hasn’t included the possibility that I could ever be with a girl like Kim. This seems to open the door for more curiosity and a new level of friendship.
In Janis’s talk about Peggy and Kim, I get an inkling that there may have been something between Janis and Peggy. There’s a gleam in her eye when she talks about Kim too. Maybe . . . ? Janis doesn’t say anything explicit, but in our conversations among the band she has revealed in a matter-of-fact way that she has had affairs with women. She has also made it plain that her active interest is focused on men. On the road, I haven’t seen her light up over a woman the way she lights up nightly about the wealth of what she likes to call male “talent” in the audience.
“There were women who turned her on, but her main focus was definitely men.”
Linda Gravenites
At the heart of Janis’s justification for doing whatever feels good, and polite behavior be damned, is her belief that our parents lied to us about pretty much everything and so we have to decide for ourselves what’s right and what’s wrong. This isn’t something she has picked up in San Francisco. It comes from personal conviction that she reveals when she talks about growing up in Texas. As a teenager in Port Arthur in the fifties, she felt the imposition of a concept of propriety that she found stifling. Girls behave a certain way. Nice girls don’t get drunk. Nice girls don’t have sex. Sex is dangerous. The social strictures included a Southern attitude about Negroes that Janis decided was wrong even before she experienced life beyond her hometown. From her Kerouacian rambles in the early sixties, and all the more since she was accepted by Big Brother and San Francisco itself, she has looked back on the guidelines that were laid down in her youth and she feels that she was deceived. “They lied to us about dope, they lied to us about black people, they lied to us about sex, man, they lied to us about everything,” more or less sums it up. Taking drugs, getting drunk, exploring bisexuality and adopting black music as her own is Janis’s natural reaction.
In the winter of 1965–1966, when Big Brother was formed, and later, when Chet Helms brought Janis up from Texas to join the band, I was just 120 miles away, in Carmel. I visited the city with Kim. I even went to the Avalon and the Fillmore once or twice. If I had connected to the burgeoning San Francisco scene back then, everything might have turned out differently. But then I might have missed connecting to Pennebaker and Monterey and I wouldn’t be here now, road-managing Big Brother.
Maybe everything really does happen the way it’s supposed to.
Our worlds overlap again when I learn that Janis has another connection to my Cambridge companions through the Cabale coffeehouse in Berkeley, which was founded by Debbie Green, a girl I’ve known since we were both in the Putney School, a progressive coed boarding school in Vermont. Debbie was the most beautiful girl in my class. Maybe in the whole school. She was one of the handful of students who got in early on the folk revival and introduced her fellow students, including me, to the folk repertoire. Her guitar playing and her songs were part of my motivation to get a guitar, while I was still at Putney, and to begin learning those songs.
Like me, Debbie was Boston bound after our Putney graduation. She met Joan Baez on opening day at Boston University. Before long they both dropped out and migrated to the nascent folk music scene in Cambridge. It was Debbie who taught Joan to play the guitar beyond the simple strums she already knew, and it was from Debbie that Joan appropriated much of her early repertoire. By the time of Janis’s first trip to the Bay Area, Debbie had moved to California, and with two partners she established the Cabale as Berkeley’s equivalent to the Club 47.
Janis heard about the Cabale through the grapevine and called up to ask if she could audition. It was Debbie who received Janis when she came by on the appointed afternoon, driving a Vespa motor scooter. Janis strummed the guitar and sang an earthy blues; it took only that much to impress Debbie, who is not easily impressed. Hearing Janis sing blew her away. “Oh, man!” she said. “We’ve got to find you a band! Of course you can play here, but first we’ve got to find you a band.” When Janis left the Cabale that afternoon, she fired up her Vespa, pulled out into the street, and was hit by a car. Debbie ran out to help her, only to find Janis laughing hysterically. Somehow the driver of the car doesn’t figure in the rest of the story. Janis was limping slightly, still laughing, only a little the worse for wear, but she agreed to let Debbie take her to an emergency room to get checked out. Debbie thought having a man along might make it go easier, so she called her boyfriend at the time, who was none other than Bob Neuwirth. The three of them spent hours in the ER waiting room, and they got along like old friends. Eventually a doctor examined Janis, told her she had a sprained ankle, wrapped it in an Ace bandage, and sent her on her way.
Debbie tried to follow up on the idea of getting Janis booked into the Cabale with a backup band, but Janis was hard to reach by phone, and her rambles took her away from San Francisco before the Cabale could be added to her list of solo venues.
Learning of Janis’s connections to Kim and the Committee and Cambridge and Berkeley makes me wonder that we haven’t met long before now.
On January 19, 1968, which is Janis’s twenty-fifth birthday, Big Brother is playing in Kaleidoscope, a club in L.A. When we arrive that evening, we find that the club’s manager has arranged three dozen roses on the stage. There are two dozen more in the dressing room, which I ordered, from the band, a dozen from friends in San Francisco, and another dozen from Peter Tork, of the Monkees. Janis fairly swoons. Conspiring with the boys in Big Brother, I have arranged to have champagne and cake appear after the show. Janis clasps her hands to her heart and sighs and smiles and laughs, and drinks champagne from the bottle.
During Big Brother’s stand at Kaleidoscope, Janis doesn’t make a brazen play for any of the good-looking guys in the audience, or even comment on the wealth of available talent. Her usual style of coming on to members of the opposite sex is like a man’s in a way that vanishingly few women will risk. In a club or bar her eyes scan the room. If she spots a likely prospect she’ll lean closer to me or one of the boys and say, with a conspiratorial leer, “Oh, my God, I think I’m in love.” Backstage at a gig, she’ll show up in the
band’s dressing room all atwitter and report on her sightings just as a guy would report to his partners in lechery, but this is a girl who talks about the pretty boys she’s seen, and she’s reporting to us. In displaying her interest in the opposite sex, as in her style of hanging out among friends in bars and pool halls and pretty much anywhere she’s comfortable, Janis is one of the guys. Which makes her behavior at Kaleidoscope all the more out of character.
After the gig, Janis doesn’t fly back to San Francisco with the rest of us. When she does come home, she takes to her bed for more than a week with what she says is a case of the flu. We have to cancel three days at the Fillmore, which costs Big Brother $8,000.
The reason for Janis’s restraint at Kaleidoscope was that she was pregnant at the time and had made plans to go to Mexico following the gig, for an abortion. Janis told her roommate, Linda Gravenites, that the culprit was the drummer from Blue Cheer, a San Francisco psychedelic blues-rock band. The drummer is one of Janis’s pretty boys. She goes for pretty boys or mountain men—hunky guys who emerge from the interior fastnesses of Marin and Sonoma counties in flannel shirts and work boots—and not much in between.
At the time, I take Janis’s flu at face value.
While she convalesces, during the break from touring, I follow the evening news and two stories that foreshadow great changes to come, both in domestic politics and in the war in Vietnam. On January 30, New York senator Robert F. Kennedy announces that “under no conceivable circumstances” will he follow Oregon senator Eugene McCarthy in challenging President Johnson for the Democratic nomination. McCarthy announced his candidacy back in November, on the day I arrived in San Francisco to take up the job with Big Brother. His focus is to oppose Johnson’s Vietnam policy and to urge the United States to find a way to end the conflict.
On the Road with Janis Joplin Page 12
