The second story will dominate the news for weeks. On the same day as Kennedy’s announcement, in Vietnam, the National Liberation Front attacks South Vietnamese units in the country’s northernmost province, along the border with North Vietnam, and in the Central Highlands. The next morning, they attack Saigon and more than thirty provincial capitals. In the days that follow, the attacks include American bases and over a hundred cities and towns across South Vietnam. Launched on the lunar new year, which the Vietnamese call Tet, the coordinated attacks become known as the Tet Offensive.
For much of 1967, my political awareness was quiescent. The starry-eyed high of the Summer of Love made it easy to believe, briefly, the promise of a new day to come. New York’s Easter Be-In in Central Park, held in response to San Francisco’s January gathering, followed by the Monterey Pop Festival and the CRVB’s California tour and—best of all—finding myself, at the year’s end, road manager for Big Brother and the Holding Company, encouraged in me a willful naïveté. During a year in which our troop strength in Vietnam increased by another ninety thousand, I turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the war and, like many of my contemporaries, embraced a hope that music, love, and flowers could influence American politics and perhaps the world.
Before long Janis is up and around and we’re off for another gig in L.A., at the Cheetah this time, and one in San Diego. On our first few plane trips, I tried to keep the band together as we passed through the San Francisco airport to the departure gate, but herding musicians is like trying to herd cats. Now I just tell them the gate number and what time to be there (with a safety margin added), and they show up, which encourages me to believe that musicians can be trained to behave like grown-ups.
Not a moment too soon. When we return to San Francisco from San Diego we have a few days to say good-bye to friends and get serious about packing for two months away from home. The great adventure is at hand: It’s time for Big Brother’s East Coast debut.
FEB. 16, 1968: Palestra, Philadelphia
FEB. 17: Anderson Theater, NYC
FEB. 22–24: Psychedelic Supermarket, Boston
FEB. 25: The Reflectory, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence*
The first thing Janis and the boys notice about New York, even before we’re out of the airport, is that people here don’t make eye contact. In California, people look you in the eye. Often they’ll nod or smile in the street. Total strangers. Pretty girls acknowledge a guy’s appreciative glance, even if they’re with their boyfriends. Pretty girls in New York may risk giving a bunch of long-haired California rockers a fleeting smile, but the ordinary man and woman go on their way heads down against the February winds. I find the avoidance of eye contact disturbing, and I realize that I’m looking at my hometown like an outsider, which raises my spirits.
While we tour the eastern states, New York will be our home base. From here we will sally forth to show the San Francisco colors to the coastal metropolises and the unsuspecting hinterland. Dave Richards and Mark Braunstein have flown Big Brother’s stage equipment east. They will rent a truck to drive it from gig to gig.
The band’s lodgings in New York are at the Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street, renowned for the artistic pursuits of its short- and long-term residents and for being the place where Dylan Thomas died. Next door, and accessible through a door in the Chelsea’s lobby, is a restaurant and bar called El Quijote. The cuisine is Spanish, of a sort, but it is the bar that catches Janis’s immediate attention. She is delighted that she can enter El Quijote without having to brave the winter weather, and she has her first drink at the bar before she sets foot in her first room at the Chelsea.
I have decided to stay at my mother’s Upper East Side apartment, which I justify by pointing out how much money it will save the band, but once again I am removing myself from the off-hours action and any whimsical demands the band might put on me at odd times of the day and night. At 325 East 72nd Street, I can cook my own breakfast. As a practical matter, I can make phone calls without being subject to the notorious delays occasioned by the Chelsea’s switchboard. All the same, it is a decision I will later regret. A writer of my generation, especially one born in New York, should have some stories to tell about the Chelsea Hotel. I missed a lot by not staying in the Chelsea.
On our first evening in town, Albert takes us all to Max’s Kansas City. We step in the door, and the song on the background music is Country Joe McDonald singing “Janis,” which he wrote for guess who. The cosmic DJ is on the job.
Like a Broadway show, Big Brother opens out of town, in Philadelphia. The following night, the band’s New York debut is underwhelming. It takes place in the Anderson Theater on Second Avenue, in the East Village. The neighborhood is dicey, the theater is kind of a dump, and the promoter is a sleazeball. If Janis and the boys were expecting gleaming limos coming and going and the eyes of the city focused on them, they’re disappointed, but they’re blown away to find that they’ve got top billing above B. B. King, who is second on the bill. The opening act is a band nobody’s heard of called the Aluminum Dream.
It’s an easy gig for me. Three thousand dollars flat, no percentage to figure, not much different, in terms of Big Brother’s income, from most of the shows in California. If it were a percentage gig, I wouldn’t trust the promoter, a dodgy type named Tony, as far as I could throw him. I would spend the whole evening checking the tickets, watching the door, watching the box office, trying to figure out how he was ripping us off.
As hard as it is to believe, New York City has no established venue for rock-and-roll shows. There’s no local equivalent for the Fillmore or the Avalon, no promoter who regularly books the top acts in pop music.
The Anderson gig is on a Saturday. We have to wait for Monday’s papers to read the reviews. The only one that matters is in the New York Times, and it’s enough to warm the hearts of a bunch of San Francisco hippies shivering in the New York winter.
Robert Shelton is New York’s Ralph Gleason, responsible for bringing Joan Baez and Bob Dylan into the music pages of the Times. Like Gleason, Shelton has graduated to rock music, and like Gleason he unlimbers the superlatives when he hears Janis. “Janis Joplin Is Climbing Fast in the Heady Rock Firmament,” proclaims the headline on Shelton’s review. He judges Janis “as remarkable a new pop-music talent as has surfaced in years.” He calls her “sparky, spunky,” and compares her to Aretha and Erma Franklin. “But comparisons wane,” Shelton writes, “for there are few voices of such power, flexibility and virtuosity in pop music anywhere. Occasionally, Miss Joplin appeared to be hitting two harmonizing notes.” Shelton waxes poetic as he describes Janis’s vocal dynamics: “Her voice shouted with ecstasy or anger one minute, trailed off into coquettish curlicues the next. It glided from soprano highs to chesty alto lows.”
Janis is in seventh heaven. Nor are the boys disappointed. All too often, print reviews, including those from Monterey, have focused mostly on Janis and mentioned the rest of the band in passing, if at all. Shelton, however, singles out the boys for special praise. The band, he says, “is inventive enough to be worthy of its star. Outstanding were its vocal style, which uses the smear and the yelp to startling effect, and arrangements that embroidered ‘The Cuckoo’ with modernistic lace and framed ‘Summertime’ with a pale metallic fugue.”*
With Shelton’s review clipped from several copies of the Monday Times, we grab a couple of cabs and head uptown to the Black Rock, Columbia’s headquarters on Sixth Avenue at 52nd Street, to sign Big Brother’s recording contract. Albert closed the deal in November, within weeks of signing Big Brother. Now, in the imposing building that says “CBS” on it in very big letters, in corporate offices twenty-six floors above the streets of New York, Janis and the boys pen their signatures on the contract and it becomes real for them. They are Columbia recording artists.
The advance Albert has negotiated for Big Brother is big news. The Airplane, the Dead, and Cou
ntry Joe have signed earlier with RCA, Warner Brothers, and Vanguard, respectively, for advances, considered precedent-setting at the time, ranging from $25,000 to $50,000. For Big Brother and the Holding Company, Columbia has shelled out $150,000—of which the band will see not a penny, because it all goes to Bobby Shad to extricate them from their contract with Mainstream, together with an additional $100,000 that will come out of the band’s earnings. Shad demanded $250,000 to let Big Brother out of the contract and he is sitting in the catbird seat. Columbia and Big Brother have no choice but to swallow their pride and pay him. Janis and the boys are not happy that Shad has enriched himself at the band’s expense, but they’re free of Mainstream at last.
Following the signing, Columbia throws a press reception for the band at a restaurant on 57th Street, presided over by president Clive Davis. There’s an open bar and lavish hors d’oeuvres. The minions of the Fourth Estate buzz around Janis like flies on honey, ignoring the boys. They feel left out, but 57th Street is a lot flashier than lower Second Avenue and they sense that the next phase of their career is truly launched.
—
(Promotional information provided by the band members, released to the press by Albert B. Grossman Management.)
MEET
BIG BROTHER AND THE HOLDING COMPANY
Janis Joplin
BORN: January 19, 1943
BIRTH SIGN: Capricorn
PLACE OF BIRTH: Port Arthur, Texas
INSTRUMENTS: Vocals, percussion
BACKGROUND: Dropped in and out of four colleges. Worked intermittently and collected unemployment. Sang country music and blues with an Austin, Texas, bluegrass band. Sang blues in folk clubs and bars in San Francisco. Joined Big Brother via Chet Helms, old friend, past manager of Big Brother and now the head of Family Dog.
MUSICAL INFLUENCES: Bessie Smith and Otis Redding (The King).
I’M A FAN OF: Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Moby Grape, Electric Flag, Bob Dylan, Mother Earth, Tina Turner, Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Beatles, Quicksilver, the Dead.
FUTURE: Buy a bar and settle down.
Sam Andrew
BORN: December 18, 1941
BIRTH SIGN: Sagittarius
PLACE OF BIRTH: Taft, California
BACKGROUND: Started playing guitar at 14. Played in rock and roll bands until 18. Began classical guitar in 1962. Played tenor sax in 1963 in a rock and roll band. Played alto sax in a military band. Played jazz guitar at the Juke Box on Haight Street. Came with Big Brother in the summer of 1965.
MAJOR MUSICAL INFLUENCES: Chuck Berry, Chet Atkins, Webb Pierce, Andres Segovia, King Curtis, B. B. King, Albert Collins and Albert King.
I’M A FAN OF: Janis Joplin, Peter Albin, Dave Getz, James Gurley, Bob Mosley, Paul Butterfield, Mike Bloomfield and Jorma Kaukonen.
FUTURE: ?
James Martin Gurley
BIRTH SIGN: Capricorn
PLACE OF BIRTH: Detroit, Michigan
INSTRUMENTS: Guitar and Kelp horn
BACKGROUND AND INFLUENCES: Been bumming around, picking up on Coleman, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Broonzy, Bach, Vivaldi, Lord Buckley, Moondog, Big Sur, Mexico, Zen, Zap, Zonk, the usual.
LIKES: Currently dig all those doing their thing well.
FUTURE: Someday I hope to regain consciousness.
Peter S. Albin
BORN: June 6, 1944
BIRTH SIGN: Gemini
PLACE OF BIRTH: San Francisco
BACKGROUND: Got started in folk music, played bluegrass, old timey music and country blues. Got involved in electric blues and rock and roll during college. Went with Big Brother and the Holding Company in 1965.
MAJOR INFLUENCES: B. B. King, John Lee Hooker, Charlie Poole, Chuck Berry, Flatt and Scruggs, Moondog, Lenny Bruce, Captain Zero, Ali Akbar Khan, Otis Redding, Rolling Stones, Spike Jones, Leonard Bernstein, early Brubeck, Bobby Breen and Charley Mingus.
I’M A FAN OF: Otis Redding, Steve Miller Blues Band, John Chambers, Beatles, B. B. King, Dionne Warwick, Siegel-Schwall, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Aretha Franklin and Pat Kilroy.
FUTURE: To continue moving people with music and musical entertainment. Producing and promoting.
David Getz
BORN: Yes
AGE: 28
INSTRUMENTS: Drums, piano, vocal
BACKGROUND: Started playing drums and drawing pictures at age 14. Became freak with no context. Lived in Brooklyn. Started art school (Cooper Union) at 17. Played with jazz groups, but mostly schlock weekend gigs for bread. Mostly painted. Went to Europe in 1959 with Dixieland band. Moved to San Francisco in 1960. Went to Art Institute. Didn’t play drums too much. Got B.F.A., M.F.A., and Fulbright Fellowship. Lived in Poland for one year. Stopped painting, started playing drums with numerous Polish jazz groups. Returned to San Francisco in 1965. Became art teacher and 2nd cook. Painted. Frustrated drummer. Met Peter Albin. Heard Big Brother and had to be the drummer again.
MUSICAL INFLUENCES: Roy Haynes, Max Roach, and lots of jazz drummers. Indian drummers (Sivarman). Rhythm and blues and soul musicians. Everything I’ve ever heard.
CHAPTER TEN
What a Wonderful Town
WE HAVE TO wait until Thursday to learn that the weekly Village Voice also gives the Anderson show a rave. When the Times and the Voice are in agreement, you’ve got the bases covered.
I spend my most of my weekdays at Albert’s office on East 55th Street, making arrangements for upcoming gigs. “The office” is in a five-story town house between Park and Madison avenues. Albert has the fourth floor and part of the fifth. A genial staffer named Marty shows me a spare desk and phone in the room where he works, and this becomes my work space.
I could leave it to the office’s travel agency to book the flights and the motels and the rental cars, but they’re making arrangements for half a dozen acts on the road at any given time and they don’t always take the comfort of the musicians into account. After we experienced a few unnecessarily trying itineraries out west, I gradually assumed the duties of Big Brother’s travel agent. The basics are simple: Don’t wake the band earlier than necessary on a travel day, don’t book connecting flights when there’s a direct flight, and ask the band when there are choices to be made. We have a day off between gigs on the road; do you want to spend the layover in city A or city B? Getting an answer to any question involves consulting with all five members of the band, sometimes more than once. Democracy in action. But they appreciate the consideration, and building a consensus on logistical decisions is becoming easier.
Max’s Kansas City becomes our regular watering place. Dave Richards connects to a lovely waitress and the single guys avail themselves of the opportunities among the waitresses and the clientele. The guys who have old ladies at home sometimes behave like single guys on the road. These are the sixties, after all.
Janis is always on the prowl and vocal about it. Her most successful pickup line is “Hiya, honey,” delivered with a winsome smile. The ballsy-mama-on-the-town persona is a role she puts on partly to cover her insecurities, and because it’s part of who she wants to be. In her quieter moments, talking about men, Janis makes it clear that she’s really looking for true love, just like the rest of us.
Janis has been to New York before, in her speed-driven wanderings of the early sixties. She comments on the enduring aspects of New York life that she noticed then—the faster pace, the higher level of adrenaline in the streets. She was pool champ of Eighth Avenue, she tells me with a bravado that lets me know it isn’t a serious claim. Trust Janis to have ended up in Hell’s Kitchen her first time in New York.
Now she has returned in style, no longer scrabbling for a place to stay. The Chelsea is funky enough to win her approval. She likes the mix of artists, musicians, bohemians and beatniks that make up the long-term residents, but she regards New York as an alien environment.
The boys have their ow
n reservations. At the end of a day on the town, James tells me, “I looked up at the sky and a rock fell in my eye.” The “rock” was a gnarly piece of urban grit that grated his cornea until he managed to extricate the offending particle.
“At first, [New York] seemed to have made us all crazy; it was dividing the unity of the band. The first three weeks here, we all got superaggressive, separate, sour. . . . San Francisco’s different. I don’t mean it’s perfect, but the rock bands there didn’t start because they wanted to make it. They dug getting stoned and playing for people dancing. Here they want to make it. What we’ve had to do is learn to control success, put it in perspective, and not lose the essence of what we’re doing—the music.”
Janis Joplin
A week after the Anderson Theater, Big Brother plays at the Psychedelic Supermarket in Boston. The Supermarket is as close as you can get to a San Francisco rock-and-roll ballroom on the East Coast, and it’s a reasonable facsimile. Janis and the boys feel more at home here than they did at the Anderson Theater, with its fixed seats. The audience fills the dance floor and Big Brother plays a spirited set, happy to feel something like their hometown connection to the dancers.
The other act on the bill is a new band formed by Al Kooper called Blood, Sweat and Tears. They’re not anything like a San Francisco band, but Janis is intrigued by the horn section. Al is trying to use horns in a new way, beyond how horns have traditionally been used by R&B groups.
The contrast between Boston and San Francisco becomes apparent when Dave Richards and Mark Braunstein come in on Saturday to find that a bunch of Big Brother’s equipment has been stolen since the end of the Friday night show. We routinely leave equipment in the San Francisco ballrooms, where Bill Graham and the Family Dog provide adequate security. Here, Dave and Marko have to scramble to beg, borrow, and buy enough equipment for us to play on Saturday night.
On the Road with Janis Joplin Page 13
