On Sunday we do a show at the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, to an enthusiastic crowd of stoned art students. Janis is delighted. “They’re just like hippies!” she says. It’s a flat-rate gig, so I don’t have much to do. During the performance I’m standing against the back wall of the student union, checking the sound and digging the set, when I feel a hand on my calf. I look down to see a lovely girl making out with her boyfriend. They’re sitting on the floor. Their eyes are closed, their lips are locked, and her hand is running up and down my leg! This probably has something to do with why, at the end of the show, I grab a mike, thank the crowd for being a great audience, and announce the address in Cambridge where I’m throwing a party for the band that night. A couple of carloads of adventurous RISD fans take me up on it and arrive to discover that the party is in an iron lung factory.
The summer before my freshman year at Harvard, I worked for my uncle Jack, my mother’s brother, in his funky three-story brick factory in a working-class section of North Cambridge. Jack was the family dropout. While his elder sister and two brothers followed in their father’s footsteps by attending Radcliffe and Harvard and going on to advanced degrees in the sciences, Jack quit college, started his own business, perfected the modern iron lung, and filed a couple of dozen patents for his inventions of mechanical devices that assisted doctors in caring for their patients, many of them related to breathing. In time, his father, my grandfather, a distinguished epidemiologist and a hard man to please, came to acknowledge that Jack had not wasted his life.
Two years ago, when I retreated to Cambridge from my abortive move to California, I lived in one of two apartments on the top floor of Jack’s factory. It became a celebrated party pad. The parties ran late and featured dancing to rock and roll on the hi-fi. With no one else living in the building, we didn’t have to worry about the noise bothering the neighbors, but the neighbors must have occasionally marveled at the number of cars coming and going from the parking lot of the J. H. Emerson Company late at night. For revelers who found themselves still there in the morning, there was bottled medical oxygen for a quick pick-me-up.
My sound system is still set up in my living room/bedroom and I haven’t yet shipped all my records to San Francisco. I have advertised the party through the Cambridge grapevine and it becomes a major event. Blood, Sweat and Tears are here in force. The Chambers Brothers are in Boston this weekend. Neuwirth has come up from New York. The living room is wall to wall with people dancing while James Gurley makes out on the bed with one of the girls from RISD.
In the back room, Neuwirth sets up a camera and tape recorder he has borrowed from Pennebaker. He isn’t sure what he’ll use the footage for, but his auteurial juices are bubbling. He calls people into the room, seats them in front of the camera, illuminated by the harsh light of a gooseneck table lamp, and interviews them. Sometimes he directs them in hysterical displays that will startle anyone who sees these shots without having experienced the party. He films Lester Chambers screaming like a banshee.
Before the party sighs to a close, in the wee hours, I am rewarded for inviting the RISD students. How can I put this discreetly? Let’s say that I share some private time—elsewhere in the factory—with the girl James was making out with earlier in a manner that both of us find pleasurable. Hail, hail, rock and roll.*
MAR. 1–2, 1968: Grande Ballroom, Detroit
MAR. 8: Fillmore East, NYC
MAR. 9: Dining Hall, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn.
MAR. 15–17: Electric Factory, Philadelphia
MAR. 22–24: Cheetah, Chicago
APR. 2–7: Generation, NYC
On the first weekend in March we play the Grande Ballroom in Detroit. It’s a homecoming of sorts for James, who was born in the Motor City. As our plane descends through the clouds on the glide path for Detroit Metro, James is sitting in the row behind me, peering out the window. A break in the clouds offers a glimpse of the city below. James casts a dubious eye on his hometown and reflects on the contrast with New York. “Ah,” he says, “from plethora to dearth in forty-five minutes.”
The city looks like a war zone. It was a war zone last summer, pacified only after more than twelve thousand paratroopers and National Guard troops quelled the rioters. Over the past few years, summertime urban race riots have become steadily more numerous. The outbreak in the Watts district of Los Angeles in August 1965 shocked the nation. The next summer saw more than three dozen riots, mostly in northern cities from Brooklyn and Baltimore to St. Louis and San Francisco. In 1967 more than a hundred cities experienced racial violence. Detroit was the worst. The official tally counted forty people dead, but some say the true toll was much higher. More than five thousand people were left homeless when their homes burned.
As in San Francisco, Detroit’s rock-and-roll counterculture sprang up near the ghetto. We drive through the combat zone on the way to the gig. There are bullet holes in the walls.
Big Brother and most of the California bands are less focused politically than my folk music compatriots. The folk scene was far more aware of politics, through its connection to the civil-rights struggle and protest songs about race, injustice, and war. Sam Andrew comments on the evidence of the riots as we pass through the Detroit ghetto, but Janis’s immediate concern is knowing that Columbia Records will be recording Big Brother at the Grande Ballroom.
The Grande (the e is not silent) is the center of the local rock scene. Once we’re inside we feel safer, and pretty much at home. MC5 is the house band, locally celebrated, not yet widely known. The names of the other bands on the bill for our Friday–Saturday gig would look right at home on a Fillmore poster—Tiffany Shade, Pink Peech Mob, and the Family Dump Truck.
The Grande’s manager, Russ Gibb, visited San Francisco a couple of years ago and saw a show at the Avalon. The Grande is his effort to create a similar scene in Detroit. In a town with the negative vibes of Motor City, he’s done as well as anyone could. Here, far removed from the Golden Gate, Big Brother hopes to conjure up some San Francisco magic.
Recording at the Grande is the band’s idea. Albert and Columbia are willing to give it a try. The hall is an open-floor ballroom like the Fillmore and the Avalon. It’s a well-intentioned effort that recognizes the band’s San Francisco origins and the relationship between musicians and audience that is unique to the city by the Bay.
Parked outside the Grande, a truck contains a rolling recording studio that is connected to the stage by a web of cables. For two nights, record producer John Simon and a Columbia engineer make a first attempt at capturing the band in live performance.
The shows feel good to me. Not as good as some, but okay. On our flight back to New York, Janis has some doubts, but she and the boys hope some of the spontaneity will come through on the tapes.
When Albert listens to the recordings, he finds the results less than impressive. He summons the band to his office. Sam arrives late. “Anybody got a joint?” he asks, figuring to get in tune with the music. “We don’t need that right now,” Albert says. Sam notices that the other band members, who have already had a preview of Albert’s disappointment, are stone-faced. Oh shit, he thinks, this is going to be a psychodrama.
No one in the band can defend the tapes. To a bunch of dancing fans, many of them stoned out of their gourds, the occasional missed chord or fluffed guitar riff passes unnoticed. A brief disagreement between the bass and the drums about just where the beat is going may not faze the audience, but the reels of tape spinning in the recording truck aren’t stoned and they aren’t dancing. They hear it all, which is why record producers hold recorded tracks to a higher standard than live performances. A recording has to hold up to repeated listenings, but just one listen to the Grande tapes is enough to persuade Janis and the boys that Albert’s harsh verdict is justified. The energy that Big Brother managed to ignite in the Grande doesn’t come through on the tape. The mistakes do. All
too audible is the fact that the band played as sloppily as at any time in recent memory. Big Brother’s Curse strikes again.
“For years, it was our particular lot not to rise to a given occasion. Every time, when it was really necessary for us to play well, we didn’t, and the Grande Ballroom is the case in point. It was probably the worst playing we did in those particular months of playing.”
Sam Andrew
Sam is afraid that Albert will fire some of the band members on the spot, but it doesn’t come to that. What Albert is looking for is something more than technical competence. It’s authenticity, both in presentation and in the emotional content of the music, a unity that is honest and real above all, and at the same time free from obvious technical faults. There is nothing phony or insincere about Big Brother, but the emotional authenticity, the enthusiasm that drives the music, sometimes outstrips the technical abilities of the band, and it’s this imbalance that Albert seeks to correct.
To this end, he suggests some radical options. How about if Sam plays bass? (Unsaid, but Sam feels it is implied: because he can’t play guitar.) How about if Peter plays guitar? (Which he used to do before he took up the bass, and which he still plays on a couple of songs.) Possible remedies are discussed, hashed over, and ultimately rejected by the band. The only conclusion that comes out of the meeting is a clear understanding that Big Brother had better learn quickly to produce better results in a studio.
That effort commences at once. Between our weekend forays into the heartland, the band works under professional conditions in Columbia’s New York studios.
The producer, John Simon, is represented by Albert Grossman, as is Elliot Mazer, who will co-produce the album. Albert has chosen Simon to oversee Big Brother’s record for Columbia without consulting the band. Simon produced the hit single “Red Rubber Ball” for the Cyrkle, he has worked with jazzman Charles Lloyd, and he produced and wrote the arrangements for Leonard Cohen’s first album.
Simon yields to Big Brother’s wish to record “live” in the studio—all playing at the same time in the same room, although this method creates technical difficulties. There is “bleed,” each microphone picking up not only the voice or instrument it’s placed in front of, but the other voices and instruments as well. This makes it difficult, or impossible, to overdub a given voice or instrument to correct errors and improve a track.
Despite this concession, there is friction between Simon and the band from the outset. John is a musician himself, a pianist and composer, very much of the educated and disciplined school. He shows little curiosity about the colorful band of California eccentrics who have generated such interest since the Monterey Pop Festival. The band members feel that Simon is standoffish, sometimes condescending. Dave Getz finds it impossible to talk to him. Sam doesn’t get along with him much better. Janis feels that Simon rebuffs her attempts to strike up a dialogue. Peter Albin is alone in believing there is potential for a good relationship with Simon, if they stick with it.
“I think fundamentally he didn’t like Janis. You know, he didn’t like it that she practiced her riffs. This came out later. He said, ‘Blues artists don’t do that.’ I just thought, That’s ridiculous. I’ve heard Ray Charles practice a riff a million times. . . . And in his biography he says, ‘That was a riff, and I practiced that, and it was a good one.’ [Simon] just had this mental construct about the band. I think he wasn’t in sympathy with Janis.”
Sam Andrew
Since Monterey, Pennebaker has kept an eye out for another chance to film Janis. He has in mind that he might make a Dont Look Back–style film about her. He expresses interest in filming a recording session. He clears it with Albert, I clear it with the band, and I serve again as Penny’s soundman. What his inquisitive camera perceives is an omen. Just as a microphone captures onstage mistakes that become glaring in playback, the camera often sees in a scene what the real-life participants miss. Penny’s philosophy of documentary film trusts the ability of the camera’s impartial eye to ferret out the truth. In Columbia’s New York Studio E, it perceives that John Simon is out of sync with these free spirits from San Francisco.
On the day we’re filming, Janis arrives after the others. The boys are jamming on a tune that isn’t one of their regular songs, a spontaneous jam. Janis skips around the studio, dancing to the music. When the tune ends, she says, “You wanna hear how shitty some people can be?” and she launches into a story about this guy she just met, the guitar player for the Animals, who are in town. The guy was busted for dope a while ago in Vancouver, British Columbia, and was released on bail. He was supposed to fly out this week for his trial, but the Animals’ manager told him not to go. Then, without telling the guy, they wired to England for another guitar player to replace him when they fired him, which they did yesterday. And now they want him to play with the band tonight because the new guy isn’t here yet!
Janis lays out the whole story in a literal minute. “I’ve never heard of anyone being treated so shabbily!” she says. “And he’s not even mad, and I’m furious!” She’s righteously incensed, but her delivery of the last line recognizes that it has the potential to be funny. No one laughs.
Throughout Janis’s rap, John Simon is leaning on the studio piano, uninvolved. He looks exhausted, or maybe exasperated. Without moving or saying a word, he projects an aura of indifference masking annoyance. When Janis delivers her closing line, he says, “Let’s do ‘Summertime.’”
“It was very hard to work with John Simon. John Simon was put on us by Albert. Albert just said, ‘I’ve got the producer and this guy’s producing this other band, and he’s great, he’s a genius.’ And Albert drew up the whole contract. Albert gave John Simon two-sevenths of the [album] royalties. . . . Janis, I think her attitude was, she was gonna have fun anyway. And she was not gonna suffer as much as John wanted everybody to suffer, as much as he was suffering. And I was suffering as much as he was suffering. I think Peter to a certain extent was. I think James and Sam were getting so loaded that they just sort of created a cloud around themselves so that they were impervious to what John was putting out, the vibe that he was putting out. And I think Janis just—I think Janis kind of picked up on where he was at, and was just intentionally, very consciously, not gonna buy into it, and was just gonna go on with her merry little act. And so I think, to her credit, she may have handled it the best of anybody. And she was a consummate performer. When it came time to go in the studio and sing, Janis knew she could do it. She knew she had the facility to perform under those kind of pressure situations, whereas we didn’t.”
David Getz
Sam Andrew has arranged the Gershwin classic with guitar arpeggios that begin slowly, then ripple nimbly through an introduction that doesn’t reveal the identity of the song until Janis opens her mouth and sings the first word: “Summertime . . .”
James plays in a lower register. Together, the two guitars weave around Janis’s high, breathy rendition to create a wholly original interpretation of the song. Gershwin would have smiled. If there’s one song in Big Brother’s repertoire that should engage John Simon and win his approval, this is it.
The first take is a little ragged. The band listens to it in the control room, then returns to the studio. They debate whether to continue working on “Summertime” until it’s done, or include another song in this evening’s session. Janis wants to work until “Summertime” is in the can, however long it takes. The clock on the wall of the studio says 9:30. Dave Getz says let’s work on it until twelve and move on to something else if we haven’t got it by then.
Penny moves his camera from one participant in the discussion to another. I stay out of his way and aim the mike at whoever’s talking. John Simon makes no effort to guide the conversation or get the band focused on the work at hand. Once again, he’s off to one side, disconnected, waiting.
The only record producer I’ve spent much time with in a studio
is Paul Rothchild. He produced the Charles River Valley Boys’ first album when he found out we didn’t have one. Paul was working for a Boston-area record distributor at the time. He came into the Club 47, heard us play, and said he’d like to handle our record. We don’t have a record, we told him. Paul came back a week later and said he’d like to help us make one. That was the start of his career as a producer. He made our record on his own label and later sold it to Prestige Records in New Jersey as part of a deal that got him a job as A&R (artists and repertory) man for the label. Before long he moved on to Jac Holzman’s Elektra Records in New York. In short order Paul produced a string of successful folk albums for Elektra, and he was instrumental in Elektra’s decision to become the first folk label to expand into recording electrified music. He has produced the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and the Doors.
In the midsixties, when I was in New York, I would check in with Paul and visit the Elektra studio if he was working with someone interesting. Without giving it much thought, until now, I have absorbed Paul’s manner in the studio as the model for how a record producer does his job. He guides the proceedings so gently, most of the time, that it would take a stranger a while to figure out who’s running the show. Paul understands musicians and gives them a lot of free rein. He wants them to be comfortable. He laughs with them, smokes pot with them, orders out for burgers with them, but he never lets the musicians forget that they’re in the studio to get some work done. However relaxed and gregarious he may be at any given moment, Paul is aware of the job at hand and he is guiding those present toward that goal. He is the captain of the ship.
On the Road with Janis Joplin Page 14
