On the Road with Janis Joplin

by John Byrne Cooke

  Paul is not a musician. He can barely carry a tune. But he loves music and he has an uncanny ability to communicate with musicians who run the gamut from highly verbal to effectively mute. Paul can express musical concepts and suggestions so articulately that singer after singer and band after band have produced under his guidance definitive performances of their music, albums that stand up to repeated listening and enhance the artists’ reputations. In the studio, everything he does is focused on making the best possible recording with these musicians in this time and place.

  I gain new respect for the effectiveness of Paul’s methods when I see Janis and the boys working with John Simon. From my viewpoint, this ship is caught in irons, with no one at the helm. Each time I visit the studio, John and the band are struggling. Despite the “live” setup, Janis and the boys find it hard to capture on tape the freewheeling sound and the exhilaration—the magic—that they generate in concert.

  “I always felt that the studio recording was stifling. I just could not get off. ’Cause I get off playing to audiences, and there’s nobody there, you know? It’s very cold and calculated.”

  Peter Albin

  The work is frustrating and tiring. They need a break, something to give them a boost, and they get it. A week after the disappointing weekend in Detroit, Janis and the boys play in New York again, on the opening night of Bill Graham’s Fillmore East.

  A few people in New York who care about rock music have urged Graham to open an operation in the city. Bill has resisted. San Francisco keeps him busy. He doesn’t want to fail in his hometown but he was finally persuaded to come take a look. He saw Big Brother’s show at the Anderson. The drab state of the theater and the indifference of the promoter to the music was just what it took to knock him off the fence. Anyone who knew Bill could see the wheels begin to spin: What this town needs is somebody to do it right!

  Across Second Avenue from the Anderson is the Village Theater, formerly a 2,400-seat Loews movie house, and, like the Anderson, a Yiddish theater before that. A few rock shows have been put on in the Village Theater, but there was no regular operation. Graham bought the Village, with Albert Grossman and his new partner, Bert Block, putting up the capital as silent partners. Bill will run the show. Between Big Brother’s February 17 appearance at the Anderson and the eighth of March, Bill and his crew have completely refurbished the old movie house and rechristened it Fillmore East. The theater’s new technical director is Chip Monck, a lighting designer who illuminated the Newport Folk Festivals and who has moved into rock show lighting. Together, Graham and Monck have pulled off a miracle. It’s still a sit-down theater, but it has the welcoming atmosphere, and some of the ambiance, of the San Francisco ballrooms.

  Big Brother headlines the opening night, with Albert King, Tim Buckley, and a San Francisco–style light show rounding out the bill. The manager of the Anderson prints counterfeit tickets to Bill’s show and gives them away on the street, but he fails in his effort to sabotage the party. The line at Fillmore East stretches around the block.

  The show presents the kind of stylistic mix—Tim Buckley’s folk rock, Big Brother’s acid rock, and Albert King’s polished blues—that Graham is known for in San Francisco. Janis and the boys are happy to be working for Graham again in front of an appreciative audience. Big Brother rocks and Janis wows the fans. Among Graham’s ushers, clad in an orange jumpsuit, is Robert Mapplethorpe, just twenty-one, already an artist, not yet a photographer, utterly unknown, at this time living in impoverished bohemian bliss in Brooklyn with the equally artistic and unknown Patti Smith. Mapplethorpe came to work looking forward to hearing Tim Buckley, but he returns home late at night to announce to Smith that he has seen someone new, someone who is going to make it big. Her name is Janis Joplin.

  Fillmore East’s opening night generates a lot of press and more good reviews for Big Brother. Variety covers the show, as well as Billboard, Cashbox, and Record World.

  Good reviews are always good news, but they are too often a double-edged sword for Big Brother. Once again, the press and the public focus most of their attention on Janis. It’s her vocals, her dynamism onstage, that knock everyone out. Once again Robert Shelton proves to be the exception by singling out the band for praise in the Times. Mostly, the boys get mixed notices. Some reviewers, and some acquaintances unaware of the San Francisco music scene’s philosophy, the ethic embraced by the founding bands, have suggested Janis get better musicians.

  Janis is loyal to Big Brother. They took her in and gave her a chance. The performances that won over the San Francisco fans and earned the great reviews at Monterey were all given with Big Brother behind her. And that’s the problem. Many observers see Big Brother behind her. They don’t give Sam’s vocals, and Peter’s and James’s, and the band’s unique sound, due credit for the success Janis and Big Brother have earned.

  If enough people tell you how great you are and in the same breath suggest that your fellow band members don’t measure up, it’s understandable that you may begin to wonder if maybe they’re right.

  Albert’s office has a publicist, Myra Friedman, working full-time on Big Brother for their first eastern tour. Myra is in awe of Janis, and she exacerbates the imbalance by devoting most of her efforts to her. In our first few weeks in New York, Myra arranges for Glamour, New York magazine, Eye magazine, and Life to do interviews or photo shoots with Janis. (Janis takes an attentive interest in her press coverage. She fires off salvos of clippings and quotes to her family in Port Arthur, along with effusive letters full of news about her rising reputation.)

  Myra’s greatest coup is arranging for Janis to be photographed by Richard Avedon for Vogue, for a photo section about the happening people in show business. A few years ago, Avedon’s fashion photos for Harper’s Bazaar became so creative that the magazine was read and talked about within the folk music underground. Instead of shooting models looking bored, Avedon photographed them looking happy, being funny, even moving. He was a past master of black and white. As innovations in art and music blossomed in the sixties, Avedon took to using psychedelic colors and effects in his spreads. In 1966, Avedon left Harper’s Bazaar for Vogue.

  Myra further endears herself to Janis by following up on an idea that Janis has been promoting for a while now: Think of all the publicity she has generated for Southern Comfort. Reporters mention Janis’s favorite drink in virtually every piece they write. Shouldn’t Southern Comfort give Janis something in return? Myra’s efforts produce an offer from Southern Comfort for Janis to visit a fur warehouse in New Jersey and choose whatever she’d like. Janis picks a three-quarter-length coat in Russian lynx and a matching hat that become her signature cold-weather traveling wear, even as she forsakes Southern Comfort in favor of drinks that don’t make her friends and drinking companions gag.

  A week after the Fillmore East, we’re in Philadelphia again for three days at the Electric Factory in Old Town, for a guarantee of $6,000 against 50 percent of the gross over $12,000. Big Brother’s take-home is $12,160. In the band’s first month in the East, they have made close to $40,000. Albert’s guarantee of $100,000 in the first year is beginning to look modest, and Janis and the boys dare to believe there may be some money left over after the debt to Mainstream is paid off.

  On the same weekend, the Charles River Valley Boys, with my predecessor, Clay Jackson, now back in the band on guitar and lead vocals, are at the Second Fret coffeehouse, the Philadelphia focus of the folk boom. After Big Brother’s show at the Electric Factory, I take them to the Second Fret and I sit in with the CRVB for most of a set. I slip back into the three-part harmonies as easily as putting on a familiar shirt, and this role reversal, with me onstage and Big Brother in the audience, makes more real for my new cohort the fact that their road manager had a life in music before he took up the reins of their traveling circus.

  Janis has a bottle in her handbag from which she sips with just the right amount of
discretion in the nonalcoholic coffeehouse. She sips liberally, however. When we get back to our hotel, I am in my road manager’s role once more as I half support, half carry her through the lobby and up the elevator to her room. It’s all part of the job.

  The following weekend takes us to Chicago, where Albert Grossman, Paul Butterfield, Mike Bloomfield, and Nick Gravenites got their start in the music business. We make a pilgrimage to the fabled South Side, where the blues clubs still flourish, but the streets are uneasy in the wake of last summer’s ghetto riots here, and we don’t linger long.

  New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago—we’re not in Fresno anymore, Toto.

  Janis and the boys take it all in stride, but there’s often a gleam in their eyes. These early weeks of touring the East are exceeding their expectations of what working under Albert’s guidance might be like.

  Janis’s professionalism, and the excitement of bringing her music to new audiences across the eastern and midwestern states, usually keeps her drinking within her customary pattern—just enough before a performance to give her the boost she needs to launch herself onto the stage. Sometimes, when the opening acts run long and Big Brother goes on late, she has trouble maintaining the preperformance edge, but when she steps onstage her adrenaline almost always powers her through.

  After the shows, she drinks more, as do the boys, but carrying her into a hotel is the exception rather than the rule. The demands of the job keep my own drinking moderate. At the end of the day, my top priority is getting enough sleep so I can get up and eat breakfast in the morning before it’s time to phone the members of the band, room by room, to wake them and give them the time they need, individually adjusted, to get their acts together and be in the lobby when it’s time to go.

  On the last day of March, we’re in New York when Lyndon Johnson goes on prime-time TV to announce a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam above the twentieth parallel, as a gesture he hopes will bring the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong to the negotiating table. At the end of the broadcast, Johnson drops a bombshell of his own when he declares that he will not run for reelection.

  Since we came east, I have followed presidential politics with little support from Janis or the boys. At first, Gene McCarthy was given no chance of unseating Lyndon Johnson, but he placed a close second in the recent New Hampshire primary. Encouraged by this sign of Johnson’s vulnerability on the issue of Vietnam, and further motivated by the Tet Offensive, whose last battles were only recently concluded, Bobby Kennedy entered the race in mid-March, despite his earlier disavowal of interest. Johnson’s bowing out now throws the race wide open.

  I go to Max’s Kansas City to celebrate by getting exuberantly drunk. If anyone had told me this evening that within a year I would miss Lyndon Johnson, I would have laughed in his face.

  Sam and Peter show some interest in Johnson’s announcement, but for the most part the band members don’t see much hope for meaningful change in the traditional political process.

  The next day, they’re back in Columbia’s Studio E, recording “Misery’n” and “Catch Me Daddy.”

  On Tuesday, April 2, Big Brother goes into a New York club called Generation for a six-night stand with B. B. King. The club is on West 8th Street, a block from Washington Square Park. Backstage on opening night, Janis receives a delegation from Jazz & Pop magazine, who tell her that she has been voted best female pop vocalist of the year in the magazine’s annual readers’ poll, beating out the soul queen, Aretha Franklin, by fourteen votes out of almost eighteen hundred. “But I’ve only been singing for a year and a half!” is Janis’s astonished reaction. She’s not about to turn down the award, but “best female pop vocalist” strikes her as a bit much. “Best chick vocalist,” she offers. “How about that?”

  On the third day of our gig at Generation, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., is assassinated in Memphis.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Swing Low, Sweet Chariot

  THE NEWS FROM Memphis, where Martin Luther King has been supporting a strike by sanitation workers, breaks shortly after 7:00 P.M. Eastern Time. First reports say King has been shot and was rushed to a hospital. Just over an hour later the word comes that he is dead. As dusk falls, riots break out in cities across the country, including Newark, Detroit, Kansas City, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

  In Indianapolis, Bobby Kennedy appears in front of a predominantly black crowd, against the counsel of his advisors. He asks his listeners to pray for the family of Dr. King and for the United States. Some credit the speech for preventing a riot in Indianapolis, and perhaps in other places where Kennedy’s words are heard.

  Pennebaker has planned to come to Generation to film more of Janis and Big Brother. Before the gig, he is with Bob Neuwirth and his lady, Tonto, who have taken a small apartment on West 46th Street, just a block from the Leacock Pennebaker offices. Penny shoots Kennedy’s speech off the TV. When they catch a cab to come to the club, the radio in the taxi is warning people not to go to Broadway or Harlem.

  At Generation, Janis and the boys are as stunned as I am. As bands, the San Francisco groups are anarchistic, humanistic, and apolitical, except in the broadest sense. The Grateful Dead won’t let anyone use their microphones for sociopolitical harangues. Their position is, “We don’t want to be connected with anti-anydamnthing. We’re not anti-war, anti-this, anti-that, we’re just pro-music, pro-party, pro-getting down.” Which pretty well sums up Big Brother’s attitude, especially Janis’s. Privately, the members of Big Brother have feelings and opinions that tend to be a country mile to the left of center. Publicly they promote no message except be true to yourself and get it on, but Dr. King’s death affects them all.

  At Generation that evening, B. B. King sits on his guitar amp onstage and plays gospel songs, moving some in the audience to tears. A number of musicians have come to the club just to be in the company of other people someplace where there’s music. After Big Brother’s closing set, there is a spontaneous jam, a kind of informal wake.

  At closing time, we’re wary of venturing into the streets, but the city is quiet. On Saturday, U.S. troops guard the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., for the first time since the Civil War.

  Rock and roll as usual doesn’t feel right, so we plan a more formal observance for Sunday, our last night at Generation. President Johnson has declared it a national day of mourning. I use Albert’s client roster as a starting point, connecting through these musicians and the members of Big Brother to others who might be in New York. We invite them to join us in celebrating the life and mourning the loss of the most eloquent advocate for nonviolent civil disobedience since Mahatma Gandhi. I send out and hand out photocopied invitations, and we fill the club. Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Guy, Joni Mitchell, Richie Havens, Al Kooper, Paul Butterfield, and Elvin Bishop are among those who answer the call.

  Since Thursday, fifty thousand federal and National Guard troops have been dispatched to some of the one hundred cities where rioting followed Dr. King’s death. More than twenty thousand people have been arrested.

  APR. 10, 1968: Anaheim Convention Center, Anaheim, Calif.

  APR. 11–13: Fillmore and Winterland, San Francisco

  APR. 19: Selland Arena, Fresno

  APR. 20: Earl Warren Fairground, Santa Barbara

  APR. 27: San Bernardino

  On Monday, Janis and the boys and I fly to Los Angeles, where the vitality of springtime in California helps to dispel the pall. We have a gig in Anaheim, followed by a weekend at the Fillmore and Winterland for Bill Graham.

  Almost losing my job back in January taught me a lesson. The band knows they need a businessman like Albert for a manager, but they don’t want too much of a businessman for a road manager. Keeping some distance to establish my authority may have been necessary at the outset, but I can’t be so remote that they feel I’m not one of them. They want to feel that I belong. They want to know that
I like them.

  I do like them. I’ve been showing it more, hanging out more, feeling more like one of the gang, but I have no indication of how the band feels about me until we’re cruising down the Santa Ana Freeway to Anaheim, riding the high of a beautiful spring day, rapping and laughing about who knows what, and out of the blue Dave Getz says, “And yes, John, we love you.”

  I say, “I love you too,” and I mean it. Janis and each of the boys have endeared themselves to me in their own ways. Privately, I’ve decided that I will stay on until the job stops being fun, or until my own work—whatever it may be—makes itself known to me and requires my full attention. And since I’ll be staying—

  “By the way,” I say, but Peter Albin is ahead of me.

  “You want a raise.”

  “Now that you mention it.” We all laugh.

  I get a fifty-dollar raise on the spot. Two hundred bucks a week. My starting salary was set by Albert when he hired me. Getting a raise from the band, unanimously approved, solidifies the working relationship, but the validation means more than the money. We wander the planet looking for members of our tribe. Once in a while, if we’re lucky, we find them.

  On Sunday, April 21, the New York Times publishes an article by the jazz critic Nat Hentoff that’s based on an interview he did with Janis while we were in New York. “Janis Joplin has exploded the increasingly mandarin categories of rock music by being so intensely, so joyfully herself,” Hentoff writes. He mentions Big Brother and the Holding Company only in passing, and quotes Janis extensively. Her answers touch on the recurrent themes she emphasizes when trying to give an accounting of herself to the world at large. “I was treated very badly in Texas,” she says. “They don’t treat beatniks too good in Texas.” Of performing, she says, “When everything is together—the band, me, the audience, it’s boss! It’s just like magic. I don’t think I could ever feel that way about a man.”