The results of Mazer’s editing and mixing create a credible impression of a “live” album. The band’s reactions to the end product are cautiously optimistic, and they’re tickled pink by the cover illustration, which is by the underground comic artist R. Crumb.
Big Brother constitutes a self-appointed chapter of the R. Crumb fan club. Initially, Columbia proposed for the album cover a photograph of the five of them in bed in the bedroom of a San Francisco hippie pad. The picture was shot in a photo studio, where Janis and the boys rearranged the prepared props with abandon, creating their own idea of an authentic hippie bedroom before jumping into bed together, all naked. The guys, being guys, are “decent” in the photo, since only their chests are exposed. Janis’s chest is also exposed. It’s a cheerful image without a hint of sexual innuendo, but Columbia balked at a topless Janis.
The band’s counterproposal was asking R. Crumb to do the cover. Crumb is widely known in the counterculture for, among other things, a wonderful multipanel strip illustrating the classic blues line, “Keep on truckin’, Mama, truckin’ my blues away.” For Big Brother’s album, Crumb has produced a riotous circular comic strip, the panels spiraling out from the center, where Janis, barefoot in a prison-striped dress, is slogging across a desert under the gaze of a smiling, merciless sun, with a ball and chain attached to her ankle. For this masterpiece, Columbia pays Crumb a pittance, and no royalties.
The album’s title is a compromise. Somewhere along the road to fame, the phrase “dope, sex, and cheap thrills” has become Big Brother’s unofficial motto. They proposed it for the album title. Columbia was understandably reluctant to plaster an advertisement for dope and sex across the nation’s music magazines and about a million record labels, if all goes according to plan. Gingerly, Clive Davis and his execs approved Cheap Thrills.
When I see the cover for the first time, I am struck by the lower left-hand panel, which shows James Gurley against a backdrop of purple mountains’ majesty. The cartoon James has a single eye centered in his forehead and he’s puffing on a joint. A golden halo hovers over his head. It brings to mind a night in New York during the winter tour, when I was well lit at Max’s Kansas City. James’s name came up in conversation and I felt compelled to phone him in his room at the Chelsea. I woke him from a sound sleep to inform him that he is the son of God. I spent a good deal of time and energy convincing him I was serious in this pronouncement, but James took it calmly, as if I had belatedly recognized what was already an acknowledged fact. Since then, this has become a running joke between us. Now I find that Crumb sees him the same way! You mean it wasn’t just the booze?
We play the Family Dog in Denver, then fly back to California for a flurry of gigs around the Bay, including a free concert in Golden Gate Park, a weekend at Kaleidoscope in L.A., and three days in the brand-new Fillmore West for Bill Graham, who has recently taken over and rechristened the Carousel ballroom. Two days later, we’re eastbound, with an intermediate stop in Salt Lake City. We play an afternoon gig in nearby Ogden, across the street from an amusement park that has an airplane ride where you can actually steer the airplanes, somewhat, as they swing around a pylon at the end of steel cables. After the sound check at the gig, we undergo flight training. Peter Albin and I are the most maniacal of the student pilots. Left rudder and up she goes. When we get the hang of it, we can take the planes through dives and climbs that set the support cables thwacking against their bolts.
The day after we arrive in New York, we play the Westbury Music Fair on Long Island, just outside New York, for $3,500 plus 50 percent of the gross over $9,000, the house scaled to a potential gross of no less than $25,000. I am no longer carrying cash home in a brown paper bag.
Albert travels with us for the first time when we fly to San Juan, Puerto Rico, for Columbia Records’ annual convention. The Columbia bigwigs have heard Cheap Thrills and they are genuinely thrilled. In exactly one week, the album will be in the stores. Scuttlebutt at the convention says it will be huge. Clive Davis divides his time between Big Brother and Blood, Sweat and Tears, doing his best to keep his stars happy.
Albert stays close to Janis, shepherding her through brief chats with important salesmen and head-office apparatchiks. This kind of pressing the flesh is new to her, but she is dazzled by the attention and does her best to smile and be polite. At the convention, more than ever, the forces dividing Janis from the boys are plainly visible. It is Janis that Clive Davis and the Columbia functionaries fawn over, while Sam and James and David and Peter hang out with musicians from the other bands.
Janis is dazzled as well by the performance of Blood, Sweat and Tears at the dinner show on the last night of the convention. The band that Al Kooper founded less than a year ago has bitten the hand that gave it birth. Al has been forced out of the group. He has been replaced by singer David Clayton Thomas. Thomas has a strong voice and he knows how to use it. Behind him, the band is tight. Kooper’s influence is still audible, especially in the horn section, which has Janis’s full attention. As early as last year, she broached with Big Brother the idea of adding horns to the band, and maybe a keyboard. Their response was split along the customary lines, Sam and David willing to try, James and Peter opposed.
Big Brother’s performance at the Columbia convention is joyously received. It’s only average, but they’re playing for the choir.
In the fifties, most major record labels shunned rock and roll. Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison and Carl Perkins got their start at Sun Records in Memphis. Elvis became the exception to the rule when RCA bought his contract, but rock and roll was widely denounced as a threat to American teens, a new socioeconomic group with the power to define trends in popular music because in the 1950s, for the first time, they had the money to buy popular music. White parents and politicians tried to protect white kids from rock and roll by branding it “jungle music” and other, more blatantly racist terms. These efforts helped rock and roll become the music of young rebellion against the staid conservatism of the Eisenhower years. Now, a decade later, one big label after another is recognizing the potential of rock, and the competition to cash in on the top acts is fierce. At the Columbia convention in Puerto Rico, the suits and ties celebrate their shaggy saviors with the fervor of newly baptized converts.
After the show, in the hotel bar, Janis is bubbly at the prospect of finally having a record that will knock the Mainstream album off the shelves. Irrepressible, full of good cheer, she flirts with Albert. It’s her customary testing routine, long postponed in Albert’s case, until Janis is sure he won’t take it amiss. Her come-on is more subtle than is her custom when sounding out a possible sex partner, but subtlety is not Janis’s strong suit. What it comes down to is, Hey, maybe we should go to bed to celebrate. She leaves it up to Albert to decide if the proposition is serious. Albert is both flattered and amused. He flashes his best smile, which shines all the more brightly for being reserved for special occasions. “I couldn’t possibly do that,” he says. “If it didn’t turn out that I was great, you wouldn’t respect me in the morning.”
Janis cracks up. It’s the perfect response, disarming and delighting her at the same time.
The next morning, we’re airborne, headed back to the mainland for the Newport Folk Festival, already in progress.
There couldn’t be a greater contrast between the intently focused commercialism of the Columbia convention and the vigilant anticommercialism of Newport. In Cambridge, we scorned the “commercial” folk acts, the guy duos and trios, the brother groups that smoothed out the mountain harmonies and made the songs sound like pop music. Newport has admitted some of the folk-pop groups because they’re known to the wider audience. Bring them in with the Kingston Trio and expose them to the authentic stuff. Peter, Paul and Mary are regular fixtures at Newport. They helped boost Dylan’s career, and they’re Albert’s act.
Big Brother and the Holding Company is a different matter. Have the walls
of Jericho fallen? Has the nation’s premier folk music gathering capitulated to the San Francisco Sound? Not by a long shot. Big Brother is one of just two rock acts on the lengthy list of performers, and the band’s appearance has come about more through connections on the folk circuit than because of Janis’s sudden prominence. Albert Grossman co-produced the festival in its first year. Since then he hasn’t had an organizational role, but he has been present for each festival as the manager of important folk acts. And Albert may not be the only one who urged Newport promoter George Wein to hire Big Brother. Also on the bill this summer is Kenneth Threadgill, a Texas singer and club owner, who hired Janis to play in his Austin filling-station bar back in 1962. Threadgill and Wein have a friend in common, Rod Kennedy, who runs the Longhorn Jazz Festival. Through Kennedy, Threadgill has put in a good word for Janis.
Two years ago, the festival board almost rejected the Lovin’ Spoonful for being “too pop,” but the Spoonful’s founder, John Sebastian, was a stalwart of the Greenwich Village folk scene and his traditional roots were impeccable. He was a soulful harmonica sideman who had played and recorded with many folk performers. Last summer, Buffalo Springfield was admitted to Newport because “For What It’s Worth” was a protest song.
As these exceptions suggest, the Folk Mafia—the old-guard folkies on the Newport festival board—are often of two minds. They don’t want to compromise the festival’s standards just to sell more tickets by putting pop-rock performers on the program. But they like to make money to attract the top rank of folk and traditional performers, and acts like the Spoonful and Buffalo Springfield bring in the kids, no question.
For Janis and Big Brother, the board has a simple rationale that makes the decision easier: The blues have been a mainstay of the festival since its earliest days. This year’s Newport program booklet points out that Janis “is considered by many the finest white blues singer today.” The board members know that Janis is a devotee of Bessie Smith, but that may not have fully prepared them for “Ball and Chain.”
The rest of the program is a typical Newport mix. This year, along with festival stalwarts like Pete Seeger and Theo Bikel, Big Brother shares the bill with Joan Baez, Jean Ritchie, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Arlo Guthrie (Woody’s son), Taj Mahal, Richie Havens, the Kweskin Jug Band, Doc Watson, the Almanac Singers, and Cambridge’s Eric von Schmidt, an early mentor of young Bobby Dylan. The urban blues are represented by B. B. King, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and the Junior Wells Band with Buddy Guy on lead guitar. Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys are the sole bluegrass act this year. Almost hidden away in the program there are some interesting anomalies: Kaleidoscope, an electrified band from L.A. that’s influenced by Middle Eastern music, and Buck Owens, a full-bore country music star.
Newport is a prestige gig, not a lucrative one. Bob Dylan’s fee at the ’65 festival, where he famously “went electric,” was $100. This year, B. B. King is getting $1,000. So is Roy Acuff, a country star of an earlier generation, closely rooted in the Appalachian traditions. Ken Threadgill’s band will receive $400, plus travel expenses (they drove from Austin). Big Brother’s take is just $250, but the festival is also paying for our rooms at the Viking Hotel downtown, long the preferred lodging for the folk in-crowd, and it’s covering our rental car. Add it all up, and Big Brother is paid more than any other act on the program.
Janis and Ken Threadgill have a happy reunion, and Janis reconnects with some acquaintances from the San Francisco ballrooms. In her first year with Big Brother, they played a bill at the Avalon with the Jim Kweskin Jug Band from Cambridge. Geoff Muldaur, the Jug Band’s blues vocalist, clarinetist, and washboard rhythm king, is Cambridge’s reigning authority on the blues and an exacting critic of blues practitioners, instrumental and vocal. Somewhat to my surprise he has judged Janis’s singing worthy.*
At Newport, Janis and Geoff fall in together one evening and pass up a late-evening blues jam in favor of a smaller gathering where Jean Ritchie, one of Janis’s earliest influences, is singing informally in one of the big mansions where the festival puts up performers like teenagers at summer camp. Janis sits at Ritchie’s feet and listens reverently to her southern Appalachian ballads, and Geoff’s respect for Janis ramps up a notch.
Being back at Newport is like a weekend holiday for me. Newport has been a high point of midsummer since my first festival, in 1960. I have only missed one since then, when I was in California chasing the Wrong Girl. This year, I am saddened to learn from my Cambridge friends that the Club 47 closed two months ago because it can no longer afford the kind of acts that made it famous. (The demise of the 47 is a sign of changing times, and a portent for the San Francisco ballrooms.)
I’m walking with Janis backstage on Saturday afternoon when I see an old friend approaching. I intercept her and introduce them.
“Janis, this is Joan. Joanie, Janis.”
Neither has the first idea what to say, and for the life of me I can’t think of a way to bridge the gap. They are incompatible elements, forces that exist in different realms. If Joan Baez is water, Janis is fire. For Joan, Newport is home. For Janis, it’s a continent away from San Francisco, the city that has made her feel truly at home for the first time in her life.
They exchange a few awkward words and Joan moves along, but Joan and Janis have more in common than the discomfiting lack of a common language suggests. Joan was the first superstar of the folk revival. Janis is on her way to becoming the first female superstar in rock. For Joan the first Newport Folk Festival, in 1959, was the same kind of launching pad that Monterey provided for Janis just a year ago, and Albert Grossman played a role in creating those opportunities for each of these uniquely talented women.
In the summer of 1959, when he helped George Wein organize the first Newport Folk Festival, Albert was running the Gate of Horn, a small but influential folk club he had established in Chicago a few years earlier. Wein had founded the Newport Jazz Festival in 1954, and he responded positively to a suggestion by Grossman that they trade on the jazz festival’s rising reputation to start an annual folk festival in the same venue.
Through the folk grapevine Albert heard reports about the long-haired girl in Cambridge with the amazing voice. He invited Joan to appear at the Gate of Horn for two weeks in July, before Newport. Joan first declined, then reconsidered and accepted. When Albert heard Joan in person and learned that she had no professional representation, he expressed interest in managing her. Joan didn’t fully trust Albert, but she recognized his good qualities as well as the self-interested ones. A rising star at the Gate of Horn was Bob Gibson, a handsome folkie with a self-assured stage manner who played the twelve-string guitar. Joan developed a crush on Gibson. When he asked her to appear at the first Newport Folk Festival as his guest, she said yes. In front of ten thousand folk fans, Joan rose to the occasion in her duets with Gibson. The response of the public and the press to her Newport appearance was a revelation, and on the basis of that experience, Joan committed her life to music.
Albert held out the lure of a recording contract with Columbia Records, but Joan turned down both Columbia and Albert’s interest in managing her. Instead, she settled on Boston’s Manny Greenhill for management and Maynard Solomon’s Vanguard Records in New York as her record company. Greenhill was a lefty of the between-the-wars folk school, a benign man with a pleasantly craggy face whose modest, what-you-see-is-what-you-get personal manner couldn’t have been farther removed from Albert’s opaque style. Vanguard was a small label, unpretentious, although much respected for its classical recordings, virtually a two-man company, founded by Maynard Solomon and his brother. Manny’s and Maynard’s laid-back styles suited Joan far better than Albert’s grand promises that she could have whatever—or whoever—she wanted in all the world.
For Janis, the decision to go with Albert was less fraught with indecision.
On Saturday evening at Newport, Big Brother does a good job of su
mmoning up the ballroom magic in front of a receptive crowd. The music is strong enough that I want to get to a better vantage point so I can see the band from out front and feel the reactions of the audience. Moving through the backstage compound, I run into Albert. “If you want to know what it’s like when the magic works, this is it,” I tell him. I’m proud of the band, and glad that Albert is hearing them play well, but Albert is less enthusiastic. “Hey,” he says, “it’s got to be better than that.”
To a greater extent than I have revealed to Janis and the boys, I am a fan of Big Brother and the Holding Company. I want them to succeed, because I believe in their magic. I think Albert is too analytical about the band’s music. If he won’t open himself to the magic, he’ll never get what Big Brother is about. From this brief exchange at Newport, and probably from the general tenor of my reports from the road, Albert knows that I am not an objective judge of the band, that I don’t evaluate their performances by the same criteria he applies. Albert doesn’t need advice from fans. He wants the opinions of skeptics. In the conversations between him and the members of the band that take place after their performance at Newport, Albert doesn’t consult me further.
Soon after Big Brother comes offstage, Peter Albin encounters Albert in one of the tents set up backstage for the performers. Albert shakes his head. “I’d like to say it was a good show, but I don’t know, it just wasn’t happening.”
This is not what Peter wants to hear. Like me, Peter felt the set went well and he’s still riding the high. Albert is bringing him down. Peter asks if they can talk about it later. Come to my room tomorrow morning, Albert says.
On the Road with Janis Joplin Page 18
