On the Road with Janis Joplin

by John Byrne Cooke

  Sunday is a day of rest before we head back to New York and a month of airplanes, rental cars, and Midwest motels. Peter presents himself at Albert’s room in the Viking Hotel at the appointed time. He is ushered in by Sally, Albert’s wife. Once they’re settled, Albert says, “Something’s just not happening. I don’t know, I guess maybe it’s the San Francisco Sound that I’m just not into, but I’m used to things where the rhythm is really tight and it’s all together.”

  This is Albert’s third attempt at encouraging some kind of progress toward solving what he perceives as Big Brother’s technical problems, their unevenness, the lack of consistency. The band didn’t accept his request that James should be replaced, made at the Golden Bear. They haven’t tried switching Sam to the bass and Peter to guitar, as Albert proposed after the recording at the Grande Ballroom. Albert has pointed to what he sees as the shortcomings and he has suggested remedies. At Newport, he speaks to David Getz as well as Peter about the rhythm section, but they offer no alternative solutions.

  Within days after we return to New York, Janis calls a band meeting in her room at the Chelsea Hotel and announces that she is leaving Big Brother.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Downtown Nowhere

  EVEN BEFORE NEWPORT, Janis was facing a decision she couldn’t put off for long. In Big Brother, she is one of four vocalists. Sam, Peter, and James each sing lead on one or more of the group’s songs. Janis is the lead vocalist, but she shares the spotlight with her bandmates. In the summer of 1968, a year after Monterey, her rising renown offers her a new possibility. It is something she dreamed long before Big Brother, a fantasy then. Now it might be a reality. She can claim center stage for her own, sharing the spotlight with no one.

  “I love those guys more than anybody else in the whole world. They know that. But if I had any serious ideas of myself as a musician, I had to leave. . . . We worked four, six nights a week for two years doing the same tunes, and we’d put everything into them we could. We just used each other up. . . . I wasn’t doing anything but standing still and being a success.”

  Janis Joplin

  Janis has dreaded telling the boys she has decided to leave the band. She knows her decision will hurt Sam and James and Peter and Dave. She knows she will be criticized. She knows she might fail. But if she doesn’t make the attempt, she will never know if she has what it takes to succeed on her own.

  For Sam, Janis’s announcement comes as no surprise. Janis told him of her decision before Newport, and she asked him to come with her in the new band she would form. At the meeting in the Chelsea, Sam senses something in her tone that makes him suspect Janis has changed her mind.

  Peter takes the news badly, erupting in anger that doesn’t mask the fear sparked by the sudden collapse of his world. Dave Getz realizes that this is something he has almost been expecting.

  “I think from Monterey on, early ’68 on, we all began to sense that there was the possibility that Janis would quit at some point. . . . Although it was never verbalized, never talked about. No one wanted—it was unthinkable, but I think everybody had it on their minds.”

  David Getz

  When the others leave, Sam stays behind, and Janis says, “I don’t want you to come with me either, Sam.”

  “Big Bother and the Folding Company” isn’t funny anymore.

  Soon after the band meeting, Janis takes me aside and asks me to stay as her road manager when her new band is formed. To me, Janis’s reasons are self-evident and inescapable. Staying with Big Brother is easy. Leaving them is much harder. Janis has chosen the more difficult course, the greater challenge.

  My choice is easier than hers. Without Janis, there’s no certainty that Big Brother will continue to perform.

  The band’s bookings extend through November. Janis will stay until these obligations have been fulfilled. At first it’s awkward, but the routines of the road are familiar. After a while it’s possible for Janis and the boys to continue as before, living in the Now of airplanes, rental cars, hotels, and gigs.

  AUG. 2–3, 1968: Fillmore East

  AUG. 9: Kiel Auditorium, St. Louis

  AUG. 14: Indiana Beach, Monticello, Ind.

  AUG. 16–17: Aragon Ballroom/Cheetah, Chicago

  AUG. 18: Tyrone Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis

  AUG. 23: Singer Bowl, Queens, N.Y.

  A few days after Newport, we play the Fillmore East again, this time with the Staple Singers and Ten Years After. As the kids stream into the house, I spy Albert’s partner, Bert Block, standing at the back of the hall with a middle-aged guy in a suit. Bert’s an old hand in the music business. Tall, slightly stooped, bald on top, with a broad smile, he was a drummer and band leader in the big band era, an agent who had his own booking agency before he joined Albert to replace departing partner John Court. Since Bert came aboard, I’ve had frequent dealings with him about bookings and the day-to-day details of Big Brother’s schedule. “Hey, John!” he calls to me. “Come over here. I want you to meet somebody. John Cooke, Benny Goodman.”

  I manage a handshake with the guy in the suit and mumble some inanity. What I may know, from seeing The Benny Goodman Story, but don’t have foremost in mind at this moment, is that in his day Goodman was as much a rebel as the San Francisco rockers of the sixties. He didn’t care about the waltzes and foxtrots that were considered respectable for white audiences. Goodman wanted to play what the black bands were playing. He broke the color barrier. He was the first bandleader to have an integrated band. He performed and recorded with black musicians. With Teddy Wilson on piano and Lionel Hampton on vibes, he started a revolution. Now Benny Goodman is in the Fillmore East in a suit and tie, looking like a businessman, because his daughter has the hots for Janis and Big Brother.

  Janis sings the gospel song “Down by the Riverside” with Mavis Staples in a duet that brings down the house. After the show, Bert Block escorts Benny Goodman and his daughter backstage. Goodman fille meets Janis and gets the thrill of her life. What Goodman père thinks of the evening’s entertainment is later related by Bert to his wife, Barbara Carroll, a noted jazz pianist and vocalist.* “Janis, in her inimitable obscenity, shocked the pants off Benny Goodman,” Barbara told me. “Because Benny was kind of a straightlaced guy, and his daughter was a young girl, and for Benny to hear this in front of his daughter, or for his daughter to hear this—it was all kind of a ‘moment to be treasured,’ as Bert described it.”

  We face a spate of gigs in the Midwest before we can look forward to some time in California.

  Janis’s decision not to take Sam with her doesn’t end their friendship. As we travel from city to city he helps her think about her new band. “You know who you should get to go with you?” he says. “Jerry Miller, from Moby Grape. He’s one of the finest guitar players I’ve ever heard. He’s got a good sound.” After a couple more gigs, Janis tells Sam, “Let’s get Jerry Miller and you to come along with me.” Sam is back on board, and that’s the way it stays.

  Sam is a link to the past, to Big Brother, to the band and the city that embraced Janis and made her feel at home. Janis and Sam write songs together and they sing together. This is a connection Janis needs. It’s too hard to cut at once all the ties that bind.

  Peter and David and James didn’t know they almost lost Sam at the outset, so the news that he’ll go with Janis comes as an unwelcome aftershock. James, being James, accepts it as part of the cosmic inevitability. Peter and David express degrees of anger and resentment before the demands of touring and playing together paper over the disruption.

  Cheap Thrills is released and it shoots up the charts. It goes gold in three days. The satisfaction Big Brother takes from the album’s success is bittersweet.

  —

  AS WORD OF Janis’s defection spreads among Big Brother’s fans in San Francisco, the consensus that coalesces is that Janis has betrayed Big Brother. Many see
Albert Grossman as a Svengali who has pulled Janis away from the band, motivated by nothing but money.

  These facile conclusions overlook Janis’s strength of will and Albert’s dedication to his artists. Albert understands what Big Brother means to Janis and what she owes them. Three times he tried to reconfigure the band to strengthen the music, but the band rejected each of his suggestions. Like Pennebaker, Albert recognizes that Janis is the incomparable element in the band, and his primary dedication is to her. His discomfort with the status quo has become evident to Janis and the implication is clear, even if he never states it explicitly: So long as she remains with Big Brother, she can’t know how far she might go as a singer.

  “See, Albert deals in sensible things. . . . The artist is the magic, you dig? I learned that a long time ago. And it’s sensible to realize that without Janis, Big Brother was just another band. It was sensible to think that.”

  Nick Gravenites

  And if Albert ever did articulate the choice frankly, his view didn’t dictate Janis’s decision. The most succinct refutation of Albert as Svengali comes from Sam Andrew, looking back on these events long after the fact. He framed it as a rhetorical question: “Can you imagine anyone making Janis do something she didn’t want to do?”*

  “[Albert] doesn’t direct me. He just finds out where I want to go, then he helps me get there.”

  Janis Joplin

  All the same, when we return to San Francisco before the Labor Day weekend, the boys take some comfort in the condolences offered by their friends.

  For a time, my attention is diverted to politics as bad news breaks from the Democratic nominating convention in Chicago. The TV news film of convention delegates being manhandled and of newsmen and hippie demonstrators beaten by Chicago police is shocking. Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut condemns “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago” from the podium, inciting in Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley a rage that makes him look like a choleric gargoyle. Lip-readers interpret Daley’s response to Ribicoff, shouted from the convention floor, as “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch! You lousy motherfucker! Go home!” The mayhem dramatizes the divisions within the Democratic party and in the society at large, and it taints the anointing of Vice President Hubert Humphrey as the Democratic nominee.

  Three weeks earlier, in Miami Beach, behind a wall of security that kept protesters at bay, the Republicans nominated Richard Nixon on the first ballot. On the evening of his acceptance speech, police and five hundred National Guard troops fought rioters in Miami’s black ghetto. They are still called “Negroes” in the summer of 1968, not yet “blacks” consistently in the press. Six miles away, in the convention hall, ringed by barricades and beyond the sound of gunfire and the smell of smoke, Tricky Dick soberly proclaimed, “My fellow Americans, the dark long night for America is about to end.” The Republicans’ Fortress Miami arrangements and the indiscriminate police violence in Chicago show that the Establishment is digging in for the long haul.

  Big Brother’s first jobs back in California reaffirm what they have achieved together and encourage them to take the pleasure to be gained from living in the moment. A Labor Day weekend concert at the Palace of Fine Arts is a quintessential San Francisco gig—outdoors, with a view of the Bay, the fans generous in the welcome they accord one of the city’s signature bands.

  A few days later, I pick up Janis and the boys for a flight to L.A., and a gig that is a milestone in Big Brother’s career. Since the Beatles sold out the Hollywood Bowl in 1965, it has become a major rock venue. On the Friday after Labor Day, 1968, Big Brother has top billing, with Iron Butterfly and the Fraternity of Man opening. Playing under the white arch of the historic band shell, looking out over the audience that fills the natural amphitheater, Big Brother plays like a band unified in their music and their mission.

  “I always have a sense of history, as you do, John, so visiting the Hollywood Bowl was a big thrill,” Sam Andrew wrote. “All of the concerts that had taken place there, classical and otherwise . . . I remember standing in the wings, feeling all that history and seeing all those people and exulting.”

  Sam Andrew

  The next morning, I’m headed for Big Sur and this year’s folk festival.

  Before the music begins, with the fog lingering along the coast, Mimi Fariña marries Milan Melvin, an announcer for KSAN, the hippest of the underground FM stations in San Francisco. Milan was Janis’s lover for a time soon after she joined Big Brother, when he was rooming in North Beach with Carl Gottlieb, of the Committee. Janis’s roommate and clothes maker, Linda Gravenites, created Mimi’s glorious wedding dress. Mimi visited Linda and Janis’s Noe Street apartment to plan and fit the dress. That was where she first met Janis. The connections among my Cambridge friends and the San Francisco community keep revealing themselves.*

  The Big Sur festival is a world away from the Hollywood Bowl. For me it’s like a family reunion. The Charles River Valley Boys are on the program again, and I resume the role of bluegrass singer and picker as if I never put it aside. At some point in the afternoon concert I am at center stage with Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, Joan Baez, and the festival’s organizer, Nancy Carlen, singing a song whose name will escape me thirty-odd years later when a photo of the moment, snapped by Robert Altman (not the film director but the San Francisco photographer of the same name) appears in People magazine. The song may have faded, but not the feeling of being back in Big Sur on a few days’ holiday between Big Brother gigs.

  The idyll is over too soon. Big Brother plays three days at Fillmore West, and then we are on a plane for L.A. again, this time for an even larger bowl—the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, seating capacity upward of ninety thousand, where it is evident that football can still outdraw an all-day rock concert. In the vast arena, the music fans fill only a fraction of the seats.

  The event is billed as “An American Music Show.” Janis’s old flame Country Joe McDonald is here with the Fish. The rest of the acts are an eclectic assortment: Joan Baez, the Everly Brothers, the Byrds, the Junior Wells Band with Buddy Guy, the Mothers of Invention, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Albert King, and Wilson Pickett. Even in this company Big Brother closes the show, another measure of how far they have come in so short a time.

  The stage is on the football field, but the audience is confined to the stadium seats, held in check by rows of Pasadena and state police. As ever, a seated audience is a challenge to Janis. She wants to put them in motion. The encore is “Down on Me,” the semi-hit single from the Mainstream album. Janis pleads with the cops to turn the kids loose, and she finally boosts the crowd’s energy to the level of spontaneous fission. Here they come, through the cops, over the railings and through the fence, an unstoppable wave.

  This time Janis gets more than she bargained for. She comes to the edge of the stage to touch a few hands, but that only encourages the fans. By the time the song ends they’re all over the stage, surrounding her, touching her, grabbing at her, pulling on her beads and bracelets and her clothes. The police help Janis get into a limousine to take her from the stage to the dressing room. Sam is in the limo with Janis. The fans pile on the car, even on the roof. Sam is afraid the roof may collapse, but it holds. The fans don’t care about the members of the band who were left behind, so we follow on foot. We wait in the dressing room for the crowd to disperse before we make our escape.

  —

  NOW AND AGAIN, Janis likes to shop. On an expedition to Beverly Hills when we were here in the spring, she ventured into Paraphernalia, a happening boutique that features hip designer Betsey Johnson’s fashions. Clad in jeans and a T-shirt, Janis half expected to be tossed out as an undesirable. Instead, the manager recognized her and fell all over her, offering to have anything she wanted made up for her at off-the-rack prices.

  After the show at the Rose Bowl, Janis shops in Beverly Hills again, this time accompanied by her attorney. Bob Gordon has a Porsche, and
Janis has been in touch with him about finding her a car. He takes Janis to his German car dealer, where they show her a 1965 convertible—a cabriolet in Porsche terminology—that they have cherried out with a hand-rubbed paint job in pearl-gray lacquer. Janis falls in love with the car and within days it is hers.

  SEPT. 27: University of California, Irvine

  SEPT. 28: San Diego

  SEPT. 29: Tape Hollywood Palace TV show, L.A.

  SEPT. 29: Long Beach Sports Arena

  During this month in California, Dave Richards decides he’s had enough of the road. Dave is confident that Mark Braunstein can take over responsibility for the equipment. Hire another guy and let Marko train him, and you’ll be fine, Dave tells the band. He stays on the job until somebody comes up with George Ostrow, a lean, sleepy-looking guy who seems bemused by the band and the job and the road, but he’s willing to learn. This transition is managed without my having to take part in it, beyond notifying Albert’s office of the change.

  Life magazine reviews Cheap Thrills in its September 20 issue. The article is headlined “Singer With a Bordello Voice” and focuses most of its attention on Janis.

  We tape a show for ABC’s Hollywood Palace. In a letter home, Janis alerts her family to watch it when it airs.

  The work begins in earnest when we fly east in the first days of October.

  OCT. 4, 1968: Public Hall, Cleveland

  OCT. 5: SUNY, Buffalo, N.Y.

  OCT. 11: War Memorial Auditorium, Syracuse, N.Y.

  OCT. 13: Music Hall, Cincinnati

  OCT. 15: Grande Ballroom, Detroit

  OCT. 18: Pennsylvania State University, State College

  OCT. 19: Spectrum, Philadelphia

  OCT. 20: Alexandria Roller Rink, Alexandria, Va.