OCT. 25: Curry Hicks Cage, UMass, Amherst
OCT. 26: Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Mass.
Big Brother is accustomed by now to being based in New York during our eastern tours. They even look forward to returning to the city and the Chelsea Hotel after a weekend in Squaresville. At least in New York we move in the counterculture of arts and music.
Another bright spot is John Fisher, our New York limo driver. We found him in the summer, after Newport. John is New York born and raised. He’s cheerful and ready for anything. Janis took to him right away, and she quickly staked her claim to the shotgun position, sharing the front seat with John. John has driven Richie Havens and Dylan and the Band, all Albert’s clients. Why we didn’t learn about John sooner, I don’t know, but we’ve got him now. No more straight limo drivers from companies that would rather be shuttling business executives from one meeting to another. John’s company is Love Limousines. The rear windows of his personal limo are tinted mauve. From the backseat, it’s like looking out on the world through rose-colored glasses.
Earlier in the year, after our first East Coast tour, Sam Andrew wrote a song that is occasionally added to the set list. It’s called “Downtown Nowhere,” and it’s about the grind of touring, the days when you can’t remember what city you’re in or where you flew in from that morning. On the fall tour, even I sometimes find myself in Downtown Nowhere. In memory, October and November play in a palette of drab grays.
In Cleveland, a contingent of Hells Angels shows up. They know that Big Brother has played benefits for the Angels in San Francisco. By extension, the local chapter feels connected to the band. By implication, they’d like to get in free. Maybe they can help with security? The hall is packed and Cleveland is kind of a tough town. I talk to the promoter, tell him the Angels are our guests. Janis really gets the kids going and a thin line of Angels across the front of the stage seems like a good idea as Big Brother’s set reaches its climax. With us, and with the audience, the Angels are polite, never threatening.
A gig in Cincinnati falls on a Sunday when a film clip of the Beatles is scheduled on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. So no one has to miss it, Mark and George set up a TV set on the stage and Big Brother interrupts their set when the Beatles come on. With a mike held next to the TV, the band and the audience catch “Revolution” in between songs by Janis and the boys. After the concert, a delegation from the counterculture invites us to an after-concert party, where everyone in the band but Peter Albin shoots up smack.
NOV. 1–2, 1968: Electric Factory, Philadelphia
NOV. 3–5: Chicago? (Aragon? Cheetah? dates and venue uncertain)
NOV. 8: Warwick, R.I.
NOV. 9: Woolsey Hall, Yale University, New Haven
NOV. 10: White Plains, N.Y.
NOV. 11: Ridge Arena, Braintree, Mass.
NOV. 12: Jersey City
NOV. 14: Hartford, Connecticut
NOV. 15: Assembly Hall, Hunter College, NYC
NOV. 16: SUNY, Stony Brook, Long Island, N.Y.
On November 2, Cheap Thrills hits number one on Cashbox magazine’s album chart. Three days later, Dick Nixon squeaks by Hubert Humphrey to win the presidency by half a million votes, less than one percentage point. I’m still registered in New York, where the black comedian Dick Gregory is the Liberal Party nominee. Unable to persuade myself to vote for Humphrey, I pull the lever for Gregory to register my feeling that a comedian has more integrity than either major candidate. When I see the election results, I realize that if a hundred thousand disenchanted Democrats in the right precincts had bitten the bullet and voted for Humphrey, we wouldn’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore.
Too late. You go to sleep, you miss your turn.
After the election, the schedule is murderous. Starting on November 8, Big Brother plays eight out of nine nights in a row in small to medium cities along a short stretch of coastal provinces, from Braintree, Massachusetts, to Jersey City. This marathon includes the only gig in New York City on the fall tour, at Hunter College, and ends the next night at the State University of New York out on Long Island. The accretion of gigs happened insidiously, one after another added to what started out as a reasonable schedule, filling in the days off until they were gone. Each time a new gig came up, I checked with the band. For the boys, the string of gigs means more money. Dave, James and Peter are facing the imminent end of their performing income for the foreseeable future. Janis recognizes their need and never puts her foot down to refuse a gig, but the demands of these nine days, capping thirty-some gigs in seven weeks, take their toll. At Hunter College, Janis is exhausted. After the SUNY gig, she falls ill and we are forced to cancel the first two of four gigs on a swing through her home state of Texas, which she has been looking forward to all fall.
NOV. 20, 1968: Austin Municipal Auditorium, Austin, Texas—CANCELLED
NOV. 21: Theater of Performing Arts, San Antonio—CANCELLED
NOV. 24: Coliseum, Dallas
NOV. 26: Denver Auditorium, Denver
NOV. 29: Seattle, Wash.
NOV. 30: Vancouver, B.C.
DEC. 1: Family Dog Benefit, San Francisco
Most of all, Janis was looking forward to playing in Austin. During her brief experiment with college life at the University of Texas, her fellow students, in an act of callous cruelty, voted her the “ugliest man on campus.” Performing there with Big Brother, rubbing her success in their faces, would be her revenge. But it’s Austin and San Antonio that are scratched.
After a week of rest, Janis rallies enough to sing in the Houston Music Hall. For this gig, her family, including her younger siblings Laura and Michael, will drive up from Port Arthur. Her mother phones ahead to reserve tickets, but there is no way Janis is going to let her parents pay to see her perform. I arrange comps and reserve a block of front-row seats for the family and some of Janis’s Austin friends.
After the concert, the Joplins experience firsthand the enthusiasm of Janis’s admirers as they join us in running from the backstage door to the cars when a group of young girls who have been waiting nearby spy Janis and give chase. For Laura and Michael, it’s an exciting glimpse of life in rock and roll, but their parents’ manner suggests concern that Janis is beyond their control in a world they do not and cannot understand. They share a late supper with her in the hotel restaurant before they pile back into the family car for the ninety-mile drive to Port Arthur.
After a concert in Dallas the next evening, we have a day off before a show in Denver. The band has chosen to spend the extra day in Dallas, for the warmer climate, and the weather cooperates. I drive to Dealey Plaza in the rental car, taking with me the Fuji 8-millimeter movie camera I bought early in our first eastern tour. It is five years almost to the day since President John F. Kennedy’s open limousine passed through the small park, and it is the same kind of day, mild and brilliantly clear. I film through the windshield as I drive past the spot where the bullets struck the president, and under the railroad bridge beyond. I double back, park the car, and film the Texas School Book Depository from several angles, zooming in on the window where Lee Harvey Oswald found his vantage point. I go behind the fence atop the grassy knoll, where conspiracy theorists believe a second gunman might have been, and I explore what lies beyond. There’s a broad expanse of dirt and gravel and three sets of train tracks. Plenty of space for a gunman to get away and be long gone in the minutes of panic and confusion after the shooting.
There are flowers at a small memorial in the park, wreaths and bouquets. “In Memory of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy, 1968,” says a handwritten card with some white carnations. A white ribbon laced among an expensive array of red roses says “Lest We Forget.”
I return to my car and retrace the motorcade’s route, continuing beyond the underpass this time. A sign directs me to Parkland Hospital, where they rushed the mortally wounded president. I film the route to t
he hospital and from there I find my way to Love Field, Dallas’s airport, where Lyndon Johnson took the oath of office in Air Force One before the plane took off to carry JFK in his coffin back to Washington.
—
AFTER DENVER, A two-day swing through the Northwest includes Vancouver, B.C., the only gig on foreign soil while I’m with Big Brother. A booking that would have taken us to Hawaii for Janis’s last show with the band has fallen through, and so, on December 1, Janis and Big Brother end where they began, in San Francisco, at a benefit for the Family Dog, which brings it full circle back to Chet Helms, who presided over the creation of Big Brother in the first place. This seems fitting, somehow, but it is not a night to celebrate.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Memphis, Tennessee
WHILE BIG BROTHER and I are powering through October and November, driven by the imperatives of the schedule, Albert is trying to cobble together Janis’s new backup band. He consults Janis, to be sure, but Janis is on the road. He enlists Nick Gravenites and Mike Bloomfield, his old Chicago friends, to propose musicians and help shape the sound.
Nick and Mike are both rooted in the blues. Mike left Paul Butterfield last year to found the Electric Flag, which included Nick as vocalist and songwriter. Mike wanted to create a band that would blend strains of jazz, soul, and blues into a new kind of electrified American music, and he achieved at least part of his vision. The Flag’s debut at the Monterey Pop Festival was well received. The group’s first album, “A Long Time Comin’,” performed well on the charts and got good notices. Mike wrote and the Flag provided the music for Peter Fonda’s feature film The Trip, about an LSD trip, which everyone I knew who ever took LSD found to be terminally strange and unlike anything they had experienced on acid. The Flag’s music got better reviews than the movie and the band seemed to be on its way, but just a year after Monterey, Mike, bedeviled by insomnia and heroin, took his leave. The Flag flapped on for a while without him, but by the time Janis and Big Brother go their separate ways, the Electric Flag is history.
What Mike attempted with the Flag bears a relationship to what Janis wants in her new band. She wants a band with horns and a keyboard that will evoke the soul sound of R&B without imitating it. It’s a fine distinction, one that confuses the musicians who are hired to fulfill the vaguely defined vision. Janis and Albert plan to debut the new band in the new year, after two months of rehearsals, but while Janis is still on the road with Big Brother, Albert manages to secure a slot for Janis at the Stax-Volt Christmas show in Memphis on December 21. This is potentially a brilliant stroke. It’s the kind of strategic move at which Albert excels. If Janis and her new band can win over the soul music crowd in Memphis, the reviews will validate her change of direction and help jump-start the next phase of her career.
Stax and Volt records are the premier labels of the Memphis sound, and the main competitors, in the world of rhythm and blues, with Detroit’s Motown. Otis Redding recorded for Stax. Albert King joined the label in ’66. Sam and Dave are turning out one hit after another for the label. Booker T. and the MGs are the house band. Wilson Pickett records at Stax, even though his label is Atlantic.
The Memphis sound is closer to the roots of the blues, more soulful, not as inclined to pander to white tastes as Motown’s slicker hits. Funkier. Which is not to say it’s any less professionally arranged, performed and recorded. In Memphis, Janis will have her work cut out for her to win over a predominantly black audience that regards the Stax and Volt artists as members of their immediate families.
When Janis awakens in her Noe Street apartment on the morning after her last performance with Big Brother, her next gig—her debut gig with the new, as-yet-unrehearsed band—is less than three weeks away.
Janis and the band rehearse first at Big Brother’s Warehouse, which makes poignantly apparent the love Janis and the boys have for each other. As wounded as David and Peter and James are by her departure, they make the Warehouse available. It belongs to Janis and Sam as much as to them. The money they all earned together still pays the rent.
Like the Electric Flag, Albert’s Canadian group, the Paupers, has also folded. The bass player, Brad Campbell, is brought in to anchor the rhythm in Janis’s new band. On alto saxophone is Terry Clements, an English expatriate who played briefly with the Flag in their declining days and just as briefly with the Buddy Miles Express, a group formed by the Flag’s drummer. Terry came to San Francisco early in the rock renaissance, and he is thoroughly assimilated. He looks more like a hippie than anyone else among the recruits, complete with long hair held in place by a bandanna around his head. Since playing with the Flag and Buddy Miles, Terry has had some gigs as a sideman, but he’s looking for something more comfortable, more permanent, more familial.
Marcus Doubleday is also plucked from the remnants of the Electric Flag to play trumpet. Marcus is an eastern urban musician, and it’s rumored that he has a drug problem.*
The organ man, Bill King, and Roy Markowitz, the drummer, are fresh from New York. King read in the press about Janis leaving Big Brother and took the initiative. He phoned Albert’s office and asked to be considered for her new band. The office set up an audition where Bill met Roy, and both of them made the cut. Bill seems out of place in San Francisco, but he’s a serious musician and maybe he’ll shine on the road. Roy is a New Yorker through and through. He’s a natural comedian and he takes on the role of the class clown.
Sam Andrew will discharge the lead guitar duties on his own. The idea to add Jerry Miller to the new band didn’t pan out. Sam and Janis are my friends, my points of reference in this new aggregation of what strike me as very disparate personalities.
The Warehouse is hard to heat on the rainy December days, and soon the rehearsals move to a synagogue that Bill Graham leases next to the original Fillmore Auditorium. Bill manages the Carlos Santana Blues Band, at this time only locally known. They use the synagogue as a rehearsal space. Through Bill’s good offices, Janis’s band shares it with Santana for the high-pressure rehearsals to prepare for the Stax-Volt show.
I’m in frequent touch with the office as Albert begins to plan the winter tour in the East. When I stop by the rehearsals, it seems to me that no one knows just what they’re supposed to be doing. Without much direction, the musicians are trying to figure out their job descriptions. Mike Bloomfield is here to help with arrangements, but Mike isn’t one to crack the whip and focus the band members on the task at hand.
Sam takes on the job of teaching the new guys the songs that Janis wants to keep from the Big Brother repertoire. He offers suggestions about how to fit the horns and the organ into the arrangements, but Sam is uncertain in his new role as Janis’s employee and he isn’t sure how far he can go in guiding the style of the new group. When it comes to the new songs, he’s as much in the dark as the others about how to proceed. What is painfully lacking is a coherent vision of how this band is supposed to sound.
Gone from the tentative playlist are “Coo-Coo/Oh, Sweet Mary” and “Easy Rider.” Among the songs the band is working on, there are no obvious connections to traditional roots, black or white, save for the fact that rhythm and blues, like rock and roll, is built on the solid foundation of the twelve-bar blues.
Bill King offers some ideas about the horn lines on the Bee Gees’ “To Love Somebody,” which Janis wants to include, and he recommends a song that was a staple in his previous band, Eddie Floyd’s soul hit, “Raise Your Hand,” for her consideration.
Janis herself has no idea how to lead the rehearsals. She can say, “That’s it,” when she hears something she likes. She may suggest that a song needs a stronger introduction or ending, but mostly she looks to Mike Bloomfield or Nick Gravenites when the tunes aren’t coming together.
In Big Brother, during my time with them, Janis was almost always confident and assertive, ever ready to put in her two cents, to argue a point or propose a course of action. In the b
and that took her on as lead vocalist she rose to become the first among equals, and she was comfortable taking that position when it suited her—about the music or anything else—because she knew Sam, Dave, Peter, and James were there to back her up or take charge when she faltered. Now, among the musicians and helpers recruited to form the backup band she has dreamed of, Janis is passive and uncertain, and there is no one to take up the slack.
She has the smarts and the force of personality to be the bandleader, but at this turning point in her career an old habit from her younger days holds her back. When she was growing up in Port Arthur, her intelligence was appreciated in her home. Her parents instilled in Janis and her siblings, Laura and Michael, respect for literature, art, and music, but these values were not common coin among Janis’s Texas contemporaries. In a Gulf coast oil town, displays of intellectual agility were not the surest way to make friends in the public school mainstream. Even among Janis’s small group of like-minded friends, being a whip-smart mouthy girl was not always the best strategy for earning peer approval. In San Francisco, there was no lack of cerebral wattage among the founders of the scene, but it has grown too fast for an intellectual tradition to keep pace. The philosophizing of the Beats has been reduced to simple platitudes like “Go with the flow” and “Let it all hang out.” At home and on the road, among promoters, fans, and members of the press, Janis often plays to the level of those around her, not condescendingly, but because she wants to fit in, to be one of the crowd. This habit has become so ingrained that she sometimes undervalues her own exceptional intelligence and the answers it might offer for her current problems.
“It has to do with a certain self-abnegation. She would put herself down to strong men. She liked men who knew what they were saying, who didn’t have a thousand self-doubts about the world and what they were. She liked men who would say things with a lot of conviction and knowledge and power and shit like that. She dug that. She dug powerful aggressive-type men. And she’d put herself down in front of those men, you dig? . . . She really depended on people to do things. People she felt know more than she did. Whether that is true or not is moot.”
On the Road with Janis Joplin Page 20
