On the Road with Janis Joplin

by John Byrne Cooke

  Nick Gravenites

  In the new band, Janis is on unfamiliar ground. This is nothing like her life with Big Brother. This is the Music Business.

  When rehearsal is over for the day, Janis lets off steam by careening around the city in her Porsche convertible, often with a couple of the new boys crammed into the cockpit, as she shows off her uniquely repainted ride.

  While we were on the road in the fall, Dave Richards took Janis’s new Porsche into Big Brother’s Warehouse, where he labored over it lovingly. Janis asked him for a custom paint job and left the rest up to him. Dave has covered every inch of the L.A. Porsche dealer’s pearl-gray paint job with hand-painted images of birds and butterflies and satellites and psychedelic mushrooms and undersea creatures and, along one side, a lovely pastoral landscape. A group portrait of Big Brother and the Holding Company adorns the left front fender.

  “I actually found Janis’s Porsche for her. She was in L.A. and called me, and said that she wanted to buy a Porsche. . . . I had a Porsche, and had frequent dealings with a particular Porsche agency in Beverly Hills. They had a Porsche . . . and I went and saw it and then told Janis about it. It had seventeen coats of lacquer, kind of oyster lacquer. [The dealer] said it was the best paint job they ever did in their lives. And after Dave Richards finished his job, Janis went down there and showed them. And I never heard the end of it.”

  Bob Gordon

  —

  WE FLY TO Memphis two days ahead of the Stax-Volt gig and hold a final rehearsal at the Stax studios in an old movie theater, where we are made welcome.

  The rehearsal is intense. This gig is no tryout in an out-of-the-way place. This is Memphis, home of the blues, home of Gus Cannon’s Jug Stompers, home of the Memphis sound. Janis and the band work on getting three numbers nailed. Eddie Floyd’s “Raise Your Hand” has worked out well and it has become Janis’s favorite among the new songs. The Bee Gees’ “To Love Somebody” is ready too. For a finale, she’ll do “Piece of My Heart” or “Ball and Chain.” Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.

  Friday evening, the night before the show, we’re invited to the home of Stax president Jim Stewart for a cocktail party. Janis and the band can’t wait to see what a cocktail party for the cream of the Memphis sound is like, and they are not disappointed. The house is a ranch-style mansion. It’s on the edge of town, surrounded by a plot of woods. Indoors, it is apparent that this is a select gathering. The partygoers are decked out in their flamboyant finest. Booker T. is here, and Stax’s number one songwriter and producer, Isaac Hayes, but our gang are even more impressed to meet Steve Cropper and Donald “Duck” Dunn, the MGs’ guitar and bass players, Stax-Volt’s premier sidemen. Janis’s guys rub elbows with these musical idols as they group around the dining room table to snack on shrimp, sandwiches, and chicken livers wrapped in bacon.

  The music that Stewart has piped throughout the house keeps the party in a reflective mood; it is from unreleased tapes by Otis Redding. The first anniversary of his death has just passed, and in this setting his absence is still a wound not fully healed.

  But Janis is always ready for a party. She drinks, laughs at the jokes, talks about music.

  We considered names for the new band in the San Francisco rehearsals, but none of the suggestions won out. The Janis Joplin Revue (boring). Janis and the Joplinaires (funny, but not a serious proposal). Janis Joplin’s Pleasure Principle. Janis Joplin and the Sordid Flavors, a play on words that probably originated with Janis or Sam. For the Stax-Volt show, she’s billed simply as Janis Joplin. When Janis sees a poster for the show, she’s embarrassed to see that her name and photo are larger than those of the soul stars she hopes to win over.

  The concert, billed as Stax-Volt’s “Yuletide Thing,” is at the Mid-South Coliseum, which is known as “The Entertainment Capital of the Mid-South.” The coliseum boasts ten thousand seats. The audience is overwhelmingly black, and they are dressed to the nines. The performers are even flashier. Everyone’s dressed up except our band and crew. Janis is decked out in a cherry-red pantsuit. She moves with apparent confidence among the other groups backstage, conscious of the attention she attracts from all sides. The other groups have matching outfits, but our band members have no unified style. Here, the eclectic haberdashery of San Francisco musicians doesn’t stand out as adventurous. They look like a bunch of guys picked at random off a street located far from Memphis.

  The show moves like clockwork. One band leaves the stage and the next group comes out, they plug in, and they play. The changeovers take only a few minutes. Janis is next to last on the program. Mark Braunstein and George Ostrow have worked with the equipment men from the other bands to speed the changeover before Janis comes onstage. The plan that involves the least shuffling of equipment has our band set up in a mirror image of their usual layout. Mark talks to our musicians backstage to prepare them. “Can you guys just get on the stage and play, wherever the amplifiers happen to be, please. Everything’s backwards. Can you please just get up there and play? Plug in and play?”

  When the time comes, the changeover would be considered fast for a show at Fillmore West, but here it seems to take forever as Janis’s guys sort themselves out and adjust this and that and check their tuning. In the Coliseum, the audience is growing restless. Offstage, Janis can’t keep still. She bounces around, getting herself worked up. As usual, she has tried to drink enough to give her the elevating boost she wants, staying on the upside of the curve until she’s onstage, where her own energy is released and sustains her through the performance. This evening she may have slipped over the top of the rise. “Come on!” she says, under her breath, then louder, until finally the announcement comes that launches her into the light.

  The band is ragged, but they’re trying. The audience is curious to hear in person this white girl they’ve heard so much about. They’re polite, but this isn’t the Monterey Jazz Festival, where black and white Californians rose to celebrate a San Francisco band and their stunning female vocalist. The Memphis audience stay in their seats and the applause is—polite.

  There may be a political edge to the audience’s indifferent reception. The loss of Martin Luther King and the rise of militant black power has made black Americans more wary of whites, less inclined to welcome white musicians riffing on black sounds. In the folk days we sang “Black and white together,” but the new theme is “Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud!”

  When Janis wrings out the final notes of “Ball and Chain,” there are no cheers. It’s clear that the applause won’t warrant an encore. Standing with Janis and the band backstage, I’m about to say, “That’s it,” when Mark Braunstein comes backstage. He has reached the same conclusion. “No encore,” he says. Onstage, the changeover to the final act is already under way.

  The winter solstice is the darkest day. That’s how it feels for Janis in Memphis, but the solstice also marks a turning toward the light.

  —

  IN SAN FRANCISCO, the band members disperse to their respective lodgings. Some go home for Christmas. Janis flies to Texas. There are no further gigs on the calendar. On January 2, the band will report for more rehearsals.

  I remove myself to what has become my preferred retreat since I lived in Carmel. Three years ago, I was invited to a picnic in Big Sur for Joan Baez’s birthday. We sat on the grass at Esalen and ate and laughed and took in the great reach of the Pacific Ocean. I don’t remember if I was introduced to the sulfur baths that day, but that’s when I was introduced to Peter Melchior and his wife, Marya. Peter was working in Esalen’s kitchen and teaching ceramics workshops. By that summer, when I attended my first Big Sur Folk Festival on the Esalen grounds, Peter had become a friend. He and Marya live north of Esalen’s buildings, across a creek that tumbles down a steep gully, in a small house on the edge of an improbably well-kept lawn, across from an improbably substantial home that belongs to the M
urphy family, who own all the habitable land on this broad ledge that was hewn from the Coast Range by tectonic shifts the present inhabitants hope not to experience.

  Peter is close to some members of the Committee and some of the musicians I know from California and Cambridge in ways that take me years to unravel. He seems to know everyone, and everyone holds him in high regard. In December 1968, I know Peter and Marya well enough to call them and ask if I can come down for Christmas.

  I sleep late, as they do, and I rarely look at a clock. The sulfur baths are part of the daily routine. On an evening in the week between Christmas and New Year’s there are ten or a dozen people in Peter and Marya’s living room after dinnertime, gathered around the fireplace. As the wine and joints and conversations flow, our thoughts turn to the remote world of politics and war, to this interregnum between the November election and the inauguration of Richard Milhous Nixon, and someone proposes that we throw the I Ching to see what it has to say. The question we ask is “What’s happening?” The hexagram we get is Po, the Splitting Apart. The implications are unsettling and uncanny: Inferior men are rising to positions of power. It is useless to oppose them. The wise course for the superior man is to remain quiet and take no part, for the condition of the time cannot be corrected by action, only by waiting for the condition to change. Careful reading of the interpretations reveals a glimmer of hope. Evil carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. This too shall pass.

  For those with a grounding in folk music, there’s an equivalent wisdom: To everything there is a season. Turn, turn, turn.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  On the Road Again

  JANIS AND THE new band start the new year by rehearsing for a solid month. Over the Christmas break, Marcus Doubleday decided to grapple with his drug problem. He is replaced on trumpet by Terry Hensley, whose personal style is similar to Terry Clements’s. We now have two longish-haired, California-style horn players named Terry.

  After the Stax-Volt gig, nobody sets eyes again on Bill King. He flew from Memphis to New York to spend Christmas with his family. The rumor is that the draft was after him and he split for Canada.

  To fill Bill’s seat at the Hammond B3 keyboard, Janis takes the band to see an organist who has been recommended to her. Richard Kermode has been in San Francisco only a short time, and he must have arrived from a distant planet, because when Janis phoned him out of the blue, he scarcely seemed to know who she was.

  “I had never even heard of Janis Joplin until about a month before I joined the band. . . . She called me one day and she said ‘I’m Janis,’ and I said ‘Well, yeah, I remember seeing that name on a record,’ and I was totally unaware of like [Big Brother] and all of that, and I said ‘Well, it’s a gig, and I need a gig so I’ll take it.’”

  Richard Kermode

  At the club where Janis and the band hear him, Richard isn’t playing rock, but he impresses them enough that Janis decides to give him a try. With his shaggy hair and full beard and mustache, Richard bears a resemblance to Lon Chaney, Jr., when he turns into the Wolf Man, but he is a benevolent spirit. He is young, laid-back, a little shy, ready to be everyone’s friend, quietly surprised at his good luck in landing this job.

  Albert’s plans for Janis’s first solo tour are taking shape. Even more so than with Big Brother, his approach is cautious. Big Brother had a solid fan base in California when they first came east, and word from the Monterey Pop Festival had aroused intense interest. For the new band, Albert adopts a reverse strategy. He knows it will be tough for Janis to win acceptance on Big Brother’s home ground, so there are no warm-up gigs in California, no trial runs to Fresno and Merced. He books an eastern tour, hoping some generous reviews will help persuade San Francisco to give her a chance.

  I book airline flights, rental cars, and hotels, and talk with promoters about the gigs. By mid-January, the tour is in place. We’ll be in the East for a little over five weeks, from February into March. It’s a repeat, but shorter, of Big Brother’s winter–spring itinerary the previous year. Once again, we will open out of town.

  A gig in Rindge, New Hampshire, is billed as a “sound test.” At the Music Hall in Boston we’ll do a “preview,” as if we’re a Broadway show, risking the scrutiny of the Boston critics before braving the Big Apple.

  Rindge is only sixty miles from Cambridge, so I book us into a hotel close to Harvard Square, which turns out to be a lucky choice. We get back late from the Rindge gig, and when we wake up the next morning there’s a foot of snow on eastern Massachusetts and more falling. By evening the streets are plowed. We get to and from the Music Hall without a problem, and the show goes well enough. The next day’s Boston Globe headline reads “Howling Storm Cripples the Northeast.” There is no overnight review.

  The real test is New York, where we’re booked for a midweek two-night stand at Fillmore East. Janis is comfortable in any house run by Bill Graham. With the Grateful Dead sharing the bill, it’s old home week. The members of the band are pumped to be in New York backing Janis Joplin. They’ve got the will, if they can find the way to pull it all together.

  The opening night is sold out and the press is on hand in force. Not just the newspapers, but Time and Newsweek, Life and Look. Janis has the rundown from Myra Friedman, whose responsibility for Janis’s publicity at this point is largely a matter of fending off the second-stringers and choosing among the many requests for interviews. In advance of the Fillmore East gig, Myra has been contacted by 60 Minutes, a new show CBS debuted a few months ago that runs every other week on Tuesday night. It’s billed as a newsmagazine program. Three or four long pieces in an hour. They’re doing a segment on Fillmore East and they want to include Janis, but Albert isn’t about to put this untried band on national television, not until it wins critical acceptance. When 60 Minutes requests permission to film Janis’s performance, Albert says no.

  On Tuesday, opening night at Fillmore East, there’s a snowstorm that is trifling in the city but more serious upstate. Unwilling to risk getting snowbound on the New York State Thruway, Albert remains in Bearsville, and he isn’t here to deal with what we find waiting for us at the gig.

  CBS reporter Mike Wallace, the host of the 60 Minutes show, is on hand with a camera crew. The producer corners me and asks to interview Janis on camera and to let them film the performance. Do you have permission from Albert’s office? I ask. He hems and haws and it’s clear he doesn’t. When I don’t have word that the office has approved an interview, I usually ask Janis if she wants to do it. That’s the routine for magazine and newspaper reporters. This is television. Janis is impressed that CBS wants to interview her, but wary, which is her customary reaction to surprises. She’d like the publicity, but she’s against letting 60 Minutes film the show and isn’t sure about doing an interview.

  Myra Friedman is here, and she’s not about to countermand Albert. We try repeatedly to reach Albert by phone, to no avail. Bill Graham jumps in on the side of 60 Minutes. If Janis is eager for the publicity, Bill is rabid. I’ve never seen him like this. Myra bears the brunt of Bill’s initial rants.

  When Neuwirth and I join them in Bill’s office, Graham outdoes, in volume and histrionics, all previous performances that I’ve witnessed. He is incredulous at the idea we might actually refuse permission for the CBS crew to film Janis in performance. It’s a new band, Bill. The arrangements haven’t settled down yet. You don’t want Janis looking bad on TV, right? Forget reasoning with him. He’s on a tirade. He shouts at Myra, he shouts at Bob Neuwirth when he tries to pour oil on the waters, he shouts at me.

  A year ago, Bill’s tirades intimidated me. By now, I know that he only screams at people he takes seriously.

  My position is simple. If 60 Minutes wants to film an interview with Janis, we have to get permission from Albert. If they want to film the performance, we have to get permission from Albert, which he has already refused.

  Fina
lly, we get through to Albert. He is steadfast against allowing the performance to be filmed. If Janis will do an interview, that’s okay. Let her decide.

  Janis does the interview after the show when she’s exhausted and no longer on the upside of her drinking. She’s been drinking heavily tonight, both before the show and after, but the high of performing carried her through. Sitting down in front of a camera and Mike Wallace, Janis does her best and she expresses her opinions in her own original way. She’s a professional, but she looks haggard, not at her best. I hope the camera will be kind to her.

  My experience with Wallace, whom I have known until now as a newsman, leaves me with a diminished view of him. His interest throughout the evening is getting the interview any way he can, regardless of whether Albert or Janis wants it done. Through all the wrangling, his slicked-down hair budges not a whisker. After this experience at the Fillmore East, I think of Wallace as a self-interested huckster.

  Sam Andrew comes off the stage unsure if the new band is going to work out. He doesn’t feel the show went well. When he muses aloud along these lines, he gets encouragement from an unexpected quarter. Frank Zappa has come to see the show. Don’t worry, Zappa tells Sam, it will come together in time. It takes a while for a large ensemble, Zappa says, but it will come together in time. Sam hopes he’s right.

  The New York Times review the next day is kind and hopeful. “Miss Joplin has never been better,” the reviewer writes, and he gives a nod to the band: “Even though her new group sounds as if it were just getting to work together, it still is very good.”

  With a decent review from the Times in hand, a less appreciative piece in the Washington Post can be consigned to the trash. What do they know about rock music in D.C.?