We’re in Stockholm to tape a TV show, which functions as our first rehearsal in Europe. It’s a studio job, no audience. Because it’s on tape, there are retakes to correct glitches. The show will be aired before Janis and the band come back to Stockholm two weeks later for the concert here.
MAR. 31, 1969: Arrive in Stockholm
APR. 1: Stockholm, tape TV show
APR. 2–10: London, rehearsals
APR. 11: Amsterdam, Concertgebouw
APR. 12: Frankfurt
APR. 14: Paris, Olympia Théâtre
APR. 17: Stockholm
APR. 19: Copenhagen, Concert Hall, Tivoli Gardens
APR. 21: London, Royal Albert Hall
Our next stop is London. Here the rehearsals get serious—again. There are nine days before the first concert, in Amsterdam. Warren is on hand with his sheet music. His mandate—from Albert? it’s never clear to me—is to help with arrangements and vocal harmonies, as well as committing the music to paper. Snooky doesn’t bother to hide his disdain. The fact that Warren is a Harvard-educated black man doesn’t impress him. In Snooky’s view, the band is playing the music correctly, but he doesn’t oppose rehearsing. The band needs the experience playing together as a unit, with Luis in the horn section, until the arrangements are second nature and the songs are tight.
The rehearsal space is the Rolling Stones’ rehearsal studio. We don’t set eyes on the Stones, but working in their studio is a validation that Janis and the band are playing in the big leagues.
In their off-hours, the musicians split off in twos and threes and become American tourists in London. Where’s Carnaby Street? Why do the pubs open and close at random hours? These English girls aren’t like the girls in California.
Luis is less wide-eyed than the others. He’s been here before, with Woody Herman.
Within the band, Snooky Flowers takes Luis under his wing and the two become a unit—nonhippie, nonwhite—sometimes to the discomfort of Terry Clements, the third man in the horn section. Terry is verbal, analytical, a good musician. Sometimes Terry’s British reserve is a barrier to revealing himself to the others, but he’s sociable, always ready to step out on the town with a few mates, and he’s a dedicated believer in the power of music to change the world.
Janis and Sam have adopted Richard Kermode, and Janis has taken Richard into her bed. He is a lover of convenience; at the gigs, Janis is still on the lookout for pretty boys. Richard evidently accepts his role as her fallback comforter.
A couple of the musicians and I discover an enormous flea market in a building that takes up a city block. Inside, there are scores of shops and stalls in a warren of passages that angle this way and that. I am a sightseer, not a shopper, but this is like a Middle Eastern bazaar, full of things you’d never think to find in England. In one of the stalls I discover an extraordinary woman’s belt of finely wrought silver, decorated with rows of tiger claws, that was handmade somewhere on the Asian subcontinent. It is a fixed size. Not adjustable. As I hold it in my hands it comes to me that I should buy it, find the woman it fits, and marry her. The price is less than a week’s salary, but my thrifty New England genes kick in, abetted by my Libran nature (we are just, as James Gurley observed, but also indecisive). I decide to think about it until we come back to London for our concert here at the end of the tour.
In Amsterdam we are met at the airport by Knud Thorbjørnsen, the Danish promoter who has booked the gigs on the Continent. Knud is about thirty, soft-spoken and polite. He will travel with us for the next ten days, until we head back to London.
We’re here a day ahead of the concert. We have arrived in time to check the band into the hotel and still have some daylight left for a little sightseeing. Knud suggests a walk along the canals, and Janis jumps at the chance. She is ready for a break from the band, so we set out, the three of us, with Knud acting as our guide. In the gathering dusk, Knud calls our attention to illuminated windows on a street fronting a canal, where young women who are less than fully dressed sit in softly lit parlors. The few passersby, mostly solitary men, appraise the women frankly as they stroll past the windows. Some of the women are very attractive.
When Janis spies a man walking toward us, she says, “You guys go on ahead.” She slips into a doorway. Knud and I follow instructions. We walk ahead. When the man has passed us, we turn to watch. As the man draws even with her doorway, Janis hails him with a “Hiya, honey.”
What is she going to do if the guy goes for it, I’m wondering, but we’ll never know. The man keeps on walking. Janis rejoins Knud and me, not really disappointed, but hurt that the guy would dismiss her with only a passing glance.
Arriving at the hotel the next morning from a transatlantic flight is another companion for our grand tour. Bobby Neuwirth had been dispatched by Albert as an extra pair of eyes and ears to report on Janis and the band in Europe. The assignment is nominal. Albert is generous with those he’s close to. He may simply have intuited that Bobby would like to come along for the ride. Covering his ticket and his expenses for a few weeks is the kind of thing Albert does for a friend.
In London, Janis and the band rehearsed for eight days straight. No one dared to suggest they should rehearse in Amsterdam on the day of the concert. It’s a free day, and the band scatters.
Janis wants to ride the canals in one of the tourist boats. Bobby and I escort her. We get directions from the hotel’s concierge and I remember to bring my movie camera. What we don’t see from the water, we see later on foot and by taxi.
The Concertgebouw, Amsterdam’s philharmonic hall, is a late-nineteenth-century gem. The interior is about 150 feet long under a ceiling 50 feet high. Backstage, the band members are bubbling with stories. Most of them have never been to Europe before. They tell tales of explorations and discoveries, several of them related to the tolerant local attitude toward smoking pot, even in some cafés, and the high visibility of Amsterdam’s prostitutes. No one, it seems, found just the right moment to do more than admire the offerings.
The Concertgebouw fills, and in high spirits, Janis and the band take the stage. And something happens. Janis cues the band and bam! Tight isn’t an adequate description. They’re playing like one person wailing on all the instruments. The energy level jumps into high gear and never slacks off. “Raise your hand!” Janis sings. The song is a rouser. Janis is smiling as she sings, which isn’t normal for her. Female vocalists in the big band era learned how to sing while smiling all the time like an ad for toothpaste. But Janis is not Rosemary Clooney. Onstage, her expression reveals what she’s putting into a song. She’ll sometimes smile between numbers, acknowledging the applause. Here in Amsterdam, she’s grinning because she feels what’s happening. Finally, the band is together.
“Maybe” is followed by “Summertime.” Luis’s trumpet takes the high road in Sam’s Baroque introduction. I never thought his arrangement could sound as soulful with this band as it did with Big Brother, but tonight it comes close.
Snooky takes the mike from Janis. He gets to sing a song in the show. It’s an R&B rocker from Otis Redding called “Can’t Turn You Loose,” and Snooky makes the most of it. Janis dances with him on this song, to give herself something to do and to keep the audience focused on Snooky. This has become a regular thing, but tonight Janis’s dancing is purely spontaneous. She skips around the stage. She shakes her butt. She gets in Snooky’s face and the audience loves it.
One song after another, like a train coming down the track, the band keeps on rocking. They give a whole new life to Jerry Ragovoy’s “Try (Just a Little Bit Harder).” Sam sings “Combination of the Two.” Janis soars on “Piece of My Heart,” another of Big Brother’s hits, reinforced now by the horn section.
In the middle of the set, Terry Clements has so much fun on a solo that he just keeps going, extending the ride, and the band keeps going with him. Nobody’s thinking, Hey, that’s not the arrangement
. Terry is tripping and the band is on his trip.
Nick Gravenites’s “Work Me, Lord” is a showstopper, and the closer. “Ball and Chain” is the encore.
After the concert, backstage, everybody is talking at once and nobody can stop grinning. Sam dares to believe that Frank Zappa was right: Don’t worry, it will come together in time.
Neuwirth is impressed. He heard the band in New York, at the Fillmore East. What he hears in Amsterdam is like a different band. During the show he took a seat in the hall and recorded the performance on a small cassette recorder. Even on the machine’s tiny speaker, you can hear how good it was.
Has it really come together? Or was tonight’s performance a nonrecurring phenomenon? Time will tell.
Our next stop is Frankfurt. Knud says it’s a happening city. There are big American bases near Frankfurt. The audience will be full of Americans.
For most of us, it’s our first time in Germany. Knud has booked a minibus to bring us into the city from the airport. I don’t have to drive and I don’t have to find the hotel, so I’m free to sightsee. What I see here and there, as we pass through the older parts of the city, are walls that are pockmarked by bullets and shell fragments. As a boy, I saw all the Second World War movies I could drag my father to on Saturday afternoons. Only Westerns held more interest for me. Now I’m on enemy ground. This is where it happened.
The same awareness gives Roy Markowitz some cause for concern, because he’s Jewish. It’s hard to tell if his worry is genuine or if he’s playing it for effect.
Russian troops man the East German border seventy-five miles from Frankfurt. Sam and I share an awareness of the recent history that hangs heavy here—the hot war that produced the Cold War. Twenty-four years later, Germany is still divided and the Soviets rule the Eastern Bloc.
Our hotel is modern and classy. It overlooks the river Main, a tributary of the Rhine. In the afternoon, before the sound check, Bobby and I hang out with Janis and Linda Gravenites in their room. Janis is laid-back, relaxed, saving her energy for the performance. She touches up her nails with an emery board, and we take in the river view from ten floors above the Main.
At the concert hall we are met by a crew from Bavarian television, who will film the concert this evening. They greet us as we get off the minibus and follow us into the dressing room backstage. Janis, as always, plays to the cameras—theirs and mine—while the rest of the band goes about their business.
The concert hall is nothing like the historic Concertgebouw. Frankfurt, like many German cities, was pulverized in the war. Here, as in the parts of London that were heavily bombed, much of the construction is new. The hall has a peculiar low-ceilinged lobby that’s washed with flat fluorescent light, but the hall itself is fine, fan-shaped, modern, with good sound. Knud and Bobby and I tour the building to familiarize ourselves with the layout.
When the audience is admitted, there are American military police outside and in the lobby. Not a lot of them; just enough to create a presence. Bobby and I cruise the crowd, admiring the girls. Judging by the bits of conversation we pick up, it’s a fair guess that about half the young men in the crowd are American. Some have German dates. Everyone’s in civvies, so it’s hard to tell.
Janis performs two shows back-to-back. The first is the regular show with the houselights off. Here again, the band is hot, and the audience is even more unrestrained in their admiration than the Dutch. When “Ball and Chain” is over, to quiet the demands of the audience for another encore, we announce that we’re going to do an abbreviated second show for the benefit of the Bavarian television crew. You’re all welcome to stay, we tell the audience. And they do, almost all of them. Play it again, Sam.
This time the houselights are on. The TV cameramen move in front of the stage and onstage too, maneuvering around Janis and the band without worrying about the sight lines of the audience. The original plan was for Janis to do four songs, which will be enough for the program the TV crew is shooting, but Janis and the band are still on a roll and they don’t want to quit after four songs. Let’s do “Combination of the Two.” Let’s do “Work Me, Lord.”
What keeps the show going is the enthusiasm of the band and the energy Janis gets back from the audience. This is what she wants every time, singer and audience engaged in a duet, each giving to and receiving from the other. She invites them up on the stage, where they cluster behind the instrument amps, forming a solid arc around Janis and the band. The rest stay out front, on their feet, dancing in front of the stage and in the aisles, and somehow the film crew maneuvers around them.
Janis and the band juggle the song list for variety. This time they do “Ball and Chain” as part of the set and save “Piece of My Heart” for the encore. During “Piece of My Heart,” Janis is still holding out her hand, helping more people up on the stage. They’re dancing within the arc of the amps now, all over the stage. The group around Janis is mostly young men dancing badly, but she couldn’t care less. She’s radiating joy.
When the song ends, Janis is in a crush so thick that Bobby Neuwirth and Mark Braunstein push through and create a small circle of sanctuary around her. I’m outside the cluster around Janis, holding my movie camera over my head, hoping I’m getting it. A kid in a T-shirt hands Janis a bouquet of flowers.
—
HOW DO YOU top that? Well, we’ve got three days in Paris, with the concert on day two, at the historic Olympia Théâtre. It’s in the Ninth Arrondissement, near the Café de la Paix and just a few blocks from Place de l’Opéra, where I picked up my mail at American Express when I spent two months in Paris on a year off from college.
Edith Piaf made her name at the Olympia. Jacques Brel and Marlene Dietrich sang here. In 1964, the Beatles played the Olympia for eighteen days straight.
Our touring band of rock-and-roll vagabonds adds another member in Paris, where we’re joined by Bobby’s lady, Tonto. Her modeling career brought her to Paris before Bobby knew her. She speaks fluent French and she has friends in town.
The Olympia is mobbed. It’s smaller than the halls in Amsterdam and Frankfurt, more intimate. In size, it’s like a decent first-run movie theater in America, with a balcony that wraps around the sides, but the ambiance is definitely continental.
Before the show, I walk around the block, following the line of hopefuls who will not all reach the box office before the show is sold out. I approach a beautiful French girl far down the line. Would you like to see the show?—le spectacle, in French, which seems especially appropriate for Janis. Oui, she says, tentatively. Come with me. She hesitates, suspecting an ulterior motive on my part. The stage door, la porte des artistes, is this way, I tell her. She decides to trust me. I take her inside and find her a seat in a box overlooking the stage. She can’t believe her luck. Her name is Nathalie Fontenoy: un nom tres Français, tres Parisien.
Janis and the band are on a roll. Once again, the energy is up from the start. During the first couple of numbers I move through the hallways and poke my head in the back of the orchestra, then climb the stairs to listen from the balcony. The Olympia has great acoustics.
I imagine the ghost of Piaf in attendance, listening from a box overlooking the stage (perhaps seated next to Nathalie), a look of astonishment on her face at the sounds Janis produces for the delighted Parisians.
The next day, I rent a car and Bobby and Tonto and I make an excursion to Chartres, an hour west of Paris. We invite Janis to come, but the appeal of driving for an hour to wander around a cathedral and look at the stained glass is difficult to convey to someone who hasn’t been there. Janis politely declines. Knud will look after her.
Chartres has been on my schedule since I was taken there by Alex Campbell, the World’s Only Scottish Cowboy and a mentor to Ramblin’ Jack Elliott in his early visit to England, on my second trip to France. It was the same day I introduced Mimi Baez to Dick Fariña in the backseat of my white Volvo, neve
r dreaming the consequences that would flow from that meeting.
You’ve never been to Chartres? Alex was shocked. Until then, my embrace of European culture had included paintings and sculpture, public statuary and very old buildings, a millennium of history in the place-names and the landscape, but like Janis, I hadn’t imagined the glories of stained glass.
On that first visit I took color slides of the beautiful windows, more than seven hundred years old. This time, I shoot movies, and seeing the windows through the viewfinder now as I film them is even more entrancing.
On our last evening in Paris, at twilight, Bobby and Tonto and Janis and I cruise the boulevards in a Rolls-Royce that belongs to one of Tonto’s friends. The municipal government has recently initiated a program of steam-cleaning public buildings to remove a century of soot and grime, and the results are astonishing, especially at night, when the governmental and cultural edifices are lit up. Great structures that were glowering hulks when I was here a few years ago are now golden landmarks, standing out from their surroundings. They absorb the floodlights’ glare and reflect it back as if the stone were illuminated from within. As we glide along in the Rolls, the city is like a stage set, on display just for us. This evening, it is truly the city of light.
—
ALTHOUGH WE ARE far from home, in foreign lands, the tour is less demanding for me than flying out of New York to the American Midwest. Dealing with the band, making sure they know when a sound check is scheduled or what time we’re leaving for a concert, making sure they’re ready backstage when it’s time to go on, is always part of the job. In Europe, there’s not much else for me to do. Knud has organized the rest: hotels and transportation. In each country, he smooths our way through immigration and customs. I wear a suit and tie for these formalities. Together we’re a couple of respectable businessmen overseeing the musicians, which allays the suspicions of the authorities. We’re met at each airport by a minibus or a van. I don’t have to drive, I don’t have to register the band at the hotels, I don’t have to check with the promoters. Knud helps with problems that arise about equipment, hotels, hall managers, and he collects the money for each concert. I go with him to the box office; I stand by his side and oversee the calculations and the payment. We fall into a cooperative routine that makes touring the capital cities of Europe easier for me than Cleveland and Chicago. In France, I speak more French than Knud; in Germany, English is the lingua franca; in Scandinavia, Knud speaks all the languages well enough.
On the Road with Janis Joplin Page 23
