On the Road with Janis Joplin

by John Byrne Cooke

  JULY 8: Tanglewood Music Festival, Mass.

  JULY 11: Hampton Beach, N.H.

  JULY 12: Yale Bowl, New Haven, Conn.

  JULY 18: The Dick Cavett Show, NYC

  JULY 19: Forest Hills Tennis Stadium, Queens, N.Y.

  We play the Denver Pop Festival at Mile High Stadium. On the last day of June we fly to St. Louis. We have three gigs in the Midwest before we get to New York, and we’re there for just two nights before we’re off to the Atlanta International Pop Festival. Two years after Monterey, everybody is having pop festivals. Festivals in Texas and New Orleans are on the itinerary later in the summer.

  The word on Atlanta is good and Bob Neuwirth comes along for the weekend. I bring from New York a would-be girlfriend, a major model who is majorly dazzling, and boy do I not know how to solidify this relationship in the densest weeks of Janis’s summer schedule. While I’m trying to entertain her, Janis and Bob Neuwirth and Bonnie Bramlett have their own hangout party backstage, keeping to the shade in the hundred-degree heat. Bonnie is an Illinois girl married to the Mississippi-born Delaney Bramlett. They made an album for Stax Records that got little notice, but they are now with Elektra and the buzz within the business says they’re going places.

  In Atlanta the huge crowd is peaceful and happy and the festival comes off well. Forty-eight hours later, we’re at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Massachusetts, a different scene entirely. Renowned for its summer festival of classical music, Tanglewood has begun presenting pop acts to bring in younger concertgoers. Here in the Berkshires, the fans that mob the place to hear Janis Joplin behave themselves on the elegant grounds of the estate, but even in this verdant, refined setting, the Kozmic Blues Band is not at peace. The bitterness engendered by how the musicians were treated during the recording sessions and the decision to exclude them from participation in the album’s expected success have put a lid on how much effort they are willing to devote to their jobs. They have settled into a sullen state of reduced expectations.

  At the routine gigs between the big festivals, in response to the band’s diminished commitment, Janis drinks before the shows and her singing sometimes has an edge of desperation. Her stage manner becomes histrionic. Despite my requests that she use a coffee mug onstage, she revives her old practice of swigging from a bottle, often flagrantly, to the delight of the audience and the annoyance of the promoters. After the show, back at the hotel, Janis disappears into her room for her nightly fix. I never see her high during the day, but the regularity of the nightly ritual reveals a dependence on heroin that is much greater than when she was flirting with it in the days with Big Brother.

  Offstage, Janis is too often on what I call her “star trip,” expecting—sometimes demanding—special treatment, dismissing rudely someone she doesn’t want to be bothered by, even gentle souls who want only to express their admiration for her. It seems to me that the impulse behind this behavior springs from a need to be acknowledged as someone of value at a time when she doesn’t value herself.

  “Janis was like this complete person, but the trouble with being a ‘star’ is that everybody who met her had this image of who she was already in their minds, so that’s what they related to in her and that’s what she gave them back. And she lost like seven tenths of herself, I mean who she really was. I mean, she was a very intelligent woman, but you wouldn’t know it.”

  Linda Gravenites

  I am restless with disappointment and bedeviled by guilt. Janis is losing control, going into a tailspin. I feel that Albert and Bob Neuwirth are the advisors most likely to steer her straight when it comes to addressing her addiction, and I perhaps underestimate my own ability to influence her.

  —

  AT THE YALE Bowl in New Haven, we meet a prospective replacement for Sam Andrew. Like Brad Campbell, John Till is a Canadian who shares musical credentials with some others among Albert’s artists. He has toured with Ronnie Hawkins, an Arkansas rocker who migrated to Ontario and made his reputation in Canada. A few years ago, alumni from Hawkins’s band became backup musicians for Bob Dylan, and have since become the Band.

  John Till was impressed by Janis’s performance in Monterey Pop, which was his first and only view of Janis to date. He is even more impressed by what he sees and hears at the Yale Bowl. It seems to John that Janis has matured as a singer and performer. While she’s onstage, he can’t take his eyes off her. He came to New Haven to see if he wants the gig. After the show, he’s sure he does.

  In New York, John rehearses with the band. Ever the perfect gentleman, Sam shows him the arrangements and some of the guitar licks he’ll need for “Summertime,” “Little Girl Blue,” “Piece of My Heart,” and other tunes where the guitar lead defines Janis’s version of the songs. John is appropriately grateful. He is quiet, modest, unassuming. Like Mike Bloomfield, he lives to play the guitar. He wins Janis’s approval, and Albert’s.

  On the Friday following the Yale Bowl, Janis is scheduled for an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show. Until recently Cavett hosted a morning show on ABC. This summer, he’s doing an interview show like Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show on NBC, but Cavett’s is in prime time, three nights a week. It’s Janis’s first network TV appearance since The Ed Sullivan Show with Big Brother. For this performance, Sam takes the stage with the band. It is too soon to debut a new guitar player.

  Janis sings “To Love Somebody” and joins Cavett on the set. Cavett doesn’t sit behind a desk like Carson, but in a chair next to his guest. It’s a more intimate format. Janis is relaxed with Cavett, and the banter is spontaneous. When she takes out a cigarette, Cavett says, “May I light your fire, my child?” Janis erupts in laughter and says, “That’s my favorite singer. How’d you know?” Cavett doesn’t know she broke a bottle over Jim Morrison’s head, so he misses the irony.

  When Cavett asks if there are male groupies, Janis says, “Not near enough,” and gets a laugh, but she gives serious answers to serious questions. When Cavett asks why there are no other “superstar rock ladies” like her, as opposed to singers like Jo Stafford, for instance, Janis suggests that maybe it’s not “feminine” to sing the way she does, to dig deep into the music, instead of “floating around on the top like most chick singers do.”

  Among Cavett’s other guests are the Committee, some of them fresh from a vacation in Tangier, Morocco. The jet lag renders the actors goonier than usual, which is suitable preparation for a piece they perform called “The Emotional Symphony.” From audience suggestions, an emotion is assigned to each player. A member of the company acts as the conductor, summoning up these emotions—expressed vocally and with body language—from the players in turn, modulating and combining the emotional tones. For this performance, Janis and Cavett are enlisted. Janis is assigned frustration, and Cavett love. It is no great stretch for Janis to summon up frustration at this point in her life. The piece is a great success with the audience, and the Committee actors remember it as a standout performance.

  The day after the Cavett show, Janis and Kozmic Blues perform in the tennis stadium at Forest Hills, in Queens. For this performance, there are two guitars in the band, Sam and John Till. It is John’s first gig with Kozmic Blues, and Sam’s last. The next day, as the Apollo 11 Lunar Module touches down and Neil Armstrong prepares to set foot on the moon, Sam is on a plane for California and I’ve lost my best friend on the road.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Half a Million Strong

  JOHN TILL GETS two gigs to find his footing as Kozmic Blues’ guitar player before the most anticipated show of the year.

  In this short time, it becomes evident that although Sam is gone, the guitar player is still going to be the guy who is chronically late. John Till’s principal means of self-expression is through his music. He is limited in verbal communication not by any fault of intelligence, but because he is a natural-born space case. He exists on a plane slightly removed from the rest of us,
and communicating through the ether imposes a burden on him that he is loath to bear for long. As I try to do with any new member of the band, I make him welcome and at the same time impress on him the necessity of being on time, being ready when called, but such imposed organization is out of tune with John’s natural rhythm. He never confronts my authority outright, but sometimes he does an end run around me just by standing still.

  The Woodstock Music and Art Fair is scheduled for three days in mid-August. It’s the most thorough attempt since Monterey to replicate both the aggregation of talent and the counterculture atmosphere that festival achieved, and the list of advertised bands is impressive. On Saturday, when Janis is scheduled, the artists include Canned Heat, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Mountain, Santana, and the Who.

  The festival was originally planned for a site near Woodstock, New York, which has gained prominence on the map of popular music since Bob Dylan moved there in the early sixties. (Dylan moved there because Albert Grossman moved there, but Albert neither receives nor wants the credit.) When Bob Neuwirth and Debbie Green and Paul Rothchild and I visited Dylan at Albert’s house in the summer of ’64, Woodstock had already acquired a nickname, Hipstock. In 1969, Paul Butterfield, Van Morrison, Geoff and Maria Muldaur, songwriter Tim Hardin, and the Band are among those who live in and around Woodstock and Bearsville.

  A proposed site for the concert in Wallkill, near Woodstock, fell through. The promoters promised town authorities no more than fifty thousand people would attend the concerts, but that was enough to scare the bejesus out of the rural New York Staters. The final site is at a farm near White Lake, fifty miles from Woodstock, but the name has cachet and nobody’s about to change it.

  Janis and I figure this is an event, like Monterey, that we want to be part of from start to—well, maybe not to the last gasp, but for most of the festivities. We plan to arrive on Friday, although Janis won’t play until the next day, so we can spend more time at the site to take in the music and the scene.

  On the drive up from New York, rental cars in convoy, we hear news reports on the radio that a lot of people are heading for the festival. When we get off the New York State Thruway and hit two-lane state roads, we are in the company of these pilgrims, and we become part of something larger than anyone imagined.

  The Holiday Inn where I have booked us is a mob scene. Everybody wants rooms. Ours are guaranteed by Albert’s office, but even so, a couple of our rooms have been hijacked and some of the Kozmic Blues musicians have to double up. Bob Neuwirth is part of our party for the weekend. By the time we get settled, it’s late enough that we give up the idea of going to the site this evening. A wise decision, as it turns out. It rains overnight, turning the festival into a mudfest.

  On Saturday morning, the question is whether we’ll get to the site at all. All the roads are blocked with cars and rumors are rife: The New York State Thruway is closed; the Canadian border is closed; Governor Rockefeller is calling out the National Guard. Estimates on the number of people who have shown up for the festival range from a quarter to half a million.

  The promoters have set up a local office with all the phone lines they thought they could possibly need, but it’s barely enough. When I get through, I’m told the musicians are being airlifted to the site by helicopter. The promoters have corralled every chopper in a hundred-mile radius. Later I’m told two hundred. Being Janis’s road manager gets me no special attention. Bands are being flown to the site based on the order of performance. The office tells me where the choppers are landing. Be there by midafternoon with the whole band. We’ll get you in when we can.

  There’s no way I can reach George Ostrow and Vince Mitchell, so I take it on faith that they made it to the site with Janis’s equipment before the approaching hordes clogged the roads.

  The staging area for the helicopter airlift is idyllic. It’s a broad grassy meadow atop a ridge that affords views of the surrounding countryside. The day is sunny and warm. Among those awaiting their turn on Saturday afternoon are familiar faces. In the absence of Linda Gravenites, Janis’s friend Peggy Caserta has come to keep her company for the Woodstock weekend. I have seen Peggy only rarely since she was my erstwhile girlfriend’s lover, and I am unsettled by her presence. When it comes to hard drugs, Peggy will be a conspirator with Janis, not a restraining force.

  Helicopters of all shapes and sizes come and go. The damp heat of the August day is almost tropical, the clusters of people colorful and patient. When it’s our turn, Janis and I squeeze into a little bubble-canopy job, both of us sharing the seat beside the pilot, Janis mostly on my lap. At this point, nothing can surprise El Piloto, not even Janis in her tie-dyed velvet pants suit, clutching three more outfits on hangers. He’s been on the job since yesterday and he’s seen rock royalty in all their plumage.

  The countryside is lush and verdant from summer rains as we fly over farms and lakes and country estates. After about ten minutes, the pilot says, There it is. Where? In the midst of the greenery there is a triangle of brown, a gentle hillside that narrows from a wide arc of ridge down to the apex where the stage is located. The hillside is brown because it’s covered with people.

  When we land and get to the backstage area, we see that the people are brown because they’re covered with mud. The Kozmic Blues Band arrives minutes later in a big chopper that brings Neuwirth and Peggy and half of another band.

  There is food and drink backstage for the musicians and crews, tables and chairs under sheltering tents and Port-a-Potties you can use without waiting in line for an hour, like those available to the audience, many of whom bag the lines and avail themselves of the tall grass in the adjoining meadows. From the backstage compound, a footbridge over a farm road provides easy access to the stage.

  In the performers’ tents, I find old friends. Joan Baez is here, and Manny Greenhill, Joan’s manager, who also managed the Charles River Valley Boys. Neuwirth and I have known John Sebastian since he was a sought-after harmonica sideman in the folk days and through his success as the leader and songwriter for the Lovin’ Spoonful. At Woodstock, John is here to play as a solo in his tie-dyed blue-jean outfit.

  The people who are running the show have been playing catch-up since Richie Havens—another of Albert’s musicians—kicked off the music yesterday, holding the stage for more than an hour until another band was ready to play.* Everything is running late. Very late. Chip Monck has been up all night, introducing the acts and giving updates to the crowd on food, bad acid, missing children, and medical emergencies. He’s haggard and hoarse, but his awareness that he’s part of an historic event keeps him going. We’ll get Janis on when we can, Chip promises. If it gets too late, we’ll shuffle the order.

  I pass the news to Janis and the band, but nobody’s uptight. We’re here. Look at it! From the stage, the mass of humanity covers the landscape up to the ridge line. The scuttlebutt says this gathering is the fourth-largest city in New York State. From across the country the trickles and streams have coalesced into a flood. They have put up with the mud and the reeking Port-a-Potties and the bad trips and the delays between sets and the interminable announcements—“Laura Sunshine, Bobo is having a bad trip. Please come to the Good Karma refreshment stand”—and they have made it a celebration.

  We eat and drink and visit with friends and listen to the music. We wait a long time. Janis tries to pace herself as night falls and the evening grows long, but you can’t stave off forever the inevitable effect of alcohol. It’s a depressant, a soporific. What drinkers are after is the boost, the sense of shifting into a higher gear, that the first couple of drinks provide. Okay! Ready to boogie! When lethargy starts to take over, have another drink. There, that’s better. Keep on rockin’. But the lift doesn’t last as long, and there comes a point when more drinking only adds to the narcotic effect. Janis struggles to get herself up for the performance. She paces behind the wall of instrument a
mps as George and Vince hustle through the changeover. “Come on, come on!” she chants, not so much to the equipment men as herself.

  When they take the stage at last, Janis and Kozmic Blues make a valiant effort. It’s an adequate set, not outstanding. Ragged around the edges. Within the band, John Till stands out. At each gig since Sam’s departure, John has felt the need to prove himself, to show he’s up to the challenge. At Woodstock, he rises to the occasion.

  As soon as she comes offstage, Janis wants to go back to the hotel. The choppers quit flying at dusk, but the promoters have somehow managed to set up a ground shuttle service to transport musicians away from the site. I see Janis aboard a car that will take her to the Holiday Inn. Some of the Kozmic Blues guys stick around, others go. You’re on your own, I tell them. At noon tomorrow, we leave for the city.

  My responsibilities over, I hang out backstage with Bobby. It helps that there’s food and coffee. At first light, there is even something approximating breakfast. How the promoters manage it, I can’t imagine.

  As dawn brightens, we’re winding down. You ready to get some sleep? Bob is ready. From the stage there’s the sound of an electric guitar raising a paean to the approaching sun. Bob beckons me toward a big station wagon. As I get in, I realize that the sound of the guitar is familiar. It’s got to be Jimi Hendrix. And what he’s playing is a far-out, joyous, free-form improvisational riff on “The Star-Spangled Banner” that may raise Francis Scott Key from his grave.

  In the front seat of the station wagon, beside the driver, are Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul and Mary, and his wife, Mary Beth. When we get down the road beyond the reach of Jimi’s anthem, Peter begins to hum a different tune. He sings the words softly, meditatively: “Here comes Peter Cottontail, hoppin’ down the bunny trail,” and even though we’re in a car, it seems to me that he sees himself as the hopping bunny, Peter Yarrow the folk troubadour, leaving behind him another landmark musical event of the sixties, moving toward the dawn’s early light.