On the Road with Janis Joplin

by John Byrne Cooke

  “Heroin has some payoffs. Of course the negative side always begins to outweigh it by so much, but in the beginning, when one first uses heroin, there’s a certain kind of freedom that one gets. . . . All of a sudden all the pain and worry and stress is removed. And you’re totally relaxed, and you feel good, and you don’t have to do anything, you’re not tense, and . . . for a performer, for someone as high-strung as Janis, I’m sure for a long time it really had a very positive payoff. Then the debilitating effects start to take over.”

  David Getz

  The awareness makes me too uncomfortable to stay. I’ve got to get out of here. How can I make my excuses? As it turns out, I don’t have to.

  The second hit gets Janis off for real. She curls up on the bed like a kitten who has just had a bowl of warm milk. Soon she is over and out. I leave her in the smell of cigarette smoke and alcohol and sweat and patchouli oil and I grab a taxi in the night, glad I left the road when I did, but sad too, because I’m not sure I will want to see Janis again. I love her too much to watch her destroy herself.

  It isn’t until much later that I remember something she said that evening, between her two hits. She promised me she is going to kick heroin.

  Brazilian Interlude:

  Manha de Carnival

  IN FEBRUARY 1970, Janis and Linda went to Rio de Janeiro for Carnival. Later that year I came into possession of a tape recording of a press conference that took place at the Copacabana Palace Hotel in Rio, where Janis was interviewed by representatives of the local press. On the tape, she sounds like the old Janis from the early days of Big Brother, but without the naïveté. Once again she represents the San Francisco music community as an articulate spokeswoman. She is focused on the future, enjoying a vacation but not seeking a prolonged escape. And she has fallen in love. David Niehaus is an American traveling in Brazil. They met on the Copacabana beach. During the press conference he is by Janis’s side.

  Janis is disappointed to learn that the official Carnival lasts less than a week and that many of the events can be enjoyed only by tourists and well-to-do Brazilians—those with enough money to buy tickets. She is trying to organize a free concert in a park in Rio with “Carnival lasts all year long” as its theme. She talks of the early days in San Francisco when the rock bands gave free concerts in Golden Gate Park on Sundays, “and everybody would come and dance, and it was beautiful.”

  There are no reminders of the wan and lonely girl I left in a New York hotel room only two months before. Janis is at her best, thoroughly comfortable with the press, fielding the questions confidently, revealing something about herself in every answer.

  Q: Why did you come to Rio?

  J.J.: Because I saw the movie Black Orpheus.

  Q: Will you come back?

  J.J.: I’d love to. I don’t think I’m gonna leave. (Laughter.)

  Q: What do you think about Vietnam?

  J.J.: I think each individual person ought to live the best life they can, to themselves and to other people, and if we did that we wouldn’t have any Vietnam. Everybody’d be happy and we’d all be dancing.

  Q: What do you think about young people dropping out of school?

  J.J.: Just keep your values straight. Find out what’s important to you. Learning how to multiply may not be as important as learning how to communicate.

  Q: Do you like Brazil?

  J.J.: I’m really glad I came, because people seem nicer to each other here than in New York. In New York they’re very aggressive and here people seem more gentle. I think it’s because of the sun.

  Q: If you weren’t a singer, what would you be?

  J.J. (without hesitation): I’d be a beatnik. I am anyway, only I make more money.

  Someone explains to a puzzled Brazilian reporter that “beatnik” is the same as “hippie.” Janis overhears and quickly sets him straight: “Beatnik and hippie are different,” she says. “Beatniks are older.”

  Q: Do you want to have children? If so, how many?

  J.J.: Someday I’d like to have children. Every woman wants to have children. But the most important thing is don’t have too many or we’re gonna outgrow the world.

  Q: Will your voice last for as long as you’d like?

  J.J.: My voice is better now than it was four years ago. It’s getting stronger. And besides, I don’t care if I lose my voice. If I lost my voice I’d be something else. I don’t want to be a singer for the rest of my life. I’d be a beach bum. I don’t care, as long as I’m having a good time.

  Before she went to Carnival, Janis had been struggling to kick heroin. Linda Gravenites’s vision of the trip was for Janis to experience a great time without dope. But there were lapses, and they cost Janis a great deal. She was using in Brazil. David Niehaus helped Janis get clean while they were together. Linda flew home ahead of Janis to oversee the carpenters working on the house in Larkspur. When David and Janis arrived at the airport in Rio to fly together to San Francisco, David was detained for overstaying his visa in Brazil. Janis went on alone, stopped over in L.A., and scored from her connection there. When David got to Larkspur two days later, Janis was stoned. For him, this was the last straw, and he left.

  Later, when Janis spoke of David Niehaus, she described him as the lost love of her life. He was a man outside the usual pattern of her conquests, neither pretty boy nor mountain man, a man she admired, one who might have been able to influence her and guide her in the right direction. David was on his way to Africa when they met in Rio. He wanted to take her to Nepal, to the Himalayas. He was convinced seeing the Himalayas would change Janis’s life, but in this hope he may have been projecting his own experience on her. In the end, it wasn’t anything Janis and David did together so much as his leaving her that had the greatest, the most beneficial influence on her. The loss of this man who moved her so deeply, her new love, followed by the departure of Linda Gravenites, her longtime roommate, advisor, and best friend, who refused to live any longer in the company of heroin, was what finally forced Janis to confront her addiction and find within herself the strength to bring it under control.

  “When I came back from England, she asked me what my attitude toward dope was then. That was the first thing she asked me. I said as long as I think you’ll quit sometime, I can stand it. But if I think it’s gonna be all the time forever, I can’t do it. You know. So, as long as I believe you’ll quit, I’ll stick around. Otherwise I’m gone. You know, and when she stopped to cop on the way home from Rio after her big quitting . . . I don’t know whether she believed me, that I wouldn’t stick around for her. Which was one of the reasons, of course, that I left, was for shock value, saying, ‘This is what you’re doing.’”

  Linda Gravenites

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The Great Tequila Boogie

  THROUGH THE COLD months, the stock market continues its slide. Financial analysts say the U.S. is in a mild depression. Our hopes for The Fool of Paris fluctuate with the Dow Jones average. The uncertainty sends risk capital into oil stocks, and Bobby and I are no longer lunching on Wall Street.

  In April, the Italian film director Marco Ferreri, little known in America, is in New York. Somehow Bobby makes contact and gets us a meeting. In conversation, Ferreri is like an Italian Albert Grossman—enigmatic, saying little. He has an assistant who translates for him, but it becomes apparent that Ferreri understands English well enough and uses the running translation to give himself more time to think. He offers us $20,000 to finance the film. We’ve calculated a budget of $100,000 just to get the actors and crew to Paris, shoot the film, develop it, and make a work print. Bobby and I go over the budget line by line and trim it down to $70,000. We present it to Ferreri, but he won’t or can’t up his offer.

  The first warm days of spring bring rumors from California. Janis has moved into her house in Larkspur. We hear she is putting together a new band. We hear she has kicked he
roin. We hear she has banished her junkie friends from her house.

  Albert calls. He confirms that the rumors are true, and his enthusiasm is palpable. I have never heard him so unrestrained, so optimistic. As he tells me about the new band and Janis’s delight in being clean, he reveals the depth of his emotional investment in her well-being.

  He asks me to go back on the road with Janis at the end of May, but it is my turn to be cautious. I have known too many reformed junkies to backslide. So long as there’s a chance that Bob and I can get our movie airborne, that’s what I want to do. I tell Albert, “Probably not.” Janis calls to make her own appeal, and I tell her the same thing, but her confidence is so real, her excitement so infectious, I dare to hope she’s serious about staying straight.

  One evening in mid-May, when I’m too weary from the late-night hanging out to accompany him, Bobby goes to the Village to hear Ramblin’ Jack Elliott at the Gaslight. He walks in and finds no one onstage. Jack’s on a break. Where’s Jack, he asks. Oh, Jack and Kris Kristofferson went around the corner to hear Odetta, the manager tells him.

  Kristofferson’s is a name that has bubbled through the music underground since last year, when Roger Miller recorded Kris’s “Me and Bobby McGee.” Ray Price has a hit with another Kristofferson tune, “For the Good Times.” But nobody we know has set eyes on Kris until now. Once again, Neuwirth’s where-it’s-happening radar is zeroed in on the right place at the right time. He finds Ramblin’ Jack and Kris at Odetta’s gig, and they become a late-night hang-out team, often joined by Michael J. Pollard, that lasts until Jack and Odetta’s Village bookings come to an end.

  Inspiration strikes Neuwirth one evening midweek. He calls Pennebaker to borrow a camera. Penny’s intrigued, so he comes along as cameraman. After the clubs close, Neuwirth takes the crew to the penthouse apartment of a friend of Pollard’s where they film The Woody Guthrie Story under Neuwirth’s direction. Neuwirth and Pennebaker shoot the life story of the Depression-era songwriter and troubadour, co-founder, with Pete Seeger, of the folk music revival, at night in a penthouse apartment in New York City. How does Bobby come up with these ideas? Sheer audacity, and a creative spark that flares most brightly at unlikely times. Ramblin’ Jack plays Woody Guthrie, at whose feet he learned his own troubadour licks. Michael Pollard plays Bob Dylan, who was an acolyte of both Woody’s and Ramblin’ Jack’s in his early days. Kris plays Woody’s pal Cisco Houston and Odetta plays Leadbelly. Now that’s casting.

  When the impromptu movie crew emerges onto the streets in the morning, they find newspaper headlines announcing the Kent State massacre. The day before, at Kent State University in Ohio, National Guardsmen killed four students and wounded nine others who were demonstrating against President Nixon for expanding the Vietnam War into Cambodia.

  What am I doing while this is going on? Too tired to come downtown at night? Can’t keep up the pace? I have no credible excuse for missing the gathering of talent and energy that launched upon an unsuspecting nation a transcontinental party-hop, bar tour, and roving hootenanny that will become famous enough in its own short life span to be given a name. It is christened the Great Tequila Boogie—by Neuwirth, it should go without saying—and we are not apt to see its like again.

  With Bobby in charge there is only one acceptable course: No one will be allowed to abandon ship—the team will continue to the next party, come hell or high water. What matter that the party is a continent away in Janis’s house in Larkspur? On very little notice, Ramblin’ Jack drives the celebrants to JFK, whence they fly to San Francisco. Bobby’s idea is that in addition to hanging out with Janis, they should visit Joan Baez and her sister Mimi. Both would be delighted to see these musical voyagers, but they would be among the least likely to join in imbibing the libation that propels the journey.

  Whether Bob, Kris, Michael, and Odetta actually connect with the ladies Bob calls “the Baez brothers” is unclear, but they do visit Janis and so are on hand for a party that will become part of Janis’s folklore. For some time a young man named Lyle Tuttle, his own body extensively decorated with indelible artwork he has mostly applied himself, has been introducing some of the leading personalities of West Coast rock and roll to the art of tattoo. Janis has one already, a bracelet on her left wrist, and gets another at the party, a miniature heart located above her real one. It is becoming fashionable, especially among the women, to have small tattoos placed on areas not normally revealed to the casual observer, all the better to delight the favored few. Accounts of how many willing subjects Tuttle actually tattooed at the party differ, but his artistry and the renown of the party contribute to the rising popularity of tattoos among the young that dates from this time.

  The party is co-hosted by Lyndall Erb, who has taken Linda Gravenites’s place as Janis’s roommate. Like Linda, Lyndall designs and makes clothes for the psychedelic era. At the Monterey Pop Festival she sold colorful shirts, one of which I bought and wore during the Charles River Valley Boys’ California tour. Lyndall has made clothes for Country Joe and the Fish and for MC5. Life magazine has dubbed her “the seamstress to hippiedom.” In recent years, Lyndall and Janis have become friends. When Linda left, Janis asked Lyndall to move in.

  The Great Tequila Boogie flight crew mingles with a host of Janis’s local friends and acquaintances. Ramblin’ Jack has made it, after driving across the country in record time. Nick Gravenites is there, and Mike Bloomfield, and Big Brother and their first equipment man, Dave Richards, along with Kozmic Blues equipment men Mark Braunstein and George Ostrow. Also present are the members of Janis’s new band, as yet unnamed, with one wife and a girlfriend or two. San Francisco erotic filmmaker Alex de Renzy records the goings-on but the results are hardly arousing. Not enough light, or too much smoke.

  There are drawbacks to being descended from a family imbued with the Puritan ethic. I am as desperate as the next guy to get out of New York, but we have set out to produce a movie and if the top man wants to take off on frivolous adventures in the middle of the night, I will prove my mettle by staying on the job and holding down the fort and keeping the home fires burning. The Tequila Boogie is rocking in California and I am marooned in the Big Apple.

  Within days of Neuwirth decamping to California, I’m on my way to Washington, D.C., with Larry Poons, a painter friend of Bob’s in whose studio we have passed many an hour during the winter, drinking and playing guitars. When we weren’t with Michael Pollard and Annie, Larry’s place was the other locus of our late-night hanging out.

  Larry and I have the same reaction to the shootings at Kent State: Okay, that’s it. They’re gunning down American students on an American college campus. Fuck ’em. We’re going to Washington. Across the country, hundreds of colleges and universities are shut down by a national student strike. Organizers have called for a mass demonstration in Washington on the weekend after the killings.

  We drive down in traffic that’s a lot heavier southbound toward D.C. than the northbound flow, and we feel that we’re part of something big. We stay with Bob Siggins, my fellow Charles River Valley Boy, who has moved to D.C. to practice the art of neuropharmacology for the National Institute of Mental Health. We walk to the Mall on a perfect spring day that has brought out a mostly cheerful crowd of demonstrators. Somewhere in the center of the densest mass there is a stage and a sound system. We hear Judy Collins sing “If I Had a Golden Thread,” and a voice that may be David Dellinger exhorting us: “How can you love the Cambodians, whom you have not seen, if you cannot love the black people in the jails and the ghettos of the United States, whom you have seen?”

  Closer at hand, the most popular chant is “One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war!” Dozens of demonstrators are frolicking in a knee-deep pool that surrounds a fountain. A couple of girls perched on the shoulders of their boyfriends have gotten topless.

  What Larry and I witness is more like a May Day festival than an antiwar demonstration,
but the next day, the Sunday papers carry stories of clashes with police and National Guard troops, and of demonstrators smashing windows and overturning cars. Spokesmen for the Nixon administration focus on the violence, and the press doesn’t give equal time to the exuberant, peaceful crowd on the Mall.

  New York is dull after the energizing weekend. On my own, there’s little I can do to further the fortunes of The Fool of Paris. I keep up regular appearances at Max’s, but when Janis and Bobby call me from the tattoo party and I hear the hullabaloo on the other end of the phone, I regret my overzealous devotion to duty. Bobby tells me to hail a taxi and go directly to JFK. “We’ll keep the party going until you get here,” he promises. Janis offers to buy me a plane ticket just to come out and meet the band and think about going on the road, but even this isn’t enough to get me going.

  It takes one more phone call. In the aftermath of the tattoo party, Bobby and Kris and Janis are sitting in Janis’s kitchen nursing hangovers. “Boy, I wish we could get John Cooke to go on the road again,” Janis says. “You want John Cooke?” Bobby picks up the phone. “I’ll get you John Cooke.” Janis is better than ever, he tells me, and you’ve got to hear this band.

  I fly into SFO on May 23. The tour will begin six days later, in Gainesville, Florida. I dump my bags in my North Beach apartment, recover my trusty Volvo from Peter Berg’s garage in Berkeley, and traverse the graceful span of the San Rafael Bridge at a high rate of speed, determined to make up in the intervening days for the fun I’ve missed.

  When I arrive in Larkspur, I learn that the band has acquired a name. On a recent day when Janis and the boys were winding up rehearsal, Neuwirth and Kristofferson sailed in, already three sheets to the wind, recruiting deck hands for the evening voyage. “Is everybody ready for a full tilt boogie?” Bobby demanded.