On the Road with Janis Joplin

by John Byrne Cooke

  Phil and Vince have kept close to me. We’re bonded in shock, staving off our own grief. They will come with me to the studio. Dave Barry knows he doesn’t belong in this coterie of Janis’s intimates, so he takes his leave. When he’s gone, I can’t remember if I cautioned him again about keeping the knowledge to himself. The only way I can hold myself together is to focus on one thing at a time. Right now, getting to the studio is the urgent necessity.

  I park in the little lot behind Sunset Sound. Phil and Vince and I come in through the back door. When we enter the studio I see the smiles, the excitement in the eyes, the pride in the work they’re doing, and I don’t want to say the words that will wipe all that away, because I know the bright, clean, unscarred feelings Paul and the Full Tilt boys have at this moment about the album, and about Janis, will never return.

  I take Paul into the hall and I tell him first. Janis is dead. Paul staggers and reaches out to steady himself against the wall. I tell him what little I know. When he recovers sufficiently, Paul asks Phil Macy, the engineer, to step out of the control room so I can tell the band in private. While the boys are absorbing the shock, Paul tells Macy we’re quitting work early.

  We go in caravan to the Landmark—my Volvo, Paul’s Porsche, and the Boogie Wagon.

  The police have arrived, and men from the county coroner’s office. They are considerate and discreet.

  Seth Morgan has taken a cab from the airport. He looks stunned and lost.

  Bennett Glotzer is here. I tell him I found Janis’s works and left them where they were. Should I have taken them? “Are you fucking crazy?” he says. “That’s a felony. You’re disturbing evidence.” Bennett was with Janis last night after work, he says. They had a couple of drinks at Barney’s Beanery. Janis had only two because she had to record the next day. He took note of her restraint.

  By now the news is out, racing through the grapevine like a jolt of bad acid. The notion that I could contain it even for an hour or two was a fantasy. Everyone who knows finds the knowledge unbearable and has to share it.

  The time remaining to reach Janis’s closest friends, and ours, before they hear it by radio or television or telephone is very short. Who have I forgotten? Everyone. I should have called the boys in Big Brother, Sam Andrew first of all, but my need to get to the studio postponed that thought. My phone rings and it’s Lyndall, Janis’s roommate. She’s alone in the house in Larkspur, crying, distraught, almost incoherent. I try to calm her and fail. I tell her I’ll send someone to be with her. I call Peter Berg in Berkeley. He knows Lyndall, and yes, he’ll drive across the Bay to keep her company.

  From now on, it’s all damage control. I’m on the phone nonstop. People come in and out of the room. When it gets late enough, when the rest of the country is past midnight and the phone lines fall silent, we huddle together in one of the big suites, anesthetized by alcohol and sorrow. Somewhere before dawn there are a few hours of fitful sleep.

  On Monday morning, the phone in my suite rings and rings. There is no call waiting, no voice mail; you get a busy signal or the phone rings and I answer. The people who get through have won an electronic roulette. John Phillips is one. I haven’t seen him since Big Brother and I saw Monterey Pop at John and Michelle’s mansion in Bel Air. John is genuinely wounded by the news and concerned for those who were close to Janis. He knows there is nothing he can do, but he offers all the same and his sincerity comforts me. My father calls. I haven’t thought to phone my parents, so they read the news in the New York Times. I phone my mother.

  Today is my thirtieth birthday.

  At some point I talk with Jack Hagy, the manager. He tells me that early Sunday morning, about one A.M., Janis said hello to the night clerk as she passed through the lobby on the way to her room. She returned a short time later to get change for the cigarette machine. This confirms the story the change and the cigarettes told me. Some things are just as they appear to be.

  Albert is on the first plane from New York. I have never seen him so stricken. He is bereft. Lyndall flew down last night.

  Kris Kristofferson was at the Big Sur Folk Festival, held in the fall this year. He got back to L.A. late yesterday, as the news was breaking. Today he’s at the Landmark.

  The gathering this evening is a select group, the core of intimates who have known and worked with Janis. Kris, the band, Paul, Seth, Lyndall, Albert, Bennett, a few more. Linda Gravenites is here. She hasn’t seen Janis since she moved out of the house in Larkspur after Janis got back from Rio. The day before Janis died, Linda had a sudden impulse to come to L.A. She flew down, connected with a mutual friend of hers and Janis’s, and was making plans to come to the Landmark yesterday to see Janis when she heard that Janis had died.

  I have brought my movie projector to L.A., and my editing setup, so I can work on my films while I’m here. I set up my projector and show the movies of Janis and Big Brother, Janis and Kozmic Blues. There she is, alive and well, giving it everything she’s got.

  Later on, my new guitar is in play. Shared music offers solace.

  In a quiet moment, Seth Morgan is riven with guilt. He knew Janis was using, even before we came to L.A. During the summer, she dabbled. After all, she had quit, hadn’t she? She was clean for months. Which proved she could do it. So why not give herself a little reward when she felt like it? The paradoxical circularity of an addict’s reasoning is self-fulfilling. A couple of weeks ago Janis called Seth and begged him to make her stop. I can’t do this for you, he said. She begged him to spend more time in L.A. If only, he says. . . .

  This prompts my own hindsight. If only I had done more, been a better friend . . . Paul Rothchild puts a quick end to this line of self-indulgence. “We’re all guilty, John,” he says.

  We console ourselves by clinging together and doing the things that have to be done, as friends continue to arrive.

  Bob Neuwirth was in Nashville when he got the news, visiting Norman Blake, a flat-picker and multi-instrumentalist who is a member of the band on Johnny Cash’s network TV show. When Bob came into the Blakes’ kitchen on Monday morning, Norman’s wife, Nancy, was making biscuits. She said, “Bobby, I have some terrible news for you.” She heard it on the radio.

  Bob arrives in L.A. on Tuesday.

  I take a phone call from Dr. Thomas Noguchi, the Los Angeles County coroner. Noguchi became nationally known when he performed the autopsy on Bobby Kennedy two years ago. Noguchi is speaking with as many of Janis’s friends and associates as he can reach, assembling a “psychological profile.” I answer his questions and add to his list of essential names. He is a dispassionate investigator, looking for any indication that Janis might deliberately have taken her own life, and finds none. His verdict will be death by accidental overdose.

  Janis’s family arrives from Texas. Mrs. Joplin’s sister lives in L.A. The family holds a service to which none of us is invited. Albert and Bennett Glotzer are permitted to attend, but no one else from the musical side of Janis’s life, the part that meant more to her than anything else. We are the people who killed their daughter. We represent San Francisco, where Janis’s nonconformist outlook made her welcome, where she was no longer the outcast, the misunderstood. Where her talent made her a local phenomenon, then a star. In the Joplins’ eyes, we are the world of rock and roll that destroyed her. This is the feeling I project on them, but I may be unfair. Later, Bennett tells me the Joplins blamed no one but themselves.

  In any event, we will have a memorial of our own. Bob Gordon tells me that Janis left $2,500 in her will for her friends to have a wake. That’s the word she used, and she intended the liveliest kind of wake. She wanted her friends to have a party and drink to her memory. She signed the updated will on Friday.* Bob had also prepared the premarital agreement that would protect Janis’s copyrights and royalties. Janis took a copy with her for Seth to sign.

  When and where the wake will be is up to us. It will be in
the Bay Area, that much is sure. The organizing will fall to Bob Gordon and me, but right now we have a more pressing concern.

  For two days we have been avoiding the crucial question—is there an album? Is there enough music on tape, in the can, to make a record? No one is sure, not even Paul Rothchild.

  Paul makes a cut-and-paste assemblage of what’s on tape. He works for two days and a night. On Thursday, we sit down in the control room at Sunset Sound to listen to what there is. Albert is here, and Bennett, the Full Tilt boys, Lyndall, and Kris Kristofferson. Like Kris, Carl Gottlieb, of the Committee, and his wife, Allison, were at the Big Sur Folk Festival, heard the news Sunday night when they got home. They were part of the Monday evening group at the Landmark, and they are here now.

  Tomorrow is John Lennon’s birthday. Some folks have been going around L.A. getting local and visiting musicians to record “Happy Birthday” for a tape that will be sent to Lennon. The first song Paul plays for us at Sunset Sound is Janis and Full Tilt’s contribution, which we recorded a couple of days before Janis died, all of us singing along behind Janis. It is raucous and joyful. We hold the final “happy birthday to youuuuuuu,” and Janis says, “Happy birthday from Janis and Full Tilt Boogie! Happy birthday, Johnny!” (Did anyone else ever call Lennon “Johnny”?) Janis breaks into her cackling laugh, and we think it’s over . . . but then Richard Bell plays the opening riff of the Roy Rogers–Dale Evans theme song, “Happy Trails.” His keyboard establishes the Western motif: “dum-da-dum-dum, dum-da-dum-dum,” and Janis sings, “Happy trails to you, until we meet again. . . .” in her high, pure soprano.

  There are few dry eyes in the control room, but Janis’s good spirits are so audible, so irrepressible, that it’s healing too. By playing this first, Paul has managed to lighten the mood. It’s even possible to smile.

  Paul thinks we have three quarters of an album. The vocal tracks are the critical element. Whatever exists on tape—that’s it. There are some final vocals and some work vocals. On Saturday, the band laid down the instrumental track for a song Nick Gravenites wrote for Janis, called “Buried Alive in the Blues.” Janis was to record the vocal for the first time on Sunday.

  We hear songs that are complete, solid, ready to go. We hear Janis sing over instrumental scratch tracks. We hear polished instrumental tracks and scratch vocals.

  When Janis’s version of “Me and Bobby McGee” comes over the speakers, Kris can bear only the first verse before he leaves the control room, the studio, and the building. I follow him into the parking lot, but he is inconsolable. He goes off into the Hollywood dusk and we don’t see him again.

  Janis’s recording of “Bobby McGee” might have signaled the introduction of a new element in her music. The Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo album and Dylan’s Nashville Skyline have brought country music influences into latter-day rock. Would Janis have recorded more country songs after “Bobby McGee”? I remember her line in the Austin Holiday Inn, in response to the little guy in the bar who couldn’t sing “Bobby McGee”—“Wait until you hear me. I can do that song.” Can a Texas girl sing a country song? You bet she can. The thought of Janis expanding her fan base to include hard-core country music fans is enough to make me smile.

  Today in the studio, when we have heard everything there is, we’re convinced there is enough to make a record. Even Albert is optimistic, but Paul doesn’t want our expectations, our need, to run away with us. For this to be the album, Janis’s last and best album, it will take a lot of work. It’s possible, Paul says, but it will take a lot of work.

  Albert gives Paul free rein. Albert will deal with Clive Davis. And so the decision is made. We have to finish this album. We seize on this goal. Not doing it is unthinkable. Without this record, the world will never hear Janis with Full Tilt Boogie, never feel her joy and pride in this band and the new material she sang across the U.S. and Canada this summer. The spirit Janis reveals in the music is proof that she had recovered from the failure of the Kozmic Blues Band, that her best years lay ahead of her.

  The work begins the next day, but it is not a return to the previous routine. It is a new routine, with the task at hand taking precedence over anything else. Our waking hours are in the studio. There is no late-night hanging out, no going to the Troubadour. We eat to sustain our bodies, have a drink or a beer or a glass of wine to sustain the spirit. We’re removed from normal space and time. In the windowless studio, hearing Janis’s voice from the speakers as the band builds a new track under a vocal brings her back to life. She is with us.

  “Everybody continued to make that record with just a little bit more love than they did before, so the mood was one of—how can you name that mood? It was almost monastic zeal, and it became just that. It was like a little monastery.”

  Paul Rothchild

  Paul is the executor of Janis’s musical legacy. His focus is total. Every day he develops techniques for things he has never had to do before. On several of the songs, the vocal track that goes on the record, that sounds as if Janis were inside your stereo speakers and singing for you alone, is assembled phrase by phrase from as many as half a dozen work vocals.

  “Cry, Baby,” one of three Jerry Ragovoy tunes Janis performed with Full Tilt, was one of the test songs they recorded at the July demo session in Columbia’s Hollywood studio. At the time, the band was inexperienced, unsure of themselves. At Sunset Sound, the boys have laid down a much stronger track—a great band track, in Paul’s view—but it’s in a different key and the tempos don’t match. Janis has done a work vocal to the new track, but her July vocal is better, no contest. So Paul and the boys make a new band track from scratch, in the original key. As the band plays to Janis’s July vocal, they hear in their headphones Clark Pierson’s drum track from that session, to set the tempo. When the rest of the instruments are recorded, Paul removes the old drum track and Clark records a new one.

  Watching the process, it seems simple enough, until Paul explains that he has never done anything like this before. It’s not something you would ever need to do, so long as you have a living singer. What you normally do is overdub instruments and vocals to fill the holes, get rid of mistakes, improve the tracks, until the song is a seamless whole that embodies a definitive performance by the vocalist and the band. Here, Paul and Full Tilt achieve the same result by underdubbing. “Cry, Baby” is seamless.

  “It was amazing to watch Paul operate. A total professional. He was really on top of it, and with his experience, pulled it all together with seeming ease. . . . As tough as it was for Paul, after Janis’s death the album took on extra special meaning to him, and he pursued it till [it was] complete and released.”

  John Till

  Finishing the album takes ten straight days of work. In the end, the overdubbing, the underdubbing, the cross-cutting from one fragment of usable track to another, the task that seemed all but impossible in the beginning, produce what this was meant to be from the beginning, Janis’s best album.*

  “That album’s a miracle.”

  Bob Neuwirth

  There are eight songs. Two were finished before Janis died—final band tracks, final vocals. Paul and Phil Macy have assembled six vocals piece by piece, with newly recorded band tracks.

  “Buried Alive in the Blues” will be on the album as an instrumental.

  The tenth track is Janis’s a capella rendition of “Mercedes Benz,” a song Janis and Bob Neuwirth wrote together around the poet Michael McClure’s line, “Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz.” At Sunset Sound, Janis sang it one day on the spur of the moment, and it was captured by the safety tape, a quarter-inch tape left running during the sessions lest a good riff or a good idea be otherwise lost. Janis and Paul had planned to expand the song into something more elaborate, but the simple a capella recording seems perfect now, capped by Janis’s happy “That’s it,” at the end, followed by her cackling laugh.

  The next
day, Clark Pierson and I leave the Landmark in my white Volvo late in the afternoon. We get as far as Santa Barbara, where we spend the night with a bottle of mezcal and a friend of mine from the folk days in Berkeley. Nan O’Byrne is a Texan who has found a home in Santa Barbara. In the early sixties, in Berkeley, with her fellow Texan and hangout partner Suzy West, the two of them defined for me the archetype of Texas women at their best—smart, funny, independent, able to be friends with men, able to keep them in line without putting them down, able to encourage them, admire them, love them, without ever allowing a man to condescend to them in any way—a model that fit Janis perfectly.

  —

  EACH DAY AT the Landmark, before we all went to the studio to finish the record, I have been on the telephone organizing Janis’s wake. We have settled on the Lion’s Share, a music club in San Anselmo, Marin County. The only night we can book the club, which has a schedule laid out for weeks in advance, is on a Monday, when the Lion’s Share is usually dark.

  On Monday, October 26, three weeks and a day after Janis died, the wake is attended by her old San Francisco friends, by new friends from the tours and the music world beyond the Bay, by all the members of Big Brother and Full Tilt Boogie and most of Kozmic Blues. We have invited Janis’s parents, but they choose to stay home. Janis’s sister, Laura Lee, flies out from Texas. Laura is twenty-one now and makes her own decisions. I am her road manager for the evening, but that doesn’t stop her from getting drunk enough to do Janis proud.

  Albert is even quieter than usual. He assumes no role in the festivities. He doesn’t preside at a table or serve as a focus around which others gather, as he often does in other settings. Neither is he simply an observer. He needs to be here in this time and place. He is present.