On the Road with Janis Joplin

by John Byrne Cooke

  Albert astonishes Linda Gravenites by asking her to dance. I have never seen Albert dance before. I have never imagined Albert dancing. Out on the floor, shuffling in time with the music, he looks pleased with himself, and it occurs to me that he wants to please Janis by dancing at her wake.

  Big Brother plays, with Nick Gravenites at the mike and, for a song or two, with James Gurley’s son, Hongo, on drums, in his public debut. Hongo is about five, on his way to becoming a serious drummer.

  David Cohen, Country Joe’s keyboard player, quiets the room when he plays “Janis,” a song Joe wrote about her, commemorating their time together.

  The music continues into the night, members of Quicksilver and the Dead and Big Brother and other musicians forming onstage combinations that are unique to this time and place. Yet despite the music and the open bar that Janis has funded, and other intoxicants privately ingested, the party never achieves the energy level or the buoyant feeling of a ripping good time that Janis wanted it to be, for the simple reason that she isn’t here. Her absence creates a gap, a void that prevents this gathering of friends from achieving critical mass.

  —

  AFTER THE WAKE, I find ways to fill every moment, to keep doing so I don’t have to stop and simply be. In November I fly east and spend Thanksgiving at Albert’s house in Bearsville. He has taken in the Full Tilt boys, giving them a place to shelter from the world until they feel whole again. I am glad for them, and fail to recognize the same need in myself.

  Finally, in mid-December, I drive down to Big Sur, where I went two years earlier to recover from the calamities of 1968, where we threw the I Ching in the interregnum between Johnson and Nixon, and as Janis turned from Big Brother to seek her independent path. A week, I say, maybe more. Peter and Marya Melchior take me in for as long as I need to stay.

  On the isolated coast, the days are quiet. I have read somewhere that alternating hot and cold baths were once a prescribed remedy for schizophrenia. I’m not feeling clinically imbalanced, but I feel the need for a regimen to pacify my spirit, so I walk to the baths each day, and when I’ve soaked long enough in the hot sulfur waters I emerge from the tub and play a stream of cold water from a hose over my steaming body. I lean on the wooden railing and absorb the vast peace of the Pacific Ocean.

  A book of Greek myths on Peter and Marya’s shelves offers to remove me by a couple of millennia from the memories of recent events. Instead, I find Janis in the archetype. A footnote suggests that “tragic flaw” is not the best interpretation of the Greek hamartia, which might be better translated as a mistake, a misstep, an error in judgment. The tragedies affect us because the protagonists of the myths—men and women of exceptional abilities and achievements—come to unjustified bad ends. Their downfall is a reversal of fortune. If the hero’s flaw were ordained by the gods, if his bad end were inevitable, if there were no more to the outcome than predestination, his fate would not engage our emotions effectively. And that is the purpose of the myths—so Aristotle wrote—to engage our emotions and to offer catharsis. In tragedy, the hero does not deserve his misfortune; his suffering is out of proportion to his offense. We feel the inequity.

  The paradigm fits Janis as if it were drawn from her life alone. She perceived a longer-lasting future than she had formerly imagined, in which she could continue to exercise her exceptional abilities. Her musical potential was greater than ever. She showed that she could overcome her predilection for self-indulgence, and she experienced the exaltation of that achievement. She had learned a measure of self-discipline, but she hadn’t yet fully embraced caution and restraint among her hard-earned truths. She believed she could flirt with her addiction. At a time when her fortunes were on the rise, she made a misstep, and she fell. The outcome was out of proportion to the offense.*

  Christmas comes and goes. I stay on the coast for a month. In the new year, I return to the world.

  —

  I DREAMED ABOUT Janis once, in the first year after she died. She came to say good-bye, and to seek, one last time, my blessing: In the dream, I am backstage at a concert in a large auditorium. I can see neither the stage nor the audience, but I can hear Janis at her best, singing her heart out, backed by Full Tilt Boogie. When the song ends, the audience gives her a roof-raising ovation. She comes tripping down a ramp to where I am waiting, and I see in her face the same little-girl uncertainty that I have seen so many times in life. Despite the sustained applause from the auditorium, there is real concern in her voice when she asks me, “Did I do okay?”

  I take her in my arms and hug her with all my strength. “You did great.”

  God bless, and Godspeed.

  Memories

  “And Janis, I think with all of her blustering and shows of strength, was an enormously vulnerable human being. And I think that people responded to that, responded to the fact that here is somebody putting on a spectacular show of strength because they’re really—the only strength there is will. The world really is—is more than this poor child can cope with. And all of the people that Janis had close to her were thick-skinned Jewish mothers. I mean you are a thick-skinned Jewish mother when it comes to road managing. You don’t let anything go by without being there with a stern word and comforting hand. Albert, the same. Me, I’m a Jewish mother, with all the credentials.”

  —Paul Rothchild, record producer, Janis’s Pearl album

  —

  “I think most people go through what Janis had to deal with, wanting to be loved and wanting to be accepted and wanting to have an impact, but she was so fierce about it, and it was so unhidden, that she just hit you like a ton of bricks. And I felt it then, and I felt it all ’til now. That something about her was just so intense, it cut right into your soul.”

  —Margaret Moore, author’s companion at Threadgill birthday party, Janis’s high school reunion

  —

  “She was a very decent person, a very vulnerable person, a person who really wanted to be loved, and was desperate to be loved and to have relationships with other people. And that’s the thing that I remember most about it. And then as a second thought, I think, ‘Wow, could she sing.’”

  —Bennett Glotzer, Grossman Glotzer Management

  —

  “In the last year of her life, I saw her two times, I think, maybe more, but two times that I remember the conversation. . . . One was in her house in Larkspur, and she spoke of the fact that she could sing. She said ‘I’m really doin’ it, man. For the first time in my life, I believe that I can sing.’ . . . She was really excited that she had finally found it, and that she had mastered something that had bothered her for her whole life, her whole singing life, anyway.”

  —Milan Melvin, Janis’s lover, 1967

  —

  “A great singer, a really great singer, is someone that no matter what material they take, who wrote the material, it becomes them. They make it themselves. They make it, in some way, like part of their autobiographical statement. And Janis is like that so much. . . . And if she did ‘Bobby McGee,’ she did ‘Bobby McGee’ not because it’s a good song, which it is, but because in some way there was some part of her life that it spoke of. And ‘Piece of My Heart,’ and ‘Ball and Chain,’ and ‘Move Over,’ and ‘Try a Little Bit Harder.’ And every song. ‘Maybe,’ and there’s a range of songs, but they were all, to her, she made them autobiographical. And that is like the essence of what to me makes a great singer.”

  —David Getz, Big Brother and the Holding Company

  —

  “She overcame so much. It’s usually not reserved for the funky people to make it. That’s not part of their future, or part of their role. . . . They’re not into the showbiz part of it. They’re into the soul part of it, the expression, the artistic part of it. And really the need to use the medium, they have to, emotionally, need to sing. It’s not like they do it because they do it best and they can make m
oney at it. They sing because they must sing and it’s the only way they can express themselves in a manner that they can get satisfied.”

  —Nick Gravenites, singer, songwriter, Albert Grossman’s friend and confidant

  —

  “Of all the lead singers that I know, or have worked with, she was the most workable singer. I mean she was a producer’s dream, for me.”

  —Paul Rothchild

  —

  “I feel that she was coming into her own, emotionally, as a person, and that the drug use was so incidental, that her death was such a filthy dirty little trick.”

  —Seth Morgan, Janis’s fiancé

  —

  “That’s the last time I ever saw her, spent any time with her, sitting in the Landmine—the Landmark—in the hotel room, thinking about how incredibly sweet she was, or could be, how sensitive and what a terrific warm, open, pulsating human being she was, and how torn down and exhausted and wrecked and self-destructive she was at the same time. Just thinking, ‘God, I wish that she could find a balance,’ you know, because what she was going for was so much softer and sweeter than anything that came through in a public persona. And I think that public persona, while it was fascinating to watch, just wasn’t all of who she was.”

  —Howard Hesseman, the Committee

  —

  “Let’s just say that Janis was a great performer, ’cause above and beyond anything else, she was a great performer. She had musical skills, but her performance skills carried the day even if she had no throat, right? . . . It’s part stage chops, it’s part desperation, it’s part ‘I love you. I need to be loved so much I’ll fucking implode if you don’t fucking look at me.’ It’s like all that fucking stuff. And the thing about it is that she was so much smarter than the public record.”

  —Bob Neuwirth

  —

  “She was a force of nature. And, like all forces of nature . . . she was unpredictable and difficult to be around. She was extraordinarily attractive, in terms of being magnetic, and sometimes repellant. She had the ability to suck all the air out of the room, because she needed it all, and it was more important for her to breathe than for anybody else to, and at the same time, she had the ability to breathe life into a room, depending on whether she was ebbing or flowing.”

  —Alan Myerson, director, the Committee

  —

  “And she also liked being the center of attention, and she liked getting attention from people that she didn’t know well, and brief sexual encounters with people who she knew would only do that because she was famous. And she liked that. That was part of the attraction of being famous, and part of the downfall of being famous.”

  —Lyndall Erb, Janis’s roommate, 1970

  —

  “She was smart, funny, intelligent, warm, caring. She was not a doper, in my mind, despite what she died of. . . . She just didn’t want to kill herself. She was not a suicidal person. What she was looking for, and I think found in Big Brother, and to a lesser extent in Full Tilt Boogie, was a core family of people who would accept her for what she is and allow her to be as outgoing and as communicative as she could possibly be.”

  —Mark Braunstein, Big Brother and Kozmic Blues equipment man

  —

  “Many people have asked me the question, do you think she did herself in. And I said ‘Absolutely not.’ There was no question—I mean, suicide—in my mind there was no question of her committing suicide. It had to be an accident. [The heroin] had to have been stronger than she expected. She was on too big a high. She was too happy with where her career was going, and her abilities. . . . It fuckin’ near killed me, man. I just could not—that was the first, and stands out in my mind as the most affecting passing of anybody I ever knew, anybody I ever heard of. It still gives me weakness in the knees when I remember the moment. And I had this flash where she—I just got on my scooter [motorcycle] and I rode around Paris in tears, and at one point I felt her climb on the pillion seat, just like she had back in the old days, and give me this little hug and press her cheek against the back of my neck.”

  —Milan Melvin

  —

  “I was just devastated. I can’t remember the highway, where I was. I might have been coming back from Woodstock. I don’t remember. I remember pulling over, and just lighting up a joint. I put her record on. I just couldn’t believe it. I was devastated. I was truly devastated. It really affected me. It broke my heart.”

  —John Fisher, Love Limousines, New York City

  —

  “Albert wasn’t the kind of guy who cried a lot or became visibly hysterical. He was upset. He loved her. It was somebody that he loved a great deal that died. He didn’t have any kids. Probably the closest thing he had to a child, for Christ’s sake, was Janis.”

  —Bennett Glotzer

  —

  “[Albert’s] energy and spirit were severely damaged when Janis died. As if he’d lost his alter ego. He adored Janis.”

  —Peter Yarrow, Peter, Paul and Mary

  —

  “All my life, I just wanted to be a beatnik. Meet all the heavies, get stoned, get laid, have a good time. That’s all I ever wanted. Except I knew I had a good voice and I could always get a couple of beers off of it. All of a sudden someone threw me in this rock-n-roll band. They threw these musicians at me, man, and the sound was coming from behind. The bass was charging me. And I decided then and there that that was it. I never wanted to do anything else.”

  —Janis Joplin

  Janis with Autoharp, 1969. On her first visit to San Francisco, in 1963, in addition to playing guitar and singing early blues and folk songs, Janis sang Carter Family songs and accompanied herself on the Autoharp.

  PHOTO © JOHN BYRNE COOKE

  D. A. Pennebaker and Albert Maysles in Pennebaker’s New York office, May 1967, a month before the Monterey Pop Festival. Maysles was one of several independent filmmakers who joined Pennebaker’s crew to film the festival.

  PHOTO © JOHN BYRNE COOKE

  D. A. Pennebaker’s film crew at the Monterey Pop Festival. Author is standing center with sunglasses, mike in hand; Bob Neuwirth is to his right, cigarette to mouth; D. A. Pennebaker is front row, left; Ricky Leacock is standing, third from the left, camera on shoulder.

  PHOTO COURTESY OF PENNEBAKER HEGEDUS FILMS

  Albert Grossman, May 1967. Those who did business with Albert often found him intimidating, but among his friends and clients he could be a benign presence, and often funny.

  PHOTO © JOHN BYRNE COOKE

  Promotional photo of Big Brother and the Holding Company.

  PHOTO © BOB SEIDEMANN

  Janis signing Big Brother and the Holding Company’s recording contract with Columbia Records in Columbia’s New York offices, February 1968. Janis’s calm expression belies the excitement she felt on signing with Columbia seven months after Big Brother’s triumphant success at the Monterey Pop Festival.

  PHOTO © JOHN BYRNE COOKE

  Peter Albin signing the Columbia contract.

  PHOTO © JOHN BYRNE COOKE

  The author (center) at the Big Sur Folk Festival in 1968, on a break from touring with Big Brother and the Holding Company. With (from left) Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, festival director Nancy Carlen, and Joan Baez.

  PHOTO © ROBERT ALTMAN

  Rock promoter Bill Graham and San Francisco Chronicle music critic Ralph J. Gleason, 1967. Gleason was responsible for getting Janis and Big Brother on the bill at the Monterey Pop Festival, and Graham booked the band often at his San Francisco venues and at Fillmore East in New York.

  PHOTO © JOHN BYRNE COOKE

  James Gurley, 1968. In Big Brother and the Holding Company, Sam, Peter, and James, as well as Janis, all sang lead vocals. One of the songs James sang often was the traditional blues “Easy Rider.”

 
PHOTO © JOHN BYRNE COOKE

  Janis’s European tour with the Kozmic Blues Band in April 1969 was a triumph. Here, Janis sings harmony with Sam Andrew as young Germans and American servicemen crowd the stage at a concert in Frankfurt, West Germany.

  PHOTO © JOHN BYRNE COOKE

  Janis and Sam Andrew in 1969, rehearsing on a California motel patio before a concert with the Kozmic Blues Band.

  PHOTO © JOHN BYRNE COOKE

  Janis and the Kozmic Blues Band on The Dick Cavett Show, July 18, 1969. Very few photos of Janis Joplin and her Kozmic Blues Band exist, partly because it was difficult to fit everyone in the band into a single photo.

  At the end of a song, Janis exults in the audience’s reaction to her concert with the Kozmic Blues Band in Frankfurt, West Germany.

  PHOTO © JOHN BYRNE COOKE

  NOTES

  CHAPTER 1

  “I remember Janis took to you right away, man”: Author interview with Sam Andrew, October 18, 1973.

  CHAPTER 2

  “I eat a persimmon”: Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men, Boston: Mariner Books, 1996, 331.

  When whisperings of the Monterey Pop Festival reached Gleason’s ears: Author interview with Ralph J. Gleason, October 2, 1973.

  “Big Brother and the Holding Company and Janis were on the Pop Festival because”: Author interview with Ralph J. Gleason, October 2, 1973.

  Five days before the festival began: Ralph J. Gleason, San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, June 11, 1967, This World magazine, 34.