On the Road with Janis Joplin
Page 42
Whitburn, Joel, ed., Billboard Top 1000 Singles 1955–96, Milwaukee, Wis: Hal Leonard, 1997.
White, Theodore H., The Making of the President 1968, New York: Atheneum, 1969.
FILMS
Comin’ Home, by Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker, 1991.
Janis, Crawley Films/MCA Home Video, 1974, F. R. Crawley, executive producer.
The Mamas & the Papas: Straight Shooter, Rhino Home Video, RNVD 1931, 1988.
Monterey Pop, The Complete Monterey Pop Festival, The Criterion Collection, 1968, Lou Adler and John Phillips, producers; D. A. Pennebaker, director.
Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music, Warner Bros. Inc., 1970, Michael Wadleigh, director.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TO TELL THE story of road-managing Janis Joplin, John Byrne Cooke draws on his experience as a musician and his skill as a writer. He played music from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to New York, Berkeley and Los Angeles. He recorded two albums before Janis made her first. He traveled with all three of Janis’s bands, from 1967 until her untimely death in 1970. Cooke has written award-winning historical novels and a critically acclaimed book of nonfiction. As Laura Joplin’s Love, Janis, is the only book that reveals Janis’s life from within the perspective of her family, On the Road with Janis Joplin is the only book that tells the story of Janis’s brief, spectacular career from inside her life on the rock-and-roll road.
In the folk music boom of the 1960s, John Byrne Cooke was a member of the Cambridge, Massachusetts, bluegrass band the Charles River Valley Boys. Joan Baez and Bob Dylan were among his friends and contemporaries. When rock and roll displaced folk music, John was in the right place at the right time. He was a member of D. A. Pennebaker’s film crew at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, where Janis and Jimi Hendrix became overnight sensations. When Albert Grossman signed on a few months later to manage Janis and her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, he hired John to road-manage them. When Janis left Big Brother in the fall of 1968, she asked John to stay with her as she formed her new group, the Kozmic Blues Band. John was with Janis and Kozmic Blues when they toured Europe in the spring of 1969, and at Woodstock in August.
Janis’s 1970 tour with her last (and best) band, Full Tilt Boogie, included the famed Festival Express train trip across Canada. John was Janis’s only companion when she went to Austin to celebrate her mentor Ken Threadgill’s sixtieth birthday, and John was with her when she attended her tenth high school reunion in Port Arthur, Texas.
John Byrne Cooke is also an award-winning author of five previous books, a photographer, and an innovative filmmaker. He lives in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Visit him online at johnbyrnecooke.com.
The author in his pointy-toed Beatles boots.
PHOTO © JOHN BYRNE COOKE
*“Vocals” is listed for lead vocals only.
*What Bob doesn’t tell me, until much later, is that Albert wanted him to road-manage Big Brother: “[Albert] tried to get me into it. I said, ‘No, Albert, I’m not doing this.’ Albert had gone all the way from ‘Who the fuck is this guy from California that’s come to town to work with Bob [Dylan],’ to later trying to get me to be Janis’s roadie. I said, ‘No, I can’t do it, but I know somebody who can.’” (Author interview with Bob Neuwirth, August 13, 1997.)
*Sam Andrew and Milan Melvin both also related, in interviews with the author, sharing enjoyable trips with Janis on acid and mescaline.
*In an interview early the following year, Janis explained to a reporter her reasons for drinking: “The reason I drink is that it loosens me up while the guys are tuning their instruments. I close my eyes and feel things. If I were a musician, it might be a lot harder to get all that feeling out, but I’m really fortunate because my gig is just feeling things. . . .” (Nat Hentoff, New York Times, April 21, 1968, section II, 19.)
*Which is not to say that the band members were unaware of James’s problems. Dave Getz says flatly that James couldn’t drink. “He had one of these alcoholic things, like almost a genetic kind of alcoholism, where he would start to drink and he’d go through a massive personality change, and become almost like catatonic. And then he was drinking and he was doing reds too.” (Author interview with David Getz, July 24, 1997.)
*The listings from Janis’s itineraries throughout the book are a majority of the gigs she played, but are not all-inclusive.
*When I asked Sam Andrew to elucidate what Shelton meant by “smear” and “yelp,” Sam explained that “smear” was a vocal glissando—“We did lots of that.” He said Big Brother used “many ‘yelps,’ especially in ‘Combination of the Two,’ but, really, everywhere. ‘Summertime’ was all about counterpoint (which includes fugal procedures),” Sam added. (E-mail to the author, April 4, 2010.) Shelton’s critique, it seems, was well-informed and right on the money.
*If I knew that the writer Michael Thomas was at the party, I didn’t know he was on duty. Six months later, his article about Janis and Big Brother appeared in Ramparts magazine. It was a rare nonpolitical article in the radical leftist magazine, and it opened with these images: “John Cooke had a party a couple of months ago in an iron lung factory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. . . . Picture all these people, say a hundred odd, following little red arrows through three floors of hospital supplies, artificial limbs, pleural suction pumps and special rocking beds. . . . It’s like sneaking in and out of all the doors you ever saw that say ‘Do Not Enter’; you keep looking over your shoulder and you talk in whispers if at all. Finally you come to a door with Spider Man on it, and that’s where John Cooke lives when he’s in Boston. Inside, there are deviled eggs and chili beans and booze and everybody Jim Kweskin knows in town.” (“Janis Joplin, Voodoo Lady of Rock,” Ramparts, August 10, 1968.)
*Two songs from the April 11–13, 1968, Winterland recordings were issued on posthumous albums: “Bye, Bye Baby” on Joplin in Concert (1972) and “Farewell Song” on the album of the same name (1982). “Magic of Love,” from the March 1, 1968, recording at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit, is also on Farewell Song. It is the only song from those sessions issued to date.
*Geoff remembers Janis warmly and speaks of her kindly. “She was heartfelt,” is the way he put it to me. “It worked. She didn’t ever have these heavyweight musicians or anything with her. It was all about her. So she was out there doing it. It was rock and roll. And it was okay.” From Geoff, this is not a backhanded compliment, it’s real praise.
*In the late forties, Carroll’s trio worked briefly with Goodman’s orchestra.
*Dave Getz agrees with Sam, with qualifications: “I don’t think Albert ever said to her specifically, ‘I think you should go out as a solo group,’ but I think there was probably, in their time together, just a lot of things that indicated to her that he didn’t really think that much of the band, and that, given the chance, she should go in a different direction.” (Author interview with David Getz, July 24, 1997.)
*Milan was unembarrassed about describing his relationship with Janis: “God almighty, man. That still is the sexual highlight of the sixties for me. I mean, the woman was wild. And experimental, and funny, and energetic. I mean, that was our relationship, really, and when we tried to do anything more than that, like carry on any kind of normal relationship, we were fishing in waters where we didn’t have the right bait. I don’t know what to say. It was almost entirely sexual.” (Author interview with Milan Melvin, October 5, 1997.)
*The rumors were true, as Mark Braunstein became aware. “I think that probably that rehearsal with Marcus Doubleday was the first inkling I had of heroin use. Remembering Marcus Doubleday falling asleep at rehearsal. Nodding out at rehearsal. I was pretty naïve.” (Author interview with Mark Braunstein, September 9, 1997.)
*Although he was ungenerous on this occasion, Gleason wasn’t blind to the reasons behind Janis leaving Big Brother. In an interview after her death, he said, “I really
dug [Big Brother] together, as a group, but it was perfectly obvious that you couldn’t have a partnership, you know, a cooperative group, with everybody as an equal partner, if you had a star. . . . It was perfectly obvious that Janis was gonna leap out of that thing and be a star.” (Author interview with Ralph J. Gleason, October 3, 1973.)
*Sam feels that “Little Girl Blue” shows Janis’s voice at its best. “Whenever I encounter jazz musicians who are condescending about Janis’s vocal ability I play them ‘Little Girl Blue.’ If they can’t hear that, they can’t hear.” (E-mail from Sam Andrew, January 3, 1999.)
*The many pop festivals produced this year offered fans some extraordinary aggregations of talent, as these listings show.
*Accounts differ on the length of Havens’s set, which began shortly after 5:00 P.M. Some claim he played for nearly three hours, but more sober souls point out that movie film and still photographs show that the two acts that followed Richie both played in daylight, and that the sun set about 8:00 P.M.
*Terry Clements was embarrassed when Janis took out her discomfort on the audience: “She was on a really weird trip with the audience, you know, swearing at them and—you know, she could say some pretty strange things to them sometimes that weren’t relative to bringing about a true renaissance of spirit in the world, which I was hoping to be committed to, in that scene.” (Author interview with Terry Clements, January 24, 1974.)
*This fall, Janis took to using our limo driver, John Fisher, for her personal transportation around the city. On the night before the concert at the Garden, Namath was Janis’s guest at her hotel, which was not the Chelsea for this stay. Fisher parked nearby and dozed through the night because Janis had to be somewhere early in the morning. When Janis appeared, she got into the front seat, tossed a football autographed by Namath into John’s lap, and informed him cheerfully that Namath was “flabby.” (Author interview with John Fisher, November 15, 1997.)
*Last year, after Kozmic Blues played at the Texas International Pop Festival, Janis brought Snooky Flowers to visit her family in Port Arthur on his way to his hometown of Lake Charles, Louisiana. Snooky was the first black man received as a guest in the Joplin home. During his visit, he took Janis to black music clubs in Port Arthur, where she had never before set foot. (Laura Joplin, Love, Janis, 258.)
*Normally, when I was escorting Janis, I would pay for everything from food and drink to transportation and entertainment. In this instance she paid for all of us out of her own pocket.
*“I have to get to know the people, the artist in particular. And when you’re dealing with a band I have to get to know each and every person to find out what their language is. Once I know what their language is I can speak to them about their music in their language. I love verbal communication, mostly because it’s so difficult.” (Author interview with Paul Rothchild, March 19, 1974.)
*Recalling this conversation later, Paul explained his goal: “I was pointing out to her that that voice was her salvation and it was towards that voice that she had to evolve her next voice. You know, a good singer—a singer’s voice goes through evolution, and develops. They all do. And she should start working towards a pure sound. Because she can’t—she couldn’t do the ‘Ball and Chain’ Janis Joplin at age forty. It would be ludicrous, right? And these are things we discussed, and she loved this because it was talk about real direction, what she should do with her vocal career and her future, and what to aim for. . . . To me it was as if my entire career was pointed at working at that record—working on that record and working with Janis. And when Janis and I would sit down and talk about the future, I would be saying things to her like, ‘Now, you see, Janis, you don’t quite get it. When you’re fifty-five I want you to be making your best records. With me. And here’s how we’ll do it.’ You know, ‘Here’s the thirty-year plan.’” (Author interview with Paul Rothchild, March 19, 1974.)
*Committee member Carl Gottlieb recalls similar mornings at the San Francisco apartment he shared with Milan Melvin in 1967, when Milan and Janis were lovers, when he and Milan would make breakfast for Janis and Carl’s girlfriend and they would read the newspaper and discuss politics and news of the world. (Author interview with Carl Gottlieb, August 7, 1997.)
*In an earlier will, when she had few assets, Janis left everything to her brother, Michael. Bob Gordon suggested, and Janis agreed, that the will be revised now to divide her estate equally among her parents and siblings.
*In recognition of Full Tilt’s achievement in finishing the record, and all the joy they gave Janis, Bob Gordon proposes to her family that the band should receive a small percentage from sales of the album. Like Sam Andrew’s effort to get something for the Kozmic Blues musicians from that album, this one fails.
*At the time, I believed that Janis had misjudged the dose of heroin she could tolerate. When I later learned from Laura Joplin’s Love, Janis that the heroin she took was unusually strong, and that others among her dealer’s customers had died of overdoses in the same week, I saw that Janis’s share of the responsibility for her misstep was smaller than I had imagined, and this made her fate seem all the more disproportionate.