Live at the Fillmore East and West

by John Glatt

  At his appeal, the sole opposition came from the beat officer and a local rabbi, who claimed that people were urinating on his wall. While they awaited a decision on his license, the San Francisco Police Department started enforcing an obscure 1909 city ordinance forbidding minors to attend public dances without an adult.

  On Friday, April 22, police officers raided the Fillmore Auditorium during a Quicksilver Messenger Service concert, after a Gleason editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle accused the police of harassing Graham. With a paddy wagon outside, cops burst into the Fillmore, checking IDs and arresting minors on the dance floor. Finally, Bill Graham was arrested at three in the morning and thrown in jail for allowing underage patrons inside the Fillmore.

  At a bail hearing in front of a judge, Graham threw a tirade and had to be calmed down by his attorney. In the following day’s San Francisco Chronicle, Gleason condemned the San Francisco Police Department’s brutish behavior.

  “The only reason I would not allow my own teenage daughters [in the Fillmore] without me now,” he wrote, “is for fear that they would be treated like criminals by the police for being under 18.”

  On June 7, Bill Graham finally got his Dance Hall Keeper’s license for the Fillmore Auditorium, after the city introduced a new provision allowing under-eighteens to attend dances where special rules prevailed. Exactly what were the special rules was—famously—never clarified.

  Bill Graham’s profits were immediate. He had an instant cash flow at every concert. In the beginning, headliner acts such as Quicksilver Messenger Service or the Grateful Dead were getting only $200 to $300 for a show. With minimal outlay and practically no overhead, Graham could gross $25,000 ($180,000) in one weekend in tickets and concessions—far more than he had been earning a year as an executive at Allis-Chalmers. And as the Fillmore never dispensed tickets, it was untraceable income.

  “Bill’s profits were enormous,” said manager Jim Haynie. “We knew he was stuffing thousands of dollars away every week, and I thought he was sending it to Swiss bank accounts. I never knew for certain.”5

  On July 1, 1966—three weeks after Bill Graham’s license came through—Janis Joplin made her debut at the Fillmore Auditorium with Big Brother and the Holding Company. Opening for Quicksilver Messenger Service, Janis’s raw emotional performance took Big Brother to a new level and blew everyone away.

  “It happened the first time,” she would later say. “I just exploded.”6

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Janis

  Janis Lyn Joplin was born on January 19, 1943, in Port Arthur, Texas. Her parents, Seth Joplin and Dorothy East, had first met on a blind date around Christmas 1932, nearly seven hundred miles northwest in Amarillo. Seth, a handsome engineering student, was something of a playboy. During the last months of Prohibition, he made bathtub gin for his college parties, and he smoked marijuana, then legal in Texas.

  Dorothy was a gifted singer with a beautiful operatic voice. A Broadway director had once invited her to travel to New York, where he promised to launch her singing career. But she had declined, opting to go to Texas Christian University in Fort Worth after winning a scholarship in a singing contest.1

  When her teacher decided she was unsuitable for a classical opera course, Dorothy returned to Amarillo to work at a local radio station. She became a flapper, cut her hair into a bob, and started smoking.

  After a four-year courtship, Seth and Dorothy married on October 20,1936, moving to Port Arthur, where Seth went to work as an engineer for the Texas Company, which would later become Texaco. In 1901 “The Lucas Gusher” had erupted at Spindletop in nearby Beaumont, launching the petroleum age and bringing Texas untold wealth. Gulf Oil and the Texas Company had then moved into Port Arthur, building refining facilities and making it the hub of the Texas oil boom. By the early 1940s, when Janis was born, Port Arthur had become hot and smoky, with the refineries spewing sulfurous gas into the air, day and night.

  Oil-company executive Seth Joplin was so happy to become a father that he wrote Dorothy a congratulatory note complimenting her on the “successful completion of [her] production quota.” 2

  Growing up in the rigidly conservative, narrow-minded town would scar Janis for life. Her parents lived in a nice house at 3130 Lombardy Drive, an affluent middle-class neighborhood. Thanks to oil, Port Arthur was safe and well kept, with some of the best schools in the country for its sixty thousand residents.

  Right from the beginning, it was obvious that Janis was a gifted child. Highly intelligent and inquisitive, the little girl loved to paint and write poetry. But it was her singing voice that really made her stand out. For her sixth birthday, her mother bought her an old upright piano and began teaching her some tunes. But after a thyroid operation ruined Dorothy’s singing voice, the piano disappeared, as she couldn’t bear hearing little Janis singing her own favorite tunes.

  In 1949, Dorothy Joplin had another daughter they named Laura, followed by a baby boy, Michael, four years later.

  Even before she had entered school, Janis was a voracious reader with a library card. By the end of her first year, she was so far ahead of her classmates that she skipped second grade altogether. From then on she would always be a year younger than her classmates, and while mentally equal to them, she was emotionally inferior.

  In September 1954, Janice entered Woodrow Wilson Junior High School. An excellent student, she was also quite popular and the star in the First Christian Church choir. Though she was soprano lead vocalist in the school glee club, her real passion was art, and her mother had arranged for her to have private art lessons.

  Like Grace Wing, Janis wrote and performed her own plays. Seth Joplin built his daughter a puppet theater in the backyard so she could stage them for an audience of friends and family.

  The young girl had an insatiable curiosity and quickly saw Port Arthur’s huge inequalities. The thriving petroleum port had a revolving door of sailors coming in and out of the town. And to cater to their needs, scores of brothels and gambling clubs existed in plain view, alongside the Port Arthur’s strict churchgoing morality.

  “The city was on the one hand very straitlaced,” said Janis’s high school classmate and lifelong friend Tary Owens, “but on the other hand absolutely wide open. The hypocrisy just glared.” 3

  At fourteen, Janis moved up to the Thomas Jefferson High School and everything changed. During puberty, she had put on weight and developed such severe facial acne it required sanding.4 Self-conscious and embarrassed about her appearance, Janis fell into a deep depression.

  Then, Janis began her outrageous rebellions. She dyed her hair orange in junior year and started drinking beer and screaming obscenities in the high school corridors.5 But even worse by Port Arthur standards, she spoke out in class about segregation and the inequalities suffered by African Americans, who made up 40 percent of the town’s population. Such outspokenness did not go down well with her bigoted classmates.

  “Integration was a major issue then,” explained Owens, “and we were still in segregated schools. The racism was just horrid, and Janis spoke out about that in class. And that was just the beginning of the reactions against her.”

  Her classmates spat on her and threw stones, calling her “Nigger Lover,” “pig,” and “whore.” She then gravitated toward a small group of more enlightened students and started hanging out with them.

  “We all had some things in common,” said Jim Langdon, who became her friend. “I would say everybody was darn bright. We had a sense of adventure . . . and [were] interested in the arts in some form or another. We were decidedly not in the mainstream of high school social life.”6

  Janis’s behavior also caused problems at home, where her conservative parents put her into psychological counseling so she could fulfill their dream of becoming a school teacher.

  “There were lots of arguments in the house between my parents and Janis,” sa
id her sister, Laura. “Trying to help her change her approach, so that life wasn’t so challenging for her.”7

  Janis and her new set of friends rushed out to buy Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road as soon as it was published in September 1957, and they discovered a kindred spirit.

  “[We] were blown away by it,” said Langdon. “It was a new voice and I think we were all rebels at heart. So that’s how we identified.”

  Janis also started listening to such folk groups as The Kingston Trio, as well exploring the musical roots of Lead Belly, Odetta, and Woody Guthrie. And they began driving fifteen miles east across the state line into Louisiana to hear the local blues bands play. They hung out in roadhouses, such as the Big Oak Club and Louanne’s, where underage teenagers could smoke and drink alcohol with no questions asked.

  “Everybody else was going to drive-ins and drinking Cokes,” Janis later told Time magazine, “and talking about going across the tracks to go nigger knocking.”8

  By her senior year of high school, Janis’s classmates found out about her trips to Louisiana and branded her a loose woman.

  “Every guy in our class claimed that he’d been to bed with Janis,” recalled Owens, “and the truth was probably she was still a virgin.”9

  Although Janis relished her reputation as an outlaw and still had excellent grades, she suffered from low self-esteem and felt socially inadequate. And in the safety of her bedroom, she would paint her nails and worry about her weight.

  When no one invited her to the senior prom she was devastated. Further humiliation followed when she was barred from attending the Black and White Ball.

  “There was nobody like me in Port Arthur,” she later explained. “It was lonely. I was just ‘silly crazy Janis.’ Man, those people hurt me.”10

  In 1960, seventeen-year-old Janis graduated. She enrolled at Lamar State College of Technology in nearby Beaumont for an art degree. Her bad reputation from Jefferson High had preceded her, and once again she found herself an outcast. She roomed with another female student and took a course at Port Arthur College, learning to punch keys on business machines. But she soon started cutting classes, spending most nights across the Louisiana state line with her friends, listening to music and drinking hard liquor.

  “We spent from midnight until dawn just prowling in and out of the clubs,” said Jim Langdon, “and hearing blues players [and] jazz players. Just digging the music and drinking. Janis loved it, and I think that was sort of a beginning as far as the kind of life she was going to pursue.”11

  One time, after telling her parents she was spending the night with a girlfriend, Janis drove their car to New Orleans. On the way back, one of her friends crashed the vehicle and Janis was questioned by the police, although no one was ever charged.

  “It was things like that that solidified Janis’s reputation as a bad girl,” said Langdon. “A really bad girl.”

  Soon after starting her own stint at Lamar State College, Frances Vincent met Janis in the student union.

  “My first impression was I didn’t like her,” recalled Frances. “She felt so bristly and hostile. As I got to know her I realized that she really was a vulnerable, fragile soul; under all that armor. And I became very fond of her.”12

  Janis ran off to Houston without telling her parents, hanging out at The Purple Onion Coffee Shop and getting ill from drinking too much alcohol on an empty stomach. Back home she had to be hospitalized for kidney trouble, later telling friends she had suffered a nervous breakdown.13

  Some time around her eighteenth birthday, Janis started becoming serious about her singing. At parties she began imitating her musical heroes, Bessie Smith, Big Mama Thornton, Big Maybelle, Odetta, and Joan Baez, with uncanny accuracy.

  “I had this voice,” she said in 1970, “and I found that every time I started singing it kind of just broke down a bunch of walls.” 14

  In the summer of 1961, Janis Joplin bought an autoharp and left home, heading to Los Angeles to become a singer. For a few weeks she lived the beatnik life on Venice Beach, playing at the Troubadour Club’s “Hootenanny Night” and the Gas House on Venice Beach.

  She then hitched north to San Francisco, buying a sheepskin jacket and hanging out in bohemian North Beach. She frequented the coffeehouses and went bar hopping, having indiscriminate sex with male and female strangers.

  “I met her at the Coffee Gallery,” recalled Nick Gravenites, who would later become a close friend. “She was playing autoharp and singing country stuff at the time—country blues, country music in particular.” 15

  That winter, Janis returned to Texas, refusing to talk about her time on the West Coast. She later explained that she had been “at a very young and fucked up stage.” 16

  Janis spent the holidays at Jim Langdon’s house, and he persuaded her to play at a New Year’s Eve party at the Halfway Coffee House Club in Beaumont. Then, in early January, she returned to Port Arthur and moved back in with her parents.

  In the spring of 1962, Janis enrolled at the University of Texas in Austin, majoring in art. Working part-time as a waitress in a bowling alley, she befriended a group of Austin hipsters living in “The Ghetto,” a small building west of campus. To Janis it was an oasis with a rotating cast of musicians, artists, and political activists. They saw themselves as a little island of intellectuals in a sea of rednecks, and Janis became a regular at their parties, singing a cappella and strumming her autoharp.

  Six years before his ill-fated partnership with Bill Graham at the Fillmore Auditorium, Chet Helms was a handsome young student at the University of Texas. He first met Janis in a student’s meeting room and was immediately struck by her distinctive country blues singing. It was the beginning of a close friendship that would set Janis on the path to superstardom.

  “We all sat around on these cushions,” recalled Helms. “People put jugs under their coats and would take turns playing. It was pretty loosely organized. Janis was very shy until she’d had a fair amount of alcohol. And then she could be cajoled, persuaded to sing. And then once she’d let go it would be fantastic.” 17

  That July, Janis joined the Waller Creek Boys with fellow students Powell St. John on harmonica and guitar and Lanny Wiggins on guitar. Janis sang and strummed autoharp.

  They began playing an Austin folk club called Threadgills, an old service station owned by a folk enthusiast named Kenneth Threadgill, who had converted it into a music venue. On Wednesday nights, Janis and the Waller Creek Boys soon became the house band.

  “Janis just knocked everybody out right from the beginning,” recalled Jim Landon. “They loved her.”

  One night at a Threadgills after-party, Janis played a Bessie Smith–influenced song she had just written called “What Good Can Drinking Do?” The song was captured on reel-to-reel tape, and it is probably the earliest recording of Janis Joplin singing.

  “This is a song,” she told her audience, “that I wrote one night after drinking myself into a stupor.”18

  On July 27, the nineteen-year-old freshman student was profiled in the student newspaper, the Daily Texan.

  “She dares to be different,” was the headline on the story, written by campus life editor Pat Sharpe. “She goes barefoot when she feels like it, wears Levi’s to class because they’re more comfortable, and carries her autoharp with her everywhere she goes so that if she gets the urge to break into song it will be handy.

  “Her name is Janis Joplin and she looks like the type of girl a square (her more descriptive term—a ‘leadbelly,’) would call a ‘beatnik.’ ‘Jivey’ is what Janis calls herself, not ‘beat.’ She leads a life that is enviously unrestrained.”

  The article noted that although Janis’s voice is “untrained,” she “sings with a certain spontaneity and gusto that cultivated voices sometimes find difficult to capture.”19

  With her long unkempt hair, torn jeans, and bare feet, Janis Jopl
in certainly stood out on the University of Texas campus. She looked nothing like the regular prim-and-proper white-bloused, bobbysoxer Texas coeds, who favored beehive hairdos and penny loafers. And many were openly hostile to Janis.

  “Janis wore blue jeans, work shirts and no bra,” recalled Chet Helms, “and she swore like a sailor.”20

  At the end of the 1962 fall semester, Alpha Phi Omega held its annual Ugliest Man on Campus Contest to raise money for charity. Each fraternity donated $5 to nominate one of their members, and Janis was elected Ugliest Man. When she found out, she was devastated, bursting into tears.

  “She was profoundly hurt,” said Powell St. John. “I’d long ago written off those people as irrelevant . . . but Janis wasn’t able to do that. She took their criticisms to heart and it really hurt her very deeply.” 21

  Soon afterward, Janis wrote a song called “It’s Sad to be Alone,” recording it at a friend’s house. Accompanying herself on autoharp, she sings, “The dusty road calls you. You walk to the end. It’s sad, so sad to be alone.”22

  In January 1963, Janis quit the University of Texas after Chet Helms persuaded her to hitchhike to San Francisco with him so he could launch her musical career.

  “I thought Janis will knock people’s socks off,” said Helms, “if I can get her to California and [they] can hear her sing.”23

  Janis looked up to the intense charismatic young man, viewing him as a worldly sophisticate. He had told her about the blossoming North Beach folk scene that he had discovered on a visit a year earlier. Now he promised to use all his contacts to help her get established.

  They set out on a cold winter’s night, after Janis’s regular Wednesday spot at Threadgills. In Fort Worth, Chet brought Janis to his mother’s house to spend the night. But the devout fundamentalist Baptist took one look at Janis, who was wearing pink sunglasses and a low-buttoned blue denim shirt with no bra, and refused to let them stay. Chet’s younger brother John then drove them to the highway outside of town, where they started hitching.