Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars 1955-1994

by David Hepworth

  Maybe it took the eyes and ears of an Anglo like Chandler to give him that chance. It wasn’t going to be easy. When Chandler sat down with him and outlined the plan the first thing he learned was that Hendrix had already signed a deal. Actually, he’d signed two. Why should this musician, who had never left the United States in his life, agree to up sticks and go with this man with a strange accent to begin a new life in England? Chandler was persuasive. He knew how musicians’ minds worked. He clinched the deal by pointing out that he was selling his bass guitars in order to buy Jimmy a ticket across the Atlantic, and what’s more that ticket would be first class. He also promised that when they got to London he would introduce him to Eric Clapton. That did the trick.

  When he arrived in London in late September 1966, Chas was so eager to show off his new charge to his muso mates that on the way into town from the airport they stopped off at band leader Zoot Money’s place in Fulham. Thus the first British guitarist to be impressed with his playing was twenty-three-year-old Andy Summers, then a member of Money’s band. The first British woman to be impressed was Money’s wife Ronnie who took one look and went running to the girl in the flat upstairs saying, ‘Chas has just brought this guy back from America and he looks like the Wild Man of Borneo.’ The first British woman to sleep with him was the girl in the flat, Kathy Etchingham. She went back to his hotel with him that night and stayed for the next three years.

  Chas’s fledgling management operation was hand to mouth. He had to get the word about his client out quickly. The very night of their arrival he took him down to the Scotch of St James. This was a club in Masons Yard where after-hours musicians gathered to impress each other. He cleared it for him to jam with the house band. It was the first of a number of cameos Hendricks performed in the first few weeks he was in the country. Happily he found that the same tricks he had used to impress the people of Georgia worked just as well on the models, gangsters and pop stars of SW1. The key thing he’d learned from the chitlin circuit was ‘watch your audience’. If the people liked it when you played the guitar behind your head then it was pretty obvious what you had to do: you played the guitar behind your head. If they lapped it up when you played guitar with your teeth then it was plain where your duty lay. Hendricks’ professional mission was to tear up whatever room he happened to find himself in. In this he did not fail.

  A few days after the Scotch of St James show Chandler contrived to bump into Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce of the recently formed Cream. Cream had been put together on the principle, long established in jazz, that if you put the best instrumentalists in a group they will produce the best music. In the world of pop music in 1966 this seemed like a very exciting idea. Furthermore, because it ministered to pop music’s earnest desire to grow up it was seductive as well. The names these musicians dropped when they told the New Musical Express of their Lifelines were increasingly the likes of Cannonball Adderley, Roland Kirk and Tony Williams. They modelled themselves on such men, who were measured more on the quality of their chops than the excitement of their noise. In the watering holes where the music business gathered, in the Speakeasy, the Cromwellian and the Scotch of St James, players were actively encouraged to get up and show what they could do.

  In this spirit Clapton asked Chas to bring his boy along to a gig they were doing that night in a basement in Little Titchfield Street (now part of the University of Westminster). Chandler duly turned up with Hendricks. Although this was supposed to be a benign meeting of brothers drawn together in the spirit of musicianly camaraderie, ground rules had to be established. Mr Hendricks would play just one number with the Cream, as they were called at the time. He would plug into Mr Bruce’s bass amp, thus ensuring he couldn’t sound too good. Mr Clapton would remain on the stage at all times, thereby making it clear whose group this was. In exchange Jimmy got to call the tune, which was Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Killing Floor’. This was a number Clapton was said to find tricky.

  Many times in the future Clapton would be called upon to remember that evening. ‘He brought his own guitar. He was left-handed but this was a normal right-handed guitar and so everything was upside down. He played just about every style you could think of, and not in a flashy way. He did a few of his tricks. Playing it behind his head and with his teeth. I think we did just that song. Then he walked off and my life was never the same again.’

  At its most effective, hype happens among peers. It generally manifests itself in a tendency to jump aboard a bandwagon in the brief period of time before it’s apparent that it is a bandwagon. Hendricks was clearly extravagantly gifted. However, it was what he represented rather than what he did that made London’s musical community race to embrace him. Because he appeared to be an avatar of an entirely new musical species in that he was both black and big-haired (a look he had to work hard to maintain) it was important to approve of him whether you liked what he did or not.

  Clapton and the other members of the guitarists’ union responded to what he did on the instrument. The wider public, which grew wider by the week that autumn – the release of his first single, ‘Hey Joe’, came just in time for Christmas – responded to the way he did it. What the UK players presented as art Jimmy, by now given the comic-book name Jimi Hendrix by his manager, presented as showbiz. What the UK players made look like hard work he made look like wizardry. While for them singing was a chore they had to complete in order to earn the right to play a long solo, his singing and playing were all part of the same rippling conversation. (Here his left-handedness helped, enabling him seemingly to direct his band with his hips.) He appeared to be the first artist who had sorted out how to make the act of singing and simultaneously playing guitar a beautiful thing to watch. One became a commentary on the other, the former keeping up a channel of back chat with the latter. It was impossible to imagine Clapton saying, ‘This is Jimi talking to you, baby’ as Jimi would mid-performance. Where the white players gathered their features into a grimace to indicate how seriously they were taking their labour, Jimi never seemed to be able to prevent himself from laughing at his own outrageous talent.

  Recalling the events of 1 October, Jack Bruce said, ‘Eric was a guitar player. Jimi was a force of nature.’ Although it purports to be the music of universal brotherhood the world of popular music is anything but colour blind. In the fifty years after Elvis it found scores of different ways of mapping sub-divisions of the music, most of them with at least some racial implication to them. Black musicians are far more likely to be called ‘forces of nature’. This implies that they have arrived at what they do by a different route from their white counterparts. Much as it’s difficult to have a white singer you would describe as a soul singer, so it’s difficult to have a black star you would call a rock star. There are a handful of musicians who’ve walked this very fine line and they’ve been helped by the fact that they were directed from the beginning towards a white audience. Ultimately the thing that elevated Jimi Hendrix above Clapton, Beck, Green and all the other guitar players who came to pay tribute in October 1966 was as much stylistic as musical. It was in the three words that everybody, including Clapton, used to describe him.

  The real thing.

  1966 PLAYLIST

  The Beach Boys, ‘Good Vibrations’

  The Beatles, ‘Paperback Writer’

  Stevie Wonder, ‘Uptight (Everything’s Alright)’

  Bobby Fuller Four, ‘I Fought The Law’

  Jimi Hendrix, ‘Hey Joe’

  The Rolling Stones, ‘Paint It, Black’

  The Kinks, ‘Sunny Afternoon’

  The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!

  The Byrds, Fifth Dimension

  Cream, Fresh Cream

  18 JUNE 1967

  MONTEREY, CALIFORNIA

  The first female rock star

  BEFORE JANIS JOPLIN there was nobody remotely like Janis Joplin. Jazz and blues had produced female singers who sang with similar directness about their thirst or their carnal appetites, but Janis was ano
ther thing altogether. She was a white rock star, which meant she was written about in newspapers and interviewed on television. Those things that were implicit in her performances became explicit when she talked about them. When asked how she came to be the singer in her band Big Brother and the Holding Company she said she had slept with the man who was sent to ask her. Furthermore she was so impressed with him she couldn’t say no. ‘I was fucked into it,’ she would cackle in interviews.

  Nobody had ever heard a woman talk like this. Certainly not for publication. Some of it was an act. Privately she confessed she had actually made up this story as a favour to the man. She seemed oblivious to what this might say about her. Because she was, in the argot of the day, a chick singer who behaved in a way no chick singer had behaved before, her personality was overshadowed by the way she played her gender and even that was overshadowed by the way she boasted about her sexuality.

  Janis was one of those rock stars who found herself representing what appeared to be a new kind of person. By the simple act of walking on to the set of a chat show she provoked questions. These were the same questions that were going through the minds of every parent in America in the mid-sixties as they surveyed their own teenage children. Why do you dress like that? Why can’t you tidy yourself up a little? Have you been taking drugs? What did you just say? Is that any way for a young lady to talk?

  There had been female musical stars before Janis Joplin but they had conducted themselves like young ladies. Many of them, like Dusty Springfield and Aretha Franklin, were much admired for their artistry. None of them was permitted anything as vulgar as a personality. In the case of Sandie Shaw the fact that she sang in bare feet was considered quite sufficient. These female singers were just as prim and proper as young women were widely expected to be at the time. The idea that they might have a love life was hard enough to imagine. A sex life would be wholly out of the question.

  Janis Joplin came to the fore in the age of let it all hang out. The thing she decided to let hang out was her own quite considerable pain. This was what the public expected. As she observed, audiences preferred their blues singers – and she did talk of herself as a blues singer – to be miserable. Some of her most devoted admirers were shiny-eyed, smartly turned-out Ali MacGraw lookalikes who would gaze up at Janis on stage, enthralled by the spectacle of somebody they would never have dared be doing things they would never have dared do, things which, in their heart of cautious hearts, they feared were bound to end badly.

  Janis Joplin came from a hard-working middle-class family in Port Arthur, Texas. The early part of her childhood was happy. When she was young she was pretty and enjoyed the benefits this can bring. Puberty, and more specifically acne, cruelly robbed her of her looks, inflicting a wound she spent the rest of her life trying to assuage. She did this in her own particular way. Janis met every misfortune that befell her in her teenage years by deliberately lowering her own standing in society. She gained a reputation as the school slut, a reputation she determined to live up to. Her mother fixed her first whisky sour when she was a senior at high school, reasoning this might ensure her drinking remained at home. It didn’t. Janis started drinking in bars and also, as they were wont to say in Port Arthur, ‘going across the river’. When she became famous she would joke that in her scuffling days she had tried turning tricks but was too ugly to find any takers. At the University of Texas a fraternity voted her the ugliest man on campus. By the time she was twenty Janis Joplin felt she had a right to sing the blues.

  She found her feet as an entertainer in San Francisco in 1966, during that perfect moment when the freaks appeared to have hijacked the music business. Here there was suddenly room for people who didn’t look right but evidently had their hearts in the right places. Room for a plugged-in jug band like the Grateful Dead. Room for a group who went under the name of Big Brother and the Holding Company but were soon known for having that crazy girl singer who did Big Mama Thornton and Irma Thomas numbers, took slugs from a bottle of whisky on stage and didn’t always wear a bra. Janis was professional when it came to the singing but was always in danger of slipping back into drugs, particularly heroin. ‘I wanted to smoke dope, take dope, lick dope, fuck dope – anything I could lay my hands on I wanted to do it,’ she said.

  Janis had always craved attention. She understood what she needed to do to be a star. She worked at it. She was smart enough to know that the appearance of spontaneity is something that must be worked at. Once she’d decided the precise number of apparently spontaneous imprecations to her sweet loving man to place in a particular verse of a song she could then do seventeen takes without the slightest variation. When she and the rest of Big Brother first sat down with a publicist she proceeded to dictate the larger-than-life version of herself she instinctively felt people would lap up. Janis was the one who urged her publicist to contact the makers of Southern Comfort and get them to pay her for drinking their product. She put the money they paid towards a fur coat. Janis was the one who would say in interviews that she had slept with all of the band at one time or another (this wasn’t true). Janis was the one who instructed her publicist to get Rolling Stone magazine to publish the news that she’d had a one-night stand with star quarterback Joe Namath.

  Janis was even the one who volunteered to take her clothes off for photographer Bob Seidemann. After he had draped her with just enough jewellery to cover her right nipple and she’d placed her hands over her crotch, the resulting picture eventually became a best-selling poster. She boasted that this made her ‘the first hippie pin-up girl’. For the ugliest man on campus this was some kind of revenge. When she invited her parents to come out to the coast and see how well she had done for herself one of the things they found most mortifying was the ubiquitous sight of that poster based on Seidemann’s picture. As far as Janis was concerned she’d shown becoming modesty by exposing just the one nipple, and besides, ‘it hardly shows, mother’.

  When she performed live she would encourage the audience to surround her on stage. It was as if she had to prove to herself that she had personal magnetism. When she was enveloped by ecstatic dancers she felt accepted. ‘Being on stage is like making love to thousands of people,’ she said, ‘but then I go home alone.’ Throughout her life she noisily complained about the difficulty she had attracting men. Just the men. The new candour about sex didn’t extend to boasting about her lesbian lovers. Now that Janis was on stage she could and did use her position to advertise her availability. She found to her puzzlement and delight that she could attract men who would never have looked twice at her had she been a waitress. This caused her more concern than it would have caused her male counterparts, many of whom were every bit as homely. Not all Janis’s boyfriends were worthless chancers. Her final one, Seth Morgan, could stand for the ones who were. After she died he admitted, ‘If she was any old body, I wouldn’t have looked at her.’

  Sunday, 18 June 1967 was the longest day of the hippy summer, the day when all America was briefly beguiled by the novelty of peace and love. The Beatles had released Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band two weeks earlier. Lou Adler and John Phillips, two smart Los Angeles music business types, had hijacked an open-air show taking place at the same fairground that normally hosted the Monterey Jazz Festival. They brought in big acts from LA, London and New York with the idea of putting their stamp on the wild music and exotic costumes of the flower children. The deal was that if the bands wanted to play they had to allow themselves to be filmed. The managers of Jimi Hendrix, Simon & Garfunkel, the Who, Jefferson Airplane and Otis Redding signed the waiver. Big Brother and the Holding Company were too suspicious and too small-time to agree, so when they played on the Saturday they weren’t filmed.

  Having seen how well they went down with the crowd and how much people were talking about this band and the wild chick, Adler, Phillips and Albert Grossman, the manager of Bob Dylan, approached Big Brother and said that they would put them on again the following day if they would agree t
o being filmed. This was an unprecedented concession to make to a band that was largely unknown. They eventually agreed, the band reluctantly and Janis gleefully. The following day they understood why. When she had performed on the Saturday it had been in a plain top and jeans. When she returned for the Sunday night show she was arrayed in a gold lamé pant suit which she satirically described as ‘lame’. She wanted to be glamorous. The members of Big Brother smelled showbiz in the air.

  That very weekend Clive Davis of Columbia Records signed her up. Grossman moved in on her management and began the inevitable process of separating her from the band and launching her as a solo star. Monterey was a heady coming-out. It was less a festival than an industry party. The acts that weren’t playing wandered through the crowd. Therefore she was suddenly seen by everyone from Brian Jones to Joan Baez and Mama Cass, who was seen enthusing during Janis’s act when the film eventually reached cinemas. Monterey was the making of three acts: Otis Redding, who had previously been largely unknown to white American audiences, Jimi Hendrix, who had broken first in the UK and was now coming home in triumph, and Janis Joplin, whose Sunday night encore ‘propelled them into the big money’, as one report said, and established her as ‘the best white blues singer’. For Janis it was a top-of-the-world moment.

  The interesting thing about the new rock stars whose images were beginning to be sold in the wake of festivals like Monterey was that they were made of such apparently unpromising clay. Frank Zappa, Jerry Garcia, Pete Townshend and Janis Joplin would never have been stars in any other medium or at any other moment. In the case of Joplin, as in the case of Zappa, they were probably more powerful as icons than as musicians. Zappa pictured on the lavatory; Janis with the beads: both were as likely to be found on walls as on turntables. The first big-label Big Brother album did well, although it took producer John Simon months to drag a performance out of the band that he was happy with. Janis’s future was as a solo star.