On the Road with Janis Joplin (10 page)

Recently, Mimi has decided to share the gift of laughter with a wider audience. She has joined the Committee, San Francisco’s resident satirical-improvisational comedy revue. The troupe was founded by Alan Myerson and Irene Riordan (later Jessica Myerson), two former members of Second City in Chicago. The company holds forth nightly from the Committee Theater on Broadway, San Francisco’s benign imitation of a sin strip, which divides North Beach from Chinatown. Unlike its New York namesake, this Broadway sports no movie palaces. It has restaurants, bars and pool halls, a few topless shows, and, since 1963, the Committee, just to keep everything in perspective.

Many of Mimi’s new colleagues lived through the Beat era in America’s artsy-intellectual ghettos, and most are connected in one way or another to the San Francisco music scene.
One of the actors, Howard Hesseman, emigrated from Oregon to San Francisco for the jazz and lucked into a job taking money at the door for the Coffee Gallery on Grant Avenue in North Beach. It was a jazz and poetry joint at the time, but within a year of Howard’s arrival it had become a folk music club. A year after that, in walks a twenty-year-old girl from Texas named Janis Joplin, but she won’t sleep with the owner,
Leo Rigler, who exercises his own version of a Hollywood casting couch to audition female singers, so he won’t hire her. Besides, she’s underage. Unlike the East Coast folk music coffeehouses, the Coffee Gallery serves alcohol, and the legal age is twenty-one. Howard, by now the bartender and night manager, lets Janis play when Leo’s in his apartment across the street.

That trip was Janis’s first real foray beyond her native Texas, and Jack Kerouac was her guide. It was a pilgrimage to the Lourdes of the Beat scene, the city where the brightest lights of the Beat Generation started a renaissance, where Dean Moriarty, the alter ego of Kerouac’s pal Neal Cassady, ended up after his travels in
On the Road
. Frisco, Ferlinghetti, City Lights bookstore, the Six Gallery—where Allen Ginsberg premiered “Howl”—this was Janis’s destination, but it was the budding folk music scene, less celebrated at the time, where she made connections that would bring her back.

On that first visit, she played and sang on
The Midnight Special
, a broadcast hootenanny put on weekly by radio station KPFA-FM. One of the other performers on that show was a kid named Peter Albin. Peter remembers Janis singing in a Bessie Smith kind of style, and he remembers, vividly, that she was one of the first girls he had seen who didn’t wear a bra.

Janis was long gone when Bob Neuwirth and I visited the Coffee Gallery in November 1964, after driving a friend’s AC Cobra across the country from Cambridge at a high rate of speed, and it was Howard Hesseman we sat and chatted and drank with. Neuwirth stayed
the winter in California and he became a regular on the Coffee Gallery’s stage. He sometimes managed to play simultaneous gigs on the same night at the Coffee Gallery and across the Bay at the Cabale, Berkeley’s answer to the Club 47, cruising across the Bay Bridge in the Cobra between sets.

After her first exploration of San Francisco, Janis crossed the country to New York, went home to Port Arthur, Texas, briefly, and came back to San Francisco, where she settled for a time and got badly enough strung out on speed that it gave her a real scare and sent her back home to Port Arthur to make a stab at being the good daughter her parents hoped she would be. It was this effort that Chet Helms interrupted by summoning Janis back to California to sing with Big Brother.

As Mimi’s friend and Janis’s road manager, I am doubly welcome at the Committee Theater. Soon I become a regular, passed through the door with a wave and a smile. (Shades of the Club 47.) Reconnecting with Howard among Mimi’s friends at the Committee and learning how the strands of coincidence weave together Cambridge and California, folk and jazz and Janis and Bobby and Mimi, is a minor marvel, akin to the many small-world connections I’ve experienced in the East Coast folk scene. It helps me see that San Francisco’s creative fraternities are parts of an extended family, an amalgam of hippies and beatniks, musicians and actors and artists who share a fellowship like the one I experienced in Cambridge. Here, it’s more broadly based, limited only by the line dividing the hip from the square, the freaks from the straights. Within the kinship of the arts, the connections are close and personal, maintained by intercourse both social and sexual.

When Janis learns that I know Mimi and Howard and I’m hanging out at the Committee on our nights off, she takes a new interest in me. Not that she’s been indifferent. After her dismissive comment about Libras at our first meeting, I didn’t expect a lot of attention from Janis, but of course I was wrong. She’s curious about everything
new, especially guys, within her orbit. She flirts with me. Coming on to a new man is her way of checking him out. When I see that the flirting is real, I try to deflect her advances without offending her. She knows full well how much power she can exert over a man. I know just as surely that I’ll never maintain the authority I need to have as Janis’s road manager if I let myself become the latest notch in her spangled belt.

She doesn’t push it. Maybe she knows we have to get along as friends if this thing is going to work. Maybe I passed the test.

We’re still engaged in this dance when we head to L.A. for two nights at the Whisky a Go Go. From Baghdad by the Bay to Sodom in the Southland.

Hooray for Hollywood

F
ROM THE
S
AN
Francisco viewpoint, Los Angeles is another planet. An entertaining place to visit, but we wouldn’t want to live here.

L.A. is gaudy and commercial. It’s tacky. It lacks a neighborhood like the Haight to give cohesiveness to the music scene. The Haight, like Greenwich Village in New York, became a haven for artists and musicians because the rents are cheap. In L.A. the cheap-rent zones are scattered hither and yon—Venice, parts of Santa Monica, certain reaches of West Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley. And, for those with good luck or a little more loot, the canyons in the Hollywood Hills. Laurel Canyon is a favorite, but the roads are all up and down and twisty-turny. There are no sidewalks and no street life. Strictly residential. The street life is on the Sunset Strip, the section of Sunset Boulevard that begins on the western edge of old Hollywood and ends at the eastern border of Beverly Hills.

In the late fifties the Strip got a boost from the TV series
77 Sunset Strip
, when private eyes were pushing Westerns off the tube. More recently it has become the gathering place for the L.A.
counterculture. Since the folk-rock scene started hopping in ’65, the focus has shifted away from the Ash Grove and the other hangouts of the folk days to the rock clubs on the Strip, where the Whisky a Go Go is the centerpiece, and to the Troubadour, a music club down on Santa Monica Boulevard that bridges the gap between folk and rock.

As we cruise the sun-bathed streets in our air-conditioned band wagon, I urge the guys to be a little less obvious about passing joints around. In satisfying Big Brother’s curiosity about me, I have let them know that I was at the center of the dope-smoking folkies in Cambridge. I’m the guy who always had a stash, often Lebanese hash I smuggled home from Paris. Janis and the boys were duly impressed when I told them I took acid for the first time when Tim Leary and Richard Alpert were still employed by Harvard University. (Alpert is now Baba Ram Dass, a countercultural guru, and Leary is, well, he’s Tim Leary, famous for advising our generation to “Tune in, turn on, drop out,” which has not endeared him to parents or higher authorities. Leary and Alpert were let go by Harvard in 1963 for getting too far out.)

With Big Brother, it’s my job to be the straight guy, the one who keeps them out of trouble. I suggest that getting busted for pot is just plain dumb, beside the fact that it would create an unnecessary hassle for all of us—cops, jails, judges, courts, dollars.

Backstage at the Whisky a Go Go, the walls are coated with cannabis resin and no one blinks at the pungent scent of pot in the dressing rooms.

For a rock band emerging on the national scene, playing the Whisky is a rite of passage. It’s the proving ground for up-and-coming acts. Big Brother’s appearance here is a test run for bigger gigs to come, and a chance to get some notice from the L.A. rock press.

The Whisky has go-go dancers in fringed dresses and white boots in hanging cages. (Try to imagine go-go dancers in the Fillmore or the Avalon.) When I comment on the weirdness of the Southern
California scene, Sam Andrew says he thinks of me as an L.A. kind of guy. The abuse I have to take on this job.

On opening night the house is packed. Musicians from other bands are on hand. So are some representatives of the movie business. They’ve seen Big Brother in
Petulia
and they’re here to check out the further cinematic potential.

On the band’s first song, Sam Andrew hits the opening chord and breaks his sixth string, the low E. The loss of tension on the fattest string throws the guitar out of tune. Unwilling to cause the anticlimax of a false start, Sam keeps playing, while trying, with limited luck, to retune the remaining strings. Sam sees this as an attack of Big Brother’s curse, a persistent jinx that strikes every time it’s important for the band to play well. They beat it at Monterey, twice in a row, and Sam hoped the jinx was gone for good.

The other band members are aware of the discord, but they recover, and the audience is focused on Janis’s astonishing vocal power. Janis holds the song together with her total dedication to her singing. On the whole, the set goes well enough, but Janis drinks more than usual in reaction to the disruption.

Drinking onstage is part of an image that Janis likes to cultivate. Often she swigs directly from a bottle of Southern Comfort, her signature booze. From the start, I’ve worked to moderate this image. In the San Fernando Valley, where our audiences are mostly made up of teenagers and college students, Janis has been willing, most of the time, to drink onstage from a coffee cup instead of her bottle. When we’re playing at a college, California law reinforces my pitch: Alcohol can’t be sold within a mile of college campuses; inciting the students to drink could get Big Brother banned from college gigs. In San Francisco or L.A., or anywhere Janis feels that the audience is made up of her people, the hip rather than the square, her impulse is to flaunt the bottle. It’s an ongoing contest between us, one in which I will have some effect but will never finally win. In part, her
onstage behavior is a public image Janis wants to cultivate, but she also maintains that drinking is essential preparation for performing at her best.
*

Our Los Angeles lodgings are at the Hollywood Sunset Motel, a seedy hostelry farther east on Sunset, on the long straightaway that crosses Vine Street in the heart of Hollywood. Big Brother found this dump when they were starving musicians. Sticking to it now, doubling up in the small rooms, is a measure of their cautionary view of the music business.

One thing I have established at the outset is that I get a room of my own. The boys can double up if they want to, but I get to have a place where I won’t be kept up by a roommate watching TV or coming in late or playing music or talking on the phone. I’m the road manager. I get a room of my own, a phone of my own, peace and quiet of my own. Janis and the boys have accepted this declaration of independence with only token resistance.

This early in the job, I hold off on suggesting an upgrade in accommodation, although I think of L.A. as a place to indulge oneself in lavish style.

In the summer after my first year of college, before I discovered the byways of folk music, I was visiting my uncle’s family in Berkeley. I flew down to Los Angeles because my father was there (he and my mother long divorced, he long remarried), and I stayed for two dollars at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Not that you could get a room, any room, at the Beverly Hills for anything close to two dollars. Two bucks wouldn’t buy you an hour in an linen closet. We’re talking here about
the rambling, palm-shaded, pink stucco palace on the western, residential part of Sunset Boulevard that Hollywood movies use as an establishing shot to evoke the glamorous life in La-La Land. The same hotel where Grace Kelly was said to enjoy the company of the cabana boys, before she became a princess.

One of my father’s few extravagances is staying in first-class hotels. At the time of our L.A. rendezvous, he had hosted
Omnibus
for several years, and it was still on the air. He was entitled. In L.A., he stayed at the Beverly Hills. When I came to see him, he ordered up a rollaway bed and I slept in his room for an extra two dollars. It’s a story he loves to tell: “My son stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel for two dollars.”

The Hollywood Sunset Motel is a place you don’t brag about, no matter how little you pay. Which makes the contrast all the more striking when we go out to Bel Air to visit John and Michelle Phillips and see the final cut of Pennebaker’s movie,
Monterey Pop
.

The mid-December weather is sunny and warm, all the better for us to admire the umpty-room shack that formerly belonged to Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. The luxuriant, rambling gardens and grounds, measured in acres, evoke an earlier era when movie stars were expected to live in a style emulating that of European royalty. The grounds are extensive enough to contain an acid trip, if you don’t mind being screamed at by the free-roaming peacocks.

For our weekend in L.A., Dave Richards has brought along a candidate for a position as assistant equipment man. With an East Coast tour coming up in the new year, Dave figures a second guy is justified, and the band approves the idea. Mark Braunstein is barely twenty, with an impressive head of dark hair that stands out in all directions.
He met Janis in the Haight, on the street, not long after she joined Big Brother, and they became friends. Mark graduated from working in an all-night doughnut shop to managing equipment for the outfit that put on free concerts in the Panhandle. When Dave Richards suggested it might be a good idea to have two guys handling
Big Brother’s equipment when we went east, Janis thought of Mark. This weekend, he is just along for the ride, to check out the scene.

Judging by Mark’s goggle-eyed reaction to the Phillips mansion, he is in the process of deciding that this is the life for him. (When the weekend is over, he will sign on board our rock-and-roll caravan.)

John and Michelle’s success is recent enough that they still have the air of kids in a candy store to find themselves living in Jeanette MacDonald’s pad. Not expecting a stern parent to come fetch them home, but still a little wide-eyed at what they’ve managed to achieve, and working hard to appear blasé about it. The enormous Christmas tree in one of the downstairs rooms is merely in proportion to its surroundings, not ostentatious at all.

John is a gregarious host, while Michelle nods in our direction and after that mostly keeps to herself. To see
Monterey Pop
, we adjourn to a recording studio in the attic—a large attic—that doubles as a screening room, where we raise the cannabis content of the air to a self-sustaining level. Big Brother’s lawyer, Bob Gordon, is with us for the screening. He isn’t aghast at the goings-on, and I begin to understand that his short hair and proper dress are in the nature of a disguise.

Lights go down in the room, and the screen lights up.

I’ve seen much of the footage, but not the edited film. For Big Brother, it’s all new. Janis’s eyes are wide as the scenes unreel—the Mamas & the Papas, Canned Heat, Hugh Masakela. Jefferson Airplane gets two songs in the movie. Janis is waiting to see herself on-screen. Audio from an abbreviated version of Big Brother’s
“Combination of the Two” ran under the opening titles, but there was no glimpse of the band.

Fifteen minutes into the film I can barely contain my reaction, but I remain outwardly calm. Inside, I’m exultant. Pennebaker has done it. He has captured the feeling of the Pop Festival, intercutting shots of happy hippies arriving, camping, dancing, and grooving to the music, with song after song from the best performances on the big stage. Papa John is proud as punch because the movie makes the festival look like a brilliant accomplishment, a once-in-a-lifetime event, which it was. But his self-satisfaction can’t hold a candle to Big Brother’s, once they see “Ball and Chain.”

The song begins twenty-five minutes into the film, on the heels of Grace Slick and Marty Balin’s lovely duet, “Today.” The last chord has barely died away when four ascending notes from James Gurley’s guitar kick off the intro to “Ball and Chain.” We see Dave Getz first, then Peter Albin. Peter is looking up, mouthing the beats, nodding his head in time with the music. Sam and James are on-screen as James’s guitar intro winds toward its peak—and now Janis’s face fills the screen in left profile as she sings the first words.

In the studio–cum–screening room, Janis breathes, “Far out.”

She cackles when she sees Mama Cass’s “Wow! That’s really heavy!” reaction at the end of the song. “How’d he get that, man?” Janis wants to know.

How indeed? Pennebaker was onstage, filming Janis, during the Sunday evening performance, and it was also Penny who got the shot of Mama Cass—on Saturday. During Big Brother’s first appearance, when he was forbidden to film the band, Penny stood in front of the stage and sneaked a few shots of the audience. In the editing room he spliced Cass’s Saturday afternoon response at the end of Sunday evening’s “Ball and Chain,” and with that simple coda he has managed to include in the film the festival audience’s first mind-blown reaction to hearing Janis sing.

After the movie, Janis repairs to the pool table with a bottle, Papa
John, and a couple of the boys. With a pool table and a few companions, Janis can be happy for hours. In San Francisco she used to hang out with a bunch of tough women, all Capricorns, like her. They frequented the pool halls, and Janis won a reputation for wielding a mean stick.

While the rest of us gravitate to the end of the house that contains the kitchen and pool table, Peter Albin hangs out in the big living room and ends up being the only one to have a conversation with Michelle.

I venture outside to survey the grounds. There’s an elegant swimming pool with a flagstone terrace and four guesthouses. Four. Count ’em.

The movie, the mansion, the sunny day—we’re in dreamland. For Janis and Big Brother it’s a glimpse of what success in the music business can bring. When we return to the funky part of Hollywood, that kind of success is a world away. Janis and the boys are playing music clubs and dance halls and college gyms for $2,500 to $3,500 a night. More when the percentage kicks in, but this kind of bread isn’t about to buy any mansions in Bel Air. Still, Albert Grossman is booking the gigs, they’ve got a road manager, and
Monterey Pop
has reminded them that they’re on a roll.

So they’re unprepared for the shock that Albert delivers during a weeklong club date
at the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach, thirty-five miles south of L.A. The Bear is a folk outpost on the southern coast that has turned to amplified music as the folk boom fades. The night Albert comes to hear the band, James is so stoned that he’s almost falling off the stage, and it’s obvious to Albert that he’s stoned on something stronger than grass and booze.