On the Road with Janis Joplin (11 page)

When Albert agreed to manage Big Brother, he made it clear that he wanted nothing to do with anyone who was involved with hard drugs. “No
shmeez
,” he said, using a slang term that none of the guys in Big Brother had heard before. “No what?” they asked. No smack, no skag, no horse. No heroin. The Electric Flag had become a vexation to Albert in that regard. He wanted to acquire no more bands that were road wrecks waiting to happen. There are no junkies in this band, right? Oh, right! Big Brother assured him.

This response was not fully honest. Janis and the boys like to call Big Brother the only “alcodelic” or “psycheholic” band in rock. On the road, alcohol is the drug of choice. They all smoke dope,
except for Janis, who says it makes her think too much. They don’t perform on acid. Conventional wisdom has it that the Grateful Dead play on acid, which may or may not be true. The Dead are known for dosing others, which is true. Big Brother is more conservative, and more private, about their drug use. Janis got heavily into speed when she lived briefly in San Francisco in the midsixties, on her second visit to the Bay. By the time the band signed with Albert, Janis had acquired more than a passing acquaintance with heroin.
With her boyfriend at the time, she was shooting speedballs, a combination of smack and speed.

Sam is a former speed freak as well. He is acquainted with smack but trifles with it rarely. For Sam, the lure of exploring heroin is to follow in the footsteps of musicians he reveres—Charlie Parker and other jazz greats. Because of that association, for Sam it has almost the mystique of Holy Communion about it. Later on, this fascination will get Sam in trouble, but for now he holds it at bay.

Dave Getz and Peter Albin are the only ones who told Albert the truth, the only members of the band who don’t have at least a nodding acquaintance with heroin. James was the first in the band to try it, and the most serious about it, well before Albert came along. He’s into pills too.

At the Golden Bear, Albert contrives to speak with the other
members of the band while James is elsewhere occupied. He suggests to them that James be replaced. Maybe not permanently, but at least for now. The real reason behind Albert’s request is that he believes the band will improve musically if James is replaced by another guitar player. Albert hopes that if James takes an enforced leave, Janis and Sam and Peter and Dave will come to realize that the band is better without James, but he keeps these hopes to himself for now. If James cleans himself up he can come back later on, Albert says. Let’s give him $10,000 and send him away to think about it.

Albert may not know of James’s importance among the creators of the San Francisco Sound. He may not recognize how unusual the dissonance of twin guitars that James and Sam have developed is in the constellation of San Francisco bands and in the wider world of rock. But even if Albert knows these things, it doesn’t matter. How a musician is regarded by his community or his contemporaries, however unusual his style, how important his innovations—these things don’t affect Albert’s opinions. His opinions are his own, and his concern is here and now. He doesn’t like James’s music and he believes that James’s drug use is a danger to the band.

Janis and the boys refuse to consider replacing James, even temporarily. James has been in this band from the beginning, they tell Albert. We’re a family. We’re going to make it or break it together.
*

Albert accepts their refusal stoically. It is his first attempt to influence the band’s musical development, but not the last.

It rattles the band’s confidence when an L.A. rock critic who hears Big Brother at the Golden Bear puts his opinion of the band in the
headline of his review: “Janis Joplin Too Full of Soul for Holding Company Partners.”

—

W
HEN WE’RE DONE
at the Golden Bear, Janis flies home to Port Arthur for a Christmas visit with her family. In my stucco motel in San Francisco, I’m a long way from my own family, but I join a Christmas dinner in Berkeley. In the sunny week between Christmas and New Year’s the temperature in San Francisco reaches seventy each day, which seems like an unseasonal miracle.

On the weekend, Janis is back in San Francisco and we go into Winterland to wind up 1967 with three nights playing for Bill Graham.

For the first two nights, Chuck Berry is the headliner. Big Brother gets second billing, over Quicksilver Messenger Service. On New Year’s Eve, Jefferson Airplane tops the bill, followed by Big Brother, Quicksilver, and Freedom Highway. There will be nonstop music from 9:00
P.M.
until 9:00
A.M.
the next morning, when Graham and his staff will serve breakfast to the survivors. A ticket to this all-night extravaganza costs six dollars.

Peter Albin arrives backstage on New Year’s Eve dressed in a silver lamé jumpsuit. His hair is teased and sprayed into a fright wig that’s strung with tiny white Christmas tree lights that wink on and off, powered by a battery pack on his belt. The band has an informal rule that they can’t wear anything onstage that they won’t wear on the street. To accommodate this custom, Peter walks around the block in his costume before coming into Winterland.

This is nothing, Sam tells me. You should have seen him on Halloween. Peter dressed as a penis. The show was called “Trip or Freak.” Peter wrapped himself in a sheath of pink cloth, which he draped over a pith helmet he wore on his head. He tied string around the sheath at his neckline to create the (circumcised) head. He attached two pink
balloons, painted with black hair, to his feet.
Et voilà
, a walking erection. He cut eye holes to see through and holes in the sides of the shaft for his arms, and he played in this costume onstage. He’s the straight one, mind you, the band’s businessman, the one who signs the contracts.

For the Halloween show, Janis dressed as Salome.

This is my first gig for Bill Graham, who has become the dominant force in the local rock scene. The Fillmore and Winterland—bigger than the Fillmore, two blocks away—are his, and his success threatens the survival of the Avalon, where Big Brother was once the de facto house band. Some in the local music community resent Graham’s hardheaded style, but he has brought a new professionalism to concert promotion around the Bay and he forces others to meet the standards he sets. Some don’t, and some fail.

Graham hires and trains his own security guards. They dress in T-shirts instead of uniform jackets, and they treat the audience like “us” instead of “them.” Bill’s goal is to create a welcoming environment for the musicians and the audience alike. At the top of the stairs, where the audience enters the hall, there’s a box of free apples.

Tonight the dressing rooms are provided with a lavish spread of food and drink for the bands, which creates an almost Rabelaisian atmosphere backstage. Why bother to go onstage and play? The party is here.

I meet Bill early in the evening, before the hall is full, before the music starts. He’s a high-intensity New York type that’s familiar to me. He has done a lot of business with Albert, and he is evidently pleased that Albert is managing Big Brother. The last thing I want to do is screw up Bill’s good relations with Albert, so we both have incentives to get along. Bill can be a charmer when he wants to, and I find myself liking him.

Before midnight, while Big Brother is onstage, Bill takes me to his office and gives me a check. Big Brother gets a flat fee when they
play for Bill, so my job is a snap. No percentage to work out, no worries about how many hippies may get into Winterland free. The professionalism of the operation puts me at ease. From what I’ve heard about Bill and what I learn from my early experiences with him, I figure if he’s going to rip off Big Brother, he’s going to do it by negotiating a tough deal with Albert, and I trust Albert to handle him.

At the stroke of the new year, I’m pouring Graham’s on-the-house champagne in the backstage dressing room for Janis. A few days later, I’m almost fired.

New York, New York

I
N TH
E FIRST
week of January I find a second-floor walk-up in North Beach. My pad-to-be is on Powell Street, on the west side of the block that houses Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church, which presides grandly over Washington Square Park. The rent is $155 a month. It’s less than a ten-minute walk to the Committee Theater on Broadway, and handy to the Embarcadero Freeway for quick trips to Berkeley. I tell Signora Andoni, the rental agent, that I’ll move in at the end of the week.

How come you didn’t look in the Haight? Janis and the boys want to know, but they admit the Haight is changing. It’s overrun by runaways and would-be hippies and tour busses full of straight people who stop to gawk in front of the Grateful Dead’s house.

I have other reasons to prefer North Beach. I like the Italian grocery stores, full of olive oil and handmade pasta. On Columbus Avenue, a broad thoroughfare that separates Telegraph Hill from Russian Hill, I hear Chinese and Italian spoken within the same block. I like the lingering vibe of the Beats and the beatniks and the proximity to the Committee. I’m a beatnik, not a hippie, and settling
here keeps me at a certain remove from the band. It preserves my independence.

Maybe this is what makes the band decide I’m not the right guy for them.

I’m dead asleep in my motel when Albert phones at midmorning. I had a late night, but he’s wide-awake on Eastern Time. He’s had a call from the band. “They don’t think it’s working,” he says. “Incompatible lifestyles,” is the complaint. This jolts me wide-awake. I have had no clue from anyone in Big Brother that they aren’t satisfied.

I tell Albert, “I’ll call you back.”

I phone every member of the band and reach four out of five, Janis and all the guys except James. “Meeting at the Warehouse,” I tell them. “Right now.” On the way across town I’m feeling betrayed and pissed off. If they’ve got a problem, how about talking to me before they call Albert?

The possibility of failure hasn’t crossed my mind. I might quit this job in six months if I find my own work to do, but I’m damned if I’ll lose it because my hair isn’t long enough. If they’ll just give me a chance, I’ll be the best damn road manager anybody ever saw. I like it here. What’s more, I like them. They’re interesting. In my wildest dreams, I couldn’t have come up with five more divergent personalities to stick in a rock-and-roll band, and yet they are truly a band. They’re united in the music and they believe in what they’re doing.

It occurs to me, as I park the car, that maybe Janis is behind the effort to get rid of me. What if the problem, at least on her part, is my refusal to yield to her sexual advances? Did she instigate the call to Albert as her way of getting back at me for not going to bed with her?

When we’re gathered in the rehearsal loft, seated around the table by the window, I ask them what’s the problem, as if I haven’t a clue. Well, you don’t hang out with us, Peter says. This is a family, and you don’t feel like one of the family, Janis says with a petulant edge.

This I can deal with. The band is put out because I didn’t rent an apartment in the Haight and outfit myself from the hippie clothing
stores and I don’t drop by their pads on our days off to hang out and smoke dope. I respond with the short speech I rehearsed in my head on the way across town: If you want some long-haired fan to hang out day and night, to smoke dope with you, to fetch cigarettes and carry your guitars, we can hire a grateful hippie to do that for fifty bucks a week. But I’ve got a job to do.

“Well, what exactly is your job?” The question comes from Dave Getz, and I realize that they truly don’t know. They know I drive the rent-a-car and handle the plane tickets and register them at the motels, because they see all that. But they don’t see the rest of it, the dozens of phone calls on our days off, and what I do while they’re onstage. So I tell them about booking the travel and talking with the promoters beforehand, and I remind them about the gig in the Valley where the third roll of tickets was sold under the counter. My job is to spot that kind of shit, I tell them. I get you to the gig on time, I handle the logistics, I make sure you get paid. I keep the promoter happy. I make sure you don’t get ripped off. I try to make it possible for you to think about nothing but the music. While you’re onstage, I’m checking the box office and the ticket takers. I check the sound. I talk to the soundman if it needs adjusting. Then I check the doors again.

I’m fighting to save my new job and my new life, but I know it can’t sound like fighting or begging. I like getting stoned and hanging out as much as you do, I tell them. But when I’m stoned I can’t do the job. I lose my motivation. I remind them that I was a bluegrass musician for six years and made two record albums before Big Brother was formed. I loved the life of a beatnik bluegrass picker, but I gave it up to work for you, I tell them. With you, my job is to be the straight guy who keeps it all together.

I’m just a little older than them and I make it sound like more. By implication, I’m beyond being an adoring fan and hangout partner. I don’t tell them how blown away I am by their music and the whole San Francisco trip, how much I like the band and being on the road.

Janis reveals no hint of having a stake in the outcome beyond the concerns that she and the guys have expressed. It’s all about their gig and my gig, and what’s best for the band. She gives no sign of a hidden agenda.

They hear me out and they don’t argue. Fine, they say. We’ll try it a little longer.

I have survived the first crisis. And, as it turns out, the only one that ever threatens my employment. I’ve done it by trusting my instincts about how to handle it, which encourages me to believe that maybe I really am cut out for this job. Back at the motel, I call Albert and tell him everything is under control. I try to sound cool about it, but my relief is my high for the day, and it’s probably audible through the cross-country phone line.

—

I
PUT A
foam mattress on the bedroom floor at 1856 Powell Street. I build some bookshelves out of bricks and planks; I buy a few pieces of furniture at secondhand stores. I spend a week’s pay on a big
Scandinavian rug, all dark greens and blues. I buy a compact KLH FM-stereo record player that packs up into a suitcase, and my new home is open for business.

I go down to Monterey and buy back the white Volvo sedan I sold to an architect there two years before. I shipped the car back from Europe in ’62 and later drove it to California in pursuit of the Wrong Girl. I worked for the Monterey architect as a carpenter while waiting in vain for her to realize I was the love of her life. Having the Volvo back now connects my past to the future. It pleases me to think that by selling the car to the architect when I bailed out of that futile quest I was stashing it, keeping it in reserve against my eventual return to the coast. Now I’m back. I’ve got wheels. I’m a California resident. I’m ready for the next summer of love.

With the road-managing crisis behind us, Janis and the boys accept me more fully, and there appear to be no lingering concerns. Janis, in particular, takes a new interest in me. This isn’t renewed flirting to see if she can lure me into bed. She has learned that the Wrong Girl I was pursuing a couple of years ago in Carmel is a girl named Kim whom Janis knows from Haight Street, where Kim’s San Francisco lover, Peggy Caserta, runs a hip clothing store called Mnasidika. This discovery intrigues Janis, because her perception of me up to this point hasn’t included the possibility that I could ever be with a girl like Kim. This seems to open the door for more curiosity and a new level of friendship.

In Janis’s talk about Peggy and Kim, I get an inkling that there may have been something between Janis and Peggy. There’s a gleam in her eye when she talks about Kim too. Maybe . . . ? Janis doesn’t say anything explicit, but in our conversations among the band she has revealed in a matter-of-fact way that she has had affairs with women. She has also made it plain that her active interest is focused on men. On the road, I haven’t seen her light up over a woman the way she lights up nightly about the wealth of what she likes to call male “talent” in the audience.

At the heart of Janis’s justification for doing whatever feels good, and polite behavior be damned, is her belief that our parents lied to us about pretty much everything and so we have to decide for ourselves what’s right and what’s wrong. This isn’t something she has picked up in San Francisco. It comes from personal conviction that she reveals when she talks about growing up in Texas. As a teenager in Port Arthur in the fifties, she felt the imposition of a concept of propriety that she found stifling. Girls behave a certain way. Nice girls don’t get drunk. Nice girls don’t have sex. Sex is dangerous. The social strictures included a Southern attitude about Negroes that Janis decided was wrong even before she experienced life beyond her hometown. From her Kerouacian rambles in the early sixties, and all the more since she was accepted by Big Brother and San Francisco itself, she has looked back on the guidelines that were laid down in her youth and she feels that she was deceived. “They lied to us about dope, they lied to us about black people, they lied to us about sex, man, they lied to us about everything,” more or less sums it up. Taking drugs, getting drunk, exploring bisexuality and adopting black music as her own is Janis’s natural reaction.

In the winter of 1965–1966, when Big Brother was formed, and later, when Chet Helms brought Janis up from Texas to join the band, I was just 120 miles away, in Carmel. I visited the city with Kim. I even went to the Avalon and the Fillmore once or twice. If I had connected to the burgeoning San Francisco scene back then, everything might have turned out differently. But then I might have missed connecting to Pennebaker and Monterey and I wouldn’t be here now, road-managing Big Brother.

Maybe everything really does happen the way it’s supposed to.

Our worlds overlap again when I learn that Janis has another
connection to my Cambridge companions through the Cabale coffeehouse in Berkeley, which was founded by Debbie Green, a girl I’ve known since we were both in the Putney School, a progressive coed boarding school in Vermont. Debbie was the most beautiful girl in my class. Maybe in the whole school. She was one of the handful of students who got in early on the folk revival and introduced her fellow students, including me, to the folk repertoire. Her guitar playing and her songs were part of my motivation to get a guitar, while I was still at Putney, and to begin learning those songs.

Like me, Debbie was Boston bound after our Putney graduation. She met Joan Baez on opening day at Boston University. Before long they both dropped out and migrated to the nascent folk music scene in Cambridge. It was Debbie who taught Joan to play the guitar beyond the simple strums she already knew, and it was from Debbie that Joan appropriated much of her early repertoire. By the time of Janis’s first trip to the Bay Area, Debbie had moved to California, and with two partners she established the Cabale as Berkeley’s equivalent to the Club 47.

Janis heard about the Cabale through the grapevine and called up to ask if she could audition.
It was Debbie who received Janis when she came by on the appointed afternoon, driving a Vespa motor scooter. Janis strummed the guitar and sang an earthy blues; it took only that much to impress Debbie, who is not easily impressed. Hearing Janis sing blew her away. “Oh, man!” she said. “We’ve got to find you a band! Of course you can play here, but first we’ve got to find you a band.” When Janis left the Cabale that afternoon, she fired up her Vespa, pulled out into the street, and was hit by a car. Debbie ran out to help her, only to find Janis laughing hysterically. Somehow the driver of the car doesn’t figure in the rest of the story. Janis was limping slightly, still laughing, only a little the worse for wear, but she agreed to let Debbie take her to an emergency room to get checked out. Debbie thought having a man along might make it go easier, so she called her boyfriend at the time, who was none other than Bob
Neuwirth. The three of them spent hours in the ER waiting room, and they got along like old friends. Eventually a doctor examined Janis, told her she had a sprained ankle, wrapped it in an Ace bandage, and sent her on her way.

Debbie tried to follow up on the idea of getting Janis booked into the Cabale with a backup band, but Janis was hard to reach by phone, and her rambles took her away from San Francisco before the Cabale could be added to her list of solo venues.

Learning of Janis’s connections to Kim and the Committee and Cambridge and Berkeley makes me wonder that we haven’t met long before now.

On January 19, 1968, which is Janis’s twenty-fifth birthday, Big Brother is playing in Kaleidoscope, a club in L.A. When we arrive that evening, we find that the club’s manager has arranged three dozen roses on the stage. There are two dozen more in the dressing room, which I ordered, from the band, a dozen from friends in San Francisco, and another dozen from Peter Tork, of the Monkees. Janis fairly swoons. Conspiring with the boys in Big Brother, I have arranged to have champagne and cake appear after the show. Janis clasps her hands to her heart and sighs and smiles and laughs, and drinks champagne from the bottle.