On the Road with Janis Joplin (12 page)

During Big Brother’s stand at Kaleidoscope, Janis doesn’t make a brazen play for any of the good-looking guys in the audience, or even comment on the wealth of available talent. Her usual style of coming on to members of the opposite sex is like a man’s in a way that vanishingly few women will risk. In a club or bar her eyes scan the room. If she spots a likely prospect she’ll lean closer to me or one of the boys and say, with a conspiratorial leer, “Oh, my God, I think I’m in love.” Backstage at a gig, she’ll show up in the band’s dressing room all atwitter and report on her sightings just as a guy would report to his partners in lechery, but this is a
girl
who talks about the pretty
boys
she’s seen, and she’s reporting to
us
. In displaying her interest in the
opposite sex, as in her style of hanging out among friends in bars and pool halls and pretty much anywhere she’s comfortable, Janis is one of the guys. Which makes her behavior at Kaleidoscope all the more out of character.

After the gig, Janis doesn’t fly back to San Francisco with the rest of us. When she does come home, she takes to her bed for more than a week with what she says is a case of the flu. We have to cancel three days at the Fillmore, which costs Big Brother $8,000.

The reason for Janis’s restraint at Kaleidoscope was that she was pregnant at the time and had made plans to go to Mexico following the gig, for an abortion. Janis told her roommate, Linda Gravenites, that the culprit was the drummer from Blue Cheer, a San Francisco psychedelic blues-rock band. The drummer is one of Janis’s pretty boys. She goes for pretty boys or mountain men—hunky guys who emerge from the interior fastnesses of Marin and Sonoma counties in flannel shirts and work boots—and not much in between.

At the time, I take Janis’s flu at face value.

While she convalesces, during the break from touring, I follow the evening news and two stories that foreshadow great changes to come, both in domestic politics and in the war in Vietnam. On January 30, New York senator Robert F. Kennedy announces that “under no conceivable circumstances” will he follow Oregon senator Eugene McCarthy in challenging President Johnson for the Democratic nomination. McCarthy announced his candidacy back in November, on the day I arrived in San Francisco to take up the job with Big Brother. His focus is to oppose Johnson’s Vietnam policy and to urge the United States to find a way to end the conflict.

The second story will dominate the news for weeks. On the same day as Kennedy’s announcement, in Vietnam, the National Liberation Front attacks South Vietnamese units in the country’s northernmost province, along the border with North Vietnam, and in the Central Highlands. The next morning, they attack Saigon and
more than thirty provincial capitals. In the days that follow, the attacks include American bases and over a hundred cities and towns across South Vietnam. Launched on the lunar new year, which the Vietnamese call Tet, the coordinated attacks become known as the Tet Offensive.

For much of 1967, my political awareness was quiescent. The starry-eyed high of the Summer of Love made it easy to believe, briefly, the promise of a new day to come. New York’s Easter Be-In in Central Park, held in response to San Francisco’s January gathering, followed by the Monterey Pop Festival and the CRVB’s California tour and—best of all—finding myself, at the year’s end, road manager for Big Brother and the Holding Company, encouraged in me a willful naïveté. During a year in which our troop strength in Vietnam increased by another ninety thousand, I turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the war and, like many of my contemporaries, embraced a hope that music, love, and flowers could influence American politics and perhaps the world.

Before long Janis is up and around and we’re off for another gig in L.A., at the Cheetah this time, and one in San Diego. On our first few plane trips, I tried to keep the band together as we passed through the San Francisco airport to the departure gate, but herding musicians is like trying to herd cats. Now I just tell them the gate number and what time to be there (with a safety margin added), and they show up, which encourages me to believe that musicians can be trained to behave like grown-ups.

Not a moment too soon. When we return to San Francisco from San Diego we have a few days to say good-bye to friends and get serious about packing for two months away from home. The great adventure is at hand: It’s time for Big Brother’s East Coast debut.

FEB. 16, 1968:
Palestra, Philadelphia

FEB. 17:
Anderson Theater, NYC

FEB. 22–24:
Psychedelic Supermarket, Boston

FEB. 25:
The Reflectory, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence
*

The first thing Janis and the boys notice about New York, even before we’re out of the airport, is that people here don’t make eye contact. In California, people look you in the eye. Often they’ll nod or smile in the street. Total strangers. Pretty girls acknowledge a guy’s appreciative glance, even if they’re with their boyfriends. Pretty girls in New York may risk giving a bunch of long-haired California rockers a fleeting smile, but the ordinary man and woman go on their way heads down against the February winds. I find the avoidance of eye contact disturbing, and I realize that I’m looking at my hometown like an outsider, which raises my spirits.

While we tour the eastern states, New York will be our home base. From here we will sally forth to show the San Francisco colors to the coastal metropolises and the unsuspecting hinterland. Dave Richards and Mark Braunstein have flown Big Brother’s stage equipment east. They will rent a truck to drive it from gig to gig.

The band’s lodgings in New York are at the Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street, renowned for the artistic pursuits of its short- and long-term residents and for being the place where Dylan Thomas died. Next door, and accessible through a door in the Chelsea’s lobby, is a restaurant and bar called El Quijote. The cuisine is Spanish, of a sort, but it is the bar that catches Janis’s immediate attention. She is delighted that she can enter El Quijote without having to brave the winter weather, and she has her first drink at the bar before she sets foot in her first room at the Chelsea.

I have decided to stay at my mother’s Upper East Side apartment,
which I justify by pointing out how much money it will save the band, but once again I am removing myself from the off-hours action and any whimsical demands the band might put on me at odd times of the day and night. At 325 East 72nd Street, I can cook my own breakfast. As a practical matter, I can make phone calls without being subject to the notorious delays occasioned by the Chelsea’s switchboard. All the same, it is a decision I will later regret. A writer of my generation, especially one born in New York, should have some stories to tell about the Chelsea Hotel. I missed a lot by not staying in the Chelsea.

On our first evening in town, Albert takes us all to Max’s Kansas City. We step in the door, and the song on the background music is Country Joe McDonald singing “Janis,” which he wrote for guess who. The cosmic DJ is on the job.

Like a Broadway show, Big Brother opens out of town, in Philadelphia. The following night, the band’s New York debut is underwhelming. It takes place in the Anderson Theater on Second Avenue, in the East Village. The neighborhood is dicey, the theater is kind of a dump, and the promoter is a sleazeball. If Janis and the boys were expecting gleaming limos coming and going and the eyes of the city focused on them, they’re disappointed, but they’re blown away to find that they’ve got top billing above B. B. King, who is second on the bill. The opening act is a band nobody’s heard of called the Aluminum Dream.

It’s an easy gig for me. Three thousand dollars flat, no percentage to figure, not much different, in terms of Big Brother’s income, from most of the shows in California. If it were a percentage gig, I wouldn’t trust the promoter, a dodgy type named Tony, as far as I could throw him. I would spend the whole evening checking the tickets, watching the door, watching the box office, trying to figure out how he was ripping us off.

As hard as it is to believe, New York City has no established venue for rock-and-roll shows. There’s no local equivalent for the Fillmore or the Avalon, no promoter who regularly books the top acts in pop music.

The Anderson gig is on a Saturday. We have to wait for Monday’s papers to read the reviews. The only one that matters is in the
New York Times
, and it’s enough to warm the hearts of a bunch of San Francisco hippies shivering in the New York winter.

Robert Shelton is New York’s Ralph Gleason, responsible for bringing Joan Baez and Bob Dylan into the music pages of the
Times
. Like Gleason, Shelton has graduated to rock music, and like Gleason he unlimbers the superlatives when he hears Janis. “
Janis Joplin Is Climbing Fast in the Heady Rock Firmament,” proclaims the headline on Shelton’s review. He judges Janis “as remarkable a new pop-music talent as has surfaced in years.” He calls her “sparky, spunky,” and compares her to Aretha and Erma Franklin. “But comparisons wane,” Shelton writes, “for there are few voices of such power, flexibility and virtuosity in pop music anywhere. Occasionally, Miss Joplin appeared to be hitting two harmonizing notes.” Shelton waxes poetic as he describes Janis’s vocal dynamics: “Her voice shouted with ecstasy or anger one minute, trailed off into coquettish curlicues the next. It glided from soprano highs to chesty alto lows.”

Janis is in seventh heaven. Nor are the boys disappointed. All too often, print reviews, including those from Monterey, have focused mostly on Janis and mentioned the rest of the band in passing, if at all. Shelton, however, singles out the boys for special praise. The band, he says, “is inventive enough to be worthy of its star. Outstanding were its vocal style, which uses the smear and the yelp to startling effect, and arrangements that embroidered ‘The Cuckoo’ with modernistic lace and framed ‘Summertime’ with a pale metallic fugue.”
*

With Shelton’s review clipped from several copies of the Monday
Times
,
we grab a couple of cabs and head uptown to the Black Rock, Columbia’s headquarters on Sixth Avenue at 52nd Street, to sign Big Brother’s recording contract. Albert closed the deal in November, within weeks of signing Big Brother. Now, in the imposing building that says “CBS” on it in very big letters, in corporate offices twenty-six floors above the streets of New York, Janis and the boys pen their signatures on the contract and it becomes real for them. They are Columbia recording artists.

The advance Albert has negotiated for Big Brother is big news. The Airplane, the Dead, and Country Joe have signed earlier with RCA, Warner Brothers, and Vanguard, respectively, for advances, considered precedent-setting at the time, ranging from $25,000 to $50,000. For Big Brother and the Holding Company, Columbia has shelled out $150,000—of which the band will see not a penny, because it all goes to Bobby Shad to extricate them from their contract with Mainstream, together with an additional $100,000 that will come out of the band’s earnings. Shad demanded $250,000 to let Big Brother out of the contract and he is sitting in the catbird seat. Columbia and Big Brother have no choice but to swallow their pride and pay him. Janis and the boys are not happy that Shad has enriched himself at the band’s expense, but they’re free of Mainstream at last.

Following the signing, Columbia throws a press reception for the band at a restaurant on 57th Street, presided over by president Clive Davis. There’s an open bar and lavish hors d’oeuvres. The minions of the Fourth Estate buzz around Janis like flies on honey, ignoring the boys. They feel left out, but 57th Street is a lot flashier than lower Second Avenue and they sense that the next phase of their career is truly launched.

—

(Promotional information provided by the band members, released to the press by Albert B. Grossman Management.)

MEET
BIG BROTHER AND THE HOLDING COMPANY

Janis Joplin

BORN:
January 19, 1943

BIRTH SIGN:
Capricorn

PLACE OF BIRTH:
Port Arthur, Texas

INSTRUMENTS:
Vocals, percussion

BACKGROUND:
Dropped in and out of four colleges. Worked intermittently and collected unemployment. Sang country music and blues with an Austin, Texas, bluegrass band. Sang blues in folk clubs and bars in San Francisco. Joined Big Brother via Chet Helms, old friend, past manager of Big Brother and now the head of Family Dog.

MUSICAL INFLUENCES:
Bessie Smith and Otis Redding (The King).

I’M A FAN OF:
Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Moby Grape, Electric Flag, Bob Dylan, Mother Earth, Tina Turner, Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Beatles, Quicksilver, the Dead.

FUTURE:
Buy a bar and settle down.

Sam Andrew

BORN:
December 18, 1941

BIRTH SIGN:
Sagittarius

PLACE OF BIRTH:
Taft, California

BACKGROUND:
Started playing guitar at 14. Played in rock and roll bands until 18. Began classical guitar in 1962. Played tenor sax in 1963 in a rock and roll band. Played alto sax in a military band. Played jazz guitar at the Juke Box on Haight Street. Came with Big Brother in the summer of 1965.

MAJOR MUSICAL INFLUENCES:
Chuck Berry, Chet Atkins, Webb Pierce, Andres Segovia, King Curtis, B. B. King, Albert Collins and Albert King.

I’M A FAN OF:
Janis Joplin, Peter Albin, Dave Getz, James Gurley, Bob Mosley, Paul Butterfield, Mike Bloomfield and Jorma Kaukonen.

FUTURE:
?

James Martin Gurley

BIRTH SIGN:
Capricorn

PLACE OF BIRTH:
Detroit, Michigan

INSTRUMENTS:
Guitar and Kelp horn

BACKGROUND AND INFLUENCES:
Been bumming around, picking up on Coleman, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Broonzy, Bach, Vivaldi, Lord Buckley, Moondog, Big Sur, Mexico, Zen, Zap, Zonk, the usual.