On the Road with Janis Joplin (13 page)

LIKES:
Currently dig all those doing their thing well.

FUTURE:
Someday I hope to regain consciousness.

Peter S. Albin

BORN:
June 6, 1944

BIRTH SIGN:
Gemini

PLACE OF BIRTH:
San Francisco

BACKGROUND:
Got started in folk music, played bluegrass, old timey music and country blues. Got involved in electric blues and rock and roll during college. Went with Big Brother and the Holding Company in 1965.

MAJOR INFLUENCES:
B. B. King, John Lee Hooker, Charlie Poole, Chuck Berry, Flatt and Scruggs, Moondog, Lenny Bruce, Captain Zero, Ali Akbar Khan, Otis Redding, Rolling Stones, Spike Jones, Leonard Bernstein, early Brubeck, Bobby Breen and Charley Mingus.

I’M A FAN OF:
Otis Redding, Steve Miller Blues Band, John Chambers, Beatles, B. B. King, Dionne Warwick, Siegel-Schwall, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Aretha Franklin and Pat Kilroy.

FUTURE:
To continue moving people with music and musical entertainment. Producing and promoting.

David Getz

BORN:
Yes

AGE:
28

INSTRUMENTS:
Drums, piano, vocal

BACKGROUND:
Started playing drums and drawing pictures at age 14. Became freak with no context. Lived in Brooklyn. Started art school (Cooper Union) at 17. Played with jazz groups, but mostly schlock weekend gigs for bread. Mostly painted. Went to Europe in 1959 with Dixieland band. Moved to San Francisco in 1960. Went to Art Institute. Didn’t play drums too much. Got B.F.A., M.F.A., and Fulbright Fellowship. Lived in Poland for one year. Stopped painting, started playing drums with numerous Polish jazz groups. Returned to San
Francisco in 1965. Became art teacher and 2nd cook. Painted. Frustrated drummer. Met Peter Albin. Heard Big Brother and had to be the drummer again.

MUSICAL INFLUENCES:
Roy Haynes, Max Roach, and lots of jazz drummers. Indian drummers (Sivarman). Rhythm and blues and soul musicians. Everything I’ve ever heard.

What a Wonderful Town

W
E HAVE TO
wait until Thursday to learn that the weekly
Village Voice
also gives the Anderson show a rave. When the
Times
and the
Voice
are in agreement, you’ve got the bases covered.

I spend my most of my weekdays at Albert’s office on East 55th Street, making arrangements for upcoming gigs. “The office” is in a five-story town house between Park and Madison avenues. Albert has the fourth floor and part of the fifth. A genial staffer named Marty shows me a spare desk and phone in the room where he works, and this becomes my work space.

I could leave it to the office’s travel agency to book the flights and the motels and the rental cars, but they’re making arrangements for half a dozen acts on the road at any given time and they don’t always take the comfort of the musicians into account. After we experienced a few unnecessarily trying itineraries out west, I gradually assumed the duties of Big Brother’s travel agent. The basics are simple: Don’t wake the band earlier than necessary on a travel day, don’t book connecting flights when there’s a direct flight, and ask the band when there are choices to be made. We have a day off between gigs on the
road; do you want to spend the layover in city A or city B? Getting an answer to any question involves consulting with all five members of the band, sometimes more than once. Democracy in action. But they appreciate the consideration, and building a consensus on logistical decisions is becoming easier.

Max’s Kansas City becomes our regular watering place. Dave Richards connects to a lovely waitress and the single guys avail themselves of the opportunities among the waitresses and the clientele. The guys who have old ladies at home sometimes behave like single guys on the road. These are the sixties, after all.

Janis is always on the prowl and vocal about it. Her most successful pickup line is “Hiya, honey,” delivered with a winsome smile. The ballsy-mama-on-the-town persona is a role she puts on partly to cover her insecurities, and because it’s part of who she wants to be. In her quieter moments, talking about men, Janis makes it clear that she’s really looking for true love, just like the rest of us.

Janis has been to New York before, in her speed-driven wanderings of the early sixties. She comments on the enduring aspects of New York life that she noticed then—the faster pace, the higher level of adrenaline in the streets. She was pool champ of Eighth Avenue, she tells me with a bravado that lets me know it isn’t a serious claim. Trust Janis to have ended up in Hell’s Kitchen her first time in New York.

Now she has returned in style, no longer scrabbling for a place to stay. The Chelsea is funky enough to win her approval. She likes the mix of artists, musicians, bohemians and beatniks that make up the long-term residents, but she regards New York as an alien environment.

The boys have their own reservations. At the end of a day on the town, James tells me, “I looked up at the sky and a rock fell in my eye.” The “rock” was a gnarly piece of urban grit that grated his cornea until he managed to extricate the offending particle.

A week after the Anderson Theater, Big Brother plays at the Psychedelic Supermarket in Boston. The Supermarket is as close as you can get to a San Francisco rock-and-roll ballroom on the East Coast, and it’s a reasonable facsimile. Janis and the boys feel more at home here than they did at the Anderson Theater, with its fixed seats. The audience fills the dance floor and Big Brother plays a spirited set, happy to feel something like their hometown connection to the dancers.

The other act on the bill is a new band formed by Al Kooper called Blood, Sweat and Tears. They’re not anything like a San Francisco band, but Janis is intrigued by the horn section. Al is trying to use horns in a new way, beyond how horns have traditionally been used by R&B groups.

The contrast between Boston and San Francisco becomes apparent when Dave Richards and Mark Braunstein come in on Saturday to find that a bunch of Big Brother’s equipment has been stolen since the end of the Friday night show. We routinely leave equipment in the San Francisco ballrooms, where Bill Graham and the Family Dog provide adequate security. Here, Dave and Marko have to scramble to beg, borrow, and buy enough equipment for us to play on Saturday night.

On Sunday we do a show at the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, to an enthusiastic crowd of stoned art students. Janis is delighted. “They’re just like hippies!” she says. It’s a flat-rate gig, so
I don’t have much to do. During the performance I’m standing against the back wall of the student union, checking the sound and digging the set, when I feel a hand on my calf. I look down to see a lovely girl making out with her boyfriend. They’re sitting on the floor. Their eyes are closed, their lips are locked, and her hand is running up and down
my
leg! This probably has something to do with why, at the end of the show, I grab a mike, thank the crowd for being a great audience, and announce the address in Cambridge where I’m throwing a party for the band that night. A couple of carloads of adventurous RISD fans take me up on it and arrive to discover that the party is in an iron lung factory.

The summer before my freshman year at Harvard, I worked for my uncle Jack, my mother’s brother, in his funky three-story brick factory in a working-class section of North Cambridge. Jack was the family dropout. While his elder sister and two brothers followed in their father’s footsteps by attending Radcliffe and Harvard and going on to advanced degrees in the sciences, Jack quit college, started his own business, perfected the modern iron lung, and filed a couple of dozen patents for his inventions of mechanical devices that assisted doctors in caring for their patients, many of them related to breathing. In time, his father, my grandfather, a distinguished epidemiologist and a hard man to please, came to acknowledge that Jack had not wasted his life.

Two years ago, when I retreated to Cambridge from my abortive move to California, I lived in one of two apartments on the top floor of Jack’s factory. It became a celebrated party pad. The parties ran late and featured dancing to rock and roll on the hi-fi. With no one else living in the building, we didn’t have to worry about the noise bothering the neighbors, but the neighbors must have occasionally marveled at the number of cars coming and going from the parking lot of the J. H. Emerson Company late at night. For revelers who found themselves still there in the morning, there was bottled medical oxygen for a quick pick-me-up.

My sound system is still set up in my living room/bedroom and I haven’t yet shipped all my records to San Francisco. I have advertised the party through the Cambridge grapevine and it becomes a major event. Blood, Sweat and Tears are here in force. The Chambers Brothers are in Boston this weekend. Neuwirth has come up from New York. The living room is wall to wall with people dancing while James Gurley makes out on the bed with one of the girls from RISD.

In the back room, Neuwirth sets up a camera and tape recorder he has borrowed from Pennebaker. He isn’t sure what he’ll use the footage for, but his auteurial juices are bubbling. He calls people into the room, seats them in front of the camera, illuminated by the harsh light of a gooseneck table lamp, and interviews them. Sometimes he directs them in hysterical displays that will startle anyone who sees these shots without having experienced the party. He films Lester Chambers screaming like a banshee.

Before the party sighs to a close, in the wee hours, I am rewarded for inviting the RISD students. How can I put this discreetly? Let’s say that I share some private time—elsewhere in the factory—with the girl James was making out with earlier in a manner that both of us find pleasurable. Hail, hail, rock and roll.
*

MAR. 1–2, 1968:
Grande Ballroom, Detroit

MAR. 8:
Fillmore East, NYC

MAR. 9:
Dining Hall, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn.

MAR. 15–17:
Electric Factory, Philadelphia

MAR. 22–24:
Cheetah, Chicago

APR. 2–7:
Generation, NYC

On the first weekend in March we play the Grande Ballroom in Detroit. It’s a homecoming of sorts for James, who was born in the Motor City. As our plane descends through the clouds on the glide path for Detroit Metro, James is sitting in the row behind me, peering out the window. A break in the clouds offers a glimpse of the city below. James casts a dubious eye on his hometown and reflects on the contrast with New York. “Ah,” he says, “from plethora to dearth in forty-five minutes.”

The city looks like a war zone. It
was
a war zone last summer, pacified only after more than twelve thousand paratroopers and National Guard troops quelled the rioters. Over the past few years, summertime urban race riots have become steadily more numerous. The outbreak in the Watts district of Los Angeles in August 1965 shocked the nation. The next summer saw more than three dozen riots, mostly in northern cities from Brooklyn and Baltimore to St. Louis and San Francisco. In 1967 more than a hundred cities experienced racial violence. Detroit was the worst. The official tally counted forty people dead, but some say the true toll was much higher. More than five thousand people were left homeless when their homes burned.

As in San Francisco, Detroit’s rock-and-roll counterculture sprang up near the ghetto. We drive through the combat zone on the way to the gig. There are bullet holes in the walls.

Big Brother and most of the California bands are less focused politically than my folk music compatriots. The folk scene was far more aware of politics, through its connection to the civil-rights
struggle and protest songs about race, injustice, and war. Sam Andrew comments on the evidence of the riots as we pass through the Detroit ghetto, but Janis’s immediate concern is knowing that Columbia Records will be recording Big Brother at the Grande Ballroom.

The Grande (the
e
is not silent) is the center of the local rock scene. Once we’re inside we feel safer, and pretty much at home. MC5 is the house band, locally celebrated, not yet widely known. The names of the other bands on the bill for our Friday–Saturday gig would look right at home on a Fillmore poster—Tiffany Shade, Pink Peech Mob, and the Family Dump Truck.

The Grande’s manager, Russ Gibb, visited San Francisco a couple of years ago and saw a show at the Avalon. The Grande is his effort to create a similar scene in Detroit. In a town with the negative vibes of Motor City, he’s done as well as anyone could. Here, far removed from the Golden Gate, Big Brother hopes to conjure up some San Francisco magic.

Recording at the Grande is the band’s idea. Albert and Columbia are willing to give it a try. The hall is an open-floor ballroom like the Fillmore and the Avalon. It’s a well-intentioned effort that recognizes the band’s San Francisco origins and the relationship between musicians and audience that is unique to the city by the Bay.

Parked outside the Grande, a truck contains a rolling recording studio that is connected to the stage by a web of cables. For two nights, record producer John Simon and a Columbia engineer make a first attempt at capturing the band in live performance.

The shows feel good to me. Not as good as some, but okay. On our flight back to New York, Janis has some doubts, but she and the boys hope some of the spontaneity will come through on the tapes.

When Albert listens to the recordings, he finds the results less than impressive. He summons the band to his office. Sam arrives late. “Anybody got a joint?” he asks, figuring to get in tune with the music. “We don’t need that right now,” Albert says. Sam notices that the other band members, who have already had a preview of Albert’s
disappointment, are stone-faced. Oh shit, he thinks, this is going to be a psychodrama.

No one in the band can defend the tapes. To a bunch of dancing fans, many of them stoned out of their gourds, the occasional missed chord or fluffed guitar riff passes unnoticed. A brief disagreement between the bass and the drums about just where the beat is going may not faze the audience, but the reels of tape spinning in the recording truck aren’t stoned and they aren’t dancing. They hear it all, which is why record producers hold recorded tracks to a higher standard than live performances. A recording has to hold up to repeated listenings, but just one listen to the Grande tapes is enough to persuade Janis and the boys that Albert’s harsh verdict is justified. The energy that Big Brother managed to ignite in the Grande doesn’t come through on the tape. The mistakes do. All too audible is the fact that the band played as sloppily as at any time in recent memory. Big Brother’s Curse strikes again.

Sam is afraid that Albert will fire some of the band members on the spot, but it doesn’t come to that. What Albert is looking for is something more than technical competence. It’s authenticity, both in presentation and in the emotional content of the music, a unity that is honest and real above all, and at the same time free from obvious technical faults. There is nothing phony or insincere about Big Brother, but the emotional authenticity, the enthusiasm that drives the music, sometimes outstrips the technical abilities of the band, and it’s this imbalance that Albert seeks to correct.