On the Road with Janis Joplin (15 page)

Albert’s office has a publicist, Myra Friedman, working full-time on Big Brother for their first eastern tour. Myra is in awe of Janis, and she exacerbates the imbalance by devoting most of her efforts to her. In our first few weeks in New York, Myra arranges for
Glamour
,
New York
magazine,
Eye
magazine, and
Life
to do interviews or photo shoots with Janis. (Janis takes an attentive interest in her press coverage. She fires off salvos of clippings and quotes to her family in Port Arthur, along with effusive letters full of news about her rising reputation.)

Myra’s greatest coup is arranging for Janis to be photographed by Richard Avedon for
Vogue
, for a photo section about the happening people in show business. A few years ago, Avedon’s fashion photos for
Harper’s Bazaar
became so creative that the magazine was read and talked about within the folk music underground. Instead of shooting models looking bored, Avedon photographed them looking happy, being funny, even
moving
. He was a past master of black and white. As innovations in art and music blossomed in the sixties, Avedon took to using psychedelic colors and effects in his spreads. In 1966, Avedon left
Harper’s Bazaar
for
Vogue
.

Myra further endears herself to Janis by following up on an idea that Janis has been promoting for a while now: Think of all the publicity she has generated for Southern Comfort. Reporters mention Janis’s favorite drink in virtually every piece they write. Shouldn’t Southern Comfort give Janis something in return? Myra’s efforts produce an offer from Southern Comfort for Janis to visit a fur warehouse in New Jersey and choose whatever she’d like. Janis picks a three-quarter-length coat in Russian lynx and a matching hat that become her signature cold-weather traveling wear, even as she
forsakes Southern Comfort in favor of drinks that don’t make her friends and drinking companions gag.

A week after the Fillmore East, we’re in Philadelphia again for three days at the Electric Factory in Old Town,
for a guarantee of $6,000 against 50 percent of the gross over $12,000. Big Brother’s take-home is $12,160. In the band’s first month in the East, they have made close to $40,000. Albert’s guarantee of $100,000 in the first year is beginning to look modest, and Janis and the boys dare to believe there may be some money left over after the debt to Mainstream is paid off.

On the same weekend, the Charles River Valley Boys, with my predecessor, Clay Jackson, now back in the band on guitar and lead vocals, are at the Second Fret coffeehouse, the Philadelphia focus of the folk boom. After Big Brother’s show at the Electric Factory, I take them to the Second Fret and I sit in with the CRVB for most of a set. I slip back into the three-part harmonies as easily as putting on a familiar shirt, and this role reversal, with me onstage and Big Brother in the audience, makes more real for my new cohort the fact that their road manager had a life in music before he took up the reins of their traveling circus.

Janis has a bottle in her handbag from which she sips with just the right amount of discretion in the nonalcoholic coffeehouse. She sips liberally, however. When we get back to our hotel, I am in my road manager’s role once more as I half support, half carry her through the lobby and up the elevator to her room. It’s all part of the job.

The following weekend takes us to Chicago, where Albert Grossman, Paul Butterfield, Mike Bloomfield, and Nick Gravenites got their start in the music business. We make a pilgrimage to the fabled South Side, where the blues clubs still flourish, but the streets are uneasy in the wake of last summer’s ghetto riots here, and we don’t linger long.

New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago—we’re not in Fresno anymore, Toto.

Janis and the boys take it all in stride, but there’s often a gleam in their eyes. These early weeks of touring the East are exceeding their expectations of what working under Albert’s guidance might be like.

Janis’s professionalism, and the excitement of bringing her music to new audiences across the eastern and midwestern states, usually keeps her drinking within her customary pattern—just enough before a performance to give her the boost she needs to launch herself onto the stage. Sometimes, when the opening acts run long and Big Brother goes on late, she has trouble maintaining the preperformance edge, but when she steps onstage her adrenaline almost always powers her through.

After the shows, she drinks more, as do the boys, but carrying her into a hotel is the exception rather than the rule. The demands of the job keep my own drinking moderate. At the end of the day, my top priority is getting enough sleep so I can get up and eat breakfast in the morning before it’s time to phone the members of the band, room by room, to wake them and give them the time they need, individually adjusted, to get their acts together and be in the lobby when it’s time to go.

On the last day of March, we’re in New York when Lyndon Johnson goes on prime-time TV to announce a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam above the twentieth parallel, as a gesture he hopes will bring the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong to the negotiating table. At the end of the broadcast, Johnson drops a bombshell of his own when he declares that he will not run for reelection.

Since we came east, I have followed presidential politics with little support from Janis or the boys. At first, Gene McCarthy was given no chance of unseating Lyndon Johnson, but he placed a close second in the recent New Hampshire primary. Encouraged by this sign of Johnson’s vulnerability on the issue of Vietnam, and further motivated by the Tet Offensive, whose last battles were only recently concluded, Bobby Kennedy entered the race in mid-March, despite his
earlier disavowal of interest. Johnson’s bowing out now throws the race wide open.

I go to Max’s Kansas City to celebrate by getting exuberantly drunk. If anyone had told me this evening that within a year I would miss Lyndon Johnson, I would have laughed in his face.

Sam and Peter show some interest in Johnson’s announcement, but for the most part the band members don’t see much hope for meaningful change in the traditional political process.

The next day, they’re back in Columbia’s Studio E, recording “Misery’n” and “Catch Me Daddy.”

On Tuesday, April 2, Big Brother goes into a New York club called Generation for a six-night stand with B. B. King. The club is on West 8th Street, a block from Washington Square Park.
Backstage on opening night, Janis receives a delegation from
Jazz & Pop
magazine, who tell her that she has been voted best female pop vocalist of the year in the magazine’s annual readers’ poll, beating out the soul queen, Aretha Franklin, by fourteen votes out of almost eighteen hundred. “But I’ve only been singing for a year and a half!” is Janis’s astonished reaction. She’s not about to turn down the award, but “best female pop vocalist” strikes her as a bit much. “Best chick vocalist,” she offers. “How about that?”

On the third day of our gig at Generation, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., is assassinated in Memphis.

Swing Low, Sweet Chariot

T
HE NEWS FRO
M
Memphis, where Martin Luther King has been supporting a strike by sanitation workers, breaks shortly after 7:00
P.M.
Eastern Time. First reports say King has been shot and was rushed to a hospital. Just over an hour later the word comes that he is dead. As dusk falls, riots break out in cities across the country, including Newark, Detroit, Kansas City, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

In Indianapolis, Bobby Kennedy appears in front of a predominantly black crowd, against the counsel of his advisors. He asks his listeners to pray for the family of Dr. King and for the United States. Some credit the speech for preventing a riot in Indianapolis, and perhaps in other places where Kennedy’s words are heard.

Pennebaker has planned to come to Generation to film more of Janis and Big Brother. Before the gig, he is with Bob Neuwirth and his lady, Tonto, who have taken a small apartment on West 46th Street, just a block from the Leacock Pennebaker offices. Penny shoots Kennedy’s speech off the TV. When they catch a cab to come to the club, the radio in the taxi is warning people not to go to Broadway or Harlem.

At Generation, Janis and the boys are as stunned as I am. As bands, the San Francisco groups are anarchistic, humanistic, and apolitical, except in the broadest sense. The Grateful Dead won’t let anyone use their microphones for sociopolitical harangues. Their position is, “
We don’t want to be connected with anti-anydamnthing. We’re not anti-war, anti-this, anti-that, we’re just pro-music, pro-party, pro-getting
down
.” Which pretty well sums up Big Brother’s attitude, especially Janis’s. Privately, the members of Big Brother have feelings and opinions that tend to be a country mile to the left of center. Publicly they promote no message except be true to yourself and get it on, but Dr. King’s death affects them all.

At Generation that evening, B. B. King sits on his guitar amp onstage and plays gospel songs, moving some in the audience to tears. A number of musicians have come to the club just to be in the company of other people someplace where there’s music. After Big Brother’s closing set, there is a spontaneous jam, a kind of informal wake.

At closing time, we’re wary of venturing into the streets, but the city is quiet.
On Saturday, U.S. troops guard the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., for the first time since the Civil War.

Rock and roll as usual doesn’t feel right, so we plan a more formal observance for Sunday, our last night at Generation. President Johnson has declared it a national day of mourning. I use Albert’s client roster as a starting point, connecting through these musicians and the members of Big Brother to others who might be in New York. We invite them to join us in celebrating the life and mourning the loss of the most eloquent advocate for nonviolent civil disobedience since Mahatma Gandhi. I send out and hand out photocopied invitations, and we fill the club. Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Guy, Joni Mitchell, Richie Havens, Al Kooper, Paul Butterfield, and Elvin Bishop are among those who answer the call.

Since Thursday, fifty thousand federal and National Guard troops have been dispatched to some of the one hundred cities where rioting
followed Dr. King’s death. More than twenty thousand people have been arrested.

APR. 10, 1968:
Anaheim Convention Center, Anaheim, Calif.

APR. 11–13:
Fillmore and Winterland, San Francisco

APR. 19:
Selland Arena, Fresno

APR. 20:
Earl Warren Fairground, Santa Barbara

APR. 27:
San Bernardino

On Monday, Janis and the boys and I fly to Los Angeles, where the vitality of springtime in California helps to dispel the pall. We have a gig in Anaheim, followed by a weekend at the Fillmore and Winterland for Bill Graham.

Almost losing my job back in January taught me a lesson. The band knows they need a businessman like Albert for a manager, but they don’t want too much of a businessman for a road manager. Keeping some distance to establish my authority may have been necessary at the outset, but I can’t be so remote that they feel I’m not one of them. They want to feel that I belong. They want to know that I like them.

I
do
like them. I’ve been showing it more, hanging out more, feeling more like one of the gang, but I have no indication of how the band feels about me until we’re cruising down the Santa Ana Freeway to Anaheim, riding the high of a beautiful spring day, rapping and laughing about who knows what, and out of the blue Dave Getz says, “And yes, John, we love you.”

I say, “I love you too,” and I mean it. Janis and each of the boys have endeared themselves to me in their own ways. Privately, I’ve decided that I will stay on until the job stops being fun, or until my own work—whatever it may be—makes itself known to me and requires my full attention. And since I’ll be staying—

“By the way,” I say, but Peter Albin is ahead of me.

“You want a raise.”

“Now that you mention it.” We all laugh.

I get a fifty-dollar raise on the spot. Two hundred bucks a week. My starting salary was set by Albert when he hired me. Getting a raise from the band, unanimously approved, solidifies the working relationship, but the validation means more than the money. We wander the planet looking for members of our tribe. Once in a while, if we’re lucky, we find them.

On Sunday, April 21, the
New York Times
publishes an article by the jazz critic Nat Hentoff that’s based on an interview he did with Janis while we were in New York. “Janis Joplin has exploded the increasingly mandarin categories of rock music by being so intensely, so joyfully herself,” Hentoff writes. He mentions Big Brother and the Holding Company only in passing, and quotes Janis extensively. Her answers touch on the recurrent themes she emphasizes when trying to give an accounting of herself to the world at large. “I was treated very badly in Texas,” she says. “They don’t treat beatniks too good in Texas.” Of performing, she says, “When everything is together—the band, me, the audience, it’s boss! It’s just like magic. I don’t think I could ever feel that way about a man.”

When Hentoff asks if she considers herself a jazz singer, Janis’s answer demonstrates the articulate precision she can bring to bear on subjects that matter to her: “No, I don’t feel quite free enough with my phrasing to say I’m a jazz singer. I sing with a more demanding beat, a steady rather than a lilting beat. I don’t riff over the band; I try to punctuate the rhythm with my voice.”

For the rest of the spring and into the summer we’re based at home in San Francisco. In our first weeks back in California we play Chico and Fresno, Santa Barbara and San Bernardino. We’re flying more often and driving less. The gigs are farther afield. The venues and the money are bigger than they were last winter.

We are veterans of the road now, and the routine of planes and
rental cars, motels and gigs is less stressful in the sunshine of the Golden State. Janis and the boys are happy to be on their home ground. In retrospect, this is our most peaceful period. Despite the busy schedule, it’s an idyll, but it’s tempered by the urgent need to finish the album for Columbia.

The advance orders for the record are huge. The sales reps are clamoring for it. Everyone from Clive Davis on down is frustrated by the slow progress, and John Simon is feeling the pressure. He takes another stab at live recording, this time in Winterland, days after we return from New York. The results are better than the Grande Ballroom, but the evening doesn’t yield any tracks deemed adequate.
*

On the last Monday in April, Simon and Big Brother begin a ten-day stint of recording in Columbia’s Los Angeles studios, but they fare no better there than they did in New York. The tensions between John Simon and the band, which Pennebaker’s camera recorded in the New York sessions, are more apparent than ever. Making a record is hard work, but it’s also supposed to be fun. In the L.A. sessions, fun is held effectively at bay. The tension between feeling good about their music onstage and feeling bad about it in the studio wears on the band. The difficulties with Simon affect David and Peter the most, while Sam and James medicate themselves to hold the aggravation at bay.

Janis handles it best. She distances herself from Simon, but when it comes time for her to sing, she steps up the microphone and gives it everything she’s got. Her ability to summon a definitive vocal rarely fails her. She lays down a couple of takes and all you have to do is choose between them, weighing the small variations.

The sessions are interrupted by a day trip to Chico, in the Sacramento Valley, for a gig there, and two days at the Shrine Auditorium in L.A. Following these jobs, Janis and the boys have only a few more days in the studio before we undertake a demanding ten-day schedule that keeps us flying back and forth between the northern and the southern parts of the state.

MAY 1, 1968:
Chico State College, Chico, Calif.

MAY 3–4:
Shrine Auditorium, Los Angeles

MAY 10:
Cal-Poly State University, San Luis Obispo

MAY 11:
Veterans Hall, Santa Rosa

MAY 12:
San Fernando Valley State College, Northridge

MAY 15:
Carousel Ballroom, San Francisco (Hells Angels benefit)

MAY 17:
Freeborn Hall, U.C. Davis

MAY 18–19:
Northern California Folk Rock Festival, Santa Clara Fairgrounds, San Jose, with the Doors, Jefferson Airplane, Eric Burdon and the Animals, Electric Flag, Country Joe and the Fish, Taj Mahal, and more.

MAY 19:
Pasadena

—

I
N LATE
M
AY,
we return to Columbia’s Hollywood studios to finish the album. To provide the band with some comfort during our stays in Hollywood, I have found lodgings more upscale than the Hollywood Sunset Motel. Elektra Records has built a West Coast studio on La Cienega Boulevard, and Paul Rothchild is spending a lot of time in Los Angeles. He has found lodging at the Hollywood Landmark Hotel, on Franklin Avenue near Highland, where the plain of the Los Angeles basin rises into the foothills. It’s on the edge of a
residential neighborhood, above the garish, commercial strips of Sunset and Hollywood boulevards, where the tourists search in vain for movie stars and the hookers troll for tourists.

Calling the Landmark a hotel is stretching it. From the street, it looks like any other two-story stucco motel, but the looks are deceiving. Walk through the lobby, past the registration desk, and through a set of glass doors to the large courtyard, and you see that the arms of the establishment ramble up the hillside, enclosing a pool and a sauna and enough terrace to accommodate a couple of rock-and-roll bands. There are palm trees and other plantings. The units that overlook the courtyard are suites, with living rooms and kitchenettes and balconies. The upstairs suites are spacious and airy, with high ceilings. Only the two-story structure that fronts on Franklin Avenue has ordinary single rooms off a central hallway, and even these have kitchenettes.

Bob Neuwirth has a poolside suite next to Paul’s. Before Paul and Bobby found the Landmark, it hosted the occasional jazz band. By the time Big Brother and I check in, it is in the process of becoming a preferred hostelry on the rock-and-roll road. Also in residence at this time is Garry Goodrow, of the Committee, which has opened a second company in a theater on Sunset Strip.

With a reference from Paul to Jack Hagy, the manager, I negotiate us a weekly rate so good that Janis and the boys raise only token objections. Hey, with kitchenettes we can save money on meals, I point out, and this helps to convince them. They’ve been working hard and they feel that they owe themselves a reward.

Janis opts for a single room in the front building. She says the courtyard suites are too big for her to knock around in all by herself. The boys like the suites and they each have one to themselves. The days of doubling up to save money are history.

Neuwirth is employed by Elektra as—what? It’s often hard to find a job description for what Bob is doing at a given moment. At present, he’s working with Paul, and Paul has bestowed a title on Bob. He is
the “expediter,” helping Paul and the Doors make the album that will be called
Waiting for the Sun
. Elektra is paying for Bob’s room and board and a rented Ford Mustang. Expediting the Doors involves some babysitting of the band in their off-hours, and of Jim Morrison in particular, with an eye to curbing his drinking. This is an exercise that bears more than a passing resemblance to putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop.

Be that as it may, there’s no question that Bob earns his keep. An impasse arises in the studio when Morrison wants to use a banjo on a particular song and the other Doors rebel. Jim wrote “My Wild Love Went Riding” with kind of a Celtic sound in mind. Why he believes that a banjo will help produce a Celtic sound he can’t exactly explain, but no one in the group plays a banjo and his bandmates don’t want anyone playing on the album except the four genuine Doors. Neuwirth offers an innovative solution. He suggests they do “My Wild Love” a capella, and the idea proves an inspiration. John Densmore, the drummer, makes a
tchhh-tch-tch-tchhhh
vocal sound to approximate brushes on a hi-hat. Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger clap their hands, along with Neuwirth and Elektra’s president, Jac Holzman. Listening to the track, it’s hard to believe there are no musical instruments, but it’s all done with voices and hands.

On the road, there are a lot of hours when Big Brother has nothing to do while the road manager is working full steam. When the band is recording, it’s the other way around. Some road managers round up their bands every day and take them to the studio, but my campaign to get the members of Big Brother to take responsibility for themselves is paying off. In New York, I pointed out that it was silly for me to hail two cabs, ride with them to the studio, and sit there twiddling my thumbs. To their credit, the band agreed. They hailed their own cabs and got to the studio on their own.