On the Road with Janis Joplin (18 page)

After the show, in the hotel bar, Janis is bubbly at the prospect of finally having a record that will knock the Mainstream album off the shelves. Irrepressible, full of good cheer, she flirts with Albert. It’s her customary testing routine, long postponed in Albert’s case, until Janis is sure he won’t take it amiss. Her come-on is more subtle than is her custom when sounding out a possible sex partner, but subtlety is not Janis’s strong suit. What it comes down to is, Hey, maybe we should go to bed to celebrate. She leaves it up to Albert to decide if the proposition is serious. Albert is both flattered and amused. He flashes his best smile, which shines all the more brightly for being reserved for special occasions. “
I couldn’t possibly do that,” he says. “If it didn’t turn out that I was great, you wouldn’t respect me in the morning.”

Janis cracks up. It’s the perfect response, disarming and delighting her at the same time.

The next morning, we’re airborne, headed back to the mainland for the Newport Folk Festival, already in progress.

There couldn’t be a greater contrast between the intently focused commercialism of the Columbia convention and the vigilant anticommercialism of Newport. In Cambridge, we scorned the “commercial” folk acts, the guy duos and trios, the brother groups that smoothed out the mountain harmonies and made the songs sound like pop music. Newport has admitted some of the folk-pop groups because they’re known to the wider audience. Bring them in with the Kingston Trio and expose them to the authentic stuff. Peter, Paul and Mary are regular fixtures at Newport. They helped boost Dylan’s career, and they’re Albert’s act.

Big Brother and the Holding Company is a different matter. Have the walls of Jericho fallen? Has the nation’s premier folk music gathering capitulated to the San Francisco Sound? Not by a long shot. Big Brother is one of just two rock acts on the lengthy list of performers, and the band’s appearance has come about more through connections on the folk circuit than because of Janis’s sudden prominence. Albert Grossman co-produced the festival in its first year. Since then he hasn’t had an organizational role, but he has been present for each festival as the manager of important folk acts. And Albert may not be the only one who urged Newport promoter George Wein to hire Big Brother. Also on the bill this summer is Kenneth Threadgill, a Texas singer and club owner, who hired Janis to play in his Austin filling-station bar back in 1962.
Threadgill and Wein have a friend in common, Rod Kennedy, who runs the Longhorn Jazz Festival. Through Kennedy, Threadgill has put in a good word for Janis.

Two years ago, the festival board almost rejected the Lovin’ Spoonful for being “too pop,” but the Spoonful’s founder, John Sebastian, was a stalwart of the Greenwich Village folk scene and his traditional roots were impeccable. He was a soulful harmonica
sideman who had played and recorded with many folk performers. Last summer, Buffalo Springfield was admitted to Newport because “For What It’s Worth” was a protest song.

As these exceptions suggest, the Folk Mafia—the old-guard folkies on the Newport festival board—are often of two minds. They don’t want to compromise the festival’s standards just to sell more tickets by putting pop-rock performers on the program. But they like to make money to attract the top rank of folk and traditional performers, and acts like the Spoonful and Buffalo Springfield bring in the kids, no question.

For Janis and Big Brother, the board has a simple rationale that makes the decision easier: The blues have been a mainstay of the festival since its earliest days.
This year’s Newport program booklet points out that Janis “is considered by many the finest white blues singer today.” The board members know that Janis is a devotee of Bessie Smith, but that may not have fully prepared them for “Ball and Chain.”

The rest of the program is a typical Newport mix. This year, along with festival stalwarts like Pete Seeger and Theo Bikel, Big Brother shares the bill with Joan Baez, Jean Ritchie, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Arlo Guthrie (Woody’s son), Taj Mahal, Richie Havens, the Kweskin Jug Band, Doc Watson, the Almanac Singers, and Cambridge’s Eric von Schmidt, an early mentor of young Bobby Dylan. The urban blues are represented by B. B. King, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and the Junior Wells Band with Buddy Guy on lead guitar. Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys are the sole bluegrass act this year. Almost hidden away in the program there are some interesting anomalies: Kaleidoscope, an electrified band from L.A. that’s influenced by Middle Eastern music, and Buck Owens, a full-bore country music star.

Newport is a prestige gig, not a lucrative one. Bob Dylan’s fee at the ’65 festival, where he famously “went electric,” was $100.
This year, B. B. King is getting $1,000. So is Roy Acuff, a country star of an
earlier generation, closely rooted in the Appalachian traditions. Ken Threadgill’s band will receive $400, plus travel expenses (they drove from Austin). Big Brother’s take is just $250, but the festival is also paying for our rooms at the Viking Hotel downtown, long the preferred lodging for the folk in-crowd, and it’s covering our rental car. Add it all up, and Big Brother is paid more than any other act on the program.

Janis and Ken Threadgill have a happy reunion, and Janis reconnects with some acquaintances from the San Francisco ballrooms. In her first year with Big Brother, they played a bill at the Avalon with the Jim Kweskin Jug Band from Cambridge. Geoff Muldaur, the Jug Band’s blues vocalist, clarinetist, and washboard rhythm king, is Cambridge’s reigning authority on the blues and an exacting critic of blues practitioners, instrumental and vocal. Somewhat to my surprise he has judged Janis’s singing worthy.
*

At Newport, Janis and Geoff fall in together one evening and pass up a late-evening blues jam in favor of a smaller gathering where Jean Ritchie, one of Janis’s earliest influences, is singing informally in one of the big mansions where the festival puts up performers like teenagers at summer camp. Janis sits at Ritchie’s feet and listens reverently to her southern Appalachian ballads, and Geoff’s respect for Janis ramps up a notch.

Being back at Newport is like a weekend holiday for me. Newport has been a high point of midsummer since my first festival, in 1960. I have only missed one since then, when I was in California chasing the Wrong Girl. This year, I am saddened to learn from my Cambridge friends that the Club 47 closed two months ago because it can
no longer afford the kind of acts that made it famous. (The demise of the 47 is a sign of changing times, and a portent for the San Francisco ballrooms.)

I’m walking with Janis backstage on Saturday afternoon when I see an old friend approaching. I intercept her and introduce them.

“Janis, this is Joan. Joanie, Janis.”

Neither has the first idea what to say, and for the life of me I can’t think of a way to bridge the gap. They are incompatible elements, forces that exist in different realms. If Joan Baez is water, Janis is fire. For Joan, Newport is home. For Janis, it’s a continent away from San Francisco, the city that has made her feel truly at home for the first time in her life.

They exchange a few awkward words and Joan moves along, but Joan and Janis have more in common than the discomfiting lack of a common language suggests. Joan was the first superstar of the folk revival. Janis is on her way to becoming the first female superstar in rock. For Joan the first Newport Folk Festival, in 1959, was the same kind of launching pad that Monterey provided for Janis just a year ago, and Albert Grossman played a role in creating those opportunities for each of these uniquely talented women.

In the summer of 1959, when he helped George Wein organize the first Newport Folk Festival, Albert was running the Gate of Horn, a small but influential folk club he had established in Chicago a few years earlier. Wein had founded the Newport Jazz Festival in 1954, and
he responded positively to a suggestion by Grossman that they trade on the jazz festival’s rising reputation to start an annual folk festival in the same venue.

Through the folk grapevine Albert heard reports about the long-haired girl in Cambridge with the amazing voice.
He invited Joan to appear at the Gate of Horn for two weeks in July, before Newport. Joan first declined, then reconsidered and accepted. When Albert heard Joan in person and learned that she had no professional representation, he expressed interest in managing her. Joan didn’t fully
trust Albert, but she recognized his good qualities as well as the self-interested ones. A rising star at the Gate of Horn was Bob Gibson, a handsome folkie with a self-assured stage manner who played the twelve-string guitar. Joan developed a crush on Gibson. When he asked her to appear at the first Newport Folk Festival as his guest, she said yes. In front of ten thousand folk fans, Joan rose to the occasion in her duets with Gibson. The response of the public and the press to her Newport appearance was a revelation, and on the basis of that experience, Joan committed her life to music.

Albert held out the lure of a recording contract with Columbia Records, but Joan turned down both Columbia and Albert’s interest in managing her. Instead, she settled on Boston’s Manny Greenhill for management and Maynard Solomon’s Vanguard Records in New York as her record company. Greenhill was a lefty of the between-the-wars folk school, a benign man with a pleasantly craggy face whose modest, what-you-see-is-what-you-get personal manner couldn’t have been farther removed from Albert’s opaque style. Vanguard was a small label, unpretentious, although much respected for its classical recordings, virtually a two-man company, founded by Maynard Solomon and his brother. Manny’s and Maynard’s laid-back styles suited Joan far better than Albert’s grand promises that she could have whatever—or whoever—she wanted in all the world.

For Janis, the decision to go with Albert was less fraught with indecision.

On Saturday evening at Newport, Big Brother does a good job of summoning up the ballroom magic in front of a receptive crowd. The music is strong enough that I want to get to a better vantage point so I can see the band from out front and feel the reactions of the audience. Moving through the backstage compound, I run into Albert. “If you want to know what it’s like when the magic works, this is it,” I tell him. I’m proud of the band, and glad that Albert is hearing them play well, but Albert is less enthusiastic. “Hey,” he says, “it’s got to be better than that.”

To a greater extent than I have revealed to Janis and the boys, I am a fan of Big Brother and the Holding Company. I want them to succeed, because I believe in their magic. I think Albert is too analytical about the band’s music. If he won’t open himself to the magic, he’ll never get what Big Brother is about. From this brief exchange at Newport, and probably from the general tenor of my reports from the road, Albert knows that I am not an objective judge of the band, that I don’t evaluate their performances by the same criteria he applies. Albert doesn’t need advice from fans. He wants the opinions of skeptics. In the conversations between him and the members of the band that take place after their performance at Newport, Albert doesn’t consult me further.

Soon after Big Brother comes offstage, Peter Albin encounters Albert in one of the tents set up backstage for the performers. Albert shakes his head. “I’d like to say it was a good show, but I don’t know, it just wasn’t happening.”

This is not what Peter wants to hear. Like me, Peter felt the set went well and he’s still riding the high. Albert is bringing him down. Peter asks if they can talk about it later. Come to my room tomorrow morning, Albert says.

Sunday is a day of rest before we head back to New York and a month of airplanes, rental cars, and Midwest motels. Peter presents himself at Albert’s room in the Viking Hotel at the appointed time. He is ushered in by Sally, Albert’s wife. Once they’re settled,
Albert says, “Something’s just not happening. I don’t know, I guess maybe it’s the San Francisco Sound that I’m just not into, but I’m used to things where the rhythm is really tight and it’s all together.”

This is Albert’s third attempt at encouraging some kind of progress toward solving what he perceives as Big Brother’s technical problems, their unevenness, the lack of consistency. The band didn’t accept his request that James should be replaced, made at the Golden Bear. They haven’t tried switching Sam to the bass and Peter to guitar, as Albert proposed after the recording at the Grande Ballroom.
Albert has pointed to what he sees as the shortcomings and he has suggested remedies. At Newport, he speaks to David Getz as well as Peter about the rhythm section, but they offer no alternative solutions.

Within days after we return to New York, Janis calls a band meeting in her room at the Chelsea Hotel and announces that she is leaving Big Brother.

Downtown Nowhere

E
VEN BEFORE
N
EWPORT,
Janis was facing a decision she couldn’t put off for long. In Big Brother, she is one of four vocalists. Sam, Peter, and James each sing lead on one or more of the group’s songs. Janis is the lead vocalist, but she shares the spotlight with her bandmates. In the summer of 1968, a year after Monterey, her rising renown offers her a new possibility. It is something she dreamed long before Big Brother, a fantasy then. Now it might be a reality. She can claim center stage for her own, sharing the spotlight with no one.

Janis has dreaded telling the boys she has decided to leave the band. She knows her decision will hurt Sam and James and Peter and
Dave. She knows she will be criticized. She knows she might fail. But if she doesn’t make the attempt, she will never know if she has what it takes to succeed on her own.

For Sam, Janis’s announcement comes as no surprise. Janis told him of her decision before Newport, and she asked him to come with her in the new band she would form. At the meeting in the Chelsea, Sam senses something in her tone that makes him suspect Janis has changed her mind.

Peter takes the news badly, erupting in anger that doesn’t mask the fear sparked by the sudden collapse of his world. Dave Getz realizes that this is something he has almost been expecting.

When the others leave, Sam stays behind, and Janis says, “I don’t want you to come with me either, Sam.”

“Big Bother and the Folding Company” isn’t funny anymore.

Soon after the band meeting, Janis takes me aside and asks me to stay as her road manager when her new band is formed. To me, Janis’s reasons are self-evident and inescapable. Staying with Big Brother is easy. Leaving them is much harder. Janis has chosen the more difficult course, the greater challenge.

My choice is easier than hers. Without Janis, there’s no certainty that Big Brother will continue to perform.

The band’s bookings extend through November. Janis will stay until these obligations have been fulfilled. At first it’s awkward, but the routines of the road are familiar. After a while it’s possible for
Janis and the boys to continue as before, living in the Now of airplanes, rental cars, hotels, and gigs.

AUG. 2–3, 1968:
Fillmore East

AUG. 9:
Kiel Auditorium, St. Louis

AUG. 14:
Indiana Beach, Monticello, Ind.

AUG. 16–17:
Aragon Ballroom/Cheetah, Chicago

AUG. 18:
Tyrone Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis

AUG. 23:
Singer Bowl, Queens, N.Y.

A few days after Newport, we play the Fillmore East again, this time with the Staple Singers and Ten Years After. As the kids stream into the house, I spy Albert’s partner, Bert Block, standing at the back of the hall with a middle-aged guy in a suit. Bert’s an old hand in the music business. Tall, slightly stooped, bald on top, with a broad smile, he was a drummer and band leader in the big band era, an agent who had his own booking agency before he joined Albert to replace departing partner John Court. Since Bert came aboard, I’ve had frequent dealings with him about bookings and the day-to-day details of Big Brother’s schedule. “Hey, John!” he calls to me. “Come over here. I want you to meet somebody. John Cooke, Benny Goodman.”

I manage a handshake with the guy in the suit and mumble some inanity. What I may know, from seeing
The Benny Goodman Story
, but don’t have foremost in mind at this moment, is that in his day Goodman was as much a rebel as the San Francisco rockers of the sixties. He didn’t care about the waltzes and foxtrots that were considered respectable for white audiences. Goodman wanted to play what the black bands were playing. He broke the color barrier. He was the first bandleader to have an integrated band. He performed and recorded with black musicians. With Teddy Wilson on piano and Lionel Hampton on vibes, he started a revolution. Now Benny Goodman is in the Fillmore East in a suit and tie, looking like a
businessman, because his daughter has the hots for Janis and Big Brother.

Janis sings the gospel song “Down by the Riverside” with Mavis Staples in a duet that brings down the house. After the show, Bert Block escorts Benny Goodman and his daughter backstage. Goodman
fille
meets Janis and gets the thrill of her life. What Goodman
père
thinks of the evening’s entertainment is later related by Bert to his wife, Barbara Carroll, a noted jazz pianist and vocalist.
*
“Janis, in her inimitable obscenity, shocked the pants off Benny Goodman,” Barbara told me. “Because Benny was kind of a straightlaced guy, and his daughter was a young girl, and for Benny to hear this in front of his daughter, or for his daughter to hear this—it was all kind of a ‘moment to be treasured,’ as Bert described it.”

We face a spate of gigs in the Midwest before we can look forward to some time in California.

Janis’s decision not to take Sam with her doesn’t end their friendship.
As we travel from city to city he helps her think about her new band. “You know who you should get to go with you?” he says. “Jerry Miller, from Moby Grape. He’s one of the finest guitar players I’ve ever heard. He’s got a good sound.” After a couple more gigs, Janis tells Sam, “Let’s get Jerry Miller and you to come along with me.” Sam is back on board, and that’s the way it stays.

Sam is a link to the past, to Big Brother, to the band and the city that embraced Janis and made her feel at home. Janis and Sam write songs together and they sing together. This is a connection Janis needs. It’s too hard to cut at once all the ties that bind.

Peter and David and James didn’t know they almost lost Sam at the outset, so the news that he’ll go with Janis comes as an unwelcome aftershock. James, being James, accepts it as part of the cosmic inevitability. Peter and David express degrees of anger and resentment
before the demands of touring and playing together paper over the disruption.

Cheap Thrills
is released and it shoots up the charts.
It goes gold in three days. The satisfaction Big Brother takes from the album’s success is bittersweet.

—

A
S WORD OF
Janis’s defection spreads among Big Brother’s fans in San Francisco, the consensus that coalesces is that Janis has betrayed Big Brother. Many see Albert Grossman as a Svengali who has pulled Janis away from the band, motivated by nothing but money.

These facile conclusions overlook Janis’s strength of will and Albert’s dedication to his artists. Albert understands what Big Brother means to Janis and what she owes them. Three times he tried to reconfigure the band to strengthen the music, but the band rejected each of his suggestions. Like Pennebaker, Albert recognizes that Janis is the incomparable element in the band, and his primary dedication is to her. His discomfort with the status quo has become evident to Janis and the implication is clear, even if he never states it explicitly: So long as she remains with Big Brother, she can’t know how far she might go as a singer.

And if Albert ever did articulate the choice frankly, his view didn’t dictate Janis’s decision. The most succinct refutation of Albert as Svengali comes from Sam Andrew, looking back on these events long
after the fact. He framed it as a rhetorical question: “Can you imagine anyone making Janis do something she didn’t want to do?”
*

All the same, when we return to San Francisco before the Labor Day weekend, the boys take some comfort in the condolences offered by their friends.

For a time, my attention is diverted to politics as bad news breaks from the Democratic nominating convention in Chicago. The TV news film of convention delegates being manhandled and of newsmen and hippie demonstrators beaten by Chicago police is shocking. Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut condemns “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago” from the podium, inciting in Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley a rage that makes him look like a choleric gargoyle.
Lip-readers interpret Daley’s response to Ribicoff, shouted from the convention floor, as “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch! You lousy motherfucker! Go home!” The mayhem dramatizes the divisions within the Democratic party and in the society at large, and it taints the anointing of Vice President Hubert Humphrey as the Democratic nominee.

Three weeks earlier, in Miami Beach, behind a wall of security that kept protesters at bay, the Republicans nominated Richard
Nixon on the first ballot. On the evening of his acceptance speech, police and five hundred National Guard troops fought rioters in Miami’s black ghetto. They are still called “Negroes” in the summer of 1968, not yet “blacks” consistently in the press. Six miles away, in the convention hall, ringed by barricades and beyond the sound of gunfire and the smell of smoke, Tricky Dick soberly proclaimed, “My fellow Americans, the dark long night for America is about to end.” The Republicans’ Fortress Miami arrangements and the indiscriminate police violence in Chicago show that the Establishment is digging in for the long haul.

Big Brother’s first jobs back in California reaffirm what they have achieved together and encourage them to take the pleasure to be gained from living in the moment. A Labor Day weekend concert at the Palace of Fine Arts is a quintessential San Francisco gig—outdoors, with a view of the Bay, the fans generous in the welcome they accord one of the city’s signature bands.

A few days later, I pick up Janis and the boys for a flight to L.A., and a gig that is a milestone in Big Brother’s career. Since the Beatles sold out the Hollywood Bowl in 1965, it has become a major rock venue. On the Friday after Labor Day, 1968, Big Brother has top billing, with Iron Butterfly and the Fraternity of Man opening. Playing under the white arch of the historic band shell, looking out over the audience that fills the natural amphitheater, Big Brother plays like a band unified in their music and their mission.

The next morning, I’m headed for Big Sur and this year’s folk festival.

Before the music begins, with the fog lingering along the coast, Mimi Fariña marries Milan Melvin, an announcer for KSAN, the hippest of the underground FM stations in San Francisco. Milan was Janis’s lover for a time soon after she joined Big Brother, when he was rooming in North Beach with Carl Gottlieb, of the Committee. Janis’s roommate and clothes maker, Linda Gravenites, created Mimi’s glorious wedding dress. Mimi visited Linda and Janis’s Noe Street apartment to plan and fit the dress. That was where she first met Janis. The connections among my Cambridge friends and the San Francisco community keep revealing themselves.
*

The Big Sur festival is a world away from the Hollywood Bowl. For me it’s like a family reunion. The Charles River Valley Boys are on the program again, and I resume the role of bluegrass singer and picker as if I never put it aside. At some point in the afternoon concert I am at center stage with Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, Joan Baez, and the festival’s organizer, Nancy Carlen, singing a song whose name will escape me thirty-odd years later when a photo of the moment, snapped by Robert Altman (not the film director but the San Francisco photographer of the same name) appears in
People
magazine. The song may have faded, but not the feeling of being back in Big Sur on a few days’ holiday between Big Brother gigs.

The idyll is over too soon. Big Brother plays three days at Fillmore West, and then we are on a plane for L.A. again, this time for an even
larger bowl—the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, seating capacity upward of ninety thousand, where it is evident that football can still outdraw an all-day rock concert. In the vast arena, the music fans fill only a fraction of the seats.

The event is billed as “An American Music Show.” Janis’s old flame Country Joe McDonald is here with the Fish. The rest of the acts are an eclectic assortment: Joan Baez, the Everly Brothers, the Byrds, the Junior Wells Band with Buddy Guy, the Mothers of Invention, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Albert King, and Wilson Pickett. Even in this company Big Brother closes the show, another measure of how far they have come in so short a time.

The stage is on the football field, but the audience is confined to the stadium seats, held in check by rows of Pasadena and state police. As ever, a seated audience is a challenge to Janis. She wants to put them in motion. The encore is “Down on Me,” the semi-hit single from the Mainstream album. Janis pleads with the cops to turn the kids loose, and she finally boosts the crowd’s energy to the level of spontaneous fission. Here they come, through the cops, over the railings and through the fence, an unstoppable wave.

This time Janis gets more than she bargained for. She comes to the edge of the stage to touch a few hands, but that only encourages the fans. By the time the song ends they’re all over the stage, surrounding her, touching her, grabbing at her, pulling on her beads and bracelets and her clothes. The police help Janis get into a limousine to take her from the stage to the dressing room. Sam is in the limo with Janis. The fans pile on the car, even on the roof. Sam is afraid the roof may collapse, but it holds. The fans don’t care about the members of the band who were left behind, so we follow on foot. We wait in the dressing room for the crowd to disperse before we make our escape.