On the Road with Janis Joplin (19 page)

—

N
OW AND AGAIN,
Janis likes to shop.
On an expedition to Beverly Hills when we were here in the spring, she ventured into Paraphernalia, a happening boutique that features hip designer Betsey Johnson’s fashions. Clad in jeans and a T-shirt, Janis half expected to be tossed out as an undesirable. Instead, the manager recognized her and fell all over her, offering to have anything she wanted made up for her at off-the-rack prices.

After the show at the Rose Bowl, Janis shops in Beverly Hills again, this time accompanied by her attorney. Bob Gordon has a Porsche, and Janis has been in touch with him about finding her a car. He takes Janis to his German car dealer, where they show her a 1965 convertible—a cabriolet in Porsche terminology—that they have cherried out with a hand-rubbed paint job in pearl-gray lacquer. Janis falls in love with the car and within days it is hers.

SEPT. 27:
University of California, Irvine

SEPT. 28:
San Diego

SEPT. 29:
Tape
Hollywood Palace
TV show, L.A.

SEPT. 29:
Long Beach Sports Arena

During this month in California, Dave Richards decides he’s had enough of the road. Dave is confident that Mark Braunstein can take over responsibility for the equipment. Hire another guy and let Marko train him, and you’ll be fine, Dave tells the band. He stays on the job until somebody comes up with George Ostrow, a lean, sleepy-looking guy who seems bemused by the band and the job and the road, but he’s willing to learn. This transition is managed without my having to take part in it, beyond notifying Albert’s office of the change.

Life
magazine reviews
Cheap Thrills
in its September 20 issue. The article is headlined “Singer With a Bordello Voice” and focuses most of its attention on Janis.

We tape a show for ABC’s
Hollywood Palace
.
In a letter home, Janis alerts her family to watch it when it airs.

The work begins in earnest when we fly east in the first days of October.

OCT. 4, 1968:
Public Hall, Cleveland

OCT. 5:
SUNY, Buffalo, N.Y.

OCT. 11:
War Memorial Auditorium, Syracuse, N.Y.

OCT. 13:
Music Hall, Cincinnati

OCT. 15:
Grande Ballroom, Detroit

OCT. 18:
Pennsylvania State University, State College

OCT. 19:
Spectrum, Philadelphia

OCT. 20:
Alexandria Roller Rink, Alexandria, Va.

OCT. 25:
Curry Hicks Cage, UMass, Amherst

OCT. 26:
Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Mass.

Big Brother is accustomed by now to being based in New York during our eastern tours. They even look forward to returning to the city and the Chelsea Hotel after a weekend in Squaresville. At least in New York we move in the counterculture of arts and music.

Another bright spot is John Fisher, our New York limo driver. We found him in the summer, after Newport. John is New York born and raised. He’s cheerful and ready for anything. Janis took to him right away, and she quickly staked her claim to the shotgun position, sharing the front seat with John. John has driven Richie Havens and Dylan and the Band, all Albert’s clients. Why we didn’t learn about John sooner, I don’t know, but we’ve got him now. No more straight limo drivers from companies that would rather be shuttling business executives from one meeting to another. John’s company is Love Limousines. The rear windows of his personal limo are tinted mauve. From the backseat, it’s like looking out on the world through rose-colored glasses.

Earlier in the year, after our first East Coast tour, Sam Andrew wrote a song that is occasionally added to the set list. It’s called “Downtown Nowhere,” and it’s about the grind of touring, the days when you can’t remember what city you’re in or where you flew in from that morning. On the fall tour, even I sometimes find myself in Downtown Nowhere. In memory, October and November play in a palette of drab grays.

In Cleveland, a contingent of Hells Angels shows up. They know that Big Brother has played benefits for the Angels in San Francisco. By extension, the local chapter feels connected to the band. By implication, they’d like to get in free. Maybe they can help with security? The hall is packed and Cleveland is kind of a tough town. I talk to the promoter, tell him the Angels are our guests. Janis really gets the kids going and a thin line of Angels across the front of the stage seems like a good idea as Big Brother’s set reaches its climax. With us, and with the audience, the Angels are polite, never threatening.

A gig in Cincinnati falls on a Sunday when a film clip of the Beatles is scheduled on the
Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour
. So no one has to miss it, Mark and George set up a TV set on the stage and Big Brother interrupts their set when the Beatles come on. With a mike held next to the TV, the band and the audience catch “Revolution” in between songs by Janis and the boys. After the concert, a delegation from the counterculture invites us to an after-concert party,
where everyone in the band but Peter Albin shoots up smack.

NOV. 1–2, 1968:
Electric Factory, Philadelphia

NOV. 3–5:
Chicago? (Aragon? Cheetah? dates and venue uncertain)

NOV. 8:
Warwick, R.I.

NOV. 9:
Woolsey Hall, Yale University, New Haven

NOV. 10:
White Plains, N.Y.

NOV. 11:
Ridge Arena, Braintree, Mass.

NOV. 12:
Jersey City

NOV. 14:
Hartford, Connecticut

NOV. 15:
Assembly Hall, Hunter College, NYC

NOV. 16:
SUNY, Stony Brook, Long Island, N.Y.

On November 2,
Cheap Thrills
hits number one on
Cashbox
magazine’s album chart. Three days later, Dick Nixon squeaks by Hubert Humphrey to win the presidency by half a million votes, less than one percentage point. I’m still registered in New York, where the black comedian Dick Gregory is the Liberal Party nominee. Unable to persuade myself to vote for Humphrey, I pull the lever for Gregory to register my feeling that a comedian has more integrity than either major candidate. When I see the election results, I realize that if a hundred thousand disenchanted Democrats in the right precincts had bitten the bullet and voted for Humphrey, we wouldn’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore.

Too late. You go to sleep, you miss your turn.

After the election, the schedule is murderous. Starting on November 8, Big Brother plays eight out of nine nights in a row in small to medium cities along a short stretch of coastal provinces, from Braintree, Massachusetts, to Jersey City. This marathon includes the only gig in New York City on the fall tour, at Hunter College, and ends the next night at the State University of New York out on Long Island. The accretion of gigs happened insidiously, one after another added to what started out as a reasonable schedule, filling in the days off until they were gone. Each time a new gig came up, I checked with the band. For the boys, the string of gigs means more money. Dave, James and Peter are facing the imminent end of their performing income for the foreseeable future. Janis recognizes their need and never puts her foot down to refuse a gig, but the demands of these nine days, capping thirty-some gigs in seven weeks, take their toll. At Hunter College, Janis is exhausted. After the SUNY gig, she falls ill and we are forced to cancel the first two of four gigs on a swing
through her home state of Texas, which she has been looking forward to all fall.

NOV. 20, 1968:
Austin Municipal Auditorium, Austin, Texas—CANCELLED

NOV. 21:
Theater of Performing Arts, San Antonio—CANCELLED

NOV. 24:
Coliseum, Dallas

NOV. 26:
Denver Auditorium, Denver

NOV. 29:
Seattle, Wash.

NOV. 30:
Vancouver, B.C.

DEC. 1:
Family Dog Benefit, San Francisco

Most of all, Janis was looking forward to playing in Austin. During her brief experiment with college life at the University of Texas, her fellow students, in an act of callous cruelty, voted her the “ugliest man on campus.” Performing there with Big Brother, rubbing her success in their faces, would be her revenge. But it’s Austin and San Antonio that are scratched.

After a week of rest, Janis rallies enough to sing in the Houston Music Hall. For this gig, her family, including her younger siblings Laura and Michael, will drive up from Port Arthur. Her mother phones ahead to reserve tickets, but there is no way Janis is going to let her parents pay to see her perform. I arrange comps and reserve a block of front-row seats for the family and some of Janis’s Austin friends.

After the concert, the Joplins experience firsthand the enthusiasm of Janis’s admirers as they join us in running from the backstage door to the cars when a group of young girls who have been waiting nearby spy Janis and give chase. For Laura and Michael, it’s an exciting glimpse of life in rock and roll, but their parents’ manner suggests concern that Janis is beyond their control in a world they do not and cannot understand. They share a late supper with her in the hotel restaurant before they pile back into the family car for the ninety-mile drive to Port Arthur.

After a concert in Dallas the next evening, we have a day off before a show in Denver. The band has chosen to spend the extra day in Dallas, for the warmer climate, and the weather cooperates. I drive to Dealey Plaza in the rental car, taking with me the Fuji 8-millimeter movie camera I bought early in our first eastern tour. It is five years almost to the day since President John F. Kennedy’s open limousine passed through the small park, and it is the same kind of day, mild and brilliantly clear. I film through the windshield as I drive past the spot where the bullets struck the president, and under the railroad bridge beyond. I double back, park the car, and film the Texas School Book Depository from several angles, zooming in on the window where Lee Harvey Oswald found his vantage point. I go behind the fence atop the grassy knoll, where conspiracy theorists believe a second gunman might have been, and I explore what lies beyond. There’s a broad expanse of dirt and gravel and three sets of train tracks. Plenty of space for a gunman to get away and be long gone in the minutes of panic and confusion after the shooting.

There are flowers at a small memorial in the park, wreaths and bouquets. “In Memory of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy, 1968,” says a handwritten card with some white carnations. A white ribbon laced among an expensive array of red roses says “Lest We Forget.”

I return to my car and retrace the motorcade’s route, continuing beyond the underpass this time. A sign directs me to Parkland Hospital, where they rushed the mortally wounded president. I film the route to the hospital and from there I find my way to Love Field, Dallas’s airport, where Lyndon Johnson took the oath of office in Air Force One before the plane took off to carry JFK in his coffin back to Washington.

—

A
FTER
D
ENVER, A
two-day swing through the Northwest includes Vancouver, B.C., the only gig on foreign soil while I’m with Big
Brother. A booking that would have taken us to Hawaii for Janis’s last show with the band has fallen through, and so, on December 1, Janis and Big Brother end where they began, in San Francisco, at a benefit for the Family Dog, which brings it full circle back to Chet Helms, who presided over the creation of Big Brother in the first place. This seems fitting, somehow, but it is not a night to celebrate.

Memphis, Tennessee

W
HILE
B
IG
B
ROTHER
and I are powering through October and November, driven by the imperatives of the schedule, Albert is trying to cobble together Janis’s new backup band. He consults Janis, to be sure, but Janis is on the road. He enlists Nick Gravenites and Mike Bloomfield, his old Chicago friends, to propose musicians and help shape the sound.

Nick and Mike are both rooted in the blues. Mike left Paul Butterfield last year to found the Electric Flag, which included Nick as vocalist and songwriter. Mike wanted to create a band that would blend strains of jazz, soul, and blues into a new kind of electrified American music, and he achieved at least part of his vision. The Flag’s debut at the Monterey Pop Festival was well received. The group’s first album, “A Long Time Comin’,” performed well on the charts and got good notices. Mike wrote and the Flag provided the music for Peter Fonda’s feature film
The Trip
, about an LSD trip, which everyone I knew who ever took LSD found to be terminally strange and unlike anything they had experienced on acid. The Flag’s music got better reviews than the movie and the band seemed to be on its way, but just
a year after Monterey, Mike, bedeviled by insomnia and heroin, took his leave. The Flag flapped on for a while without him, but by the time Janis and Big Brother go their separate ways, the Electric Flag is history.

What Mike attempted with the Flag bears a relationship to what Janis wants in her new band. She wants a band with horns and a keyboard that will evoke the soul sound of R&B without imitating it. It’s a fine distinction, one that confuses the musicians who are hired to fulfill the vaguely defined vision. Janis and Albert plan to debut the new band in the new year, after two months of rehearsals, but while Janis is still on the road with Big Brother, Albert manages to secure a slot for Janis at the Stax-Volt Christmas show in Memphis on December 21. This is potentially a brilliant stroke. It’s the kind of strategic move at which Albert excels. If Janis and her new band can win over the soul music crowd in Memphis, the reviews will validate her change of direction and help jump-start the next phase of her career.

Stax and Volt records are the premier labels of the Memphis sound, and the main competitors, in the world of rhythm and blues, with Detroit’s Motown. Otis Redding recorded for Stax. Albert King joined the label in ’66. Sam and Dave are turning out one hit after another for the label. Booker T. and the MGs are the house band. Wilson Pickett records at Stax, even though his label is Atlantic.

The Memphis sound is closer to the roots of the blues, more soulful, not as inclined to pander to white tastes as Motown’s slicker hits. Funkier. Which is not to say it’s any less professionally arranged, performed and recorded. In Memphis, Janis will have her work cut out for her to win over a predominantly black audience that regards the Stax and Volt artists as members of their immediate families.

When Janis awakens in her Noe Street apartment on the morning after her last performance with Big Brother, her next gig—her debut gig with the new, as-yet-unrehearsed band—is less than three weeks away.

Janis and the band rehearse first at Big Brother’s Warehouse, which makes poignantly apparent the love Janis and the boys have for each other. As wounded as David and Peter and James are by her departure, they make the Warehouse available. It belongs to Janis and Sam as much as to them. The money they all earned together still pays the rent.

Like the Electric Flag, Albert’s Canadian group, the Paupers, has also folded. The bass player, Brad Campbell, is brought in to anchor the rhythm in Janis’s new band. On alto saxophone is Terry Clements, an English expatriate who played briefly with the Flag in their declining days and just as briefly with the Buddy Miles Express, a group formed by the Flag’s drummer. Terry came to San Francisco early in the rock renaissance, and he is thoroughly assimilated. He looks more like a hippie than anyone else among the recruits, complete with long hair held in place by a bandanna around his head. Since playing with the Flag and Buddy Miles, Terry has had some gigs as a sideman, but he’s looking for something more comfortable, more permanent, more familial.

Marcus Doubleday is also plucked from the remnants of the Electric Flag to play trumpet. Marcus is an eastern urban musician, and it’s rumored that he has a drug problem.
*

The organ man, Bill King, and Roy Markowitz, the drummer, are fresh from New York. King read in the press about Janis leaving Big Brother and took the initiative. He phoned Albert’s office and asked to be considered for her new band. The office set up an audition where Bill met Roy, and both of them made the cut. Bill seems out of place in San Francisco, but he’s a serious musician and maybe he’ll
shine on the road. Roy is a New Yorker through and through. He’s a natural comedian and he takes on the role of the class clown.

Sam Andrew will discharge the lead guitar duties on his own. The idea to add Jerry Miller to the new band didn’t pan out. Sam and Janis are my friends, my points of reference in this new aggregation of what strike me as very disparate personalities.

The Warehouse is hard to heat on the rainy December days, and soon the rehearsals move to a synagogue that Bill Graham leases next to the original Fillmore Auditorium. Bill manages the Carlos Santana Blues Band, at this time only locally known. They use the synagogue as a rehearsal space. Through Bill’s good offices, Janis’s band shares it with Santana for the high-pressure rehearsals to prepare for the Stax-Volt show.

I’m in frequent touch with the office as Albert begins to plan the winter tour in the East. When I stop by the rehearsals, it seems to me that no one knows just what they’re supposed to be doing. Without much direction, the musicians are trying to figure out their job descriptions. Mike Bloomfield is here to help with arrangements, but Mike isn’t one to crack the whip and focus the band members on the task at hand.

Sam takes on the job of teaching the new guys the songs that Janis wants to keep from the Big Brother repertoire. He offers suggestions about how to fit the horns and the organ into the arrangements, but Sam is uncertain in his new role as Janis’s employee and he isn’t sure how far he can go in guiding the style of the new group. When it comes to the new songs, he’s as much in the dark as the others about how to proceed. What is painfully lacking is a coherent vision of how this band is supposed to sound.

Gone from the tentative playlist are “Coo-Coo/Oh, Sweet Mary” and “Easy Rider.” Among the songs the band is working on, there are no obvious connections to traditional roots, black or white, save for the fact that rhythm and blues, like rock and roll, is built on the solid foundation of the twelve-bar blues.

Bill King offers some ideas about the horn lines on the Bee Gees’ “To Love Somebody,” which Janis wants to include, and he recommends a song that was a staple in his previous band, Eddie Floyd’s soul hit, “Raise Your Hand,” for her consideration.

Janis herself has no idea how to lead the rehearsals. She can say, “That’s it,” when she hears something she likes. She may suggest that a song needs a stronger introduction or ending, but mostly she looks to Mike Bloomfield or Nick Gravenites when the tunes aren’t coming together.

In Big Brother, during my time with them, Janis was almost always confident and assertive, ever ready to put in her two cents, to argue a point or propose a course of action. In the band that took her on as lead vocalist she rose to become the first among equals, and she was comfortable taking that position when it suited her—about the music or anything else—because she knew Sam, Dave, Peter, and James were there to back her up or take charge when she faltered. Now, among the musicians and helpers recruited to form the backup band she has dreamed of, Janis is passive and uncertain, and there is no one to take up the slack.

She has the smarts and the force of personality to be the bandleader, but at this turning point in her career an old habit from her younger days holds her back. When she was growing up in Port Arthur, her intelligence was appreciated in her home. Her parents instilled in Janis and her siblings, Laura and Michael, respect for literature, art, and music, but these values were not common coin among Janis’s Texas contemporaries. In a Gulf coast oil town, displays of intellectual agility were not the surest way to make friends in the public school mainstream. Even among Janis’s small group of like-minded friends, being a whip-smart mouthy girl was not always the best strategy for earning peer approval. In San Francisco, there was no lack of cerebral wattage among the founders of the scene, but it has grown too fast for an intellectual tradition to keep pace. The philosophizing of the Beats has been reduced to simple platitudes like
“Go with the flow” and “Let it all hang out.” At home and on the road, among promoters, fans, and members of the press, Janis often plays to the level of those around her, not condescendingly, but because she wants to fit in, to be one of the crowd. This habit has become so ingrained that she sometimes undervalues her own exceptional intelligence and the answers it might offer for her current problems.

In the new band, Janis is on unfamiliar ground. This is nothing like her life with Big Brother. This is the Music Business.

When rehearsal is over for the day, Janis lets off steam by careening around the city in her Porsche convertible, often with a couple of the new boys crammed into the cockpit, as she shows off her uniquely repainted ride.

While we were on the road in the fall, Dave Richards took Janis’s new Porsche into Big Brother’s Warehouse, where he labored over it lovingly. Janis asked him for a custom paint job and left the rest up to him. Dave has covered every inch of the L.A. Porsche dealer’s pearl-gray paint job with hand-painted images of birds and butterflies and satellites and psychedelic mushrooms and undersea creatures and, along one side, a lovely pastoral landscape. A group portrait of Big Brother and the Holding Company adorns the left front fender.

—

W
E FLY TO
Memphis two days ahead of the Stax-Volt gig and hold a final rehearsal at the Stax studios in an old movie theater, where we are made welcome.

The rehearsal is intense. This gig is no tryout in an out-of-the-way place. This is Memphis, home of the blues, home of Gus Cannon’s Jug Stompers, home of the Memphis sound. Janis and the band work on getting three numbers nailed. Eddie Floyd’s “Raise Your Hand” has worked out well and it has become Janis’s favorite among the new songs. The Bee Gees’ “To Love Somebody” is ready too. For a finale, she’ll do “Piece of My Heart” or “Ball and Chain.” Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.

Friday evening, the night before the show, we’re invited to the home of Stax president Jim Stewart for a cocktail party. Janis and the band can’t wait to see what a cocktail party for the cream of the Memphis sound is like, and they are not disappointed. The house is a ranch-style mansion. It’s on the edge of town, surrounded by a plot of woods. Indoors, it is apparent that this is a select gathering. The partygoers are decked out in their flamboyant finest. Booker T. is here, and Stax’s number one songwriter and producer, Isaac Hayes, but our gang are even more impressed to meet Steve Cropper and Donald “Duck” Dunn, the MGs’ guitar and bass players, Stax-Volt’s premier sidemen. Janis’s guys rub elbows with these musical idols as
they group around the dining room table to snack on shrimp, sandwiches, and chicken livers wrapped in bacon.

The music that Stewart has piped throughout the house keeps the party in a reflective mood; it is from unreleased tapes by Otis Redding. The first anniversary of his death has just passed, and in this setting his absence is still a wound not fully healed.

But Janis is always ready for a party. She drinks, laughs at the jokes, talks about music.

We considered names for the new band in the San Francisco rehearsals, but none of the suggestions won out. The Janis Joplin Revue (boring). Janis and the Joplinaires (funny, but not a serious proposal). Janis Joplin’s Pleasure Principle. Janis Joplin and the Sordid Flavors, a play on words that probably originated with Janis or Sam. For the Stax-Volt show, she’s billed simply as Janis Joplin.
When Janis sees a poster for the show, she’s embarrassed to see that her name and photo are larger than those of the soul stars she hopes to win over.

The concert, billed as Stax-Volt’s “Yuletide Thing,” is at the Mid-South Coliseum, which is known as “The Entertainment Capital of the Mid-South.” The coliseum boasts ten thousand seats. The audience is overwhelmingly black, and they are dressed to the nines. The performers are even flashier. Everyone’s dressed up except our band and crew. Janis is decked out in a cherry-red pantsuit. She moves with apparent confidence among the other groups backstage, conscious of the attention she attracts from all sides. The other groups have matching outfits, but our band members have no unified style. Here, the eclectic haberdashery of San Francisco musicians doesn’t stand out as adventurous. They look like a bunch of guys picked at random off a street located far from Memphis.