On the Road with Janis Joplin (22 page)

This time the houselights are on. The TV cameramen move in front of the stage and onstage too, maneuvering around Janis and the band without worrying about the sight lines of the audience. The original plan was for Janis to do four songs, which will be enough for the program the TV crew is shooting, but Janis and the band are still on a roll and they don’t want to quit after four songs. Let’s do “Combination of the Two.” Let’s do “Work Me, Lord.”

What keeps the show going is the enthusiasm of the band and the energy Janis gets back from the audience. This is what she wants every
time, singer and audience engaged in a duet, each giving to and receiving from the other. She invites them up on the stage, where they cluster behind the instrument amps, forming a solid arc around Janis and the band. The rest stay out front, on their feet, dancing in front of the stage and in the aisles, and somehow the film crew maneuvers around them.

Janis and the band juggle the song list for variety. This time they do “Ball and Chain” as part of the set and save “Piece of My Heart” for the encore. During “Piece of My Heart,” Janis is still holding out her hand, helping more people up on the stage. They’re dancing within the arc of the amps now, all over the stage. The group around Janis is mostly young men dancing badly, but she couldn’t care less. She’s radiating joy.

When the song ends, Janis is in a crush so thick that Bobby Neuwirth and Mark Braunstein push through and create a small circle of sanctuary around her. I’m outside the cluster around Janis, holding my movie camera over my head, hoping I’m getting it. A kid in a T-shirt hands Janis a bouquet of flowers.

—

H
OW DO YOU
top that? Well, we’ve got three days in Paris, with the concert on day two, at the historic Olympia Théâtre. It’s in the Ninth Arrondissement, near the Café de la Paix and just a few blocks from Place de l’Opéra, where I picked up my mail at American Express when I spent two months in Paris on a year off from college.

Edith Piaf made her name at the Olympia. Jacques Brel and Marlene Dietrich sang here. In 1964, the Beatles played the Olympia for eighteen days straight.

Our touring band of rock-and-roll vagabonds adds another member in Paris, where we’re joined by Bobby’s lady, Tonto. Her modeling career brought her to Paris before Bobby knew her. She speaks fluent French and she has friends in town.

The Olympia is mobbed. It’s smaller than the halls in Amsterdam and Frankfurt, more intimate. In size, it’s like a decent first-run movie theater in America, with a balcony that wraps around the sides, but the ambiance is definitely continental.

Before the show, I walk around the block, following the line of hopefuls who will not all reach the box office before the show is sold out. I approach a beautiful French girl far down the line. Would you like to see the show?—
le spectacle
, in French, which seems especially appropriate for Janis.
Oui
, she says, tentatively. Come with me. She hesitates, suspecting an ulterior motive on my part. The stage door,
la porte des artistes
, is this way, I tell her. She decides to trust me. I take her inside and find her a seat in a box overlooking the stage. She can’t believe her luck. Her name is Nathalie Fontenoy:
un nom tres Français, tres Parisien
.

Janis and the band are on a roll. Once again, the energy is up from the start. During the first couple of numbers I move through the hallways and poke my head in the back of the orchestra, then climb the stairs to listen from the balcony. The Olympia has great acoustics.

I imagine the ghost of Piaf in attendance, listening from a box overlooking the stage (perhaps seated next to Nathalie), a look of astonishment on her face at the sounds Janis produces for the delighted Parisians.

The next day, I rent a car and Bobby and Tonto and I make an excursion to Chartres, an hour west of Paris. We invite Janis to come, but the appeal of driving for an hour to wander around a cathedral and look at the stained glass is difficult to convey to someone who hasn’t been there. Janis politely declines. Knud will look after her.

Chartres has been on my schedule since I was taken there by Alex Campbell, the World’s Only Scottish Cowboy and a mentor to Ramblin’ Jack Elliott in his early visit to England, on my second trip to France. It was the same day I introduced Mimi Baez to Dick Fariña in the backseat of my white Volvo, never dreaming the consequences that would flow from that meeting.

You’ve never been to Chartres? Alex was shocked. Until then, my embrace of European culture had included paintings and sculpture, public statuary and very old buildings, a millennium of history in the place-names and the landscape, but like Janis, I hadn’t imagined the glories of stained glass.

On that first visit I took color slides of the beautiful windows, more than seven hundred years old. This time, I shoot movies, and seeing the windows through the viewfinder now as I film them is even more entrancing.

On our last evening in Paris, at twilight, Bobby and Tonto and Janis and I cruise the boulevards in a Rolls-Royce that belongs to one of Tonto’s friends. The municipal government has recently initiated a program of steam-cleaning public buildings to remove a century of soot and grime, and the results are astonishing, especially at night, when the governmental and cultural edifices are lit up. Great structures that were glowering hulks when I was here a few years ago are now golden landmarks, standing out from their surroundings. They absorb the floodlights’ glare and reflect it back as if the stone were illuminated from within. As we glide along in the Rolls, the city is like a stage set, on display just for us. This evening, it is truly the city of light.

—

A
LTHOUGH WE ARE
far from home, in foreign lands, the tour is less demanding for me than flying out of New York to the American Midwest. Dealing with the band, making sure they know when a sound check is scheduled or what time we’re leaving for a concert, making sure they’re ready backstage when it’s time to go on, is always part of the job. In Europe, there’s not much else for me to do. Knud has organized the rest: hotels and transportation. In each country, he smooths our way through immigration and customs. I wear a suit and tie for these formalities. Together we’re a couple of respectable businessmen overseeing the musicians, which allays the suspicions of
the authorities. We’re met at each airport by a minibus or a van. I don’t have to drive, I don’t have to register the band at the hotels, I don’t have to check with the promoters. Knud helps with problems that arise about equipment, hotels, hall managers, and he collects the money for each concert. I go with him to the box office; I stand by his side and oversee the calculations and the payment. We fall into a cooperative routine that makes touring the capital cities of Europe easier for me than Cleveland and Chicago. In France, I speak more French than Knud; in Germany, English is the lingua franca; in Scandinavia, Knud speaks all the languages well enough.

If I have less to do than when we’re touring in the U.S., Mark Braunstein and George Ostrow are working harder than ever, and I’m grateful for the professionalism they have developed as a team. Mark and George fly with us, and on arrival they disappear. We have brought only our stage equipment—the instrument amps and the drums. Mark and George get these items onto each plane, collect them at the other end, and set up where we need them, for rehearsals and concerts. An added item for the English and European gigs is a large voltage transformer that enables our band to use their American amps.

Amid the welter of European languages, I find a use for my Spanish in forging a working relationship with Luis Gasca. Luis is a professional, and he is touchy about it. He gets his back up when I try to herd him along like some of the others—the habitual laggards in the band. He responds more cooperatively if I simply ask, “
Listo
, Luis?” Are you ready? “
Siempre listo
, Juan,” he replies. Always ready. He helps me refresh my Spanish, and I’m delighted to learn that the coarse English phrase “a stiff prick has no conscience” trips off the tongue like poetry in Spanish:
“Una pinga parada no tiene conciencia.”

The band is a unit at last, relaxed in its new confidence. After Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Paris, no one worries that everything may fall apart in the next show.

From Paris, we return to Stockholm. Here, as elsewhere in
Europe, the concert hall has a bar. This is a source of delight to Janis. Knud introduces us to what he calls “snapps.” The Germans say “schnapps,” but in Scandinavia, it’s “snapps.” We arrive at the hall, we make sure the band is settled in their dressing room, and Knud says, “We have a snapps?” Yes, we have a snapps. We have a couple of snapps.

The concert goes well, and in what’s now part of their continental routine, several members of the band go out to clubs afterward to drink with local fans eager to show them the town. Carousing to wind down after a gig is part of the musician’s life, but I keep to my own routine, which is to get a good night’s sleep whenever I can, so I miss my chance to meet the mayor of Stockholm.

Bobby and Tonto and Sam are no sooner settled at a table in a restaurant-nightclub than Bobby—on his way back to the table from the bar—meets the mayor. Come on over and meet Sam Andrew, Bobby says. He’s here with Janis to play in your city. The mayor of Stockholm becomes their drinking buddy for the evening.

When they get back to the hotel, they find Janis awake, in a reflective mood. She marvels at how the band has come together since we arrived in Europe, how much they’ve achieved in a short time. She can hardly believe it. Believe it, Bobby tells her. They go to Bobby and Tonto’s room, where Bobby plays Janis and Sam the tape he has recorded at tonight’s concert. Janis and the boys are a band. Believe it.

In Copenhagen, they play the elegant Concert Hall at the Tivoli Gardens. The next morning, we say good-bye to Knud Thorbjørnsen. We’d like to take him to London. Hell, we want to take him home to America. He has become our hangout partner, and a friend.

—

T
HE
R
OYAL
A
LBERT
Hall is an august pile of Victorian brick that heard Verdi and Wagner conduct English premieres of their works. Churchill spoke here. In modern times it has become the plum venue
for pop musicians. Sinatra, in his day, and the Beatles, it goes without saying. In February of this year, Jimi Hendrix sold out two nights at the hall.

Janis is focused on Bob Dylan’s sell-out appearance in 1965, which is chronicled in
Dont Look Back
. She is determined to do the same, and, if possible, to get the British audience out of their seats and dancing in the aisles.

The date of the concert is April 21, four months after the Stax-Volt show in Memphis, half a world away in time and space. Outside the hall, as the hour approaches, scalpers are hawking a few stray tickets, but most of the ticket holders won’t part with them for love nor money.

It is rumored that some of the Beatles are here, some of the Stones. Fleetwood Mac is here. Eric Clapton is here for sure. Somebody saw him. God knows who else, if you believe the rumors.

The packed house, pop royalty and commoner alike, doesn’t need much urging from Janis to get on their feet and boogie. It’s like a replay of the first charmed show in Amsterdam.

Coming offstage after the final encore, Janis is irrepressible. A small handful of British music reporters have gathered backstage, from
Melody Maker
and the
Daily Sketch
and the
Daily Telegraph
. When Janis has changed out of her sweat-soaked garments and put on something fresh, she joins us in the band’s dressing room and delivers a paean to what the band achieved tonight.

“
Don’t you know how happy we must be?” she says. “We really broke through a wall that I didn’t think was possible. Like ever since we’ve been here, like the audiences we’ve had that have danced, we’ve always felt, oh, too much, that’s really wonderful of them. But everybody said, ‘Don’t expect that of a British audience. Don’t expect them to do nothin’, man.’ And when they first got up and started dancin’, it was just like a big hot
rush
. We just went, ‘Oh,
yeah
?’ It’s like a whole other door opened up, a whole other possibility that had never even occurred to you.”

It’s significant that Janis says “we” tonight in London. In interviews with the press she often talks about being onstage, what it means to her, what it feels like, the relationship she tries to establish with the audience, and the subject is the first person singular. It’s about her, which is, after all, what the interviewers want. Tonight, at Albert Hall, talking not just about tonight, but looking back on the whole European tour, she’s talking about what she and the band have achieved. She feels for the first time that she and they are a unit that she is proud to embrace in the first person plural.

The questions the British journalists ask make it clear that the controversy in the American rock press about Janis leaving Big Brother is unknown to them. These pop critics are getting their first look at Janis, and they like what they see. Like tonight’s audience in the Royal Albert Hall, they’re dazzled.

It’s not really a press conference, though a few flashbulbs pop. Janis shows off the new shoes she bought in Paris and she takes an ostentatious swig of tequila from a bottle we brought to the gig. “
Do you prefer it?” a reporter asks. “Is it a better drink?” “I love it!” Janis says. “It tastes terrible, but I love it!” When we weren’t drinking snapps with Knud in the concert hall bars, tequila has become the libation of choice on the tour, once Bobby joined us. Finding limes is a bitch on the Continent. The French don’t even have a word for limes. They call them
citrons verts
—green lemons. In London too, we
have to resort to lemons as chasers. (Reports in the American press have continued to tout Janis’s devotion to Southern Comfort, but the reporters aren’t paying attention. Even before she left Big Brother, Janis switched her affections to B&B, motivated in part by a desire to adjust her image by drinking something more sophisticated.)