On the Road with Janis Joplin (24 page)

Sam comes into the sessions ready to do whatever he can to make them work, but Gabriel hardly acknowledges Sam’s presence. Maybe he sees Sam as a threat because he comes from Big Brother, where he was Janis’s equal.

The musicians are looking for recognition of who they are and what they have accomplished in their time with Janis. They are a backup band, pieced together by Albert and Mike Bloomfield and others, but each musician wants it to be more than that. In Europe, it
was
more than that. In Columbia’s L.A. studio, they are salaried sidemen who are being paid less than union scale for the sessions. They are being asked to refine the arrangements, to show Janis at her best, but they have no incentive to take on the added responsibilities.
They resent being treated like hired hands, and the fact that Janis won’t stand up for them in the face of Gabriel’s dismissive attitude.

Janis reacts to the conflicts by separating herself from the band and retiring into semiseclusion. She no longer turns to Richard Kermode as a fallback lover. On the days when Gabriel doesn’t need her, when he’s working with the band, she spends much of her time alone. The self-imposed discipline that limited her on the road to a daily hit of smack after a performance isn’t needed here. In his off-hours, Sam is still Janis’s partner in the covert companionship of heroin. He keeps pace with her, and for the first time he feels that the drug use is getting out of hand.

In the studio, their relationship doesn’t exist. At work, Janis and Gabriel are a unit apart from the others. Their mutual dependence produces a song that offers at last a name for the band. The song is called “I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again, Mama.” (This will be the name of the album.) When we leave L.A., the band will be the Kozmic Blues Band. Later, we’ll embrace the name, even enjoy it, but during the recording, the concept of cosmic blues suggests the depth of the musicians’ discomfort.

Given the tensions in the studio, I have even less incentive than usual to spend time there. I hang out with my fellow Charles River Valley Boy and Cambridge roommate, Fritz Richmond, who moved to L.A. last year to work at Elektra Records’ Los Angeles studios as a sound engineer. He trained with Paul Rothchild, who has since left Elektra to become an independent producer. Fritz remains one of Paul’s preferred engineers for Elektra projects, and they share a house in Laurel Canyon. Fritz and I dine often at a restaurant called the Blue Boar, just down La Cienega from the Elektra studios. We discover that the restaurant has a stash of exceptional Puligny Montrachet wine at a very reasonable price. Customarily, gourmands of our generation choose a wine to suit the meal. At the Blue Boar, Fritz and I tailor our meals to suit the wine. We get mellow together, and I confide in him about the changes I’m experiencing on the road. A
year ago, it was all new and exciting. Now I wonder how much longer I want to do this job.

Albert arrives in Los Angeles early in the recording. He takes up lodging in his customary room at the Chateau Marmont, a 1920s castle above Sunset where hip movie stars and moguls of the music business stay in L.A.

Albert seeks the opinions of the musicians about how to improve the arrangements and the atmosphere in the studio. He talks with Terry Clements, and even asks if Terry knows a third party, someone outside the band, who might help. He consults with Snooky. He talks with Sam. As he did with Big Brother, Albert is looking for solutions to what he sees as an ongoing problem. Each of the musicians tells him what it was like in Europe. Albert has heard about Europe from Neuwirth too. But these exuberant reports don’t change what Albert hears in the studio, where the musical cohesion Janis and the band achieved on the European tour is not in evidence.

It doesn’t help that Gabriel and the engineer require multiple takes, sometimes dozens, and that many are necessitated by simple technical mistakes—mikes not on, or not properly placed. When the musicians complain about these things, or ask for a better mix in their earphones, Janis gets bitchy with the band. She feels they’re being prima donnas, and she doesn’t acknowledge, or doesn’t recognize, that the sessions are not being competently run.

Insult is added to the other irritants when Richard Kermode arrives at a session to find someone else sitting at his organ. Without consulting or forewarning the band, Gabriel has hired a studio sideman to play on a certain tune. He does this on other occasions, bringing in outside musicians without giving any advance notice to Janis’s band members, and in consequence their resentment grows stronger.

The unsung hero of the sessions is Mike Bloomfield. He spends time in the studio and gives of his expertise selflessly. He helps Sam work out an arrangement for “Little Girl Blue,” a Rodgers and Hart classic that Mike and Sam transform as thoroughly as Sam did
Gershwin’s “Summertime.”
*
Mike plays slide guitar on “One Good Man,” a song Janis writes during the session. And when it’s all over and done, Mike asks for no credit on the album and will accept none.

The sessions are most difficult for Sam. In Big Brother, he was creatively at the center of the band. He wrote “Call on Me” and “Combination of the Two,” two of the band’s early signature songs. He co-wrote “I Need a Man to Love” with Janis. Without his lyrical arrangement of “Summertime,” that song would never have become so identified with Janis, evoking applause from her audiences, even in Europe, from the first notes of the guitar intro. Overnight, Sam has gone from being Janis’s equal partner to a guitar for hire. As the gulf widens between Janis and the band, Sam sides with the musicians.

Their resentments come to a head one evening at the Landmark. The musicians feel they should get a piece of the record, just a few percentage points, to reflect what they have contributed, and so they have a stake in the outcome. They ask for a meeting with Albert and Janis. Beforehand, they talk among themselves and build up a head of steam, but in Janis’s room, faced with Albert’s sphinxlike presence,
the others lose their nerve.
Sam has known Albert longest, and he is the one who has the courage to speak. Give us a couple of percent from the album, he says. “Just give us like one percent. Give us anything that’ll reflect sales of the album rather than just like the—”

“Why, man?” Albert asks. “I can go get better guys than any one of you guys, in—session men from Nashville.”

“That’s true, Albert,” Sam says. “But what does that have to do with it? The fact is, we’ve gone through all these gigs with Janis and we deserve something more than just like session pay.” All the musicians have contributed to the arrangements we’re using on the album, he says. We’ve worked to make this a band.

Sam’s plea falls on deaf ears. The other musicians remain mute, and meekly retire from Janis’s room in defeat.

Not long after this confrontation, on another evening at the Landmark, after Sam and Janis have shot up together in her room, Janis seems agitated, despite the soporific effect of the drug. The cause, and the measure of her discomfort, is evident when she works up the courage to say what’s on her mind. It comes out sounding artificially formal, as if Janis were a school principal addressing an incompetent teacher across a wide oak desk. “Your services are no longer required,” she says. Sam says nothing. “Don’t you want to know why?” she says. He says, “Does it really matter?”

Walking across the patio by the pool, Sam encounters Richard Kermode. “How you doing, Sam?” Richard asks. “Well, pretty good,” Sam says. “Janis just fired me.”

By now, it’s clear to both Sam and Janis that Janis brought Sam with her when she left Big Brother because she was unable to make a complete break from the past. She needed to keep some connection with all that San Francisco and Big Brother meant to her, which was everything. Sam was a friend. He was a songwriter, and he knew how to arrange a song so it supported Janis’s vocal. With Sam, Janis had a point of reference amid a host of new uncertainties.

Now, six months into the new band, the dissension in the
recording sessions has made painfully apparent that there is no solution to the discomfort Sam’s reduced position in this group has created. What Janis doesn’t tell Sam is that among the other musicians there is a feeling that replacing him is a necessary step to finding the groove Janis wants, and Albert agrees.

So she lets him go. But not yet. There’s a record to finish, and a tour that begins in another week, ready or not. Within a day of firing him, Janis asks Sam if he will stay until she can find a new guitar player. Of course he says yes.

JUNE 27–29, 1969:
Denver Pop Festival, Mile High Stadium. Big Mama Thornton, Three Dog Night, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Iron Butterfly, Johnny Winter, Tim Buckley, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Joe Cocker, Jimi Hendrix.
*

JUNE 30:
St. Louis

JULY 1:
Edwardsville, Ill.

JULY 2:
Des Moines, Iowa

JULY 5:
Atlanta International Pop Festival, Atlanta International Raceway, Hampton, Ga. Johnny Winter, Johnny Rivers, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Canned Heat, Spirit, Joe Cocker, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Al Kooper, Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Dave Brubeck, Delaney & Bonnie, Led Zeppelin, Grand Funk Railroad, Chicago Transit Authority, and more.

JULY 8:
Tanglewood Music Festival, Mass.

JULY 11:
Hampton Beach, N.H.

JULY 12:
Yale Bowl, New Haven, Conn.

JULY 18:
The Dick Cavett Show
, NYC

JULY 19:
Forest Hills Tennis Stadium, Queens, N.Y.

We play the Denver Pop Festival at Mile High Stadium. On the last day of June we fly to St. Louis. We have three gigs in the Midwest before we get to New York, and we’re there for just two nights before we’re off to the Atlanta International Pop Festival. Two years after Monterey, everybody is having pop festivals. Festivals in Texas and New Orleans are on the itinerary later in the summer.

The word on Atlanta is good and Bob Neuwirth comes along for the weekend. I bring from New York a would-be girlfriend, a major model who is majorly dazzling, and boy do I not know how to solidify this relationship in the densest weeks of Janis’s summer schedule. While I’m trying to entertain her, Janis and Bob Neuwirth and Bonnie Bramlett have their own hangout party backstage, keeping to the shade in the hundred-degree heat. Bonnie is an Illinois girl married to the Mississippi-born Delaney Bramlett. They made an album for Stax Records that got little notice, but they are now with Elektra and the buzz within the business says they’re going places.

In Atlanta the huge crowd is peaceful and happy and the festival comes off well. Forty-eight hours later, we’re at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Massachusetts, a different scene entirely. Renowned for its summer festival of classical music, Tanglewood has begun presenting pop acts to bring in younger concertgoers. Here in the Berkshires, the fans that mob the place to hear Janis Joplin behave themselves on the elegant grounds of the estate, but even in this verdant, refined setting, the Kozmic Blues Band is not at peace. The bitterness engendered by how the musicians were treated during the recording sessions and the decision to exclude them from participation in the album’s expected success have put a lid on how much effort they are willing to devote to their jobs. They have settled into a sullen state of reduced expectations.

At the routine gigs between the big festivals, in response to the band’s diminished commitment, Janis drinks before the shows and her singing sometimes has an edge of desperation. Her stage manner becomes histrionic. Despite my requests that she use a coffee mug
onstage, she revives her old practice of swigging from a bottle, often flagrantly, to the delight of the audience and the annoyance of the promoters. After the show, back at the hotel, Janis disappears into her room for her nightly fix. I never see her high during the day, but the regularity of the nightly ritual reveals a dependence on heroin that is much greater than when she was flirting with it in the days with Big Brother.

Offstage, Janis is too often on what I call her “star trip,” expecting—sometimes demanding—special treatment, dismissing rudely someone she doesn’t want to be bothered by, even gentle souls who want only to express their admiration for her. It seems to me that the impulse behind this behavior springs from a need to be acknowledged as someone of value at a time when she doesn’t value herself.

I am restless with disappointment and bedeviled by guilt. Janis is losing control, going into a tailspin. I feel that Albert and Bob Neuwirth are the advisors most likely to steer her straight when it comes to addressing her addiction, and I perhaps underestimate my own ability to influence her.

—

A
T THE
Y
ALE
Bowl in New Haven, we meet a prospective replacement for Sam Andrew. Like Brad Campbell,
John Till is a Canadian who shares musical credentials with some others among Albert’s artists. He has toured with Ronnie Hawkins, an Arkansas rocker who
migrated to Ontario and made his reputation in Canada. A few years ago, alumni from Hawkins’s band became backup musicians for Bob Dylan, and have since become the Band.

John Till was impressed by Janis’s performance in
Monterey Pop
, which was his first and only view of Janis to date. He is even more impressed by what he sees and hears at the Yale Bowl. It seems to John that Janis has matured as a singer and performer. While she’s onstage, he can’t take his eyes off her. He came to New Haven to see if he wants the gig. After the show, he’s sure he does.