On the Road with Janis Joplin (26 page)

Still, something essential has changed since Monterey. We went there expecting to hear some great music and found that we were part of an Event, a not-to-be-missed happening that made us the envy of those who didn’t make it. Two years later, there is a built-in hype attached to any rock festival. Each gathering has to top the last, striving to be the one that’s definitively not to be missed. When I remember Monterey, I remember the music above all, one act after another that stood an audience of ten thousand on its collective ear. At
Woodstock, in memory, the event overwhelms even the glorious variety of the music.

It takes a while to sink in, but it becomes clear before long that Woodstock was the capper, the one that no sensible promoters should try to top, or even to equal. The lesson is simple: There can be no more music festivals on this scale. Even well removed from the centers of population, an all-star collection of rock and pop headliners will attract an unmanageable number of fans.

After Woodstock, the return to routine touring is a letdown. My own sense of anticlimax is compounded by the feeling that I can do nothing for Janis until she is ready to help herself. My frustration at being unable to solve her problems, or urge her closer to solving them, makes me push her harder than necessary and I blame myself for adding to her woes.

Even so, before we leave New York for Ohio, Texas and California, I present Janis with another problem: I tell her I have decided to leave the road. I will stay to train a replacement, but after that I’m done.

Little Girl Blue

AUG. 23, 1969:
Convention Hall, Asbury Park, N.J.

AUG. 27:
Saratoga Performing Arts Camp, Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

AUG. 29:
Blossom Music Festival, Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio

AUG. 30:
Texas International Pop Festival, Dallas International Speedway. Canned Heat, Chicago Transit Authority, Led Zeppelin, B. B. King, Sam & Dave, James Cotton Blues Band, Santana, Delaney and Bonnie & Friends, Herbie Mann, and more.

AUG. 31:
New Orleans Pop Festival, Baton Rouge International Speedway, Prairieville, Louisiana. The Byrds, Canned Heat, Chicago Transit Authority, Country Joe & the Fish, Grateful Dead, the Youngbloods, and more.

SEPT. 9:
Rehearse
Music Scene
TV show, L.A.

SEPT. 11:
Tape
Music Scene
TV show, L.A., ABC-TV

SEPT. 19:
Rehearse Tom Jones TV show,
This Is Tom Jones
, L.A.

SEPT. 20:
Hollywood Bowl

SEPT. 21:
Tape Tom Jones TV show, ABC-TV

OCT. 3:
Tempe, Ariz.

OCT. 4:
San Diego Sports Arena

J
OHN
T
ILL HAS
been in the band for a month now. He’s quiet by nature, so we have no way of knowing that he still harbors doubts about whether we have accepted him and whether he is up to the gig.

After a show at the Blossom Music Festival in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, John is in the dumps. He’s convinced he played terribly. Later that evening, when John and Richard Kermode leave the motel to get something to eat, they’re spotted by two groupies hanging around the front office. John and Richard have seen the girls earlier, at the gig. They are not a dream team. John and Richard have to sprint to escape the determined pursuit. Later, when Richard tells the story to the rest of the band, he says, “Boy, John Till just won’t quit.” It’s an admiring comment, Richard’s way of saying that John ran like the wind, but John takes it amiss. He is unnerved by the disparate personal and musical trips in the band and by the musicians’ fractious relationship with Janis. He isn’t sure who to trust. Somehow, John interprets Richard’s remark as a hint that he should quit the band.

From Ohio, we’re headed for big pop festivals in Texas and New Orleans. John agonizes during the flight to Dallas. Backstage at the Texas International Pop Festival—an all-day marathon with a dozen top acts—John seeks out Janis. He finds her in one of the small dressing rooms we’ve been assigned, only marginally larger than portable toilets. He asks her if she wants him to leave.

Like the rest of us, Janis has accepted John as a member of the band, and his self-doubts take her by surprise. “No!” she says. “I want you to come to California with me. You can’t leave now, that will really screw things up.” She thinks a minute and says, “Have you ever been insane, or anything like that? Is it in your family?” It’s John’s turn to be taken aback. “No”, he says. “Well, I have some experience with that,” Janis tells him. “Believe me, it’s all in your head.”

Somehow this bizarre exchange banishes John’s doubts. Hereafter, he remembers this moment as the first time he felt close to Janis. When he tells the story, he says, “She really cooled me out.”

Janis saw a need in John, and she met it. This is one of her
abilities, part of her better nature. Even amid the uncertainties with Kozmic Blues, she manifests this generosity often enough to win the respect of most members of the band. When she turns on them, going on her star trip, ranting that she deserves better, that they don’t give her what she wants, they avoid her as best they can. Her worst outbursts are still reserved for strangers—the waiter who doesn’t like longhairs, the curious onlooker at the airport, the reporter who comes on too strong, the audiences who don’t get it.
*
Janis is incapable of loosing her real fury at anyone close to her, not even at the band that can’t find the way to become what she can’t describe but desperately wants it to be.

This is the persistent problem: Sam’s departure and John Till’s arrival haven’t solved the lack of direction in the music. John brings new life to some of the arrangements, but he is just one of seven electrons orbiting Janis’s nucleus in random paths, only occasionally falling into a pattern with the others that permits the energy of the whole to be exerted in a unified way. The Kozmic Blues Band has acquired a stubborn identity all its own, one that endures despite changes in personnel.

Just a year after Janis made the difficult decision to leave Big Brother, she is facing the probability that her new band may be a failure.

—

O
N
S
EPTEMBER
1, at long last, we fly back to California. Except for a few weeks’ vacation in the spring, the Kozmic Blues Band has been
on the road since the beginning of February. They have played six concerts in Europe and more than forty in the U.S. outside California, against just seven dates there, including the depressing four-night stand in San Francisco back in March.

With Big Brother, every homecoming felt like a celebration. Now we slip into town like thieves. Some of the musicians have homes in the city or Marin County, north across the Golden Gate Bridge, which has become the preferred destination for rockers abandoning the Haight. Janis retreats into her Noe Street apartment and the company of her closest friends.

The band members get just a week to rest before we fly to L.A. to tape a performance for a new rock-pop TV show called
Music Scene
that will debut later in the month. The concept is that each week the show will feature artists whose songs are at the top of the charts. Columbia has just released the Kozmic Blues album. The expectation is that Janis’s appearance will air as the record hits the charts and give it a boost.

Janis and the band rehearse in the ABC studio on a Tuesday and return to tape the show on Thursday. The musical acts will perform in a concert setting, with Janis, as the headliner, scheduled last. She will sing three songs, of which the producers will choose two to air on the show. The opening acts are the comedian Pat Paulsen, folk legend Pete Seeger, and the English bluesman John Mayall, who has recently introduced a quieter, acoustic version of his Bluesbreakers band.

These are the early days of videotape, and the technology is cumbersome. The cameras are larger than 35-millimeter film cameras and awkward to move. It’s a convention that they not be seen on-screen, so repositioning the cameras requires a break in the taping.

The taping goes slowly. The Committee actor Carl Gottlieb is writing for the show, so we have a friend in-house.
Carl keeps us amused in the green room. He tells us, when we are the only ones in
the room, that the director is “a deaf old fart” from New York who’s got himself on the show as a co-producer so he can direct when he wants to. The guy has hearing aids in both ears and he’s used to directing old-style musical reviews. Tommy Smothers fired this director from the Smothers Brothers TV show, Carl says. He is not exactly up to rock and roll.

Janis paces her drinking through the hours of waiting. We arrived at the studio at three
P.M.
It’s almost eleven when Janis’s turn comes at last, but somehow she is raring to go. She and the band take the stage, they plug in, and Janis says, “Are you ready?” From the control room, the old-fart director gives the okay. “Good,” Janis says, “’cause I’m only doing this once. One, two, three!” She kicks out her leg, the band launches into the first song, and the cameras barely get tape rolling in time. Janis and the band play three songs in a row with scarcely a moment to draw breath between numbers. The live audience is
alive
. By Carl Gottlieb’s account, knowing he has to get it with no retakes gives the director such a boost of adrenaline that he does his best work of the seventeen shows
Music Scene
produces before it is cancelled.

Once again, by pure luck, a break in the schedule makes it possible for me to attend this year’s Big Sur Folk Festival. It has become for me an annual ritual of rest and renewal. The connection I feel with old friends among the performers, with the music, with the California coast, reinforce me in my decision to leave the rock-and-roll road.

Joni Mitchell is here again, and she bewitches the Big Sur crowd with a song she has written about Woodstock, the first time she has sung it in public. The irony is that Joni didn’t attend the festival because her manager thought keeping a date on
The Dick Cavett Show
was more important. Mitchell’s remarkable achievement is that she has not only captured the spirit of Woodstock, based on the account she heard from Graham Nash, her current lover (he’s here in Big Sur
with Crosby, Stills and Young), and what she saw on television, but she has crystallized the lesson of the gathering:
We have got to get ourselves back to the Garden.

At the end of the week it’s back to work for Janis and Kozmic Blues. A week after taping
Music Scene
, they report once more to the Los Angeles studios of ABC-TV, this time to tape the singer Tom Jones’s weekly show,
This Is Tom Jones
. In the green room, a bar in the corner is doing lively business in midafternoon. Some members of the Committee are on this show too—it’s our year to connect with them in TV studios. Janis and I launch into catch-up conversation with the actors. The guys in the band remember them from the Cavett show. The green room is ours, the atmosphere relaxed and lively.

Before long, Jones himself, still getting mileage out of “It’s Not Unusual,” his big hit of a few years earlier, wanders in with a drink in his hand. He says hello to Janis and soon wanders out again. He seems uncomfortable around beatniks and rockers. He has a small corner of the youth audience, enough to need some top rock acts on his show, but Jones is already edging toward his later position as the darling of the blue-haired set in Las Vegas.

Janis, giving credit where it’s due, admires Jones’s singing, if not always his choice of material.

Janis will do two songs on the show. The first, a duet with Jones on “Raise Your Hand,” presents no problems. The unusual setup has a few members of the audience seated on the floor behind the singers, and the band in front of them. It makes sense when we see how the
cameras shoot through the band, toward the singers and the audience beyond. As seen on the studio monitors, it works. Jones and Janis have fun swapping verses and the energy is good.

Janis’s second song is the wistful Rodgers and Hart tune “Little Girl Blue.” Sam Andrew and Mike Bloomfield’s arrangement has caught the interest of Jones’s producers. The art director has dressed a corner of the huge soundstage as a garden, complete with a white picket fence and a trellis archway covered with plastic vines and flowers. The idea is to have Janis wander through the garden while she sings, followed by a boom mike. The band will be out of sight behind a gauze scrim.

When the director explains the concept to Janis I expect her to reject it out of hand, which she does, emphatically. She is used to singing mike-in-hand in front of her band and that’s that. To my surprise, when she cools down she reconsiders. She agrees to give the plan a try if the stagehands will strip the tacky props from the set so she will sing on an empty stage, backed by the scrim, with a mike on a stand. She wants something to hold on to.

With these conditions met, Janis dutifully runs through the song several times so the director can work out the camera moves. She is intrigued by the novelty of doing a number as a television torch singer, but when we leave the studio after the rehearsal, she wonders aloud if she should call off the experiment.

On the day between the rehearsal and taping of the Jones show, Janis and the Kozmic Blues Band headline at the Hollywood Bowl. Just a year after Big Brother’s triumph at the Bowl, this is Janis’s first L.A. appearance with Kozmic Blues, and the controversy over the new band has aroused a lot of curiosity. The Bowl is sold out and the stars are right. For Janis and the boys, it is the most satisfying concert since the Albert Hall show. From the first number, the audience is unreservedly enthusiastic. We’re all so eager for approval, one good gig makes us giddy with joy.

The next day, the taping of the Tom Jones show goes smoothly.
During “Little Girl Blue,” small spots of light float across the scrim behind Janis, like drifting stars. Janis is satisfied with her performance, but she won’t rest easy until she has seen it on the air, and the air date is almost three months away.

For this busy weekend in L.A., we have a road manager trainee in tow. Joe Crowley has some experience promoting rock concerts in Seattle but no time on the road. He keeps close by my side and appears to be absorbing the essentials of the job. The show at the Hollywood Bowl is as big as anything Joe will have to cope with on Janis’s fall schedule. As he follows me around, I tell him more than he ever wanted to know about being a road manager, with special attention to Janis’s problems and peculiarities. Joe is attentive and willing, and I figure he has an even chance of becoming adequate in the job.

On the road for a two-state, three-concert foray in the first week of October, I shadow Joe while he takes on most of the responsibilities, and he acquits himself well.

The last of the three shows, back in San Francisco for Bill Graham, involves nothing like the tensions of Janis’s first hometown appearance with Kozmic Blues back in the spring. The local fans know by now that they are getting something very different from Big Brother and they come anyway, if not in such passionate throngs as in the past.

The San Francisco gig is my last day on the job, and my twenty-ninth birthday to boot. During September, Janis has approached me a couple of times to ask if I will stay with her a while longer. She and Albert have decided to call it quits with Kozmic Blues when the booked gigs are completed. “Can’t you finish the tour?” she asks. These requests come from the little-girl side of her personality, at her most winsome, hardest to resist because you want to do anything for her. But I manage to resist, and I take some comfort now in knowing that I’m leaving Janis in her hometown, the city she loves. Abandoning her out on the road was unthinkable.