On the Road with Janis Joplin (29 page)

Janis looks trim and fit, and she is in high spirits as she presents me to the band. Brad Campbell and John Till, the two holdovers from the Kozmic Blues Band, greet me like a long-lost brother. Meeting the three new members, and learning how they all came together, gives me more reasons to believe that Janis’s rampant optimism is justified.

In the final days of the Kozmic Blues Band, on a flight to Nashville for the last gig before Madison Square Garden, John Till was feeling low. He had been with the band only five months and it was folding out from under him. He looked up and saw Brad Campbell bouncing down the aisle toward him, all grins, and he wondered what Brad had to be so happy about. Brad sat down next to John. “She wants you and me to come out to California,” he said.

Brad and John have spent the winter in San Francisco, living on a retainer, waiting for Janis to put together her next band. The retainer was less than they would have made on the road but more than they would have gotten from unemployment. They did a little
freelancing—play a gig here, play a gig there—but nothing regular. One day in the spring, John Till was wandering around North Beach when he ran into Snooky Flowers and a guy he didn’t know. “You wanna play guitar tonight?” the guy said.

“Sure,” John said.

“Can you get a bass player?”

“How about Brad, man?” Snooky said. “Can you get Brad to play?”

John went off to phone Brad. They spent the afternoon rehearsing in a second-floor loft with Snooky, the other guy, and a drummer named Clark Pierson.

Clark is from Albert Lea, Minnesota. He’s an American version of Ringo Starr: It takes a lot to wipe the grin off his face, and he has the same happy-go-lucky basic rhythm. Clark came to California from Chicago with a band that had a recording contract. The record didn’t go anywhere, and in the spring of 1970 Clark was living in San Francisco playing music anywhere he could get a job, Polish dances included. He had a small-time agent trying to find him work. One day the agent called up and said, “These people need a drummer for a week. Do you want the job?”

“How much is the pay?”

“Thirty a night.”

“Sure.”

Clark showed up at the second-floor loft for rehearsal, where he met Brad and John and Snooky’s friend. The gig was playing five sets a night in the Galaxy, a topless joint on Broadway. Rumor later has it that Clark was discovered in a strip joint, but he scotches that story: “There’s a difference between the strip joints and the topless: Topless is already topless.”

One night, along about the middle of the evening, Clark heard a jingle-jangle sound and he saw a long-haired chick come into the club, dressed up in satin and spangles, with small bells tinkling from a sash tied around her waist. She was arm in arm with an older man
in a Brooks Brothers shirt and a crewneck sweater and a pair of Levi’s turned up at the cuff over a pair of Buster Brown shoes that may never have been polished. His gray hair was tied back in a ponytail and he looked like the man on the Quaker Oats box. “Man,” Clark thought to himself, “what a weird couple.”

When the song ended, Snooky grabbed the mike. “Ladies and gentlemen, in this club tonight we have one of the finest singers”—racka-racka-racka, giving Janis a glowing introduction. Snooky harbored no grudges about the demise of the Kozmic Blues Band. Albert sat in the spotlight’s glare and smiled his best smile. When the set was over, Brad and John went over to talk to Janis and Albert, and after a little while Brad came back to ask Clark if he’d like to audition to play in Janis’s new band.

“Well, I ain’t got nothing else to do,” Clark said. A few days later he went to the house in Larkspur. “We played a couple of tunes and then Janis asked me if I wanted to join the group. Albert is standing there. I can’t get used to him. She was real happy when I said, ‘Yeah.’”

Besides Brad and John and Clark, there is Richard Bell on electric piano and Ken Pearson on organ. Like Brad and John, they are Canadians. Kenny has played with Jesse Winchester, an American songwriter who removed himself to Canada a couple of years ago, beyond the reach of draft, and made his reputation there. Richard is yet another graduate of Ronnie Hawkins’s bands, from which Albert earlier plucked Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson to play behind Bob Dylan when Dylan electrified his act.

“Hey, you guys, here’s a song I like,” Janis will say. She’ll play the boys a tape and they’ll run through the song to see if it begins to rock. To Big Brother classics like “Ball and Chain” and “Summertime” and “Piece of My Heart,” and a few songs from Kozmic Blues, like “Try (Just a Little Bit Harder),” they have added punchy new tunes that will soon become familiar to audiences across the country—“Move Over” and “Half Moon” and “Cry, Baby” and “Get It While You Can.”

The band is tight. There is none of the every-man-for-himself wariness that marked the early days of Kozmic Blues. These guys are already a band. They are on Janis’s trip and she basks in their selfless support.

In her garage-studio-poolroom, I see something new in Janis. She is running the rehearsals as if she’s done it all her life. There is no slack time. Oh, they laugh, and there are jokes, but when Janis counts off a song and kicks a leg to start the beat, the band is right there. She is in charge, with none of the strained authority that marked her occasional attempts to exert leadership with Kozmic Blues. It’s clear that the boys already feel they are working with her, not just for her. Unlike the macho-sensitive men in Kozmic Blues, they don’t object when Janis calls them “my boys”—they love it. From the stories I hear, Richard and Kenny were sometimes overwhelmed by the level of hanging out that kicked in when the Great Tequila Boogie hit town, but Janis helped them over the rough spots. Now that she has forbidden Bobby and Kris from tempting the band with invitations to play hooky, not even the promise of a full night of rocking can distract Janis from the task at hand: She is getting her act in shape. Put on your dancing shoes, boys, we’re going on the road.

The band has already had its local debut. They played a gig at Pepperland, a dance hall in San Rafael, for the Hells Angels, where Janis’s act was billed as “Main Squeeze and Janis.”
Bennett Glotzer, who has been Albert’s partner since Albert’s relationship with Bert Block ended last year, became close to Janis in the fall, during my hiatus from the road. Bennett was managing Blood, Sweat and Tears when Janis and Big Brother played with them at the Psychedelic Supermarket in Boston and again at the Columbia Records convention in Puerto Rico. Janis has been aware of Bennett since then, and since he joined Albert, he has become someone Janis confides in. Like Albert, Bennett has spent time in California this spring, supporting Janis in preparing for her return to touring. He has been largely responsible for booking the upcoming tour.

Bennett didn’t want Janis to do the Pepperland gig. Hells Angels? What are you, crazy? Remember Altamont? Bennett thinks the Angels are sociopaths and thugs. But Janis insisted, and the stories are wild: An Angel (not really an Angel, Peter Albin says—a member of a rival club, maybe a Gypsy Joker; everybody else says he was an Angel) and his motorcycle mama fought Janis for her bottle as she was about to go onstage. Bennett stepped in and got pinned under the melee, which ended when Sweet William, a member of the Angels’ San Francisco chapter, stomped the guy on the head and escorted Janis to the stage.
During her set, a naked couple tried to make it onstage, in the midst of the music, and an Angel, a real one this time for sure, tossed the naked guy out and let the naked girl stay. Big Brother and the Holding Company, reconstituted since Sam left Kozmic Blues, opened the show, with Nick the Greek Gravenites at the mike, in a friendly battle of the bands. By all reports it was intense like no other gig in memory.

Afterward, when Janis was leaving the hall with Glotzer, she said to him, “Well, Bennett, you were right.”

Be that as it may, the Pepperland gig has redounded to Janis’s benefit. The reviews, and the word of mouth around the Bay, are favorable. Old prejudices that did so much to alienate Janis from her hometown the year before have evaporated with demise of the Kozmic Blues Band. In the Larkspur house or sashaying into the Trident—the preferred watering hole of the famous and funky in Marin, a hippie rock-and-roll hangout with organic food and tall drinks, stunning waitresses and a view of Sausalito Bay—or whipping across the Golden Gate Bridge in her psychedelic Porsche, Janis is firmly in her element and enjoying every minute.

Even before I absorb the full extent of Janis’s rebirth, I want my old job back. But I have delayed accepting the offer long enough that Janis and Albert have taken on a provisional road manager. Stan Rublowsky has some credentials from another wing of the music business—he has toured with the renowned jazz pianist Stan
Kenton—but he seems a trifle out of place in Janis’s Marin madhouse. A new age has surely dawned if a guy who has road-managed jazz musicians looks too straight to rock-and-rollers.

Janis feels an obligation to Rublowsky, but she is happy to see me again and tells me so. Finding her so bright-eyed and cocksure, so uncontainably happy, I realize I’ll be seriously bummed if I don’t get to wrangle this bunch on the road. It’s no time to be coy, and I let my enthusiasm show. Janis resolves the dilemma by deciding to take both candidates out for the first couple of weeks. She will decide later which of us to keep. Stan and I agree to do the job together, which should make it easy on both of us. He has already confirmed most of the arrangements for the first weeks of the tour. I look them over and find them in order, which leaves me with little to do by way of work until we are off and sailing. I am out of New York at last, after a long winter of discontent, and glad to be back in California. I’m ready to celebrate. The Great Tequila Boogie, in its final days, provides the vehicle.

Neuwirth and Kristofferson are the sole survivors. Odetta and Michael J. are long gone. Ramblin’ Jack has rambled on. Kris and Bobby decamp to my San Francisco apartment when I arrive. They sleep in my living room for the next few days and we put plenty of miles on their rent-a-car and my Volvo, around the Bay, visiting friends, playing music, chasing women, and stopping at assorted bars to refuel.

Kris is a former Rhodes scholar, a former army captain and former chopper pilot in Vietnam, which adds a dimension to his persona as a leather-clad, long-haired songwriter, not a Nashville type at all, but one who has surely got Nashville’s attention.

Kris’s Bay Area rambles with Neuwirth have already earned him his first booking in L.A., thanks to Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. Jack had a gig at the Keystone, a Berkeley music club, where Bobby and Kris joined him on the very evening when Janis and Full Tilt Boogie were debuting at Pepperland. (Like Bennett Glotzer, Neuwirth too was
leery of the Angels and what might ensue at a full-on rock-and-roll goonbash fired up by Big Brother and the Holding Company and Janis’s new band.)

As Jack tells the story, he invited Bobby to sing a song or two and Neuwirth in turn persuaded Kris to sing. In the club that night was Doug Weston, owner of the Troubadour, in L.A. After hearing Kris, Weston booked him at the Troubadour.

According to Ramblin’ Jack, Janis was so pissed at Kris and Bobby for missing the Pepperland gig, she called the Keystone and left a message that was handed to the miscreants as a written note that said, “Thanks a lot. Now I’ll know who my friends are.”

For the record, tequila is not just another drink. Some component of the agave plant contributes, along with the alcohol, to the elevating result. For many, the effect is psychedelic. Where tequila puts me is out there, especially drinking it day and night with two lunatics who don’t know any better. Now and then I suspect that
I
know better, but I try to keep up anyway. It isn’t bad, really, once I get used to ordering Bloody Marys for breakfast to calm the tequila willies before I tackle the huevos rancheros. And the truth is, I will remember these days fondly, even though the few scenes I can recall in any detail play like clips from a demented underground movie—

EXT. MILL VALLEY HOME—SWIMMING POOL—DUSK

The house belongs to Big Daddy Tom Donahue, a pioneer of underground FM radio. Tom is not home. The young men and women in the pool are naked. Donahue’s teenage son is not sure he should allow these people on the premises, but he can’t imagine how to evict them, and besides, the naked girls are very attractive.

CUT TO

INT. PEGGY CASERTA’S HOUSE—STINSON BEACH—NIGHT

The party turns weird when Peggy decides to shoot herself up. Neuwirth, Kristofferson, and Cooke abandon ship.

CUT TO

INT. CARL DUKATZ’S HOUSE—BERKELEY—MORNING

Kris is singing “Sunday Morning Coming Down.” It is morning, but not Sunday. We are coming down but trying to get back up. Carl learns the lead guitar part as it goes along and Neuwirth finally gets the harmony right after weeks of patient instruction from Kris.

FADE OUT

Through it all we avoid serious trouble and get little sleep. On Thursday, May 28, Stan Rublowsky and I pick up Janis and the band and we fly off to Florida. Kris comes with us as far as Atlanta, where he changes planes for Nashville. He has run out of money and I lend him fifty bucks. When he strolls off down the concourse, giving us a parting look at his Western-hero walk, we feel we are losing a member of the family.

It may be the last time Kris has to borrow pocket money. Roger Miller’s and Ray Price’s recordings of his songs are beginning to pay off. Later in the summer, Kris gets a quarterly royalty payment in five figures that’s a boost toward the fame and fortune that will follow. He repays my loan with a check I wish I had framed. For Kris, like Janis, the spring of 1970 marks a turning point toward the good times.

The Great Tequila Boogie is history. Full Tilt Boogie is on the road.

Full Tilt Boogie

MAY 29, 1970:
Gainesville, Fla.

MAY 30:
Snider Armory, Jacksonville, Fla.

MAY 31:
Miami, Fla.

JUNE 5:
Columbus, Ohio

JUNE 6:
Indianapolis, Ind.

JUNE 12:
Freedom Hall State Fair and Exposition Center, Louisville, Ken.

JUNE 14:
Kansas City

JUNE 19–20:
College Park,Md.

JUNE 25:
The Dick Cavett Show

JUNE 26:
Schenectady, N.Y.

W
E OPEN THE
tour in Florida, in the final days of May. Despite her confidence in the new material and the new band, Janis approaches these first concerts as if the judgment to be passed on her were governed by fickle fortune, as if her talent and Full Tilt Boogie might not be enough to recapture what she has lost. To steady her nerves, she
drinks before the concerts with only marginally more restraint than she was applying in the final months of touring with Kozmic Blues.

The gig in Miami is our first big show, an all-day outdoor rock festival with Janis as the headliner. We will be flown to the site by helicopter. Our pickup point is a high school football field. The chopper is late. It’s a warm day and Janis lies down in the grass to catch forty winks. When the chopper lands, she is sound asleep.

I shake her awake. “Come on, Janis, time to go.” She gets up bleary-eyed and blowsy, her hair and feathers in disarray. The alert pilot spots the tequila bottle protruding from her bag. “I can’t carry her,” he says. “She’s intoxicated.” No sleazy hippie broad is going to get in his chopper if she’s been drinking.

At this very moment there are thousands of passengers airborne over America who have tanked up at the airport bar and had a double on board the plane before lunch, all of them more soused than Janis, but no amount of persuasion on my part or Stan’s can convince the Guardian of the Airways to fly the star of the show to the concert site. He’ll take the rest of us, he says. Fuck you, we tell him.

We make our way by rent-a-car through crowded streets and unfamiliar byways, but that’s what road managers are for, and we’ve got two. Our combined efforts get us to the festival site just in time for Janis’s set. The natives are restless after long hours in the sun with too much beer and too few toilets. The collective mood is, Come on, man, I been sittin’ here all day. What else can you show me?

Albert isn’t one to pester the road crew with his concerns, but he has given me a message about the opening weekend of the tour: Be cool in Florida, where the local newspapers may remind the fans (and the police) that Janis was busted for obscenity at a concert in Tampa back in November. Reaching an out-of-court settlement on that charge cost her a hefty legal fee.

Before Janis goes onstage, I caution her against doing anything to offend the sensibilities of the Miami constabulary, in case they’re
looking for an excuse to prove that they are just as vigilant as their Tampa colleagues. Just over a year ago, these same Miami cops busted Jim Morrison for public profanity, indecent exposure, public drunkenness, and incitement to riot when the Doors were here. Morrison’s trial is pending.

Not to worry. Janis is a model of superstar decorum. She keeps the tequila bottle out of sight, she holds her tongue between songs, she makes the crowd forget the heat. Full Tilt is on a full boogie, and they bring the show to a rousing finale.

—

W
E S
ETTLE INTO
the One Fifth Avenue hotel in New York and at the end of the week we commence a relatively relaxed, two-gigs-a-weekend schedule. Following his custom, Albert sends us into the heartland to gear up the band on the road before presenting Janis and her new ensemble to the scrutiny of the rock press. In the Midwest, spring feels like summer. We play Columbus, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Kansas City. For the time being we are scrutinized only by David Dalton, a young journalist who will travel with us for several weeks to gather material for a piece on Janis that will appear in
Rolling Stone
too late to affect the initial judgments of her new band.

Janis has warned Dalton at the outset, “I hope you jerkoffs at
Rolling Stone
aren’t going to demolish me like you did the last two times,” but Dalton isn’t here to do a hatchet job. He seems more interested in the multifaceted Janis than the star. He notes with interest that Janis has Nancy Mitford’s
Zelda
and Thomas Wolfe’s
Look Homeward, Angel
in her carry-on bag.

Albert’s prudence is wise but, as it turns out, unnecessary. Any rough edges in the music are smoothed out by Full Tilt’s steamroller energy and everyone’s good spirits. Janis and the band roll effortlessly through the first weeks of the tour. The Full Tilt boys are neither psycheholic nor alcodelic. Like most musicians, they tend to smoke a little weed or have a few drinks on occasion. The hanging out back in
Marin expanded their concept of what having a few drinks entails, and for the first week or two the boys sometimes overflow their customary limits, but soon enough the postgig partying comes under control.

In Full Tilt, Brad Campbell and John Till seem truly at home for the first time. They are the veterans, and they welcome the newcomers. From the beginning, the five of them form a cohesive unit not only musically but in the off-hours as well, something that never happened in the Kozmic Blues Band. Ken Pearson and Richard Bell give me more laughs than worries. Kenny is like a teddy bear, until he sits down at his organ. Richard is lean, with a dreamy smile that can lure you into mistaking him for a space case, but he’s paying attention all the time. He’s tied with Brad for best musician in the band, but no one is keeping score and everyone more than pulls his weight. John Till is often late checking out of a motel or getting to the gate in an airport, but he’s right there when it’s time to go onstage.

Janis’s transparent delight in working with these boys makes all the more apparent what was lacking in the Kozmic Blues Band. There is love in some measure in all friendship. For Janis, a professional relationship that doesn’t become at least a middling friendship is one that she won’t bear for long. In Kozmic Blues, the reserves of love were inadequate. With Full Tilt Boogie, Janis has already created the closeness that’s essential to her happiness and success on the road. Nothing will ever be just like Big Brother, but with Full Tilt, it’s a family again.

The mood of the tour reminds me of my first months with Big Brother: We are outward bound and the sky’s the limit. Even the routine gigs in inconsequential cities lack the tedious aspects that prompted Sam Andrew to write “Downtown Nowhere.” This is more like Downtown Everywhere—it’s summertime and the living is easy. After Miami, Janis plays no more festivals for a time, as she renews her acquaintance with municipal auditoriums and college gyms.

In Louisville, the audience of four thousand can’t occupy a quarter
of the seats in the huge Freedom Hall, but Janis revs up enough energy to fill the auditorium. For a time, it seems the security rent-a-cops may overdo their efforts at crowd control. Janis jumps down to dance with the kids in the front row and that gets everyone dancing. By the end of the show, they’re on the stage, and the hall manager has the lights on, but the festivities stay just shy of uncontrolled. Janis keeps the energy positive and the crowd in check.

When we have been on the road for two weeks, Stan Rublowsky and I sharing the road manager’s duties, neither of us pushing Janis for a decision about which of us to keep, Janis asks me to sit with her on a flight back to New York. She says she wants me to handle the road show for as long as I’m willing to stay. I told her back in California that even if she chooses me I will probably leave her again after the summer tour. I remind her that Stan is willing to stay on the job indefinitely. Janis says what’s important is that she and I are friends. We have a history together, shared experience that includes both highs and lows. I tell her if it keeps on being this much fun, I may stay through the fall.

We enjoy our reconfirmed partnership in silence for a time, but I have a bit of business to transact, now that I am officially back on the payroll. I worked with Kozmic Blues for a year without a raise, at $250 a week. I’ve been on the road now for a couple of weeks with no idea how much I’m being paid. I broach the matter of my salary and Janis doesn’t shy away. “How much do you want?”

“How about four hundred a week?”

“All right,” she says. This is the first time we have ever discussed the terms of my employment, just the two of us. Janis displays none of the old anxieties about being ripped off or not having enough money, which date back to her first days with Big Brother and complicated many of her dealings with partners and employees in the past.

With that out of the way, Janis reveals a decision that surprises me: “I’m not going to make it with anyone that works for me,” she says. It’s too hard to keep the intimacy of sleeping with someone
balanced with the demands of the employer-employee relationship, she says. I tell her I think keeping some professional distance is a good idea, but I realize she doesn’t really need and isn’t really seeking my approval. Janis has made this decision from the head, not the heart. She’s willing to deny herself the kind of transient romantic attachment with a guy in the band or one of the boys on the road crew that has offered her comfort in the past because she knows it’s the smart thing to do, for the greater good of her new band and for her career.

Seeing the dramatic improvement in Janis’s health and her spirits is reward enough for coming back on the road, and I realize that road managing is a valuable resource. It’s my safety net. Writing the
Fool of Paris
script, I learned something about how to write screenplays and I want to learn more. Janis’s failure with Kozmic Blues made me quit the road. As a result, I may have found my own work. Talk about silver linings. Helping Janis now is a form of payback, a way of saying thanks.

Janis is making decisions about the business side of her career as well. She discusses her investments with Albert, she tells me, and with the office accountant, Sy Rosen, a genial man who helped me get my American Express card. At long last, Janis believes that after the band and the travel expenses have been paid and Albert takes his cut, she will still have enough. More than she ever dreamed when she was just a hopeful hippie on Haight Street.

As Janis opens a book to read, I marvel at what she has accomplished in the six months since we parted in New York. She has brought her formidable intelligence to bear on getting it right this
time. She has examined the lessons to be learned from the failure of the Kozmic Blues Band. She took the lead role in assembling Full Tilt Boogie. If she was evading her responsibilities last year, she is embracing full responsibility now, not tentatively, but as if she’s been doing it this way all along. There’s no more deferring to men she thinks know more than she does, no more waiting for others to solve her problems.

She has cleaned up her act.

Stan Rublowsky departs with no ill will and the road crew takes on its final form for the summer tour. We are hauling our own PA system now, adequate for all but the biggest shows, and we have added two more equipment men to handle the load. George Ostrow and Vince Mitchell are augmented now by Phil Badella and Joel Kornoelje. The four of them are the California hippie wing of our little family. Driving the PA and stage equipment from gig to gig in a truck means that Albert’s office has to book the concerts no farther apart than a twelve-hour drive. Three to four hundred miles is about right. George and Vince got the equipment routine down solid with Kozmic Blues, and they come to me only rarely. For the most part, the equipment crew operates on its own and gets the job done.

Besides the equipment truck, George and the boys are in charge of a brand-new, bright red International Travelall, which we immediately dub the Boogie Wagon. Albert’s idea is that Janis and I and the Full Tilt boys will use the Boogie Wagon instead of rental cars, thus saving some bucks, but the scheme contains a flaw. After each night’s gig the equipment men leave for the next city, driving the equipment truck and the Boogie Wagon. The band and I still have to get to the hotel and from the hotel to the airport. We often arrive at the next destination ahead of the road crew. So we continue to rent a car, which leaves the road crew with a great vehicle at their disposal once they’ve unloaded the truck into the concert hall. They soon discover that the Boogie Wagon can accommodate a promising number of groupies.

The band is a road manager’s dream, almost always willing to follow direction. If I do something that puts somebody’s back up, I back off and become the peacemaker. My job is to keep them happy. It doesn’t hurt to say so when I have to soothe ruffled feathers.

John Till and Brad Campbell are old hands, accustomed to my style. I have no idea what the new boys make of my role until one morning when Richard Bell breaks out laughing as he watches me get it together to check us out of a hotel. “What are you laughing at?” I want to know, too ready to take offense.

“Nothing. It’s great! I never had anyone do all this for me before, is all.”

Later on, I learn from the boys that Janis has laid down the law, warning them not to give me a hard time, but Richard’s appreciation is spontaneous and genuine. Clark and Kenny second the motion. In a few weeks, we have formed a benevolent cohesion that survives the occasional inevitable dustups on the rock-and-roll road.

Janis and I are comrades in arms. I rarely have to do more than suggest that it would be nice if she could be in the motel lobby in five minutes for her to appear breathless in three, hair and feather boas flying, tripping along in her sashaying run, calling out, “I’m ready, John! I’m ready!” So I’m all the more surprised when she pulls one of her old tricks as the band gathers in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel to head out of town for a weekend’s gigs. (Janis prefers One Fifth Avenue, but it’s full up this week.) John Fisher’s limo is out front and we’re about to leave for La Guardia when Janis presents me with a sloe-eyed pretty boy who has spent the night in her bed. “We’ve got to drop him off in the East Village,” she announces.