On the Road with Janis Joplin (30 page)

In my first weeks with Big Brother, I established it as the Eleventh Commandment that if anyone in the band needed to delay our progress toward a departing flight, that person had better let me know ahead of time. The East Village will take us half an hour out of our way, maybe more, depending on traffic. I always allow extra time to get to airports, but making the detour will cut it pretty fine. I launch
into my prerecorded diatribe about no side trips that might make us miss a flight. Halfway through, Janis jumps in with some real heat of her own as the onlookers draw back to a safe distance.

The volume escalates, and suddenly we reach an impasse. Janis sputters for a moment, then says, “I wouldn’t take this from anyone but you!”

“Well, I wouldn’t do this for anyone but you!” I shoot back.

We stand nose to nose. Janis cracks first. She grins, and we dissolve into laughter. Janis gives the pretty boy ten bucks and tells him to take a cab.

This is the new Janis, who doesn’t have to defend her position with the last ounce of her energy. She is more comfortable in herself, more centered. She is the linchpin that holds Full Tilt Boogie together, onstage and off. She is the leader of the band. If the craziness of the road gets to one of the new guys, she lightens the moment with a joke, or says something that helps him cope, much as she cooled out John Till after his first month with the Kozmic Blues Band. Last year, Janis had a clause inserted in her contract rider that required she have a dressing room separate from the band’s, to give her some privacy and some distance from the intramural tensions in Kozmic Blues. That provision is still in force, but she spends little time alone now, except to change clothes. The rest of the time she is with the band.

Shortly before we left California, Janis confided to us that she wanted a nickname, something that suggested a good-time woman. After some discussion it came down to “Rose” or “Pearl,” but there is
no final decision until we are out on the road. Self-consciously, we try these monikers on for size. It isn’t long before Janis decides that “Rose” doesn’t suit her and “Pearl” she becomes, the name already taking on an identity separate from the public persona of Janis Joplin. It’s a way for her to appear among her friends in human form. It’s a private name, an intimate name, used for saying friendly things. We’ll say, “Knock ’em dead, Pearl,” before a show, or, “You’re lookin’ good, Pearl,” or “Hey, what’s the matter, Pearl?” But when the talk is about business, or when communications get strained, as they do on the road, even among family, it’s always Janis then, never Pearl.

Later on, when the nickname appears in the press, some people perceive it as a gaudy label associated with Janis’s wild outfits and her most outrageous behavior. They’ll call out, “Hiya, Pearl!” on the street and Janis will cackle and wave back, loving it in a way, but she loves it most the way it’s used among her friends. It’s a name that tells her we love her.

—

I
N ONE CONCERT
after the next, Janis recaptures her audience without a fight. She controls them confidently, using between-song raps and stories to keep them on her wavelength or to lay a bit of philosophy on them. She has a new introduction to the Jerry Ragovoy tune, “Try (Just a Little Bit Harder),” which she has kept from the Kozmic Blues song list. It’s a story whose moral is that if you aren’t happy with where you’re at, if everyone around you seems to be getting more of the action than you are, you got to try harder.
Wham!
she jams her fist into the air, kicks out one leg, and the band starts the song with a punch that knocks the front row of the audience back ten feet.

That kick gets her into trouble in College Park, Maryland. Midsong, Janis accentuates a beat with a good hard kick and pulls a muscle deep in her groin. She comes offstage at the end of the set, her face taut with pain. She asks me please to tell the audience that she
can’t do an encore. The promoter calls an ambulance, and the band and I follow the flashing red lights through the late-night suburban streets at sixty plus to the nearest hospital, where Janis lies on a table in the emergency room for half an hour until a doctor finds time to examine her. He tells her she has pulled a muscle.

She gets a good laugh out of this incident a few days later, on
The Dick Cavett Show
, which is now running five nights a week on ABC’s late-night schedule, opposite Johnny Carson. Janis has been invited to appear on other talk shows, but she accepts invitations only from Cavett, because she likes him and because, she says, he’s the only talk show host who actually listens to his guests.

“I hear you tore a muscle somewhere near Maryland,” Cavett says, once the applause for Janis’s opening song has died down.

Janis gives a breathy laugh. “It was a lot closer to home than that, baby.” The audience roars.

When Cavett asks her to explain the opening song, “Move Over,” which Janis wrote, she says it’s the old story about getting a mule to move by holding out a carrot in front of him, dangling from the end of a stick. The woman is the mule, she says, while men are “constantly holding out something more than they can give.”

Cavett draws himself up. “I have to defend my entire sex, ladies and gentlemen.”

“Go right ahead, honey,” Janis says. The audience cracks up.

Cavett has somehow gotten wind of the fact that Janis’s Port Arthur high school class is holding its ten-year reunion in August, and Janis is planning to go. “I don’t have that many friends in my high school class,” Cavett admits. “I don’t either,” Janis says. Her wistful tone gets her another laugh, but she’s serious when she says, “They laughed me out of class, out of town, and out of the state. So I’m goin’ home.”

Janis holds her own as the next guest joins the conversation. She met Raquel Welch last fall at a party
Life
magazine gave for “the top
stars of the sixties.” Raquel and Janis hit it off then, and Raquel took Janis to the premiere of
Myra Breckenridge
, a film adaptation of Gore Vidal’s novel, in which Raquel co-starred with Mae West, John Huston, Farrah Fawcett, Tom Selleck, and the fastidious film critic Rex Reed, who played a transsexual. When Cavett asks Welch what kind of people come to see a film that many find bizarre, Raquel says she has seen the movie three times and twice the audiences were predominantly homosexual.

“Of course they weren’t all homosexual,” she adds. “Janis was there.”

“Thank you, baby,” Janis says with a grin. This gets another big laugh from the audience, as they pick up the reference to Janis’s often-alleged bisexuality.

“Can we clear anything else up while we’re here?” Cavett asks innocently. As Cavett and Raquel understand and Janis’s response makes clear, she prefers to be seen by the public as an enthusiastic heterosexual. Nor is this an evasion. As love objects and sex objects, men are her first choice.

Cavett touches on Janis’s winter trip to Rio, but neither mentions the highlight of her summer tour, which is just two days away.

Three venturesome music promoters in Toronto, collectively known as Eaton-Walker Associates, have chartered a Canadian National Railways train that will traverse the continent from east to west. The passengers, an all-star lineup of bands, will give concerts in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary, and Vancouver. The train, and the tour, is called Festival Express 1970. Like the Monterey Pop Festival, it is envisioned as an annual event. Like Monterey, it will never be repeated.

The passenger list is impressive. In addition to Janis and Full Tilt Boogie, it includes the Grateful Dead, the Band, Delaney and Bonnie and Friends, Tom Rush, the Buddy Guy Blues Band, Ian and Sylvia, Mountain, Traffic, Ten Years After, Seatrain (an act Bennett Glotzer
has managed since before he joined Albert), James and the Good Brothers, and more. Janis will get $25,000 for each concert. She will gross $125,000 for a week’s work. Two years earlier, it took Big Brother and the Holding Company six months to earn as much.

As the starting date draws near, our imaginations are running wild. Let’s resurrect the Great Tequila Boogie and put it on rails. Janis and I call Neuwirth and Kristofferson and I cajole the promoters into reserving them bed space on the train.

Ten days before the start of the tour we learn that the Montreal and Vancouver shows have been cancelled for lack of adequate advance sales. For a time we fear the whole scheme may evaporate like a pipe dream, but the other dates hold firm.

The night before we’re due in Toronto, Janis and Full Tilt do a show in Schenectady, New York, near Albany. Because of the last-minute change in the starting point of the train tour, I haven’t been able to book a direct flight from Albany to Toronto. The only available flight leaves Albany at eight forty in the morning and involves a plane change in Buffalo, a city I remember mainly for detaining Sam Andrew when he was caught driving without a license after a Big Brother concert. On my birthday. He woke me in the middle of the night to bail him out.

I roll Janis and Full Tilt Boogie out of bed at 7:00
A.M.
Bitching and moaning, they straggle aboard the plane. We eat some breakfast in Buffalo between flights, which helps some, but the plane to Toronto is late. By the time we finally land in Canada we are tired and cranky and in no mood for further delays. Hotel rooms await us, and a day off—what’s left of it. The band follows me through the Toronto airport like zombies. In their present condition, they would follow me off a cliff.

In this state we approach Canadian customs, notorious throughout the drug underground as being even tougher than their American counterparts. I have warned the band that I will brook no nonsense at customs. No secret stashes, no dumb jokes, nothing that will raise
the hackles of officialdom. And it is here that Janis’s pride in having kicked heroin manifests itself in an unexpected way.

The smartly uniformed officers take one look at us and decide we warrant closer inspection.

“Step this way, please, and open your luggage.”

Like unimaginative civil servants around the globe, the Canadian customs officials judge a book by its cover. Of course the long-haired musicians will be the ones carrying drugs, right? As I was for each border crossing in Europe, I am a model of businesslike rectitude for this one. No suit and tie today, but even the underwear in my suitcase is laid out foursquare and my customs-officer reading material is face-up on top of my clothes—paperback copies of the U.S. Constitution and Thomas Jefferson’s
On Democracy
.

“Thank you, sir.” I am waved through to await the others.

At the opposite end of the sartorial scale is Janis, who might be Mark Braunstein in drag, dressed up for a costume party. The Full Tilt boys are Ivy League by comparison. The inspecting officers pass them through with a few perfunctory pokes in their bags while a diminutive officer with a solemn, round face begins a thorough search of Janis’s luggage. Unaccountably, she seems to welcome his attention.

Her suitcase looks as if she packed by throwing clothes at it from across the room. Her hippie handbag is overflowing with odds and ends scooped up at the last minute during the bleary rush of our early-morning departure.

“Hey, man,” Janis says to the small customs officer. “Don’t you want to look in here? That’s my toilet kit, man, there might be some pills in there.”

What the hell is going on? I try to signal Janis to quit goading the inspector so we can get out of here before we all keel over from exhaustion. I’m afraid to do it too openly for fear of arousing more suspicion. Janis takes no notice.

Like a sheep being led to the dipping trough, the officer follows
Janis’s direction. He heads straight for the toilet kit and pulls out a bag of powder. My heart skips a beat.

“What is this,
ma’mselle
?”

Janis can scarcely contain herself. “That’s douche powder, honey!” she proclaims, loud enough for everyone to hear.

“Ah,
oui, oui, ma’mselle
.” The little French-Canadian inspector almost chokes with embarrassment. His complexion explores the scarlet end of the spectrum while he moves on quickly to something safer. But he keeps searching.

I’m pacing up and down, pissed at Janis for delaying us. And then—comes the light. I sit down and prepare myself for a long wait. Belatedly, I begin to enjoy the show.

On Kozmic Blues’ tour of Europe, Janis was terrified at every border crossing and customs inspection, knowing that the works and the smack she had stashed on her person could send her directly to jail on a tough rap to beat in foreign courts. But she was unwilling to go without, so she carried a supply everywhere, despite the risks. Now she is taking her revenge on the customs officers of the world, and now I understand the full extent of Janis’s joy in her new freedom. The border watchdogs can search all day and never find a thing. Janis is clean. She is as respectable as a symphony conductor. She is proud and she is celebrating.

The boys amuse themselves as best they can. Richard Bell passes the time with a yo-yo. Nothing fancy, just up and down, up and down, grinning as he watches Janis urge the inspector on. John Till wanders around with his cassette recorder slung from his shoulder and earphones on his head, nodding dreamily in time to the music, oblivious to everything else. Clark sits on a bench practicing rhythms. A good drummer is never without his drumsticks and a practice pad.

Every five minutes or so a fat officer walks purposefully through the room muttering under his breath. “Move, move! Goddamn hippies!”

Janis prolongs the game until even the obtuse little customs
inspector finally realizes that no one who has anything to hide would behave like this. Janis is still bubbling, joking with the boys as we leave the airport, all the fatigue and hassle of our early start and the Buffalo layover banished. When we are settled in the rent-a-car she says to me, “I had to do it. You understand, don’tcha, honey?”