On the Road with Janis Joplin (31 page)

For once the stern road manager has to give in.

Riding That Train

T
HE
T
ORONTO KICKOFF
of Festival Express 1970 is a weekend of music, noon to midnight on Saturday and Sunday, but our drawn-out travels keep most of us from the Saturday show. Sunday is a perfect summer day. The concert stadium is in a park on the shore of Lake Ontario. George Ostrow and I and two girls George brought from New York explore the belt of greensward that borders the lake, where sailboats make the most of a light breeze. A tank and an antiaircraft gun and a four-engine bomber mounted on a pylon make up a World War II memorial. We climb on the tank and stroll around the park until the concert starts. We have checked out of our hotel rooms. After the concert, we’ll board the train for Winnipeg and the West.

Backstage, Brad Campbell flags me down. Look who’s here, he says, and he presents to me none other than Bill King, the Kozmic Blues organ player who played only the Stax-Volt Christmas show before he disappeared.
It turns out that when Bill arrived in New York for Christmas with his family after the Memphis gig, the FBI nabbed him for dodging his draft notices and a federal judge gave him a choice: Join the army or go to jail. Bill chose the army. He went
through basic training and followed orders for almost a year, until orders came to ship out for Vietnam. At that point Bill, recently married, hitchhiked with his young bride to Canada and settled in Toronto. Bill has a band, Homestead, that opened the concert here today.

Janis greets Bill like a long-lost friend, her irrepressible exuberance in her new life, her new band, and the start of the Festival Express tour pouring out to the organist who knew her briefly in gloomier times. She tells Bill she has quit smack, regales him with accounts of the Full Tilt band and her new material, and even tells him about her Brazilian adventures with Linda Gravenites and David Niehaus, who she still hopes will come back to her.

The energy of the other performers can’t match Janis’s high spirits, but several groups come close. Like those who were at the Monterey Pop Festival, the bands who have signed up for the cross-country train tour sense that this is the start of something special.

The audience—twenty thousand, they say—seems to feel the same high. Backstage, we hear some talk about fans trying to jump the fences, storm the gates. The word is, they’re radical protesters who think the concert should be free.

Janis is receiving a flat fee for each concert. The number of tickets sold and how many kids manage to scale the fence don’t affect her pay, so I’m not keeping tabs on security. Later we hear that Jerry Garcia helped arrange a free concert at another park nearby on the lakeshore, where the Dead and the New Riders of the Purple Sage performed, along with Canadian artists Ian and Sylvia and James and the Good Brothers. This diversion draws the protesters from the CNE stadium and apparently pacifies them.

It is past midnight when the last act leaves the stage. In the quiet hours before the short summer night wanes, we are transported to the train, which sits engineless on a siding in the CNR rail yards, and we explore what will be our home for the next five days. I help Janis and the band find their berths in the sleeping cars, but no one is ready to fall into bed. In the middle of the train we discover what will become
the centers of social activity during the journey: a dining car and two bar cars. Someone points to electrical outlets in the walls of the bar cars. Is the power up here 110 volts? I think so. Let’s try it out.

The road crews have loaded the bands’ equipment into the baggage car. They troop through the train and retrieve some amps, a couple of drum sets, an electric keyboard, a basic PA with a mike or two, and before the train begins to roll one bar car is transformed into the electric-music jam car. Acoustic musicians find a home in the other.

At eight o’clock in the morning, the train pulls out of the yards and the music falls into the rhythm of the rails. (Neuwirth and Kristofferson are no-shows. They will regret their decision.)

It’s a rolling hootenanny. From Toronto to Winnipeg, the music never stops. At any time of the day or night, you can climb out of your berth and lurch down the narrow corridors to the bar cars, and you’ll find someone playing. There are brief lulls, but never for long. Someone else picks up a guitar, a drummer finds the beat, and off we go.

I’ve got my movie camera and my stereo cassette recorder with me. Somewhere between the lakes and woodlands of Ontario and the spreading farmland of Manitoba, I set up the cassette recorder in the electric-music car and record ninety minutes of train music. There are long instrumental jams, some totally improvised, some based on known tunes. One of the best, with a trumpet lead, is Hugh Masakela’s “Grazing in the Grass,” which he played at Monterey, before it became one of his biggest hits.

The musicians get a joyful workout when Buddy Guy and Bonnie Bramlett have a blues sing-off, passing the mike back and forth, swapping songs, swapping verses. People moving through the car stop to listen. In the acoustic car, Janis and Jerry Garcia sing “Careless Love,” and Jerry and John Marmaduke Dawson of the New Riders wail on “Wake Up, Little Susie.”

When I set aside my movie camera, I borrow a guitar. The Martin D-18 I played with the Charles River Valley Boys was stolen off a baggage cart in the Chelsea Hotel last year, while Mark and George were
loading Kozmic Blues’ equipment into the truck late at night. So far, I haven’t replaced it. But there are plenty of guitars. I trade Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers songs with Rick Danko of the Band. After I finish one of Hank’s lonesome blues, Rick’s bandmate Richard Manuel says, “Hey, man, you can’t sing like that. You’re a road manager.” This backhanded compliment from a musician I admire makes my day.

There are other cameras on board, a 16-millimeter film crew hired by the promoters. Cool. Someday we’ll relive the trip in a movie theater. When Janis and Marmaduke sing together, Janis motions the cameraman to focus on Marmaduke, so the camera doesn’t stay just on her. Give the man his due.

Janis spends most of her waking hours in the acoustic bar car or the dining car, where drinks are also available. By day, the cars are a little brighter than she likes—she prefers cool dark spaces, like her home in the redwoods. On the train, she wears her large round rose-colored sunglasses day and night and it’s all the same to her.

The trip gives her a chance to spend time with her old friends from the other San Francisco bands. Her departure from Big Brother, which aroused criticism at the time, is history now, and Kozmic Blues is forgotten. Holding forth with a glass in her hand, Janis is in top form, and she is exuberant in her praise for Full Tilt Boogie.

Whatever other drugs the passengers may consume aboard the train, alcohol fuels the music and the social intercourse. Joints are passed from time to time in the music cars, but most of the smoke
that wafts through the train is from tobacco. From the first day out of Toronto, Janis and I buy drinks for Jerry Garcia and encourage him to keep pace with us.

The sleeping compartments seem impossibly small at first encounter. They’re completely filled by the bed when it’s down. You get out into the corridor, lower the bed, and climb back in. You’ve got a light, a fan and a little sink. Hmm. Not bad. Lie down and watch the countryside pass by in the Canadian summer dusk, which lingers forever. When you want to shut out the light, pull down the shade, and you’re in a comforting cocoon. It’s easy to doze when you’re lulled by the rhythm of the rails, but it’s hard to sleep for long when you’re missing the rolling party.

In Winnipeg, the promoters have arranged with the local authorities to make the municipal swimming pool available for the exclusive use of the Festival Express gang before the concert starts at noon. They provide buses. Dozens avail themselves of the offer. The Olympic-sized pool offers a chance to improvise water volleyball or dive off boards and platforms on three ascending levels.

Few of the travelers thought to pack bathing suits. Most swim in their underwear. None get naked, not even the Californians, who have made public nudity commonplace in counterculture environs. The decision to observe this level of decorum disappoints me initially, but I realize it is wise, as is the facility’s decision to exclude the curious public while we’re splashing about. Long-haired men in Jockey shorts might not occasion scandal, but the women of Festival Express, in their lacy bras and bikini panties, would probably test Winnipegians’ sense of propriety.

After the pool, I’m off to the airport. Three of the Full Tilt boys—John Till and Richard and Ken—stayed in Ontario after the Toronto concert to spend a couple of days with their families. I find them in the Winnipeg airport in company with a professional clown in full costume and makeup, who is paid by the provincial government to keep travelers amused.

Another stadium, another sports field. The crowd at this concert is much smaller than Toronto. It’s Canada Day, and Pierre Trudeau, the prime minister, is in town to celebrate Manitoba’s centennial. Trudeau draws crowds like a rock star. We’ve got a trainload of rock stars, but this concert is laid-back, a pleasant interlude.

The day is fair and the wind is brisk. Backstage, Janis sits on the grass against a snow fence with Marmaduke. They were keeping company on the train as well. Maybe Janis is experiencing the romance of the rails.

Aboard the train, many of us—musicians and road crew alike—who would normally confine drinking to the evening hours have been drinking during the day. Janis has kept us company. In Winnipeg, she slacks off a little in the afternoon, then has a belt or three as the time to go onstage approaches. The boost she’s looking for is harder to feel when it’s floating on top of a daylong bender. So she reinforces it.

The result is that Janis performs the show as drunk as she sometimes was with Kozmic Blues. What saves her is that the booze isn’t walking hand in hand with heroin, she isn’t looking forward to her postconcert fix, and she’s got the Full Tilt Boogie Band behind her. She summons her reserves and she is
up
for the show.

Her spoken introduction to “Try (Just a Little Bit Harder)” is longer, as are the improvised raps she inserts in a couple of other songs, pacing the stage, talking to the audience, while the band keeps the groove going, riffing on the tonic chord behind her, until she finally jumps back into the song.

Given how tight and fine Janis can be with Full Tilt, her rambling raps in Winnipeg seem self-indulgent to me, and I can sense the audience becoming restless when they run long. But when Janis is singing, the band is with her and she’s got the crowd.

With most of my road-managing tasks handled by the Festival Express promoters, the concerts are easy for me. They transport us from the concerts to the train and from the train to the concerts. All I have to do is make sure Janis and the boys are ready to go onstage when the time comes.

Onward to Calgary. In the bar cars, the music continues. Life on the train has become the norm. Day and night blend into a continuum. We sleep when we can’t stay awake, and wake up to get back on board the party. On the first night out of Winnipeg, I see northern lights in the sky and I haul members of the Grateful Dead to the platforms between the cars to take in the light show, as entrancing as the best of Headlights’ efforts at the Fillmore, even without music.

Midday, a rumor sweeps the train: The bar cars are running out of liquor. Given the steady pace of the drinking, no one questions the story. Canadian National Railways no doubt stocked up as they would for a normal passenger run, but this is not a normal passenger run.

I shift into road manager mode and locate Kenny Walker, the Walker in Eaton-Walker Associates. Is there a stop coming up anytime soon? Yes, Kenny says, we’ll stop at Saskatoon. Can you get the railroad to give us a car and a driver? He’s sure he can.

I need something to collect money in. Fortunately, the women have been shopping in Toronto. What is always on the shopping list when a stylish woman is feeling frisky? Shoes. An empty shoebox is just the thing. I find my old Cambridge friend Tom Rush, another regular at the Club 47, and I enlist him in the cause. We walk the train from one end to the other, soliciting contributions: “Donations for the People’s Bar!” In fifteen minutes, we collect over three hundred dollars.

Saskatoon, pearl of the prairie. Cultural hub of Saskatchewan. Chauffeured to a provincial liquor store by an obliging CNR official, Kenny Walker and I and a couple of volunteers who accompany us point at bottles on the shelves and fill cardboard cases. No beer, goddammit, we need booze! We’re stumped for how to spend the last thirty dollars until we spot an oversize bottle of Scotch. If it were wine, it would be something more than a magnum, maybe a jeroboam. Is that a display bottle? It’s real? We’ll take it. And we’re done.

Back at the train, eager hands help load the liquor out of the trunk of the car onto the train. And as it turns out, the bar cars aren’t running out of booze after all, so we’re well provisioned for the final leg of the trip to Calgary.

Late that night, our last on the train, Janis and Marmaduke and Rick Danko and I are among those who launch into a long and loud rendition of “Ain’t No More Cane on the Brazos,” a Southern chain-gang work song I first learned from Dick Fariña. It’s a haunting song, but haunting isn’t what we’re after tonight. We’re into volume and six-part harmony. It’s exhilarating at the time, but long afterward, when I see it in the documentary film
Festival Express
, well, let’s say it was a rendition best savored in the moment rather than preserved for posterity. You had to be there.