On the Road with Janis Joplin (35 page)

Q:
Did you entertain in high school, when you were back here in high school?

J.J.:
Only when I walked down the aisle. (Laughter.) No, I was a painter, and sort of a recluse in high school. I’ve changed.

Q:
What happened?

J.J.:
I got liberated. No, I started to sing, and singing makes you
want to come out, whereas painting, I feel, really keeps you inside.

Q:
How were you different from your schoolmates?

J.J.:
I don’t know. Why don’t you ask them?

Asked about the nickname “Pearl,” which has been widely reported in recent weeks, Janis sets the record straight: “
That name was not supposed to reach the press. . . . That name’s a private name for my friends to call me so they won’t have to call me Janis Joplin.”

The reunion dinner is a step down from the rubber-chicken circuit much bemoaned by campaigning politicians. The roast beef is cooked to the consistency of shoe leather. We load up on salad and vegetables instead.
As Bob Neuwirth makes his way back to our table, his selection draws some taunts from Janis’s classmates. “What’s the matter, you don’t eat meat? You like that rabbit food?”

There are some halfhearted speeches, and a few tales of high-school pranks. We figure we can’t leave until it’s over, and so Janis is on hand to receive the prize for having come the longest distance to get to the reunion. They give her a bald tire. At least it’s painted gold.

It’s meant to be funny, but it makes Janis feel the way she felt too often when she was in school with these same people.

On her first day back in Port Arthur, Janis and Laura met with the reunion committee at their request, at one of her classmate’s homes. “What do you want?” they asked Janis. Being polite, Janis said, “Oh, nothing.” Of course she wanted something, an acknowledgment of her presence and how far she had come, both literally and figuratively, to get there. She doesn’t want it to be all about her, but a moment of recognition would be nice. If the committee had an ounce of imagination among them, they would have organized some gesture, something to make her feel welcome without being fawning. But they took Janis too literally, and the bald tire is all she gets.

Dancing is scheduled after the drab dinner, but we are seeking
livelier entertainment. Jerry Lee Lewis is playing at a roadhouse out toward Beaumont. A bottle of tequila and some rock and roll by the Killer will lift our spirits. We are ever optimistic.

The roadhouse has a box office, where you pay to see the show. Janis announces, “I’m Janis Joplin,” but that doesn’t get us in. Informed we’ll have to pay like everybody else, Janis pulls out the cash and slaps it down and in we go.
*

This is a genuine Texas roadhouse with an unlikely name, the Pelican Club. Smoky and rowdy and drunk from wall to wall. Jerry Lee is onstage, shouting out the rocking blues and making the piano ring. Now and again he hollers instructions to the young bass player.

This is not the first time Janis has set eyes on the bass player. When we played Louisville, Kentucky, back in June, we had a day off after Janis’s Friday night concert.
On Saturday, Janis and Clark Pierson and David Dalton went to see a big country show starring Jerry Lee and George Jones at the civic auditorium. Backstage, Janis made a blatant play for the bass player, who might be all of seventeen, embarrassing him no end.

Bound to continue her quest tonight, Janis leads the way backstage at the Pelican Club when Jerry Lee and the band take a break. The atmosphere in the cramped, sweaty band room is not festive. There are two or three guys in the room who are not members of the band. They’re the heavies. Whatever the details of their role, they are here as muscle. Somebody is counting out money on a small table, and that’s part of the heavies’ job, to guard the money. One of the guys has a pistol stuck in the back of his waistband.

Lewis himself does not smile, does not react to our group entering his domain, except to follow Janis with a cold stare. In Louisville, he wasn’t exactly welcoming. Here, he’s downright hostile.

Janis is oblivious to the signs. She waves a Hiya, honey, at the young bass player and leads Laura over to meet Jerry Lee. “Hey, Jerry Lee,” she says, “this is my hometown, and I want you to meet my little sister, Laura. Isn’t she pretty?” Jerry Lee looks at Laura and he’s quiet for a long moment, and then he says, “Not really.”

And Janis goes straight for Jerry Lee and clips him a flailing smack upside the head and without a second’s hesitation, he slaps her right back. Bobby and I grab her, and she’s cursing Jerry Lee, calling him a motherfucker and he’s responding in kind. Margaret and Laura are out the door and the rest of us aren’t far behind. Out to the parking lot and into the car, and so much for the Pelican Club.

We were in the back room longer than that, and maybe Janis took a few minutes to chat up the bass player, who, it turns out, is Jerry Lee’s son, but that’s the way it plays back in memory, both later that night and long after the event.

All in all, not as much fun as Ken Threadgill’s birthday party. Yet despite Janis’s disappointment that she hasn’t gained the satisfaction she was hoping for from her reunion weekend, the next morning, when Bobby and John Fisher and Margaret and I hug her good-bye
before we hit the road for the Houston airport, she seems to be centered and calm, as if her not-so-triumphant return to the scene, and the company, of her adolescent difficulties has helped her put at least some of the lingering resentments behind her.

Janis is looking ahead, and she has much to look forward to. She will stay with her family for a few more days before she flies home to San Francisco for two weeks’ vacation. After that, we go to L.A. to begin recording with Paul Rothchild. Before the reunion, while we were touring in the East, we got word that Paul played the July demos for Albert and Clive Davis and the Columbia executives in a blind hearing. Nobody knew which demo was made in which studio. Sunset Sound won hands down.

A Woman Left Lonely

A
S SOON AS
Paul Rothchild returns to Los Angeles from his trip to the Bay Area in July, he puts out the word to songwriters and music publishers that he will be producing Janis’s next album and she needs material.

Songs arrive by the bucketload, on cassettes and demo discs and reel-to-reel tapes. With help from his housemate and sometimes engineer, Fritz Richmond, Paul goes through the material, looking for anything that might appeal to Janis. A representative of MCA Publishing, with a misguided sense of initiative, shows up at Paul and Fritz’s house on Ridpath Drive at eight thirty one morning, barges through the big wooden gate, jangling the bell that’s wired to it, and knocks on the door of the house. When Paul mumbles, “Who is it?” from the bedroom, where he is a couple of hours away from his usual rising time, the guy calls out, “I’m from MCA. You might have heard of us.” To which Paul replies, “Get the fuck out of here!” No songs from MCA are considered for the album.

At the upper end of professionalism is the Motown representative,
who calls for an appointment and arrives at the house on the dot, with reel tapes, discs, and his own cassette player that he plugs into the stereo. He has lyric and lead sheets and he has Paul’s and Fritz’s full attention throughout his presentation.

Another question on which Paul enlists Fritz’s expertise is how best to record Janis’s exceptional voice. They talk about different types of mikes they’ve used for recording different singers, and they hit on the idea of using an RCA ribbon mike, an old-fashioned mike from between the wars that produces a very mellow sound. By capturing Janis’s voice, which is anything but mellow, with the RCA mike, Paul may get a more manageable signal to work with.

Janis and Full Tilt Boogie arrive in L.A. before Labor Day and settle into the Landmark Hotel for what could be two months of recording. Janis has driven down from the Bay Area in her Porsche. George Ostrow has decided he’s put in enough time on the road. Vince Mitchell and Phil Badella are handling the equipment for these sessions. They have brought the Boogie Wagon, which will be the band’s taxi.

In the first week, Janis and Paul Rothchild settle into a routine. Janis drives up to Paul and Fritz’s house in Laurel Canyon around eleven in the morning. Paul makes a pot of coffee and they listen to the songs he and Fritz have selected, to see what Janis likes and to decide which song they will work on in the studio that day.

Paul schedules the sessions at Sunset Sound on musicians’ hours. Work begins sometime after midday and ends in time for a late supper and drinks at Barney’s Beanery. At the end of each day’s work, Paul tells Janis and the band when to show up the next day. It’s less than a mile from the Landmark Hotel to Sunset Sound. Sometimes the band members walk. Sometimes I shuttle someone in my car. Often Phil or Vince or one of the Full Tilt boys drives the Boogie Wagon.

On some days Paul needs just Janis in the studio, or just the band, but Janis likes to have the band on hand when she’s laying down
vocal tracks. (The RCA ribbon mike proves to be just the thing, and Janis sings into the forty-year-old mike throughout the sessions.)

As Paul develops his working relationship with Janis, he is also getting to know each member of the band, which for him is an essential part of the producer’s job.
*
He learns how to talk with them. He teaches them the difference between playing in live performance and playing in the studio. When they have questions or suggestions, Paul listens. He makes them feel like an important part of the process.

I spend more time in the studio than I did with Big Brother or Kozmic Blues, because this time it’s fun.

Late one afternoon I come back to the Landmark to find Janis sitting by the pool. She’s on a chaise on the shady side, looking alone and serious—maybe blue? She’s thinking hard. I can almost hear the wheels spinning. I sit beside her. “What’s happening, Pearl?” She shakes her head. “Boy, that guy,” she says.

“What guy?”

“Rothchild.”

I feel a chill. If Janis has decided Paul isn’t the right producer,
we’re in deep shit. “What about him?” Janis shakes her head, still doesn’t look at me. “He’s really something.” She starts to talk now—the serious Janis, explaining something that’s important to her—and my fear gives way to a rush of relief as she tells me how much she’s learning from Paul, how well it’s going. For the first time, she’s experiencing recording—the long hours spent in the studio—as a high in itself, rather than a trial to be endured. She never dreamed the relationship between a singer and a producer could be like this.

Paul has been talking to her about how she uses her voice, onstage and in the studio. He has helped her understand that different techniques are required, but he isn’t telling her to put anything less than her full commitment into a song. This is something Janis will never do, and Paul’s not asking her to do it. He’s asking her to explore the different voices she has at her command, the different parts of her range, to experiment with modulating her vocal power and considering more critically when to use it at full force.

Janis talks about these things with something close to a sense of wonder. Paul has opened doors to possibilities she didn’t know existed. Maybe she doesn’t have to blow her voice out within a few years. She likes to joke that when she loses her voice she’ll buy a bar in Marin County and settle down. This is what she has always expected, but maybe it doesn’t have to be that way.

I remember what Paul said to me in San Francisco, about wanting to introduce Janis to the truly great singer inside her. Paul is proceeding at his own pace, in his own way, and from everything Janis tells me the plan is on track.

“You know what he told me?” Janis says, and now she’s got that little-girl-who-got-an-A-on-her-homework look. “He said I’m the only woman he’s ever met who could be a record producer.” She’s proud, and well she should be. If Paul said that, he meant it.

During breaks in the recording and over the occasional meals and drinks we share, I get Paul’s side of the story. He says that working with Janis is going better than he dared hope. His experience with
lead singers is that they are self-indulgent children who show up at the studio late, sometimes drunk or stoned, and sometimes you have to send out search parties to find them in a bar or in bed with a groupie. Not Janis. She always shows up within half an hour of the appointed time, which for a rock singer is on the dot. She never gives less than everything she’s got, and she always lets her affection show for the boys in the band, which puffs them up with pride and makes them redouble their efforts to please her.

Paul is impressed by Janis’s capacity for storing information and using it. In the studio, she often sits beside him in the control room while the band is recording. Whenever she expresses curiosity about some aspect of the recording procedure, Paul fills her up with as much information as she wants. That she takes an interest in the technical aspects of recording adds another dimension to his respect for her, while the center of his focus remains her voice. Since the start of the sessions he has become convinced that Janis has yet to develop her full range. He tells me of a conversation they had recently. Paul asked her, “Come on, Pearl, what do you really sing like?” And she said, “I’ll show you.” What happened next pleased him no end. “She sang me stuff out of the church choir. Like she used to sing back in the church choir, when she was a teenager, a young teenager. And I heard this pure, straight, white voice. Clean, clear, no vibrato, no fur, no broken glass and rusty razor blades, just ‘Ahhhh,’ soprano. And I said, ‘Right, you can sing, fantastic.’” For Paul, the revelation that Janis has this voice has far-reaching implications for her career, and for his. Paul is never less than self-interested. He knows his work with Janis can benefit his reputation in both the short and the long term. But the long-term benefits will only be realized if he can help Janis develop in a way that is best for her long-term prospects as well.
*

Paul and Janis have been spending time together outside the studio too—not just having drinks or a meal after work, but talking about cars and driving their Porsches along Mulholland Drive, the twisty road that winds along the crest of the Hollywood Hills, at a high rate of speed.

Paul is an automotive enthusiast. When I first knew him in Cambridge, he drove an Alfa Romeo convertible. His present car is a Porsche 911S. The way Janis drives tells him she understands her own Porsche as a finely tuned machine. She doesn’t share his interest in the detailed workings of the internal combustion engine, but she understands the coordination of the engine, the gears and the steering. “She drives like a man,” he says, and from Paul there is no greater compliment. (He is something of a chauvinist, in these times that are still more than a little chauvinistic.) Paul knew beforehand that Janis is a very emotional person. That’s where the music comes from. But she also understands machines. She can examine and analyze and articulate abstract concepts and things in the physical world. Right brain, left brain, both up and running. In a woman or a man, this is a rare combination.

In a few weeks, Paul has become one of the handful of intimates with whom Janis will drop the tough-woman-of-the-streets style she
assimilated in San Francisco. He perceived at once how we use her “Pearl” nickname. Paul uses it as we do, and Janis accepts it. She is willing to reveal herself to him, her hopes and fears, the little girl as well as the woman who is not so tough as she pretends.

She trusts him.

Yet all of this positive energy gives rise to a paradox. Janis’s commitment to the work, her excitement at the possibilities she sees opening before her, make her off-hours even harder to bear than usual. She has always complained about the downtime during recording. She gets bored. She doesn’t like Hollywood. She’d rather be home in the Bay Area, close to her friends. Here, she’s got no one to call when she gets lonely. It seems especially unfair now because she has a boyfriend, a new love, and he’s only in L.A. on the weekends. What is she supposed to do the rest of the time?

Seth Morgan was at the tattoo party in Janis’s house back in the spring. He’s a student at UC Berkeley. He’s a rich kid hiding his privilege under a biker-punk veneer. He rides a Harley, has coke in his pocket, drinks Wild Turkey, and enjoys flouting convention with the best of them.

In the summer, after we got back from Hawaii and Ken Threadgill’s birthday party and before we headed out for the gigs in the East, Janis and Seth reconnected. She was attracted by his insolence. He doesn’t give a shit that she’s Janis Joplin. He is neither a pretty boy nor a mountain man. He’s not David Niehaus, but neither is he a return to her old pattern. The pretty boy/mountain man dichotomy represents two extremes in Janis, neither of which is the place where she should settle down. The pretty boys are lapdogs. They fawn over her, give her pleasure, and tell her how great she is. With them, she can do no wrong. The mountain men counterbalance the pretty boys. They’re big, they’re strong, they won’t take any of her bullshit, but they’re not often equipped to give her the comfort, and the counsel, she needs. For these things, Janis turns to her oldest friends in the San
Francisco community, the ones who knew her before she was famous. Linda Gravenites, her surrogate mother. The boys in Big Brother. And a few others. Whether Seth Morgan can earn a place in this select circle remains to be seen.

With Seth, Janis falls for the punk and comes to love the inner man. She finds that beneath the bad-boy exterior there is a perceptive intellect. They connect through the drinking and the brag talk and, to their mutual surprise, they discover that they like quiet times together too. They find that they enjoy each other’s company as much, maybe even more, if they don’t go out drinking. They spend mornings reading the newspaper over breakfast on the deck and talking about the news.
Seth is surprised to learn that Janis reads the whole front section of the paper every day, that she is aware of current events, that she reads books—Thomas Wolfe, Herman Hesse.
*

They talk about books and ideas and the doings of the world. They drive around the countryside, see a movie, have dinner out with just a glass or two of wine and go home early. When they do go out for a rocking good time with Janis’s Bay Area or music business friends, Seth notices that Janis never displays to others the current-events and intellectual interests she has revealed to him.

When Janis returned to the Bay Area in August, after her high school reunion, she and Seth talked of marriage. They considered how they might make a life together that won’t be subservient to Janis’s performing career.

Seth made it clear from the outset that when the two of them are together they are separate from her professional life. Like David
Niehaus, Seth is not from the music world and, like Niehaus, Seth is not about to be drawn into Janis’s scene as a hanger-on.

A visit to L.A. early in the recording reinforces this conviction. At the Landmark, or sitting in the control room to watch a recording session, Seth feels like a fifth wheel. He is close to finishing his degree at Berkeley and he doesn’t want to blow it. He comes down most weekends and he tries to time his visits when Janis will have a day off.

This arrangement doesn’t satisfy Janis. Her head can understand Seth’s reasons for keeping a distance, but her heart wants him
here
, and without him she is lonely.

In Seth’s absence, Janis receives another visitor. One day when the band and I are making waves in the Landmark pool, Peggy Caserta comes to the gate of the chain-link fence that encloses the pool, with Janis close behind. They’re going out to dinner and they stop by to say hello. Peggy was banished from Janis’s house in the spring, along with the rest of Janis’s druggie friends. So far as I know, Peggy hasn’t been welcome in Larkspur since then. The unease I felt when Peggy was with Janis at Woodstock returns.