On the Road with Janis Joplin (37 page)

When and where the wake will be is up to us. It will be in the Bay Area, that much is sure. The organizing will fall to Bob Gordon and me, but right now we have a more pressing concern.

For two days we have been avoiding the crucial question—is there an album? Is there enough music on tape, in the can, to make a record? No one is sure, not even Paul Rothchild.

Paul makes a cut-and-paste assemblage of what’s on tape. He works for two days and a night. On Thursday, we sit down in the control room at Sunset Sound to listen to what there is. Albert is here, and Bennett, the Full Tilt boys, Lyndall, and Kris Kristofferson. Like Kris, Carl Gottlieb, of the Committee, and his wife, Allison, were at the Big Sur Folk Festival, heard the news Sunday night when they got home. They were part of the Monday evening group at the Landmark, and they are here now.

Tomorrow is John Lennon’s birthday. Some folks have been going around L.A. getting local and visiting musicians to record “Happy Birthday” for a tape that will be sent to Lennon. The first song Paul plays for us at Sunset Sound is Janis and Full Tilt’s contribution, which we recorded a couple of days before Janis died, all of us singing along behind Janis. It is raucous and joyful. We hold the final “happy birthday to youuuuuuu,” and Janis says, “Happy birthday from Janis and Full Tilt Boogie! Happy birthday, Johnny!” (Did anyone else ever call Lennon “Johnny”?) Janis breaks into her cackling laugh, and we think it’s over . . . but then Richard Bell plays the opening riff of the Roy Rogers–Dale Evans theme song, “Happy Trails.” His keyboard establishes the Western motif: “dum-da-dum-dum, dum-da-dum-dum,” and Janis sings, “Happy trails to you, until we meet again. . . .” in her high, pure soprano.

There are few dry eyes in the control room, but Janis’s good spirits are so audible, so irrepressible, that it’s healing too. By playing this first, Paul has managed to lighten the mood. It’s even possible to smile.

Paul thinks we have three quarters of an album. The vocal tracks are the critical element. Whatever exists on tape—that’s it. There are some final vocals and some work vocals. On Saturday, the band laid down the instrumental track for a song Nick Gravenites wrote for Janis, called “Buried Alive in the Blues.” Janis was to record the vocal for the first time on Sunday.

We hear songs that are complete, solid, ready to go. We hear Janis sing over instrumental scratch tracks. We hear polished instrumental tracks and scratch vocals.

When Janis’s version of “Me and Bobby McGee” comes over the speakers, Kris can bear only the first verse before he leaves the control room, the studio, and the building. I follow him into the parking lot, but he is inconsolable. He goes off into the Hollywood dusk and we don’t see him again.

Janis’s recording of “Bobby McGee” might have signaled the introduction of a new element in her music. The Byrds’
Sweetheart of the Rodeo
album and Dylan’s
Nashville Skyline
have brought country music influences into latter-day rock. Would Janis have recorded more country songs after “Bobby McGee”? I remember her line in the Austin Holiday Inn, in response to the little guy in the bar who couldn’t sing “Bobby McGee”—“Wait until you hear me. I can do that song.” Can a Texas girl sing a country song? You bet she can. The thought of Janis expanding her fan base to include hard-core country music fans is enough to make me smile.

Today in the studio, when we have heard everything there is, we’re convinced there is enough to make a record. Even Albert is optimistic, but Paul doesn’t want our expectations, our need, to run away with us. For this to be
the
album, Janis’s last and best album, it will take a lot of work. It’s possible, Paul says, but it will take a lot of work.

Albert gives Paul free rein. Albert will deal with Clive Davis. And so the decision is made. We have to finish this album. We seize on this goal. Not doing it is unthinkable. Without this record, the world will never hear Janis with Full Tilt Boogie, never feel her joy and pride in this band and the new material she sang across the U.S. and Canada this summer. The spirit Janis reveals in the music is proof that she had recovered from the failure of the Kozmic Blues Band, that her best years lay ahead of her.

The work begins the next day, but it is not a return to the previous routine. It is a new routine, with the task at hand taking precedence over anything else. Our waking hours are in the studio. There is no late-night hanging out, no going to the Troubadour. We eat to sustain our bodies, have a drink or a beer or a glass of wine to sustain the spirit. We’re removed from normal space and time. In the windowless studio, hearing Janis’s voice from the speakers as the band builds a new track under a vocal brings her back to life. She is with us.

Paul is the executor of Janis’s musical legacy. His focus is total. Every day he develops techniques for things he has never had to do before. On several of the songs, the vocal track that goes on the record, that sounds as if Janis were inside your stereo speakers and singing for you alone, is assembled phrase by phrase from as many as half a dozen work vocals.

“Cry, Baby,” one of three Jerry Ragovoy tunes Janis performed with Full Tilt, was one of the test songs they recorded at the July demo session in Columbia’s Hollywood studio. At the time, the band was inexperienced, unsure of themselves. At Sunset Sound, the boys have laid down a much stronger track—a great band track, in Paul’s view—but it’s in a different key and the tempos don’t match. Janis has done a work vocal to the new track, but her July vocal is better, no contest. So Paul and the boys make a new band track from scratch, in the original key. As the band plays to Janis’s July vocal, they hear in their headphones Clark Pierson’s drum track from that session, to set the tempo. When the rest of the instruments are recorded, Paul removes the old drum track and Clark records a new one.

Watching the process, it seems simple enough, until Paul explains that he has never done anything like this before. It’s not something you would ever need to do, so long as you have a living singer. What you normally do is overdub instruments and vocals to fill the holes, get rid of mistakes, improve the tracks, until the song is a seamless whole that embodies a definitive performance by the vocalist and the band. Here, Paul and Full Tilt achieve the same result by underdubbing. “Cry, Baby” is seamless.

Finishing the album takes ten straight days of work. In the end, the overdubbing, the underdubbing, the cross-cutting from one fragment of usable track to another, the task that seemed all but impossible in the beginning, produce what this was meant to be from the beginning, Janis’s best album.
*

There are eight songs. Two were finished before Janis died—final band tracks, final vocals. Paul and Phil Macy have assembled six vocals piece by piece, with newly recorded band tracks.

“Buried Alive in the Blues” will be on the album as an instrumental.

The tenth track is Janis’s a capella rendition of “Mercedes Benz,” a song Janis and Bob Neuwirth wrote together around the poet Michael McClure’s line, “Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz.” At Sunset Sound, Janis sang it one day on the spur of the moment, and it was captured by the safety tape, a quarter-inch tape left running during the sessions lest a good riff or a good idea be otherwise lost.
Janis and Paul had planned to expand the song into something more elaborate, but the simple a capella recording seems perfect now, capped by Janis’s happy “That’s it,” at the end, followed by her cackling laugh.

The next day, Clark Pierson and I leave the Landmark in my white Volvo late in the afternoon. We get as far as Santa Barbara, where we spend the night with a bottle of mezcal and a friend of mine from the folk days in Berkeley. Nan O’Byrne is a Texan who has found a home in Santa Barbara. In the early sixties, in Berkeley, with her fellow Texan and hangout partner Suzy West, the two of them defined for me the archetype of Texas women at their best—smart, funny, independent, able to be friends with men, able to keep them in line without putting them down, able to encourage them, admire them, love them, without ever allowing a man to condescend to them in any way—a model that fit Janis perfectly.

—

E
ACH DAY AT
the Landmark, before we all went to the studio to finish the record, I have been on the telephone organizing Janis’s wake. We have settled on the Lion’s Share, a music club in San Anselmo, Marin County. The only night we can book the club, which has a schedule laid out for weeks in advance, is on a Monday, when the Lion’s Share is usually dark.

On Monday, October 26, three weeks and a day after Janis died, the wake is attended by her old San Francisco friends, by new friends from the tours and the music world beyond the Bay, by all the members of Big Brother and Full Tilt Boogie and most of Kozmic Blues. We have invited Janis’s parents, but they choose to stay home. Janis’s sister, Laura Lee, flies out from Texas. Laura is twenty-one now and makes her own decisions. I am her road manager for the evening, but that doesn’t stop her from getting drunk enough to do Janis proud.

Albert is even quieter than usual. He assumes no role in the festivities. He doesn’t preside at a table or serve as a focus around which
others gather, as he often does in other settings. Neither is he simply an observer. He needs to be here in this time and place. He is present.

Albert astonishes Linda Gravenites by asking her to dance. I have never seen Albert dance before. I have never
imagined
Albert dancing. Out on the floor, shuffling in time with the music, he looks pleased with himself, and it occurs to me that he wants to please Janis by dancing at her wake.

Big Brother plays, with Nick Gravenites at the mike and, for a song or two, with James Gurley’s son, Hongo, on drums, in his public debut. Hongo is about five, on his way to becoming a serious drummer.

David Cohen, Country Joe’s keyboard player, quiets the room when he plays “Janis,” a song Joe wrote about her, commemorating their time together.

The music continues into the night, members of Quicksilver and the Dead and Big Brother and other musicians forming onstage combinations that are unique to this time and place. Yet despite the music and the open bar that Janis has funded, and other intoxicants privately ingested, the party never achieves the energy level or the buoyant feeling of a ripping good time that Janis wanted it to be, for the simple reason that she isn’t here. Her absence creates a gap, a void that prevents this gathering of friends from achieving critical mass.

—

A
FTE
R THE WAKE,
I find ways to fill every moment, to keep
doing
so I don’t have to stop and simply
be
. In November I fly east and spend Thanksgiving at Albert’s house in Bearsville. He has taken in the Full Tilt boys, giving them a place to shelter from the world until they feel whole again. I am glad for them, and fail to recognize the same need in myself.

Finally, in mid-December, I drive down to Big Sur, where I went two years earlier to recover from the calamities of 1968, where we threw the
I Ching
in the interregnum between Johnson and Nixon,
and as Janis turned from Big Brother to seek her independent path. A week, I say, maybe more. Peter and Marya Melchior take me in for as long as I need to stay.

On the isolated coast, the days are quiet. I have read somewhere that alternating hot and cold baths were once a prescribed remedy for schizophrenia. I’m not feeling clinically imbalanced, but I feel the need for a regimen to pacify my spirit, so I walk to the baths each day, and when I’ve soaked long enough in the hot sulfur waters I emerge from the tub and play a stream of cold water from a hose over my steaming body. I lean on the wooden railing and absorb the vast peace of the Pacific Ocean.

A book of Greek myths on Peter and Marya’s shelves offers to remove me by a couple of millennia from the memories of recent events. Instead, I find Janis in the archetype. A footnote suggests that “tragic flaw” is not the best interpretation of the Greek
hamartia
, which might be better translated as a mistake, a misstep, an error in judgment. The tragedies affect us because the protagonists of the myths—men and women of exceptional abilities and achievements—come to
unjustified
bad ends. Their downfall is a reversal of fortune. If the hero’s flaw were ordained by the gods, if his bad end were inevitable, if there were no more to the outcome than predestination, his fate would not engage our emotions effectively. And that is the purpose of the myths—so Aristotle wrote—to engage our emotions and to offer catharsis. In tragedy, the hero does not deserve his misfortune; his suffering is out of proportion to his offense. We feel the inequity.

The paradigm fits Janis as if it were drawn from her life alone. She perceived a longer-lasting future than she had formerly imagined, in which she could continue to exercise her exceptional abilities. Her musical potential was greater than ever. She showed that she could overcome her predilection for self-indulgence, and she experienced the exaltation of that achievement. She had learned a measure of self-discipline, but she hadn’t yet fully embraced caution and restraint
among her hard-earned truths. She believed she could flirt with her addiction. At a time when her fortunes were on the rise, she made a misstep, and she fell. The outcome was out of proportion to the offense.
*

Christmas comes and goes. I stay on the coast for a month. In the new year, I return to the world.