On the Road with Janis Joplin (4 page)

Grossman is at Monterey to shepherd two of his acts. The Paupers are Canadian, new talent from north of the border. The Electric Flag is a band recently formed by Mike Bloomfield, the blues guitar virtuoso, formerly of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Monterey is the Flag’s debut performance. Butterfield, of course, is here too, with Elvin Bishop now discharging by himself the lead guitar duties that he has shared with Bloomfield until recently. Grossman knows both Butterfield and Bloomfield from Chicago, where they all got their start in the music business. He was responsible for Butterfield’s acceptance in the folk clubs of the early sixties. The Butterfield band is one that other musicians go out of their way to hear. Grossman also manages Peter, Paul and Mary. Hell, he
invented
Peter, Paul and Mary. He noticed that all the folk-pop groups were guys—the Kingston Trio, the Brothers Four, the Limelighters, the Chad Mitchell Trio—and it occurred to him that a group with a girl might catch the
public’s imagination. Grossman tried to interest his friends Bob Gibson and Bob (soon to be Hamilton) Camp, who performed as a duo and sang exceptional harmonies together, in taking on a girl singer to take the harmonies to the next level. Gibson and Camp didn’t share his vision, but Peter Yarrow and Noel (soon to be Paul) Stookey, were more open to suggestion, and, together with Mary Travers, they are reaping the rewards.

At the time of the Pop Festival, Grossman’s roster of clients also includes the James Cotton Blues Band, Richie Havens, Gordon Lightfoot, Odetta, Ian and Sylvia, and the Band.

The breadth of Grossman’s achievements is less important to Janis and Big Brother than the singular fact that he is Bob Dylan’s manager and that Dylan has thrived under his care. He encouraged Peter, Paul and Mary to record Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and by so doing accelerated the trio’s rise to fame and used their momentum to bring more notice to Dylan, whose name was then becoming known but whom relatively few in the folk music audience had seen or heard. It was not an accident of timing that Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” was rising on the charts in the weeks before the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, where Dylan scored his breakthrough triumph—with a significant boost from Joan Baez, who sang with him in his set and brought him onstage during her Sunday night closer.

Backstage at Monterey, Grossman is the only person who appears unperturbed amid the commotion swirling around Janis and Big Brother. His presence is imposing, in part because of his physical appearance, in part because of his manner. He is portly without being fat. He remains still for long periods of time, but when he moves he moves briskly, in the manner of a slender man. His hair turned gray before he was forty. Half a generation older than most of his clients, his aura can seem parental. When he wants to be overbearing, it’s as though your stern grandfather has taken umbrage.
John L.
Wasserman, film critic for the
San Francisco Chronicle
, said in his review of
Dont Look Back
that Grossman looked like a Soviet diplomat. Two years later, Grossman has let his hair grow longer. He wears round steel-rimmed glasses. They make him look wide-eyed, which is one of his favorite expressions. Who, me? He resembles no one so much as the man on the Quaker Oats carton.

Ron Polte, manager of Quicksilver Messenger Service, knows Grossman from Chicago. At Monterey, he has introduced Grossman to Big Brother. On Saturday afternoon, Janis approaches Grossman and asks him to consult with the band about Pennebaker’s movie.

By now, John Phillips and Lou Adler have made Big Brother a tempting offer: If you’ll agree to be filmed, we’ll put you on again, on Sunday evening.

Pennebaker has spoken with Albert about Janis’s performance, which blew him away. “Whatever you have to do,” Penny said to him, “I don’t care if you have to go in and break a leg. God, we have to film her! We just have to do it. This is the basis of the whole film.”

“
Don’t worry,” Albert said. “I’ll fix it for you.” And he does.

When Big Brother asks Albert if they should accept the offer to perform again, if they’ll agree to be filmed, he says, Hey, I’d do it. He doesn’t say this just because Penny asked for his help. Albert has no stake in the movie, no investment yet, either financial or emotional, in Big Brother’s career. He tells them to go for it because he knows it’s the right thing for them to do. If you want wider recognition, he says, this is the way to get it.

Albert’s approval is all the holdouts in Big Brother need. They consent to be filmed. Janis is elated, and Julius Karpen storms off in a huff. Adler and Phillips juggle the schedule and make room for Big Brother on the Sunday evening program.

While this drama plays out in the background, we of the Pennebaker crew are focused on the performances at hand. On Saturday evening, Otis Redding is the highlight, but the Airplane, the
Byrds, Hugh Masakela, and Booker T. and the MGs also work their magic.

On Sunday morning, Chief Marinello sends home half the officers he has mustered to police the festival.

Ravi Shankar is the sole performer on Sunday afternoon. In this gathering where the other performers are mining mother lode veins of rock and roll, R&B, folk, and jazz, the crowd—a scattering of blues and jazz and folk fans among the dominant mass of beatniks and hippies and flower children—accords Shankar the status of guru-for-the-day.

For this performance, I take control of the button that will turn on the red light and signal the cameras to roll. Our tripod cameras have twelve-hundred-foot magazines that run for half an hour without reloading, but the others—the free-roaming cameras on our catwalks alongside the stage—have four-hundred-foot rolls that last just ten minutes. Penny has decided to film Ravi’s final raga, which will surely run longer than that. My job is to guess when the tune is within ten minutes of its end, so the shoulder-held cameras can shoot without interruption until it’s over.

My qualifications for undertaking this responsibility are late nights in Cambridge that ended up stoned to the gills and zoning out to the recordings of this very same wizard of the sitar, or to Ali Akbar Khan, equally adept master of the sitar’s first cousin, the sarod, in the company of my roommate Fritz Richmond, washtub bassist for the Charles River Valley Boys and the Jim Kweskin Jug Band—whose mastery of the washtub approaches Ravi’s on the sitar, relatively speaking—and our frequent guest, Bob Neuwirth.

At Monterey, I stroll the arena during Shankar’s early pieces, absorbing the music on the move. Ravi feels connected to the audience. He introduces each piece at greater length than is his custom before a Western audience. The crowd is with him all the way. In the front rows of seats reserved for performers, a cluster of musicians—
Mike Bloomfield, Jimi Hendrix, Al Wilson of Canned Heat, Michelle Phillips—listen raptly.

Today the coastal clouds have hung around, and colors glow more brightly in the diffuse light.
A plan to have bagsful of the festival’s signature pink orchids tossed from a hot-air balloon above the arena has gone awry because of the fog bank, so instead the ushers have placed an orchid on every seat before the concert begins. During Ravi’s set, the flowers, threaded through buttonholes, tucked behind ears, held in hands, or woven into long hair, glow like radiant, oversized fireflies that have alighted throughout the audience.

As the final raga begins, I return to the catwalk at the edge of the stage, all my attention on Ravi and his accompanists. I shoot some photos. . . . I wait . . . and wait, through the languid, hypnotic exposition of the opening themes. Almost imperceptibly, the tempo of the music increases, the rhythms of the tabla—the small hand drums played incomparably by Alla Rakha—gaining speed, Ravi effortlessly keeping pace. The tempo becomes insistent . . . and still I wait . . . until I dare not wait any longer. I switch on the red light and the cameras roll, ten minutes of film spooling off at twenty-four frames a second.

The interplay between the sitar and the tabla grows steadily more complex as Ravi initiates the phase where the sitar calls to the tabla and the drums answer—short phrases, simple at first, then more complex, drawing smiles of delight from Alla Rakha, answering smiles from Shankar and from Kamala Chakravarty, who fills out the sound with the mesmeric monotone of the tamboura. Toward the end, the tabla and sitar join together, the players’ hands flying over the strings and drumheads in a blur, impossibly fast, until the elation that this music from halfway around the world brings to this arena, this audience, approaches rapture.

The ending brings the crowd to its feet as one with a joyous roar that must be audible in downtown Monterey.

The audience pelts the stage with flowers. Pink orchids pile up at the feet of the musicians. They bow time and again, palms together, beatific, deeply moved by the response. The trio leaves the stage. They are called back. The waves of applause wash the arena. The ovation promises to go on until it’s time for the evening concert. In the film, the applause will continue for almost two minutes, which seems like a very long time. Now, in real life, it lasts much longer.

Finally Shankar holds up his arms and the audience quiets. “I want you to know how much I love you all and how happy I am to be loved by you,” he says. He picks up a handful of orchids, throws them back into the crowd, bows for the last time, and the grateful people let him go.

It is a singular triumph among many on a triumphant weekend.

I cherish one image, a mental film clip, from Sunday afternoon after Ravi’s transcendent set. Strolling the fairgrounds, I see a Monterey motorcycle cop cruising along a roadway, greeted everywhere with smiles and smiling nonstop himself, the whip antenna on the back of the bike waving brightly, pinkly, adorned from bottom to top with skewered orchids.

—

S
UNDAY EVENING IS
Big Brother’s chance to prove they can repeat their Saturday sensation. For this performance, Janis decks herself out in a gold lamé pantsuit and she sings as if her future depends on it, which it does. This time around, many in the audience know what to expect, but “Ball and Chain” knocks them out all over again and once more they roar their admiration. As Janis leaves the stage, she raises her arms and skips with joy. She knows she nailed it for the cameras.

And still, there is more to come. The Who are straight from two days at the Fillmore. Giddy in their first rush of California gooniness, they turn loose high-volume British rock and roll—“Substitute,” “Summertime Blues,” and a couple more—and destroy most of their equipment at the end of their last song, “My Generation,” shocking some and pissing off the sound crew, who dash onstage to save the microphones, but the band is so off-the-wall, out-of-control, to-hell-with-the-sensible-limits that we just watch, agog, and wait for the stage to be cleaned up before the next act. Being outrageous is part of the countercultural ethic, but our interest in this Götterdämmerung acting out will diminish when we learn it’s a regular part of their act.
They trash the same amp at every show, and smash up cheap guitars.

And besides, they can’t top Jimi Hendrix, who carries
outrageous
to new heights. Pennebaker and I chanced to be on hand for Jimi’s sound check this morning, in the empty arena, and we took note that this is a guitar player of exceptional ability. On Sunday night the cameras are on Jimi from the start of his set, but we don’t expect another performance that will create a sensation to equal Janis and Big Brother.

Jimi plays the guitar behind his back, over his head, with his teeth. He plays the longest set of the night. He plays B. B. King’s “Rock Me Baby,” the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” and Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” He grabs songs from across the pop spectrum and makes each one his own. He sneaks “Strangers in the Night” into his guitar solo on “Wild Thing” . . . he turns a somersault on the stage without missing a note . . . he makes a little bow before he lays his guitar on the stage, squirts it with lighter fluid, sets it afire, urges the flames higher with his hands, and then, almost regretfully, smashes the guitar and throws the fragments into the audience magnanimously, as a peace offering . . . all of which is easier to understand if you know that Jimi took a bunch of Owsley acid before the
performance, the micrograms measured in the thousands, but probably no more than everyone else in the arena ingested collectively.

In contrast to the Who’s calculated smashup, Jimi’s theatrics are spontaneous, fueled by equal doses of LSD and the love made manifest in his music. This is his first American performance since he gigged as an R&B sideman with the Isley Brothers and Little Richard years ago. A few fans might have seen him backing John Hammond, Jr., in a Greenwich Village gig back in the folk days, but here the show is all Jimi. He’s making it up as he goes along, and he ends his set in a literal blaze of glory.

To close the evening, and the festival, the Mamas and the Papas float about the stage in floor-length dresses and robes. Denny shows up at the eleventh hour and puts his heart fully into the songs, the group truly reunited and as happy to be on this stage as all the others who have preceded them.