On the Road with Janis Joplin (42 page)

INTERVIEWS

Taped interviews conducted by the author. In a few cases, notably with Sam Andrew, I followed up on the interviews through e-mails.

Members of Janis’s Bands

Big Brother

Peter Albin

Sam Andrew

David Getz

Mark Braunstein—Equipment

Kozmic Blues Band

Sam Andrew

Brad Campbell

Terry Clements

Richard Kermode

John Till

Mark Braunstein—Equipment

Full Tilt Boogie

Richard Bell

Brad Campbell

Clark Pierson

John Till

Others

Barbara Carroll—widow of Bert Block, who was Albert Grossman’s partner, 1968–1969

Ramblin’ Jack Elliott—the one and only

Lyndall Erb—Janis’s roommate, April–October 1970

Mimi Baez Fariña—Joan Baez’s sister; wife of Richard Fariña

Barry Feinstein—photographer;
Monterey Pop
cameraman

John Fisher—Love Limousines, New York City

Ralph J. Gleason—
San Francisco Chronicle
music critic

Bennett Glotzer—Albert Grossman’s partner, 1969–

Garry Goodrow—the Committee

Robert E. Gordon—attorney for Albert Grossman, Big Brother, Janis

Carl Gottlieb—the Committee; television writer

Bill Graham—rock promoter

Linda Gravenites—Janis’s roommate, 1968–spring 1970; former wife of Nick Gravenites

Nick Gravenites—singer, songwriter, Albert Grossman’s friend and confidant

Debbie Green—taught Joan Baez guitar; Cabale Creamery coffeehouse, Berkeley

Sally Grossman—widow of Albert Grossman

Howard Hesseman—the Committee

Robert L. Jones—George Wein Productions: Newport Folk Festivals

Jon McIntire—Grateful Dead management

Peter Melchior—Esalen Institute; Big Sur Folk Festivals

Milan Melvin—Janis’s early lover in San Francisco; involved in underground FM radio in San Francisco

Seth Morgan—Janis’s fiancé at the time of her death

Geoff Muldaur—Jim Kweskin Jug Band

Alan Myerson—director of the Committee

Bob Neuwirth—artist, musician, songwriter

D. A. Pennebaker—filmmaker:
Monterey Pop
and others

Fritz Richmond—author’s Cambridge roommate, Charles River Valley Boys, Jim Kweskin Jug Band, Elektra Records engineer

Paul A. Rothchild—record producer: Doors, Janis’s
Pearl
album, others

Rock Scully—Grateful Dead management

Bob Seidemann—San Francisco photographer; early friend of Big Brother and the Holding Company

BOOKS

Baez, Joan,
And a Voice to Sing With
, New York: Summit/Simon & Schuster, 1987.

Crosby, David, and Carl Gottlieb,
Long Time Gone: The Autobiography of David Crosby
, New York: Doubleday, 1988.

Dalton, David,
Piece of My Heart: A Portrait of Janis Joplin
, New York: Da Capo, 1991.

Gleason, Ralph J.,
The Jefferson Airplane and the San Francisco Sound
, New York: Ballantine, 1969.

Goodman, Fred,
The Mansion on the Hill: Dylan, Young, Geffen, Springsteen, and the Head-on Collision of Rock and Commerce
, New York: Times Books, 1997.

Graham, Bill, and Robert Greenfield,
Bill Graham Presents
, New York: Dell, 1993.

Grushkin, Paul,
The Art of Rock
, New York: Artabras, 1987.

Holzman, Jac, and Gavan Daws,
Follow the Music: The Life and High Times of Elektra Records in the Great Years of American Pop Music
, Santa Monica, Calif.: First Media, 1998.

Janis Joplin: A Performance Diary
, Petaluma, Calif.: Acid Test Productions, 1997, includes ten essays by John Byrne Cooke.

Joplin, Laura,
Love, Janis
, New York: Villard, 1992.

Kooper, Al,
Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards
, New York: Billboard Books, 1998.

Lemke, Gayle, and Jacaeber Kastor,
The Art of the Fillmore 1966–1971
, Petaluma, Calif.: Acid Test Productions, 1997.

Mailer, Norman,
Miami and the Siege of Chicago
, New York: Primus, Donald I. Fine, Inc.

Scully, Rock, and David Dalton,
Living with the Dead
, Boston: Little, Brown, 1996.

Von Schmidt, Eric, and Jim Rooney,
Baby, Let Me Follow You Down: The Illustrated Story of the Cambridge Folk Years
, Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1979.

Whitburn, Joel, ed.,
Billboard Top 1000 Singles 1955–96
, Milwaukee, Wis: Hal Leonard, 1997.

White, Theodore H.,
The Making of the President 1968
, New York: Atheneum, 1969.

FILMS

Comin’ Home
, by Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker, 1991.

Janis
, Crawley Films/MCA Home Video, 1974, F. R. Crawley, executive producer.

The Mamas & the Papas: Straight Shooter
, Rhino Home Video, RNVD 1931, 1988.

Monterey Pop
, The Complete Monterey Pop Festival,
The Criterion Collection,
1968, Lou Adler and John Phillips, producers; D. A. Pennebaker, director.

Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music
, Warner Bros. Inc., 1970, Michael Wadleigh, director.

T
O TELL THE
story of road-managing Janis Joplin, John Byrne Cooke draws on his experience as a musician and his skill as a writer. He played music from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to New York, Berkeley and Los Angeles. He recorded two albums before Janis made her first. He traveled with all three of Janis’s bands, from 1967 until her untimely death in 1970. Cooke has written award-winning historical novels and a critically acclaimed book of nonfiction. As Laura Joplin’s
Love, Janis
, is the only book that reveals Janis’s life from within the perspective of her family,
On the Road with Janis Joplin
is the only book that tells the story of Janis’s brief, spectacular career from inside her life on the rock-and-roll road.

In the folk music boom of the 1960s, John Byrne Cooke was a member of the Cambridge, Massachusetts, bluegrass band the Charles River Valley Boys. Joan Baez and Bob Dylan were among his friends and contemporaries. When rock and roll displaced folk music, John was in the right place at the right time. He was a member of D. A. Pennebaker’s film crew at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, where Janis and Jimi Hendrix became overnight sensations.
When Albert Grossman signed on a few months later to manage Janis and her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, he hired John to road-manage them. When Janis left Big Brother in the fall of 1968, she asked John to stay with her as she formed her new group, the Kozmic Blues Band. John was with Janis and Kozmic Blues when they toured Europe in the spring of 1969, and at Woodstock in August.

Janis’s 1970 tour with her last (and best) band, Full Tilt Boogie, included the famed Festival Express train trip across Canada. John was Janis’s only companion when she went to Austin to celebrate her mentor Ken Threadgill’s sixtieth birthday, and John was with her when she attended her tenth high school reunion in Port Arthur, Texas.

John Byrne Cooke is also an award-winning author of five previous books, a photographer, and an innovative filmmaker. He lives in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Visit him online at johnbyrnecooke.com.

The author in his pointy-toed Beatles boots.

PHOTO © JOHN BYRNE
COOKE

*
“Vocals” is listed for lead vocals only.

*
What Bob doesn’t tell me, until much later, is that Albert wanted
him
to road-manage Big Brother: “[Albert] tried to get me into it. I said, ‘No, Albert, I’m not doing this.’ Albert had gone all the way from ‘Who the fuck is this guy from California that’s come to town to work with Bob [Dylan],’ to later trying to get me to be Janis’s roadie. I said, ‘No, I can’t do it, but I know somebody who can.’” (Author interview with Bob Neuwirth, August 13, 1997.)

*
Sam Andrew and Milan Melvin both also related, in interviews with the author, sharing enjoyable trips with Janis on acid and mescaline.

*
In an interview early the following year, Janis explained to a reporter her reasons for drinking: “The reason I drink is that it loosens me up while the guys are tuning their instruments. I close my eyes and feel things. If I were a musician, it might be a lot harder to get all that feeling out, but I’m really fortunate because my gig is just feeling things. . . .” (Nat Hentoff,
New York Times
, April 21, 1968, section II, 19.)

*
Which is not to say that the band members were unaware of James’s problems. Dave Getz says flatly that James couldn’t drink. “He had one of these alcoholic things, like almost a genetic kind of alcoholism, where he would start to drink and he’d go through a massive personality change, and become almost like catatonic. And then he was drinking and he was doing reds too.” (Author interview with David Getz, July 24, 1997.)

*
The listings from Janis’s itineraries throughout the book are a majority of the gigs she played, but are not all-inclusive.

*
When I asked Sam Andrew to elucidate what Shelton meant by “smear” and “yelp,” Sam explained that “smear” was a vocal glissando—“We did lots of that.” He said Big Brother used “many ‘yelps,’ especially in ‘Combination of the Two,’ but, really, everywhere. ‘Summertime’ was all about counterpoint (which includes fugal procedures),” Sam added. (E-mail to the author, April 4, 2010.) Shelton’s critique, it seems, was well-informed and right on the money.

*
If I knew that the writer Michael Thomas was at the party, I didn’t know he was on duty. Six months later, his article about Janis and Big Brother appeared in
Ramparts
magazine. It was a rare nonpolitical article in the radical leftist magazine, and it opened with these images: “John Cooke had a party a couple of months ago in an iron lung factory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. . . . Picture all these people, say a hundred odd, following little red arrows through three floors of hospital supplies, artificial limbs, pleural suction pumps and special rocking beds. . . . It’s like sneaking in and out of all the doors you ever saw that say ‘Do Not Enter’; you keep looking over your shoulder and you talk in whispers if at all. Finally you come to a door with Spider Man on it, and that’s where John Cooke lives when he’s in Boston. Inside, there are deviled eggs and chili beans and booze and everybody Jim Kweskin knows in town.” (“Janis Joplin, Voodoo Lady of Rock,”
Ramparts
, August 10, 1968.)

*
Two songs from the April 11–13, 1968, Winterland recordings were issued on posthumous albums: “Bye, Bye Baby” on
Joplin in Concert
(1972) and “Farewell Song” on the album of the same name (1982). “Magic of Love,” from the March 1, 1968, recording at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit, is also on
Farewell Song
. It is the only song from those sessions issued to date.

*
Geoff remembers Janis warmly and speaks of her kindly. “She was heartfelt,” is the way he put it to me. “It worked. She didn’t ever have these heavyweight musicians or anything with her. It was all about her. So she was out there doing it. It was rock and roll. And it was okay.” From Geoff, this is not a backhanded compliment, it’s real praise.

*
In the late forties, Carroll’s trio worked briefly with Goodman’s orchestra.

*
Dave Getz agrees with Sam, with qualifications: “I don’t think Albert ever said to her specifically, ‘I think you should go out as a solo group,’ but I think there was probably, in their time together, just a lot of things that indicated to her that he didn’t really think that much of the band, and that, given the chance, she should go in a different direction.” (Author interview with David Getz, July 24, 1997.)

*
Milan was unembarrassed about describing his relationship with Janis: “God almighty, man. That still is the sexual highlight of the sixties for me. I mean, the woman was wild. And experimental, and funny, and energetic. I mean, that was our relationship, really, and when we tried to do anything more than that, like carry on any kind of normal relationship, we were fishing in waters where we didn’t have the right bait. I don’t know what to say. It was almost entirely sexual.” (Author interview with Milan Melvin, October 5, 1997.)