On the Road with Janis Joplin (6 page)

Brian turns very bright pink.

“Okay, man, listen,” I say to him. “Just take your clothes off, right now, and I promise you—I
promise
you—that in ten minutes, you’ll forget all about it. Trust me. You only feel self-conscious around naked people when you’ve got clothes on.”

As I speak, I’m removing my own garments as if they’re on fire. To the everlasting credit of the olde country, Brian starts to undress. Ten minutes later I see him sitting on the edge of a tub, pink all over, chatting with a naked girl as confidently as if he were in a pub on Carnaby Street.

The CRVB’s next gig is at the Jabberwock, a folk music coffeehouse in Berkeley. With or without mind-bending chemicals, Big Sur is an alternative reality where humans and our constructs are humbled
by the natural world. Returning from that powerful coastscape to the bustle of Berkeley makes me feel like a time traveler. For my compatriots from the valley of the Charles River, the sudden immersion in the full-blown gooniness of Berserkeley amounts to culture shock.

Bob and Joe regard the goings-on with varying degrees of askance. Bob Siggins dances the Nebraska bop to rock and roll, and you’d never guess he’s got a Ph.D. in neuropharmacology unless you chance to pass an offhand remark about serotonin in his presence. He has incorporated Bill Keith’s dazzling new style of banjo fingerpicking into his Scruggs picking to produce a sound that is distinctly his own. You can take the banjo out of the country, but it’s not gonna sound like city-boy bluegrass so long as Bob is playing the flat-top Gibson Mastertone. His musical tastes go well beyond bluegrass and country, and his bullshit detector tends to peak out in the presence of folk purists who are a little too pure. He’s tickled by the Berkeley scene and not above sampling the wares, acoustic or vegetable, but on the whole he prefers to conduct his serious pharmacological experiments in the laboratory.

Joe likes to play the straight man. The unfettered lunacy of the scene is beyond his wildest imaginings, up to now, but he’s got a sense of humor. He takes it all in with a twinkle in his eye, as he tries to stay upwind of the smoke.

After our sojourn in Big Sur, Peter Berg is solidly in the CRVB groove. He has decided that the rest of us talk more than enough during our performances, and from here on out, beginning with our three nights at the Jabberwock, he never says a word onstage. In the Summer of Love, nobody blinks at a bluegrass band with a mute electric bass player who resembles a short, purple Superman.

A few days later, we play the opening night of the tenth annual Berkeley Folk Festival. The festival’s director, Barry Olivier, is keeping up with the times. Last year, his inclusion of Jefferson Airplane must have been something of a surprise to Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs
and the Greenbriar Boys. This year, the Charles River Valley Boys share the opening-night bill with the Reverend Gary Davis, Janis Ian, an oral storyteller, and Kaleidoscope, an electrified band from L.A. that has brought Middle Eastern influences into the psychedelic mix. There’s patchouli and pot in the air, and the colorful clothing worn by many in the audience evokes memories of the midway at Monterey.

In the course of the five-day festival, the dazzling guitar work of Doc Watson and the passionate singing of Richie Havens are interspersed with electric explorations and blues that boogie from Crome Syrcus, Red Crayola, the James Cotton Blues Band, and Country Joe and the Fish, which is a Berkeley band. The Steve Miller Blues Band commutes between the folk festival and the Fillmore, where they’re playing nights with Chuck Berry and Eric Burdon and the Animals.

The mix of sounds on the Berkeley stages makes visible for me what was groundbreaking about the Pop Festival at Monterey. It was the first festival of the sixties that was
not
organized around acoustic folk music. For almost a decade, since the folk revival kicked into high gear, the model has been festivals with “folk” in the title, from Newport and Indian Neck and Philadelphia to Berkeley and Big Sur, each presenting many of the same artists who travel the summer circuit, featuring English ballads and Scotch-Irish fiddle tunes and American work songs and union songs and songs of the westward migration, a songwriter or two like Dylan, Tim Hardin and Tom Paxton, along with bluegrass and old-time music, and the greatest American form, the blues.

The folk revival scorned pop music. In Cambridge, we put down the commercial folk acts, the guy duos and trios, the brother groups that smoothed out the mountain harmonies and rewrote traditional English and Appalachian ballads so the lines rhymed where the originals didn’t. The early rockers got our attention—the Everly Brothers, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, and, of
course, Elvis—but they were from somewhere else; they weren’t
us
, and their music wasn’t ours.

Now, with the transition from folk to folk-rock and the rise of the San Francisco bands, pop music has become Us. Janis Joplin’s Monterey sensation, “Ball and Chain,” is grounded in the twelve-bar blues, but the San Francisco Sound of Big Brother and Quicksilver and the Airplane and the Dead represents a leap that transcends gradual evolution. In logic, a sudden advance based more on intuition, or faith, than logic, is called the inductive leap. In music maybe we can call it the psychedelic leap.

On the Fourth of July, the Charles River Valley Boys follow Country Joe and the Fish and precede Doc Watson in the Berkeley Folk Festival’s grand finale, which is held at UC’s Greek Theater, up in the hills. The order of performance may be purely serendipitous, or maybe Barry Olivier sees the CRVB’s bluegrass-style Beatles tunes as an appropriate bridge between Country Joe’s far-out music of the present moment and Doc Watson’s traditional roots.

The last whistle stop on our California ramble is L.A., where we play five days at the Ash Grove. Founded in 1958, the same year as the Club 47 in Cambridge, the Ash Grove has served a similar role as a focal point for the folk boom. It feels friendly and familiar, but our L.A. crash pad is a far cry from the funky folkie houses in Berkeley and the rustic cabins of Big Sur.

Purple Man’s father and stepmother have a house on the beach in Malibu. Better still, they’re out of town. Peter clears it with the folks, and we settle down in a style to which we’re quickly accustomed, lulled by the rhythm of the waves and dazzled by the view of the Pacific out the floor-to-ceiling windows. The album of the month is
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
and the grass of the month is a particularly elevating harvest called Ice Bag, so named because it comes packaged in plastic bags intended for ice-dispensing machines. Two hundred bucks a key. Peter’s folks’ liquor cabinet features Jack Daniel’s, which we sip at first, then tap more liberally. (I hope we
replaced it.) Evenings after the Ash Grove, we often end up paralyzed on the living room floor by a combination of the two, trying to detect the exact moment when the perpetual chord at the end of “A Day in the Life” finally evaporates in the sound of the surf.

The day we arrive in town, we’re driving along the Sunset Strip in Peter’s VW bus when Neuwirth suddenly shouts, “Stop! Stop the bus, man! Pull over here!” He has spotted, walking on the sidewalk, a stunning model whose acquaintance he made in New York, back in the spring. The unlikelihood of seeing someone you know walking along the street in L.A. is astronomical, given that nobody in L.A. walks anywhere. In the residential sections of Beverly Hills, a pedestrian is likely to be stopped by the police and questioned as a suspicious character. The Sunset Strip, for a mile or so, is a stroller’s sanctuary.

Bobby intercepts Phyllis, their relationship blooms in the California sunshine, and they take over one of the guest rooms in Malibu. Phyllis is cheerful, gorgeous, and very fond of Bobby. He gives her a nickname, Tonto, which she accepts and invites us to use freely. For Bobby, it’s an ironic way of admitting that he is modifying, for now, the Lone Ranger’s role that he has so carefully refined. I have never seen him so much at ease. Witnessing the flowering romance is one more intoxicant that lightens our Malibu days. For my own part, the ladies of the canyons find the beach house a pleasant place to visit, and I am warmed by their company.

Joe Val declines to share our beachfront idyll, choosing instead to keep himself at a safe remove from the goofy hippies his bluegrass cohorts have become. It’s bad enough that Bob Siggins and I took to wearing psychedelic shirts onstage in Berkeley. What gives Joe real concern is that we might get him arrested for being in company with a bunch of potheads. In Cambridge, nobody smokes dope in the Club 47 and Joe finds it fairly easy to distance himself from the illicit practices of his fellow musicians. In Northern California, he was eating and sleeping in the same premises where we indulged our
enhanced explorations. Assuring him that the cops can’t be bothered busting everybody with a joint in his hand hasn’t brought Joe peace of mind. In L.A., Joe looks up a musician friend who has fled the freezing slush of Boston winters for the land of swaying palms. He never sets foot in the Bergs’ Malibu house. During our gig at the Ash Grove, Joe sleeps safe and sound, far from the surf and the scent of Ice Bag. Each evening, properly attired in black jeans, dress shirts, vests and string ties, we meet Joe at the Ash Grove and belt out our own mix of breakdowns, heart songs, gospel tunes and Beatles songs.

Joe’s day job compels him to fly back to Boston before our last night at the Ash Grove. With our straight man homeward bound, we cast off the last restraints we’ve kept in place out of love and respect for Joe. Chris Darrow, of Kaleidoscope, sits in on mandolin. On the whole, I don’t perform bluegrass stoned, not since the night a few years earlier, at the Club 47, when the words to several songs suddenly eluded me midverse. Tonight I cast my fate to the wind. If I forget the words, I’ll make up new ones.

Our imaginations, fueled by intoxicants consumed during the Malibu cocktail hour, lead us to a new plane of psychedelic bluegrass. We call on Neuwirth’s artistic talent: Before we go onstage, Bob paints our faces. The style is more appropriate to an acid test than the warpaths of the Old West. We announce to the audience that the evening’s entertainment will be a bluegrass opera, but it’s a narrative only in the most free-associative sense, a tale that Aldous Huxley could follow more easily than Puccini. We introduce each song with
a story that’s made up on the spot. The next singer picks up the story and carries it forward to introduce the next song. That’s the idea, anyway. Along about midevening the narrative threads grow exceedingly thin, but our Ash Grove audience is ready for anything. If by chance anyone recorded the proceedings, please contact me by Galactic Express Priority Overnight.

Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay

J
ANIS AND
B
IG
Brother are frustrated by a feeling of a bright promise delayed. After their spectacular success at Monterey they are touring the same circuit of gigs that has become familiar to them. They play the Avalon, the Fillmore, the California Hall. They play the Straight Theater and Golden Gate Park. They play around the Bay.

In August, their first record album hits the stores, but the record isn’t all they hoped it would be and its appearance now is bittersweet. They signed with Mainstream—a small label known mostly for blues and jazz—over a year ago. At the time, the recording contract seemed like confirmation that the group was bound for bigger things, and it had the more important effect of solidifying Janis’s connection to the band.

Big Brother was first approached by Bobby Shad, the owner of Mainstream, in the summer of ’66. The band had been playing together for eight or nine months, but Janis was a new addition, called up from Texas by her fellow Texan, Chet Helms, who had midwifed the birth of Big Brother and the Holding Company, and who
had functioned since its beginnings as the band’s manager without portfolio.

Shad was in San Francisco to check out the new rock groups. He expressed interest in recording Big Brother, but he triggered all of Helms’s distrust of outsiders from the Music Business, and Chet rebuffed the offer.
Chet’s out-of-hand dismissal of Shad’s interest proved to be the catalyst that led Big Brother to dissolve their informal management arrangement. Chet had established Family Dog Productions within a hippie commune of the same name. It was a catch-as-catch-can organization, very much in the spirit of the times, that managed the Avalon Ballroom and associated events. Big Brother felt their needs were playing second fiddle to Chet’s other interests. It was time for someone a little more professional.

Soon after parting from Chet, the band took a monthlong booking at a club in Chicago called Mother Blues, but Janis wasn’t sure she would go.

“
I have a problem,” she wrote to her parents in Port Arthur, Texas. She told them what she had not yet told the boys in the band: She had been approached by a record producer named Paul Rothchild. Paul worked for Elektra Records. He had produced a handful of folk artists including Tom Rush and Tom Paxton. He produced the Butterfield Blues Band. The first record Paul ever produced was the Charles River Valley Boys, but he had no reason to mention this bit of arcana to Janis. In the summer of 1966, Paul had sold Elektra’s president, Jac Holzman, on an idea: He would assemble a group of young urban interpreters of the blues, pay their expenses for six months, and see if the effort produced a viable band. Jac came to San Francisco with Paul, they auditioned Janis, and Jac liked what he saw.

Paul gathered several musicians in a living room in Berkeley. Among those present were Al Wilson, who owned every blues record ever pressed and could play most of the songs; Taj Mahal, who had been playing solo, mostly in the East, for several years; and Janis.

They traded songs back and forth for a while, and it was beginning to click. Somebody would say, What about Such-and-Such-a-Blues? Oh, yeah, I know that. And they’d play it. Janis was having a good time, but the Mother Blues gig was looming. She had to decide whether she was going to stick with Big Brother or take a chance that Paul Rothchild’s idea would pan out.

Janis wasn’t sure she and Big Brother were going to pan out. She had never sung rock and roll before. Except for a raggedy-ass and briefly popular band in Austin, where she just as briefly attended the University of Texas, she’d never sung with a band before at all. She was having to invent a whole new vocal style for San Francisco acid rock, and Big Brother was having to adjust their instrumental style to accommodate her singing. But Janis liked the feeling Big Brother gave her, the power of it, and she loved the interplay between the bands and the dancers in the Avalon and the Fillmore.

In the letter to her parents, Janis expressed another doubt. “I’m not sure yet whether the rest of the band (Big Brother) will, indeed
want to
, work hard enough to be good enough to make it. We’re not now I don’t think. Oh God, I’m just fraught w/ indecision!”

A month after the Monterey Pop Festival, Janis and the guys in Big Brother had moved to a house in Lagunitas, in Marin County, north of San Francisco. The shift to communal living was intended to strengthen the bonds within the group and make them a true family band in the San Francisco style. One morning when everybody was up and about,
Janis told the boys about Paul Rothchild’s offer, and she told them she was considering it. Her announcement provoked a shocked response. To Peter and Sam and Dave and James,
joining a band was a sacred trust. It wasn’t just a business, it was a commitment. You didn’t just back out after a couple of months when something that looked like a better offer came along. Peter Albin was the one who reacted most indignantly. He went at Janis hammer and tongs, demanding that she commit to the Chicago gig right then and there.

Taken aback by Peter’s onslaught, Janis gave in.

At her next meeting with Paul Rothchild, Janis told him she liked playing with Taj and Al, but she really wanted to play electric music. “Oh, hey,” Paul said, “we’ll do that too.” Janis said, “Well, I’ve been working with another group of musicians and I want to try that for a while and if that doesn’t happen, we’ll put this thing back together.” She had committed to the Mother Blues gig, but she was still weighing her options.
She wrote her parents that she hoped the time in Chicago would give her perspective and help her make a final decision.

In Chicago, Bobby Shad approached the band again, renewing his offer of a record contract. This time there was no Chet to blow him off. Peter and David and Sam and James wanted to go for it. Janis’s uncertainty about staying with the band had shaken them all. They recognized that her vocals were a vital addition to the group’s unique sound. Some of Big Brother’s San Francisco partisans had objected at first to the addition of a chick singer, but as the band’s music adapted to embrace Janis, her lead vocals had become the high points of their performances. A record deal would hold the band together, at least for a time.

The boys argued for accepting Shad’s offer, and Janis gave her consent. Mainstream wasn’t Elektra by a long shot, but the record would be made now, not six months or more down the road,
if
the prospective blues band panned out. A more important consideration for Janis was proving herself to her parents. Growing up in Port Arthur, a Gulf coast oil town, and during her brief stab at college in Austin, she had always felt like a misfit. In San Francisco, she had
found a band and a community that welcomed her, that made her feel she belonged. She wanted her parents to approve of her unconventional life. She had written them enthusiastically about Big Brother in her first weeks with the group. Making a record would prove that her contribution to the band was real. It would prove that she could take a job and stick to it.

The relationship with Mainstream was uneasy from the start. The Mainstream engineers couldn’t grasp that James Gurley
wanted
the VU meters up in the red on the guitar solos. Distortion had been an essential element of his technique since the early days of ’65, when he was known as Weird Jim Gurley and called his music “freak rock,” playing an acoustic Martin guitar with a vocal mike taped to it for amplification.

Big Brother’s music proved too out there for Bobby Shad. He wouldn’t allow the band in the control room during the final mix. Still, for all the hassles, the Mainstream deal and the Mother Blues gig did what the boys hoped they would do—they kept Janis in the group. After Mother Blues, she didn’t raise the subject of leaving the band again.

Big Brother recorded some songs at a studio in Chicago, and more, later in the year, in Los Angeles. While they were in L.A., Mainstream put out two songs from the Chicago sessions as a single that sank without a whimper. In May ’67, Mainstream issued another single whose A side, “Down on Me,” aroused some notice.

All of this was before Monterey. After the band’s success at the Pop Festival, Mainstream scrambled to get out an album to capitalize on the publicity.

When the record hits the stores, Janis and the boys feel it’s too little, too late. The album has a thin, strangled quality, as if the sound that won over the San Francisco ballroom fans and made such an impression at Monterey had been squeezed through a two-inch car radio speaker. In the months since the Mainstream recording
sessions, Big Brother has continued to evolve. The changes Janis and the band have made to adapt her singing and their sound to each other have achieved a synthesis, a unity that isn’t present on the Mainstream album. All the same, having a record in the stores a few weeks after Monterey, however much they dislike the sound, helps Big Brother believe that their Pop Festival success wasn’t just a onetime thing.

In September, another triumph helps to banish that fear. The band’s champion, Ralph Gleason, has arranged for Big Brother to play on a Saturday afternoon blues program at the tenth annual Monterey Jazz Festival. Gleason is producing a TV special on the festival for KQED, San Francisco’s educational television outlet. In the world of jazz, Monterey is as much revered by western fans as the jazz festival at Newport is by East Coast devotees.

This time, the audience in Monterey is shy on hippies and long on blacks. As Big Brother begins their first song, the crowd is silent, stunned by the sounds emerging from Janis’s Texas-white mouth. After sixteen bars they are on their feet, dancing in the aisles. When the set ends, Big Brother gets a standing ovation.

Janis comes offstage, skipping and happy, bumps into Ralph Gleason, and throws her arms around him. “It was good, huh?” “It was dynamite,” the usually sardonic Gleason agrees. “Didja get it okay?” Janis asks. “Whaddya mean get it?” Gleason says. “Julius wouldn’t let us film it.”

As at the Pop Festival, Julius Karpen reacted to the presence of a film crew with instinctive hostility. Before Big Brother’s set at the Jazz Festival, Karpen and Gleason had a shouting match in the festival office, during which Julius expressed his conviction that if Big Brother were in the TV film, someone would steal it and sell it in Australia. This bizarre comment convinced Gleason there was no reasoning with Julius, who proceeded from the office to the backstage control boards of Wally Heider’s sound company—there to record the
festival performances—where he made Heider shut down the taping system as Janis and the boys went onstage.

This time, there is no chance for a second performance.

In his Monday column in the
Chronicle
, Gleason writes, “
Big Brother was really a delight and Miss Joplin is a gas, easily the most exciting singer of her race to appear in a decade or more.”

Like Chet Helms’s rejection of Bobby Shad’s first offer, Julius Karpen’s exclusion of Big Brother from the KQED special brings smoldering resentments within the band to full combustion in the days following the Jazz Festival. They have already realized that Julius isn’t as big a departure from Chet as they had hoped. He’s too local, too focused on the San Francisco scene, not adequately aware of or connected to the wider world of music. Bill Graham won’t talk to Julius. If Big Brother wants to play the Fillmore, they have to talk directly to Bill. Janis hasn’t gotten along with Julius from the start. They fight like alley cats.

Peter Albin’s uncle, a real-estate investor who owns the house in the Haight where Big Brother first rehearsed, asks if the band has ever seen Julius’s accounts for the time he has managed the band. They have not. You’re giving him a license to rob you blind, Peter’s uncle says. He insists the band ask for an accounting. They take his advice, but Julius refuses to open the books, and that’s the last straw. The band fires Julius and lets it be known that they are seeking new representation. They talk to their friends. They put out the word.

Big Brother’s willingness to dump Julius rises from the confidence they gained from their triumphs at Monterey, first at the Pop Festival and then at the Jazz Festival. The receptions they earned not just from the audiences, white and black, but also from the musicians with whom they shared the stage, including some of the best in the world, has given them the courage to take a leap of faith.

They talk to Bill Graham. He already manages Jefferson Airplane. Can’t he manage Big Brother too?
Graham knows that realizing Big
Brother’s full potential will take more time than he can devote to the task. He recommends that Big Brother talk to Albert Grossman.

Grossman has been in Big Brother’s thoughts since they sought his guidance at the Monterey Pop Festival. Now Janis asks her San Francisco friends for advice. One of those closest to her is her new roommate, Linda Gravenites. Six months in Lagunitas cured Big Brother of the communal living trip. When the landlady wanted the house back, they returned to the city and moved into individual pads where they have some space and privacy.
Linda was one of a few creative women who were making clothes for the San Francisco bands. She had made a couple of shirts for Sam Andrew, and she made Janis’s outfit for the Jazz Festival. She had been looking after the Grateful Dead’s house while the band was on tour; when they came back Linda asked Janis if she could crash on her couch in the Lyon Street apartment where Janis had settled. Not long after that, they were cleaning up the kitchen together one morning when Janis said, in an offhand kind of way, “I need a mother.” And Linda thought, “I could do that. Take care of all the shit she doesn’t want to do. Sure. I could do that.” So that’s Linda’s role in Janis’s life: roommate and mother, including mother as advisor on the things Janis needs advice about.