On the Road with Janis Joplin (9 page)

Sam is the one who incurs my outbursts most often, but I can’t stay mad at Sam. He’s my first real friend in the band. He has played music since his early teens—jazz and classical, saxophone as well as
guitar, all through his years as a student. Intellectual, sensitive, thoughtful, a die-hard romantic where women are concerned, Sam dropped out of graduate studies in linguistics at UC Berkeley to play rock and roll. Linguistics is like the philosophy and physics of language rolled into one discipline. Someone who is attracted to linguistics is someone who enjoys the life of the mind in its rarefied recesses. Sam landed in linguistics after earlier studies in philosophy and English literature. In Big Brother, Sam is in retreat from the life of the mind. It strikes me that he will have to find an outlet for his intellect somewhere along the way, or suffer the consequences of keeping it in confinement.

On our car trips, the band is like a bunch of kids. Are we there yet? I have to pee. Who’s got a joint? Can we stop and eat?

Well, yes, because I’ve planned a meal break. When the timing is right, we like to eat at the Nut Tree restaurant in Vacaville, just off Interstate 80, our route from the Bay Area to Sacramento and the Valley. The Nut Tree has been a California landmark since the twenties. In addition to the restaurant, there is a toy store and a small-scale railroad that gives kids rides from the toy store to the restaurant. Inside the restaurant there’s a glassed-in aviary. Big Brother likes the Nut Tree because the restaurant bakes its own bread and features fresh vegetables and fruits on the menu. It’s as close as we can get to a health-food restaurant in the Valley.

“Are there sprouts on the salad?” Janis wants to know. Janis is sporadically into healthy food. She fights a tendency to plump up on road fare. The boys eat like farmhands. I pay for the meals out of the road fund, and at first the band is horrified by the size of the tips I leave. We’ve run the waitress ragged for an hour—“Oh, miss, I asked for my coffee black.”

“Can I change my soup for a salad?” (This as she sets the soup on the table.)

“Could you get the chef to cook this steak for another thirty seconds on both sides?”

“Can I get ice cream on that pie?”—and they begrudge her a ten-dollar tip. Ten bucks looks like a lot of money lying there on the table. “Hey,” I tell them, “the bill was sixty dollars—ten bucks is fifteen percent rounded up to the nearest dollar.” Over time, I raise it toward 20 percent. Let’s leave a trail of goodwill behind the hippie musicians, instead of frowns and a muttered “Good riddance.” Oh, but we’re poor, man. We can’t afford it. Bullshit. They think this is 1966 and Chet is still managing them. Persuading them that they aren’t as poor as they think they are takes some time.

On one of our early trips to the central valley, I see a touchy side of Janis. East of the Berkeley Hills, we’re a band of long-haired hippies invading the Land of the Squares. Outside her hometown environment, Janis can be defensive. Something the waitress says, or something in her attitude, sets Janis off. “You know, you could be more polite to us. Our money’s just as good as these other people’s,” is the gist of her short lecture. Janis’s tone manages to combine righteous indignation with the feelings of a child who has been unjustly scolded.

On another occasion, the family in the next booth gawks at us and Janis is quick to get her dander up. “What are you looking at?”

At first, I think Janis is too quick to take offense, but I come to see that in these situations Janis’s reaction isn’t only personal—she’s taking offense for all of us. She is just as quick to jump in if someone else is mistreated. If we’re eating at a wayside restaurant in the Valley that doesn’t get as many long-distance travelers as the Nut Tree and a couple of young hippies come in, the girl barefoot, both of them bedraggled and out of place, they may not be greeted in the same way the straight people are welcomed. When Janis perceives the slight, she intercedes in their defense. She sides with the underdog. She stands up for what is right. It’s not right to treat people badly because they’re different. This perception becomes a useful key to my understanding of what makes Janis tick.

—

N
OW THAT THE
members of the band are living in individual pads in the city, the only time they’re all together and not playing music is when we’re driving to a gig in the Valley, heading to SFO to catch a flight, or hanging out backstage at a gig while the opening act is on. They take these opportunities to discuss band business that comes up, anything from the set list to whether to play a benefit for some cause or other, or whether the guys’ old ladies can come on road trips. Janis would prefer not, but sometimes, if we’re going to be in one place for several days or a week, the old ladies travel with us or fly in separately. Peter is married to Cindy. Dave Getz has an old lady, Nancy Parker. James has an old lady also named Nancy, whom I hear about but rarely see.

Big Brother is a democratic band. Everyone is equal. Everyone has a say, and they say it at length. Janis and Peter and Dave are the most forceful in stating their positions when there’s a disagreement within the group. Sam and James are a little more laid-back, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have opinions. The band’s decisions are made by voting. Good thing there are five people. If it were an even number, they’d be deadlocked all the time. Sam and Dave are the most flexible, the most willing to try something new. Peter and James usually resist change. Janis is the swing vote. She’s very articulate, and amenable to reason until she makes up her mind. Then her opinion is carved in stone. Until she changes it.

Janis and Peter like to press for a vote early in any discussion. “C’mon, let’s vote!” As one who observes the passionate disputes from a dispassionate remove, I see that most of the arguments are about small stuff. On the whole, the band shares a similar outlook on the world and its problems. They’re proud to be among the founders of the San Francisco rock scene. They’re proud to represent San Francisco and the counterculture at large when we play the straight towns of the San Joaquin Valley and farther afield. They delight in the scene that repeats itself almost daily when we’re on the freeways, as we’re passed by a big American station wagon with an American flag decal pasted to the window, driven by a crew-cut businessman or ex-military father, and the kids in the rear-facing backseat flash us the peace sign.

After a couple of band arguments leave someone feeling sour for the rest of the day, I begin to stick my two cents into the conversations, initiating what will be an ongoing effort to persuade the band that in a group of five people it’s possible to govern by consensus. Voting creates winners and losers. Talking over a problem until everyone’s willing to go along with what the majority wants takes a little longer, but it’s worth it. It’s like singing in harmony, even if it’s not your favorite song.

As I begin to get a sense of the band members as distinct individuals, it seems to me all the more remarkable that they have come together in this band they believe in so passionately.

Janis, of course, is one of a kind. Born in Port Arthur, Texas, on the Gulf coast, dropped out of college in Austin, played music, traveled around the country, but never really felt she belonged until June last year, when she came to San Francisco to join Big Brother. There’s a vortex of energy churning inside her. It manifests itself in her laughter, in her sometimes rapid shifts of mood, in the way she breaks into a conversation with a rap that nails the issues and states her position in a flurry of fast sentences. Some of the time she’s like a chain
reaction on the verge of going critical. She is quick, smart, and often funny. She’s given to delivering lines with a W. C. Fields accent. So am I—we become dueling W. C. Fieldses.

Janis reads a lot. Her intellect isn’t disciplined or academically trained like Sam’s; it’s wilder, and it fires at will. The breadth and sometimes the depth of her interests is startling. She’s got an opinion about everything and states it forcefully, astutely, originally. When she really gets going she can weave her sentences into a stunning cascade of words that overwhelms anyone who disagrees with her, often winding up with a capper, a knockout blow that’s so neat it delights her as much as her listeners, and she’ll burst into a cackle of laughter at her own achievement. When the discussion settles on a subject that just flat doesn’t interest her, she drops out and acts bored until the talk moves on to something else.

Janis and Sam like plays on words, and the others sometimes join the verbal game. Favorites within the band include “Sam and Janis evening” to the tune of “Some Enchanted Evening,” and a variation on the band’s name: “Big Bother and the Folding Company.”

David Getz is an artist, taking time out to be a rock drummer. He showed exceptional talent for art early on. From Cooper Union in New York he was going to Yale, but a friend diverted him to San Francisco, where he attended and taught at the San Francisco Art Institute. He’s got a BFA and an MFA. He spent a year in Poland on a Fulbright fellowship. It’s an unusual pedigree for a rock-and-roller, but no more unusual than Sam’s. Dave forms rock-solid positions on the issues in the band, which he rarely changes, but he is slow to anger. Janis and Peter are far more volatile. When Dave’s ire is aroused, he can match them in intensity.

Dave was not Big Brother’s first drummer. When he first heard Big Brother, he thought the band was fantastic—except for the drummer. He had met Peter Albin, and every time he saw Peter, he’d say, “I can drum better than that guy with one hand tied behind my
back. Why don’t you fire that guy and hire me?” Dave’s persistence got him a chance on a night when the band was short a drummer, and that gig got him the job.

Peter Albin is more typical of what I expect in a California rocker. He’s the group’s only folkie. He played folk music in college, then switched to amplified sounds. He’s been in half a dozen bands. Maybe this rather bland bio is what allows him to masquerade as the straight member of the group.

Somehow I never learn much about James’s origins, or the information evaporates from memory because it doesn’t fit the here-and-now that he projects. He’s from Detroit, for what it’s worth, but James belongs in this time and place. It’s impossible to imagine him in khakis and a button-down shirt and a short haircut, looking like the other kids in a 1950s Detroit high school. It’s much easier to believe that he appeared fully grown in San Francisco in 1965, hair to his shoulders, with beads and jeans and boots, hung about with American Indian totems, sprung from the earth in Golden Gate Park, or risen, on the half shell, like Botticelli’s Venus, from the surf at Ocean Beach, and walking—on the water—to shore. A fanciful picture that
becomes only a little skewed when I learn that in the folk days, when he played regularly at Leo Rigler’s Coffee Gallery in North Beach, James’s head was shaved bald.

James and I share a familiarity with Spanish. I take to calling him Jaime and he calls me Juan. Perfecto Garcia is a prominent brand of premium cigars. James has turned the name into an expression of approval. “Ah,” he says, “Perfecto, Garcia,” as if he’s addressing Jerry, of the Dead.

—

I
COME HOME
from the road trips with thousands of dollars in small bills in my briefcase. On Monday morning I separate the bills by denomination and “face” them, sorting them with the portrait right side up. This saves time at the bank, where I turn the cash into a cashier’s check that I send to Albert’s office along with my gig report. Often I keep back a thousand dollars or so for the road fund, out of which each member of the band draws pocket money of $125 a week and from which I pay our expenses on the road. I’ve got credit cards from Albert’s office for Hertz and Avis, but I pay for our meals and most of our lodging in cash, and I have to account for it all down to the last red cent. Nobody told me part of being a road manager was being a banker and an accountant.

On my days off I look for an apartment and I spend some of my money. My salary is $150 a week. It’s more than enough for a single guy to live comfortably, not enough to buy a Porsche.

Since Dick died, Mimi Fariña has moved to San Francisco. She lives on Telegraph Hill. We go out for dinner often when I’m in town. Mimi is an incomparable dinner companion. We dine mostly in North Beach, home ground of the Beats and the folkies. We eat on lower Broadway at Enrico’s sidewalk café, where live jazz harks back a short historical hop to the heyday of the Beats, when the café opened, or at Vanessi’s restaurant, where the waiters whip up sweet foamy zabaglione in copper bowls right at the table. Mimi goes into
gales of laughter at my expression of bliss when I taste the zabaglione. (Time spent laughing with Mimi is added to the span of one’s life.) Sometimes we hop a cable car downtown for a fancy meal at a French restaurant.

For the first time in my life I’m feeling flush. On the road, all my expenses are covered—travel, lodging, food. The balance in my checking account rises steadily, offset by the occasional splurge. I feel like the sailor played by the character actor Edgar Buchanan in a World War II movie I saw on late-night TV. Back in Hawaii after a long stretch of sea duty, Buchanan tells the girl he’s dancing with that he’s got three months of back pay coming. “How are you going to spend all that money, sailor?” she asks suggestively. “Oh,” he says, “some on whiskey, some on women, and the rest frivolously.”