On the Road with Janis Joplin (2 page)

A
FRIEND OF
mine likes to say that history is what you remember. Memories are fallible, of course. Our impressions of the past are subjective and selective. They summon up what we want it to be as well as what it was. In preparing to write this story I spoke with many people who experienced the same events I did, and many who were present at times and places where I was not. We all saw the sixties from different perspectives. For many of us, the friendships we formed in those years have proven to be lifelong; we share similar memories of the music and the seemingly unlimited possibilities that characterized the times.

Aided by the recollections of others, this narrative relates my personal experience, focused through my memory and shaped according to my sensibilities. Any errors of fact or interpretation are mine alone.

John Byrne Cooke
Jackson, Wyoming
2014

BIG BROTHER AND THE HOLDING COMPANY

Janis Joplin—vocals and percussion

Sam Andrew—guitar and vocals
*

James Gurley—guitar and vocals

Peter Albin—bass, guitar and vocals

Dave Getz—drums

Road Crew

Big Brother had no road manager until Albert Grossman managed the band.

John Cooke—road manager

Dave Richards—equipment

Mark Braunstein—equipment

George Ostrow—equipment

Management

Chet Helms (1965–1966)

Julius Karpen (1966–1967)

Albert Grossman (1967–)

John Court—Albert’s partner (1967–1968)

Bert Block—Albert’s partner (1968–1969)

THE KOZMIC BLUES BAND

Musicians playing each instrument are listed in the order in which they played with this band.

Janis Joplin—vocals and percussion

Sam Andrew—guitar and vocals

John Till—guitar

Brad Campbell—bass

Roy Markowitz—drums

Lonnie Castille—drums

Maury Baker—drums

Terry Clements—alto saxophone

Snooky Flowers—baritone saxophone and vocals

Marcus Doubleday—trumpet

Terry Hensley—trumpet

Luis Gasca—trumpet

Dave Woodward—trumpet

Bill King—organ

Richard Kermode—organ

Road Crew

John Cooke—road manager (Dec. 1968–Oct. 1969)

Joe Crowley—road manager (Oct.–Dec. 1969)

Mark Braunstein—equipment

George Ostrow—equipment

Vince Mitchell—equipment

Management

Albert Grossman

Bert Block—Albert’s partner (–1969)

Bennett Glotzer—Albert’s partner (1969–)

FULL TILT BOOGIE

There were no changes in personnel during the life of this band.

Janis Joplin—vocals and percussion

John Till—guitar

Brad Campbell—bass

Ken Pearson—organ

Richard Bell—electric piano

Clark Pierson—drums

Road Crew

John Cooke—road manager

George Ostrow—equipment

Vince Mitchell—equipment

Phil Badella—equipment

Joel Kornoelje—equipment

Management

Albert Grossman

Bennett Glotzer

If You’re Going to San Francisco

November 30, 1967

T
HE
707’
S WHEELS
touch down at San Francisco International Airport and with few regrets I leave behind the East, where my mother’s family has lived since they arrived on the New England coast aboard a vessel that followed in the wake of the
Mayflower
. There they landed and there, for the most part, they stayed, close by the Atlantic shore. In five hours I’ve covered what it took the emigrants of the nineteenth century’s great westward migration months of peril to travel. Like those earlier travelers, I’m casting off the old and hoping to find in California the magic pathway to the rest of my life.

Go west, young man.

In my case, it is Albert Grossman, not Horace Greeley, who points the way.

The southwest wind is roiling the shallow waters off the airport runway, turning them muddy emerald. It has been a cold fall in the East. By comparison, the California air feels springlike as I cross the tarmac to the terminal. The hills that surround the Bay are greened
by the rains that return to the coast with autumn. Autumn in the East forces the flora into retreat and quiescence. To an easterner, green hills in November signal rebirth ahead of its time, a resurrection that fills me with hope. The breeze carries the scent of growing things. Mixed with the jet fumes, I can smell salt water, and something more exotic—patchouli oil, maybe, or pot.

Peter Albin greets me at the gate. We have talked on the phone in recent days, to discuss logistics (“My flight gets in at . . .” “I’ll pick you up and we’ll . . .”). I know Peter by sight because I saw him, back in June, at the Monterey International Pop Festival, standing his ground at stage right as a member of Big Brother and the Holding Company, the band that knocked the audience back on its collective heel. Peter’s feet don’t move much when he plays the electric bass. His body sways to the beat, sometimes curling over the instrument to wring from it insistent riffs that propel the songs forward, sometimes standing bolt upright, his back arched, shaking the bass so the notes fly from the stage with that much more force.

In the airport, face-to-face, Peter is friendly, open, welcoming. He moves with angular looseness and has a lopsided smile. At twenty-three, he’s the youngest in the band. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I have lived for the past nine years, Peter’s shoulder-length hair would earn him derisive shouts of “Hahvahd fairy!” from the townies, their ducktails rigid with Brylcreem. In SFO, he attracts surreptitious glances from the servicemen emplaning for Vietnam and the businessmen in their suits. It would surprise them to know that Peter is a junior executive, dressed for rock and roll. He is the member of Big Brother who signs the contracts, the one who comes to pick up the guy dispatched from New York by Albert Grossman—creator of Peter, Paul and Mary, manager of Bob Dylan and a host of lesser folk luminaries—to oversee the band on the road. As the music of the counterculture has evolved from folk to folk-rock—the Mamas & the Papas, Simon & Garfunkel, Buffalo Springfield—to full-bore rock and roll, Albert has kept pace.

When Peter’s car crests the rise where Highway 101 leaves South San Francisco behind and comes in view of the city proper, I see the white houses dancing up and down the hills and I feel at home. San Francisco is my favorite American city. I have been here often over the years, most recently in June, when I landed at SFO as part of D. A. Pennebaker’s film crew, on my way to Monterey for the Pop Festival, fired then, as now, with the sense of moving toward the promise of things to come, ready to do my part to make the promise come true.

I have a family connection to the Bay Area, an uncle who is a professor of botany at UC Berkeley. When I drove across the country for the first time, in the summer after my sophomore year at Harvard, my uncle’s Berkeley home was my destination. In recent years, it is music that has brought me often to the cities by the Bay. From the first time I stepped into the Club 47 coffeehouse in Cambridge and heard Joan Baez sing, music has defined my friendships and my life. I discovered bluegrass music and became a member of Cambridge’s homegrown bluegrass and old-time band, the Charles River Valley Boys. In the spring of 1963 I drove across the country again, this time with two friends from Cambridge, and we discovered in Berkeley a folk community that was welcoming and familiar.

In the folk music revival, Berkeley and Cambridge were united by enthusiasm for the traditional roots of American music, black and white, and the innovations that creative players could derive from those themes. Some of my Cambridge friends made the journey to California regularly. A few moved here. The kinship forged on the Cambridge-Berkeley axis was based on sharing the music and shunning competition. We believed ourselves to be quietly superior to what we saw as the more commercially oriented pickers in New York and L.A. Our image of the prototypical New York guitar player was a guy who turned toward the wall when he played his hottest licks, so you couldn’t see how he did it.

Since that first visit to the Berkeley folk scene in 1963, I have come back whenever I can, to play music and smoke dope and drink Jack
Daniel’s Tennessee whiskey and Rainier Ale—Berkeley’s preferred boilermaker, known locally as JD and Green Death—and to experience the brilliant, preternaturally focused California days that inspire us to throw some bread and cheese and wine into a backpack and take acid and spend the day somewhere on the coast.

A couple of years ago I moved to California for what I thought would be forever, but it turned out I was chasing the Wrong Girl. This time, I’m here to stay. I have left behind the life of a performing musician in the interest of getting serious about the rest of my life. For now, I will help others devote themselves more fully to their music while I handle the money and logistics. I have exchanged my guitar for an attaché case. It contains itineraries, contracts, and the promise of loud music, late nights, and loose women.

To Peter Albin, I reveal none of the giddy high that the waters of the Bay, the sight of Coit Tower, a glimpse of the Golden Gate Bridge, arouse in me. With Peter, I’m all business. I’m cool. He takes me to a motel on Columbus Avenue, in North Beach. A few years ago, the North Beach coffeehouses were the focus of San Francisco’s folk scene, and before that, the home of the Beats. I wonder if any unamplified music survives in the city that has become the wellspring of American rock and roll, but satisfying this curiosity will have to wait. Right now, I’ve got to pass inspection by my prospective employers. Peter gives me half an hour to come down from thirty thousand feet, then picks me up again and takes me to meet the band.

They rehearse in a third-floor loft in a building they call the Warehouse, close by an off-ramp where the Central Freeway dumps traffic into the city streets. When Peter and I enter the loft, the four other members of the band are sitting at a round oak table by the windows. There’s a bed covered with a madras spread, the ubiquitous, versatile fabric by which a generation of bohemian youth is enriching the textile magnates of India. There are amps and instruments and a drum set off to one side, random sticks of furniture, and enough floor space
to hold a dance competition. A few oil paintings adorn the walls. They’re by the drummer, David Getz, I will learn. David has set his painting aside for a venture into rock and roll.

The space could be any number of artists’ lofts where I’ve been to late-night parties in New York, but, except for the paintings, the art in progress here isn’t visible, and the quintet scrutinizing me now is pure San Francisco. This is the moment of truth. The truth is, I’m nervous, which is a condition I customarily conceal beneath a reserved exterior.

I recognize Janis, of course, but Peter is a polite fellow and he introduces her first. It was Janis who took the audience’s breath away at Monterey, this Texas white girl who belts the rocking blues like no one else, propelled by one of the founding bands of the San Francisco Sound.

Sam Andrew and James Gurley are the lanky guitar players, sprawled in their chairs with legs askew. Tight-fitting black jeans. Pointy-toed boots.
Long
hair. Way longer than any East Coast beatnik’s. Theirs is down past their shoulders, combed straight like Janis’s. I’m six-feet-one-and-a-bit, and I judge that Sam and James, upright, will inhabit the same altitude. Peter is a couple of inches shorter. David is more compact. He falls into the range that eyewitnesses describe as average height. At this meeting he sits squarely on his chair, all his attention on me, just as he sits at his drums onstage, centered and balanced. David’s hair, and Peter’s, is a little shorter than Sam’s and James’s, pageboy haircuts gone to seed.

Janis is watchful. In repose her face is unremarkable, not what you’d call pretty. Only her eyes betray the vitality she releases in performance. They are clear and alert, and when the introductions are over it is Janis who speaks first.

“What sign are you?”

“Libra.”

“That sounds just,” James says. This is a generous reaction and I’m
grateful to him, but Janis is looking me up and down with all the distrust appropriate for greeting a newcomer from the East, a road manager imposed on the band by Albert Grossman, the personal manager they barely know and for sure don’t fully trust.

Janis shrugs. “I don’t care much about Libras one way or the other.”

But I’m cool. I take no offense, because they accept me. Cautiously and with reservations, to be sure, but they accept me. I’m a rock-and-roll road manager. When I got off the plane it was only make-believe.

Now it’s real.

California Dreamin’

T
HE POET-NOVELIST
R
O
BERT
Penn Warren wrote, “
I eat a persimmon and the teeth of a tinker in Tibet are put on edge.” He liked to watch the far-reaching ripples of unpredictable cause and effect spread from that crystalline moment when the stone hits the still surface of the pond.

There are times and places where the flow of events becomes focused through an accidental lens—an experience, an event that becomes a turning point in many lives. Our generation is entranced by synchronicity, yet only those most attuned to the flow recognize these confluences for what they are at the time, even when they blunder into them head-on. The Monterey Pop Festival was such a moment for Janis and Big Brother. Their presence at the festival and the effect of their performance were the result of many decisions and turning points, any one of which might have yielded a different result.

For my part, if I hadn’t been at the Pop Festival, I wouldn’t have become the road manager for Big Brother and the Holding Company. That’s as close to fact as you can get in the realm of “what if?”

What if Big Brother hadn’t played at Monterey? They might not have signed a management contract with Albert Grossman later that year, maybe never. They might still have achieved the wider renown that launched Janis to even greater fame as the first woman superstar in rock music, for she was a powerful force, probably uncontainable at that point in the evolution of American popular music.

But the alternatives were roads not taken.

We were there, the band and I, borne by ripples set in motion at points far separated in geography and time, and the effect for each of us was life-changing. As a result, I moved from Cambridge to California as the focus of the counterculture shifted from east to west, and I continued to be a participant—in a new capacity—in the music that was pied piper to a decade of innovation and upheaval. For Janis and Big Brother, the attention they gained at the Monterey Pop Festival launched them toward their destiny and summoned the forces that would eventually pull them apart.

At this remove in time, Monterey seems to me the jewel in the crown of the sixties. It was not the largest festival, but the brightest, the most finely formed, where all the benevolent potency that musicians and fans could generate together was made manifest, briefly, like a rainbow, or a ring around the sun, a vision impossible to fix in the physical world, but one whose glow endures in memory, freighted with emotion and meaning.

I’d like to claim that I understood the full significance of the Pop Festival while I was following D. A. Pennebaker around the Monterey County Fairgrounds with a Nagra tape recorder slung from my shoulder, but that would be an abuse of the storyteller’s power. Much later, when I traced how the Pop Festival came about, how Big Brother came to be included and how Pennebaker came to film it, I marveled at the winding paths we followed, each strewn with many “What if?” moments, where a different decision, a different opportunity at any step of the way could have changed everything.

The seeds of the landmark gathering were sown by a quartet of
would-be rock entrepreneurs from Los Angeles whose names sounded like a promising law firm: Wheeler, Taylor, Pariser and Shapiro. The idea was simple and visionary—corral as many of the reigning pop stars of the moment as could be persuaded to work for a small fraction of their regular fees to play at a three-day festival that would unfold at the county fairgrounds in Monterey sometime in the summer of 1967. Enlist nobody but headliners. Shoot for the stars. Dazzle the music world and reap the harvest.

Things didn’t work out quite the way these visionaries planned. They needed one act to commit before the rest, as a bellwether, a stalking horse. Get the bandwagon rolling, they thought, and others will jump on board. They approached the Mamas and the Papas and Simon and Garfunkel, separately.

You want us to play for a small fraction of our regular fee? Who else have you got?

The would-be promoters named a bunch of names tinged with stardust, none of whom had yet pledged themselves to the festival. Forget it, said the Mamas and the Papas and Simon and Garfunkel, separately. The would-be promoters pleaded, and their enthusiasm kindled a spark of light in Papa John Phillips. The Taylor of the firm was Derek Taylor, formerly a tabloid journalist in his native England, more recently the publicist for and a good chum of the Beatles. Taylor was slight and fastidious, whereas Phillips was long and loose. They both had genuine smiles, honest charm, and a way with words. Phillips sensed in Taylor a kindred spirit. I’ll tell you what, Phillips said. I’ll talk to Paul (Simon) and Art (Garfunkel), and if they say yes we’ll say yes.

Already a crucial change had taken place. Instead of the would-be promoters trying to sign up musicians, one of the musicians was talking to other musicians to consider how a new kind of music festival might come to be.

A meeting took place at Jeanette MacDonald’s Bel Air mansion, which John and Michelle Phillips had recently purchased, thanks to
John’s way with words and harmonies and chord progressions. (A new day had surely dawned when folk-rock stars could buy real estate only movie stars—and a few popular music stars of a very different style—could previously afford.) The main house, a mansion deserving of the name, encouraged everyone to believe that music could build castles in the air.

Attending the summit were John and Michelle and Paul and Art, the would-be promoters, and another quartet—Adler, Melcher, Turetsky and Somer—that in fact included two lawyers. This was, after all, L.A., the land of greed and profit. True, it had welcomed or given birth in recent years not only to the Mamas and the Papas but also to Buffalo Springfield and the Chambers Brothers and the Byrds and the Beach Boys. Hippie chicks with stars in their eyes and love in their hearts flocked to the Sunset Strip, where the promoters and the agents camouflaged themselves with bell-bottoms and hair newly permitted to grow past ears and collars, but the bottom line was still the bottom line.

There was magic in the air at Jeanette MacDonald’s castle, and magic carried the day. The musicians decided they absolutely definitely positively would
not
play for a fraction of their usual fees, but they would play for
free
, and from that moment the musicians ran the festival.

Within a few days, the Beach Boys, the Byrds, the Who, the Association, Dionne Warwick, and Buffalo Springfield had added their names to the list of performers, with the Mamas and the Papas and Simon and Garfunkel at the top. Within a week, the festival was christened the Monterey International Pop Festival and it boasted among its board of governors Paul McCartney of the Beatles, Jim McGuinn of the Byrds, Mick Jagger and Andrew Loog Oldham of the Rolling Stones, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, John Phillips, Lou Adler—formerly the record producer for Jan and Dean, now producing the Mamas and the Papas—Smokey Robinson, Paul Simon, and Johnny Rivers. An eclectic assortment of talents, heavily
inclined toward the L.A. cosmology. The festival would be set up as a nonprofit, with the proceeds to go to causes that benefited popular music, applications to be reviewed by the board.

The momentum began to build, the bandwagon fired up a head of steam, and more talent, from far and near, lined up to climb aboard. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Eric Burdon and the Animals. Booker T. and the MGs, Canned Heat, Hugh Masakela, the Electric Flag, Laura Nyro, the Blues Project, the Paupers, Jimi Hendrix. Otis Redding!
Ravi Shankar!
Enough stars, well known and lesser known, to establish a new galaxy and open it up for business.

Okay, what’s missing?

The festival directors knew that a bunch of bands with funny names had sprung up in San Francisco in the past couple of years. They knew because Jefferson Airplane already had a hit—“White Rabbit”—whose references to drugs had put a generation of wary parents even more on their guard, and because one of the best-respected music critics of the day was championing the Northern California rockers.

The
San Francisco Chronicle
’s Ralph J. Gleason would not have been out of place in a thirties spy movie by the brothers Warner. He was a between-the-wars character, trench-coated, armed with a sardonic manner, his cigarettes screwed into a short black holder. He looked with amusement on the excesses of the young, and at the same time reveled in the present moment. Gleason had written a jazz column since the day after the Creation. When he blessed a jazz album with liner notes, he bestowed the imprimatur of a recognized authority. He had alarmed his hepcat readers in the early sixties by writing the occasional column about folk music. Joan Baez caught his eye and ear. So did Bob Dylan. Gleason was that rarity among critics, a music lover who dared to applaud new music that he deemed worthy, even if the newcomers were displacing the cherished sounds of his own generation.

Gleason led the way, among the established critics, in recognizing
and extolling the unique sound of the San Francisco rock bands. The scene in San Francisco had been percolating for a couple of years, mostly keeping to itself. Bright-eyed kids flocked to the Avalon and the Fillmore, Depression-era ballrooms now levitating to a new beat, where fans gyrated around the dance floors and the bands played the dancers like an instrument. When the energy of the dancers encouraged the songs to run long, the symbiosis offered flashes of enlightenment. There were light shows and acid tests, and the sexual revolution was enlisting eager recruits by the thousand.

The civic authorities, alarmed, resuscitated an archaic bit of municipal code that prohibited dancing at concerts of live music. Gleason lobbied in his column to overturn the code. At his urging, the
Chronicle
editorialized in support of Bill Graham, when the former waiter, actor, and San Francisco Mime Troupe manager applied for a permit to operate the Fillmore Auditorium as a rock-and-roll dance hall. (At the Avalon, a counterculture collective called the Family Dog orchestrated the entertainment.)

When whisperings of the Monterey Pop Festival reached Gleason’s ears, he expressed curiosity, then interest. In a twinkling he was invited to join the festival board. Say, fellows, he offered—after hearing what the Los Angelenos had in mind—you really ought to get some of the San Francisco bands. They already planned to invite the Airplane. Gleason suggested more names. Still smiling all around, the members of the board heeded his counsel. But getting the bands with the weird names and the far-out sounds to sign on for the festival was another matter.

The San Francisco bands were like families, and the Haight-Ashbury district of the city, where most of the bands lived, near Golden Gate Park, was their neighborhood. They were clannish, socially radical, wary of the mainstream music business in general and of L.A. in particular. A pilgrimage by John and Michelle Phillips and Lou Adler to the Haight did little to allay the musicians’ misgivings. Adler was a smooth type they had seen before and distrusted on sight.
(The fact that he was more than he seemed and would be a guiding force that helped the Pop Festival to fulfill its potential would become apparent only later.) When Paul Simon, soft-spoken and sincere, visited the Haight, that was something else. Derek Taylor won some converts too, just as he had helped to win John Phillips to the idea in the first place.

It was clear to the San Francisco groups that while Adler and company didn’t know much about the individual bands, they were aware of the San Francisco scene and they wanted to tap into its energy. Which convinced some of the musicians that the festival would exploit the bands and rip them off. Still, they sensed a not-to-be-missed event in the making. They were as eager as everyone else to hear the Who and Otis Redding and Ravi Shankar. Hey, listen, it might be far out.

The tipping point for the San Francisco bands was that musicians were running the show, and everyone was playing for free.

Five days before the festival began, Ralph Gleason reported in the
Chronicle
that the San Francisco Sound would be represented at Monterey not only by Jefferson Airplane, but also by the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Moby Grape, Country Joe and the Fish, and the Steve Miller Blues Band. And Big Brother and the Holding Company.

With the roster complete, the festival looked like a surefire
winner. And just in case the founders’ wide-eyed visions came true, the proceedings, from start to finish, would be recorded on film for posterity.

D. A. Pennebaker’s role as the Pop Festival’s sight-and-sound archivist was even more of a fluke than the bloodless palace coup that put the musicians in charge. And, as it turned out, his presence was the key that unlocked the magic kingdom for Janis Joplin.

The waves of cause and effect that brought Pennebaker to Monterey in June 1967 had begun to spread years before, in the early sixties, when Penny and his partner, Ricky Leacock, made a film in Hungary about the cellist Pablo Casals. Flash-forward to 1965: Bob Dylan and his friend Bob Neuwirth were flipping the channel knob on a hotel TV and chanced to see the Casals film on what was then National Educational Television, not yet PBS. At the same time, a girl named Sara was working in the New York offices of Leacock Pennebaker, Inc. Sara had been impressed by “Daybreak Express,” Pennebaker’s first film, a five-minute marvel that employed Duke Ellington’s eponymous tune as the camera recorded the sunrise journey of a New York subway train from an outer borough to Manhattan. Sara knew Dylan. (She would in time become Sara Dylan.) She thought Bob would like the film. She arranged for him to see it.