When a former UT student and fellow liberal, Chet Helms, heard Janis sing at Threadgills, he swore she could be a sensation in San Francisco, where he thought the folky music scene could benefit from her rich, raucous wail. In early January 1963 the two hitched across the country, and just two days later Janis was singing in North Beach at Coffee and Confusion, earning fourteen dollars her first night.
Janis became a regular on the coffeehouse circuit and she and Chet crashed all over town until a couple of fans let her live in their basement. She worked regular jobs sporadically (including a brief stint at the American Can Company), and along with her ever-increasing booze consumption, Janis became a consistent drug user—mainly methedrine. Speed made her feel as if she could accomplish anything. She had flings with men and women, but Janis still felt unsettled and lonesome. In the summer of 1964 she just had to check out the Greenwich Village scene and took off for New York, moving into a hotel full of creative stoners—and quickly becoming one of them. She did a lot of speed, sang in Village clubs, and had a short, lusty affair with a black girl, but by August she was restless and drove her yellow Morris Minor convertible back to San Francisco, stopping just long enough in Port Arthur to worry her mom and dad sick.
According to Bob Dylan, times were a-changing, and Janis felt she was an integral part of the movement, determined to live every second right now. She moved into a little dump on Geary Street with a friend, Linda Gottfried, and ravenously pursued her “art.” “Janis called herself the first black-white person,” Linda said, “a candle burning on both ends,” announcing she knew she would die young, often wondering, “When am I going to burn out?”
She listened to Bessie Smith, studied Hesse, Kant, and Nietzsche, hunting the truth while she shot meth, which she felt made her more creative. She even dealt the drug for a while before trying to commit herself to San Francisco General Hospital for being “crazy.” They told her she was sane and to go away. Then early in 1965 she fell in love with another speed freak, a well-dressed, intelligent charmer with impeccable manners and a mysterious past. He had big dreams and so did Janis and they connected, but together they shot so much methedrine that their dreams turned into hallucinations. Janis got down to eighty-eight pounds, and her boyfriend actually did wind up in a mental hospital. She visited him daily and the recovering couple decided to get married when he was well enough.
Realizing she had hit bottom, a reformed Janis went back to Port Arthur to ready herself for the upcoming wedding. It seems that deep down she must have desired that idealized notion of normalcy. Back at home, she heartily attempted to redeem her wicked past by enrolling at Lama State, becoming an ardent college student. With her unruly hair tucked into a prim bun, she wore ordinary dresses—with long sleeves to cover the tracks on her arms.
Janis’s love arrived a few weeks later and asked Mr. Joplin for his daughter’s s hand. He seemed to be a sincere, devoted fiancé, spending quality time with the Joplin family before leaving to take care of his own “family business.” It wasn’t long before Janis found out that her “fiancé” was already married and his wife was expecting a baby! He convinced Janis he was going to get a divorce, and she carried on making her Texas Star quilt, shopping for linens and china while her mother stitched her wedding dress.
Janis saw a counselor about her former drug use, got B’s in her boring classes, and waited for Mr. Right, who told her he was bringing her an engagement ring for Christmas. When he didn’t show, Janis took the rejection hard. Her last-ditch trip to Normalville hadn’t worked and she started spending more time in Austin clubs, belting out her brokenhearted blues, which earned her a great review in the Austin American-Statesman: “But the most exciting portion of the program [was] JANIS JOPLIN—the only female performer on the bill—who literally electrified her audience with her powerful, soul-searching blues presentation.”
For almost a year Janis had stayed away from drugs, so when she got an offer from old friend Chet Helms to audition for Big Brother and the Holding Company in San Francisco, she thought long and hard before accepting the offer. It’s true that drugs were rampant in San Francisco, but Janis had finally realized music was the only thing that made her feel good—“the one thing that felt honest and right,” said her sister Laura. Still, Janis made Chet promise to buy her a Greyhound ticket home if she didn’t make the grade with Big Brother.
When Janis hit Haight-Ashbury in June 1966, it had been taken over by thousands of rebellious tuned-in, turned-on, dropped-out young peaceniks, swaddled in velvets and thrift-store castoffs, flying high on LSD and creating their own culture. Bands like the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Quicksilver Messenger Service were sharing their kaleidoscopic secrets at the Avalon Ballroom and Bill Graham’s Fillmore. Janis’s first mentor, Chet Helms, managed the Avalon and ran a rock-and-roll corporation called the Family Dog, and Big Brother already had an avid, tripped-out cult following. All they needed was a chick singer to make it happen. But when Janis walked in, plain and pudgy with a scarred and pitted complexion, the band didn’t know what to think.
I recently met with Big Brother guitarist Sam Andrew in the bar of a fancy-schmantzy hotel in San Francisco. He’s slim, dressed in leather, his shiny blond-gray hair hiding his much wiser eyes. “She was very feminine,” he tells me, recalling the day Janis auditioned. “Texas is a really strange place, particularly the time she grew up. Anything emotional or passionate was real suspect. ‘Don’t do that. That’s not the way to be. You should be a lady.’ Getting that all her life—and being so much the other way—must have been confusing.” Sam smiles. “When she came to sing with us she was wearing short-shorts, tied at the side. A little cotton cut-off blouse—basic Texas tacky. Nobody knew how to dress then anyway—we were making it up as we went along.” The band had misgivings about the terrified, plain-Jane girl from Texas until she opened her throat and cut loose. Janis was hired instantly and six days later played her first gig with Big Brother at the Avalon Ballroom.
In a letter back home Janis said, “I’m not at all sold on the idea of becoming the poor man’s Cher,” adding that she was really trying to “keep a level head and not go overboard w/ enthusiasm.” Janis was concerned that her parents believed that her “self-destructive streak” had gotten the best of her again, and apologized for being a “disappointment” to them. She admitted she understood their fears and even shared some of them. “I really do think there’s an awfully good chance I won’t blow it this time … and please believe you can’t possibly want for me to be a winner more than I do … .”
The first thing Janis did was to fall in love with Big Brother guitarist James Gurley and, though he was married, the two lived together for a short and blissful time. When the fling was over, Janis became close with James’s wife, Nancy, who taught her the art of bead-making, as well as getting her back into the hyperactive rush of speed. As Sam Andrew told me, “It was just the times. There were no boundaries. Everybody was high on something.”
Big Brother became the house band at Avalon Ballroom and, along with wives, lovers, dogs, cats, and babies, moved into a rambling pad in the canyons of Lagunitas, where they lived, ate, drank, and shot music. At last Janis felt accepted, even loved, for who she was. In August she wrote her family, “I/we got an ovation,” the biggest of the night, which led Janis to exclaim, “Wow, I can’t help it—I love it! I’m somebody important. SIGH!! …”
With her newfound confidence, Janis started dressing with more aplomb—tight bell-bottoms, boots, spangly blouses, and antique dresses along with ropes and ropes of handmade beads. She was radiant. Instead of getting in trouble for who she was, Janis was being adored, and she bloomed.
When Big Brother played the Mother Blues club in Chicago, Bob Shad offered the band a deal on his small record label, Mainstream, and in September Janis and her boys were in the studio. In late 1966 a couple of singles were released, but even with some good local notices, nobody paid much attention. But Janis wasn’t discouraged. She
had gigantic hopes.
At a gig in Los Angeles Janis picked up a busboy, a young Peter Tork, at the Golden Bear club, and it took a bit of convincing, but Tork, who later became one of the Monkees, told me about their off-and-on relationship. “Janis made no particular point of displaying her intelligence,” he said, “but this came up and she couldn’t help setting me straight. She had her bottle of Southern Comfort right there, and I told her she would get ‘sclerosis’ of the liver. She corrected me on my usage of the word, ‘No, it’s cirrhosis of the liver.’” Peter laughed. “In those days acts were booked for a week, and there we were! For a while every time I saw Janis, she was happy to see me, hugged me, gave me that great big old laugh, and the next thing I knew we were rolling in the hay together. Then one day I caught up with her at a Who concert and she wasn’t friendly to me at all, and I said, ‘Okay, I get it, she’s after one of these other guys!’ That was that.”
Surrounded by colorful, high people, Janis found she was still lonely. She got herself a little puppy and called him George. She worked at staying off speed but still managed to drink a pint of liquor a day. Trying to be productive, she bought an old sewing machine and made herself some velvet clothes. She decorated her pad and wrote probing songs about her new life. She saw a dermatologist about her miserable complexion and started taking antibiotics. She had endless parties. But nothing seemed to take away the loneliness.
Janis had been so deeply hurt by the aborted marriage that men became sex objects to her. She picked up “pretty boys” in the Haight and practiced free love for all she was worth. She had her share of girls, too. One of these girls was Peggy Caserta, who later wrote an X-rated tell-all called Going Down with Janis. The opening two sentences: “I was stark naked, stoned out of my mind on heroin, and the girl lying between my legs giving me head was Janis Joplin. She was stoned blind on smack, too, but the junk flowing through her veins and saturating her brain hadn’t diminished the skill with which she used her mouth on me.” The book is full of hot sex, pledges of love, hard drugs, and jealous rages, but many people close to Janis say that Peggy greatly embellished and exaggerated their relationship.
She may have been brazenly “doing her own thing,” but for Christmas Janis asked her mother for “a good, all-round cookbook, Betty Crocker or Better Homes.” When her aunt Barbara came to visit, Janis put on a bra and played golf, proudly sending her scorecard back home. She seemed to be a complete dichotomy.
Early in 1967, Big Brother had had enough of too-cozy family living and Janis rented an apartment with a friend of Sam Andrew’s, Linda Gravenites, and the girls became very close. Linda was a costume designer and saw Janis as a dazzling and exciting performer, dressing her in low-cut satins and antique lace. Janis wore flowers in her hair and even started using makeup. She posed for a “High Priestess of the Haight” poster with one of her nipples showing, and began a fun and flashy love affair with Country Joe McDonald. In her scrapbook Janis wrote, “For a while it was Country Brother and the Holding Fish.” The first hippie pin-up doll and the leader of Country Joe and the Fish would traipse hand-in-hand through the Haight like the king and queen of cool. But their careers got in the way of Cupid. The affair lasted six months.
Discontented and hypersensitive, Janis needed continuous attention to keep her even slightly satisfied. She craved it like a drug. Although she may have seemed in sync with the mellow, laid-backward flower children, her desire for success was paramount. Said her roommate Linda, “Janis wanted to succeed in capital letters. On her own terms. To be famous and show everybody.” Janis’s deepest wish was about to come true.
Big Brother helped to bring in the Summer of Love at the Monterey Pop Festival and, along with Hendrix and the Who, garnered raves that shook up the industry. The reviews in Newsweek (which featured a photo of Janis) and Time magazine were glowing, reflecting the feelings of the forty thousand who were electrified by Janis’s razor-scalding rendition of Willie Mae (“Big Mama”) Thornton’s classic, “Ball and Chain.” She tore out her heart and hurled it into the audience. They couldn’t get enough.
She rehearsed with the band every day and played gigs on weekends. Big Brother kept on getting raves, with Janis being singled out as the Second Coming of the blues. As a direct result of their combustible Monterey performance, in November 1967 the group signed with Dylan’s brilliant, arrogant manager, Albert Grossman, who had a reputation for adoring the dollar and recognizing major talent. His only request was that the band stay away from heroin, which was proliferating in the Haight, and they all agreed. He immediately got Big Brother a high-figure deal at Columbia Records. Janis called him “Uncle Albert” and believed she would finally be taken care of and understood. Grossman did watch over Janis’s career but stayed out of her personal life, which was always chaotic. Surrounded by acid- and potheads, Janis still preferred the sweet whiskey Southern Comfort and, as a Texan, held her liquor proudly. Walking in the park with her dog, George, she met an elusive young junkie, and when they got romantically entangled, Janis started dallying with heroin, even after having made that promise to Uncle Albert that she wouldn’t.
Big Brother and the Holding Company bring in the Summer of Love with the “High Priestess of the Haight.” (MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/VENICE, CALIF.)
In December 1967 I dropped a fat blue tab of mescaline and wandered down the brilliant, melting maze of the Sunset Strip into the Whiskey-a-Go-Go to see Big Brother. I oozed down front where Janis was on the floor begging us to take another little piece of her heart. “Take it, take it, TAKE IT!” she pleaded, aflame with furious abandon, nothing held back, nothing left for herself. She left the stage weak and wet. I was full of her passion for days. I was so grateful I got to see her perform.
Christmas was spent with her family. Janis was making money, and along with copies of Big Brother’s new single, “Down on Me,” she brought generous gifts all around. She caused a commotion in the local 7-Eleven, did interviews with the local press, and suggested that her little brother grow his hair longer. Then she went to Mexico and had a botched abortion. It took her weeks to recover.
But she didn’t stop working. Todd Schifman was Big Brother’s booking agent at the time. “They were playing the Kaleidoscope in L.A … . I get a call from the road manager about six o‘clock and he says, ‘Todd, you’d better get down here, there’s big problems.’ The mob had come in, walking around with guns, threatening to cut the wires on the P.A. system, and there was a line three blocks long outside. I go into the dressing room and Janis is lying on the floor, sick. I had to carry her to the phone, and she called the hospital. She had just had an abortion and something was wrong. She was in terrible pain. After the call she laid out on the floor and I told her she couldn’t go on. We had a perfect out! I told the road manager to postpone it for a night, but they opened up the doors and all these kids swarmed in. I said to Janis, ‘Just so there’s no problem, maybe you could go up onstage and tell these people to come back tomorrow.’ So I help her up onstage, and I couldn’t believe it, she calls the band up there and she says, ‘There’s some shit goin’ on here tonight, guys backstage runnin’ around with guns. Well, fuck ‘em, we’re gonna play for you!’ And she did an hour-and-a-half show. You never would have known she was in pain. She could have killed herself, but that’s the type of person she was. She told it like she felt it.”
Big Brother signed their contract with Columbia in New York after playing a scorching set at the Anderson Theater. Reaction from the press was unexpectedly swift and glorious. The review in The New York Times the following day proclaimed, “There are few voices of such power, flexibility and virtuosity in pop music anywhere.” Janis veered from frenzied ecstasy to abject insecurity, and she needed constant assurances from her friends and band mates about her appeal. Sure, audiences were eating her up, important journalists were vying for twenty minutes of her time, but was she fat? She was already getting wrinkles, wasn’t she? To her folks she wrote: “Wow, I’m so lucky—I just fumble
d around being a mixed-up kid (& young adult) & then fell into this. And finally it looks like something is going to work for me. Incredible.” In a letter to her roommate, Linda, she said, “Tomorrow (please let me brag—it’s just about the only satisfaction I’m getting) I’m being interviewed for a thing in Life, and Look is going to do us when we get back to S.F … .” Success was finally hers, but it didn’t make Janis happy. With all her inner tumult, Janis didn’t seem to realize that she was shoving the door wide open for women. The Village Voice said: “The girl gap is an easy term for a hard problem that’s been facing the music industry. The plumage and the punch in the last few years’ rock has remained the province of men … . Now, with Janis all that is over.”
In between recording sessions, Big Brother toured. Janis was getting so much solo attention that the guys felt like her backing group. When Grossman changed the billing to “Big Brother and the Holding Company, featuring Janis Joplin,” there was a whole lot of grumbling in the band. And Janis didn’t think they were cutting it in the studio, once storming out of a session shouting, “I ain’t gonna sing with them motherfuckers!”
At the time of the Cheap Thrills (originally Sex, Dope, and Cheap Thrills) sessions, Janis had an infamous encounter with Jim Morrison, a bang-up battle that she asked her publicist, Myra Friedman, to play up in the press. Janis told Myra that Jim had been slobbering drunk and had pulled out a “whole bunch” of her hair, and she cracked a bottle of scotch over his head. According to Chet Helms, who says he was there, “He unzipped his pants and put his penis in her face, and she hauled off and whacked him good!”
True to the hippie credo, Janis tried to live smack dab in the moment, telling The New York Times, “Maybe I won’t last as long as other singers, but I think you can destroy your now by worrying about tomorrow.” She prided herself on being totally uninhibited and unconventional, yet was always surprised by the consequences of her actions.
Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon Page 25