Good Booty

by Ann Powers

  One person’s “pep” is another’s mania. Myra Friedman was Joplin’s publicist and first chronicler, author of the tortured 1973 elegy-cum-biography Buried Alive, where she quotes a former psychiatric counselor who says of the singer, “She was . . . ‘diffused’—spewing, splattering, spraying all over, without a center to hold.” The older Friedman was trying to process Joplin’s drug use and her bisexuality, which Friedman found distressing. But the shrink’s reductive description actually applies fairly well to Joplin’s onstage style, which was purposefully disordered, grating one minute and soulfully warm the next.45

  Joplin early on proved able to absorb many different musical influences, from pristine folk singing to gutbucket blues belting. By the time she tried out for Big Brother, the noisy psychedelic blues band that would bring her the fame she craved, she’d developed a lot of vocal options. “She had about three different voices when we first knew her, see. When she sang rock and roll, that was one particular kind of voice,” her bandmate Peter Albin told another early Joplin biographer, Deborah Landau. “When we lived over in Lagunitas together, one night I remember we were listening—I was up in my room with my old lady—and I heard this Joan Baez record singing songs I never heard before, and I went down and it was her! It was this Joan Baez voice, exactly like the record. And then she had a Bessie Smith voice . . . a deep growl, the kind of voice that she couldn’t get on stage with a rock and roll band, because the volume was too loud . . . when we first started doing stuff with her she tried to use that voice and it just couldn’t work. Times changed and the music grew louder than her voice. She had to gradually change herself.”46 To fit in with the boys of Big Brother, Joplin learned to bellow. “To try and get out in front of that heavy sound, the only thing that she could apparently think of to do was just to scream, which she did,” another friend of Joplin’s told Landau. “Just screamed, oh man. It was really hard to stay in the same room with her.”47

  But people did stay, because Joplin turned that scream into something fluid, and even joyful. “To sing the blues is a way of transcending pain by confronting it with dignity, but Janis wanted nothing less than to scream it out of existence,” Willis wrote. Joplin did something else when she basically invented the singing style that came to signify hard rock. She screamed old notions of dignity out of existence—screamed away the social hierarchies that demanded women be deferential and self-contained, using not only noise but ribald humor and an embrace of ugliness that employed nuance to make it seductive, even beautiful.

  Joplin’s outrageousness had a paradoxical effect often experienced by women who fulfill the time-honored role of the good-time girl. Excessively female, she could no longer fit a proper definition of the feminine, and so she became “one of the guys.” That phrase has been used by countless male associates of the singer, from the high school friends in Beaumont, Texas, who climbed the towering Rainbow Bridge with her, to Paul Rothchild, the producer of her final album, Pearl. “How can I say this without being sexist? Janis was one of the guys. When I was with her, there was no sense of she’s female, I’m male,” Rothchild told Joplin’s sister and biographer, Laura, twenty years after the star’s death. He recalled her taunting her session players in a recording studio parking lot with boasts like, “Who’s got the biggest balls? I DO!” One way Joplin bonded with her high school buddies was to gossip with them about their classmates’ sex lives, though she didn’t have many stories of her own to share. In the free-love environment of her hippie days, she’d create those stories by frequently enjoying one-night stands with men who were, before and after, primarily friends.48

  Her occasional partners included several members of Big Brother, but her main accommodation to them was adapting her singing style to their frenetic playing. Inspired by free jazz and acid trips, the group tended to play very quickly and very loud, “much faster than the punk rock that came later,” in the words of guitarist Sam Andrew. When the band made room for Joplin, she felt an overwhelming need to fill the space. “See, there’s this big hole in the song that’s mine, and I’ve got to fill it with something,” she told journalist Richard Goldstein. “It really tires me out.” As part of Big Brother, Joplin stepped away from the big, open phrasing she’d borrowed from Bessie Smith and cultivated a kind of blues glossolalia, informed by gospel music and Tina Turner (whom she once declared “the best chick ever”), but also by that polymorphous feeling prevalent at San Francisco’s psychedelic parties, where babbling made sense.49

  Babbling—repeating words until they became run-on sentences, or squalling like Aretha Franklin, but with rawness instead of the gospel soul queen’s clarity, or moving into a yowl and then pulling it back into a murmur, only to push it past its limit again—Joplin made the blues, a music about life’s limits, into a body of water constantly overflowing its banks. This reflected her own version of Hendrix’s manic depression, a performance of pain that was in part authentic and in part a playing out of false presumptions about the African Americans who’d invented the music she loved, not disconnected to the “coon”-style images of African Americans within the R. Crumb cartoon that famously graces the cover of Big Brother’s first album, Cheap Thrills. (These were exactly the kinds of images that hippies thought their idealism rendered acceptable, but which in fact embodied the casual racism Jimi Hendrix regularly faced.) Jae Whitaker, a fellow musician who is black and was one of Joplin’s early San Francisco lovers, remarked to Alice Echols that she felt Joplin used drugs in part “to put herself on the lower rung.” Yet if she courted pain partly to fulfill her debt to heroines like Bessie Smith, whom she viewed on some level as courting trouble, she also recognized the importance of those forebears’ humor. At her best Joplin slipped past the racially charged caricatures she courted, on the power of a confrontational smile.50

  Even when communicating sorrow, Joplin retained that spirit of “pep,” reveling in her vocal power and making it clear that constructing these blood-and-guts stories was fun for her. Her comparisons of singing to sex were blunt—she often used the word orgasm—and her remark to one reporter that she often asked her lovers, “Do I ball like I sing?” suggested that singing might have been the greater pleasure for her. One way in which Joplin was “prefeminist” was in her bold public image, which anticipated the early street protests of women’s liberation groups like Willis’s Redstockings, who protested the 1968 Miss America pageant by marching with placards emblazoned with phrases that could have been in blues songs (“If you want meat, go to the butcher”) and a giant, big-breasted puppet that looked something like an R. Crumb drawing.51

  Eventually, Joplin’s pep became a trap very similar to the one Hendrix felt stifling him. After leaving Big Brother, she sought out more conventionally competent musicians in an attempt to match the soul-revue stylings of her idols Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding. Playing with musicians who could competently roll out blues and soul clichés instead of making a happy mess of them, Joplin still sang powerfully, and perhaps more legibly. But audiences now dwelled on the role she was playing instead of the ways in which she constantly exceeded it. Reviewers began referring to her approach as “brassy burlesque” and “showboating.”52 A disastrous performance in front of African American music-industry insiders in Memphis in 1969 made her wonder if she could ever perform the music she loved without slipping into parody. Her best songs on Pearl, unfinished at the time of her accidental heroin overdose, saw her exerting more control over her vocals, if not exactly toning them down. Perhaps she’d begun to question her own immersion in glorious excess, realizing the ways in which it stopped her from developing personally, even as it offered so much to her fans—especially the female ones.

  JIM MORRISON: LAMENT FOR THE DEATH OF MY COCK

  While Janis Joplin was entertaining hippies with jokes about her private parts, Jim Morrison and the Doors were courting teenagers via gossipy rock publications like Hullabaloo. “See how well you match with the Doors!” read the introductory text to a 1967 quiz
in that publication, peppered with questions about keyboardist Ray Manzarek’s favorite seafood dish (snails, oysters) and bassist Robby Krieger’s screen idol (Marlon Brando). Mixed in with the typical fan mag material, however, were a couple of seriously eyebrow-raising answers from the band’s ultimate pinup. “Jim is attracted to ideas about . . . ANSWER: revolt against authority.” And, “Jim’s music is concerned with . . . ANSWER: chaos (that means disorder, kids!).”53

  Serving an audience eager to experience and explore, the counterculture’s musical avatars embodied irreverence for established gender roles and patterns of behavior. Yet they operated within mass media, where sex was often still sold in old-fashioned ways. Hendrix and Joplin inhabited and exploded roles that were both marginalized and fetishized within the counterculture. They were sex symbols who, sometimes consciously and sometimes in frustration, showed how the experience of embodying desire was empowering and alienating all at once. “There was a real vengeance there,” Pete Townshend said of Hendrix’s performances; the rival guitarist saw the black one’s rage as a form of reclamation, but it was also an expression of Hendrix’s awareness that in order to even begin to communicate eroticism in a new way, he had to still offer up the old ones, which were ultimately degrading. Joplin expressed this conundrum, too. In 1970, in the midst of the fame whirlwind that ultimately placed her in an LA hotel room to perish alone, an old friend at a show asked if she enjoyed what she was doing. “I wrote the part,” she answered testily.54

  For Jim Morrison, a former film student who’d been raised by a very traditionally masculine military father, sex symbolism was easier to access but no less complicated. Committed to wreaking havoc upon orthodoxies of desire, he couldn’t help but fit within them. He wanted to be love’s terrorist, but he looked, moved, and sounded like a teen idol. Wielding his penis as a weapon—to a brutal extent that sometimes led to real violence against individual women, and against the teen-girl audience that was always his most loyal fan base—he always realized how flabby that sword inevitably became. In 1970, not long before he would slink off to Paris to overindulge himself before dying, he wrote a poem:

  Lament for my cock

  Sore & crucified

  I seek to know you

  acquiring soulful wisdom

  You can open walls of

  mystery

  strip-show55

  This work, both the apex and the denouement of Morrison’s lifelong attempt to become a serious writer, continues for nine brutally self-deflating stanzas before ending with the phrase “I sacrifice my cock on the altar of silence.” It encapsulates what makes the Doors singer such a compelling and ridiculous figure. An unstable firebrand whom the critic Richard Goldstein, who wrote about him frequently, called “a borderline personality,” and an alcoholic who justified inebriated incoherence as a way of accessing old gods (he regularly invoked his Celtic forebears, as well as the Greek sacrificial figure Dionysus), Morrison also expressed, in moments of clarity, a pitch-black absurdity that dismantled the very myths he used to fuel his charisma. In his own memoir, Goldstein recalled asking Morrison if he’d planned his satyr image; his reply that it “just sort of happened . . . unconsciously” implied that he’d lost control of it. What he’d lost, most of all, was humor. Goldstein writes: “He shot me his famous half-smile. ‘I’m beginning to think it’s easier to scare people than to make them laugh.’”56

  The counterculture granted rock stars, figures once considered nonsensically preliterate, a cultural authority never before thrust upon musical entertainers. They could be gurus, members of the literati, political activists, and experts on everything from race relations to the fine details of the sexual revolution. Yet they also had to be clowns. Talk show hosts treated them like comic relief; in one appearance by Joplin on Dick Cavett’s program, her host and good friend ribbed her about singing so hard she pulled a muscle “somewhere around Maryland,” and she shot back with a classic punch line, “It was a lot closer to home than that!” The rock press took them much more seriously, but used them as sounding boards for their own (often chemically) high theories and explicit fantasies. One writer for Jazz & Pop magazine chronicled his own orgasm while listening to the Doors’ “Horse Latitudes,” sweatily concluding, “I broke on through the other side.”57 Between poles of uncomfortably intimate hero worship and barely tolerant derision, the new stars tried to communicate.

  Morrison, like Joplin a childhood devotee of Mad magazine, first hit upon his life’s work of exploring and disrupting the phallic paradigm by creating junior high school cartoons of figures with outrageously distended penises and collages that showed Donald Duck penetrating his paramour Daisy. Though his posthumous reputation is as the counterculture’s most pretentious wild man, who intensified the rock game with what the critic Greil Marcus describes as “a seriousness of intent that was thrilling on its own terms,” during his life, Morrison always undercut his elaborate dramas with deliberate buffoonery. Apparently, this was his way in private, too; a college girlfriend recalled asking him why he didn’t brush his hair, and Morrison replying, batting his eyelashes, “Because I want it to look like a bird’s wing.” Later that night, he threatened her with a kitchen knife. This was the borderline nature of his game; possibly suffering from bipolar disorder, Morrison couldn’t control his drama or his jokes. But by making music at the needle point where a joke turns serious, or seriousness becomes so intense only manic laughter can relieve it, Morrison attempted to unravel the white masculine authority he found as oppressive as it was powerful.58

  The counterculture was a great place to be a white male. The new permissiveness and pursuit of self-realization (social progress, hippie heroes argued) through sensual self-exploration allowed men to wear their hair long, dress like dandies, and lecherously pursue conquests. “The plumage and the punch in the last three years has remained in the province of men,” columnist Howard Smith wrote in a 1968 paean to Joplin as the new foil for (who else but) Hendrix and Morrison. Throwing off their ties, countercultural men enjoyed a psychedelic version of what Playboy magnate Hugh Hefner was selling less revolution-minded men. “[Underground] magazines and newspapers increasingly became littered with personal sex ads, caricatures of naked women, and jibes at women’s liberation,” writes musicologist Nadya Zimmerman. “Photographs of women showed their breasts, often without the rest of their bodies, portraying them as disembodied objects.” In houses where these publications caused coffee tables to sag, women were expected to offer up their bodies for the cause of free love. White guy hippies liked boobs a lot, and they grabbed them often, too.59

  This permissiveness was not only top-down; it was also tacitly homophobic. Although men like Hendrix were known to indulge in group sex with multiple women and trade partners with male bandmates as a form of homosocial bonding, aggressive heterosexuality obscured most traces of physical love among the scene’s male peacocks. Though a nascent movement burst forth in the riots at the Stonewall bar in New York in 1969, and produced small hippie collectives like San Francisco’s Cockettes, the dominant attitude toward queer sexuality within the counterculture was suspicion: some progressives suspected gay liberation was a conservative conspiracy meant to disrupt their communities.60

  Hippies who felt they might be gay often suppressed their longings. “Openly gay writers were expected to be bitchy, fucked-up, or geniuses, and I was none of those things,” writes Goldstein, who would later marry a longtime male partner after first wedding and divorcing a woman. “Instead I went with the orthodoxy of the time and told myself that everyone was basically bisexual.”61 Bisexuality was mostly considered a hobby, though; Joplin was widely viewed as a man-loving chick who just ran through women as a stopgap, despite the fact that her longest relationships were with female companions like Jae Whitaker and Peggy Caserta. (Joplin herself was ambivalent on this subject; her biographer Alice Echols calls her “a throwback to an earlier bohemian model of sexual ambiguity.”)62 It would have been even more difficult for
Morrison to clearly articulate an erotic connection to men, and though rumors have surfaced that he had some undergraduate same-sex encounters, his main romantic and sexual pursuits involved women.

  Yet as a performer, Morrison trod the same perverse, darkly comical, proto-queer ground his New York counterpart Lou Reed was exploring with the Velvet Underground in New York, lending credence to desire in ways that challenged the straight paradigm. The echo of the line he drunkenly hurled at Hendrix—“I want to suck your cock!”—resonates throughout his life and work.

  “Grab your fucking friend and love him!” Morrison shouted before allegedly exposing his penis at Miami’s Dinner Key Auditorium on March 1, 1969, not the first but the most consequential occasion of him tussling with police onstage. Morrison harbored a lifelong animosity toward police, and the homophobia of the state was built into the censure he received. Photographs of him being arrested and dragged from the stage evoke those of the men hustled into paddy wagons outside gay bars across America during the same time period. His ritualistic acts of self-love and self-exposure went beyond Mick Jagger’s preening or even Hendrix’s gyrations, because they weren’t clearly directed or ultimately beautiful. If the hippie ideal of sex elevated “the worship that it is to fuck” without fully acknowledging the power relations defining such encounters, Morrison focused on the interruptions, the limitations, and the violence that compromised the dream of free love. Morrison would stand stock-still onstage for long stretches of his performance, or collapse so quickly some thought he was having a seizure. “[The Doors] don’t extend themselves to please an audience in the usual sugary, entertainer way,” declared a writer for Freakout. “That’s Jim Morrison—mysterious, unreachable.”63

  For Morrison, this led to a long struggle with an image that he initially cultivated—he famously asked Hollywood stylist Jay Sebring to make his curls look like those of Alexander the Great—but which he soon rubbed aggressively against. In their first year playing Hollywood clubs, the Doors employed an amateur army of pubescent girls to pack their shows. Morrison’s treatment of those girls was, from the beginning, highly questionable. Leading band courtesan Pamela Des Barres had an interlude with Morrison; later, during his show, he reached out and slapped her in the face while shouting, “Get it on!” Her diary entry said she found this abusive behavior fascinating and framed it as the realization of an animal spirit most people repressed. “How perfectly he has reached his insanity! Can insanity be perfect I wonder? He took a full bottle of beer and threw it into [fellow groupie] Miss Lucy’s face tonight, and when she screamed, ‘That wasn’t very nice!’ he looked up painfully and said, ‘I know.’” For Des Barres, Morrison’s brutality revealed a truth about sexual freedom: “How wonderful to do what your body tells you to do.” What he did to others’ bodies, however, wasn’t always so liberating.64