by Laura Joplin
Austin was deep into the tap roots of this music. The more commercial groups, like the Kingston Trio, differed markedly from the ragged, direct style Janis sang in Austin. Only one successful performer commanded the respect of the Austin group—Bob Dylan. Janis believed in Dylan for a long time. She thought Dylan and folk music were the answer.
But folk was only one stepping-stone on the path to discovering those hidden aspects of life that she was so intent upon finding. She later described her situation, saying, “There was a time I wanted to know everything. I was an intellectual. Feelings made me very unhappy.” Her gang of intellectuals in Port Arthur had unknowingly adopted our cultural separation of the intellect from the feeling and spiritual aspects of life. Even when they listened to music, they analyzed it intellectually. That confusion was still woven into Janis’s life until she found the Austin group. In Threadgill’s bar she found the emotional roots of music, a way to express her feelings—by singing the blues. Blues replaced even Dylan’s style of folk music. Feelings began to work for her! In blues, Janis could celebrate the bouquet of natural life rather than guard against spontaneity as her Anglo culture preached. Music was the compelling experience and folk music told the stories of everyday life. It was basically democratic, lauding the value of each individual. Music and the stage were the vehicle; the audience response was the guide. The blind led the blind.
That it should spontaneously occur in Texas is really no accident. Texas was one of the last outposts of the original American spirit. Big dreams were part of the culture, alongside a fervent belief in the individual’s ability to act and reap the rewards. Its continued adherence to the foundations of American Protestant belief placed the local society years behind the changes that affected the rest of the country. Texas was also geographically isolated from New York and Los Angeles. Stuck in the middle of the continent with little experience of the dog-eat-dog competition in the large cities, Janis’s gang held unlimited visions of success. Their ambitions included social change. They merely expected the country to be what it should be. They demanded that Camelot arise at once!
Their views were made known through the Texas Ranger’s social commentary, satirizing the dominant culture’s follies. They stated their complaints in humorous language, not angry shouts. Founded in 1923, the Ranger was an early example in a long line of college humor magazines that cropped up on campuses in the early 1960s. It was the best, voted number one by college humor editors all over the country. The people were the magazine. Their loose communal commitment to the monthly deadline in spite of miserly or nonexistent pay was based solely on love for the work and each other.
Bill Helmer, the quick-witted editor in 1959–60, said, “[We] turned the Ranger from a cliquish, genteel publication to a popular commercial publication.” The magazine was operated by a company known as Texas Student Publications. The editor was allowed only a one-year term. That should have meant staff turnover. In 1962 it meant that the job was traded among a group of people and that the staffers were holdovers from the past and incredibly capable.
Janis witnessed the development of a social phenomenon as the Ranger’s circulation rose from five thousand to twenty-five thousand. What engineered the grand rise in interest was based on the university administration’s desire to censor it. They trumpeted freespeech violations in an argument over a poem. “The butcher the baker the candlestick maker. Why can’t I?” The authorities thought it was an obscene use of a candlestick. The writers thought it was a funny play on words.
The Ranger’s growth showed Janis one strategy of getting noticed: using notoriety to succeed artistically. The Ranger was a rallying point as important to Janis’s development as her experience with folk music.
Janis brought home a favorite page of the September issue of the Ranger when she came for a visit. She proudly taped on the wall one of Gilbert Shelton’s cartoon strips (shown above). He hit the nail on the head, capturing her complaint about society in the relationship between the painter and his subject.
Shelton, editor in chief of the magazine, was most famous in Austin for his “Wonder Wart Hog” cartoon strip, an underground superman character known as the “Pig of Iron.” Rippling muscles erupting through the suit he wore on his day job, Foolbert Sturgeon metamorphosed into the hog, “that fighting, fearless, foul-mouthed champion of justice.”
Where the Port Arthur group had been introspective, Jack Smith explained that the Austin group’s motto was “Whatever this thing’s for, let’s reverse it.” They were into fun and excitement. They lived an upside-down life, forcing their observers to stop their routine lives for a moment.
Many cultures have a hallowed place for the down, like the Navajo Indian tales of the cunning coyote, who seems to thwart man’s best efforts while teaching him a lesson in humility. Janis’s gang were trickster coyotes, bringing the Navajo culture’s lesson to the Anglos. Some Indians chose reverse roles, they washed with dirt and dried with water, merely for the educational benefit of making people think. It’s too easy to focus on the routine and miss the profound. By breaking the tedium, the group allowed others to change their focus. The Ranger gave Janis the gift of the clown and the coyote.
In 1962 the coyote must have nominated Janis for Ugly Man on Campus, a fund-raising prank of a fraternity. For one day they erected a stage on campus and wrote names on a large board. Each vote cost a quarter, and there was fun competition among the frats to have their man win. Traditionally, school personalities were nominated—all the deans, etc. Janis’s humor group saw the contest as a challenge to be turned and played with. Running a woman in the Ugly Man Contest would be a perfect foil! Jack said selecting Janis as Ugly Man was like Rice University selecting a refrigerator as homecoming queen, which they did a few years after Janis was in Austin. Jack said she nominated herself, as a lark! Others felt it was a type of revenge from a frat rat who Janis had teased sexually.
Janis complained about her involvement in the contest bitterly when interviewed later. Austin didn’t appreciate her then—they elected her Ugly Man on Campus! Well, Janis didn’t win, even if she was in the running. Her friends gave conflicting stories. Several recalled the event humorously, but Powell St. John remembered Janis coming into the Union with tears in her eyes because she was getting votes in the contest. Even if it was initiated in parody and jest, Janis resented the experience.
Janis had the same emotional needs as any adolescent girl—to be loved and accepted for who she was. But she was living Wonder Wart Hog’s fanciful life as a “fighting, fearless, foul-mouthed” woman. She chose a role lauded in the hog by her friends, but she refused to accept the consequences that others saw in her female brand of toughness. In her heart she was just as soft and loving as any other woman.
In Austin her men friends related to her as a woman, not just as “one of the guys,” like she was in Port Arthur. She had boyfriends, first Powell St. John from the musical group and finally settling on a Ranger editor, Bill Killeen. He was a cool, intense, intelligent, six-foot-tall, thin man with dark hair and eyes. Originally from Massachusetts, he was an old humor magazine hand from Oklahoma State University who blew into Austin in a limping 1950 Cadillac Superior model hearse with red velvet upholstery. He took women on strange dates to graveyards in his hearse.
Janis met Bill at a party at Gilbert Shelton’s house, where Bill was staying. They walked down to a restaurant near the capitol and watched a bat fly around and terrorize the eating patrons. Janis thought it was hilarious. They slept that night on the capitol lawn, near one of the monuments. A capitol guard made a feeble attempt to shoo them off, but they weren’t doing much, just cuddling, and he soon strolled away.
Their romance was complicated by neither of them having a place for amorous entwining. Janis lived in a rooming house that didn’t allow male visitors. Killeen was just crashing with Shelton. Then Janis got a boon from a friend named Wynn Pratt. His father was a UT professor who owned a rental house that was vacant. Wynn gave them a
key. They lived there in September and October.
They hosted a party one evening that was boisterous enough to get police attention. “Who lives here?” the cops asked. Killeen said, “I do.” “And what is your name, please?” he was asked. “Foolbert Sturgeon” he replied, using the moniker of Wonder Wart Hog. He enjoyed defying authority. He drove without a driver’s license, the Ranger explained. “What need have I of a license? I can drive all right without one.” He was fun, serious, and articulate, and Janis loved him.
Bill found Janis to be a fascinating alternative to most girls he knew. She had more drive and zest for life. She wanted to have fun and he was a willing companion. Janis didn’t want to miss out on anything. When he read her an article in a newspaper about LSD causing people to jump out of buildings, he remarked, “I don’t want anything to do with that stuff.” Janis said, “Well, I want some right now!” Janis was heavier than in her high school years; she might have weighed 140 pounds. Her face was round, made rounder by the way she wore her hair, and with her penchant for loose clothes, she looked even larger.
With Bill, Janis played with her more feminine self. She dressed up, fixed her hair, and put on high heels when they double-dated to the first football game of the year, UT playing Oregon. There was a Ranger party afterward and Janis was grumbling by the end of the game, “What the hell did I come to this thing for? There’s not going to be any liquor left at the party.”
Janis and Bill ventured to the border town of Nuevo Laredo one weekend with Gilbert Shelton and Karen Kay Kirkland. It was a pleasant time, though Karen almost got them into a fight by calling some Mexican thugs “specious asses.”
Their relationship fell apart as much by losing the free house to live in as anything. The final test was the UT-Oklahoma University football weekend. It was a staunch local rivalry supported by students who ventured to Dallas, where the game was held, and got drunk. Janis wanted to go to the party. Bill didn’t. He was not a drinking man. Janis went with a group, and when she came back, they had been evicted from their love nest by Pratt senior and Bill was sleeping on an unheated porch. There was no room for romance. She moved back into the rooming house our parents had been paying for all along.
John Clay was a man whose journalistic style the October Ranger called “Texanese, to be read with a slow drawl . . .” He said Janis and Bill’s relationship had started out all love and roses. Janis was Bill’s girl. He was strong and older and, according to John, “kept her in line.” So romance with one of the gang still resulted in a general belief that a woman needed to be kept in line. What did that tell Janis?
Outside of a relationship, sexual conquest was considered a party sport by Janis. She took humorous pride in flirting with a frat rat at Threadgill’s one night, the same incident purportedly linked to the Ugly Man Contest. He followed her back to the Ghetto as the party continued. Upon leaving, he raised his eyes at his fraternity buddies in a manner that implied, “Look what I’m going to be getting!” Then Janis slipped out and left his masculine ego a-hurting.
Sexual experimentation also included relations with women. She boldly announced her intentions, strolling up to a group of her friends in the Student Union that included Ted Klein. She sat down and said, “I’ve decided to become a lesbian.” Given her visible appetite for men, people guffawed. “You wait and see,” she replied to their jests. They wished her well on her decision. A few days later she returned to the gang in the Union. They asked how her lesbian experiences had been. Ted Klein said that Janis “shrugged her shoulders, mumbled a fairly neutral ‘ehnn’ and went back to pinching the boys.”
There were several women who had a homosexual reputation in the group, in particular short, muscular Juli Paul. Everyone accepted them, possibly even enjoying the way their presence heightened the group’s sense of its own nonconformity. Juli was kind, soft-hearted, and considerate. She could also be aggressive and tended to get emotional, especially when she drank.
Juli Paul described their first meeting. “When I first saw Janis, I was driving down the Drag, down Guadalupe, and Janis, Lanny, and Powell were walking along and the Autoharp and banjo were in evidence. I really just thought it was the thing to do, to pull over and see what they were up to, where they were going. And I’m sure it was Janis and her bawdy voice that said they were going to a party, did I want to go?”
Their relationship was steadfast and stormy—sometimes lovers; sometimes just friends. The tone ranged from buddies forever to drunken yelling matches. One evening Juli got very drunk. Janis was with her in the Ghetto. A few rounds of verbal sparring found Janis calling Juli a phony,a hypocrite. That was too much! Juli stumbled in a blind roaring stupor after Janis, ready to flatten her. She chased her through the apartments until Janis sneaked away. Juli began an apartment-to-apartment search and started making people mad, upsetting the whole tenor of the easygoing social scene. One thing led to another and a few shoves later, Juli was sliding down the stairs. In Buried Alive, Myra Friedman wrote that Janis pushed Juli down the stairs. Others recall someone else making the fateful push. Either way, Juli landed at the bottom, surprised and sore but okay.
Stan Alexander, one of the Austin gang, said Juli was “wild but interesting,a lost soul.” Janis told him that she and Juli had hitchhiked to Port Arthur. The two of them had been forceful in getting rides, to the point of lying down on the highway across the lanes to get people to stop and listen to their pleas. The Port Arthur group didn’t welcome Juli with open arms. She confronted them with rough mannerisms that at least a few found repulsive.
There was a constant stream of traffic between the Austin and Beaumont-Port Arthur contingents of the group. Several times the Austin crowd was taken on a tour of the Vinton clubs by Port Arthur folk. Once Janis took Wally Stopher, Dave Moriaty, Travis Rivers, Tary Owens, Johnny Moyer, and Wynn Pratt to Vinton. She settled into her former routine of sexually baiting the Cajuns, thinking that the Austin guys would perform the same function that her former group had. But they didn’t know the unwritten laws of Cajun country. They didn’t flaunt their toughness in a way that protected them from the taunts of the locals. They kept it hidden until it was needed.
Wynn Pratt was a Golden Gloves boxer. When the Louisiana guys started pushing him, he tried to back off and avoid a confrontation. They assumed he was just chickenshit and pushed him up against the wall. He punched back with a fist crowned by a high school ring and opened somebody’s jaw. Stunned silence was followed by mass pandemonium and swinging fists. Someone smashed a beer bottle against Johnny Moyer’s face and he was bent with pain. The girls saw he’d been terribly hurt and ushered him under a table so that he couldn’t get hit again. Travis, who had been currying favor with the locals by playing pool in the back room, returned to help extricate the gang. The girls took Johnny to the car. Carefully the Austin folks pulled out of the fray until the entire fight was locals fighting locals. Dave and Tary were in the parking lot, sitting on the hood of a 1953 Chevy, watching some fool try to run down people with his Oldsmobile. The brawling Louisiana boys emerged on the porch just as the Austin-bound car was preparing for a quick exit. With a little he-man to he-man talk, they were on the highway, carrying fodder for stories of life on the edge. The tales were greeted with drawn looks and shaking heads especially on learning that Johnny had a broken jaw. What used to be good fun was beginning to be a pain.
Alcohol had taken the spirit of nonconformity and escalated it until problems erupted. Drugs of one sort or another were always involved in the excesses of the group. The Ranger ran a story titled “How to Get Drunk in Dallas,” showing the group’s assumption that being drunk was not only desired but required. Men proved their masculinity by regularly getting sot-faced, expecting the resulting antics to provide them the social esteem of raging Texas bulls.
Alcohol was frequently the aim of getting money, the requirement for starting a party, and the subject of tall tales spread liberally among the friends. Beer and liquor consumed the meager prof
its the group made by selling copies of the Ranger. It was quickly guzzled at the monthly staff party after each issue’s publication. A bottle of booze was the prize of a Saturday bike race sponsored by the Ranger. This race was a mad dash through town in search of a hidden treasure—whiskey. Twelve contestants pedaled furiously around the police station, the capitol, and Scholz’s [Beer] Garten with their eyes peeled for the glint of amber liquid in glass. Gilbert Shelton won. Beer was the payment Kenneth Threadgill laid on his musicians in place of money. It was everywhere. Alcohol was the cause of turning good-natured fun into outrageous antics. Things often got out of hand. Juli Paul once stopped her Triumph on the Austin streets and physically pushed Janis out of the car. Juli roared off, leaving Janis to walk.
Gilbert Shelton and friends played a prank on Lieuen Adkins, who had squirreled away a full bottle of gin to keep it from the lips of his friends during a brief absence. Finding the clear liquid in his closet, they enjoyed it. Then they replaced it with clear water and waited for Lieuen to return. When he returned, he fixed himself a drink. As he sipped, Bill Killeen volunteered to chug the whole bottle of gin if Lieuen would buy them dinner. Lieuen raised his eyebrows at the possibility of seeing the modest drinker, Bill, get smashed on gin and agreed to the bet. Bill drank the “gin,” but Lieuen caught on. He bought them dinner anyway. He tried to get back at them by buying a new bottle of gin, emptying it, and replacing it with water. They upped him once again, finding the real gin, drinking it, and replacing it with water once again.
Some people used peyote, which was legal then. Out on Highway 183, John Clay explained, anyone could go to Hudson’s Cactus Gardens and buy peyote for ten cents a plant. “Forty cents’ worth was an effective dose.” People simmered it on the stove until it turned into a foul green broth. Four ounces were required to get high.