Love, Janis

by Laura Joplin

  Peyote had been used by Indians in the western United States and Mexico for centuries. After it was discovered by white men, it went from the scientists to the intellectuals to the bohemians, a process that took thirty years. Psychiatrists believed mescaline, the active ingredient in peyote, mimicked schizophrenia. They used it therapeutically to help clients draw their emotions and visions from the depths of their subconscious. Others saw it as a learning tool to escape the rational plane of a literal world. Psilocybin, similar to mescaline, was discovered in 1958, and by 1961 had become the toast of the New York jet set, who zoomed off for weekends of visionary splendor. Texas was slow to catch on to new trends. Peyote still held sway. Janis surely tried peyote, but she wasn’t taken by a spiritual rebirth or even a sufficient interest in using it frequently.

  Marijuana was smoked by several people, though because it was illegal and the gang was watched, the level of paranoia was high. Most of the time a joint was lit in a bathroom with the blinds drawn. Janis and Tommy Stopher gave Powell St. John his first joint. It was extremely thin, but the three of them shared it reverently. Janis and Tommy said they got high off it, but Powell didn’t feel any effects.

  Janis enjoyed grass because it was something “verboten,” but alcohol was her drug of choice. She stuck to beer, as did most of the crowd. Underage drinking was their primary crime. Alcohol was also their biggest problem. No one seemed to know when to stop drinking.

  By the winter of 1962 a new fellow had arrived in town. Chet Helms was a Texan and a former UT student now living in San Francisco. He was just passing through and was taken with the quality of the folk music in Austin. These musicians had achieved something the San Francisco musicians wanted, a true roots sound. The Northern California musicians were stuck in a pop-folk sound, yearning for authenticity. Chet told Janis that she would be a hit in San Francisco.

  The flicker of fascination flamed in her mind. She set about planning to go. She needed money, and one way she found it was to not buy food—she stole it instead. In this way she intended to be ready to leave with Chet.

  Many people shoplifted occasionally in the Ghetto group. For most it was for thrills. Janis liked to lift a jar of maraschino cherries or some T-bone steaks from the Checker Front Store across the street and down a bit from the Ghetto. Then she paraded her cache mirthfully in front of the gang. Bill Helmer invoked situational morality to take avocadoes because the outrageous prices kept them out of reach. He also felt that if he did get busted, it would make good newspaper copy: BUSTED FOR SHOPLIFTING AVOCADOES! “We needed them for the avocado dip!”

  Janis liked the excitement of life on the edge, living between the known and the unknown. Where Port Arthur may have formed her impulses, only in Austin did she get to test her wings and practice her style. Austin tutored her in performing, gave her the necessary support and recognition, and shaped her Texas-style public satire. Janis’s life in Austin was the proper jumping-off point for her. It was a place to test the waters, to gain experience, so that when opportunity beckoned, she would be ready.

  SEVEN

  THE SAN FRANCISCO BEAT SCENE

  I ain’t got no reason for living

  I can’t find no cause to die . . .

  I ain’t got no reason for going

  I can’t find no cause to stay here

  I got the blues

  I got to find me that middle road

  —JANIS JOPLIN, “No Reason for Living”

  IN MID-JANUARY 1962, when the winter term ended at the University of Texas, Janis and Chet Helms put their thumbs to the wind and hitchhiked to San Francisco. Janis wanted more than Austin offered. On the Road had been her map for finding life, and she had already been to Venice, California. Her next goal was the North Beach community of San Francisco.

  Janis and Chet landed first in Forth Worth, where Chet’s parents lived. The traveling pair were received politely and entertained over dinner, but Janis wouldn’t court their approval. They were put off by her profanity and wild-woman style. Janis and Chet were refused hospitality for the night. They headed out to the highway and thumbed down truckers heading to California. Not more than fifty hours later they made it to San Francisco.

  “Wall-to-wall people” is how Nick Gravenites described the scene. Nick was a tall, gentle man full of burning emotions that he let loose in short bursts to dramatize his points. He had been into folk music since 1955. In 1959 he headed to San Francisco from the University of Chicago. The people in North Beach were much like the ones Janis knew in Austin and Port Arthur, but there were a lot more of them.

  The scene owed its existence to the literary soirées that Kenneth Rexroth, noted radical poet, had been holding in apartments in the city since the 1940s. The city on a hill with a cultured undercurrent attracted poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1951. In 1953 he stumbled onto what became the City Lights Pocket Book Shop. By 1955 Ferlinghetti was the sole proprietor. It was open from morning until midnight, seven days a week—the first all-paperback bookshop in the country at a time when hardcovers were still the norm. From the start, the owners wanted the bookshop to be the heart of an intellectual and artistic community.

  The 1950s saw publication of such books as Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and William Whyte’s The Organization Man. They raised the charge of bartering one’s soul to the corporation at a time when American corporations controlled one of every two dollars of wealth in the country. They jabbed at the idea of a managerial approach that enslaved the thoughts and habits of its workers, in contrast to the national magazine stories about continued prosperity.

  In 1950s America, nonconformists were despised and feared because they rocked the boat in which everyone sat busily rowing. Nonconformists were attracted to City Lights, and providing an alternative was the whole point of the endeavor.

  National awareness focused on the San Francisco scene from the time of an October 13, 1955, poetry reading at Six Gallery. Six poets read that night; second among them was Allen Ginsberg reading “Howl,” a complaint that cried, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix . . .” Jack Kerouac was there, shouting amid a clapping, foot-stomping audience rhythm section—“Go! Go! Go!”—as Ginsberg read in rapid patter. It was a watershed. The rest of the nation awoke to the challenge when customs agent Chester MacPhee seized 520 copies of “Howl” as they entered the country from the British printer. He labeled the poem “obscene.” Ferlinghetti was arrested as the publisher. From that moment on it was required reading for every soul with a flickering sense of disagreement with the establishment. City Lights Book Shop became nationally known.

  Janis entered a scene that had been started and led by a group that Ferlinghetti called “New York carpetbaggers.” Rexroth called it “the San Francisco Renaissance.” When Janis arrived in January 1963, the artistic scene had peaked. Many of those defining the pulse of the movement had fled North Beach to less visible locales. Michael McClure, noted local poet, moved to Haight-Ashbury. Lawrence Ferlinghetti took a part-time home at Big Sur. Gray Line bus tours of the beatnik scene signified an end to the underground vitality living off its own energy. Janis came to a place that was filled with others like herself, seekers from across the country attracted by the reputation of the area. They arrived unconnected and searching for roots. Janis stayed briefly with Chet Helms and his friends and then moved on.

  North Beach offered Janis a true cross-race experience, with a greater variety of ethnic and social backgrounds than she had ever known. It was one of the first integrated communities in America. George Wallace was elected governor of Alabama with the slogan “Segregation now; segregation tomorrow; segregation forever!” The San Francisco integration was vilified in the press and watched by the police. Those within it grew that much more committed to their ideals. Their frontier mind-set quickly developed into a sense of community, which was welcome, as most had cut
their ties to home.

  Sleeping on concrete floors or in lofts over neighborhood warehouses, the Beats cultivated a sense of “All for one and one for all.” Whoever had money provided the food, with each person contributing whenever he or she could. Janis ran with a group that often gathered at an apartment rented by a close friend, Kenai, a talented artist. Kenai was Filipino, but his parents were diplomats, so he grew up everywhere but the Philippines. He entered Northwestern University in Illinois at the age of thirteen. Transferring among several colleges, he eventually received a bachelor’s degree in English history and another in psychology. He dropped out of architecture school in 1956 to be a beatnik and live in North Beach. For a time, he helped publish a twenty-page magazine called Beatitude, which sold in the Bay Area. He lived an artist’s life, asking very little and giving what he had, all with a smile on his friendly face. At three A.M. he would sweep the bars and gather everyone to his place. People would bring food and someone would always go to the bakery at Union and Grant to get plenty of French bread. Sometimes the events were food feasts, when a friend would donate fifty pounds of shrimp or lobster from his job at Fisherman’s Wharf. Other times there was very little, but whatever there was everyone shared.

  No one put down anything except conventionalism. People wanted to feel everything, merely for the value of experiencing. The first oral contraceptive was approved by the FDA in May 1960. This drug paved the way for the sexual revolution Janis was encountering. Allen Ginsberg blew into town again in August 1963. He had been traveling in India and had a fresh angle to his message of free love to save the world: He was into sex orgies, a world united into one big family through physical bonding. Experimentation was the byword, whether through heterosexual or homosexual acts.

  The excitement of creating and being part of a vibrant artistic current was enhanced by the use of various drugs floating through the Beat scene, especially speed. It magnified hugely the intensity of an earlier day, when coffee was the drug of choice. That powerful brew loaded with caffeine had horrified citizens at the turn of the century in what was known as the bohemian coffee cult. Users were warned that the drink could cost them their self-control, that they would be subject to fits of nervousness and depression. Speed was an infinitely bigger step down that same path.

  Jack Kerouac wrote one version of On the Road in 1951 in twenty coffee and Benzedrine-driven days, chronicled by his biographer Tom Clark. Kerouac followed a formula discussed in the North Beach community: He worked and lived a somewhat regular existence for a while, then chucked it all, holed up with his typewriter, downed speed, and wrote rambling memories of his earlier life. Big Sur, published in 1962, was written in much the same way.

  Alcohol was also a common drug in North Beach. Janis’s tolerance for alcohol had reached a level where she could drink a lot with little visible effect. In fact, at only twenty years of age she was beginning to be compulsive about her liquid friend.

  The Coffee Gallery became one of Janis’s favorite haunts. She sang there frequently, though it was never a source of real income. Kenai sometimes passed the hat during her performance but never raised more than eight dollars. James Gurley, who later played with Janis in Big Brother and the Holding Company, frequently played there. He performed eerie original music and distinguished himself with a clean-shaven head. Sam Andrew—also a future member of Big Brother—played jazz there with Steve Mann.

  At the Coffee Gallery, Janis met her eventual roommate and longtime friend, Linda Gottfried. Linda, a Los Angeles girl, had just turned nineteen and was focused on life’s frustrations. A lover said, “Go to San Francisco. You’re not the only one who feels like you. Go to the Coffee Gallery and look up my friend Janis Joplin.” Following those instructions, Linda appeared, and Janis was performing that night.

  Janis was living in a basement on Sacramento Street. It wasn’t a basement apartment, Linda said, it was the basement of a house that was rented by people who were fans of Janis. They let Janis live there free because they liked hearing her sing around the house. Linda moved in and the two of them lived together off and on.

  Together, the two girls planned their days around the idea of nurturing their creativity. They sampled many modes of expression alongside Janis’s devotion to painting—photography, poetry and song, and more. There were places to see, things to do, and people to know. At night they would collapse at home and share SpaghettiOs and Fudgsicles.

  To be an artist was to interpret experiences for others. The more a person tuned in to the charismatic forces in life or in a piece of art, the more that person lived in the ecstasy of energy we call life.

  In 1963 Janis appeared on a local radio show with Peter Albin, one of the founding members of the group she would eventually join in 1966, Big Brother and the Holding Company. Janis was a bit overweight and her face was broken out at the time. She wore a man’s dress shirt that was unbuttoned several notches, allowing glimpses of her breasts. She sang in a rough manner that accentuated the bluntness and defiance of her physical appearance.

  Janis had been singing with Roger Perkins, Larry Hanks, and Billy Roberts. They performed around town, at the Folk Theater and other places. They had a spot in the upcoming San Francisco State Music Festival, organized by Peter Albin’s brother. They never showed up for the festival, perhaps because Janis had injured her leg trying to mount her Vespa motorcycle while she was drunk.

  Or perhaps it was the call of the road that compelled her to miss the festival. Rumors say Janis hitchhiked to New York sometime in 1963 for a brief look at the tap root of the Beat movement, Greenwich Village. Chet Helms said that Janis quaked in her shoes about being on the road from Austin to San Francisco when they arrived in January 1963. She confided to him, “I’ve never hitched this far.” She clung to him with female softness, asking for male protectiveness. A trip across the country later in 1963 would have been a giant leap from the fear she showed to Chet.

  A trip, solo or with someone, must have appeared more possible considering the network of folk musicians that had developed coast-to-coast. The Beat movement was old enough to have spawned a whole series of coffeehouses across the country. Most were loosely allied with universities. Since hitchhiking was “the experience” for the young Beats, the group mingled a lot. Each enclave knew who the hot talents were in other spots. Janis could have availed herself of this underground railroad.

  On November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas, ushering in an age of anti-Texas sentiment—that Texas was where the crazies lived. It must have helped fuel Janis’s belief that Texas was beyond help—if JFK could be shot in broad daylight, then nothing was safe down there. It would have been easy to sit in a bar in San Francisco and put down her home state.

  Folk music was also in the news. The August 27 issue of Look magazine wrote, “Yesterday, it was the esoteric kick of history buffs and music scholars. Today, it’s show biz. With a hoot and a holler, folk music has taken over from coffeehouse to campus to prime time television.” Hootenanny was a regular Saturday night television show. Peter, Paul and Mary made seventy-five hundred dollars a night in concert. The popular folk groups were giving fewer campus concerts and making big bucks in cigarette commercials and nightclubs.

  The national acceptance of the folk scene may have helped Janis decide to head to New York and witness Greenwich Village for herself. She passed through Port Arthur in December, showing up unexpectedly at the Christmas gathering of her friends at Jim Langdon’s house in Lafayette. He had quit school and taken a job working on the local newspaper to support his growing family. Most of Janis’s friends were in their third year of college, attending either the University of Texas, Lamar Tech, or other good schools in the South. Several were married with children.

  It must have been obvious by then that her life was far different from the lives of her friends. While Janis was pursuing a degree in the Beat experience, they were looking for careers and thinking about raising children. Their social beliefs and
artistic interests were still similar, but the individual commitments were changing.

  Janis was accepted as an equal, but more as an equal to the men. The women in the group were mostly wives, often with children. They were working to put their husbands through school. They prepared the food and cleaned up after the all-night drinking, talking, and listening-to-music sessions.

  Janis was taking off for Venice, San Francisco, and New York. She had male and female lovers, and lived a life ostensibly focused on developing her artistic expression. I wonder how she felt when she came home? Most of the women she knew in Port Arthur were not role models for her. They were hardly pals or confidantes. They were often just appendages to the real focus of the group, the men and their jovial and intellectual haranguing. Rae Logan and Gloria Haston explained that sex-role issues had not yet come together for anyone. They would, but not in 1963.

  Soon she was off for New York. Linda Gottfried explained that Janis went there for the purpose of earning and saving money so that she wouldn’t confuse her image as a San Francisco artist by working in California. She intended to return to San Francisco and continue exploring her creativity. In New York, she got a job as a keypunch operator, working for a large company. She moved into a residence hotel full of musicians and druggies. She was on the edge, supporting herself, and pursuing the artistic life in the Village. She ran into Austin friends Gilbert Shelton and Joe E. Brown. She looked the same as she had in Austin, Gilbert said, only a bit thinner, having lost the pudginess that characterized her at the Ghetto.

  New York was full of meth that year. It was the newest drug and could be found everywhere. In February 1963, Allen Ginsberg had written to Timothy Leary, as recorded in Ginsberg by Barry Miles, “All the young kids are shooting [needle] a drug called methedrine. An amphetamine semi-hallucinogen—haven’t tried it yet. It’s all the vogue.” There were also huge pot love circles with free sexual exploration enhanced by the stimulating properties of marijuana.