Love, Janis

by Laura Joplin

  Many psychiatrists were overjoyed that a drug was finally capable of giving them insight into the problems their patients confronted. They postulated that LSD cut through the inhibitions with which people structure their daily lives to allow the hidden truths of the subconscious to be made conscious. Therapists began giving it to some patients in order to pull repressed memories up to be analyzed. Then the patients could be freed from the control of their subconscious.

  It wasn’t long before LSD found its way into the hands of artists. Aldous Huxley, who had become interested in psychedelics through mescaline, took his first LSD trip in 1955 and was profoundly affected by its potency. Dr. Timothy Leary of Harvard, who was conducting research on LSD, found poets and musicians to be willing subjects. He gave it to Allen Ginsberg in 1960, and together they made a list of people who should be turned on. Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, took LSD through the experiments of Dr. Leo Hollister at Menlo Park in California. Once introduced to LSD, Leary, Ginsberg, and Kesey continued their experiments outside the laboratory. The LSD experience gave users strong new convictions about spirituality and the world. Their experiences were so powerful that they withstood the challenges and taunts of the uninitiated long after the drug wore off. They were so elated by them, they wanted to share them with others.

  Important differences developed among the three about sharing LSD. Huxley counseled that LSD should be given only to an elite group of people who could handle its potency. Leary felt that LSD was right for everyone if the circumstances were controlled and an experienced guide was provided. Kesey pulled out all the stops and felt that no controls were necessary.

  Kesey shared LSD with friends at his house, and a group of people formed through the shared experience. Where other users had analyzed and tried to describe LSD and its effects, Kesey’s group played with their new visions. They called themselves the Merry Pranksters. In comic-book fun they imagined a place called Edge City, a town reminiscent of that described by Robert Heinlein in Stranger in a Strange Land, which was about a Martian living on earth. They redesigned their dress to reflect a user’s absorption in design and detail. They especially liked Day-Glo orange and green. They christened their new selves with fresh names like Gretchin Fetchin, Mal-Function, and Cool Breeze. They took off from California in July 1964 to visit Leary’s group in New York, driving a converted 1939 school bus that had the sign FUURTHER on the front and CAUTION: WEIRD LOAD on the rear.

  The Pranksters were back in California by the end of 1964. Word about LSD was getting around. Aldous Huxley had written The Doors of Perception in 1954 about his mescaline experiences; it was published together with his Heaven and Hell in 1963. In 1962, Huxley’s Island appeared, a saga of what a psychedelically enlightened community could be. Other books about exploring the inner self began to appear: Adelle Davis’s Exploring Inner Space and Alan Watts’s The Joyous Cosmology. The popular press was beginning to run articles about LSD. People were becoming aware that something was afoot.

  The Pranksters took it upon themselves to initiate a small number of citizens into the new culture. They began to hold what they called “acid tests.” The initial gatherings were held in people’s houses and advertised only by means of a poster that said “Can You Pass the Acid Test?” At first only Pranksters and their friends attended. Later others began hearing about the experience, and participation grew.

  Organizer Stewart Brand, who later developed The Essential Whole Earth Catalog, took over the management of a grand acid test in San Francisco. He rented the Longshoreman’s Hall in San Francisco, a popular convention center, and hired a publicist who, among other things, released three weather balloons that spelled the word NOW. Scheduled for the third week in January 1966, ten thousand people paid to listen to the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company, watch various theater groups, and amble among booths that sold sweatshirts, incense, and psychedelic literature.

  Kesey’s experiment was not just attracting nonconformists, it was creating them. The moment of social action had arrived, and the powers resisting change were already fighting back. Kesey was arrested three days before the January test for possession of marijuana. After the watershed event, he jumped bail and headed for Mexico.

  Janis arrived on the Haight scene in June 1966. By then the acid ritual had evolved into a multimedia experience, with rock music and other sensory visuals and movement. Gathering in large ballrooms for rock-and-roll dances, people were bedecked in velvet and brocade, madras from India, and anything paisley. They were typically aged eighteen to twenty, encountering the profound through ingesting tablets of LSD.

  Big Brother’s modernized spiritual “Blindman” echoed the listeners’ cravings, intoning, “Blindman stood by the way and cried, cryin’, ‘Show me the way, the way to go home.’” Big Brother’s audience knew “home” meant returning to the truth, living in love and harmony, and discarding the irrelevant trappings of the bourgeoisie. Their audience was constantly tripping. Acid was legal and essentially free in the Haight-Ashbury district.

  These denizens of the Haight had left the controlled, clean environments of middle-class America and, with the aid of acid, began playing with the memory-stored images of their lives. They turned themselves into elaborately adorned replicas of the visions they saw. They dug through the discards of society’s closets, easily found in the local Goodwill stores, creating the new out of the old. They stared with wonder at design patterns reminiscent of the gaudy Victorian era. They found interest in intricacy, much as their parents found delight in the simple, direct lines of the modern or Bauhaus movements. The young wanted decoration in every conceivable corner of their lives, from beadwork on their shoes to braids, feathers, and beads in their hair, multiple rings, acres of bangles adorning arms and legs, and layers of clothing that blended but never matched.

  With or without the drug behind it all, the music performed in San Francisco had changed. Though it was called rock and roll instead of folk music, it had discarded the bubble-gum lightness of early rock so evident in such tunes as the 1955 hit “Earth Angel.” Folk songs delivered a true picture of human drama, but only the new rock, with its psychedelic influence, promised a way to confront the audience with a sensory experience of reality.

  The new rock was more than music. Listening alone couldn’t convey the whole experience—all the senses were involved. Carl Belz, in The Story of Rock, wrote that the new rock concerts were much like the happenings created by 1950s New York artists Claes Oldenburg and Alan Kaprow, combining music, art, drama, and life. The musicians pushed the electrical pulsing to such a volume that it seemed to ignite the molecules in the air, which surrounded the audience like prickly vibrations, forcing them to dance.

  Janis brought her roots in blues. She knew the blues, and wanted her audience to know them through her. If the audience sought to have all its senses aroused at a concert, then Janis, as trance enhancer, brought total commitment to her music. Hers was not a music born merely of the vocal cords anyway, but an ensemble piece within her physical presence alone. She coaxed the music with urging arms and strutting steps. She delved deep within herself, so that pieces of her soul seemed to dance along the harmonies and ride the tidal waves of sound that defined her voice.

  Big Brother and the Holding Company slowly began weeding through their song list. Their loud freak rock overwhelmed even a singer as strong as Janis. The most she could do was stand in the back and play the tambourine on those numbers. They began to change their repertoire to include more blues, enabling the lead singer to move in front of the music. The singing was shared among the group. Janis was featured only on about a third of the songs in any one night.

  Her first out-of-town gig was a dance in an indoor exhibition building at the Monterey County Fairgrounds. The poster read, “Karma Productions & Brotherhood of the Spirit Presents: Big Brother and the Holding Company, Quicksilver Messenger Service, The Gladstones, Bill Ham’s Lightshow, Famous Underground Movies.
Don’t Miss the Great Event, July 2 & 3.” Tickets were sold at the Psychedelic Shop in the Haight, City Lights Book Shop in North Beach, and in Berkeley, San Carlos, and Menlo Park.

  July 3, 1966

  Hello!

  In Monterey this weekend for an “Independence Dance.” Beautiful country—have a photograph from this Sunday’s paper to send for illustration. Work’s going fine except a lot of hassles w/the union (I think I’m going Republican). A letter brimming w/news as soon as I have time to write. Like to hear from you—Love

  XX

  Janis

  The new rock artists invited the audience to be a part of the music. Listener and performer built a feedback loop that evoked new responses on each other’s part. The artists depended upon spontaneous reactions in the audience. They lived Baba Ram Dass’s words “Be here now.” Here, at last, was the true initiation into another life, out of an ordered, planned, and logical culture. To leave the mental control of that life even once was to know a truth that permeated the rest of your days. Spontaneity was more than a characteristic. It was a religion unto itself.

  The press coined the term hippie as a takeoff on hipster. Few in the Haight liked the word, but it stuck. By June 1966 there were about fifteen thousand hippies in the Haight-Ashbury area. They spawned a local culture. By September 1966 they had their own newspaper, The Oracle, giving the true inside story. It emerged from the model of The Village Voice in Greenwich Village. The Voice had led the way, showing that virtue and inspired amateurs could produce a meaningful community newspaper, wrote Abe Peck in Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press. The Oracle also took energy from Art Kunkin’s development of the Los Angeles Free Press, which found its power and financial viability by focusing on the racial uprisings in Watts. The Oracle was destined to be the herald of the new social order of the Haight, and was different from the other papers because of its grounding in the developing hippie culture. Abe Peck quoted Allen Cohen, the managing editor: “The Oracle was designed to aid people on their [LSD] trips.” He continued, describing the paper’s focus as “a more conscious, loving, intimate, non-alienated world . . .” One sign of the difference was the paper’s use of colored inks in nontraditional ways, sometimes just squirting them on the paper and adding aromatic perfumes.

  The new culture spawned a changing emphasis in local specialty shops catering to the hippies. The Psychedelic Shop opened in January 1966 and sold underground newspapers, rolling papers and pipes of all kinds for smoking grass and hash, and the other small necessities of daily existence. The first hippie boutique, Mnasidika, was owned by Peggy Caserta and her partner, who became Janis’s friends—everyone in the area was a member of an extended family tribe.

  Janis must have felt that the audience response was as much for her as for the music. This was the ultimate community she had sought to find or create since her break with convention at age fourteen. What blissful delight! They accepted her for her true self, her soul. They related to the real person that she was.

  Janis found individual acceptance as well, falling in love with James Gurley. He was tall and angular with a distant, haunting look. He had spent months in Mexico taking psychedelic mushrooms with the Indians in the mountains. He didn’t use LSD, but his days with the folk who had learned from psychedelics for centuries added to his awesomeness. He sometimes donned a full set of buckskin mountain-man clothes and wore feathers in his long curly hair. Janis felt James had everything she needed in a man to make her feel as if she fully belonged. James even left his wife, Nancy, to live with Janis for a while. For weeks they cuddled and played music. With him she could reveal the tender, soft Janis, the one that didn’t need the protection from the tough, ballsy mama. Ahhh, such a dream she was living. Janis had left Austin on a whim and dropped into never-never land to become romantically linked with one of its leading citizens.

  The music within Big Brother and the Holding Company was evolving. Well-intentioned critics told the guys, “You have to get rid of the chick!” But there was never any question for the five members that they were right for each other.

  San Francisco was the place to develop their music. Chet Helms, through the Family Dog commune, had put on the first dances at the Fillmore with the aid of Bill Graham. As head of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, Graham had a long-term lease on the building. Later Graham chose to put the dances on himself, and Chet et al. moved their scene to the Avalon Ballroom. Together they provided a rich atmosphere, flush with musical opportunities. In frequent small concerts, the music evolved according to audience feedback.

  Big Brother became the unofficial house band at the Avalon Ballroom. It was a large open room on the second floor of a typical storefront at 1268 Sutter Street, at Van Ness Avenue. Built in 1911, the Avalon held about twelve hundred people. It was originally a dance studio, part of a chain of ballrooms in the 1930s. Ornate gilded balconies ran along the top of the room. It was very Deco, with gilded columns, mirrors, and red flocked wallpaper. A full bar was upstairs, but they served no alcohol. There was a dance floor and seating area on the first floor. Here and there were other activities to entertain patrons: light shows, strobes to play in, chalk for face-painting, and more. The acoustics were wonderful, as the ceiling was draped for sound.

  The Avalon provided the base to develop the final polish, but the gelling as a unit came when Big Brother and the Holding Company rented a large summer home in the canyon town of Lagunitas. Other rock bands had moved there from the city. Big Brother’s house, nicknamed “Argentina,” was down the street from the Grateful Dead’s place. Surrounded by acres of woodlands, they practiced their music daily in the living room of their rambling hunting lodge, which was rumored to have once sheltered Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir. The house seemed to evoke great things from a grander era. Here the group’s musical cohesiveness was strengthened by living together and talking, breathing, playing, and partying around music.

  August 13, 1966

  Dear Family . . .

  At last a tranquil day & time to write all the good news. I am now safely moved into my new room in our beautiful house in the country. I’m the only member of the band out here so far. Our landlady & one of her daughters are still here but they’ve gone out to dinner so I’m all alone, sitting in a comfortable chair by the fireplace, doors wide open and a 180° view of trees, redwood & fir. Bliss! I’ve never felt so relaxed in my life. This is the most fantastic house & setting. I really wish you could see it. Of course part of my comfort is due to the fact that this is the first day in 10 or 11 that I’ve had to relax at all. We’ve been working every night for 11 days. S.F., Vancouver, S.F. again—and we really worked! Last night, for example, we played a benefit. They had scads of talent-5 rock bands, 2 poets, 2 comedians, a puppet show, etc. Went on from 3 pm to 1 am. We went on at 5 and again at midnight. Really was exciting though . . . two of the bands have hit records out—the Grass Roots (who incidentally are big fans of ours and even wear our buttons when they play) and the Jefferson Airplane—and were very well received, but I/we got an ovation, bigger than any other groups, for a slow blues in a minor key. Wow, I can’t help it—I love it! People really treat me with deference. I’m somebody important. SIGH!!

  We have a P.O. Box here in Lagunitas but I don’t know the number—will add a P.S. w/it. I’ve got the best bedroom in the house (I got here first) w/sunshine all day. The weather up here is much warmer than in the city. In S.F., you have to wear a heavy coat even in the afternoon, but it’s just perfect here. I plan on getting a wonderful tan. And it’s not too hot like Texas. Just lovely—75–80°, don’t you envy me? If you have a map, look on the coast for Stinson Beach—we’re about 10 mi. inland from there.

  The guys from the band are going to be in a movie—a short, about 2 girls who fall in love w/a rock and roll group. I can’t be in it because I’m a girl & consequently no romantic figure for 2 girls. In the movie, the band will be called The Weasels. Not much money but it should be fun. Also in the
fire, we’re talking to ESP records—they want us to do an album. Did you read in TIME about the new upsurge in underground newspapers—the East Village Other, Berkeley Barb, etc? Well, ESP is either owned by them or owns them & is sort-of an underground record company. Not big and flashy, only does albums, & only does slightly out-of-the-way groups, which I must admit we are. We wouldn’t get a big nat’l following like the Lovin’ Spoonful, but we’d have a steady following among the hippies.

  And lest you think that not much—beatniks are making money these days. And by being beatniks, it’s really amazing. There’s such an upsurge among teenagers trying/wanting to be hip. Several of my friends own dress shops & make really far-out clothes for them, others make beads & sell them, others make leather things, but most of them are in the rock & roll business. Really fantastic—a social phenomena really. The society seems to be leaning away from itself, straining for the periphery of hell, the edges, you know. At least in California. Now that is a qualifying statement.

  —Later, sorry. Address is P.O. Box 94, Lagunitas, Calif.

  As I mentioned earlier, we played Vancouver 2 weekends ago, enclosed something I brought back for Mike & Laura. For Laura’s jewelry box-money collection, a Canadian dollar; for Mike’s coin collection, a Canadian nickel. Note the edges.

  A fashion note—thought y’all would like to know what everyone looks like out here. The girls are, of course, young & beautiful looking w/long straight hair. The beatnik look, I call it is definitely in. Pants, sandals, capes of all kinds, far out hand made jewelry, or loose fitting dresses & sandals. The younger girls wear very tight bell-bottoms cut very low around the hips & short tops—bare midriffs. But the boys are the real peacocks. All have hair at least Beatle length—[drawing indicating chin-length hair], most rock & roll people have theirs about this long [shoulder-length] & some, our manager Chet’s for example as long as this [below shoulders], much longer than mine. And very ultra Mod dress—boots, always boots, tight low pants in houndstooth check, stripes, even polka-dots! Very fancy shirts—prints, very loud, high collars, Tom Jones full sleeves. Fancy print ties, Bob Dylan caps. Really too much—just like in the magazines, folks.