by Laura Joplin
March 5, 1968
Dear Mother—
So very busy & N.Y. is very strange—competitive & ugly & is turning us all around. On my evening off, I went & saw Hello Dolly w/Pearl Bailey. She’s wonderful.
Love, Janis
April 4, 1968
Dear Mother,
I just can’t tell you how much your letters have meant to me here—so nice.
Your first born is really doing great in the music business. Did I tell you about all my reviews? Can I tell you again? This is all so exciting to me. Now just since we’ve been in New York, all of the following has happened.
1. Vogue—picture session w/Avedon who is #1 for the “People Are Talking About” section, 3 mos or so.
2. Glamour—Interview & picture for their column on “happening” people—great picture, I’ve got a copy, June issue maybe.
3. New York Times—the review that you saw plus I was interviewed last week by Nat Hentoff (maybe you’ve heard of him?) who’s writing an article on me for the Sunday Times—be in about 2 more weeks.
4. Jazz & Pop—was notified by the editor last night that I had won!! their reader’s poll for female vocalist—be out in April!!!!
5. Eye magazine—picture & article in “Elevator” section people on way up. Out now.
6. Life—interviewed for an article on 7 rock groups which is scheduled though I have my doubts it will appear.
8. New York Magazine—a new magazine, an outgrowth of the Sunday supplement to the N.Y. Herald Tribune which folded, covered a gig in Detroit for an article.
9. Cashbox, Billboard, Record World & Variety reviewed our opening at the Fillmore East in N.Y. last month.
10. Village Voice—a fashion interview & picture thing
11. underground press reviews by 3 N.Y. papers—Rat, East Village Other (EVO), & N.Y. Free Press
ISN’T THAT TOO MUCH?!
I just have to crow.
Our record is coming slowly & at this point we don’t know whether we’re going to be able to finish in L.A. (we’re going back to Calif next week) because our producer wants us to do it in New York which means coming back & also canceling some gigs (losing a lot of money in the process) so we don’t know what’s up. But the 3 tracks that we have down really sound good. As a matter of fact, some friends of ours—a band—just returned from England (they cut their album there w/the Rolling Stone’s producer) & we listened to their tapes & ours are better. At least we think so.
Just bought $115 worth of fur—a deer skin for the wall, 5 used coats to cut up & sew back together for a huge rug & a fantastic white alpaca rug about 3” thick & huge! Fantastic, I love fur & soft things.
I didn’t get any clothes while I was here—just some shoes. In fact I didn’t do anything except the music bizness. Recording, gigs, interviews & picture sessions took all of our time. Oh, new interview to mention—an article for the Women’s page of the Washington Post.
So, sorry, no news except my music. Except I met a very charming young man in Chicago I’m going to visit on my way back to Calif.
Bye for now—try to write again when I’m not so enamored w/myself.
Love, Janis
FOOTNOTE TO: 1. In the current Vogue I’m mentioned in the People Are Talking About, also my fondness for Southern Comfort, also my press person at the office thinks I may be for something bigger in the “American Woman” (!?!) issue.
Janis shared her views on the “bizness” with Glamour: “In New York, music is ambition, pressure, pushiness. Be nice to this one or that one. We were never in the music ‘business’ and all that raka-raka, and we’re beginning to get weird about it.” Yet, she found time to attend the theater and be inspired by Pearl Bailey in Hello, Dolly! Janis had read about New York and its cultural offerings for years in The New Yorker magazine, to which our folks subscribed. Not only was she in the city and ready to enjoy it, but she was also a part of that cultural elite!
Big Brother and their friends prowled the streets hunting for bookstores and clothing boutiques. They encountered the variety and vehemence of the New York natives. One incensed woman accosted Sam and his girlfriend Carol Cavallon at a street crosswalk, cursing him and hitting him on the back. Sam was in a gay mood and decided to try to persuade her he was human. With dark-suited gentlemen hurrying by offering sympathetic glances, Sam assumed the missionary role of the hippie in a foreign land, intent on demonstrating that the world would be a better place if we could love and understand each other.
The hippies tried to lead the masses forward in spite of those who obviously weren’t listening. “Celebrity in those days was about being allowed into a peer group of the leaders,” said noted record producer Paul Rothchild. He continued, “It was like Camelot.” Every day seemed to bring new, miraculous surprises to delight the confident knights of the hippie Round Table. Janis seemed to explode into rock “by being so intensely, joyfully” herself, wrote Nat Hentoff in the New York Times on April 21.
New York folk scene veteran Bobby Neuwirth, Janis’s friend and touring companion who went along to do troubleshooting for Albert’s office, was the kind of guy who was content living in the moment and trying to have a good time. His nature was also colored by true creative talent. He mused, “Maybe the reason Janis had her success was her very lack of polish. She was earnest and sincere.” Bobby said she was an idealist and a dreamer. “Janis was an artist,” he exclaimed. “An artist is not only a person who has something to say, but a person who can’t not say it.”
The subject of heroin arose again in the band’s relationship with Albert. Janis wrote to roommate Linda Gravenites, “Now to explain this fat thing because I understand you’re real skinny now (!!!) So many frustrations here—no men, of course, lots & lots of heavy pressure plus a big lecture coupled w/an implied threat from Albert about smack (no more or he drops us. . . . ) & I was freaking. So I started eating too much, right? Then I started worrying about that—for 2 weeks I ate & chastised myself. Now I’ve got it a little straight—I’m just not gonna worry about it now, I’ve got too much else to fucking worry about. So what we have now is a fat chick with a much better attitude.” The attraction of their new fame with all the energy, excitement, and sense of importance was the driving element in their lives. It easily outgunned rational caution or business threats.
Though Janis lamented the lack of men to her confidante Linda, she was often full of tales of sexual escapades. In April of 1968 she wrote of having a “nice thing w/that guy in Chicago, Jeff. He’s just an incredible cat.” Her intention was to bring him to California, an offer she often made to people. More in the nature of her anything goes reputation, she also wrote to Linda in the summer of 1968 of a drunken romp with Lester Chambers of Blood Sweat & Tears in Puerto Rico, followed by picking up an “absolutely gorgeous boy” in Newport. She relates that once she got to New York “pretty Richard just fled my mind. So started seeing Emmett & Peter—1st night [we] had an incredible shooting party—dope—in my hotel room. Mostly my dope too, come to think of it. Oh but I was so in love! w/all of them! They’ve got such interesting heads—I just love to sit & listen! God. So that night I ended up w/Emmett (just 2 years late was all he said & it was groovey) so spending a lot of time w/them & so happy. One afternoon last week I called Emmett & told him I was bored so, lo, he sent Peter over & honey!! Now I know our tastes are alike. God I’m really in love w/him.”
March 1–2 Big Brother played at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit. They brought tons of equipment, engineers, and producers to make a live recording, planning on using it as the basis of their first album with Columbia. Everyone in Detroit made them feel at home, but somehow the music just didn’t click. Nothing was usable. Janis said, “Albert is miffed,” a favorite expression of hers.
In New York, the band met with producer John Simon and his assistant, Elliot Mazer, a fellow who calls it as he sees it without much soul-searching. Elliot explained that Janis worried about the “untogetherness of the band.” He recalled her as �
�nervous, frightened, confident, and very powerful, a person who was very specific about what she liked and disliked musically.” He added, “Janis was as together in the studio as anyone I have ever worked with, interested in everything and totally committed.”
The producers and engineers struggled to capture the band’s music. The guys knew that their sound was an on-again, off-again commodity. When it gelled, it was great. The rest of the time it got the audience off, but was of questionable musical quality. They talked, listened, tried innovations, and stretched to capture the precision that lived in their minds as they played.
D. A. Pennebaker, the noted filmmaker who did Monterey Pop and profiled Dylan in Don’t Look Back, met Janis while the band was recording in New York. They agreed that he could do a film on Janis similar to the one he did on Dylan. He began appearing when they were working or playing. In the studio he captured the band negotiating about the nature of the instrumental arrangement on songs. Janis danced a few steps, smiled, and winked. “We can do it either way, they’re both valid approaches,” Janis said, presenting her opinion of how to proceed. “But I think, it’s ten o’clock, and I think by four we could have ‘Summertime.’ It will be hard. But if you want to approach it by doing a little bit of ‘Summertime’ and then a little bit of ‘Brownsville’ we can. You all voted to do a bunch of them tonight but I personally don’t agree with it. . . . What you hear is what’s up front and that’s the vocal. Unless the instrumental really makes a mistake, you aren’t gonna hear it.”
Everyone got “superaggressive, separate, sour.” Fred Catero, the engineer on the recording, said that the vocals worked fine, but the instrumental parts always had mistakes. On one song, “after four tries, Janis stormed out, screaming, ‘I ain’t going to sing with those mother-fuckers!’” Slowly they learned how to handle New York and the pressures around them. Janis told reporter Nat Hentoff of the New York Times, “San Francisco’s different. I don’t mean it’s perfect, but the rock bands there didn’t start because they wanted to make it. They dug getting stoned and playing for people dancing. Here they want to make it.”
After a gig in Philadelphia on March 16, everything fell back into place. The band worked and played together. They were friends more than anything. Discussing the prior evening’s debauchery in jovial, reminiscent tones, Janis told James, “You look so cute when you’re passed out, just like Hongo.” They had carried him from the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel, where they were staying, up to his room. They opened the door and announced, “Coming up, one James Gurley,” just like short-order cooks.
Janis was a loyal friend. She once declared to the guys, “Man, you want to hear how shitty some people are,” then launched into a story about a mutual friend who’d been busted in Canada. He played with another band that was in New York at the time and had been advised by his managers to skip bail on a drug bust so he could stay for a gig in the city. The next day they fired him because he couldn’t get a visa. Janis ranted on about it, saying, “He isn’t even mad and I’m furious.” They treated him “shabbily,” she cried.
On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis. The band was stunned but rose to the occasion. On April 17, along with many other musicians, they played a benefit at the Generation Club in New York. “Emotions were running very high and a lot of cities all around the country were in flames,” wrote Sam Andrew in his unpublished memoirs. “B. B King sat backstage and talked about the tragedy in a very emotional, beautiful, calm manner. He made us feel the dignity and the poignancy of the moment. It was like being in church to hear him talk of the need for understanding and love between the brothers and the sisters, oh, yes, all over this world.” Big Brother came onstage for what Sam called a consecrated moment, playing “Brownsville,” “Piece of My Heart,” and “Down On Me.”
An interview appearing four days later in The Village Voice quoted Janis. “Make-up for Janis is a ‘lot of insignificant crap. Sometimes I wish I was black or of some exotic race, where, baby, it’s your face alone that’s working for you, no camouflage.’”
The dichotomy of “us and them” was never so clear as in King’s murder. Janis knew what camp she lived in and told Nat Hentoff of the New York Times, “In Texas, I was a beatnik, a weirdo, and since I wasn’t making it the way I am now, my parents thought I was a goner. Now my mother writes and asks what kind of clothes a 1968 blues singer wears. That’s kind of groovy, since we’ve been on opposite sides since I was 14. Texas is O.K. if you want to settle down and do your own thing quietly, but it’s not for outrageous people, and I was always outrageous. I got treated very badly in Texas.”
She responded to Hentoff’s question about abusing her voice, saying that she tried to lay back and not push her singing, but she didn’t like the feeling in performing. She said, “Maybe I won’t last as long as other singers, but I think you can destroy your now by worrying about tomorrow. . . . We look back at our parents and see how they gave up and compromised and wound up with very little. So the kids want a lot of something now rather than a little of hardly anything spread over 70 years.”
1968
Dear Mother & family
At last a few moments of peace! We have a few weeks’ vacation after finishing a month’s recording in L.A. plus gigs on the weekend. Mother, even you w/your incredible pace would be amazed at all we’ve been doing. Working, working, working, all spare time devoted to sleeping & eating & readying for the next trip. Positively incredible. So I’m in the middle of my one week off. I’m spending a few days at a friend’s cabin in Stinson Beach w/George. I’ve been doing nothing except sleeping, eating, & reading cheap novels. Lots of sleeping. Tomorrow back to the city to spend the rest of my vacation moving. We’ve been evicted because of George (dirty old thing). Our new address is
892 Noe.
phone # I’ll send later. Some vacation—I’ll just get all the boxes upstairs then it’s back to L.A. for mixing. That’s the final thing on the record—it means setting the balances of all instruments & voices to each other. It could be a very simple or a very complicated procedure—we’ll see.
I guess by now you’ve seen the things in Vogue, Glamour, & Mademoiselle. (Did the Port Arthur News have anything on these? If so, please send) I’m sending along two you won’t have seen—the Nat Hentoff piece from the New York Times Sunday entertainment section & Jazz & Pop where I won the reader’s poll. There was also a groovy thing (one full page) in the Washington Post but I only have one copy. Some people from Look have been following us around so we can expect something & Life did us for an article on Rock. So, keep checking your neighborhood newsstands, folks!
I’ve been gaining a little weight & Linda is hard pressed to keep me in clothes. She’s working on something now to end all. Some Indian material, sort of a soft silk chiffon—all vaguely floral blues, greens & purples covered w/a gold thread sewn on in intricate floral patterns—cost me $18 a yd. (!) but it’ll be beautiful—pants very full at bottom, see-through belled very full at wrist sleeves all lined in purple w/gold piping. Just gorgeous. Also of help in this current clothes crisis—I went shopping at Paraphernalia in Beverly Hills in a pair of old Levis & a tee shirt only to be recognized & fawned over by the manager who will make me up anything I want in any color & made to fit me at rack prices. (“Well, we make all of Tony Curtis’ lovely shirts.”) Too much!! Sure beats being a beatnik! Like somebody once said “I’ve been rich & I’ve been poor, and rich is better.”
Hope Mike got & liked his vest. (Dad, I’ll get to you I promise!! Soon as I have time—you greedy devil . . . ) I think it may be a bit short but that’s okay in a vest, just supposed to wear them loose. I hope you let him wear it for heaven’s sake. I was going to send a mess of posters too but then I remembered you were legislating against them when I called last. Ahh, maybe Daddy would like them. . . . .
All this time in L.A. & I haven’t seen any of the family. I really feel bad but I don’t know how to get a hold of any of them. I tried to c
all Barbara but her #’s been changed. Just had a brainstorm. I’ll write her & have her call me at the motel. Why didn’t I think of that before? Well, I do hope to get in touch.
Glad to hear that Laura’s surviving society’s rigors, i.e. school & sorority. Hope Mike’s doing as well. Just to put out a feeler—how about if Mike came out one summer for awhile?
Well, back to my novels—have you red Rosemary’s Baby—it’s a mind-blower, as they say in the vernacular. Album should be out sometime in July. Hope to get it out before we play the Columbia convention in Puerto Rico—July 25. After that we’ll be doing another Eastern thing to promote the record. Oh, !! I almost forgot! I may be in a movie! Starring Michael Pollard who was C. W. Moss in “Bonnie & Clyde.” He’s very big now. Some sort of a hip Western a la “Cat Ballou.” I’d play the part of a Texas barroom singer—no lack of authenticity there & probably get a lot of money & get to sing a tune. But it’s all in the talk stages now.
Bye, my love to everyone
XXXXX
Janis
Also sending a brand new thing from Eye magazine.
Big Brother worked to play “live” in a studio, by recording everyone playing at once. May 20 through June 12 they worked in Los Angeles with John Simon and Elliot Mazer. Sam Andrew described John, saying, “One couldn’t have found someone more unsympathetic to what we were trying to do.” He was a very deliberate, precise, control-oriented producer. Sam Andrew aimed for a Dionysian guitar ecstasy. The band felt John Simon didn’t understand them, their music, or the way they needed to record to capture it on tape.
With studio and live recordings in hand, Janis, Sam Andrew, and Fred Catero, a Columbia engineer, spent thirty-six hours straight doing a final mix for the album. The audience noise on the released songs wasn’t authentic. It was secretaries and other people screaming and clapping in the studio. Even Bill Graham’s opening monologue on the album was added in the studio. But the final product captured the powerful rawness of the band’s performing impact.