by Laura Joplin
The album was titled Cheap Thrills, though they had wanted to use a longer title, Sex, Dope, and Cheap Thrills. It was a phrase that came from the 1930s, Sam Andrew explained, when films like Reefer Madness warned about the ravages of marijuana addiction. Columbia nixed the first two words, but everyone was happy with the compromise.
Bob Cato, art director at Columbia, suggested an album cover of the whole band in bed in a typical hippie pad. Sam Andrew and Dave Getz arrived first at the photo studio and immediately began laughing at the Madison Avenue view of hippie night chambers—pink with ruffles and soft light. When Janis walked in she said, “Let’s trash it, boys,” and they did. They tore out the frilly stuff, took some props from the studio, hung some of their own things around, undressed and jumped in bed smiling for the camera. The shots were innocent enough but didn’t capture anything the band wanted to say about themselves. They weren’t used.
They searched around for other ideas and became inspired. Perhaps Janis delved back into her humor magazine mind-set by choosing R. Crumb to draw the cover. “You’re really big,” he told Janis, and he liked big women. Crumb drew what he liked, the voluptuous Rubenesque woman in a hippie caricature. He watched them in concert and drew impressions of them and their songs for the back of the album. Instead they put his captivating comic art on the cover.
The fun-loving humor of the gang showed best when they were taped for KOED-TV and asked the staple query, “Who is Big Brother?” All at once they replied, “He always stays in the bathroom. Go get him, we’ve been trying to play with that cat for so long. Get him out of there. He never shows up for a gig.”
Janis confided to Sam Andrew while driving the Mercedes-populated streets of L.A., “Listen, if I have to sell out, I’ll sell out. I love this!” Janis’s comments hit him hard. This was far from the righteous attitude that had given birth to the group’s career. “Before, nobody ever cared about whether I lived,” Janis explained to reporter Beatrice Berg in the Philadelphia Inquirer. “This is exciting and I want to do it until it isn’t there anymore. I could be very cool about it, but I don’t want to know it’s all bull. Maybe when I’m 45 I’ll wake up and find this was all wrong, but now’s the time to be excited. I’m excited!”
The new rock groups were difficult for the record executives to manage. They didn’t take guidance from the in-house A&R men. The company artistic directors couldn’t dictate recording plans, music choice, or mixing. The musicians didn’t take input from anyone! That terrified the business structure, because it meant things were less predictable. The executives became more dependent upon the whims of the new artistic temperament. The San Francisco rock groups forced the industry to accept greater artistic freedom.
This loss of business power came while merchandisers were realizing the enormous buying power of adolescents. Teenagers accounted for more than 40 percent of the records sold. The baby boomers were a huge untapped group that had cash to spend, and they didn’t want the same music that their parents, or even older siblings, preferred. The sales of Cheap Thrills amazed the executives. Columbia handled mostly slick and polished material. Few people there understood rock and roll, but the times were changing.
In 1968 Dave Moriaty showed up in San Francisco, just back from the Marine Corps, angry and ready to join the thriving California scene. In Nam he’d heard that Janis was famous. “I went to her house,” he said, “and found her down the street at a washeteria. She was wearing some kind of fur coat and blue jeans. She came running and jumped into my arms and I was just physically bowled over. She had to act like that, to differentiate between fans and friends. She was euphoric.”
Dave probably told Janis that Austin was changing. All the musicians were getting into rock and the police were getting heavy. The whole scene seemed to hit the trail on out to San Francisco. Dave and his friend Gilbert Shelton, cartoonist extraordinaire from the Ranger magazine, went there together and found Dave’s college roommate, Jack Jackson, running the business operations of the Family Dog, which became insolvent in November 1968. Even selling $60,000 worth of posters a month, they couldn’t support the money-losing Avalon Ballroom. Dave, Jack, Gilbert Shelton, and Fred Todd formed Rip Off Press with $35.00 apiece as a down payment on a $1,000 used printing press. Their first job was posters for the reincarnated Avalon, which had been taken over by another group of Texans. Soon they were also printing R. Crumb’s comics.
Many underground presses were flourishing. By 1969, reported Abe Peck, at least five hundred underground papers had emerged in cities and towns throughout the country. An additional five hundred to one thousand were published in high schools. Peck wrote in Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press, “The papers could offer an honest subjectivity in place of an ‘objectivity’ that ignored its own underlying political and cultural assumptions.”
With Cheap Thrills released in July 1968, Janis and Big Brother were now a certified musical success. The album went gold in three days! The band played the CBS convention in Puerto Rico to an audience of the stars Janis had listened to in awe merely a few months earlier. Big Brother was now playing to them, and not just as equals—they were the best of the new competition. What had happened? Janis had hardly changed what she had been doing for years. Now, instead of looking down their noses, people were applauding her.
July 1968
Dear family . . .
HAD to write you a card from Puerto Rico. So far all I’ve seen, unfortunately, is the inside of 3 hotels & a short stretch of beach—but lots of free rum punch on Columbia. We play tonite & leave tomorrow morning for Newport but at least I’ll get to see the island from the air . . . Special note to Mike—honey, just congratulations & pride & all the love I have for your work, in Agape [a newspaper Michael and his friend Jimmy Pryor put out], particularly the poem—oh so fine!!! I have it on my wall. Love to everyone,
Janis
P.S. I’ll be at the Chelsea, 222 W.23rd, N.Y for about a month.
XXX Janis
“The self and the public image blended more in those days,” explained Bennett Glotzer, Albert’s one-time partner. Bennett saw the world mostly according to business loyalties: “Stars used to hang out in public, meeting at designated gathering places. Everybody wore the same clothes on the street that they wore onstage.” Janis was the same as her audience. She shared the same taste in clothes, drink, and musical entertainment.
Her popular acceptance wouldn’t have been possible had her public persona not been based on some true aspect of her personality. It was part of her, but she seemed to begin to believe it was all of her. Instantly, she had become the subject of constant press observation. Janis always had to be “on” because someone was always there observing. “If you practice long enough being a big, brassy blues mama,” Bobby Neuwirth said, “you become one. You start to expect it of yourself just as others expect it of you.” “For me,” Janis explained to the press, “life-style and singing are the same.”
Janis believed the newspapers. “I’m the biggest groupie in the world,” she told Dave Getz. Janis would “meet somebody and fawn all over them, and want to hang out with them,” he laughed.
Paul Rothchild kept smiling and laughing when he described the mutual pleasure Janis and Jim Morrison had, meeting at a party at John Davidson’s house. They talked and joked, egging each other on with verbal sparring. A few hours of drinking and several games of pool later, Jim proceeded to develop his characteristic alcohol induced belligerence. The finale was Janis’s attempted getaway. He wouldn’t take no for an answer and stuck his head in the car as she tried to leave. Janis had to smash a bottle over his head to make her point. The next morning Jim told Paul he really wanted to see her again.
Janis had some rough moments, but her time onstage was still driving her life. “I do believe in some very amorphous things that happen when you’re onstage . . . like something moves in the air,” Janis tried to explain to the interviewer from the Los Angeles Times West magazine, Ras
a Gustaitis. “It seems like a real thing that moves around in the air. It’s nonexistent but it’s so real it’s like love or desire. You know damn well it’s there, you know it’s RIGHT THERE, man—something’s going on.” Rasa became a friend after this interview, Janis liked her questions so much. Rasa called Janis a shaman woman, “wailing as though possessed.”
Rasa quoted a fan who was later echoed by fan letters sent after Janis’s death. “She’s us. She’s not a star, she’s us. I’ve never met her but I know her. It’s like, hearing her, you leave your body and you just move, man. She’s just all energy. I don’t know, she’s all of us.”
It was beginning to seem as if the only time Janis was herself was onstage. Offstage a personal duality arose that made little sense. It didn’t feel as real as the locked-in vibes of the audience trance. She explained, “I’m full of emotion and want a release. And if you’re onstage and it’s really working and you’ve got the audience with you, it’s a oneness you feel. I’m into me, plus they’re into me, and everything comes together.”
The fans got so into Janis and the band that they began storming the stage. The first time was in Cleveland, where people ran through the band while they were playing a song and began trying to pull the bangles off Janis’s arm. She was shocked and startled, saying, “What are you doing? I’m trying to sing.”
“Performing with Janis was an adrenaline-raising thing,” James Gurley said. “I would never be able to go to sleep till past dawn. . . . And so, there was always wanting something that would cool you out.” Janis faced the question of how to reenter the everyday world after her shamanic ecstasies onstage.
Alcohol was always her drug of choice, her friends individually reported to me. Janis favored Rainier Ale when Linda Gravenites first met her, and that evolved into Southern Comfort. Alcohol was a social drug. People went out and had a drink together. As her career advanced, Janis’s comfort in the general social realm seemed to diminish correspondingly with her need to be her public image. Every alcoholic, and surely Janis became one, has this thing, explained Bobby Neuwirth. She told him, “Someday they’re going to find out that I don’t really know what I’m doing.” And she once whispered to Linda, “What if they find out I’m only Janis?”
With heroin, explained James, “it was a casual thing that started. None of us were strung out. Because it was just infrequent, you know. Every couple of months we might come across some heroin. It was always after the show.” Sam Andrew told me quietly, “It was a spirit of adventure and Janis got into doing things other people weren’t.” There was also that sense of childish kinship, a belief in club membership based on the drugs you used or your way of life. “She said it was the blues-singer mystique, like Billie Holiday, to get real messed up,” recalled Linda Gravenites.
“In Cincinnati, we went to a party with a fan after the concert, to a funky hippie pad. We all sat around,” passing a needle and shooting junk. “It didn’t seem insane to us at all, then!” laughed David Getz.
“Someone told me that Albert Grossman sent him to get Janis some heroin,” said Bennett Glotzer. “I say, ‘Bullshit!’ That’s not what Albert would do.” So he didn’t get Janis heroin or support her in her habit. Did it matter? He did other drugs. The message was always what drug you did. In California, while they were recording Cheap Thrills, someone found a packet of heroin on the seat after the band got up from a restaurant booth. Albert was called and he canceled an upcoming gig; instead he flew the group to New York for a talk. Heroin was serious business to him. If lectures could have worked, he could have succeeded in ending any use of the drug.
Janis’s situation was complicated by the public’s need to watch her flaunt her newfound freedoms. The more outrageous Janis was, the more “in” she was. Soon even the parents of her fans began talking “hippie.” The press promoted the idea that breaking down barriers was the gift of youth to society. Janis still read Time magazine every week, cover to cover. Where was the balancing force for her? All messages praised the dissolution of barriers and the creation of a new world. And her public image represented one of the forces for change.
In 1968 the scene began changing. Things didn’t feel right. On April 27, 1968, during the days of peace and love, fans came backstage and stole Janis’s beautiful handmade cape that a fan had given to her. In Ann Arbor, Janis quipped, “They loved me so much, they stole my black pants before I got my purple pants on.”
Janis told Rasa, “It isn’t worth it,” and that seems like it was truly from the heart. “Everyone she met,” lamented Linda, “had a preconceived idea of who she was . . . and that was what she related to. So that’s what she reacted back. So she lost huge chunks of herself by disuse.”
She was beginning to feel the repercussions of becoming a youth-culture Moses. Her success burdened her life like a ball and chain. “Fame is a contract between the audience and the famous, where the seeker knows less about it than the appreciators,” wrote Leo Braudy in The Frenzy of Renown. Janis was no longer controlling her life. It was controlling her.
Still, she hadn’t lost her sense of humor. “She called herself a ‘social phenomonemone’ [fe-nom-o-nem-o-nee],” laughed Linda, remembering Janis’s parody of the phrase social phenomenon. Commenting on her new life, she tossed aside grand illusions with this pithy statement: “There’s a lot of TV in being a musician.”
The novelty of being a white, female blues singer made Janis fabulously successful. It also held her in a prison whose limits she was just discovering. This predicament brought out the worst in Janis—her narcissism. She didn’t just demand love, she demanded worship. The world had become unreal and she had no idea of her limits. Most people get feedback from the world that helps them define their personal aspirations and limits of acceptable behavior. Janis’s success threw her former assumptions away. She wanted her life to be as gratifying as her stage performances.
She seldom thought about the repercussions of her actions. Linda Gravenites explained, “She’d do things without reflection and worry about it later. But it never stopped her from doing anything. The only time we had a fight,” she continued, “was because I had this man I thought was gorgeous and wonderful. One night at the Avalon, Janis got a ride home with him on his motorcycle. I thought, hmmm, she’s not thinking, she doesn’t realize what she’s doing to me. The next day she said, ‘Linda, you’re taking this well.’ I thought, she wasn’t unaware. She knew what she had done to me! I went smash with the coffee cup.” Linda disagrees, but I wonder if Janis was testing the fidelity of her relationship with Linda. Like a three-year-old, Janis demanded to know if Linda would love her, even if she did something awful.
Not everyone played into the new worship routine. Janis could depend on Linda Gravenites and her other longtime friends. Linda Wauldron came for a visit with her two-year-old daughter, Sabina. No matter the time or distance, that relationship was still down-to-earth. Janis could confide and wonder about life with Linda Wauldron, just like when they had been roommates way back when.
Pat Nichols was also a dependable companion. After the ego-enhancing possibilities of one performance Janis and Pat went to a bar and drank Ramos Fizzes. With Pat she could expound on how fantastic her life was becoming. Other times she went to concerts or played pool at Gino and Carlo’s Bar in North Beach. Pat chuckled about the times Janis came to a place where Pat waitressed and gave her a break by waiting the tables for her. “They don’t know who I am,” Janis hooted to her. “They tipped me a quarter!” There were small reminders of reality, but they seem to have been too few.
Janis’s life became ever more tied to the East Coast, away from the antibourgeois scene of the West Coast. At least when she was in California, the San Francisco beliefs supported her style. They provided some help to guide her through the new situations her increasing success forced upon her.
New York held Janis’s business influences—Albert Grossman, her manager; Clive Davis, the head of CBS; and the bulk of the national press. Togethe
r, their influence on Janis seemed to undermine her relationship with the rest of the band. Elliot Mazer explained, “Janis’s ultimate goal was new. She didn’t strive to play Las Vegas or primetime TV; she wanted to play clubs and turn kids on.” Elliot believed that popular music was more about communicating emotion than about technical competence. Big Brother was unequaled in that. “Anybody who saw how good that band was to an audience should have maximized it rather than change everything,” Elliot exclaimed. “Technical competence has little to do with what the audience gets.”
People were whispering in Janis’s ear, “You’re better than the guys in the band. You should leave them. They’re holding you back. They’re going to ruin your career and you’ll just be penniless again.” Janis believed her press clippings, and in spite of her guidepost of “being true to herself,” she started thinking that others knew what was best.
According to Elliot Mazer, Albert’s office was no haven from the doubts expressed by Clive and the press. Nick Gravenites got the same feeling about Albert from other encounters with him. Nick remembered, “Albert would say, ‘You love these guys but I’m more interested in you. I will get you a deal for two million dollars, but only if you get it. I won’t put the money into the other guys’ pockets.’” That’s the way he was. Janis was only twenty-five years old and forced to decide between band loyalty and a dreamlike financial success that seemed to hinge on leaving the band. All the while, the press was harping that the band was holding her back.