Love, Janis

by Laura Joplin

  There were quiet times too. Janis and I went to the beach one afternoon. We drove the long, narrow highway that snaked through the oil refineries, past the Menhadden canning plant and on through the village of Sabine Pass. We gazed at the miles of marsh grass that filled the Texas coastal plain up to the narrow sandy shore itself. We parked and stood with our faces to the wind. We smelled that telltale Texas coast odor and relaxed with the seemingly endless view of the debris of the tides—the scalloped lace made of seaweed, shells, and jellyfish bodies. “I forgot how nice it is in winter down here,” Janis said with a sigh. “Yes,” I replied, glad that she had said something good about our home.

  Leaving the sanctuary of our house, Janis jumped back into the turmoil of her life. The San Francisco press was openly hostile to her leaving Big Brother. They saw her defection as a public denial of the values that had created the scene and her fame. Her leaving was evidence that the movement was not triumphing but disintegrating. Her career aspirations were interpreted as ego-driven self-glorification. She was falling prey to the financial lust and personal acclaim that the hippie culture openly disdained. For that reason, Albert’s office scheduled the new band’s tour to start in the East.

  The new group spent the weeks before February 8, 1969, rehearsing and experimenting with their new sound. They still hadn’t decided on a name for the group. Various monikers were jokingly suggested, including Janis Joplin Blues Church, Janis Joplin’s Pleasure Principle, the Squeeze, and Janis Joplin and the Sordid Flavors.

  Tuesday, February 11, was the official opening of the tour. The Fillmore East sold out tickets for four performances. Reporters from the magazines Time, Life, Look, and Newsweek dominated the complimentary tickets. Mike Wallace was there with a 60 Minutes crew, taping a segment entitled “Carnegie Hall for Kids.”

  The band opened with Sam Andrew on lead guitar, Terry Clements on tenor sax, Richard Kermode on organ, Roy Markowitz on drums, Terry Hensley on trumpet, and a temporary bass player, Keith Cherry, who was later replaced by Brad Campbell. The only song that Paul Nelson of Rolling Stone deemed acceptable was “Work Me, Lord” by Nick Gravenites. The rest he panned as “failed to mesh, stiff and preordained.” The audience response was called “respectful.” Nelson described his after-concert interview of Janis, saying, “Janis seems that rare kind of personality who lacks the essential self-protective distancing that a singer of her fame and stature would appear to need, [and] the necessary degree of honest cynicism needed to survive an all media assault. . . .”

  Nelson also reported Janis’s abundant apologies and explanations for the band. She said the sound was not developed yet. She was still hunting for a musical director to enliven the arrangements. She protested that the group needed time playing together to get into each other, etc. Nelson was also surprised at Janis’s open plays for support in saying, “Don’t you think I’m singing better? Well, Jesus fucking Christ, I’m really better, believe me!”

  The article in Rolling Stone also reported that some fans thought Janis was at her best ever. Other fans, however, liked her better with Big Brother. One said, “Her thing now is showboating.” Another felt that “success had most definitely spoiled Janis Joplin. This new thing was a brassy burlesque show . . .” The reporter wrote that while “the opening wasn’t a success, neither was it any sort of a disaster.”

  The biggest difference from Big Brother, of course, was that the new band was a hired one of professional musicians. There was no commitment to the democratic band ideals she’d lived with before. Offstage they were different as well. Terry Clements was into yoga and health foods, contrasting sharply with Janis’s ever-increasing drinking. Also, “they weren’t as interesting to be with,” Sam Andrew remembered, “because they didn’t have breadth. They were more one-dimensional, into their music. In Big Brother, Dave had a master’s degree in fine arts, Peter was into photography, James was one-of-a-kind, and I was a linguist.”

  “Janis wanted to love the people in the band,” explained John Cooke. How could she develop that degree of affection and respect with less than two months’ rehearsal? Though the new band recognized her as the leader, she was uncertain in guiding them. Big Brother had made decisions by voting. Janis had no experience in telling musicians how she wanted them to sound behind her. The guys in the new band knew more than she did about music and had more experience in performing and touring. Her failure to assert her role as band leader would be harder to overcome as the band solidified its attitudes.

  Cut loose from the confines of Big Brother, Janis was developing and embellishing her image. She didn’t talk about San Francisco and the movement any longer. Now she talked only about herself. She told a Newsweek reporter, “I didn’t start out to be a singer. I started out to be just a person on the street, like everybody else. But suddenly I got sort of swept up into this singing thing. And after I got involved in it, it got really important to me if I was good or not. . . . I just like to say one thing on stage, ‘Let yourself go and you’ll be more than you’ve ever thought of being.’”

  She began to display her bottle of Southern Comfort prominently onstage. The press always seemed to mention what or when she was guzzling. The Detroit Free Press called her “100-Proof Janis Joplin.” Newsweek reported her late breakfast as “an unlovely concoction apparently made of wood alcohol and chocolate syrup.” Backstage stories described her uninhibited manner of smoking and “always indulging in the hard liquor from bottles that had collected on a table.” The band reportedly joked that she wasn’t psychedelic, she was a psycheholic. Press stories often mentioned an alcohol-related story, such as spending an afternoon drinking sweet vermouth over glassfuls of ice. Janis said she believed in “getting stoned and staying happy.”

  A caring, more experienced black blues singer approached Janis backstage one night. “You’re going to lose your voice if you keep drinking like that,” she told Janis. The warning crept into her thoughts, but she wasn’t yet frustrated enough with her life to try to deal with it.

  The New York Times Magazine quoted her as saying, “Yeah, I know I might be going too fast. That’s what a doctor said. He looked at me and said my liver is a little big, swollen, y’know. Got all melodramatic—‘what’s a good, talented girl doing with yourself’ and all that blah blah. I don’t go back to him anymore. Man, I’d rather have 10 years of superhypermost than live to be 70 by sitting in some goddamn chair watching TV. Right now is where you are, how can you wait?”

  She toyed with the press’s and the public’s fascination with the sexual component of her music and stage persona. She moaned about the boring life on the road, saying, “Guys on the road at least have girls they can pick up, but who are the boys who come to see me—fourteen-year-olds, man.” She described music in sexual terms: “I can’t talk about my singing, I’m inside out . . . like when you’re first in love. It’s more than sex, I know that. It’s that point two people can get to they call love, like when you really touch someone for the first time, but it’s gigantic, multiplied by the whole audience. I feel chills, weird feelings slipping all over my body, it’s a supreme emotional and physical experience.”

  “Being an intellectual creates a lot of questions and no answers,” Janis told a Newsweek reporter in February. “You can fill your life up with ideas and still go home lonely. All you really have that really matters are feelings. That’s what music is to me.”

  That same month, she told Paul Nelson of Rolling Stone that she was still hunting for a band name, and laughingly toyed with the moniker “Janis Joplin and the Joplinaires.”

  At least she had the opportunity to delve no-holds-barred into the blues. In February Janis was blessed with the addition of another great musician to her band, baritone saxophonist Cornelius “Snooky” Flowers, who also happened to be black. He provided essential expertise in making the band the success that it became. “With us, she opened up musically,” Snooky remembered. “With Big Brother, they only had two or three chord changes, but we bro
ught her along.” Snooky called her “Little Mama,” and always made her feel at home. He had a special rapport with Janis because he grew up close to our hometown, in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Snooky helped bring the band together, possessing what Sam Andrew described as a “joie de vivre,” a unique quality that made the hours they spent working together more fun.

  Most of the musicians in San Francisco supported her efforts and wished her the best, yet the public and press anger at her new experiment continued. Had she violated that unwritten contract with the audience? Was she daring to try something new when the audience just wanted to hear her and Big Brother play “Down On Me” yet another time? The first few months performing with the new group tested her conviction in becoming a solo artist, no matter how confidently she talked. There were always those lurking questions: “Will I fail by myself?” “Should I have stayed with Big Brother?”

  In the middle of March the band ventured to California to play to a hostile West Coast audience and press. The media pressure might have been one reason she gave herself for increasing her use of heroin. It might also have been her view of “the thing to do,” since the whole Haight-Ashbury scene was experiencing a heroin epidemic in 1969. Linda Gravenites found Janis purple on the floor one day in March. At least she knew how to revive Janis from that heroin overdose. “Walk,” Linda commanded, forcing her to pace up and down the California hills around her house until three A.M. Janis mumbled, “What happened, Linda?” She replied, “You were trying to die!” “No,” Janis said, ignoring Linda’s warning.

  Unknowingly, Janis was flirting with a lethal combination of drugs—alcohol and heroin. Heroin by itself seldom kills people, even in large doses. In combination, what is known as a polydrug effect takes over, and breathing can stop, resulting in death characterized by pulmonary edema—swelling of the lung tissues with water. By adding heroin to her preferred alcohol, Janis was challenging the odds to get her.

  Oblivious to the problems around her, Janis focused on continuing her professional success. During the five performances the band played in California in March, she was still struggling. Her repertoire included “Maybe,” an old Chantels R&B tune from the late fifties; Robin and Barry Gibb’s popular song “To Love Somebody”; and even a Rodgers and Hart show tune, “Little Girl Blue.”

  Janis called home to wish me a happy birthday and brag about her upcoming appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. “Mama, Mama, guess what they’re paying me for this one show.” Mother replied, “You’re worth every penny of it, darling.”

  March 16, 1969, Janis appeared on Ed Sullivan, an achievement recognized as the pinnacle of acceptance by the public and the powers within the industry. Janis appeared in a hot-pink satin blouse with darker pink pants and an open vest held together by strings of gold links. She sang a thundering “Maybe” to a wildly responsive audience. It was broadcast with a state-of-the-art attempt at a psychedelic backdrop of swirling black and white lines fading to superimposed pictures of the band. At the end of the show all the acts came onstage together and Ed Sullivan walked out too. Janis enthused to Aunt Mimi, “You can’t believe! You’re nobody unless he asks you over to shake his hand.” When Sullivan reached out to Janis, she beamed as bright as any star in the sky. That meant everything in the world to her. Sullivan said, “Thank you,” and Janis’s heart was screaming, “Yes, yes, yes!”

  After the show, everyone gathered at Max’s Kansas City. In his unpublished memoirs, Sam Andrew described a large disparate group of people—Larry Rivers, Edie Sedgwick, Andy Warhol, Bobby Neuwirth, Rip Torn, and Debbie Harry. Tiny Tim roamed around carrying his ukelele in a paper bag. Salvador Dalí emerged from the crowd and chatted for a while in the middle of all the madness.

  Janis was still developing the songs. She worked with a fellow in New York who wrote out the music, arranged it, and made corrections in the vocal harmonies. Everything was coming together. A month in Europe gave the group cause for hope. Finally, the audience could feel the music that they intended. The press was full of glowing reports wherever the band went. The European audience listened, free of Big Brother expectations. They came to the concerts to love Janis and found her eminently worthy of their adoration.

  A high point of the tour was the show in Frankfurt, full of American servicemen. After a rousing encore, Janis told the audience that she was going to do another show to be taped for television. Anyone who wanted to stay was welcome. The majority of them did. At the end they stormed onstage to dance alongside the mistress of “Get It While You Can” rock and roll.

  The concert in London at Albert Hall was also a raving smash. Bobby Neuwirth’s tape made in the dressing room after the show clearly captured a bubbling Janis saying, “It was dynamite, man! I haven’t been this excited in two years, man. . . . Don’t you know how happy we must be?. . . We really broke through a wall that I didn’t think was possible. Like ever since we’ve been here [Europe], like the audiences we’ve had are the best. We’ve always felt, ‘Oh, too much! That’s really wonderful of them.’ But everybody says, ‘Don’t expect that of the British audience. Don’t expect them to do nothing, man.’ When they first got up and started dancing, it was just like a big hot rush. And we just went, ‘Oh, yeah!’ It’s like a whole other door opened up, a whole other possibility that had never occurred to you, like air just came in that you could breathe, maybe. . . .”

  This was the first time Janis had been in Europe. In spite of the schedule, she and Bobby Neuwirth frequented art museums to see the great works she had studied in her days as a painter. She went to the theater in London to see a production of Hair. She was regaining her old cockiness. Responding rudely to a punk in a pub after the theater, Janis ran to Linda Gravenites and exclaimed, “He hit me! Did you see that?” That type of reality-testing hadn’t happened for a long time.

  John Cooke exclaimed, “That band could be fun! Especially in Europe, there were some wonderful concerts, and everybody felt good.” Janis could feel justifiably that they had become the synchronized performing blues band she had wanted. Surely everything was okay now! Then the night of the Albert Hall show, constant friend Sam Andrew, whom she affectionately called “Sam-O,” overdosed at the party celebrating the band’s tremendous success. Once again, Linda Gravenites was there. Janis and Linda put Sam in the bathtub and covered him with ice-cold water. They jostled him constantly to keep him conscious. He seemed to fight their efforts, almost refusing to breathe. In the end, he made it through the ordeal. So did Janis, but she didn’t seem to learn anything from it.

  “I was the one who had to tell her she was wrong in a way she could accept,” sighed Linda. “She could get real defensive, real quick. I hated dope! I just hated it!” Linda continued, “I asked Janis why she did dope, and she said, ‘I just want a little fucking peace, man.’”

  Heroin, like alcohol, dulls the senses. It appeals to people who are cursed with an unquenchable inner turmoil, a fast-paced introverted dynamic that asks questions on top of questions. Both heroin and alcohol can partially stop some types of stress and conflict. Janis was undoubtedly anxious, a condition worsened by her position in life and a lack of other grounding mechanisms. She enhanced her sense of being adrift by a liberal use of alcohol and a diet that was heavy on sugar. The more she used external aids, the more she swung emotionally and the more she needed to calm herself. Rather than making it better, they made it worse. She began a process of self-medication, mostly using alcohol and, in 1969, heroin.

  Janis was never interested in psychedelics, which have the opposite effect. They heighten the inner life, blowing up the complexity and intensity of everyday experience. “With dope, she turned into this grayish-colored shell, and I liked the real her, not this slack nobody,” Linda Gravenites explained. Linda had gotten to the end of her willingness to put up with the dope. Sam’s close call in London convinced her she needed a break. Linda chose to stay in England when the tour returned to the States. Her convenient excuse was that George Harrison, one of the Beat
les, had requested one of her artistically crafted jackets.

  Returning to New York, Janis heard that James Gurley’s wife, Nancy, had died of an overdose of heroin. They had been camping in the woods alone, both sailing on smack while lying in sleeping bags under the picturesque pines. James was charged with murder because he had injected the dope. What did Janis and Sam do when they heard? Why, they went out and scored some dope and both shot up together. It was such horrible news that they just had to escape. Janis sent twenty-five thousand dollars to help pay for James’s legal expenses.

  It’s not as though Janis wasn’t around people encouraging her to quit. “Snooky was great,” remembered Sam. “If he’d had his say, things would have been very different. He didn’t have any bad habits or anything. He’d been in Nam and had seen drugs and he didn’t do any. He was like a preaching person.” Yet Janis told Sam the narcissistic drug taker’s fantasy: “Nothing’s going to happen to me, I’m from tough pioneer stock!” Bobby Neuwirth encouraged her to substitute one drug, alcohol, for the other, heroin.

  Back in the States, the band expected the American public to continue the enthusiasm of the European public and press. They were wrong. Americans were unaware of the triumphs Janis had experienced elsewhere and continued to scorn the group. “Janis really believed the media put-downs,” Snooky said, sighing.

  The end of April and the first half of May, she toured the East Coast again. Based in New York at the Chelsea Hotel, Janis flew out for gigs on the weekends. She hated New York. It represented everything she didn’t want to be, and contained the trappings of society that she rebelled against. The people were different and the pace of life was more frantic. In New York she had to concentrate on the “bizness” instead of art.