Love, Janis

by Laura Joplin

  Albert’s office was in New York, as were Columbia’s headquarters. She also had to contend with press interviews and receptions arranged by her press agent, Myra Friedman. Myra was a special type of friend, a break from the monotony of male musicians. Bennett Glotzer, Albert’s partner, explained that one of Myra’s assignments in the office was to be Janis’s companion when she was in New York. Janis was, for most people, a humorous, captivating, and inspiring friend.

  Janis’s schedule gave her May 12 to June 16 off for a much needed vacation. She said, “Traveling around, you don’t see anything but the inside of airports, Holiday Inns, and men’s gymnasiums. . . . Success gets in your way. There’s so much unspoken crap in the air that you’re really alone.” Janis told Pat Nichols when she went back to California, “Never again! I can’t stand the one-night stands and little rooms!” Still, Janis wasn’t about to give it up. I’m sure she did hate it, yet I think there was an ambivalent tone in her laments. Janis almost seemed to cry, “Isn’t it wonderfully horrible? I’m so successful that I have to put up with all of this!”

  The band spent ten days in Los Angeles, June 16–26, to record a new album. They arrived in Hollywood and dropped into a party at the home of Tom Wolfe, who was wearing all white—a latter-day Mark Twain, Sam Andrew said. Hollywood was not their kind of town. It oozed what Sam called a soft evil, a preoccupation with the image, the surface, the meaningless look of things, and ignored the substance. The general malaise of society at that time compounded their subconscious anxiety about life—bombing was intensified in Vietnam; Senator Edward Kennedy accidentally drove his car off a bridge, causing the drowning death of his companion, Mary Jo Kopechne. Even the stock market was down.

  The band stayed at the Landmark Hotel in Los Angeles. Janis called Sam Andrew to her room and they shared some dope together. Afterward, with both of them chemically relaxed, she told Sam his services would no longer be needed. He didn’t react, so she said, “Well, aren’t you going to ask me why?” Sam replied that it didn’t make much difference since he was going anyway. She just mumbled, “I guess you’re right.” A week later she asked him to stay on until she could find another guitar player, and he was glad to have the opportunity to be generous by agreeing.

  The album they were wrestling with in the studio would be called I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama! The phrase kozmic blues was a true Joplinesque missile. It combined the real angst of worrying about death with the sophisticated twist of misspelling cosmic. The result laughed at itself because it was laughing.

  Gabriel Mekler, who produced the album, was a professional taken with who was important and who wasn’t, adding a divisive element to an already bumpy band relationship. He ignored the suggestions of the experienced musicians, making them bristle and curse under their breath, and spent most of his energy dealing with Janis, the star. This created a greater rift in the group, between Janis, who couldn’t quite assume her position as leader, and a group of more experienced individuals who had little cohesiveness other than a common source of a paycheck.

  In July, touring in the East again, Janis called the group the Band from Beyond. Later, that group was referred to as the Kozmic Blues Band, after the album title. That album never received the acclaim that some of her other work did, but it is a particularly grand collection of Janis’s performances.

  The group changed members frequently, a symptom of Janis’s confusion about what direction to move in musically. John Cooke described the band’s transitions in Rolling Stone on November 12, 1970:

  The only two musicians who were with the Kozmic Blues band throughout the year of existence are Brad Campbell [bass] and Terry Clements [alto sax]. Bill King was the original organ player but the Army started chasing him after two gigs and he was replaced by Richard Kermode, who stayed for the duration. Roy Markowitz was the drummer for about half of the year, followed for a week [during some of the recording sessions] by Lonnie Castille and then by Maury Baker. After Sam Andrew left, John Till brought his guitar to the group and has been with Janis ever since. Marcus Doubleday played trumpet briefly and decided the road was not for him anymore. He was followed first by Terry Hensley and then by Luis Gasca, who was with the band for more than eight months. . . . In the last few weeks Luis was followed by Dave Woodward. Snooky Flowers [baritone sax] was added to the band early along, and was in it to the end.

  In 1969 Janis was truly in the big time. She had recorded her second Dick Cavett Show on July 18, a sign of her acceptance by the intelligentsia. She appeared in a pinkish-red satin V-necked blouse over matching bell-bottom pants, topped with an open-weave gold vest and the trademark strands of beads, hundreds of bangles, and multiple rings. She proudly wore gold-heeled sandals with red stockings that matched her outfit. She was happy and relaxed, in fine form that night. She opened with “To Love Somebody” and later in the show sang “Try.”

  She talked about characteristic topics: why she seemed different from other female singers; her feelings about touring; whether or not Cavett had “soul.” Janis said, “You do, everybody does.” She joked that when her career ebbed, she would “learn how to bake organic bread and have babies.” Janis spoke repeatedly about reviewers. One had asked, “Can a rock star making hundreds of thousands of dollars sing the blues?” Janis fumed at the idea and explained that “when you get up there and play, it doesn’t have anything to do with money. Playing is about feeling. . . . It’s about letting yourself feel all those things you have inside of you.” Later in the show she interjected a note about excesses in reviews: “I’ve read pages upon pages comparing—‘I noticed the Shelenberg influence in this particular riff’—when the guy was just going ‘suubey-doobey.’” She also commented that writers are often saying more about themselves than about what they are ostensibly describing. She noted that this was particularly obvious to a reader if he or she had been to the event the guy was covering.

  During the show, Janis also appeared with the Committee, the improvisational theater group that then numbered twenty-five people and had three locations—in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. They provided a “Soul Lesson,” with a black man teaching a white man how to walk and talk. Their final number was a “Symphony of Emotions,” in which all the actors and guests on the show played an emotion. Cavett was love and Janis played frustration. It was a fun event, with a conductor guiding the overall tone of ten people or so emoting vigorously in unison.

  She also taped the Music Scene television show on September 8. The Committee hosted the show, with Pat Paulsen and Janis among the guests. Janis was included in the group of privileged stars invited to Tommy Smothers’s house the night of the broadcast for a party kicking off Donovan’s tour. After listening to the man sing while he was perched atop a pillow on the diving board, the group gathered to watch themselves on TV. Also at the party were Andy Williams, Mama Cass, Peter Fonda, Mason Williams, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash. That was in her off time! To think that she could relax in this kind of company was ludicrous. She was stuck in the all capitals JANIS JOPLIN mode.

  The veneer of fame was beginning to wear thin. A year earlier, she had sometimes behaved like a groupie. By 1969 she was explaining, “When I first met Dylan, I didn’t recognize him, or George Harrison. People look different in person. They’re always littler than you think.” She realized that it had affected her personal life differently than expected. “Success gets in your way,” she told Newsweek. “You have something that’s bigger and more important than just being with people. I can’t just hang out anymore on the street. Now, whenever I see people—except my own friends—there’s an artificial atmosphere, people talking to you for the wrong reasons.”

  When the Kozmic Blues album was released, CBS gave Janis a stack of albums for her personal distribution. She piled the copies in her home, getting ready to give them to friends. She and Pat Nichols invited two Hell’s Angels over to celebrate a birthday. In through the window stormed fellow Angels, who found the two-foot-high p
ile of albums enticing. As they helped themselves to the records, Janis screamed, “Get out!” She expected her invited friends to support her, especially when one of the uninvited hit her and knocked her back. “When you ask one of us, you ask all of us,” they said. Helpless, Janis and Pat watched the party disappear, and most of her albums as well.

  The most celebrated event of rock and roll, love, and community flowered on August 15 and 16, 1969, at Max Yasgur’s dairy farm near Woodstock, New York. “The human onslaught created emergency conditions—food and water shortages, overflowing toilets, medical crises,” wrote John Morthland in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll. “Rain turned the festival into a huge mud puddle. The talent lineup was the greatest ever assembled, but hardly anybody heard the music, and hardly anybody cared.” More than 100,000 of the people attending had no tickets, adding to the already burdened logistical preparations. With help from the rock stars and donations from the promoters, the crowd made do, solving their own problems. Morthland wrote, “Woodstock became the symbol of youth solidarity.”

  “A whole new minority group,” Newsweek quoted Janis as saying in her enthusiastic description of the event. “There’s lots and lots and lots of us, more than anybody ever thought before. We used to think of ourselves as little clumps of weirdos.” Not anymore. Woodstock announced the taking of America by the youth. The rebellion was no longer based in California; it had swept the nation.

  The site was an easy drive to Albert Grossman’s house, and invitations to his place to stay or eat were the credentials of elitism. Janis and other musicians bought food and brought it to the festival to give away, she told me later. Still, it felt pitifully inadequate to the challenge of enduring the hardships of rain, wind, mud, insufficient toilets, and the generalized mayhem of populating a medium-sized city in a couple of days.

  The press called Woodstock the crowning achievement of the love culture, yet love hadn’t changed Janis’s mind about letting Sam Andrew go. He had quietly packed his guitar and exited the band merely three gigs before the event. Sam thought Janis had wanted a musical change, but perhaps it was more. He was the last connection to her rock origins in Big Brother, and probably her best friend in the group. He had always told Janis there were better guitar players and was never sure why she kept him on that long. Perhaps letting go of Sam was another step in her commitment to long-term professional success. It was undoubtedly hard for her to fire Sam, no matter how sound she felt the reasons. Though romantic rumors had linked them together, the only time they slept together was shortly after she fired him. She was always unwilling to make clean breaks in her relationships. Was having sex with him after she’d severed his professional responsibilities a way of asking forgiveness? Were either of them testing whether Sam’s leaving the band was what they wanted?

  Janis played the Texas International Pop Festival on August 30, 31, and September 1. A lot of people were trying to copy the success of Woodstock. Promoters who had put on the Atlanta Pop Festival on July 4 scheduled one in Lewisville, Texas, at the Dallas International Motor Speedway, for Labor Day weekend. Heavy blues was the dominant music, and Janis received several standing ovations. The Dallas Morning News reported, “An unexplainable feeling of generosity and rapport developed over the 3-day period that exemplified the true meaning of brotherhood.”

  Stopping in Port Arthur for a brief family visit, Janis tried to explain the impact of these events. She expected us to realize that the hippies were now a horde of believers. The revolution had come! We smiled and said, “Wow, that must have been great,” but for us, Woodstock was just another article in Time.

  She brought Snooky Flowers, the baritone saxophone player in her new band. He was the first black man entertained in our house—a milestone of sorts, though it just felt like a friend coming over. He was gracious and affable. His warmth and protectiveness toward Janis was comforting to our parents, especially when he took her down to Houston Avenue to enjoy the local black clubs. Janis returned full of stories of meeting the African-American population of the city, which had been denied to her as a young white girl. She elatedly confided to me, “We talked to this really together old black lady who’s seen it all, and she said I’m ‘really down,’ man, ‘down’! I can’t believe it!” Janis needed acceptance from black society, from those whom her high school friends had defined as the heroes of the underbelly of America, the guideposts of her life. When Otis Redding died, Janis and Sam Andrew sat up all night listening to his music. Janis said that she just wanted him to hear her sing and say that she was good.

  Janis crowed about her Russian lynx coat. It wasn’t enough for her that the coat was beautiful and that it fit her image perfectly; it also had a walloping good story behind it. She pranced about, telling us the tale she had told the New York Times Magazine. “I had the chick in my manager’s office photostat every goddamn clipping that ever had me mentioning Southern Comfort, and I sent them to the company, and they sent me a whole lotta money. How could anybody in their right mind want me for their image? Oh, man, that was the best hustle I ever pulled—can you imagine getting paid for passing out for two years?” They offered to buy Janis a coat of her choosing. She went to a fur warehouse in New York when it was closed to the public and wandered through the racks of coats. She could pick any one of them. From a South Texas perspective, she had surely hit the big time. The climate was so temperate in Port Arthur, no one wore a fur coat unless they wanted to show off. For Janis, the gift of a fur was clearly a high honor.

  The next time I saw Janis was on This Is Tom Jones. Taped on September 21, the show was telecast on December 6, 1969. She sang her favorite song, “Little Girl Blue,” and a duet with Tom Jones, “Raise Your Hand.” More than a year later, after Janis died, Mom received a lengthy letter from a Louisiana girl who said she had met Janis while working as a gofer on the Tom Jones show. She had run away from home with the dream of being an actress. She went to Los Angeles and, a few days before starvation, landed a job on that show. She was assigned to help Janis with whatever she wanted. The letter implied that she had found herself pregnant and didn’t know what to do. Evidently, Janis took the girl under her wing, brought her to a party, introduced her to everyone, and then put her on a bus back to the Gulf Coast. “But I haven’t talked to my family since I ran away,” she had worried. “No matter,” Janis told her, “they’re your family and they’ll love you and want you back.” Janis could tell her that from experience. Enclosed with the letter sent to Mom was a photo of a woman with a baby she had named Janice. I wonder if Janis had held a fleeting wish to get on the bus alongside that girl.

  Janis’s career continued its skyrocketing climb. Hippies were becoming as common as the girl-next-door. The Monterey Pop film was released to acclaim in May 1969, and Janis’s picture was on the cover of Newsweek that same month. Easy Rider opened in July, another in the series of alternative movies that included Alice’s Restaurant and if . . . In spite of what looked like a trend, the top grossing movie of 1969 was The Love Bug, far from a counterculture model. From the inside, the decay in the movement was more obvious. Thirty-six storefronts stood empty in the Haight. The eighteen that remained open had added metal grates over their fronts, reported Charles Perry in The Haight-Ashbury. Dave Moriaty said, “That spring there were seventeen murders in one month.” Compared with the dynamism of 1966–67, rock and roll and the social movement were directionless. Ever-increasing commercialization changed even the rock bands that emerged from the movement.

  The ugliness underlying peace and love burst to the surface in Altamont, California. The Rolling Stones scheduled a free concert for the end of their 1969 United States tour. About 300,000 people gathered at the Altamont Speedway. Again, the facilities were woefully inadequate and crowds overwhelmed the intended excitement of the music. The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll said, “Altamont turned into a nightmare of drug casualties, stench from toilets and fires and food and vomit, faulty sound, and, finally,
the brutal violence visited on the audience by pool-cue- and knife-wielding Hell’s Angels who said they had been hired (by the Stones and cosponsors Grateful Dead, for $500 worth of beer) as security guards.” Late in the day a young black man pulled a gun and was knifed by Angels, reportedly in full view of the audience. Three other people died at Altamont as well. What had begun at Monterey and climaxed at Woodstock crashed and burned at Altamont.

  If that wasn’t enough, public opinion violently censured the communal-family ideal because of the distortions and insanity of the Charles Manson cult. His group had brutally murdered pregnant actress Sharon Tate and four others in her home. The unleashed emotions and unfettered behavior of the movement was backfiring all around.

  The pithy, jocular, cocky Janis had already given way to the disillusioned, fed-up-with-their-ignorance Janis. “I’ve said it all fifty times,” she complained to a reporter seeking an interview. The reporter said, “But I’ve got some really good new questions. Tell me about your past.” Janis often made a stab at distancing herself from the heart of the very movement that had crowned her with such glory. She wrestled with whether or not to believe. She often said, “I’m a beatnik. They reject society and the world disappoints them. Beatniks believe things won’t get better—so they say to hell with it and just stay stoned.” Once she said, “Look, I’m not a spokesman for my generation. I don’t even use acid. I drink.” But on The Dick Cavett Show she defended hippies, saying, “I believe in the youth.”

  A more thoughtful Janis arose. “Usually, [interviewers] don’t talk about my singing as much as about my life-style,” the Port Arthur News quoted her as saying. “The only reasons I can see is that maybe a lot of artists have one way of art and another way of life. In me, they’re the same. It just came as a natural thing out of the way I love, the freedom needed and sought. I wanted the same thing that happened in music and I just happened to have a voice. The kids are interested because it is like a graphic representation of what it is like to really let go and be whatever you are.”