Love, Janis

by Laura Joplin

  Janis played the Hollywood Bowl on September 23. It was a rousing good time, highlighted by Aunt Barbara’s attendance. Barbara went to the event intentionally dressed to kill in her mink stole. She sat proudly in the first row. Janis stopped her patter to the audience at one point, looked down at Barbara, laughing lovingly, and said, “You’re going to ruin my image if they find out you’re my aunt.”

  On October 19 she arrived in Austin, Texas, looking “magnificently frowsy in a silk embroidered shawl, white imitation fur hat and lavender tinted sunglasses,” wrote the Austin American-Statesman. She sang for seven thousand “frantically enthusiastic” people at Gregory Gym. It was a cathartic experience for fans and star alike. Janis said, “I used to go to school here and they never treated me like this.” Finally, she had that sense of triumphant homecoming she needed.

  But all was not well. Later that fall, John Cooke gave in to his reservations about the scene and retired as road manager with two months of the tour to go, saying, “It just isn’t fun anymore.” That year Janis’s drinking had visibly affected her performing. Anyone with knowledge of alcoholism could have seen signs of the disease in her behavior. She would wake the morning after an evening out and ask Linda, “How’d we get home last night?” Memory blackouts were one sign that she’d gone past any reasonable level of drinking. Janis said she drank before performing just to loosen up a bit. Like musicians tuning their instruments, Janis drank to get her emotions and adrenaline flowing.

  But her abuse of alcohol also showed when she drank and did outlandish things. One time, she drove to a bus station with Snooky, stopped her Porsche, and called out for anyone who wanted to party a bit: “Two to go!” Snooky laughed about it, citing the story as Janis being “totally free.” In New York, she went to Max’s Kansas City, where Andy Warhol and friends held court. She ended up getting kicked all the way under the table by one of them during a verbal and physical fight.

  On October 5, Janis and the band played Winterland in San Francisco, and Ralph Gleason blasted them. It was John Cooke’s last gig with her, and he thought it marked her conclusion that the brassy black blues sound wasn’t going to be publicly accepted.

  Snooky reacted angrily when discussing those days. He felt that because of Ralph Gleason and the bad press, the Kozmic Blues Band got little credit for helping Janis to develop as a singer. They were the band that toured Europe, yet all the acclaim over there proved worthless back in the States. He summarized Janis’s decision to disband the group, saying, “Kozmic Blues was a little too powerful for Janis. She never felt totally comfortable because she knew the band was better than she was, musically beyond her.”

  Janis had an encounter with the Houston fire marshal during a concert at the Houston Coliseum on October 26. At many concerts on that tour she had cautioned her audience about overreacting. She sometimes warned kids about dancing because there were cops in the wings waiting to put a bum rap on everyone. In Houston, the fire marshal walked onstage during her vocal absorption in “Ball and Chain,” saying, “Miss Joplin, we’d like you to ask the crowd to move back and cool off.” Janis stopped singing, the band ground to a halt, and she stared uncomprehendingly at Paul Carr of the Houston Fire Department. She put the microphone down, covered it with her hand, and told Carr what she thought of his action. Janis finished the song and left the stage, grumbling to herself.

  The police and firemen were cracking down at all concerts across the country. They were anxious about the potential problems that could result from thousands of kids standing on chairs and getting wild in a huge hall. People could get trampled. The Houston scene almost repeated itself for Janis in Tampa, Florida. There the cops pulled out a bullhorn to interrupt “Try.” Janis stopped and replied, “I know there won’t be any trouble if you’ll just leave!” Refusing to exit the stage, the cops returned to using the bullhorn and Janis flipped out. Rather than holding the mike down and cursing at the policemen, as she had done in Houston, Janis rent the air in Florida with her expletives and was promptly arrested, hauled offstage, and taken to jail for using profanity. Her response to reporters was, “I say anything I want onstage. I don’t mind getting arrested because I’ve turned a lot of kids on.”

  Her arrest made Time magazine on November 28. I read it and a lump formed in my stomach. What was happening to my sister? What did she think she was doing?

  Her behavioral changes were noticed by people who followed the scene. Robert Somma wrote about Janis in the fall of 1969’s Drama Review covering “Rock Theatricality.” Somma wrote, “At first, Janis relied on her range and volume; then, as she ascended the scale of popularity, she loosened a bit, added a few stagey components (booze, skittish body English) and, with the inevitable fatigue and posturing, her once raw but compelling style became hardened, cynical, and neurotic. She seemed to lose touch with herself in the overwhelming contact she faced.”

  Perhaps in her search for her music after Big Brother, Janis was trying to jump beyond her “white girl blues.” She was still emulating those she had idolized and thus was caught in a transitional period of musical expression. In 1969 she was being challenged to craft a new authentic white sound that also had soul.

  That fall, Albert sent Janis to a physician, Dr. Edmund Rothschild, an internist who had often seen Albert’s clients. Dr. Rothschild found Janis to be a bouncy, vibrant, and exciting young woman. She pranced into his office wearing a translucent blouse with feather boas in her hair. She told him she wanted to quit using heroin but that she didn’t think of herself as a heavy narcotics user. He took a thorough oral history and did a physical exam, finding nothing unusual. He found her heroin use to be intermittent and episodic.

  Many heroin users take the drug to escape psychological pain. The practice Janis described to Dr. Rothschild was quite the opposite. She used heroin after a concert, a thrilling success. Perhaps she was using heroin the same way a speed freak does, to avoid the depression of the speed wearing off, as a way to ease back into life. Perhaps Janis used heroin to help come off of the adrenaline high that she roused herself to during performing, to get some peace from the intensity of being onstage.

  Janis felt her alcohol use was a problem, and her doctor agreed. She used alcohol excessively and daily. Though the results of the tests he ran on her liver were normal, he counseled her about the complications that could arise if she continued drinking at her present rate. At the time she was very thin and described an atrocious diet to Dr. Rothschild. She ate a lot of junk food and sweets. Alcoholics often live in a state of hypoglycemic reaction to eating sugar, craving and being energized by sweets and then crashing when the sugar rush is gone, and starting the cycle again. Alcoholics often have poor diets, replacing healthy food calories with unhealthy alcoholic ones. Janis wasn’t ready to deal with her drinking, bravely saying that the healthy lab results proved that she was okay.

  They focused on her desire to quit heroin. Dr. Rothschild emphasized the dangers in what she was doing, that she could never know the strength or purity of the drugs she was injecting straight into her body. He didn’t feel she was really physically addicted to heroin at that point but suggested methadone as a safe way to get her off the drug. He prescribed enough methadone to last for one week.

  Methadone prevents heroin from having its pleasurable effect and stops the craving addicts feel. But it isn’t the high of heroin that hooks addicts; it is the side effects on their basic system. Clean addicts who relapse into using heroin again say, “It makes me feel normal again.”

  Successfully recovered addicts have found that dropping the drug isn’t enough; you must also change your friends and social activities. Rather than partying in a group that reinforces the desire to use this or that drug, someone in recovery needs a social system that supports abstention. Without knowing it, Janis seemed to be trying just that. She and Pat Nichols made a pact with each other. They had both decided to quit using heroin. They felt that their mutual weakness for it fed on each other. They would not see ea
ch other until they were both clean. It was a beginning.

  Quitting something as addictive as heroin is often a multi-staged process. Janis was trying, but she was just approaching the crux of the issue. She still invented reasons why dope was okay for her. As Janis saw it, physicians equated psychological health with social conformity. She saw her choice as either abandoning the lifestyle that had brought her such acclaim and behaving like a schoolteacher in our hometown, or continuing the habits that she was seeking to quit. The way she framed the choice itself almost obligated her to deny recovery as a viable option. She needed to drift back in time to the days when she wrote the lyrics, “I got no reason for living / Got no cause to die / Got to find a middle road.” The question was, was she willing to give up something in order to see a middle road?

  When Janis got back to California on brief visits, she felt the loss of her longtime roommate, Linda Gravenites. Linda was still in Europe, not eager to reenter Janis’s drug-based way of life. Janis wrote to Linda and persuaded her to return to Marin. She plied her with stories of forgoing drugs and living her life the “other” way. According to one of Janis’s letters that Myra Friedman had, she planned walks in the woods, yoga, and learning piano and possibly horseback riding. Her romantic version of clean living was merely a denial of the tasks she truly needed to do, as was her continuing consumption of alcohol.

  The biggest constructive change she made was buying a house. Janis contacted Aunt Barbara’s friend Ed and sent him to comb the area for a special retreat. He found a perfect home in Larkspur, a small community in Marin County, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. It was a mountain community consisting of many narrow roads snaking in and around the hills. Located at the end of a cul-de-sac in a hilly, treed area, the lot on which the house stood backed up to an open-space woodland. It was the quintessential rock-star home of the time: lots of decks with redwood trees growing up through them, and lots of glass. “It was in the West Baltimore area near a street called Shady Lane, which thrilled Janis to no end,” said Bob Gordon. “She always said she wanted to live on Shady Lane.”

  Janis’s musical taste was softening. She spontaneously debuted Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee” while playing Nashville in November. The reception was enthusiastic. It helped to give her a new sense of direction.

  The Kozmic Blues Band played its final performance in Madison Square Garden on December 19, 1969. It was a triumph. She knocked the audience out and got them jumping in the way that she loved to do. Clive Davis threw a celebration for Janis after the gig. “She seemed in bad shape,” John Cooke recalled about that party. He thought, “Gee, am I glad I left the tour when I did. I didn’t want to watch this happen to her.” Change was hard, especially when the part of her that was demanding the change was corralled by such lethal barbed wire as heroin, alcohol, and superstar status.

  All her life Janis had craved freedom. It was her banner, her sword, her proudest description, and her most misunderstood goal. She thought being free meant doing what others didn’t do. But it also means free not to act. By 1969 Janis couldn’t choose whether to do her wild-woman, do-anything routine. She had to do it.

  In 1969 Janis had learned many lessons. She had avoided responsibility for her career, left the decisions to too many experts, and lost touch with her very essence. Her touring schedule consumed her personal life. She had little time to develop or maintain relationships. She had lost control of her self-image, and believed the press stories about her uniqueness. She had courted the excesses that brought her meaningless strokes of approval. Janis was beginning to see that she had to make some changes. The year 1969 was a turning point.

  FOURTEEN

  REST, ROMANCE, AND REGROUP

  I don’t want much out of life

  I never wanted a mansion in the South

  I just wanted to find someone sincere

  Who treated me like he talks

  One good man . . .

  —JANIS JOPLIN, “One Good Man”

  IN THE FIRST FOUR MONTHS OF 1970, Janis finally had time away from the hectic days of touring. She could sort out her life, plan her next professional moves, and relax. She inaugurated the era with a smashing housewarming party at the tail end of December 1969. This was no down-home party. She produced the counterculture equivalent of a country-club gala. The event was catered and a white-jacketed bartender stood ready to mix anything anyone requested. There was another, less elegant aspect to the party: The rock-and-roll crowd could not resist the tendency to party in excess. A few guests climbed woozily off into the pine woods to make mind-fogged love under the forest canopy. Others threw up and passed out under a redwood deck. The party was, at least, her attempt at a little grandeur.

  Janis’s Larkspur house felt cozy. The interior was all redwood. Sliding glass doors highlighted the walls. They brought the outside vistas into the room and framed the view like so many paintings. Janis’s home did not fit the ostentatious, wild image that her press stories loved to portray. There was no neon there.

  Janis decorated this new symbol of her arrival with Victorian furniture and Oriental carpets. She chose warm colors and soft textures that blended with the hippie folk-art style of the times. The house was full of knickknacks—things bought on impulse just because she liked them.

  1-23-70

  Dear Family . . .

  I managed to pass my—gasp—27th birthday without really feeling it. Not doing much now—just enjoying the house. I’m one month into a supposedly 3 month long vacation which looks like it will end up a month & a half vacation. Sigh. Ah, such a funny game . . . when you’re nobody & poor, you don’t care—you can just drift but when you get a little position & a little money, you start really hustling to get more & then when you’re numero uno, you’ve gotta really break ass so nobody catches you! Catches you?! Two years ago I didn’t even want to be it! No, that’s not true. I’ve been looking around & I’ve noticed something. After you reach a certain level of talent (& quite a few have that talent) the deciding factor is ambition, or as I see it, how much you really need. Need to be loved & need to be proud of yourself.. . . .& I guess that’s what ambition is—it’s not all a depraved quest for position, Mike, or money, maybe it’s for love. Lots of love! Ha.. . . .

  Having some beautiful work done on the house—the guys are half artists & half carpenters—turning a plain unused & unexciting wall into a sunburst of redwood planks w/a bar & a set of shelves flowing organically out of both ends—all rich wood & flowing shapes. Really defies description—I’ll send a picture when I’m through.

  Linda & I are going to Rio for Carnival in Feb. Did you see Black Orpheus? It took place there—the forefathers of Mardi Gras. The whole city parties for a week—dancing in the streets! So we’re going to go. . . .

  Got a new little white dog—George’s daughter. If you ever decide to breed Lady, I’d like one of the puppies, we want lots of dogs! & Linda has asked specifically for a borzoi.

  My piano teacher just arrived, got to go.

  All my love & thanks for calling!!

  Love,

  Janis

  High on her list of new acquisitions was dogs. Janis’s wonderful mutt George was the mainstay of her life in California. Loyal and loving, he was there whenever she came home. But one day in late 1969, she took him to town in her Porsche, and he jumped out to go for a stroll. Janis went on the local radio station asking for help in finding him, but the best she got was vague rumors. Sometimes she felt that a fan had taken George and was showing him off as a present she had given him. Janis gave up hope of ever seeing George again. Like many people faced with a loss they couldn’t accept, Janis took steps to limit her vulnerability. Instead of replacing George with one dog, she got a pack of mutts from the pound as well as purebreds selected from dog shows.

  “Her house was nice, tasteful,” Nick Gravenites said, “not over- or underdone. I was always welcome there. She would have parties, not all night debaucheries, but an afte
rnoon vodka and orange juice thing. She loved her home and her dogs.”

  Janis’s roommate, Linda Gravenites, had returned from her extended stay in Europe. With her help Janis was trying to get back to the middle road. She had started trying to kick heroin in December, and the effort continued. There were trips to different physicians and the use of Dolophine to suppress the need for the drug. Some days were clean, others were not.

  Janis and Linda schemed up the idea of going to Brazil for Carnival. “Going to Rio was to be without dope,” explained Linda, “to have a crazy enough time without it.” Linda never let Janis forget what she thought about dope—she hated it! It had gotten so that every time Janis went into her bedroom and shut the door, Linda held her breath until she reappeared. Janis knew she had to quit, but she wasn’t sure how. Indeed, most of the people she knew who did the drug were also trying to quit. The heroin epidemic of 1968 and 1969 was turning into a battle to quit in 1970. As early as 1968, 60 percent of the drug busts in the Haight had been for speed or heroin, not marijuana. The years of use were showing. People were desperate to get clean.

  Clearly the times were changing. In 1970, the mid-calf-length midiskirt replaced the mini. President Nixon was withdrawing troops from Vietnam. Unemployment was up to 6 percent, and eighteen-year-olds got the right to vote. The United Farm Workers gained recognition from the grape growers in California. The Beatles introduced the songs “The Long and Winding Road” and “Let It Be.”