Love, Janis

by Laura Joplin

  Janis telephoned home about her exciting plans to see the Rio Carnival. The folks tried to act supportive, hoping she would have fun. But on reflection, talking with Karleen in a grocery store, Pop said, “I don’t know why she’s going to all the trouble to get to Brazil. All she’s going to do is get drunk, and she can do that as easily at home.”

  Officially, Carnival in Brazil started on Friday evening, February 6, and ran until the morning of Ash Wednesday, February 11. In reality, events last for two weeks. It is a pre-Lentan ritual, in preparation for a time of fasting and penance. During that time, all normal activity ceases throughout the country, but particularly in Rio. Daily parades, from midafternoon until dawn, link strangers dancing mindless sambas through the streets. Some are in wild costumes, though many wear as little as possible due to the hot Brazilian summers. Women often flaunt their sexuality in erotic dress. Timidity is the only thing that is frowned upon during Carnival. It is a time of banishing inhibitions and releasing desire. Carnival is not just a series of events. It is a state of mind, trying to force rebirth by the sheer intensity of personal abandon.

  In the evenings there are many balls for the middle and upper classes. Janis and Linda attended the Municipal Ball, where every invitation must be sponsored. Janis had managed to be invited by a silver-haired aristocrat, Mr. Mayo. His invitation even gave her entry to the presidential box. Unbelievable! Here she was in a foreign country, and her success entitled her to such honors. But once she was in the presidential box, it became obvious that she was on a different social level. Someone asked her to leave. With typical Joplin aplomb—a glass of champagne supposedly thrown in the bouncer’s face—Janis exited. Once among the everyday folk, Janis and Linda had a great time, dancing and laughing the night away.

  On the beach, Janis wore a bikini that had dark-colored handprints on a white background. They were strategically placed on the panties and bra, as though gripping her body where it mattered. A slender fellow stood looking at Janis and her bathing suit. He had just come from a year and a half of canoeing and exploring the Amazon River in the Brazilian jungle. He looked rough, wild, and experienced. “Hi, you cute thing,” Janis said, in her jovial way of having fun with strangers. But this fellow started a conversation, and soon Janis and Linda were hanging out with David Niehaus and his traveling buddy, Ben Beall.

  Janis always wanted a man who would love her for her soul. She wanted someone who could see past the veneer, whether it be the famous singer or the beatnik artist. In David Niehaus, she found that: “David was a real person,” Linda said. “One of the few in the later part of her life.” Amid a sea of one-night stands, she began a true love affair.

  David and Ben were college friends reconnoitering after four years of intense living following graduation. David was an upper-middle-class Cincinnati kid who had studied communications at Notre Dame. He was an athletic six feet one and a half inches tall, two hundred pounds, with brown hair and green eyes. David had joined the Peace Corps after college and worked in a small village in Turkey. He saw traveling as a way to break out of the conditioning of American culture, to become free of prejudgments. He tried law school, but when he met Janis he was taking time off. He’d been to Woodstock, from there to Peru, and then down the Amazon River to meet Ben Beall in Rio. Ben had majored in international studies at Notre Dame and then joined the marines. He’d recently gotten out of a VA hospital, recuperating from multiple injuries from a grenade explosion.

  Two days after meeting Janis, David said, “You know, you look like that rock star, Janis Joplin.” She paused and turned, saying, “I am Janis Joplin.” Could anything tell her better that David loved the person Janis and not her image? He hadn’t even realized who she was when he fell for her! David was a kind man, but too intense to be soft. His voice never wavered, reflecting the kind of charged ferocity that could send him around the world and make him captain of the New York Yacht Club Boat of the Year.

  The fellows soon moved into a large suite of rooms at a beach-side hotel with the girls. Then they set out to have a good time. David and Ben had been in Rio awhile so they knew the sights. They were pretty disappointed with Carnival, finding it too commercial to be fun. So the group partied around its fringe, strolling around the nightly parades, dressing in costume, and frequenting the bars.

  Janis kicked heroin when she was in Brazil, and David helped. He held her through the symptoms of withdrawal—the weakness, insomnia, chills, and waves of gooseflesh that give the process its name: cold turkey. It was one day of hell surrounded by two days only slightly better. But it worked. She was clean. “I really did love her. She was a great girl, she’s in my heart, I can tell you that,” he said. “Janis chose to do heroin because she couldn’t escape feeling all the emotions of her fans.” He said that Janis was supersensitive to those around her and couldn’t turn their emotions off, even when she was offstage.

  “Albert wrote her a few telegrams saying, ‘Get back here, get to work.’” David was proud that Janis wired back, “No. And don’t lay that guilt trip on me.” She was going back when she was ready. She was in charge of her life.

  “We went into the jungle,” he continued, “with nothing except stacks of money to buy antiques for her house. She went right with me.” Hopping a jungle-bound flatbed, the breeze casting loose her billowing chestnut hair, Janis sang “Me and Bobby McGee” just for David. “Just two beatniks on the road,” she described the experience later.

  But still she couldn’t escape her role. The first village they came to after weeks in the Brazilian jungle had its jukebox cranked up when they walked past the bus station. It was Janis’s voice penetrating the South American air, singing a tune from her Kozmic Blues album, as though to shock her back to reality after her idyllic journey.

  Janis did concede one professional gesture while she was in Brazil: She learned there had never been a rock-and-roll concert in Brazil, so she decided to put on the first one. Everything was ready when she climbed aboard David’s motorcycle, dressed in a bikini and wrapped in a sleeping bag to keep warm on the drive to the site. It was scheduled at a beach five hours north of Rio. She lay her head on David’s back and slept as they rode. Coming up over a hill, he swerved to miss a cement traffic island in the middle of the road. He hit the brakes, the bike skidded out from under them, and they rolled over and over and over. Janis hit her head on the curb and lay completely still. Someone came along in a Volkswagen and took them to a hospital. She had a concussion and couldn’t do the concert.

  Janis and David spent hours talking in Brazil, telling each other the stories of their lives. Janis talked about the importance of breaking into the music business and how she had first felt success in Austin at Ken Threadgill’s bar. She told him that earlier in her life she had been really fat. She ate and ate because she was afraid she wasn’t going to get anymore. Then she fasted down to nothing, and that helped her have the strength to finally make it. She tested her fear and rose above it. She saw the cycles of her life for what they were.

  The lovers planned to return to California together, but the airport passport check uncovered an irregularity with David’s papers—he had overstayed his visa. Janis’s incensed attitude didn’t help, irrationally yelling, “You’re a cunt and this is a cunt country!” That was all the officials needed to hear to want to show her who had the power. They detained David for two days. Janis wasn’t allowed to remain with him, either. They packed her off onto her scheduled flight to California. For someone with as tenuous a hold on reason as Janis, that was as good an excuse as any to score some heroin during plane changes in Los Angeles. Arriving back in San Francisco, she was already stoned.

  What could David have said when he arrived two days later and was greeted by a gray ghost of a woman? Not to mention the chaos of the San Francisco rock scene. That was enough to confound anyone, but David seemed to know who he was. Janis was the one who seemed lost.

  Watching Janis shoot heroin was hard for David, but he tried to see p
ast it. He could accept alcohol, which, he felt, allowed people to face the things they weren’t strong enough to face. He thought heroin was like alcohol, but much stronger. Once it was in your body, nothing mattered anymore, your whole body relaxed. He was totally against it, but he could understand why Janis used it. However, the drugs made him say, “Honey, I don’t know how long I can do this.”

  Everyone oscillates emotionally. Sometimes life seems clear and easy, and other times it’s almost overwhelming. But Janis also had to confront the crazy hours and schedule demanded of a musician. She could be intensely busy and out of touch with all her friends for several months and then be totally free for weeks. Her mood swings were always exacerbated by her use of alcohol and other drugs. Clearly her life had many moments of exquisite success. When she was on top, she loved it. Other times she felt small, and it terrified her.

  But Janis tried to maintain an intimate relationship with David. She cooked him breakfast, rubbed his back when he was taking a bath, and talked with him for long hours about anything. Here was a man who confided, “Some of my best friends are books.” David knew the soft Janis: “She made me happy. Nobody’d ever cared for me before. . . . I never really had somebody who loved me before except my ma.”

  They had fun together. Out riding around in Janis’s Porsche, they passed Muddy Waters on the road. Janis hailed him, calling out, “Hey, come on over.” They spent a couple of days together burning joints, drinking, and partying. There were always people around, good people.

  “One night we wake up,” David related, “and four or five Hell’s Angels with guns in their belts and stoned on acid have eaten everything out of the refrigerator. ‘Honey,’ Janis said, ‘get those boys out of here.’ I got up, put my pants on, and walked into the living room, to be greeted with looks saying, ‘Who is this asshole?’ Returning to her side, I said, ‘Oh, baby, you don’t want me to do that. There’s five of them.’ So Janis opened the door and declared, ‘You guys are assholes, ’cause you ate all my food and should have more sense than that. What are you doing here at this time in the morning, keeping me and my boyfriend up?’” Instantly, Janis turned those big, burly men into cowering third-graders, embarrassed about their indiscretions. Later, five grocery sacks were found in the kitchen, their contents neatly placed in the fridge.

  Janis and David went to L.A. and wound up in a recording studio, curled up in a soundproof booth. They shared a bottle of tequila while Janis sang eight or nine songs in her beautiful voice, just for David.

  David wrestled with the idea of staying with Janis as he tried to find a sense of his own life. Then, returning to Larkspur from a two-day solo skiing trip to Heavenly Valley, he discovered Janis in bed with a female lover, Peggy Caserta. Two days? Couldn’t she be true for two days? But no, David had no claims on Janis, and this was the era of free sex. Peggy made it clear that she felt she had a prior claim on Janis. Their relationship went back for years. David thought Peggy tried to make him feel like the interloper. This proved to be more life than David cared to accept. He wanted a wife, a partner.

  David declared, “Honey, I can’t stay here.” Janis proposed that he become her road manager on a planned tour with a new band that later became known as the Full Tilt Boogie Band. He considered it, but having a job wasn’t the only problem. “I’ll stop doing this shit [heroin] if you stay,” Janis pleaded. But David didn’t want Janis to blame him for her stopping drugs the next time she felt the craving. He wanted her to make the decision herself.

  “It was too radical,” David explained. “I’m sort of an ego person like she was, and every time we went out of the house she had five hundred people screaming around her car, that hand-painted Porsche. It just wasn’t fun. I would have taken her with me in a hot second, but she wanted to go on this tour. . . . She almost came with me, but she had worked so long for all that. I called her a couple of times from Turkey, and sent her some radical antique things that the women used to wear. She wanted to be there, but it would have required her giving up everything. She wasn’t ready to give it up. She’d worked a long time to get there. I was so young and so on fire. I wanted her to come with me. I didn’t want to just go on her trip. I wanted to go on our trip.” The best Janis could say was, “Maybe I’ll see you later.”

  In December 1969, just four months before Janis parted with David, she had sat up all night with a woman she met at the Chelsea Hotel in New York. Janis advised her about whether she should marry her boyfriend or not. With the emphatic earnestness of one who was laying out the truth, Janis exclaimed, “If I ever meet a man who really loves me, I’ll never let him go. I’ll do anything to make it work.” Only she didn’t. By all accounts, David was the best thing that had ever happened to Janis. Yet when it came to choosing between love and her career, Janis stuck with the latter. That was hard. Many of her friends felt that she wasn’t a feminist, that what she really wanted was a husband, kids, and a cozy home. But they were wrong; what she wanted was a career and a man who could fit into it. Did she just worry that the romance wouldn’t last? Did she think David might prove as false as Peter de Blanc had? Was she forced to choose between her career self and her romantic self?

  JANIS’S CAREER QUESTIONS were now endless. What kind of singer was she going to be? What kind of songs? What kind of band? Who to be in the band? Those are big questions for someone who always said her chief strength as a singer was her ability to communicate emotion. At least Janis wasn’t alone. Albert Grossman provided the professional guidance and support that she needed. Realizing that the Kozmic Blues Band suffered from a lack of direction from Janis as band leader, she participated directly in selecting the next group. Albert and Janis listened to tapes of prospective musicians, visited shows to see them in action, and discussed and discussed.

  “He doesn’t direct me,” she said of Albert. “He just finds out where I want to go, then he helps me get there. And he’s there to comfort me when I need it. Man, that’s important. I don’t like to admit I need help, but I do, I do.”

  Janis had finished the blues-band fantasy, realizing it wouldn’t be accepted by the public. She was a folk/blues singer who turned to rock and roll and then went to soul rock. The next step came through experimenting. Janis crafted a more individualized white-blues sound. She had risen to fame on the novelty of being a white female blues singer. Now she realized that it didn’t mean acting and sounding black, it meant being the unique version of blues that could speak most directly to her audience.

  Janis had asked both John Till, her guitarist, and Brad Campbell, her bass player, to continue from the Kozmic Blues Band to the new group. For the four months before the new tour, they received $123.40 per week, on retainer. She found her pianist, Richard Bell, while he was playing for Ronnie Hawkins’s band. Listening to a Jesse Winchester album, she chose her organ player, Ken Pearson.

  All she needed was a drummer. Janis heard him when she went to see John and Brad playing a gig with Snooky Flowers at a San Francisco topless club, the Galaxie. When Albert was in town, the two of them went. It must have been quite a sight to see Janis and Albert as a couple in a topless club—Albert with his paunch, gray corduroy jacket, and light sweater, with long gray hair in a ponytail; Janis with her saucy gait, bedecked in chattering bells and topped with mounds of wavy hair. Snooky turned the spotlight on them, saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, in this club tonight we have one of the finest singers . . .” They just sat there smiling.

  After the set, Janis talked with Albert about Clark Pierson, the drummer playing with Snooky’s band. She sent Brad over to see if he wanted to audition at Janis’s house the next day. Clark hadn’t even known who she was until Snooky introduced her. He laughed, “Well, I ain’t got nothing else to do.” He went over and the group played a couple of tunes in her makeshift studio in the garage. Standing beside Albert, Janis asked Clark if he wanted to join. She was happy when he said yes.

  Clark was the last member to join the band. His week of drumming with Brad and J
ohn had already proven he could fit in. This band was a younger group than she had been working with in Kozmic Blues. Most important, explained John Cooke, “these guys were looking for a band that was their home. They knew that Janis was the boss, and they all liked each other right away. I think the fact that four out of five were Canadian helped.”

  April 1970

  Hello!

  Really rushing through rehearsals, have a new (2 of the same guys, 3 new) smaller band & it’s really going fantastic! Great new songs—really needed new songs—so we’ll do an album while on the next tour. Albert is lightening up my schedule a little because of my old age & because I put my foot Down! 2 mos on the road then 2 off, 2 on, 2 off, etc. So I can have a little personal life, I hope. I met a really fine man in Rio but I had to get back to work so he’s off finding the rest of the world—Africa or Morocco now I think, but he really did love me & was so good to me & he wants to come back & marry me! I thought I’d die without someone besides fans asking me. But he meant it & who knows—I may get tired of the music biz, but I’m really gettin it on now! & doing much & fantastic & expensive work on the house. It’s turning into a palace—all fur & wood & stained glass & velvet couches & chaise lounges & even a chandelier hanging in the middle of an eye-full of redwoods. FANTASTIC! Have a new puppy—a Great Pyrenees all white, one of the biggest dogs around—grows to be 180 lbs. all lumbering & loving, rare & expensive—from the Pyrenees mtns, long ago a cross between a St. Bernard & a Mastiff—named him Thurber, thanks for the books when I was young, Dad. It does make a difference.

  LOVE,

  Janis

  By 1970, Janis had wide emotional swings, the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. She might change moment to moment, or stick in one frame of mind for days. “It was just that she was on fire. She had the power,” David Niehaus said. “She was aware, and where that power comes from is from seeing the truth. She didn’t always, but she had the power to see the truth. There was nothing that could stand up to her when she was clear. The only reason her career caused her problems,” he explained, “was her personality oscillated to such extremes. So, when she was small, her career was overwhelming to her. You have to understand”—he paused—“it wasn’t the career that was overwhelming to her, it was the state of mind. When she was in the big state of mind, her career wasn’t overwhelming at all.”