by Laura Joplin
Janis had a fresh look in her stage clothes to go with the new act. Perhaps it was Kristofferson’s country influence that led her to have a few outfits made by the famous country-and-western costume designer Nudie. Her favorite was a pair of tight bell-bottom pants and a long open-front vest in royal purple. Swirls of gold braid and white and red stones cascaded down and around the garments. They were the perfect accent for a flashing figure onstage.
“Going across the border into Canada,” laughed John Cooke, “was the first time she crossed the border without having anything to hide. They could search everything and they weren’t going to find anything. . . . This little French-Canadian immigration customs guy started going through Janis’s stuff. She went wild, and by that time it was the feather boa. . . . She was egging him on. He found a powdered substance in her toilet kit. She said, ‘Don’t you want to know what that is, honey?’ And he said, ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est?’ And she said, ‘It’s douche powder, man.’ And he turned beet red. It just took forever, she was having such fun with the inspection!”
“The train across Canada was the high point that summer,” explained John Cooke. “It was a rolling festival, a combination of people who never got such an opportunity to play together, to jam together, to be together around music, perform, practice, and talk.” The chartered train included Ian and Sylvia, Delaney and Bonnie, Buddy Guy, the Grateful Dead, the Band, and more. John Cooke wandered through the eighteen cars with a shoe box, saying, “Money for the people’s bar.” He got $350 in ten minutes, all of which was spent in Saskatoon, buying bottles for on-train consumption.
The musicians designated one lounge car for acoustic musicians and the other for electric. “It really was like a vacation,” explained John. “Other people were doing the driving and there was this beautiful scenery outside. It became very celebratory. And people, including myself, drank a good deal of the day instead of just the evening.”
In this environment, there was little suggestion that Janis should worry about alcohol. The entire crowd reveled in its intoxicating delights. When people drink, they want music. When they have music, they want a drink, right? John said, “I sort of remember Janis and me saying, ‘Hey, man, you got to try this, stay drunk all day, it’s wild!’ If you do it on the right level, you aren’t getting all bleary and stupid, you’re just sort of maintaining.” Janis may have been on the bandwagon, preaching against drugs, but she put alcohol in another category. She liked to mix it with sweet juices to make it slide down ever so easily. By experimenting with the amount she took, she hoped to get rid of alcohol’s frustrating tendency to get one sloppy and fuzzy.
Speaking with a reporter from Circus in Toronto, Janis shared her elation with the band, the tour, and the new sound. “I always used to get drunk onstage,” she said, “but now I don’t need it. Sometimes I drink, sometimes I don’t. I can get high just on the music!”
Janis was infatuated with her new band. They were the group she had always wanted. They were musicians, friends, and fellow artists who clicked together. In the solo of “Tell Mama” or “Move Over,” John Till said, “she’d come boogeying up to me and our faces would come right together like that, and then she’d give me a great big kiss. And I wouldn’t remember nothing except big asterisks and fucking exclamation marks over my head. I’d be trying to take a solo and this—woooo! It was an experience, taking a guitar solo in front of forty thousand people and getting this beautiful (sigh) kiss from Janis.”
There was a shadow of 1966 on the train when someone laced the tequila with acid. By 1970 people were generally against that kind of thing. Luckily, someone intervened before too many people had sampled the surprise.
After the train, Janis’s schedule took the band to Hawaii. After the concert there, the band got a chance to relax, but Janis had another engagement. She was off to Austin, a surprise guest at Ken Threadgill’s jubilee birthday party on July 10, 1970. Old friend Juli Paul had called and invited Janis. “Can’t you make it another day? I work weekends,” Janis asked. She went anyway, direct from Hawaii to the party barn at Oak Hill in Austin.
Eight thousand people attended and all were in a mood of celebration. Many people performed, playing some of the folk standards the audience expected. Then they asked Janis to sing and the audience began to erupt. Janis hollered, “Are you ready for some rock and roll?” The reply was emphatic. Fumbling, asking for the loan of a “gitar,” and adjusting the microphones, Janis wailed, “I can’t tune worth a shit, will someone tune this thing?” She joked with the audience about why she played acoustic guitar. She explained that if she screwed up the chords, no one could hear. At the worst they would think the band was out of tune!
Ken Threadgill’s support had been one of the turning points in her life. He had helped her when it mattered the most. She went to Austin to honor him, and so refrained from hogging the eager eyes of the press or dominating the stage. She sang “Me and Bobby McGee,” telling the crowd that Kris Kristofferson was going to be famous real soon because he wrote such good songs. At the crowd’s insistence, she also sang another of Kris’s tunes, “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down.”
There were eight thousand voices cheering in unison that they loved Austin, Ken Threadgill, the music he sponsored, and Janis. She saw people she used to know in the crowd. One asked her, “Do you like what you’re doing?” Her quick reply was, “I wrote the part.”
The next day she went back on tour. The band played San Diego on July 11, a double bill with Big Brother and the Holding Company. Sam said the drinking was beginning to show in Janis’s body and she was gaining weight again. Sam also recalled the puffy red skin that she had, a clear sign of excessive alcohol consumption.
The emotional roller coaster was still going fast for Janis. High and then low, she struggled to maintain an equilibrium. The presence of old friends in San Diego had energized her for the airplane journey back to San Francisco. She bought drinks for everyone. James Gurley found her too exuberant, as though desperately trying to be the life of the party. But Sam Andrew didn’t even notice that Janis was on the airplane. He was too absorbed in listening to Michael Bloomfield, guitar virtuoso, tell about his sexual experiments. Janis asked James to join her on the rest of the tour, but he declined.
Most of the time, life on the road was boring. Janis kept trying to make it more palatable, carrying little things from home to make the endless motel rooms seem more personalized. She draped silk scarves over the lamps to give the light a soft glow. She often turned on the color television set, and using the fine-tuning knob, she blurred the picture so that a continuous light show played in the background.
“When Janis was on the road, she spent a lot of time reading, as opposed to what most people think,” explained Bobby Neuwirth. “She was by herself, not loaded but reading. There were a lot of quiet conversations, because there was a lot of time.”
The quiet times were also spent writing letters. Though her romance with David Niehaus was stuck in the pause mode due to his continued wanderings around the world, the embers kept a low glow through sporadic communication. July 24, Janis wrote David a joyful, loving letter.
David, honey! DADDY!!
I didn’t forget you and I even wrote you—you must have not gotten it at Am. Express. HOWEVER! I wrote w/fantastic News!! Listen—I kicked!!! 4 mos. Ago, am on the road rockin’ w/a great group, have absolutely no eyes to ever get off again (because I’m having so much fun!) why sleep? Right?! So I get Janis back! She’s absolutely & (if I do say so myself) delightfully crazy but I love it! And I’ve got that picture of us in Salvador and every time I look at it I look like a woman—not a pop star—but I’m afraid it’s too late! I know how to be a pop star but I don’t know how to bake bread . . . But honey, when I look at ya—this whole flood comes over me and I do remember . . . you and everything and I love ya and I did write motherfucker don’t you yell at me!! I’m now on my way to Albuquerque for a 1 nighter and my band is great and I’m getting fantastic and w
e’re having a good time! Just played a show in San Diego and sang a song called “Cry.” It’s a good song but I do a rap in the middle all about (ulp) your About lovin’ and leaving and someday (this is the way I do it in the son-) “you’re gonna wake up and REALIZE that your life ain’t over there in Africa, honey you left your life right here at home. . . .” and on and on ad boredom. But anyway I got a letter from Dodge who was at the show and said he was thrilled to know the man I was cryin’ about! Very paradoxical, compliment “STRANGE,” but he dug the show anyway.
I called your mother in Cincinati (however you spell it . . . ?) a couple of weeks ago to see if she’d heard from you cause I hadn’t and she was very nice and we sounded like two silly women talking about a man they both loved who was gone—and we were. And he is. . . .
But anyway—if you haven’t guessed I’m a little (?) stoned, am going to a gig, spaced by my entire life (HELP!) and I still do love ya.
Hope you get this letter and hope you can dig the fact I am no longer a junkie and am again full of feelings! It’s fantastic and it hurts, but I wouldn’t go back to sleepin’ for nothing. Oh and Linda left me—decided I was a loser—
But I’m NOT!! Have a good time over there, dig those people and learn all those languages, but don’t forget home—cause It’s waitin’ for ya . . . LOVE!, Janis
Addtl note from home, sober
I’ll be touring till end of August, recording September, and will be off approx 25 of Sept to end of October—where will you be? Let me know and maybe I could come and see ya—I’d love to—
Sure hope you get this fucking letter!!
I’m 10 pages in the new Playboy but I doubt if you can get it. Sotry’s a year old—but nice sort of. ’Bye honey, have an ouzo on me and I love ya . . .
Janis
His reply is equally moving.
Aug 17 Monday
Istanbul hot with people everywhere. About to head East—across Turkey to Baghdad then up through Iran to Afganistan (Kabul), Kashmir and Nepal (Katmandu)
Come on, Mama! Sure would dig that you were here.
Found this vest in the Istanbul market. It’s 130 years old. Think the work is really too much. Trust Linda might be able to restore it a bit. Will try to send some wall hangings from Iran or Afgan.
Hay, Mama! Come over and see some of the East. Nepal in October is said to really be something write me C/O American Embassy, Kabul, Afganistan if you can come for a few weeks or a few years. Could meet you in Katmandu anytime, but Late October is the best season. Anyway, Baby—write to Kabul and let me know how you’re doing. Haven’t heard shit from you and don’t know if the mail is being fucked or you’re being a cunt.
Really miss ya. Things aren’t the same alone (scribbled and crossed through)
Love ya, Mama, more than you know.
David
Have a fantastic hookah—wanted to send for Linda but too many years of hash to pass customs. Perhaps I can have it cleaned by the time I get to Iran.
In 1970 Zelda, by Nancy Milford, was published. Janis bought it immediately. She loved biographies, and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were guiding influences in her life. Scott and Zelda led the Jazz Age, famous for their elegant escapades as much as his writing, some of which was borrowed from Zelda.
On the June 1970 Dick Cavett Show, Cavett asked Janis if she wanted to hear any stories about Fitzgerald, because another guest, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., had known him. Janis pursed her mouth and very earnestly said, “No, only the truth.” Janis recommended the book on camera and commented, “The impression I got from all the Fitzgerald biographies was that he sort of destroyed her. But he wrote her a letter [reprinted in Zelda] that said, ‘They keep saying we destroyed each other, I don’t think that’s true. I think we destroyed ourselves.’”
During the tour, Janis confronted questions about the record the band would be making. Who should be the producer? How will it work? Gabriel Mekler, the producer of her Kozmic Blues album, had created a rift between Janis and the previous band. She knew she didn’t want that, but she had only a vague sense of what she did want.
Slowly came the recollection that Paul Rothchild had liked her singing. Long before fame had colored people’s perceptions of Janis, Paul had made his respect for her known. It just so happened that Paul was an old friend of John Cooke’s. John called Paul and went through the same song and dance that Bobby had to do to get John to join the tour. “I don’t know,” Paul stated. “The last time I saw Janis she was a junkie. She couldn’t focus on her art.” Cooke exclaimed in his emphatic fashion, “No, it’s all better now. She’s off junk and hardly drinking and got a new band. They’re green, wide awake, and innocent! Janis wants you to come on tour with them for a while, to see what’s going on.” Paul told me, “It was a joyous reunion and Janis’s eyes were bright and clear, and her spirit up.”
Paul Rothchild was a moderate five feet eight inches tall, with bushy blondish-brown hair and blue eyes. His face had what he calls a “quirky” look, but women found it cute and handsome, in spite of his dominating Roman nose. His lithe build looked perfect in black jeans, black shirts, and cowboy boots, set off by one good Indian turquoise bracelet. He was often seen under a dark green Borsalino hat, the kind gentlemen ranchers wore, not cowboys on the open range.
Rothchild was a man of humor who liked to have fun. Trained as a classical conductor, he was drawn to produce folk, blues, and bluegrass in the fifties and sixties. He was the recording director for Prestige Records and then Elektra Records until 1968. Then he became an independent producer. He produced all of the Doors’ albums and also did the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. His connection to an obscure folk-blues group from the Minneapolis folk scene—Koerner, Ray and Glover—earned him Janis’s special respect.
Rothchild accompanied her on the last few gigs of the tour, from July 11 in San Diego to August 12 at Harvard. Wandering around backstage, he could occasionally be seen peering deeply into the amplifiers, pondering the mix, and checking other details of the band’s sound. In San Diego, Janis gave him a stopwatch, saying, “Look, I’ve only got thirty-five good minutes in me. You stand behind the amps and I’ll look over, you flash me how much time I have left.” Paul thought it was a good sign that she was pacing herself like a runner.
One of his questions in working with Janis had been about her voice. When Paul heard the Kozmic Blues Band, he worried that she had killed it. Standing backstage in San Diego, within the first ten seconds he realized the voice was all there again. “She was singing and I was enraptured because I was listening to one of the most brilliant vocalists I ever heard in classical, pop, or jazz music. What a voice! I went, ‘Oh! My God!’ All of the woman was revealed. The vessel of Janis vanished. For somebody like me who was always talking about the inner beauty and all that stuff, it got me big. So, I was totally hooked from that moment on, on every single possible level.”
Paul was a marked contrast to other producers she had worked with. He was a sixties guy who thought the musicians should be the central focus. Paul believed that a producer should create an atmosphere in which musicians were comfortable and could bring forth their best. He understood that though the focus of recording was always on the music, the musicians couldn’t bring forth their best unless the ambience and feelings were right.
He became her champion in a fight over the CBS restriction that required their artists to record in a CBS studio with CBS engineers. “Wait a minute,” Paul exclaimed. “CBS engineers all come from the age of Noah. The studios are out of date, and they’re geared to making the Johnny Mathis sound.” Presenting his case to Clive Davis, Paul continued, “We want to do this right, in an environment that will be rock and roll.” No matter the arguments, the corporate attorneys could say only that the engineers would strike.
Finally, a compromise was reached. The executives were sensitive to the argument that if CBS were not responsive to the new music, they couldn’t sign new acts. Paul would do two demonstration recordings wit
h Janis. One would be in a CBS studio with CBS engineers; the other would be at the independent studio, Sunset Sound. Clive Davis agreed, with the stipulation that the work at Sunset Sound would include a CBS engineer sitting in the room, feather-bedding.
They made the two recordings, and played them in a blind test for all involved. Everyone chose the Sunset Sound recording, and so Clive Davis allowed the record to be made there. He stated emphatically that if there were any complaints from the union, he was closing the studios in L.A., where 176 engineers worked. The engineers complained, and the CBS studios in L.A. were closed and remain closed.
Between making the demos and starting work on the record, Paul came to Larkspur with John Cooke. “She didn’t realize it at the time,” he said, “but I was very carefully studying her. Drugs weren’t there, at all.” He asked Janis, “What do you want to be when you’re forty-five, or fifty-five?” “I want to be the greatest blues singer in the world,” she shouted. Nodding his head with a smile on his face, he replied, “That’s available to you, but not if you blow your voice out.”
Paul then commenced to prove his point. In her sunlit redwood living room, they each sang in the church-choir voices they had used when they were ten. He explained, “What we want to do is work that part of your voice into songs and develop it into the full passionate one, so the effect is more dramatic.” “Yes, yes, yes! Great, let’s do it,” was how he remembered Janis’s reply.
Janis had been struggling with this issue ever since she became prominent. She told a Playboy interviewer that the reason she was working so hard was “sure as hell not the money. At first it was to get love from the audience. Now it’s to reach my fullest potential, to go as far as I can go. I’ve got the chance. It’s a great opportunity!”
What a boon for Janis to find Paul, someone who knew how to help. Janis’s friends often said that she liked people who didn’t have self-doubts and knew what they were talking about. She thrived on their conviction, knowledge, and power. Part of it was that she valued competence on its own merits. Part of it was her own insecurity, feeling she needed someone to tell her what to do. She didn’t understand her rise to fame and was unable to talk clearly to musicians due to her lack of training. She sought help whenever she found someone who knew. In recording, Paul Rothchild was someone to lean on and learn from.