On the Road with Janis Joplin

by John Byrne Cooke

  When Pennebaker heard that Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, was interested in making a documentary film about Dylan, Penny presented himself for consideration. Thanks to Sara and “Daybreak Express” and the Casals film, Grossman and Dylan agreed to let Pennebaker film Dylan’s upcoming tour of England. Pennebaker asked Bob Altschuler, head of public relations at Columbia Records, Dylan’s label, for $5,000 to cover transportation, in exchange for which he offered to give Columbia a 50 percent interest in the movie. Altschuler said thanks but no thanks, demonstrating that 20/20 foresight is often in limited supply. Penny raised the money elsewhere, but he never let Altschuler forget the missed opportunity.

  Pennebaker’s style of filmmaking is to launch himself into real life, point his camera, and keep shooting. Early on, he found that in a surprisingly short time his subjects stop playing to the camera, more or less, and resume their normal behavior, whatever that might be. There are no staged scenes, no scripted dialogue, no retakes. The films are documentaries, if you understand that they involve going out to document, as best as you can, what’s happening, rather than cobbling together a movie from stock footage and staged events and filmed interviews. The French call it cinéma vérité. In America, this approach is known as “direct cinema” or “living cinema” or “truth cinema.” Penny just goes out and does it. What he gets, he gets. What he misses—because he’s eating or sleeping or just because he’s tired, for the moment, of lugging the camera around on his shoulder—he misses. Do the subjects ever forget completely that the cameraman and soundman are there? Probably not. Is there truth in what the camera sees, even if the subjects are aware of the camera? You bet your life.

  In the spring of 1965, Pennebaker accompanied Bob Dylan on a concert tour of England. He filmed Dylan being funny and cruel, brilliant and petty. He caught the power of one young man alone on a stage, playing his guitar and singing his extraordinary songs to rapt audiences. If Dylan was at any point putting on an act for the camera, he was playing himself as he wanted to be, as he imagined himself to be, which is another way of saying as he really was.

  In the spring of 1967, the film, titled Dont Look Back (the lack of an apostrophe was intentional), opened in a smattering of art houses. The distribution was about one step higher than what was called a “road show” in the silent era, when a film’s producer would book the theaters himself and carry the reels from town to town in a Model T Ford. Limited initial distribution notwithstanding, the film did well and attracted favorable critical notice. Out of the blue, Penny got a call from Bob Rafelson, a TV writer-producer and would-be film director, who, with his partner, Bert Schneider, had created the pop group the Monkees. Rafelson had seen Dont Look Back. He wondered if Penny might be interested in filming a pop music festival. Penny was interested. Where’s the festival gonna be? In Monterey, California.

  At the mention of California, Penny’s interest ratcheted up a notch. He had recently seen The Endless Summer, a documentary in which director Bruce Brown followed two surfers around the world as they sought the perfect wave. Most people thought of it as a surfing movie, but Penny didn’t see it that way at all. His filmmaker’s eye perceived the lyrical images as a paean to California—California as a state of mind, California as a new American Dream for the sixties.

  Penny knew there had been a film about the Newport, Rhode Island, Jazz Festival, but he hadn’t seen it. He was certain no one had made a movie about a pop festival.

  Penny flew to Los Angeles, where Rafelson took him to meet John Phillips and Lou Adler. Penny found something about John Phillips intriguing, and Phillips and Adler were intrigued by Dont Look Back. They proposed hiring Penny to direct the filming of the Pop Festival, but it was obvious to Penny that neither Phillips nor Adler had the first clue about how to produce a movie. “You need a producer,” Penny told them. They were astute enough to agree, and it became Penny’s movie.

  Back at the offices of Leacock Pennebaker on West 45th Street, Penny began to organize the California expeditionary force. He was going to need a lot of film. He was going to need a lot of cameras. He was going to need a lot of money.

  Phillips and Adler made a deal with ABC-TV to show the movie. Film arrived at Leacock Pennebaker by the case. Penny spent days and nights in the workshop to see how many cameras he could get up and running in time. The cameras were his design, a modification of a 16-millimeter Auricon, with the two-hundred-foot magazine canted at an angle to the rear so the camera balanced better on the shoulder, and a hand grip added at the front of the housing for stability. They were powered by rechargeable nickel-cadmium battery packs that strapped around the cameraman’s waist. Suited up with this outfit for a couple of hours, the effect was like wearing a Colt .45 Peacemaker—when you took it off, you felt naked.

  —

  IN THE SPRING of 1967, the siren call of “There’s something happening here” is beckoning me. To where, I don’t know, but a Harvard degree in Romance languages and literature doesn’t provide the road map. Nor, for the first time since I graduated from college, does bluegrass music. I have been playing with the Charles River Valley Boys for almost six years, but the invasion of British rockers that began in 1964 has changed everything, bringing electric music to the forefront. By ’67, even for a well-established bluegrass band, folk music gigs are fewer and farther between.

  It’s my hangout partner and sometimes Cambridge lodger, Bob Neuwirth, who opens the doorway to what’s next and invites me in. During Dylan’s Dont Look Back tour of England, Bobby was along for the ride as Dylan’s road manager. The next year, following Dylan’s electrified set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Neuwirth worked with Pennebaker on a follow-up film of Dylan touring England again, this time with an amplified backup band that within a few years would become known simply as “The Band.” The second film is unreleased, but Bobby has kept in touch with Pennebaker. When the Leacock Pennebaker offices begin to hum with preparations for Monterey, Bobby’s hip-happening potentiometer goes off the scale. He introduces me to Penny, and Penny hires me onto the crew.

  A few days before the Pop Festival, Bobby and I fly to San Francisco. Pennebaker has gone a day ahead of us with the advance guard, to scout the scene and find a cheap motel for the film platoon soon to follow. Bobby and I rent a car at the airport and bushwhack across the peninsula to Highway One, the coast road. As a recent California resident, I’m the designated pilot, and I’m too impatient for the sight of the Pacific Ocean to cruise down 101. We spin the dial of the radio, searching for Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale,” or some AM deejay playing any cut from the Beatles’ latest release, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The underground FM stations are playing the whole album in big chunks of uninterrupted awe, but rental cars don’t have FM.

  In Monterey, Pennebaker is already shooting film. “Here,” he says. He hands me a Nagra tape recorder. I like machines and this one is simple. Watch the VU meter. Don’t let it pin in the red or we’ll get distortion. Try to keep the mike out of the shots. Penny doesn’t tell me the Nagra costs thousands of dollars.

  Pennebaker and Ricky Leacock’s breakthrough technical contribution to documentary filmmaking is the light weight and portability of their cameras and tape recorders, so the cameraman doesn’t have to be anchored by a tripod, and the sync-pulse generators built into the Nagra tape recorders, which eliminates the need for a wire connecting the camera to the recorder. At the beginning or end of a shot, the cameraman focuses the camera on the soundman. The soundman pushes a button on the Nagra. A light attached to the Nagra’s shoulder strap flashes, and at the same time a beep goes on the tape. Et voilà! In the editing room, you sync the flash of light on the film to the beep on the tape and away you go. In the field, the cameraman and soundman are free to move independently, recording the scene from any angle, and to position the mike close to the sound source, untethered by wires.

  Penny and I ramble the grounds. We film Tom Law putting
up his tepee and smiling hippies erecting flimsy stalls for what will become a sideshow of psychedelia, a midway of far-out fashions and posters and sculpted aromatic candles and hippie gewgaws. We film in the festival office, where John and Michelle Phillips and Lou Adler and a host of assistants perform an intricate ballet from phone to phone. Dionne Warwick can’t make it. The Beach Boys? Yes, no, maybe, and in the end, no. Too bad.

  The oval fairgrounds arena has roofed tiers of seats flanking the long sides, and the stage fills most of one end. The other end is closed off with a simple board fence to control admissions. The lawn within the arena, built to accommodate horse shows, is covered with orderly rows of folding chairs. For the Pop Festival, seating within the arena is seven thousand plus.

  Our film crew badges give us unfettered access to the arena, backstage, everywhere. We film the construction of the stage. When the sound system is hooked up, David Crosby, of the Byrds, tests it by humming into a mike. He smiles. “Oh, groovy. A nice sound system at last.”

  Elsewhere, the vibes are less jubilant. Monterey police chief Frank Marinello estimates the potential attendance at fifty thousand, and he worries that the Hells Angels may arrive in force. In his mental screening room he is running The Wild One, with leather boys Brando and Lee Marvin running amok among the daughters and granddaughters of the Monterey Peninsula’s flag-waving Republicans and military families. Nearby Fort Ord is a major training ground for Vietnam-bound troops.

  The civic leaders wonder where they are going to get the foodstuffs to feed fifty thousand beatniks and hippies, where all these undesirables will sleep, and, ohmyGod, will they have to defecate while they’re here?

  The night before the concerts get under way, Pennebaker wangles a dinner invitation from John and Michelle Phillips for himself and his trusty soundman. We arrive with camera and Nagra in hand. Penny is following his instincts, maybe hoping for some behind-the-scenes footage that will illuminate what is about to happen. John and Michelle have rented a house in Monterey to serve as an off-premises retreat during the festival. Outside the windows there are redwoods on a wooded slope that could be in Marin County or the Berkeley Hills. Michelle cooks steaks, makes a salad, sticks some French bread in the oven. The four of us eat, drink wine, and have a lovely time. Penny doesn’t shoot a foot of film and I learn one of the ancillary benefits of cinéma vérité: Sometimes you just live life with your subjects instead of filming them.

  In the course of the evening, there is no hint of the turmoil that Michelle has recently caused within the Mamas and the Papas. Just sixteen when she met John, she is nineteen now. Not yet really mature enough to be a wife or a Mama, she has been testing her wings. Brief affairs with Papa Denny Doherty and the Byrds’ Gene Clark threatened her marriage to John and motivated John, Denny, and Mama Cass Elliott (who is carrying a torch for Denny herself) to eject Michelle from the group. They recently performed a four-city tour with Michelle’s parts sung by Lou Adler’s girlfriend, Jill Gibson, but the fans were loyal to Michelle and the tour went badly. On their return to L.A., John and Denny and Cass took Michelle back. She and John reconciled. Denny, still nursing his wounds, has not yet arrived in Monterey. The group may have to perform without him.

  This evening John and Michelle drink their wine and entertain us in a subdued style. It is the calm before whatever the confluence of energies gathered in Monterey is about to release.

  On Friday morning, the air throughout the Monterey County Fairgrounds quivers almost audibly with high expectations. The coastal clouds retreat at midday and the sunshine is warm. Everybody’s smiling. Ready or not, here we come.

  “It’s a Mexican standoff, typical of the yawning gulf between L.A. and San Francisco. . . . Paul Simon is the spiritual leader of the festival and most of us get involved because of him. He rises above all the scaly maneuvering and makes us see it from the audience’s point of view. . . . The combination of Paul Simon’s vision and Derek Taylor’s acidic poise convinces us in the end. We do it for the fans and fuck the rest of it. . . . When you walk through the fairgrounds at twilight with the teepees painted with Sioux symbols, people playing guitars, and children and dogs running around the tents, it’s worth all the hassles in the world. We’ve infiltrated the enemy camp and turned it into our own event. . . . We have our peyote-ceremony tents set up just as you walk in the gate.”

  Rock Scully, Grateful Dead management

  CHAPTER THREE

  It Happened in Monterey

  THE THEME OF the festival is “Music, Love and Flowers.” The music is a sure thing. For three days an extraordinary succession of acts will step onto the stage and play for the joy of it. The flowers arrive from Hawaii—eighty thousand orchids, a literal planeload, pink orchids everywhere. The love is speculative. It is a hope. A prayer. You can’t ship it in or order it up. Can’t buy me love.

  The evening performances are sold out before the first ticket holder enters the fairgrounds.

  People arrive by the carful, the VW busful, the hand-painted school busful. They come hitchhiking and they come by motorcycle. They come from up and down the coast, from San Francisco and L.A., and from farther afield. One girl has hitchhiked from Champaign, Illinois. Wiping the morning dew off the folding metal chairs in the fairgrounds arena gets her into the show. “How’d you get this job?” Pennebaker asks her, filming all the while. “Do you know somebody?” “No,” she says, “I just happened to be lucky, I guess.”

  The fans have dressed for the occasion pretty much as they dress every day in the Summer of Love. Colors run wild. The range of fashions is broad enough to confound anyone hoping to spot a trend and sell clothes to this crowd next year or next month. Antique clothes and work clothes and formal clothes. Tie-dyes and batiks. Curtains and bedspreads and odd-lot material made into free-flowing shirts and dresses. Hats are much in style. Derby hats and top hats and cowboy hats, berets and Arab fezzes and American Indian headbands and fur hats the Russians wear in winter. Boots too—tall boots and short boots and cowboy boots and hippie boots that zip up the side or the back, and lots of boots with really pointy toes like the English rockers wear. Winkle pickers, the Brits call them. What’s a winkle? Something you eat. A very small marine snail. You eat it with your boots?

  For the concerts, the Pennebaker film crew will occupy prime vantage points. The festival carpenters have built catwalks at each side of the stage about three feet below its level. The stage has a rectangular thrust that extends out about fifteen feet downstage center. Our catwalks wrap around the front corners of the thrust platform, allowing the cameramen to shoot from several angles.

  Thirty feet in front of the stage, in the front rows of seats, Pennebaker places one camera on a tripod. Two more are mounted in the near ends of the permanent, roofed seats on either side of the arena. The others will be shoulder-held, shooting from the catwalks or other vantage points. Pennebaker himself has no fixed position. He will roam, free to shoot from the wings or behind the amps onstage or wherever else the spirit takes him.

  The list of cameramen who have come along to film this pop music extravaganza contains some distinguished names. Albert Maysles is on a busman’s holiday from cinéma vérité filmmaking with his brother David. The Maysleses made What’s Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A. a few years ago. Nick Proferes and Jim Desmond are Leacock Pennebaker protégés who have formed their own film company. Ricky Leacock, Penny’s partner, is in the front rank of those who pioneered the vérité documentary style. He worked with the legendary filmmaker Robert Flaherty on Louisiana Story. Before that, Ricky was a combat cameraman in World War II, experience he hopes will not be relevant to surviving the Monterey Pop Festival.

  Neuwirth has no camera, no Nagra, no apparent function within the crew—until the music starts. In real life he is an artist, a painter who also plays the guitar and writes songs. His true calling seems to be keeping in tune with the times and being on hand wherever the most memorabl
e events are taking place. At Monterey, Bobby is Pennebaker’s aesthetic consultant, the arbiter of hip, the guide for what to shoot and what to ignore. We can’t film everybody. We don’t have enough film. We have to shoot all the acts in which Lou Adler and John Phillips—the film’s co-producers—have a special interest. Beyond that, the choice is ours. Somebody has to make the decisions. Penny has instincts of his own, and when a musical act grabs him, he shoots it. Otherwise he leaves it up to Bob. Bob sometimes consults with me. We rig a red light on a short pole at stage right, on the handrail of our catwalk there, where it can be seen from all the fixed camera positions. When Bobby turns on the light, the cameramen will go into action.

  Camping spaces on the fairgrounds and in local campgrounds are full before the Friday evening concert, and the San Francisco bands see a chance to put into practice their music-for-the-people philosophy. In San Francisco they play free concerts and benefits with a frequency that would alarm any profit-minded manager. The Grateful Dead family, spearheaded by co-manager Rock Scully, gets Monterey Peninsula College to open its football field as a temporary campground. More festival pilgrims sack out in the floral pavilion on the fairgrounds, by arrangement with the sponsoring florists. Over the course of the weekend, the Dead and Jefferson Airplane and several other performers play in the pavilion and at the football field for free, to the surprise and delight of the campers.

  Everywhere, people are smiling, and we’re thinking, Look how many of us there are! As the music begins, a gossamer enchantment seems to settle over the fairgrounds.