On the Road with Janis Joplin

by John Byrne Cooke

  “So much of Monterey had nothing to do with logistics or planning. The bird just landed there. No rules, no instructions. It also said a lot to me about Northern California. So much of it could never have happened anywhere else. . . . It’s always an amazing experience for me when I go to something that is not my production. I am like the maître d’ from the Catskills. . . . Why is it taking so long to move the equipment? You call this a hot dog? . . . But Monterey passed the test. In the sense that the majority of the people came there to enjoy themselves, and they did. What prevailed over everything was the meeting of unnamed tribes who didn’t even know they were tribes. . . . The looseness of Monterey, I always attributed to Lou Adler. After a while, there was no control. But they didn’t need control because of the audience. They were all already members of the same organization. Before they got to the grand meeting of Monterey.”

  Bill Graham, rock promoter, Fillmore Auditorium

  My perspective is more San Francisco than L.A. On Friday night, the acts that don’t arouse my interest—the Association, Johnny Rivers, Beverley—are the acts, not by coincidence, that Neuwirth and Pennebaker deem not worth filming. The Paupers, a group recently acquired by Albert Grossman, are spirited but unknown. Eric Burdon and the Animals raise the energy a couple of jumps. In performance, their hit version of the folk classic “The House of the Rising Sun” is impressive and moving.

  The light show for the evening performances is by Head Lights, from the Fillmore in San Francisco, projected on huge screens behind the performers: bubbles of color pulsating, undulating, overlaid with photos and film clips, a visual supplement to the music that few but the San Francisco ballroom fans have seen before.

  By Saturday morning, Chief Marinello is smiling. The feared invasion by the Hells Angels has not materialized and the vibe on the fairgrounds is peaceful, elevated, charged with anticipation of the music yet to come.

  In memory, the festival plays like a movie put together by a cheerfully stoned editor. It’s a montage of vignettes, each one contributing something singular to the accumulating impression: Simon and Garfunkel singing better than ever . . . Otis Redding, taking obvious pleasure in singing for what he calls “the love crowd,” putting his soul into “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” . . . Hugh Masakela all but unknown in this gathering, the music jazz, and pretty good jazz at that, the vocals African tribal, the fusion of the two unfamiliar, but we dig it all the same, because it is here and now and part of this scene that is blowing our minds, and because in this context no one can do wrong.

  During the concerts, I have no responsibilities. Pennebaker is recording the concert sound from the stage mikes, mixed through the main board. When the act onstage doesn’t hold my attention, I stroll the tent-alley bazaar outside the arena, where the incenses and oils give off Middle Eastern aromas. The kaleidoscopic array of tie-dye and batik and beads and face painters is dazzling.

  The infectious spirit of the festival draws from one act after another performances that exceed their own expectations, and ours. In the midst of so many successes, the San Francisco bands succeed both individually and as a group. New to most of the crowd, they more than hold their own in this company, validating the recently christened San Francisco Sound. Country Joe MacDonald, on Saturday afternoon, with flower blossoms painted on his cheeks and an antique fireman’s hard hat perched on his head, plays an extended rendition of “Section 43,” a mesmerizing instrumental. The Fish are in the zone and they bring us with them. Close your eyes and it gets you high without chemical aids.

  Jefferson Airplane work their vocal sorcery—Grace Slick, Marty Balin and Paul Kantner singing alternating leads on “High Flying Bird,” Grace and Marty magical in duet on “Today,” the band’s tonalities and inflections utterly distinctive. After this, we can identify an Airplane song from thirty thousand feet.

  The Grateful Dead are down to earth, boogeying, raising some dancers from their seats to vibrate in the aisles, on the grass at the back of the arena, and as far beyond its gates as the sounds carry, but the Dead never fully get up to speed. They’re just back from New York and they played in L.A. the night before. Jerry Garcia’s guitar has been stolen, he’s bummed, the band is tired. But the Dead are the Dead, sui generis, and they add new recruits to the core of San Francisco devotees who are already called Deadheads.

  The performance many of us will remember forever comes from Big Brother and the Holding Company. They take the stage on Saturday afternoon, four long-haired guys and Janis Joplin. Their outfits aren’t as flamboyant or coordinated as the styles of the L.A. acts. Sam and James are in black jeans and boots and loose-fitting shirts. Peter and David venture more color. Janis wears hippie street clothes, jeans and a top. In San Francisco she’s already something of a local legend. She has been singing with Big Brother for just a year, and she has won a reputation as a singer like no other. Beyond the Bay, she is all but unknown.

  The short set culminates with Janis’s showstopper from the San Francisco ballrooms, Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton’s “Ball and Chain,” which Big Brother has recast in a minor key, the better to evoke the emotion in the lyrics. Their arrangement begins with four ascending notes wrenched from James Gurley’s guitar, a momentary Handelian silence, and an intro that shatters all the rules. James plays riffs from an alternative reality, and chords that no one at the Gibson guitar factory ever dreamed. His overture is a wail from another point of view, an assault on the festival’s self-satisfied bliss, and it transfixes the audience. Up to now, Big Brother is just another variation on the San Francisco Sound. From this moment, they’re Something Else.

  James’s introduction shrieks to a crescendo and spins off into the ether, leaving only the drums and Peter Albin’s bass, slow and low, thumping like a tired heart in labor, as Janis barely whispers the opening lines:

  Sittin’ down by my window,

  Just lookin’ out at the rain . . .

  She doesn’t stay in the soft register for long. Her voice rises, pleads, screams. By the time she hits the first chorus, the audience is mesmerized. Can a white girl sing the blues? Janis’s answer is yes, in spades. She matches the intensity of James’s guitar while she explores the same outer realms, and . . . she can’t . . . but she does. . . . When she really pulls out all the stops she sings chords!

  In the second row of the audience, in the fenced-off section reserved for performers and VIPs, Mama Cass Elliott gapes openmouthed. When the audience’s roar of approval erupts at the end of the song, Cass turns to the guy beside her and exclaims, “Wow. Wow! That’s really heavy!”

  Backstage, Big Brother is jubilant—but there is trouble brewing, right here in Music City. Big Brother, along with some of the other San Francisco bands, refused permission to be filmed, and Pennebaker is beside himself. Big Brother has to be in the movie! Janis’s performance will make the movie!

  The Grateful Dead have also declined to be filmed. So have Moby Grape, but the Bay Area ranks are disunited. Country Joe and the Fish gave permission. So did the Airplane. Julius Karpen, Big Brother’s manager, is adamantly against their appearing in the movie. Karpen is a balding, myopic, beatnik businessman who drives a hearse. He is called Green Julius within the San Francisco rock scene because he smokes prodigious amounts of weed. By the account of one insider, Julius refuses to discuss business with anyone who won’t first smoke grass with him. He is given to waxing philosophical, and at length, about the state of the world and the unique role of the San Francisco scene in the larger swirl of the cosmos. Like many another eccentric, Julius has found a home in the San Francisco counterculture. He is deeply suspicious of the music business. The movie is a rip-off, he says. Everybody’s playing for free, so why should Phillips and Adler and ABC-TV and whoever else profit from the performances, while the bands get nothing? Oh, right, proceeds to causes that benefit popular music, whatever that means.

  Janis is sympathetic to the anticommercial et
hic that pervades the San Francisco music scene. She is devoted to the communal spirit that the bands share, but nothing is more important to her than Big Brother’s career. Maybe the fact that the Airplane—the only other San Francisco band that features a chick singer—has agreed to be filmed has something to do with Janis’s determination that Big Brother should be in the movie too. She leads the fight against Julius, and a couple of the boys back her. At an impasse among themselves and at odds with their manager, the band casts about for an oracle to show them the auspicious pathway. They turn to Albert Grossman.

  Grossman is at Monterey to shepherd two of his acts. The Paupers are Canadian, new talent from north of the border. The Electric Flag is a band recently formed by Mike Bloomfield, the blues guitar virtuoso, formerly of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Monterey is the Flag’s debut performance. Butterfield, of course, is here too, with Elvin Bishop now discharging by himself the lead guitar duties that he has shared with Bloomfield until recently. Grossman knows both Butterfield and Bloomfield from Chicago, where they all got their start in the music business. He was responsible for Butterfield’s acceptance in the folk clubs of the early sixties. The Butterfield band is one that other musicians go out of their way to hear. Grossman also manages Peter, Paul and Mary. Hell, he invented Peter, Paul and Mary. He noticed that all the folk-pop groups were guys—the Kingston Trio, the Brothers Four, the Limelighters, the Chad Mitchell Trio—and it occurred to him that a group with a girl might catch the public’s imagination. Grossman tried to interest his friends Bob Gibson and Bob (soon to be Hamilton) Camp, who performed as a duo and sang exceptional harmonies together, in taking on a girl singer to take the harmonies to the next level. Gibson and Camp didn’t share his vision, but Peter Yarrow and Noel (soon to be Paul) Stookey, were more open to suggestion, and, together with Mary Travers, they are reaping the rewards.

  At the time of the Pop Festival, Grossman’s roster of clients also includes the James Cotton Blues Band, Richie Havens, Gordon Lightfoot, Odetta, Ian and Sylvia, and the Band.

  The breadth of Grossman’s achievements is less important to Janis and Big Brother than the singular fact that he is Bob Dylan’s manager and that Dylan has thrived under his care. He encouraged Peter, Paul and Mary to record Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and by so doing accelerated the trio’s rise to fame and used their momentum to bring more notice to Dylan, whose name was then becoming known but whom relatively few in the folk music audience had seen or heard. It was not an accident of timing that Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” was rising on the charts in the weeks before the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, where Dylan scored his breakthrough triumph—with a significant boost from Joan Baez, who sang with him in his set and brought him onstage during her Sunday night closer.

  Backstage at Monterey, Grossman is the only person who appears unperturbed amid the commotion swirling around Janis and Big Brother. His presence is imposing, in part because of his physical appearance, in part because of his manner. He is portly without being fat. He remains still for long periods of time, but when he moves he moves briskly, in the manner of a slender man. His hair turned gray before he was forty. Half a generation older than most of his clients, his aura can seem parental. When he wants to be overbearing, it’s as though your stern grandfather has taken umbrage. John L. Wasserman, film critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, said in his review of Dont Look Back that Grossman looked like a Soviet diplomat. Two years later, Grossman has let his hair grow longer. He wears round steel-rimmed glasses. They make him look wide-eyed, which is one of his favorite expressions. Who, me? He resembles no one so much as the man on the Quaker Oats carton.

  Ron Polte, manager of Quicksilver Messenger Service, knows Grossman from Chicago. At Monterey, he has introduced Grossman to Big Brother. On Saturday afternoon, Janis approaches Grossman and asks him to consult with the band about Pennebaker’s movie.

  By now, John Phillips and Lou Adler have made Big Brother a tempting offer: If you’ll agree to be filmed, we’ll put you on again, on Sunday evening.

  Pennebaker has spoken with Albert about Janis’s performance, which blew him away. “Whatever you have to do,” Penny said to him, “I don’t care if you have to go in and break a leg. God, we have to film her! We just have to do it. This is the basis of the whole film.”

  “Don’t worry,” Albert said. “I’ll fix it for you.” And he does.

  When Big Brother asks Albert if they should accept the offer to perform again, if they’ll agree to be filmed, he says, Hey, I’d do it. He doesn’t say this just because Penny asked for his help. Albert has no stake in the movie, no investment yet, either financial or emotional, in Big Brother’s career. He tells them to go for it because he knows it’s the right thing for them to do. If you want wider recognition, he says, this is the way to get it.

  Albert’s approval is all the holdouts in Big Brother need. They consent to be filmed. Janis is elated, and Julius Karpen storms off in a huff. Adler and Phillips juggle the schedule and make room for Big Brother on the Sunday evening program.

  While this drama plays out in the background, we of the Pennebaker crew are focused on the performances at hand. On Saturday evening, Otis Redding is the highlight, but the Airplane, the Byrds, Hugh Masakela, and Booker T. and the MGs also work their magic.

  On Sunday morning, Chief Marinello sends home half the officers he has mustered to police the festival.

  Ravi Shankar is the sole performer on Sunday afternoon. In this gathering where the other performers are mining mother lode veins of rock and roll, R&B, folk, and jazz, the crowd—a scattering of blues and jazz and folk fans among the dominant mass of beatniks and hippies and flower children—accords Shankar the status of guru-for-the-day.

  For this performance, I take control of the button that will turn on the red light and signal the cameras to roll. Our tripod cameras have twelve-hundred-foot magazines that run for half an hour without reloading, but the others—the free-roaming cameras on our catwalks alongside the stage—have four-hundred-foot rolls that last just ten minutes. Penny has decided to film Ravi’s final raga, which will surely run longer than that. My job is to guess when the tune is within ten minutes of its end, so the shoulder-held cameras can shoot without interruption until it’s over.

  My qualifications for undertaking this responsibility are late nights in Cambridge that ended up stoned to the gills and zoning out to the recordings of this very same wizard of the sitar, or to Ali Akbar Khan, equally adept master of the sitar’s first cousin, the sarod, in the company of my roommate Fritz Richmond, washtub bassist for the Charles River Valley Boys and the Jim Kweskin Jug Band—whose mastery of the washtub approaches Ravi’s on the sitar, relatively speaking—and our frequent guest, Bob Neuwirth.

  At Monterey, I stroll the arena during Shankar’s early pieces, absorbing the music on the move. Ravi feels connected to the audience. He introduces each piece at greater length than is his custom before a Western audience. The crowd is with him all the way. In the front rows of seats reserved for performers, a cluster of musicians—Mike Bloomfield, Jimi Hendrix, Al Wilson of Canned Heat, Michelle Phillips—listen raptly.

  Today the coastal clouds have hung around, and colors glow more brightly in the diffuse light. A plan to have bagsful of the festival’s signature pink orchids tossed from a hot-air balloon above the arena has gone awry because of the fog bank, so instead the ushers have placed an orchid on every seat before the concert begins. During Ravi’s set, the flowers, threaded through buttonholes, tucked behind ears, held in hands, or woven into long hair, glow like radiant, oversized fireflies that have alighted throughout the audience.

  As the final raga begins, I return to the catwalk at the edge of the stage, all my attention on Ravi and his accompanists. I shoot some photos. . . . I wait . . . and wait, through the languid, hypnotic exposition of the opening themes. Almost imperceptibly, the tempo of the music increases, the rhythms o
f the tabla—the small hand drums played incomparably by Alla Rakha—gaining speed, Ravi effortlessly keeping pace. The tempo becomes insistent . . . and still I wait . . . until I dare not wait any longer. I switch on the red light and the cameras roll, ten minutes of film spooling off at twenty-four frames a second.

  The interplay between the sitar and the tabla grows steadily more complex as Ravi initiates the phase where the sitar calls to the tabla and the drums answer—short phrases, simple at first, then more complex, drawing smiles of delight from Alla Rakha, answering smiles from Shankar and from Kamala Chakravarty, who fills out the sound with the mesmeric monotone of the tamboura. Toward the end, the tabla and sitar join together, the players’ hands flying over the strings and drumheads in a blur, impossibly fast, until the elation that this music from halfway around the world brings to this arena, this audience, approaches rapture.

  The ending brings the crowd to its feet as one with a joyous roar that must be audible in downtown Monterey.

  The audience pelts the stage with flowers. Pink orchids pile up at the feet of the musicians. They bow time and again, palms together, beatific, deeply moved by the response. The trio leaves the stage. They are called back. The waves of applause wash the arena. The ovation promises to go on until it’s time for the evening concert. In the film, the applause will continue for almost two minutes, which seems like a very long time. Now, in real life, it lasts much longer.

  Finally Shankar holds up his arms and the audience quiets. “I want you to know how much I love you all and how happy I am to be loved by you,” he says. He picks up a handful of orchids, throws them back into the crowd, bows for the last time, and the grateful people let him go.

  It is a singular triumph among many on a triumphant weekend.

  I cherish one image, a mental film clip, from Sunday afternoon after Ravi’s transcendent set. Strolling the fairgrounds, I see a Monterey motorcycle cop cruising along a roadway, greeted everywhere with smiles and smiling nonstop himself, the whip antenna on the back of the bike waving brightly, pinkly, adorned from bottom to top with skewered orchids.