On the Road with Janis Joplin

by John Byrne Cooke

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  SUNDAY EVENING IS Big Brother’s chance to prove they can repeat their Saturday sensation. For this performance, Janis decks herself out in a gold lamé pantsuit and she sings as if her future depends on it, which it does. This time around, many in the audience know what to expect, but “Ball and Chain” knocks them out all over again and once more they roar their admiration. As Janis leaves the stage, she raises her arms and skips with joy. She knows she nailed it for the cameras.

  “The best time of all was Monterey. It was one of the highest points of my life. Those were real flower children. They really were beautiful and gentle and completely open, man. Ain’t nothing like that ever gonna happen again.”

  Janis Joplin

  And still, there is more to come. The Who are straight from two days at the Fillmore. Giddy in their first rush of California gooniness, they turn loose high-volume British rock and roll—“Substitute,” “Summertime Blues,” and a couple more—and destroy most of their equipment at the end of their last song, “My Generation,” shocking some and pissing off the sound crew, who dash onstage to save the microphones, but the band is so off-the-wall, out-of-control, to-hell-with-the-sensible-limits that we just watch, agog, and wait for the stage to be cleaned up before the next act. Being outrageous is part of the countercultural ethic, but our interest in this Götterdämmerung acting out will diminish when we learn it’s a regular part of their act. They trash the same amp at every show, and smash up cheap guitars.

  And besides, they can’t top Jimi Hendrix, who carries outrageous to new heights. Pennebaker and I chanced to be on hand for Jimi’s sound check this morning, in the empty arena, and we took note that this is a guitar player of exceptional ability. On Sunday night the cameras are on Jimi from the start of his set, but we don’t expect another performance that will create a sensation to equal Janis and Big Brother.

  Jimi plays the guitar behind his back, over his head, with his teeth. He plays the longest set of the night. He plays B. B. King’s “Rock Me Baby,” the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” and Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” He grabs songs from across the pop spectrum and makes each one his own. He sneaks “Strangers in the Night” into his guitar solo on “Wild Thing” . . . he turns a somersault on the stage without missing a note . . . he makes a little bow before he lays his guitar on the stage, squirts it with lighter fluid, sets it afire, urges the flames higher with his hands, and then, almost regretfully, smashes the guitar and throws the fragments into the audience magnanimously, as a peace offering . . . all of which is easier to understand if you know that Jimi took a bunch of Owsley acid before the performance, the micrograms measured in the thousands, but probably no more than everyone else in the arena ingested collectively.

  “I saw Owsley give him two of his little purple tabs, and I watched Jimi swallow them about half an hour before he went onstage.”

  Peter Pilafian, Mamas & Papas road manager

  “I saw him take, literally, a handful of Owsley tabs. At least four, maybe six. I saw him take it. And then he crumpled up in the corner. And he was wearing—English garb, you know, stuff. Ruffled stuff, psychedelic ruffles. And he looked like a bag of laundry in the corner of the room, and people were taking bets if he could even stand, much less get onstage. . . . And he looked like laundry in the corner of the tent. And when his time came to play, they literally—guys came in and picked him up, and sort of walked him to the stage. And as soon as he got onstage, he transformed into Jimi Hendrix, from a crumpled bunch of laundry into the greatest rock-and-roll guitar player in history.”

  Bob Seidemann, San Francisco photographer

  In contrast to the Who’s calculated smashup, Jimi’s theatrics are spontaneous, fueled by equal doses of LSD and the love made manifest in his music. This is his first American performance since he gigged as an R&B sideman with the Isley Brothers and Little Richard years ago. A few fans might have seen him backing John Hammond, Jr., in a Greenwich Village gig back in the folk days, but here the show is all Jimi. He’s making it up as he goes along, and he ends his set in a literal blaze of glory.

  To close the evening, and the festival, the Mamas and the Papas float about the stage in floor-length dresses and robes. Denny shows up at the eleventh hour and puts his heart fully into the songs, the group truly reunited and as happy to be on this stage as all the others who have preceded them.

  “I thought that [Monterey] just cut the whole scene wide open. It connected it. It was like opening a gigantic door that suddenly made what was an embryonic West Coast music scene into something of national, cultural prominence. And I thought it sort of put the stamp on the era. I thought it was enormously powerful. Because it was innocence. It was a window on this land of innocence where sweetness and a certain kind of Tao-like love of poetry and music and friends that was suddenly—the spotlight turned on and it was all there for the country to see, and it made it visible. It didn’t last very long.”

  Peter Pilafian

  “My idea of a good festival, the best festival of all time, was Monterey.”

  Grace Slick

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  ON MONDAY MORNING the stragglers melt away into the postpsychedelic mists, carrying fragments of the festival’s spirit out into the world, while county workers set about raking up the wilting orchids. The dreaded fifty thousand failed to materialize, but Chief Marinello figures the three-day crowd at thirty-five thousand, with more than ten thousand able to hear the music coming from the stage at any given moment, including those outside the arena on the fairgrounds.

  Janis and Big Brother aren’t the only ones who achieve sudden renown at Monterey. Jimi Hendrix becomes an overnight sensation. A measure of how little known he was before Monterey is his third billing, below Jefferson Airplane and the jazz guitarist Gabor Szabo, on the poster—printed before Monterey—for his scheduled appearance at the Fillmore in San Francisco that follows the Pop Festival.

  And Otis Redding has brought soul music a giant step closer to the mainstream by knocking the socks off a musical generation that is leavening the pop charts with songs about subjects far beyond teenage heartbreak.

  In the immediate aftermath of the festival, it is Janis who gets the most notice, the biggest boost. The fact that Big Brother was the only act to perform twice gains them an extra measure of attention from the fans and the press. In many of the articles about the Pop Festival that bloom in newspapers and magazines across the land, there’s Janis, hair flying, singing her heart out with such conviction that even in a still photograph you can feel her power.

  Less noticed, except by some of us who remain connected to Janis through the months and years that follow, is the fortuitous confluence of events that combined here to produce her sudden rise in the popular consciousness. It is not just the fact that a film was being made, but that the filmmaker was Pennebaker, that his reaction to Janis boosted the effort to offer them a second chance, that Penny knew Albert Grossman, and that the need to have Janis in the movie brought Albert and the members of Big Brother to each other’s attention in a way that probably contributes to Albert’s signing to manage Big Brother before the year is out. So many apparently random ripples flow together to create the perfect wave.

  My own presence at the festival is in no way related to Janis’s rise to prominence, but if I hadn’t been at Monterey, if I hadn’t known Bob Neuwirth, who knew Pennebaker, if I hadn’t reacted to Janis as everyone who heard her reacted, I wouldn’t be able to tell the tale that follows.

  In the elevating afterglow, the Monterey Pop Festival reveals itself as something more than the launching pad for new beginnings. It is the culmination of a movement that began when the first inspired soul of the post–World War II generation—inspired by Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, the Weavers, Burl Ives, and Josh White, among others—picked up a guitar and strummed out a folk song. In the fifties, teenagers supported the creati
on of a new kind of pop music. In the sixties, many of those same teens, now in their twenties, are making it. American popular music has become a do-it-yourself enterprise, and it has extended its appeal to a broader demographic. Assembled at Monterey, the leading lights of the new music, in company with their fans, have demonstrated the magnanimous force of music, love and flowers.

  As the Pennebaker crew packs up to head for the airport, those who have found Monterey to their liking have got the Leavin’ California Blues. I sympathize as best I can, but my exploration of the Summer of Love is just beginning. My bluegrass band, the Charles River Valley Boys, is booked for a California tour.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  More Pretty Girls Than One

  ON MONDAY MORNING, Ralph Gleason reports in the San Francisco Chronicle that Monterey’s chief of police, Frank Marinello, now considers hippies his friends. “These people have proved flowers and love are a symbol of what they really believe in,” Gleason quotes the chief. The festival’s ticket director pays the audience a similar tribute: “I’ve never seen a crowd like it. These people are polite and patient and gentle.”

  In his own words, adopting a favorite word of the flower children, Gleason sums up the festival in a glowing review. “The first annual Monterey International Pop Festival this weekend was a beautiful, warm, groovy affair which showed the world a very great deal about the younger generation. In the first place, the music was fine, the staging was excellent and the shows were good. You know they are when the audiences stay until well after 1 a.m. But beyond that, it showed something else very important—you can have 35,000 long-haired, buck-skin and beaded hippies in one place without a hassle. . . . Saturday night was the biggest crowd in the arena in the history of the fairground. . . . So much for an inadequate description of one of the most remarkable scenes in contemporary American history, a giant musical love-in which set a standard of peacefulness and sobriety for the entire country. It was the greatest assembly of contemporary musical talent in history.”

  Bob Siggins and Joe Val, my fellow Charles River Valley Boys, are due to fly into San Francisco a few days after the Pop Festival. Until then, Pennebaker and Neuwirth and I reconnoiter the San Francisco scene. Penny is sufficiently curious to stick around for a day or two, and Bobby has decided to ride along on the CRVB’s California tour. We find a place to crash at a friend’s house in Berkeley and set off to scout the Haight-Ashbury.

  The Haight is south of the Panhandle, a narrow extension of Golden Gate Park that juts to the east. The great park itself is more than three miles long and half a mile wide, a sylvan retreat that offers informal camping to hundreds of young nomads each night.

  Since the first Human Be-In was held in the park in January, the national press has focused a spotlight on San Francisco, sensationalizing the long hair and outlandish clothing, the free love and the acid rock and the drugs, luring a generation that’s hungry for new experience. Summer’s here, school’s out, and the kids are arriving by the thousands.

  The park and the Panhandle have been the settings for dozens of free rock concerts since the scene began to percolate a couple of years ago. If these lush green spaces are the playground for the Haight-Ashbury community, the junction of Haight Street and Ashbury Avenue, two blocks off the Panhandle, is the civic center. The streets are as crowded as New York’s Fifth Avenue at lunch hour, but here ties and coats are even rarer than beads and tie-dye on the upscale streets of the Big Apple. The kids sit on the stoops of the houses, the fenders of parked cars, the curbstones. They smoke joints and cigarettes, they make out, they play guitars and drums and flutes and instruments contrived of found objects. What do they hope to find here? Drugs and sex, for sure. A place where they can be as stoned or freaky as they want and nobody will think the worse of them. Beyond that . . . ?

  What Bobby and Penny and I see is what’s already changing, but it’s all new to us and we don’t perceive the metamorphosis that’s under way. We have been drawn here by the TV news, the pieces in Time and Newsweek, the same coverage that brought all these kids, and, like them, we’re digging it for the first time. For the pioneers who created the upwelling of music, theater, art, and creativity, the eruption of a whole new, gaudy, outrage-the-straights, to-hell-with-limits lifestyle in San Francisco over the previous two years, this is the beginning of the end. What arose as a community where creative spirits of many descriptions could live together—young hippies, older beatniks, musicians, potheads, artists—an enclave within the broader society, removed from the scrutiny of parents and disapproving authorities, has become the focus of the press and the whole damn country. Among the founders, the exodus has already begun, as residents of the Haight decamp for Marin and Sonoma counties, the East Bay, and more remote refuges.

  We’re looking for what lies beneath the hubbub, hoping to find the genesis of the spirit we felt at Monterey, but we have no one to guide us, no insider to take us beyond the flow of wandering explorers and runaways. At midweek, we miss Big Brother and the Grateful Dead playing at a summer solstice celebration in Golden Gate Park because we’re not yet plugged into the rock underground.

  A few days later, Penny is airborne for New York and Bobby and I are southbound with Bob Siggins and Joe Val, heading back to Monterey and beyond, past Carmel, where I was living just a year ago, and down the coast to the headlands of Big Sur, where the Charles River Valley Boys will perform at the country’s smallest, best-kept secret on the festival circuit.

  This tour, our first and only venture to California, came about by accidents as lucky as those that brought me to Monterey with Pennebaker. Manny Greenhill, our Boston manager, has customarily booked his artists in the Berkeley Folk Festival, an annual event that has been around even longer than the convocations at Newport. During my year in Carmel, I learned of the much smaller folk festival in Big Sur, also held in midsummer. I knew a few folk music coffeehouses in Berkeley, and the Ash Grove in L.A. has a national reputation equal to that of the Club 47. Could Manny put together enough gigs to make a California tour worthwhile? He could, and he did.

  Bob Siggins is a founding member of the CRVB, a Harvard graduate whose postdoctoral studies in neuroscience at Boston University pretty much allow him to set his own schedule. Joe Val is a maestro of the mandolin who plays and sings like Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass music, with a Boston accent. In his day job, Joe is mild-mannered Joseph Valiante, a typewriter repairman whose boss has belatedly recognized that Joe is his most valuable employee. When the idea for taking the CRVB to California came up, Joe’s boss agreed to let him go.

  At the helm of the VW bus that is carrying us southward on Highway One is Peter Berg, a Berkeley musician Neuwirth and I have known since the early sixties, when Peter was in a group that played string band music and country songs and some bluegrass of a sort, but they felt it wasn’t as refined as bluegrass so they called it crabgrass. The Crabgrass Band featured Toni Brown on guitar and vocals. In the summer of 1967, Toni is better known as half of the Joy of Cooking and our Peter Berg is “the Berkeley Peter Berg,” to distinguish him from the San Francisco Peter Berg, who was one of the motivators behind the San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Diggers, and is altogether a different person.

  Our Cambridge bass player, Everett Alan Lilly, wasn’t able to make the trip. To replace him, we have recruited Peter, who will be the CRVB’s first electric bassist.

  In a whimsical moment, Peter has decided to assume an alias for his tour with the Charles River Valley Boys. He has a pair of blue jeans that turned purple when they were accidentally washed in hot water with some bright reds. Neuwirth lends him a purple corduroy jacket cut short like a Levi’s jacket. Peter comes up with a purple cape and dubs himself Purple Man.

  After the intensity of Monterey, the Big Sur Folk Festival is like a weekend at a summer camp for hippies. Big Sur is a place out of time. Access is by the two-lane coast road, California Route 1, from north or south, except when it is
washed out by winter rains. It’s a second- and third-gear road with a few long straightaways, an invitation to spirited driving. Even in summer, when the flow of tourists makes cruising the coast road at optimal speed unlikely, Big Sur feels remote from what we call civilization.

  The audience at this festival is a drop in the bucket compared to Monterey. You can count the fans in the hundreds. They park along Highway One and come trooping down the entrance road to the Esalen Institute, where the festival is held. During the rest of the year, Esalen hosts retreats and workshops featuring a grab bag of current philosophical and humanistic studies aimed at expanding what Aldous Huxley called “human potentialities.” Gestalt therapy and transactional analysis are current favorites in the counterculture’s explorations of mind and body. Seminars are hosted by resident and guest gurus that have included Fritz Perls, Alan Watts, and Eric Berne. Richard Alpert and Tim Leary have visited Esalen. So have Linus Pauling and B. F. Skinner. Attendees make reservations in advance and pay handsomely to have their consciousness raised. The Folk Festival, in contrast, is the least formal event of the year, a come-one, come-all event that brings a colorful collection of latter-day pilgrims leading kids by the hand and carrying picnic supplies and psychoactives by the bagload. They’re mostly locals from a hundred-mile stretch of coastline, joined by a handful of devotees who make the trek from Berkeley and San Francisco and L.A. The daytrippers spread out on the thick lawn below the main building, facing the terraced pool, and it is there on the terrace, with batik banners blowing in the wind and the Pacific Ocean as backdrop, that the celebrations commence.