On the Road with Janis Joplin

by John Byrne Cooke

  Paul gathered several musicians in a living room in Berkeley. Among those present were Al Wilson, who owned every blues record ever pressed and could play most of the songs; Taj Mahal, who had been playing solo, mostly in the East, for several years; and Janis.

  “In San Francisco, Paul Rothchild and I tried to recruit Janis Joplin for Elektra . . . she brought her guitars and sang for us at a mutual friend’s apartment—incredible power, the room was too small to hold her, she just about pushed you against the wall.”

  Jac Holzman

  They traded songs back and forth for a while, and it was beginning to click. Somebody would say, What about Such-and-Such-a-Blues? Oh, yeah, I know that. And they’d play it. Janis was having a good time, but the Mother Blues gig was looming. She had to decide whether she was going to stick with Big Brother or take a chance that Paul Rothchild’s idea would pan out.

  Janis wasn’t sure she and Big Brother were going to pan out. She had never sung rock and roll before. Except for a raggedy-ass and briefly popular band in Austin, where she just as briefly attended the University of Texas, she’d never sung with a band before at all. She was having to invent a whole new vocal style for San Francisco acid rock, and Big Brother was having to adjust their instrumental style to accommodate her singing. But Janis liked the feeling Big Brother gave her, the power of it, and she loved the interplay between the bands and the dancers in the Avalon and the Fillmore.

  In the letter to her parents, Janis expressed another doubt. “I’m not sure yet whether the rest of the band (Big Brother) will, indeed want to, work hard enough to be good enough to make it. We’re not now I don’t think. Oh God, I’m just fraught w/ indecision!”

  A month after the Monterey Pop Festival, Janis and the guys in Big Brother had moved to a house in Lagunitas, in Marin County, north of San Francisco. The shift to communal living was intended to strengthen the bonds within the group and make them a true family band in the San Francisco style. One morning when everybody was up and about, Janis told the boys about Paul Rothchild’s offer, and she told them she was considering it. Her announcement provoked a shocked response. To Peter and Sam and Dave and James, joining a band was a sacred trust. It wasn’t just a business, it was a commitment. You didn’t just back out after a couple of months when something that looked like a better offer came along. Peter Albin was the one who reacted most indignantly. He went at Janis hammer and tongs, demanding that she commit to the Chicago gig right then and there.

  Taken aback by Peter’s onslaught, Janis gave in.

  At her next meeting with Paul Rothchild, Janis told him she liked playing with Taj and Al, but she really wanted to play electric music. “Oh, hey,” Paul said, “we’ll do that too.” Janis said, “Well, I’ve been working with another group of musicians and I want to try that for a while and if that doesn’t happen, we’ll put this thing back together.” She had committed to the Mother Blues gig, but she was still weighing her options. She wrote her parents that she hoped the time in Chicago would give her perspective and help her make a final decision.

  In Chicago, Bobby Shad approached the band again, renewing his offer of a record contract. This time there was no Chet to blow him off. Peter and David and Sam and James wanted to go for it. Janis’s uncertainty about staying with the band had shaken them all. They recognized that her vocals were a vital addition to the group’s unique sound. Some of Big Brother’s San Francisco partisans had objected at first to the addition of a chick singer, but as the band’s music adapted to embrace Janis, her lead vocals had become the high points of their performances. A record deal would hold the band together, at least for a time.

  The boys argued for accepting Shad’s offer, and Janis gave her consent. Mainstream wasn’t Elektra by a long shot, but the record would be made now, not six months or more down the road, if the prospective blues band panned out. A more important consideration for Janis was proving herself to her parents. Growing up in Port Arthur, a Gulf coast oil town, and during her brief stab at college in Austin, she had always felt like a misfit. In San Francisco, she had found a band and a community that welcomed her, that made her feel she belonged. She wanted her parents to approve of her unconventional life. She had written them enthusiastically about Big Brother in her first weeks with the group. Making a record would prove that her contribution to the band was real. It would prove that she could take a job and stick to it.

  The relationship with Mainstream was uneasy from the start. The Mainstream engineers couldn’t grasp that James Gurley wanted the VU meters up in the red on the guitar solos. Distortion had been an essential element of his technique since the early days of ’65, when he was known as Weird Jim Gurley and called his music “freak rock,” playing an acoustic Martin guitar with a vocal mike taped to it for amplification.

  Big Brother’s music proved too out there for Bobby Shad. He wouldn’t allow the band in the control room during the final mix. Still, for all the hassles, the Mainstream deal and the Mother Blues gig did what the boys hoped they would do—they kept Janis in the group. After Mother Blues, she didn’t raise the subject of leaving the band again.

  Big Brother recorded some songs at a studio in Chicago, and more, later in the year, in Los Angeles. While they were in L.A., Mainstream put out two songs from the Chicago sessions as a single that sank without a whimper. In May ’67, Mainstream issued another single whose A side, “Down on Me,” aroused some notice.

  All of this was before Monterey. After the band’s success at the Pop Festival, Mainstream scrambled to get out an album to capitalize on the publicity.

  When the record hits the stores, Janis and the boys feel it’s too little, too late. The album has a thin, strangled quality, as if the sound that won over the San Francisco ballroom fans and made such an impression at Monterey had been squeezed through a two-inch car radio speaker. In the months since the Mainstream recording sessions, Big Brother has continued to evolve. The changes Janis and the band have made to adapt her singing and their sound to each other have achieved a synthesis, a unity that isn’t present on the Mainstream album. All the same, having a record in the stores a few weeks after Monterey, however much they dislike the sound, helps Big Brother believe that their Pop Festival success wasn’t just a onetime thing.

  In September, another triumph helps to banish that fear. The band’s champion, Ralph Gleason, has arranged for Big Brother to play on a Saturday afternoon blues program at the tenth annual Monterey Jazz Festival. Gleason is producing a TV special on the festival for KQED, San Francisco’s educational television outlet. In the world of jazz, Monterey is as much revered by western fans as the jazz festival at Newport is by East Coast devotees.

  This time, the audience in Monterey is shy on hippies and long on blacks. As Big Brother begins their first song, the crowd is silent, stunned by the sounds emerging from Janis’s Texas-white mouth. After sixteen bars they are on their feet, dancing in the aisles. When the set ends, Big Brother gets a standing ovation.

  Janis comes offstage, skipping and happy, bumps into Ralph Gleason, and throws her arms around him. “It was good, huh?” “It was dynamite,” the usually sardonic Gleason agrees. “Didja get it okay?” Janis asks. “Whaddya mean get it?” Gleason says. “Julius wouldn’t let us film it.”

  As at the Pop Festival, Julius Karpen reacted to the presence of a film crew with instinctive hostility. Before Big Brother’s set at the Jazz Festival, Karpen and Gleason had a shouting match in the festival office, during which Julius expressed his conviction that if Big Brother were in the TV film, someone would steal it and sell it in Australia. This bizarre comment convinced Gleason there was no reasoning with Julius, who proceeded from the office to the backstage control boards of Wally Heider’s sound company—there to record the festival performances—where he made Heider shut down the taping system as Janis and the boys went onstage.

  This time, there is no chance for a second performance.


  In his Monday column in the Chronicle, Gleason writes, “Big Brother was really a delight and Miss Joplin is a gas, easily the most exciting singer of her race to appear in a decade or more.”

  Like Chet Helms’s rejection of Bobby Shad’s first offer, Julius Karpen’s exclusion of Big Brother from the KQED special brings smoldering resentments within the band to full combustion in the days following the Jazz Festival. They have already realized that Julius isn’t as big a departure from Chet as they had hoped. He’s too local, too focused on the San Francisco scene, not adequately aware of or connected to the wider world of music. Bill Graham won’t talk to Julius. If Big Brother wants to play the Fillmore, they have to talk directly to Bill. Janis hasn’t gotten along with Julius from the start. They fight like alley cats.

  Peter Albin’s uncle, a real-estate investor who owns the house in the Haight where Big Brother first rehearsed, asks if the band has ever seen Julius’s accounts for the time he has managed the band. They have not. You’re giving him a license to rob you blind, Peter’s uncle says. He insists the band ask for an accounting. They take his advice, but Julius refuses to open the books, and that’s the last straw. The band fires Julius and lets it be known that they are seeking new representation. They talk to their friends. They put out the word.

  Big Brother’s willingness to dump Julius rises from the confidence they gained from their triumphs at Monterey, first at the Pop Festival and then at the Jazz Festival. The receptions they earned not just from the audiences, white and black, but also from the musicians with whom they shared the stage, including some of the best in the world, has given them the courage to take a leap of faith.

  They talk to Bill Graham. He already manages Jefferson Airplane. Can’t he manage Big Brother too? Graham knows that realizing Big Brother’s full potential will take more time than he can devote to the task. He recommends that Big Brother talk to Albert Grossman.

  “At that period, there were only two people that Albert really wanted to work with. It was Janis and Jimi Hendrix. He really had the utmost appreciation for both of them, musically.”

  Barry Feinstein, photographer, member of Pennebaker film crew at Monterey

  Grossman has been in Big Brother’s thoughts since they sought his guidance at the Monterey Pop Festival. Now Janis asks her San Francisco friends for advice. One of those closest to her is her new roommate, Linda Gravenites. Six months in Lagunitas cured Big Brother of the communal living trip. When the landlady wanted the house back, they returned to the city and moved into individual pads where they have some space and privacy. Linda was one of a few creative women who were making clothes for the San Francisco bands. She had made a couple of shirts for Sam Andrew, and she made Janis’s outfit for the Jazz Festival. She had been looking after the Grateful Dead’s house while the band was on tour; when they came back Linda asked Janis if she could crash on her couch in the Lyon Street apartment where Janis had settled. Not long after that, they were cleaning up the kitchen together one morning when Janis said, in an offhand kind of way, “I need a mother.” And Linda thought, “I could do that. Take care of all the shit she doesn’t want to do. Sure. I could do that.” So that’s Linda’s role in Janis’s life: roommate and mother, including mother as advisor on the things Janis needs advice about.

  Linda knows Albert. She doesn’t know him well, but she knows a lot about him from people who are close to him, people who believe in him. Linda’s former husband, Nick Gravenites, is a blues singer and songwriter from the mean streets of Chicago, where he was known as Nick the Greek and carried a gun. Nick is tight with Paul Butterfield and Mike Bloomfield. He’s one of Albert’s inner circle of confidants from the early days.

  When Janis asks Linda who she thinks would be the best manager for Big Brother, Linda says, “If you want to stay in San Francisco and play around and have a good time, it really doesn’t matter. But if you want to be an international phenomenon, Albert. No question.”

  Others offer conflicting advice. A New York manager! Are you crazy? The San Francisco paranoia about being ripped off is a formidable obstacle to any kind of business deal with someone who isn’t a hippie: Don’t go to Monterey, you’ll get ripped off. Don’t be in the movie, you’ll get ripped off. Don’t sign a record deal, you’ll get ripped off. Don’t be on TV, you’ll get ripped off. And, hey, don’t sign with a New York manager, man, you’ll get ripped off for sure.

  Well, yes. Somebody might make some money off you. But that’s the way it works! Somebody makes money off you, and if they’re good at what they do, they help you get seen and heard by more people than will ever see and hear you if you scurry for your hole every time the possibility comes up that somebody else will make money off you. Yes, a manager gets a percentage of your earnings, but he only makes money when you make money, and you make more than he does.

  No one in Big Brother has accepted all of this as gospel yet, but for the band even to consider approaching Albert Grossman to manage them represents a sea change. They have recognized that they need businesspeople, not hippies, to handle the business.

  Albert comes to San Francisco. Janis and the boys can’t get over the fact that he looks like the guy on the Quaker Oats box. It amuses them, and it kindles in them the first glimmers of affection for this taciturn man who has expanded his influence so surely, so apparently effortlessly, beyond folk music into the realm of rock.

  He’s funny too. The humor is bone dry, understated, but some of the band members, Janis and Sam in particular, pick up on Albert’s wordplay and note the comic spark in his eyes.

  The meeting is in Janis’s apartment on Lyon Street, between Haight Street and the Panhandle. The living room is furnished in a Beat-Victorian style that is uniquely Janis. Posters and pieces of fabric are hung on the walls and more odd bits of fabric are draped over the furniture and the lamps.

  Albert is a past master at Socratic inscrutability. When the guys in the band ask him a question, he asks one in return.

  As our manager, what will you do for us?

  What do you want?

  They tell him, and he listens. His eyebrows are slightly raised behind his round glasses, giving him the expression of a curious owl.

  Big Brother is contractually bound to Mainstream. That is something Albert will have to deal with, because they have no intention of recording for Bobby Shad again. Earlier in the year there were feelers from Warner Brothers. Julius fielded them and they went nowhere. More recently, Columbia has expressed interest. At the Monterey Jazz Festival, Columbia’s legendary producer, John Hammond, Sr., who signed Bob Dylan to the label, invited Janis and Peter Albin to sit in his private box. Big Brother is ready for a real manager and a real record deal. They want to see the world beyond the San Francisco Bay. They want to find out how far they can go.

  Sitting with them in Janis’s living room while they lay this out for Albert is Bob Gordon, an attorney who represents Albert on the West Coast and has also represented Big Brother, independently, in some recent matters.

  Bob earned his law degree in Berkeley, at Boalt Hall, in the fifties, when the campus was a bastion of peaceful conformity. He is now a partner in a Los Angeles law firm that boasts former California governor Pat Brown on its letterhead. Of those gathered in Janis’s living room, Bob is the one who looks most out of place, the only one wearing a tie. He presents the appearance and demeanor of a solid citizen. A square. But beneath the traditional exterior lies a more individualistic spirit. For a time, Bob represented A&M Records. The founders, Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss, set out to establish a company that would be scrupulously fair to musicians and songwriters and represent their interests in a business that was not noted for giving artists—the creative spirits—their due. With the phenomenal success Alpert and his band, the Tijuana Brass, achieved by the midsixties, it seemed to Bob Gordon that Moss and Alpert became focused on making every deal bigger than the last and lost sight of their altr
uistic ideals, and Bob found himself less interested in working with them.

  By then, Bob was traveling often to San Francisco on business and he became fascinated by the growth of the music scene there.

  “I wouldn’t say that either Jerry or Herb are really nasty people. They’re not. They’re really good people, except that they got into a competitive spirit that belied the basis on which the company was formed. And at the same time, I was going to San Francisco and seeing kids working for nothing twenty hours a day, sanding floors and building community facilities, and putting every ounce of their soul into what they were doing, for nothing. And the contrast was so striking to me, that I gradually kind of lost interest in A&M . . . and at the same time I found myself just so pleased with what was going on in San Francisco, and feeling a part of it, and feeling worthwhile.”

  Bob Gordon

  Early in 1967, before the Pop Festival, Bob represented Big Brother when they were asked to appear in director Richard Lester’s film Petulia, starring Julie Christie and George C. Scott, which was shot in San Francisco. Lester had directed the Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night, so Big Brother jumped at the chance to work with him when he was recruiting bands for Petulia. The contract that Warner Brothers, the film’s producers, presented to Big Brother would have transferred to Warner Brothers the copyrights of the songs Big Brother performed in the film.

  Excuse me, Bob Gordon said, what are you trying to pull here? You don’t get the copyright. All you get is a sync license.