On the Road with Janis Joplin

by John Byrne Cooke

  The Warner Brothers lawyers smiled and said, Oh, sure, of course, while under their breath they were muttering, Curses, foiled again. Warner Brothers offered union scale for Big Brother’s performance in the film. Bob got them more. This negotiation won Bob Gordon a lot of points with the band.

  Between the Pop Festival and the Jazz Festival, Julius Karpen called on Bob to accompany him to Columbia Records’ annual convention, held in L.A. Julius was invited as Big Brother’s manager. He asked Bob to come along to protect his back. They met with Columbia president Clive Davis to discuss Big Brother, but the existence of the Mainstream contract posed an obstacle that was not overcome at the convention.

  In the matter of Albert’s management contract with Big Brother, Bob has told Albert that Big Brother needs his advice more than Albert does. Bob represents the band, while Albert’s New York lawyers can oversee his side of the contract. Big Brother knows all this and they trust Bob to protect their interests.

  The band wants an escape clause that will get them out of the management contract if things don’t work out. They ask Albert to guarantee that he will make them an outlandish amount of money in the coming year. Name your price, Albert says. The figure the band has in mind is $75,000. Albert smiles his enigmatic smile. “Make it $100,000,” he says, and then he has a better idea. “I’ll tell you what,” he says. “If I don’t make you that much money, I won’t take my twenty percent. I won’t take anything, and you can fire me.”

  Janis and the boys sign on the dotted line.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Gonna Lay Down My Old Guitar

  ON OUR RETURN to New York after the Pop Festival and the Charles River Valley Boys’ cruise through the Summer of Love, Neuwirth and I feel that we have been expelled from the initiates’ level of paradise to the midregions of purgatory. The return to the East is a rude reminder that the rest of America hasn’t yet received the message that music, love and flowers are here to stay. We cushion the shock of reentry by ensconcing ourselves in the screening room at the offices of Leacock Pennebaker, in the company of friends who still glow in the dark with memories of Monterey, and we let the celluloid images transport us back. They’re all there, Paul and Art, John and Michelle and Cass and Denny, Otis and Ravi and Grace. And Janis. On repeated viewings, “Ball and Chain” loses none of its power.

  Within a few days, Bob and I are festival-bound again, off to Newport, where the barricades are still manned against amplified music that is too far out for the traditionalists. The Chambers Brothers startle the old guard with their break-out, space-out hit, “Time Has Come Today,” but the brothers are fully fledged members of the folk family and the audience welcomes “Time” as a breath of fresh air. Buffalo Springfield’s ticket to Newport is “For What It’s Worth,” which carries the folk tradition of protest into electrified pop music. The rest of this summer’s Newport roster is down-the-line folk, old-time, gospel, bluegrass, and blues—Joan Baez, Maybelle Carter, Bill Monroe, Pete Seeger, Judy Collins, the Staple Singers, Grandpa Jones. The wild card this summer is country music star Dave Dudley, whose trucking song “Six Days on the Road” has caught the ear of folkies and rockers alike.

  It is pleasant to sit in the sun in Peabody Park and listen to the musicians, uniformly excellent, but it is hard to escape a feeling that Newport has become a something of a backwater. Just two years after Bob Dylan shocked the old folkies by playing an electrified set at Newport, the musical offshoots that took so much inspiration from Dylan’s amplified sound have gathered strength and spread across the land. The focus has shifted westward, leaping the heartland to settle on the Pacific shore. Is it possible that Monterey marked not the beginning of the shift, but its completion?

  Tonto comes east to join Bobby. We take her up to Cambridge and show her the town. We spend time in Cambridge sitting in outdoor cafés on brick sidewalks and soaking up the summertime vibes. The Club 47’s calendar is heavily tilted toward blues of the jumping variety—Howlin’ Wolf, the Siegel-Schwall Blues Band, Buddy Guy and Junior Wells—along with the Kweskin Jug Band and the far-roaming Chambers Brothers. Close your eyes, and the sounds from the small stage on Palmer Street could be coming from grander platforms. Just to keep the mix interesting, the Club has booked the jazz pianist Mose Allison for a week. Allison’s love of the blues makes him an appropriate bridge between Buddy Guy and Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys.

  My schedule with the Charles River Valley Boys isn’t enough to keep body and soul together. We play a gig here, play a gig there, but the folk boom is spent. Between bluegrass gigs I spend my time in New York, where Pennebaker is assembling a rough cut of the Monterey footage. Some film work seems like just the thing to take up the slack. Penny and Ricky’s office manager hires me in an undefined role. “Don’t worry,” he says, “we’ll find something.” I finish a transcription of the Dont Look Back sound track, which is to be published as a book. I help put together a photo collage that will become the endpapers. I enlist Neuwirth and a couple of the back-room crew to contribute improvisations for some very off-the-wall radio spots Penny uses to promote the film’s New York debut.

  Until the small hours of the morning, we’re often at Max’s Kansas City, a restaurant and bar on Park Avenue South that was formerly renowned, possibly apocryphally, for feeding goldfish to a tankful of piranhas at cocktail hour.

  Max’s is a steak house. The sign out front announces “Steak, lobster, chick peas.” The place is long and narrow, the art on the walls is eclectic, and the banquettes, the tablecloths, the napkins—everything but the white walls—are red. A round table in the back room is the late-night rendezvous for Andy Warhol and his crew from the Factory. In the back room, even the lighting is red. After a few drinks, it’s like being in a photographic darkroom with the safelight on.

  Max’s became a favorite hangout for artists when the owner, Mickey Ruskin, began accepting paintings in payment for bar bills. Soon the visual artists were joined by musicians and actors.

  The balance of my life has shifted. After almost ten years of living in Cambridge and visiting New York, I’m spending most of my time in New York and making the run up to Cambridge to play with the CRVB. Neuwirth and I talk about sharing an apartment. We look at pads on the Upper West Side—not yet trendy—where rents are cheap. Three hundred bucks a month for five or six rooms with an eye-of-the-needle glimpse of the Hudson River. Whew. Steep. A full-time job at Leacock Pennebaker fails to materialize and I find it hard to settle into any kind of routine. I’ve been through the looking glass. I’ve glimpsed a new dimension. I’m not just hoping for a chance to make another trip to California. I want to live there.

  As summer gives way to fall and the first gusts of winter probe the rectilinear ravines of New York City, the idea of becoming a road manager is the furthest thing from my mind—until a day when Neuwirth takes me into a cutting room at the Leacock Pennebaker offices on West 45th Street and informs me, in the kind of undertones usually reserved for conveying nuclear launch codes, that Albert wants to have dinner with me.

  I don’t have to ask “Albert who?” A couple of months after hitchhiking aboard Bob Dylan’s springtime road trip, I was splashing in Albert Grossman’s swimming pool in Bearsville, New York, just up the road from Woodstock. The house is the first Albert has ever owned, the first house he has lived in. Growing up in Chicago, he always lived in apartments, and he took to the role of country squire as if to the manor born. (A fondness for the bear image may be why Albert bought property in Bearsville instead of Woodstock. He briefly owned a club in Chicago called the Bear, where he often appeared in a huge fur coat, like the raccoon coats from the ’20s, taking on the physical presence of a bear. He will later establish the Bear Café and Bearsville Sound Studios in his adopted hometown.)

  The summer of ’64 was Albert and his new wife Sally’s first summer in the house, and they hosted a revolving-door parade of musicians and friends as lord and lady of the sy
lvan estate. Dylan was in residence, considering finding a house of his own somewhere nearby, but in no hurry. For a time, when Albert was away on business, Dick and Mimi Fariña house-sat for the Grossmans. Calls went out to Cambridge. Hey, come on over! Paul Rothchild and Neuwirth and I joined Dick and Mimi and Bob and Sara-who-would-eventually-become-Bob’s-wife for the summer solstice.

  Albert recognizes Cambridge as an important way station on the folk circuit, and he has visited several times. On one occasion he made use of the guest room in the Reservoir Street pad that I shared with Fritz Richmond. A few days after Albert’s departure, we received as a thank-you gift the Elektra album Music of Bulgaria, whose stunning harmonies graced our late-night listening for a long time to come.

  Since traveling with Dylan, Neuwirth has become Albert’s confidant. He’s not supposed to forewarn me about Albert’s invitation, but he wants me to be prepared. Dinner is fine with me, I say. Albert is a convivial host. Bobby tells me there will be more to it. Albert has signed to manage Big Brother and the Holding Company, he says. This gets my attention. And (pause for effect) Albert is looking for a road manager.

  It is not Albert’s practice to send his musicians out on the road unattended. Not long after Bob Dylan committed himself to Albert’s keeping, Albert decided that Bob should have a road manager. In the spring of 1964, Dylan arrived in Cambridge in a Ford station wagon driven by Victor Maimudes. Victor was the first road manager anyone in folk music had ever seen, and we were duly impressed. Jazz bands had road managers. Scruffy folk troubadours got lost driving from New York to Boston and were usually late for their gigs. Not Bob Dylan.

  Bob and Victor used Cambridge as their base of operations for the better part of a week. Dylan liked the company of kindred souls, which in those days included many of the folks who lived at the heart of the Cambridge music scene.

  Several of us went with Bob and Victor to Providence, Rhode Island, where Bob played at Brown University. We hung out backstage at a concert in Boston. We took another day trip to Amherst, where Bob played UMass, and where we met a student named Henry Fredericks, but we didn’t know that was his name because a couple of years earlier he had a dream about Gandhi, and India, and started calling himself Taj Mahal. Taj could definitely play the blues, and more. He had absorbed the folk boom and was finding his own music.

  Beaujolais was the drink of choice during these New England rambles. Genuine French Beaujolais for $1.95 a bottle. Victor made sure there were always a few bottles in the car. The Beaujolais went well with pot. Dylan laughed a lot, and he never gave a thought about where he was going or what time he was supposed to be there. Neither did the crew of hangers-on. Victor road-managed all of us. He drove the Ford station wagon, he made sure we got there on time, he got us in backstage at the gigs, and before the gig was over he disappeared briefly to collect the money.

  I thought Victor had the coolest job in the world.

  By now, in 1967, having a road manager is a mark of success both among the harshly winnowed ranks of folk performers and in the booming electrified free-for-all. With no pool of experienced candidates to draw from, what Albert is looking for is someone who can do the job but doesn’t know he can do it. Bobby has assured him I have the requisite potential.

  Albert and I dine at Max’s Kansas City. I smile at the waitresses and try to make small talk with Albert, which is not easy. He prefers to listen more than he talks. In negotiations, or conversation with those he regards as opponents, silence is his preferred weapon and he wields it without mercy. Reluctant to reveal himself, he is adept at getting others to reveal themselves. When an adversary is done delivering his pitch at great length, Albert will nod ever so slightly. He’ll say, “Mmm,” as if what he heard is worthy of consideration, and he will sit there, waiting for more. His interlocutor, burdened with responsibility for the silence, will step in to fill the void, trip over things he hadn’t intended to say, and prostrate himself before the Sphinx.

  In congenial company, Albert often uses his natural reticence for humorous effect, capping the conversation of others with a pithy comment that gets the biggest laugh. When I come to know him better, I realize that Albert has turned the natural demeanor of a shy man to his advantage.

  With me, Albert has always been friendly, rarely intimidating. Maybe he recognizes me as a fellow member of Shy People Anonymous. I’m not often tongue-tied, but with Albert I don’t want to rattle on like an imbecile. I want to say things that interest him, things that make him think well of me. Things that make him laugh. I want to impress him. As a consequence, I’m tongue-tied.

  “So, John,” Albert says, when a silence grows long. “How would you feel about going on the road?”

  He surprises me by saying that he has three groups in need of supervision—the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the Electric Flag, and Big Brother and the Holding Company. Bobby didn’t warn me I’d have to make a choice. Maybe he didn’t know. Albert doesn’t reveal all his cards, even to his intimates.

  I pretend to think it over. Butterfield is from the Chicago blues scene, a long way from the Club 47 in Cambridge. As a white guy playing black music, Butter is a phenomenon. Invited to sit in with Junior Wells at the Blue Flame Lounge, a black club in Chicago where Paul was a regular—kind of a novelty act, like “Watch this white boy play the harp!”—he blew Junior Wells off the stage so thoroughly that Junior put on his hat and coat and left the club. The crowd wouldn’t let Paul go, but they let Junior go without a peep. This is Junior Wells, the guy who defines the Chicago style of playing harp. Junior didn’t come back until the next night, invited Paul to sit in again, and the same thing happened! Paul blew him away just like the night before. Junior put on his hat and coat and was out the door.

  Paul not only plays blues harp, he can sing. He brought the Chicago sound—electrified, contemporary, urban black music—to the white folk fans that have become the core audience for the rock-and-roll explosion. I love Paul’s music, but the Butterfield band plays two-week club dates in places like Detroit where I will die of boredom. The urban blues scene isn’t my first choice for hanging out.

  The Electric Flag is already notorious within Albert’s office for some band members’ propensity for serious substance abuse. No, thank you. I tell Albert that Big Brother impressed me at Monterey, and I’ve always liked San Francisco. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

  If Albert finds either irony or pleasure in the fact that the son of immigrant Jewish tailors from Riga, Latvia (his mother), and Odessa (his father) is hiring a Harvard-graduate bluegrass singer who is the son of Alistair Cooke to be a rock-and-roll road manager, he keeps his feelings to himself. (Few Americans are aware that my father is the chief American correspondent for the British newspaper The Guardian, or that for more than twenty years he has written and broadcast a weekly radio program, Letter from America, for the BBC. At this time, he is somewhat known in the United States as a television “personality,” a term he loathes, because from 1952 until 1961 he hosted Omnibus, a ninety-minute variety program of a type never seen before or since, that ran on Sunday afternoons. In November 1967, Omnibus is six years in the past and Masterpiece Theatre four years in the future.)

  Albert wants me on the West Coast by the first of December. Thanksgiving is just a week away.

  By the next day I’m—well, I’m not really having second thoughts; I want to do this gig, but I’m wondering if I can. Neuwirth reassures me: Hey, man, nothing to it.

  Yeah, well what do I do?

  Simple: get the band to the gig, collect the money, make sure everybody’s happy. Bob has one piece of serious advice: Don’t be a fan, he cautions. Sometimes you’ll have to tell the band what to do. If you’re a fan, they won’t listen to you. Be the road manager. Don’t be the guy who runs to buy them cigarettes. Be the guy who knows all the shit they don’t know.

  Great, but I don’t know all the shit they don’t know.

  Pretend you d
o.*

  I fill up on Thanksgiving turkey in Cambridge, play a final gig with the Charles River Valley Boys, spend a few days in New York to see my parents, and on November 30 I catch a cab for JFK.

  Just like that, my California visa has fallen into my lap. I don’t tell Albert or anyone else that I view this job as temporary employment to carry me through a transitional phase. For now, I’ll help Janis and Big Brother do their thing. I’ll travel the country, I’ll meet new people (including, in my imagination, many fetching young women) and see new possibilities. Somewhere along the way, I’ll decide what to do next. Whether I stay in California will depend on what my thing eventually reveals itself to be. For now, the road-managing gig is the ideal bridge between my Cambridge past and a future that I hope will not be too far removed from the music and the friends I found in Cambridge.

  I resolve to give the job six months, enough to get Big Brother up and running on the national stage.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Hit the Road, Jack

  WE’RE ON THE road within a few days of my arrival in California. For the month of December and into the new year, Albert is keeping Big Brother on the West Coast, in the wings, as he prepares to bring them east. He’s planning the band’s New York debut for midwinter. In the meantime, I’m grateful for a chance to learn the job in high school gyms and war memorial auditoriums up and down the San Joaquin Valley and in the kaleidoscope dance halls of San Francisco.

  On December 10, Otis Redding dies in the crash of a chartered plane. Janis takes it especially hard. She first heard Otis perform live just a year ago, at the Fillmore. She and Dave Getz had been to a party in the city where someone spiked a bottle of Cold Duck with LSD. Janis enjoyed acid but took it rarely. On the other hand, she rarely turned down a bottle passed in her direction. When she learned what was in the duck she forced herself to throw up, but the bottle had been liberally medicated and she had already absorbed more than enough to get high. Being Janis, she wasn’t about to miss Otis Redding live just because someone had dosed the wine. Acid made her spiritual, contemplative, which was not necessarily how she might have chosen to approach hearing Otis live for the first time, but it turned out just fine. Janis and Dave sat on the floor in front of the stage at the Fillmore, and they dug Otis Redding.* The next day, Janis could sing half his riffs. His performance at the Monterey Pop Festival blew her away all over again.