When Hentoff asks if she considers herself a jazz singer, Janis’s answer demonstrates the articulate precision she can bring to bear on subjects that matter to her: “No, I don’t feel quite free enough with my phrasing to say I’m a jazz singer. I sing with a more demanding beat, a steady rather than a lilting beat. I don’t riff over the band; I try to punctuate the rhythm with my voice.”
For the rest of the spring and into the summer we’re based at home in San Francisco. In our first weeks back in California we play Chico and Fresno, Santa Barbara and San Bernardino. We’re flying more often and driving less. The gigs are farther afield. The venues and the money are bigger than they were last winter.
We are veterans of the road now, and the routine of planes and rental cars, motels and gigs is less stressful in the sunshine of the Golden State. Janis and the boys are happy to be on their home ground. In retrospect, this is our most peaceful period. Despite the busy schedule, it’s an idyll, but it’s tempered by the urgent need to finish the album for Columbia.
The advance orders for the record are huge. The sales reps are clamoring for it. Everyone from Clive Davis on down is frustrated by the slow progress, and John Simon is feeling the pressure. He takes another stab at live recording, this time in Winterland, days after we return from New York. The results are better than the Grande Ballroom, but the evening doesn’t yield any tracks deemed adequate.*
On the last Monday in April, Simon and Big Brother begin a ten-day stint of recording in Columbia’s Los Angeles studios, but they fare no better there than they did in New York. The tensions between John Simon and the band, which Pennebaker’s camera recorded in the New York sessions, are more apparent than ever. Making a record is hard work, but it’s also supposed to be fun. In the L.A. sessions, fun is held effectively at bay. The tension between feeling good about their music onstage and feeling bad about it in the studio wears on the band. The difficulties with Simon affect David and Peter the most, while Sam and James medicate themselves to hold the aggravation at bay.
Janis handles it best. She distances herself from Simon, but when it comes time for her to sing, she steps up the microphone and gives it everything she’s got. Her ability to summon a definitive vocal rarely fails her. She lays down a couple of takes and all you have to do is choose between them, weighing the small variations.
“Janis was as together in the studio as anyone I have ever worked with, interested in everything and totally committed.”
Elliot Mazer, co-producer, Cheap Thrills
The sessions are interrupted by a day trip to Chico, in the Sacramento Valley, for a gig there, and two days at the Shrine Auditorium in L.A. Following these jobs, Janis and the boys have only a few more days in the studio before we undertake a demanding ten-day schedule that keeps us flying back and forth between the northern and the southern parts of the state.
MAY 1, 1968: Chico State College, Chico, Calif.
MAY 3–4: Shrine Auditorium, Los Angeles
MAY 10: Cal-Poly State University, San Luis Obispo
MAY 11: Veterans Hall, Santa Rosa
MAY 12: San Fernando Valley State College, Northridge
MAY 15: Carousel Ballroom, San Francisco (Hells Angels benefit)
MAY 17: Freeborn Hall, U.C. Davis
MAY 18–19: Northern California Folk Rock Festival, Santa Clara Fairgrounds, San Jose, with the Doors, Jefferson Airplane, Eric Burdon and the Animals, Electric Flag, Country Joe and the Fish, Taj Mahal, and more.
MAY 19: Pasadena
—
IN LATE MAY, we return to Columbia’s Hollywood studios to finish the album. To provide the band with some comfort during our stays in Hollywood, I have found lodgings more upscale than the Hollywood Sunset Motel. Elektra Records has built a West Coast studio on La Cienega Boulevard, and Paul Rothchild is spending a lot of time in Los Angeles. He has found lodging at the Hollywood Landmark Hotel, on Franklin Avenue near Highland, where the plain of the Los Angeles basin rises into the foothills. It’s on the edge of a residential neighborhood, above the garish, commercial strips of Sunset and Hollywood boulevards, where the tourists search in vain for movie stars and the hookers troll for tourists.
Calling the Landmark a hotel is stretching it. From the street, it looks like any other two-story stucco motel, but the looks are deceiving. Walk through the lobby, past the registration desk, and through a set of glass doors to the large courtyard, and you see that the arms of the establishment ramble up the hillside, enclosing a pool and a sauna and enough terrace to accommodate a couple of rock-and-roll bands. There are palm trees and other plantings. The units that overlook the courtyard are suites, with living rooms and kitchenettes and balconies. The upstairs suites are spacious and airy, with high ceilings. Only the two-story structure that fronts on Franklin Avenue has ordinary single rooms off a central hallway, and even these have kitchenettes.
Bob Neuwirth has a poolside suite next to Paul’s. Before Paul and Bobby found the Landmark, it hosted the occasional jazz band. By the time Big Brother and I check in, it is in the process of becoming a preferred hostelry on the rock-and-roll road. Also in residence at this time is Garry Goodrow, of the Committee, which has opened a second company in a theater on Sunset Strip.
With a reference from Paul to Jack Hagy, the manager, I negotiate us a weekly rate so good that Janis and the boys raise only token objections. Hey, with kitchenettes we can save money on meals, I point out, and this helps to convince them. They’ve been working hard and they feel that they owe themselves a reward.
Janis opts for a single room in the front building. She says the courtyard suites are too big for her to knock around in all by herself. The boys like the suites and they each have one to themselves. The days of doubling up to save money are history.
Neuwirth is employed by Elektra as—what? It’s often hard to find a job description for what Bob is doing at a given moment. At present, he’s working with Paul, and Paul has bestowed a title on Bob. He is the “expediter,” helping Paul and the Doors make the album that will be called Waiting for the Sun. Elektra is paying for Bob’s room and board and a rented Ford Mustang. Expediting the Doors involves some babysitting of the band in their off-hours, and of Jim Morrison in particular, with an eye to curbing his drinking. This is an exercise that bears more than a passing resemblance to putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop.
Be that as it may, there’s no question that Bob earns his keep. An impasse arises in the studio when Morrison wants to use a banjo on a particular song and the other Doors rebel. Jim wrote “My Wild Love Went Riding” with kind of a Celtic sound in mind. Why he believes that a banjo will help produce a Celtic sound he can’t exactly explain, but no one in the group plays a banjo and his bandmates don’t want anyone playing on the album except the four genuine Doors. Neuwirth offers an innovative solution. He suggests they do “My Wild Love” a capella, and the idea proves an inspiration. John Densmore, the drummer, makes a tchhh-tch-tch-tchhhh vocal sound to approximate brushes on a hi-hat. Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger clap their hands, along with Neuwirth and Elektra’s president, Jac Holzman. Listening to the track, it’s hard to believe there are no musical instruments, but it’s all done with voices and hands.
On the road, there are a lot of hours when Big Brother has nothing to do while the road manager is working full steam. When the band is recording, it’s the other way around. Some road managers round up their bands every day and take them to the studio, but my campaign to get the members of Big Brother to take responsibility for themselves is paying off. In New York, I pointed out that it was silly for me to hail two cabs, ride with them to the studio, and sit there twiddling my thumbs. To their credit, the band agreed. They hailed their own cabs and got to the studio on their own.
In L.A., while Big Brother is contending with John Simon, I keep in touch with the office and up-to-date on the arrangements for future gigs. When my work is done,
I try not to feel guilty about splashing in the Landmark pool. I hang out with Bobby and Paul when they’re free. In the evenings I often go to see the Committee at the Tiffany Theater on Sunset. For music, there’s the Troubadour on Santa Monica Boulevard, which is displacing the Ash Grove as L.A.’s premier folk club by virtue of the fact that the bar has become a favorite late-night hangout for rockers and actors.
Outside their long studio hours, Janis and the boys are alert for recreational opportunities. With our friends from the Committee as the catalyst, a party is organized on short notice for a weekend afternoon. Howard Hesseman and Carl Gottlieb have made the acquaintance of two charming young women who are house-sitting in Calabasas, over in the San Fernando Valley, for the singer John Davidson. This is the upscale part of the valley, where the lots are measured in acres and many residents have horses. Davidson’s next-door neighbor on one side is Don Drysdale, the Dodgers’ pitcher. Across the street is the movie director Don Siegel, who directed The Invasion of the Body Snatchers back in the fifties and is currently working on a film with Clint Eastwood.
The house-sitters, Jackie and Lorene by name, are taken with Howard and Carl, and vice versa. (Howard describes Jackie, with great enthusiasm, as a blond bombshell.) Howard and Carl have spent a few nights in Calabasas. Jackie and Lorene have met some of Howard and Carl’s friends and find them fascinating. Why don’t we have a party? they say. It’s a big house. You can invite your friends.
Howard and Carl discuss this between themselves. Do these girls have any idea what they’re letting themselves in for? “Are you sure you want to do this?” they ask the girls. “You really do want to do this?” “Yeah. Invite your friends.”
There are many accounts of what happens at the party, on the day itself and long after. It gets under way in midafternoon. Janis is there, and Jim Morrison. That much is clear. Some other members of Big Brother and the Doors and the Committee. Many friends. Lots of people.
There are alcoholic beverages. We all bring some, and a wider selection is available after Jim Morrison smashes the glass door of Davidson’s locked liquor cabinet. At some point, Howard’s blond bombshell informs him that Morrison has thrown up on the cowhide rug in the rec room.
Janis, meantime, has found the pool table. When Morrison joins the game, the play gets lively. Pool isn’t my thing and I’m elsewhere at the time. Music is my thing, but no one has brought instruments to this party, so I’m cruising the house and the grounds for interesting conversations and beguiling women. After the fracas, I get fragmentary accounts. It’s like the police detective who interviews ten eyewitnesses to a crime and gets a dozen different stories.
Everyone agrees that Morrison offended Janis. He may have told her she can’t sing the blues, which would be a mortal insult. He also did her some physical harm. By Howard’s account, Jim took hold of Janis by the hair and pushed her facedown onto a coffee table. Others say the tussle started at the pool table. Either way, Janis ran from the room, crying, and locked herself in a bathroom. When she realized she wasn’t seriously injured, the hurt was replaced by outrage. She emerged, found a bottle of whiskey, and tracked down Morrison. She broke the bottle over his head. Some say this happened outside; most agree it was inside. Garry Goodrow’s old lady, Annie, insists that Janis threw the bottle across the pool table, while Garry, who was standing right next to Annie at the time, sides with those who say the bottle was in her hand when she hit Morrison with it.
Why would Jim Morrison provoke Janis? He’s a bigger star—far bigger at this time. The Doors’ first album, released more than a year ago, produced a smash hit single, “Light My Fire.” The single and the album both went gold. The Doors’ second album, Strange Days, is already out and Waiting for the Sun is in the wings, while Janis and Big Brother’s output to date is limited to the year-old Mainstream album.
Morrison is a phenomenon in his own right, but maybe Janis’s news-grabbing rise threatens him. Fuck you, Janis, I’m a bigger fucking star than you are. David Crosby, of the Byrds, has hung out with the drunk Morrison and he has formulated a theory: He thinks Jim is a masochist who gets drunk and stoned and picks a fight so he’ll get beat up. If that’s what he was after, Janis was ready to oblige.
As the sun lowers in the west, Howard and Carl have to leave because showtime for the Committee’s evening performance is approaching. By now, it is abundantly clear to Jackie and Lorene that the proceedings are beyond their, or anyone else’s, control. But what are we going to do? they plead with Howard and Carl. Are your friends leaving too?
Hey, it’s a party, Howard says. I don’t know, but I have to go to work.
Jackie follows them out to the driveway. As Howard and Carl beat their retreat, Jackie sees that the Drysdales are having a barbecue. The ruckus at the Davidson house is of another magnitude altogether, and there’s a gaggle of Dodgers fans lined up at the Drysdales’ fence, staring at what’s unfolding next door.
—
ON AN AFTERNOON when John Simon doesn’t need Janis in the studio, she and I take in a more sedate entertainment, a matinee of 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Cinerama Dome on Sunset, which has the biggest screen in L.A., maybe the world, at this time. It’s our first recreational outing together, just the two of us. We have a late brunch and early drinks at a nearby restaurant-bar before the show. Kahlua and cream instead of coffee, as I recall. At the Cinerama Dome we sit midway in the orchestra, on the aisle. 2001 is widely touted as a don’t-miss visual trip, and it lives up to its reputation. When we get to the dazzling light show where the spaceship zooms headlong into the most eye-boggling special effect yet produced on film, a dazed hippie rises from his seat and staggers down the aisle, past Janis and me, his saucer eyes riveted on the careening images. He kneels on the plush red carpet right at the center of the screen, which has got to be eighty feet wide.
The curved Cinerama screen is made of vertical slats hung facing the audience, like a venetian blind set on edge, so the projected image reflects straight out and doesn’t lose brightness at the edges. The hippie puts his arms between the vertical panels and hugs the screen.
Uh-oh, here comes the usher.
I figure he’s going to give the hippie a hard time, but I’ve underestimated how far the prevailing ethic of the counterculture has spread. The usher puts a gentle hand on the hippie’s shoulder and says, “Hey, man, it’s only a movie.” The hippie smiles beatifically and allows himself to be led back to his seat.
For all the film’s visual pyrotechnics, it strikes Janis and me that the characters in the space-travel future are bland, two-dimensional, dull. They’re squares. Only the apes in the opening sequence are spontaneous and alive to life’s possibilities, most dramatically when they discover the potential of using bones as tools—and weapons.
After the movie, we repair to the same bar, where we agree over another round of drinks that we’re living in a period of exploration and discovery with music as part of the motivating force, and we don’t want it to lead to a future where the squares will be in charge of space travel.
—
THE CALIFORNIA PRESIDENTIAL primary takes place on the fourth of June. In the evening, as the returns start to come in, I follow them in my suite at the Landmark. Victory in California will clinch Bobby Kennedy’s position as front-runner for the Democratic nomination. It’s not that I’m unsympathetic to Gene McCarthy, who was first to challenge Lyndon Johnson back before RFK entered the race, but McCarthy is a one-issue candidate, campaigning against the war in Vietnam. He appeals mainly to the educated middle class and the more moderate elements of the counterculture. Minorities and the poor don’t feel that he has any special empathy for their problems, while Kennedy attracts all the factions that supported his brother, and more, including passionate support from the disempowered.
A few weeks ago, Janis and Linda Gravenites saw Kennedy campaign in San Francisco. He was touring the neighborhoods, his route announced i
n advance. Janis and Linda and Janis’s mixed-breed dog, George, moved out of the Haight in April, when we got back from New York. They’re on Noe Street now, in Noe Valley, a neighborhood that borders the upper Mission district. When Janis learned that Kennedy’s motorcade would pass just a few blocks from their apartment, she suggested they walk over to watch, and they got swept up in a vivid demonstration of Bobby’s appeal. Engulfed in the mob of onlookers, they saw Kennedy standing in an open car, held upright by two strong aides to keep him from being pulled from the car by the eager hands that reached out to shake his as the car crept along Castro Street. At one point, Janis and Linda were lifted off their feet as the mob surged forward, but they emerged unharmed. Linda lost her shoes. They were affected by the emotional power of the crowd, and its palpable belief—the need to believe—that Kennedy could make a difference.
I have followed Bobby’s California campaign. Even on TV, the effect of his presence is a phenomenon. His public appearances produce a quickening of the blood. The pundits think he might even carry Orange County, which is usually so right-wing that the ghost of Joseph Goebbels could be elected sheriff by acclamation. The people mob Bobby everywhere—in Oakland and Watts and in the fields where Cesar Chavez and his United Farm Workers labor. The crowds laugh at his jokes, and their eyes glow with hope. Maybe more hope than should ever be vested in one human being. The loss of Martin Luther King should have taught us that. Now, with King gone, all that hope is looking for somewhere to light, and it has settled on Bobby. We are all fallible, the Kennedys along with the rest of us, but I see in Bobby an awareness of his own fallibility. The self-deprecation that dominates his humor is real, and there’s a sadness in his eyes that reveals a new depth of understanding.
South Dakota holds its primary on the same day as California. In one precinct on a Lakota Sioux reservation, Kennedy polls 878 votes against 2 for Johnson, who is still on the ballot because of the requirements of the voting laws, and none for McCarthy.
On the Road with Janis Joplin Page 16