On the Road with Janis Joplin

by John Byrne Cooke

  If I have less to do than when we’re touring in the U.S., Mark Braunstein and George Ostrow are working harder than ever, and I’m grateful for the professionalism they have developed as a team. Mark and George fly with us, and on arrival they disappear. We have brought only our stage equipment—the instrument amps and the drums. Mark and George get these items onto each plane, collect them at the other end, and set up where we need them, for rehearsals and concerts. An added item for the English and European gigs is a large voltage transformer that enables our band to use their American amps.

  Amid the welter of European languages, I find a use for my Spanish in forging a working relationship with Luis Gasca. Luis is a professional, and he is touchy about it. He gets his back up when I try to herd him along like some of the others—the habitual laggards in the band. He responds more cooperatively if I simply ask, “Listo, Luis?” Are you ready? “Siempre listo, Juan,” he replies. Always ready. He helps me refresh my Spanish, and I’m delighted to learn that the coarse English phrase “a stiff prick has no conscience” trips off the tongue like poetry in Spanish: “Una pinga parada no tiene conciencia.”

  The band is a unit at last, relaxed in its new confidence. After Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Paris, no one worries that everything may fall apart in the next show.

  From Paris, we return to Stockholm. Here, as elsewhere in Europe, the concert hall has a bar. This is a source of delight to Janis. Knud introduces us to what he calls “snapps.” The Germans say “schnapps,” but in Scandinavia, it’s “snapps.” We arrive at the hall, we make sure the band is settled in their dressing room, and Knud says, “We have a snapps?” Yes, we have a snapps. We have a couple of snapps.

  The concert goes well, and in what’s now part of their continental routine, several members of the band go out to clubs afterward to drink with local fans eager to show them the town. Carousing to wind down after a gig is part of the musician’s life, but I keep to my own routine, which is to get a good night’s sleep whenever I can, so I miss my chance to meet the mayor of Stockholm.

  Bobby and Tonto and Sam are no sooner settled at a table in a restaurant-nightclub than Bobby—on his way back to the table from the bar—meets the mayor. Come on over and meet Sam Andrew, Bobby says. He’s here with Janis to play in your city. The mayor of Stockholm becomes their drinking buddy for the evening.

  When they get back to the hotel, they find Janis awake, in a reflective mood. She marvels at how the band has come together since we arrived in Europe, how much they’ve achieved in a short time. She can hardly believe it. Believe it, Bobby tells her. They go to Bobby and Tonto’s room, where Bobby plays Janis and Sam the tape he has recorded at tonight’s concert. Janis and the boys are a band. Believe it.

  In Copenhagen, they play the elegant Concert Hall at the Tivoli Gardens. The next morning, we say good-bye to Knud Thorbjørnsen. We’d like to take him to London. Hell, we want to take him home to America. He has become our hangout partner, and a friend.

  —

  THE ROYAL ALBERT Hall is an august pile of Victorian brick that heard Verdi and Wagner conduct English premieres of their works. Churchill spoke here. In modern times it has become the plum venue for pop musicians. Sinatra, in his day, and the Beatles, it goes without saying. In February of this year, Jimi Hendrix sold out two nights at the hall.

  Janis is focused on Bob Dylan’s sell-out appearance in 1965, which is chronicled in Dont Look Back. She is determined to do the same, and, if possible, to get the British audience out of their seats and dancing in the aisles.

  The date of the concert is April 21, four months after the Stax-Volt show in Memphis, half a world away in time and space. Outside the hall, as the hour approaches, scalpers are hawking a few stray tickets, but most of the ticket holders won’t part with them for love nor money.

  It is rumored that some of the Beatles are here, some of the Stones. Fleetwood Mac is here. Eric Clapton is here for sure. Somebody saw him. God knows who else, if you believe the rumors.

  The packed house, pop royalty and commoner alike, doesn’t need much urging from Janis to get on their feet and boogie. It’s like a replay of the first charmed show in Amsterdam.

  Coming offstage after the final encore, Janis is irrepressible. A small handful of British music reporters have gathered backstage, from Melody Maker and the Daily Sketch and the Daily Telegraph. When Janis has changed out of her sweat-soaked garments and put on something fresh, she joins us in the band’s dressing room and delivers a paean to what the band achieved tonight.

  “Don’t you know how happy we must be?” she says. “We really broke through a wall that I didn’t think was possible. Like ever since we’ve been here, like the audiences we’ve had that have danced, we’ve always felt, oh, too much, that’s really wonderful of them. But everybody said, ‘Don’t expect that of a British audience. Don’t expect them to do nothin’, man.’ And when they first got up and started dancin’, it was just like a big hot rush. We just went, ‘Oh, yeah?’ It’s like a whole other door opened up, a whole other possibility that had never even occurred to you.”

  “I figure if you take an audience that have been told what to do all their lives and they’re too young or scared . . . If you can get them once, man, get them standing up when they should be sitting down, sweaty when they should be decorous, smile when they should be applauding politely . . . I think you sort of switch on their brain, man, so that makes them say ‘Wait a minute, maybe I can do anything.’ Whooooo! It’s life. That’s what rock ’n’ roll is for, turn that switch on.”

  Janis Joplin

  It’s significant that Janis says “we” tonight in London. In interviews with the press she often talks about being onstage, what it means to her, what it feels like, the relationship she tries to establish with the audience, and the subject is the first person singular. It’s about her, which is, after all, what the interviewers want. Tonight, at Albert Hall, talking not just about tonight, but looking back on the whole European tour, she’s talking about what she and the band have achieved. She feels for the first time that she and they are a unit that she is proud to embrace in the first person plural.

  The questions the British journalists ask make it clear that the controversy in the American rock press about Janis leaving Big Brother is unknown to them. These pop critics are getting their first look at Janis, and they like what they see. Like tonight’s audience in the Royal Albert Hall, they’re dazzled.

  It’s not really a press conference, though a few flashbulbs pop. Janis shows off the new shoes she bought in Paris and she takes an ostentatious swig of tequila from a bottle we brought to the gig. “Do you prefer it?” a reporter asks. “Is it a better drink?” “I love it!” Janis says. “It tastes terrible, but I love it!” When we weren’t drinking snapps with Knud in the concert hall bars, tequila has become the libation of choice on the tour, once Bobby joined us. Finding limes is a bitch on the Continent. The French don’t even have a word for limes. They call them citrons verts—green lemons. In London too, we have to resort to lemons as chasers. (Reports in the American press have continued to tout Janis’s devotion to Southern Comfort, but the reporters aren’t paying attention. Even before she left Big Brother, Janis switched her affections to B&B, motivated in part by a desire to adjust her image by drinking something more sophisticated.)

  Outside the stage door, there is a secure area where the band’s limos are parked during the show. The boys in the band have made their escape in one limo, some of them on foot, but the crush of fans beyond the gate are waiting for a glimpse of Janis. The crowd shows no signs of diminishing, so eventually Bobby and Janis and I and at least six other people cram into the back of the other limo, Janis on Bobby’s lap. The driver noses carefully through the crowd and gains the street. “I’m so excited!” Janis exults, but she catches herself. “Dylan didn’t ever do that,” she says to Bobby. “I’m not cool enough, huh? He didn’t ever get�
�happy. I’m ecstatic and screaming.” She waves to a trio of pretty boys peering at the limo’s tinted windows. “So long, boys,” she says. “Oh, my God.” Her eye for a pretty boy is ever vigilant.

  As in each of the other cities on the European tour, Janis’s first stop after the show is the hotel, where she takes her leave and goes to her room. The purpose of these postconcert retreats is to get high before she sets off for late-night recreation in public. Since we’ve been on the road with the new band, the routine is more regular, more predictable. If the show went badly, getting high is her consolation. Tonight, as after the other European concerts, it’s a reward, a celebration.

  The party is in Janis’s room. It’s a suite, actually. We’re in London for four nights and Janis has indulged herself by taking a suite for herself and Linda, where they can entertain royally.

  I don’t join the party, because I have a date. On our first day back in London I made a beeline for the flea market and the stall where I discovered the tiger-claw belt. The minute we left England I knew I had to have it. But I hesitated, and I lost. The belt is gone. Still there, however, is a blond American named Nancy, tending the stall next door. I struck up an acquaintance with her before, and I renew it now with an invitation to the concert. I can’t escort her, but I stop by her seat and say hello before the show, and we’ve arranged to meet at the hotel afterward.

  We entertain ourselves in my room, with drinks and a late supper from room service, and it is well after the event that I learn we almost lost Sam in the early hours of the morning.

  In Janis’s suite, the presence of old friends from San Francisco fuels the festive feeling. Bob Seidemann is a San Francisco photographer who knew the boys in Big Brother before Janis joined the band. He took the photo of Big Brother, including Janis, that Albert Grossman’s office used for publicity. Bob has taken a nude portrait of Janis—the only nude portrait of Janis—with her hands chastely folded over her pubic area, which he has refused to exploit for profit. Also on hand is Stanley Mouse, one of the creators and the foremost practitioner of the psychedelic rock-and-roll poster style that defined the Fillmore and the Avalon ballroom scene and has spread as far and wide as acid rock. Eric Clapton is among the celebrants as well. See!—he really was there.

  Seidemann hears Janis’s voice announce from the bathroom, “Oh, I really got off. I really got off.” A short time later, Seidemann peers into the bathroom and what he sees is Sam, in the bathtub, fully dressed, with a girl clad only in panties sitting astride him. Seidemann takes in the fact that Sam is blue and his eyes are closed. And now Janis and Linda Gravenites are bending over Sam, and Seidemann understands that Sam has OD’d.

  Seidemann would do anything to help Sam, but three women are ministering to him and there is something else that needs to be done. Seidemann takes Clapton aside and says, “Eric, get out. A guy in the other room’s OD’d.” If things go badly, no one wants to read in tomorrow’s newspapers that Clapton was at the scene of a drug overdose. Clapton splits, and Seidemann gets to work clearing the suite.

  It seems to take forever—fifteen minutes to shove the geeks and yahoos and hangers-on out the door—and when they’re gone Seidemann returns to the bathroom, where those who know and care for Sam are apparently trying to keep him cold and awake. Which he isn’t yet, but there are flickers of returning consciousness.

  There’s talk of calling a doctor. Seidemann puts a stop to that. He has been in England long enough to know that nobody calls doctors for OD’ing junkies, because calling doctors means the police will show up as well.

  Eventually Sam comes out of it, because of—or in spite of—the efforts of Janis and Linda and the nearly naked girl, whose name is Susie Creamcheese. Of course it is.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Back in the U.S.A.

  APR. 25, 1969: Springfield, Mass.

  APR. 26: MIT, Cambridge, Mass. (1 P.M.)

  APR. 26: Brown University, Providence, R.I. (8:30 P.M.)

  APR. 27: Rochester, N.Y.

  MAY 2: Onondaga War Memorial Auditorium, Syracuse, N.Y.

  MAY 3: Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.

  MAY 4: University of New Hampshire, Durham, N.H.

  MAY 9: Cleveland Convention Center, Cleveland, Ohio

  MAY 10: Cobo Hall, Detroit

  MAY 11: Veterans Memorial Music Hall, Columbus, Ohio

  ON APRIL 24 we land in Boston and keep right on following the sun along the Mass Pike to Springfield, where we have twenty-four hours to rest and recuperate before the gig. We are a cosmopolitan crew, fresh from European triumphs. Springfield is a manufacturing city in decline, unworthy of our attention, but Janis and the band deign to play for the younger residents, to give them hope.

  The next day we have two shows fifty miles apart. The first is at MIT in Cambridge, with a 1:00 P.M. start, followed by an evening show in Providence, at Brown University. This is a bit of a scramble for Mark and George, no sweat for me and Janis and the band. At Brown, probably half the audience are RISD students, but this time no fetching girls fondle me as I check the sound from the back of the hall.

  We’re coasting on the European high, but Syracuse, Rochester, and Cleveland can’t hold a candle to Paris, Copenhagen and London. The cohesion Janis and the band found in Europe begins to dissipate. Janis repairs to her hotel room each night after the gig, sometimes with Richard, sometimes alone. Linda Gravenites decided at the last minute to stay in London to make clothes for the English rockers. Some of the Rolling Stones were among her potential customers. Linda’s real reason is that she can’t bear to be around Janis so long as Janis is in thrall to heroin.

  Back in New York, between gigs, Janis and Sam get word that Nancy Gurley, James’s wife, has died of an overdose. James and Nancy went camping in Sonoma County. They brought along some smack to get high in the country. When James woke up in the morning, Nancy was dead at his side. James is being charged with second-degree murder, because he shot her up. Janis and Sam’s reaction to the news is to score and get high.

  Janis’s next reaction is to call Bob Gordon to ask his help in finding an attorney to defend James. She will contribute to the legal fees, and this help will prove decisive in keeping James out of jail.

  We fly out of New York to tour the Midwest. This spring, the hyped-up expectations of the audiences, together with the still-growing disdain for authority that characterizes the youth “movement” as a whole, increasingly threaten concert security. The kids want in, whether there are tickets or not, whether they can afford them or not. Controlling entries at a municipal auditorium is one thing, but as the weather warms and the concerts move out into stadiums, parks and racetracks, the temptations to gate-crashers are often irresistible. If enough frustrated fans want to see a show, it takes more than some snow fence and a few rent-a-cops to keep them out.

  For the first time, I’m dealing with security as an essential part of the arrangements for every concert. Janis is now so well known that her appearances bring the threat that the ticketless hordes will try to come over the fence or through the back door. A riot at a Janis Joplin concert means bad publicity for Janis and future loss of income, if promoters become reluctant to book her. It means present loss of income too. Janis’s fees this year are almost always based on a guarantee versus a percentage. Every nimble kid who jumps the fence is money lost. If the show is sold out, we couldn’t care less, because Janis will be paid based on the sold-out seat count, but even so, gate-crashers create resentment among the paying guests and provoke confrontations with the police and rent-a-cops.

  In concert halls and auditoriums, there are ways to protect the stage. Is there an orchestra pit? Can it be open during the performance, creating a waterless moat between the audience and the stage? In outdoor settings, a fenced no-man’s-land in front of the stage can help. When we arrive at a gig, I talk with the security staff and police. I tell them we know they’re on our side. I tell
them our preferred method for dealing with fans who make it onto the stage is to take them through the wings and let them back into the audience if they will go peacefully. If not, out the back door. These kids pay all our salaries; they deserve to be treated with care, even if they make trouble.

  When security breaks down and the stage is mobbed, the power cords to the stage monitors often get kicked loose. Janis hates it when she can’t hear herself. After a few incidents where equipment is damaged or stolen, or where Janis is assaulted in midsong by an especially ardent fan, she is willing for the most part to do what she can to keep the crowd under control. She still urges the audience to get up and dance, but at the same time she asks them to keep off the stage.

  Some of the city cops and rent-a-cops belong to Vice President Spiro Agnew’s Silent Majority. To them, the culture of rock and roll and dope-smoking hippies is a symptom of the world gone to the dogs, and nothing will straighten out a faggot hippie quicker than a billy club upside the head. More often, the security men’s occasional overreactions are prompted less by repressed fascist rage than by fear. At one show where a few enthusiastic fans gain the stage, I arrive in the wings just in time to stop an aging rent-a-cop, a former policeman, from using his billy club on a cowering kid who is maybe all of seventeen. “Hold it!” I shout, and my voice carries enough authority to freeze the old man. I put myself between him and the kid. The rent-a-cop’s hand is shaking as he puts his club back in its belt loop. He has never seen anything like a Janis Joplin show before. He doesn’t know what to make of it or what the fans might do if they reach the stage en masse. He is as frightened as the kid.