On the Road with Janis Joplin

by John Byrne Cooke

  Aside from a few such adrenaline-provoking moments, life on the road follows the familiar routine. There are good days, bad days, and boring days. Within a couple of weeks after our return, the elevating unity the band experienced in Europe is gone. There are spats among the musicians and times when Janis is pushy or demanding or just plain unpleasant to any and all of them. More often, her commitment to good company and good times gives her enough energy to keep the band, despite its interpersonal and musical problems, from degenerating into a group of strangers with no common bonds.

  The band member who requires the most maintenance during the intramural upsets is Luis Gasca. Quick to take offense, his frequent reaction to some real or imagined slight is to throw a fit and threaten to quit the band. I played with Mongo Santamaria, man, I don’t need this shit! Each time, I take him aside and talk him down. We have a record coming up, and a summer tour. You want to be on the record, right?

  On May 12, we fly from Ohio to San Francisco for five weeks’ vacation. Janis and the band, still unnamed, have been on the road for three months straight.

  —

  THERE IS A letdown from the routine of being on the road and in the company of others who are working together in the same enterprise, but there are compensations too. In the familiar comfort of my North Beach apartment, I sleep well. Apart from time on the phone to make a few arrangements for the summer tour, I am free, for the moment, from the demands of road managing. I put a bunch of paychecks into the bank. I go to the Committee, I have dinner with Mimi, I visit friends in Berkeley—where I find the city on the verge of something like a revolution. The local hippies have occupied a vacant lot, a rectangle of grass and foliage that’s owned by the University of California. The lot is near Telegraph Avenue, the Berkeley equivalent of Haight Street. The hippies have christened the lot People’s Park. They have planted trees, created a garden. At night, they gather around campfires. It’s a tribal gathering place.

  The UC regents are taking a dog-in-the-manger attitude: We’re not using it, but you can’t either. On my third day home, Berkeley police use shotguns and tear gas to break up a demonstration in support of People’s Park. An onlooker is wounded. Governor Ronald Reagan mobilizes the National Guard and gives a bogus justification for cops beating kids. A policeman is only human, Reagan says on TV. If you call him obscene names, he’ll sometimes react just as anyone would. Wrong, Ronnie. A policeman doesn’t get to react just like some right-wing hardhat. A policeman represents the state, and the state represents the law. The state doesn’t get to mete out summary beatings in response to verbal abuse. Even if some hippie calls a cop a motherfucking pig, the cop doesn’t get to pound on the kid with a truncheon.

  Four days later the wounded onlooker dies. When a memorial gathering masses on the UC campus, a helicopter drops tear gas on the crowd while National Guard troops prevent the demonstrators from escaping into the city streets. Seen on the evening news, there’s an uncomfortable similarity between the Berkeley footage and the preceding report from Vietnam, where the American troop level is now well over half a million.

  The next day, I drive through Berkeley with a friend, filming cops and National Guard troops from my car. It’s sunny and warm. Springtime in California. Under normal circumstances, a perfect day to stroll up Telegraph Avenue and through the campus. Today, the massed forces of uniformed men in blue and olive-drab uniforms, the cruising convoys of cop cars and National Guard jeeps, turn the familiar streets into something surreal, like a set for a dystopian movie. On Telegraph Avenue, where hippies sell beads and God’s eyes and tie-dyed T-shirts in normal times, I see hanging from a second-story window a sheet that evokes the Soviet Union’s brutal suppression of Czechoslovakia’s peaceful revolution just a year ago. On the sheet, the occupants have painted, “Welcome to Prague.”

  For a ninety-minute break from Ronald Reagan’s California, I go to see Monterey Pop, which has opened in San Francisco while we were away. The film was originally planned as a television special on ABC, but ABC took a look and took a pass, so Pennebaker and the festival organizers decided to release it in theaters. Documentaries rarely do well theatrically, but Penny had success with Dont Look Back that he hopes to repeat. At the Presidio Theater, where Dont Look Back had a successful run, the audience loves Monterey Pop. For me, it brings back memories of the screening in John and Michelle Phillips’s Bel Air mansion, when the glow of the Summer of Love was still warm in memory. What strikes me now are the cutaways to the faces in the audience and the people strolling the fairgrounds, so young and bright and open, full of hope and joy. With the traumas of 1968 behind us and the National Guard occupying Berkeley, the idea that music, love, and flowers might truly change the world seems impossibly naïve.

  Newsweek is on the stands with Janis on the cover for a story on the rebirth of the blues in pop music. The article does a creditable job of tracing the origins of the blues from the early recordings of Bessie Smith and Robert Johnson to the best current practitioners. It places Janis at the center of a blues revival, in company with B. B. and Albert King, Jimi Hendrix, Muddy Waters, Johnny Winter, and Big Mama Thornton herself, whose “Ball and Chain” was Janis’s ticket to fame. The article doesn’t mention Big Brother or Janis’s new band.

  Soon after our return to San Francisco, Mark Braunstein announces that he’s quitting. He’s had enough of the road. With Big Brother, it was fun. With this band it isn’t.

  “I felt the [new band] was constantly trying too hard, was somewhat unnatural, was forced. . . . I never felt that the [new band] was receiving the adoration and communication and warmth from the audience that Big Brother was, because I didn’t feel they were putting it out.”

  Mark Braunstein

  —

  IN THE MIDDLE of June, we convene in Los Angeles to make a record. Columbia wants an album that demonstrates Janis’s new sounds to the fans who made Cheap Thrills a bestseller.

  George Ostrow is in charge of the equipment now. His new assistant is Vince Mitchell, as long and lean as George, his dark hair often in a ponytail.

  We have less than two weeks in the studio before a gig in Denver on the way to another eastern tour. The pressure is on, and we have new drummers to break in, first one, then another. After our final concert of the spring tour, in Columbus, Ohio, Roy Markowitz flew home to New York and decided not to return. In his stead there is Lonnie Castille, a tall, genial guy who lasts about a week, to be replaced by Maury Baker, who is shorter, with longer hair.

  The producer Albert has chosen to guide this album is Gabriel Mekler. Mekler arrived in L.A. a few years ago, knowing almost nothing about pop music. He lucked into a job at Lou Adler’s Dunhill Records, where he produced Steppenwolf’s debut album last year. The story is, he gave the group its name. This short pedigree in music producing arouses the interest of Janis’s musicians.

  Janis has decided that this time around she is going to get along with her record producer come hell or high water. She sets out to win Gabriel to her side, and she succeeds. From the outset, he is solicitous of her and always listens to what she has to say. It wouldn’t be accurate to say they become friends. What Janis is after is a working relationship in which she feels recognized rather than neglected, and she achieves this with Gabriel.

  In contrast, he treats the band members as if they don’t exist. Snooky feels that Gabriel doesn’t have the first clue about black music or the hybrid sound Janis and the band have been working to create. Terry Clements musters his verbal skills to communicate with Gabriel about the horns and the arrangements, but Gabriel doesn’t show much interest in what Terry has to say. Terry gets the impression that Gabriel has his own idea about what Janis’s new band should have been and isn’t willing to deal with what it is.

  Sam comes into the sessions ready to do whatever he can to make them work, but Gabriel hardly acknowledges Sam’s presence. Maybe he sees Sam as a threat because he comes from Bi
g Brother, where he was Janis’s equal.

  The musicians are looking for recognition of who they are and what they have accomplished in their time with Janis. They are a backup band, pieced together by Albert and Mike Bloomfield and others, but each musician wants it to be more than that. In Europe, it was more than that. In Columbia’s L.A. studio, they are salaried sidemen who are being paid less than union scale for the sessions. They are being asked to refine the arrangements, to show Janis at her best, but they have no incentive to take on the added responsibilities. They resent being treated like hired hands, and the fact that Janis won’t stand up for them in the face of Gabriel’s dismissive attitude.

  Janis reacts to the conflicts by separating herself from the band and retiring into semiseclusion. She no longer turns to Richard Kermode as a fallback lover. On the days when Gabriel doesn’t need her, when he’s working with the band, she spends much of her time alone. The self-imposed discipline that limited her on the road to a daily hit of smack after a performance isn’t needed here. In his off-hours, Sam is still Janis’s partner in the covert companionship of heroin. He keeps pace with her, and for the first time he feels that the drug use is getting out of hand.

  In the studio, their relationship doesn’t exist. At work, Janis and Gabriel are a unit apart from the others. Their mutual dependence produces a song that offers at last a name for the band. The song is called “I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again, Mama.” (This will be the name of the album.) When we leave L.A., the band will be the Kozmic Blues Band. Later, we’ll embrace the name, even enjoy it, but during the recording, the concept of cosmic blues suggests the depth of the musicians’ discomfort.

  Given the tensions in the studio, I have even less incentive than usual to spend time there. I hang out with my fellow Charles River Valley Boy and Cambridge roommate, Fritz Richmond, who moved to L.A. last year to work at Elektra Records’ Los Angeles studios as a sound engineer. He trained with Paul Rothchild, who has since left Elektra to become an independent producer. Fritz remains one of Paul’s preferred engineers for Elektra projects, and they share a house in Laurel Canyon. Fritz and I dine often at a restaurant called the Blue Boar, just down La Cienega from the Elektra studios. We discover that the restaurant has a stash of exceptional Puligny Montrachet wine at a very reasonable price. Customarily, gourmands of our generation choose a wine to suit the meal. At the Blue Boar, Fritz and I tailor our meals to suit the wine. We get mellow together, and I confide in him about the changes I’m experiencing on the road. A year ago, it was all new and exciting. Now I wonder how much longer I want to do this job.

  Albert arrives in Los Angeles early in the recording. He takes up lodging in his customary room at the Chateau Marmont, a 1920s castle above Sunset where hip movie stars and moguls of the music business stay in L.A.

  Albert seeks the opinions of the musicians about how to improve the arrangements and the atmosphere in the studio. He talks with Terry Clements, and even asks if Terry knows a third party, someone outside the band, who might help. He consults with Snooky. He talks with Sam. As he did with Big Brother, Albert is looking for solutions to what he sees as an ongoing problem. Each of the musicians tells him what it was like in Europe. Albert has heard about Europe from Neuwirth too. But these exuberant reports don’t change what Albert hears in the studio, where the musical cohesion Janis and the band achieved on the European tour is not in evidence.

  It doesn’t help that Gabriel and the engineer require multiple takes, sometimes dozens, and that many are necessitated by simple technical mistakes—mikes not on, or not properly placed. When the musicians complain about these things, or ask for a better mix in their earphones, Janis gets bitchy with the band. She feels they’re being prima donnas, and she doesn’t acknowledge, or doesn’t recognize, that the sessions are not being competently run.

  Insult is added to the other irritants when Richard Kermode arrives at a session to find someone else sitting at his organ. Without consulting or forewarning the band, Gabriel has hired a studio sideman to play on a certain tune. He does this on other occasions, bringing in outside musicians without giving any advance notice to Janis’s band members, and in consequence their resentment grows stronger.

  The unsung hero of the sessions is Mike Bloomfield. He spends time in the studio and gives of his expertise selflessly. He helps Sam work out an arrangement for “Little Girl Blue,” a Rodgers and Hart classic that Mike and Sam transform as thoroughly as Sam did Gershwin’s “Summertime.”* Mike plays slide guitar on “One Good Man,” a song Janis writes during the session. And when it’s all over and done, Mike asks for no credit on the album and will accept none.

  “Every now and then a guitarist will still come up to me and he’ll go, ‘That wasn’t you, that was Mike Bloomfield, right?’ And I’ll say, ‘Yeah.’ I don’t know why he didn’t take the credit. . . . He’s playing slide on the album. And I still get asked about that. And so he was like real noble. He was doing all this stuff and he didn’t put his name on anywhere. And Gabriel wasn’t doing anything and he put his name everywhere.”

  Sam Andrew

  The sessions are most difficult for Sam. In Big Brother, he was creatively at the center of the band. He wrote “Call on Me” and “Combination of the Two,” two of the band’s early signature songs. He co-wrote “I Need a Man to Love” with Janis. Without his lyrical arrangement of “Summertime,” that song would never have become so identified with Janis, evoking applause from her audiences, even in Europe, from the first notes of the guitar intro. Overnight, Sam has gone from being Janis’s equal partner to a guitar for hire. As the gulf widens between Janis and the band, Sam sides with the musicians.

  Their resentments come to a head one evening at the Landmark. The musicians feel they should get a piece of the record, just a few percentage points, to reflect what they have contributed, and so they have a stake in the outcome. They ask for a meeting with Albert and Janis. Beforehand, they talk among themselves and build up a head of steam, but in Janis’s room, faced with Albert’s sphinxlike presence, the others lose their nerve. Sam has known Albert longest, and he is the one who has the courage to speak. Give us a couple of percent from the album, he says. “Just give us like one percent. Give us anything that’ll reflect sales of the album rather than just like the—”

  “Why, man?” Albert asks. “I can go get better guys than any one of you guys, in—session men from Nashville.”

  “That’s true, Albert,” Sam says. “But what does that have to do with it? The fact is, we’ve gone through all these gigs with Janis and we deserve something more than just like session pay.” All the musicians have contributed to the arrangements we’re using on the album, he says. We’ve worked to make this a band.

  Sam’s plea falls on deaf ears. The other musicians remain mute, and meekly retire from Janis’s room in defeat.

  Not long after this confrontation, on another evening at the Landmark, after Sam and Janis have shot up together in her room, Janis seems agitated, despite the soporific effect of the drug. The cause, and the measure of her discomfort, is evident when she works up the courage to say what’s on her mind. It comes out sounding artificially formal, as if Janis were a school principal addressing an incompetent teacher across a wide oak desk. “Your services are no longer required,” she says. Sam says nothing. “Don’t you want to know why?” she says. He says, “Does it really matter?”

  Walking across the patio by the pool, Sam encounters Richard Kermode. “How you doing, Sam?” Richard asks. “Well, pretty good,” Sam says. “Janis just fired me.”

  By now, it’s clear to both Sam and Janis that Janis brought Sam with her when she left Big Brother because she was unable to make a complete break from the past. She needed to keep some connection with all that San Francisco and Big Brother meant to her, which was everything. Sam was a friend. He was a songwriter, and he knew how to arrange a song so it supported Janis’s vocal. With Sam, Janis
had a point of reference amid a host of new uncertainties.

  Now, six months into the new band, the dissension in the recording sessions has made painfully apparent that there is no solution to the discomfort Sam’s reduced position in this group has created. What Janis doesn’t tell Sam is that among the other musicians there is a feeling that replacing him is a necessary step to finding the groove Janis wants, and Albert agrees.

  So she lets him go. But not yet. There’s a record to finish, and a tour that begins in another week, ready or not. Within a day of firing him, Janis asks Sam if he will stay until she can find a new guitar player. Of course he says yes.

  JUNE 27–29, 1969: Denver Pop Festival, Mile High Stadium. Big Mama Thornton, Three Dog Night, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Iron Butterfly, Johnny Winter, Tim Buckley, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Joe Cocker, Jimi Hendrix.*

  JUNE 30: St. Louis

  JULY 1: Edwardsville, Ill.

  JULY 2: Des Moines, Iowa

  JULY 5: Atlanta International Pop Festival, Atlanta International Raceway, Hampton, Ga. Johnny Winter, Johnny Rivers, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Canned Heat, Spirit, Joe Cocker, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Al Kooper, Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Dave Brubeck, Delaney & Bonnie, Led Zeppelin, Grand Funk Railroad, Chicago Transit Authority, and more.