Janis lit up like a neon sign. “Full Tilt Boogie!” she cried, and the christening was celebrated with holy water from the agave plant.
By the time I get there, the Boogie has been curtailed, and it’s Janis who is cracking the whip. She has banished Bobby and Kris during working hours. When they first arrived in California, they were spreading the good-times gospel of the Great Tequila Boogie around the Bay each day and falling down on Janis’s floor each night. Kris’s sleeping accommodations soon evolved upward to the comfort of Janis’s satin sheets. She persuaded him to remove, at least temporarily, the split-cowhide shirt and pants he has been wearing nonstop since he left New York. He hesitated, briefly, fearing that if he took off his latter-day mountain man’s garb, he would fall to the ground while the outfit remained standing, a concern that proved to have some basis in fact.
Each afternoon, after band rehearsal, Bob and Kris would corral Janis and the boys for the evening’s rambles. But the drinking, and its effects, were cutting into rehearsal time, and Janis laid down the law: We’ve got songs to learn, a tour coming up, and I need these guys to stay sober.
Janis’s new house is a palatial version of her recent apartments, furnished in a combination of Beatnik Modern and Grand Funk. It is set among old-growth redwoods, where it catches maybe half an hour of sunlight a day in midsummer and exists for the rest of the time in softly filtered light that is gentle on the eyes. I prefer open skies and long vistas, but this nest in the forest primeval perfectly suits Janis’s preference to be sheltered from the full glare of day.
The house is full of dogs. Janis’s beloved George was let out of her Porsche last year while she was rehearsing with Kozmic Blues in San Francisco, and he vanished. The loss hit Janis hard. To fill the gap, Albert has given her, as a house present, a good-natured malamute mix whose mother was Albert’s malamute bitch, and whose father, the story goes, was Bob Dylan’s poodle. His name is Butch. Dave Richards has given Janis another puppy, Lyndall has a young dog, and Janis recently acquired a Great Pyrenees and named him Thurber. When a new arrival comes in the door, the canine troop careens through the house for a welcoming inspection. It’s a noisy but cheerful domestic ritual.
The garage has been converted into a rehearsal studio that features an antique pool table with a slate top and leather pockets. Janis’s two-piece cue, and the set of ivory balls, were a Christmas gift from our New York limo driver, John Fisher. The stick, he told her, once belonged to pool legend Willie Mosconi.
The lamp that hangs over the table has a (genuine) Tiffany shade. A new tape recorder and a rack of tapes stand on a bookshelf in the corner, the source of old and new material to be learned by the Full Tilt kids. On breaks, they can shoot a rack or two.
Janis looks trim and fit, and she is in high spirits as she presents me to the band. Brad Campbell and John Till, the two holdovers from the Kozmic Blues Band, greet me like a long-lost brother. Meeting the three new members, and learning how they all came together, gives me more reasons to believe that Janis’s rampant optimism is justified.
In the final days of the Kozmic Blues Band, on a flight to Nashville for the last gig before Madison Square Garden, John Till was feeling low. He had been with the band only five months and it was folding out from under him. He looked up and saw Brad Campbell bouncing down the aisle toward him, all grins, and he wondered what Brad had to be so happy about. Brad sat down next to John. “She wants you and me to come out to California,” he said.
Brad and John have spent the winter in San Francisco, living on a retainer, waiting for Janis to put together her next band. The retainer was less than they would have made on the road but more than they would have gotten from unemployment. They did a little freelancing—play a gig here, play a gig there—but nothing regular. One day in the spring, John Till was wandering around North Beach when he ran into Snooky Flowers and a guy he didn’t know. “You wanna play guitar tonight?” the guy said.
“Sure,” John said.
“Can you get a bass player?”
“How about Brad, man?” Snooky said. “Can you get Brad to play?”
John went off to phone Brad. They spent the afternoon rehearsing in a second-floor loft with Snooky, the other guy, and a drummer named Clark Pierson.
Clark is from Albert Lea, Minnesota. He’s an American version of Ringo Starr: It takes a lot to wipe the grin off his face, and he has the same happy-go-lucky basic rhythm. Clark came to California from Chicago with a band that had a recording contract. The record didn’t go anywhere, and in the spring of 1970 Clark was living in San Francisco playing music anywhere he could get a job, Polish dances included. He had a small-time agent trying to find him work. One day the agent called up and said, “These people need a drummer for a week. Do you want the job?”
“How much is the pay?”
“Thirty a night.”
“Sure.”
Clark showed up at the second-floor loft for rehearsal, where he met Brad and John and Snooky’s friend. The gig was playing five sets a night in the Galaxy, a topless joint on Broadway. Rumor later has it that Clark was discovered in a strip joint, but he scotches that story: “There’s a difference between the strip joints and the topless: Topless is already topless.”
One night, along about the middle of the evening, Clark heard a jingle-jangle sound and he saw a long-haired chick come into the club, dressed up in satin and spangles, with small bells tinkling from a sash tied around her waist. She was arm in arm with an older man in a Brooks Brothers shirt and a crewneck sweater and a pair of Levi’s turned up at the cuff over a pair of Buster Brown shoes that may never have been polished. His gray hair was tied back in a ponytail and he looked like the man on the Quaker Oats box. “Man,” Clark thought to himself, “what a weird couple.”
When the song ended, Snooky grabbed the mike. “Ladies and gentlemen, in this club tonight we have one of the finest singers”—racka-racka-racka, giving Janis a glowing introduction. Snooky harbored no grudges about the demise of the Kozmic Blues Band. Albert sat in the spotlight’s glare and smiled his best smile. When the set was over, Brad and John went over to talk to Janis and Albert, and after a little while Brad came back to ask Clark if he’d like to audition to play in Janis’s new band.
“Well, I ain’t got nothing else to do,” Clark said. A few days later he went to the house in Larkspur. “We played a couple of tunes and then Janis asked me if I wanted to join the group. Albert is standing there. I can’t get used to him. She was real happy when I said, ‘Yeah.’”
Besides Brad and John and Clark, there is Richard Bell on electric piano and Ken Pearson on organ. Like Brad and John, they are Canadians. Kenny has played with Jesse Winchester, an American songwriter who removed himself to Canada a couple of years ago, beyond the reach of draft, and made his reputation there. Richard is yet another graduate of Ronnie Hawkins’s bands, from which Albert earlier plucked Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson to play behind Bob Dylan when Dylan electrified his act.
“Hey, you guys, here’s a song I like,” Janis will say. She’ll play the boys a tape and they’ll run through the song to see if it begins to rock. To Big Brother classics like “Ball and Chain” and “Summertime” and “Piece of My Heart,” and a few songs from Kozmic Blues, like “Try (Just a Little Bit Harder),” they have added punchy new tunes that will soon become familiar to audiences across the country—“Move Over” and “Half Moon” and “Cry, Baby” and “Get It While You Can.”
The band is tight. There is none of the every-man-for-himself wariness that marked the early days of Kozmic Blues. These guys are already a band. They are on Janis’s trip and she basks in their selfless support.
In her garage-studio-poolroom, I see something new in Janis. She is running the rehearsals as if she’s done it all her life. There is no slack time. Oh, they laugh, and there are jokes, but when Janis counts off a song and kicks a leg t
o start the beat, the band is right there. She is in charge, with none of the strained authority that marked her occasional attempts to exert leadership with Kozmic Blues. It’s clear that the boys already feel they are working with her, not just for her. Unlike the macho-sensitive men in Kozmic Blues, they don’t object when Janis calls them “my boys”—they love it. From the stories I hear, Richard and Kenny were sometimes overwhelmed by the level of hanging out that kicked in when the Great Tequila Boogie hit town, but Janis helped them over the rough spots. Now that she has forbidden Bobby and Kris from tempting the band with invitations to play hooky, not even the promise of a full night of rocking can distract Janis from the task at hand: She is getting her act in shape. Put on your dancing shoes, boys, we’re going on the road.
The band has already had its local debut. They played a gig at Pepperland, a dance hall in San Rafael, for the Hells Angels, where Janis’s act was billed as “Main Squeeze and Janis.” Bennett Glotzer, who has been Albert’s partner since Albert’s relationship with Bert Block ended last year, became close to Janis in the fall, during my hiatus from the road. Bennett was managing Blood, Sweat and Tears when Janis and Big Brother played with them at the Psychedelic Supermarket in Boston and again at the Columbia Records convention in Puerto Rico. Janis has been aware of Bennett since then, and since he joined Albert, he has become someone Janis confides in. Like Albert, Bennett has spent time in California this spring, supporting Janis in preparing for her return to touring. He has been largely responsible for booking the upcoming tour.
Bennett didn’t want Janis to do the Pepperland gig. Hells Angels? What are you, crazy? Remember Altamont? Bennett thinks the Angels are sociopaths and thugs. But Janis insisted, and the stories are wild: An Angel (not really an Angel, Peter Albin says—a member of a rival club, maybe a Gypsy Joker; everybody else says he was an Angel) and his motorcycle mama fought Janis for her bottle as she was about to go onstage. Bennett stepped in and got pinned under the melee, which ended when Sweet William, a member of the Angels’ San Francisco chapter, stomped the guy on the head and escorted Janis to the stage. During her set, a naked couple tried to make it onstage, in the midst of the music, and an Angel, a real one this time for sure, tossed the naked guy out and let the naked girl stay. Big Brother and the Holding Company, reconstituted since Sam left Kozmic Blues, opened the show, with Nick the Greek Gravenites at the mike, in a friendly battle of the bands. By all reports it was intense like no other gig in memory.
Afterward, when Janis was leaving the hall with Glotzer, she said to him, “Well, Bennett, you were right.”
Be that as it may, the Pepperland gig has redounded to Janis’s benefit. The reviews, and the word of mouth around the Bay, are favorable. Old prejudices that did so much to alienate Janis from her hometown the year before have evaporated with demise of the Kozmic Blues Band. In the Larkspur house or sashaying into the Trident—the preferred watering hole of the famous and funky in Marin, a hippie rock-and-roll hangout with organic food and tall drinks, stunning waitresses and a view of Sausalito Bay—or whipping across the Golden Gate Bridge in her psychedelic Porsche, Janis is firmly in her element and enjoying every minute.
Even before I absorb the full extent of Janis’s rebirth, I want my old job back. But I have delayed accepting the offer long enough that Janis and Albert have taken on a provisional road manager. Stan Rublowsky has some credentials from another wing of the music business—he has toured with the renowned jazz pianist Stan Kenton—but he seems a trifle out of place in Janis’s Marin madhouse. A new age has surely dawned if a guy who has road-managed jazz musicians looks too straight to rock-and-rollers.
Janis feels an obligation to Rublowsky, but she is happy to see me again and tells me so. Finding her so bright-eyed and cocksure, so uncontainably happy, I realize I’ll be seriously bummed if I don’t get to wrangle this bunch on the road. It’s no time to be coy, and I let my enthusiasm show. Janis resolves the dilemma by deciding to take both candidates out for the first couple of weeks. She will decide later which of us to keep. Stan and I agree to do the job together, which should make it easy on both of us. He has already confirmed most of the arrangements for the first weeks of the tour. I look them over and find them in order, which leaves me with little to do by way of work until we are off and sailing. I am out of New York at last, after a long winter of discontent, and glad to be back in California. I’m ready to celebrate. The Great Tequila Boogie, in its final days, provides the vehicle.
Neuwirth and Kristofferson are the sole survivors. Odetta and Michael J. are long gone. Ramblin’ Jack has rambled on. Kris and Bobby decamp to my San Francisco apartment when I arrive. They sleep in my living room for the next few days and we put plenty of miles on their rent-a-car and my Volvo, around the Bay, visiting friends, playing music, chasing women, and stopping at assorted bars to refuel.
Kris is a former Rhodes scholar, a former army captain and former chopper pilot in Vietnam, which adds a dimension to his persona as a leather-clad, long-haired songwriter, not a Nashville type at all, but one who has surely got Nashville’s attention.
Kris’s Bay Area rambles with Neuwirth have already earned him his first booking in L.A., thanks to Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. Jack had a gig at the Keystone, a Berkeley music club, where Bobby and Kris joined him on the very evening when Janis and Full Tilt Boogie were debuting at Pepperland. (Like Bennett Glotzer, Neuwirth too was leery of the Angels and what might ensue at a full-on rock-and-roll goonbash fired up by Big Brother and the Holding Company and Janis’s new band.)
As Jack tells the story, he invited Bobby to sing a song or two and Neuwirth in turn persuaded Kris to sing. In the club that night was Doug Weston, owner of the Troubadour, in L.A. After hearing Kris, Weston booked him at the Troubadour.
According to Ramblin’ Jack, Janis was so pissed at Kris and Bobby for missing the Pepperland gig, she called the Keystone and left a message that was handed to the miscreants as a written note that said, “Thanks a lot. Now I’ll know who my friends are.”
For the record, tequila is not just another drink. Some component of the agave plant contributes, along with the alcohol, to the elevating result. For many, the effect is psychedelic. Where tequila puts me is out there, especially drinking it day and night with two lunatics who don’t know any better. Now and then I suspect that I know better, but I try to keep up anyway. It isn’t bad, really, once I get used to ordering Bloody Marys for breakfast to calm the tequila willies before I tackle the huevos rancheros. And the truth is, I will remember these days fondly, even though the few scenes I can recall in any detail play like clips from a demented underground movie—
EXT. MILL VALLEY HOME—SWIMMING POOL—DUSK
The house belongs to Big Daddy Tom Donahue, a pioneer of underground FM radio. Tom is not home. The young men and women in the pool are naked. Donahue’s teenage son is not sure he should allow these people on the premises, but he can’t imagine how to evict them, and besides, the naked girls are very attractive.
CUT TO
INT. PEGGY CASERTA’S HOUSE—STINSON BEACH—NIGHT
The party turns weird when Peggy decides to shoot herself up. Neuwirth, Kristofferson, and Cooke abandon ship.
CUT TO
INT. CARL DUKATZ’S HOUSE—BERKELEY—MORNING
Kris is singing “Sunday Morning Coming Down.” It is morning, but not Sunday. We are coming down but trying to get back up. Carl learns the lead guitar part as it goes along and Neuwirth finally gets the harmony right after weeks of patient instruction from Kris.
FADE OUT
Through it all we avoid serious trouble and get little sleep. On Thursday, May 28, Stan Rublowsky and I pick up Janis and the band and we fly off to Florida. Kris comes with us as far as Atlanta, where he changes planes for Nashville. He has run out of money and I lend him fifty bucks. When he strolls off down the concourse, giving us a parting look at his Western-hero walk, we feel we are losing a member
of the family.
It may be the last time Kris has to borrow pocket money. Roger Miller’s and Ray Price’s recordings of his songs are beginning to pay off. Later in the summer, Kris gets a quarterly royalty payment in five figures that’s a boost toward the fame and fortune that will follow. He repays my loan with a check I wish I had framed. For Kris, like Janis, the spring of 1970 marks a turning point toward the good times.
The Great Tequila Boogie is history. Full Tilt Boogie is on the road.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Full Tilt Boogie
MAY 29, 1970: Gainesville, Fla.
MAY 30: Snider Armory, Jacksonville, Fla.
MAY 31: Miami, Fla.
JUNE 5: Columbus, Ohio
JUNE 6: Indianapolis, Ind.
JUNE 12: Freedom Hall State Fair and Exposition Center, Louisville, Ken.
JUNE 14: Kansas City
JUNE 19–20: College Park,Md.
JUNE 25: The Dick Cavett Show
JUNE 26: Schenectady, N.Y.
WE OPEN THE tour in Florida, in the final days of May. Despite her confidence in the new material and the new band, Janis approaches these first concerts as if the judgment to be passed on her were governed by fickle fortune, as if her talent and Full Tilt Boogie might not be enough to recapture what she has lost. To steady her nerves, she drinks before the concerts with only marginally more restraint than she was applying in the final months of touring with Kozmic Blues.
The gig in Miami is our first big show, an all-day outdoor rock festival with Janis as the headliner. We will be flown to the site by helicopter. Our pickup point is a high school football field. The chopper is late. It’s a warm day and Janis lies down in the grass to catch forty winks. When the chopper lands, she is sound asleep.
I shake her awake. “Come on, Janis, time to go.” She gets up bleary-eyed and blowsy, her hair and feathers in disarray. The alert pilot spots the tequila bottle protruding from her bag. “I can’t carry her,” he says. “She’s intoxicated.” No sleazy hippie broad is going to get in his chopper if she’s been drinking.
On the Road with Janis Joplin Page 30