On the Road with Janis Joplin

by John Byrne Cooke

  Cavett draws himself up. “I have to defend my entire sex, ladies and gentlemen.”

  “Go right ahead, honey,” Janis says. The audience cracks up.

  Cavett has somehow gotten wind of the fact that Janis’s Port Arthur high school class is holding its ten-year reunion in August, and Janis is planning to go. “I don’t have that many friends in my high school class,” Cavett admits. “I don’t either,” Janis says. Her wistful tone gets her another laugh, but she’s serious when she says, “They laughed me out of class, out of town, and out of the state. So I’m goin’ home.”

  Janis holds her own as the next guest joins the conversation. She met Raquel Welch last fall at a party Life magazine gave for “the top stars of the sixties.” Raquel and Janis hit it off then, and Raquel took Janis to the premiere of Myra Breckenridge, a film adaptation of Gore Vidal’s novel, in which Raquel co-starred with Mae West, John Huston, Farrah Fawcett, Tom Selleck, and the fastidious film critic Rex Reed, who played a transsexual. When Cavett asks Welch what kind of people come to see a film that many find bizarre, Raquel says she has seen the movie three times and twice the audiences were predominantly homosexual.

  “Of course they weren’t all homosexual,” she adds. “Janis was there.”

  “Thank you, baby,” Janis says with a grin. This gets another big laugh from the audience, as they pick up the reference to Janis’s often-alleged bisexuality.

  “Can we clear anything else up while we’re here?” Cavett asks innocently. As Cavett and Raquel understand and Janis’s response makes clear, she prefers to be seen by the public as an enthusiastic heterosexual. Nor is this an evasion. As love objects and sex objects, men are her first choice.

  Cavett touches on Janis’s winter trip to Rio, but neither mentions the highlight of her summer tour, which is just two days away.

  Three venturesome music promoters in Toronto, collectively known as Eaton-Walker Associates, have chartered a Canadian National Railways train that will traverse the continent from east to west. The passengers, an all-star lineup of bands, will give concerts in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary, and Vancouver. The train, and the tour, is called Festival Express 1970. Like the Monterey Pop Festival, it is envisioned as an annual event. Like Monterey, it will never be repeated.

  The passenger list is impressive. In addition to Janis and Full Tilt Boogie, it includes the Grateful Dead, the Band, Delaney and Bonnie and Friends, Tom Rush, the Buddy Guy Blues Band, Ian and Sylvia, Mountain, Traffic, Ten Years After, Seatrain (an act Bennett Glotzer has managed since before he joined Albert), James and the Good Brothers, and more. Janis will get $25,000 for each concert. She will gross $125,000 for a week’s work. Two years earlier, it took Big Brother and the Holding Company six months to earn as much.

  As the starting date draws near, our imaginations are running wild. Let’s resurrect the Great Tequila Boogie and put it on rails. Janis and I call Neuwirth and Kristofferson and I cajole the promoters into reserving them bed space on the train.

  Ten days before the start of the tour we learn that the Montreal and Vancouver shows have been cancelled for lack of adequate advance sales. For a time we fear the whole scheme may evaporate like a pipe dream, but the other dates hold firm.

  The night before we’re due in Toronto, Janis and Full Tilt do a show in Schenectady, New York, near Albany. Because of the last-minute change in the starting point of the train tour, I haven’t been able to book a direct flight from Albany to Toronto. The only available flight leaves Albany at eight forty in the morning and involves a plane change in Buffalo, a city I remember mainly for detaining Sam Andrew when he was caught driving without a license after a Big Brother concert. On my birthday. He woke me in the middle of the night to bail him out.

  I roll Janis and Full Tilt Boogie out of bed at 7:00 A.M. Bitching and moaning, they straggle aboard the plane. We eat some breakfast in Buffalo between flights, which helps some, but the plane to Toronto is late. By the time we finally land in Canada we are tired and cranky and in no mood for further delays. Hotel rooms await us, and a day off—what’s left of it. The band follows me through the Toronto airport like zombies. In their present condition, they would follow me off a cliff.

  In this state we approach Canadian customs, notorious throughout the drug underground as being even tougher than their American counterparts. I have warned the band that I will brook no nonsense at customs. No secret stashes, no dumb jokes, nothing that will raise the hackles of officialdom. And it is here that Janis’s pride in having kicked heroin manifests itself in an unexpected way.

  The smartly uniformed officers take one look at us and decide we warrant closer inspection.

  “Step this way, please, and open your luggage.”

  Like unimaginative civil servants around the globe, the Canadian customs officials judge a book by its cover. Of course the long-haired musicians will be the ones carrying drugs, right? As I was for each border crossing in Europe, I am a model of businesslike rectitude for this one. No suit and tie today, but even the underwear in my suitcase is laid out foursquare and my customs-officer reading material is face-up on top of my clothes—paperback copies of the U.S. Constitution and Thomas Jefferson’s On Democracy.

  “Thank you, sir.” I am waved through to await the others.

  At the opposite end of the sartorial scale is Janis, who might be Mark Braunstein in drag, dressed up for a costume party. The Full Tilt boys are Ivy League by comparison. The inspecting officers pass them through with a few perfunctory pokes in their bags while a diminutive officer with a solemn, round face begins a thorough search of Janis’s luggage. Unaccountably, she seems to welcome his attention.

  Her suitcase looks as if she packed by throwing clothes at it from across the room. Her hippie handbag is overflowing with odds and ends scooped up at the last minute during the bleary rush of our early-morning departure.

  “Hey, man,” Janis says to the small customs officer. “Don’t you want to look in here? That’s my toilet kit, man, there might be some pills in there.”

  What the hell is going on? I try to signal Janis to quit goading the inspector so we can get out of here before we all keel over from exhaustion. I’m afraid to do it too openly for fear of arousing more suspicion. Janis takes no notice.

  Like a sheep being led to the dipping trough, the officer follows Janis’s direction. He heads straight for the toilet kit and pulls out a bag of powder. My heart skips a beat.

  “What is this, ma’mselle?”

  Janis can scarcely contain herself. “That’s douche powder, honey!” she proclaims, loud enough for everyone to hear.

  “Ah, oui, oui, ma’mselle.” The little French-Canadian inspector almost chokes with embarrassment. His complexion explores the scarlet end of the spectrum while he moves on quickly to something safer. But he keeps searching.

  I’m pacing up and down, pissed at Janis for delaying us. And then—comes the light. I sit down and prepare myself for a long wait. Belatedly, I begin to enjoy the show.

  On Kozmic Blues’ tour of Europe, Janis was terrified at every border crossing and customs inspection, knowing that the works and the smack she had stashed on her person could send her directly to jail on a tough rap to beat in foreign courts. But she was unwilling to go without, so she carried a supply everywhere, despite the risks. Now she is taking her revenge on the customs officers of the world, and now I understand the full extent of Janis’s joy in her new freedom. The border watchdogs can search all day and never find a thing. Janis is clean. She is as respectable as a symphony conductor. She is proud and she is celebrating.

  The boys amuse themselves as best they can. Richard Bell passes the time with a yo-yo. Nothing fancy, just up and down, up and down, grinning as he watches Janis urge the inspector on. John Till wanders around with his cassette recorder slung from his shoulder and earphones on his head, nodding dreamily in time to the music, oblivious to e
verything else. Clark sits on a bench practicing rhythms. A good drummer is never without his drumsticks and a practice pad.

  Every five minutes or so a fat officer walks purposefully through the room muttering under his breath. “Move, move! Goddamn hippies!”

  Janis prolongs the game until even the obtuse little customs inspector finally realizes that no one who has anything to hide would behave like this. Janis is still bubbling, joking with the boys as we leave the airport, all the fatigue and hassle of our early start and the Buffalo layover banished. When we are settled in the rent-a-car she says to me, “I had to do it. You understand, don’tcha, honey?”

  For once the stern road manager has to give in.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Riding That Train

  THE TORONTO KICKOFF of Festival Express 1970 is a weekend of music, noon to midnight on Saturday and Sunday, but our drawn-out travels keep most of us from the Saturday show. Sunday is a perfect summer day. The concert stadium is in a park on the shore of Lake Ontario. George Ostrow and I and two girls George brought from New York explore the belt of greensward that borders the lake, where sailboats make the most of a light breeze. A tank and an antiaircraft gun and a four-engine bomber mounted on a pylon make up a World War II memorial. We climb on the tank and stroll around the park until the concert starts. We have checked out of our hotel rooms. After the concert, we’ll board the train for Winnipeg and the West.

  Backstage, Brad Campbell flags me down. Look who’s here, he says, and he presents to me none other than Bill King, the Kozmic Blues organ player who played only the Stax-Volt Christmas show before he disappeared. It turns out that when Bill arrived in New York for Christmas with his family after the Memphis gig, the FBI nabbed him for dodging his draft notices and a federal judge gave him a choice: Join the army or go to jail. Bill chose the army. He went through basic training and followed orders for almost a year, until orders came to ship out for Vietnam. At that point Bill, recently married, hitchhiked with his young bride to Canada and settled in Toronto. Bill has a band, Homestead, that opened the concert here today.

  Janis greets Bill like a long-lost friend, her irrepressible exuberance in her new life, her new band, and the start of the Festival Express tour pouring out to the organist who knew her briefly in gloomier times. She tells Bill she has quit smack, regales him with accounts of the Full Tilt band and her new material, and even tells him about her Brazilian adventures with Linda Gravenites and David Niehaus, who she still hopes will come back to her.

  The energy of the other performers can’t match Janis’s high spirits, but several groups come close. Like those who were at the Monterey Pop Festival, the bands who have signed up for the cross-country train tour sense that this is the start of something special.

  The audience—twenty thousand, they say—seems to feel the same high. Backstage, we hear some talk about fans trying to jump the fences, storm the gates. The word is, they’re radical protesters who think the concert should be free.

  Janis is receiving a flat fee for each concert. The number of tickets sold and how many kids manage to scale the fence don’t affect her pay, so I’m not keeping tabs on security. Later we hear that Jerry Garcia helped arrange a free concert at another park nearby on the lakeshore, where the Dead and the New Riders of the Purple Sage performed, along with Canadian artists Ian and Sylvia and James and the Good Brothers. This diversion draws the protesters from the CNE stadium and apparently pacifies them.

  It is past midnight when the last act leaves the stage. In the quiet hours before the short summer night wanes, we are transported to the train, which sits engineless on a siding in the CNR rail yards, and we explore what will be our home for the next five days. I help Janis and the band find their berths in the sleeping cars, but no one is ready to fall into bed. In the middle of the train we discover what will become the centers of social activity during the journey: a dining car and two bar cars. Someone points to electrical outlets in the walls of the bar cars. Is the power up here 110 volts? I think so. Let’s try it out.

  The road crews have loaded the bands’ equipment into the baggage car. They troop through the train and retrieve some amps, a couple of drum sets, an electric keyboard, a basic PA with a mike or two, and before the train begins to roll one bar car is transformed into the electric-music jam car. Acoustic musicians find a home in the other.

  At eight o’clock in the morning, the train pulls out of the yards and the music falls into the rhythm of the rails. (Neuwirth and Kristofferson are no-shows. They will regret their decision.)

  It’s a rolling hootenanny. From Toronto to Winnipeg, the music never stops. At any time of the day or night, you can climb out of your berth and lurch down the narrow corridors to the bar cars, and you’ll find someone playing. There are brief lulls, but never for long. Someone else picks up a guitar, a drummer finds the beat, and off we go.

  I’ve got my movie camera and my stereo cassette recorder with me. Somewhere between the lakes and woodlands of Ontario and the spreading farmland of Manitoba, I set up the cassette recorder in the electric-music car and record ninety minutes of train music. There are long instrumental jams, some totally improvised, some based on known tunes. One of the best, with a trumpet lead, is Hugh Masakela’s “Grazing in the Grass,” which he played at Monterey, before it became one of his biggest hits.

  The musicians get a joyful workout when Buddy Guy and Bonnie Bramlett have a blues sing-off, passing the mike back and forth, swapping songs, swapping verses. People moving through the car stop to listen. In the acoustic car, Janis and Jerry Garcia sing “Careless Love,” and Jerry and John Marmaduke Dawson of the New Riders wail on “Wake Up, Little Susie.”

  When I set aside my movie camera, I borrow a guitar. The Martin D-18 I played with the Charles River Valley Boys was stolen off a baggage cart in the Chelsea Hotel last year, while Mark and George were loading Kozmic Blues’ equipment into the truck late at night. So far, I haven’t replaced it. But there are plenty of guitars. I trade Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers songs with Rick Danko of the Band. After I finish one of Hank’s lonesome blues, Rick’s bandmate Richard Manuel says, “Hey, man, you can’t sing like that. You’re a road manager.” This backhanded compliment from a musician I admire makes my day.

  There are other cameras on board, a 16-millimeter film crew hired by the promoters. Cool. Someday we’ll relive the trip in a movie theater. When Janis and Marmaduke sing together, Janis motions the cameraman to focus on Marmaduke, so the camera doesn’t stay just on her. Give the man his due.

  Janis spends most of her waking hours in the acoustic bar car or the dining car, where drinks are also available. By day, the cars are a little brighter than she likes—she prefers cool dark spaces, like her home in the redwoods. On the train, she wears her large round rose-colored sunglasses day and night and it’s all the same to her.

  The trip gives her a chance to spend time with her old friends from the other San Francisco bands. Her departure from Big Brother, which aroused criticism at the time, is history now, and Kozmic Blues is forgotten. Holding forth with a glass in her hand, Janis is in top form, and she is exuberant in her praise for Full Tilt Boogie.

  “Full Tilt Boogie, from what Janis was telling us—Janis was reporting to Garcia and myself—telling us, I mean she was really turned on about that band. She felt like it was coming back together again. It was like the first band that she’d had that she was happy with, since the early days, and a much better band, at that.”

  Rock Scully

  Whatever other drugs the passengers may consume aboard the train, alcohol fuels the music and the social intercourse. Joints are passed from time to time in the music cars, but most of the smoke that wafts through the train is from tobacco. From the first day out of Toronto, Janis and I buy drinks for Jerry Garcia and encourage him to keep pace with us.

  The sleeping compartments seem impossibly small at first encounter.
They’re completely filled by the bed when it’s down. You get out into the corridor, lower the bed, and climb back in. You’ve got a light, a fan and a little sink. Hmm. Not bad. Lie down and watch the countryside pass by in the Canadian summer dusk, which lingers forever. When you want to shut out the light, pull down the shade, and you’re in a comforting cocoon. It’s easy to doze when you’re lulled by the rhythm of the rails, but it’s hard to sleep for long when you’re missing the rolling party.

  In Winnipeg, the promoters have arranged with the local authorities to make the municipal swimming pool available for the exclusive use of the Festival Express gang before the concert starts at noon. They provide buses. Dozens avail themselves of the offer. The Olympic-sized pool offers a chance to improvise water volleyball or dive off boards and platforms on three ascending levels.

  Few of the travelers thought to pack bathing suits. Most swim in their underwear. None get naked, not even the Californians, who have made public nudity commonplace in counterculture environs. The decision to observe this level of decorum disappoints me initially, but I realize it is wise, as is the facility’s decision to exclude the curious public while we’re splashing about. Long-haired men in Jockey shorts might not occasion scandal, but the women of Festival Express, in their lacy bras and bikini panties, would probably test Winnipegians’ sense of propriety.

  After the pool, I’m off to the airport. Three of the Full Tilt boys—John Till and Richard and Ken—stayed in Ontario after the Toronto concert to spend a couple of days with their families. I find them in the Winnipeg airport in company with a professional clown in full costume and makeup, who is paid by the provincial government to keep travelers amused.

  Another stadium, another sports field. The crowd at this concert is much smaller than Toronto. It’s Canada Day, and Pierre Trudeau, the prime minister, is in town to celebrate Manitoba’s centennial. Trudeau draws crowds like a rock star. We’ve got a trainload of rock stars, but this concert is laid-back, a pleasant interlude.