On the Road with Janis Joplin

by John Byrne Cooke

  The day is fair and the wind is brisk. Backstage, Janis sits on the grass against a snow fence with Marmaduke. They were keeping company on the train as well. Maybe Janis is experiencing the romance of the rails.

  Aboard the train, many of us—musicians and road crew alike—who would normally confine drinking to the evening hours have been drinking during the day. Janis has kept us company. In Winnipeg, she slacks off a little in the afternoon, then has a belt or three as the time to go onstage approaches. The boost she’s looking for is harder to feel when it’s floating on top of a daylong bender. So she reinforces it.

  The result is that Janis performs the show as drunk as she sometimes was with Kozmic Blues. What saves her is that the booze isn’t walking hand in hand with heroin, she isn’t looking forward to her postconcert fix, and she’s got the Full Tilt Boogie Band behind her. She summons her reserves and she is up for the show.

  Her spoken introduction to “Try (Just a Little Bit Harder)” is longer, as are the improvised raps she inserts in a couple of other songs, pacing the stage, talking to the audience, while the band keeps the groove going, riffing on the tonic chord behind her, until she finally jumps back into the song.

  “The singer is only as good as the band, and this is the first band that really helped me. . . . This band, man, I could be in the middle of a verse and go on a different trip, and they can follow me. They won’t go with the arrangement. They go right with me, man.”

  Janis Joplin

  Given how tight and fine Janis can be with Full Tilt, her rambling raps in Winnipeg seem self-indulgent to me, and I can sense the audience becoming restless when they run long. But when Janis is singing, the band is with her and she’s got the crowd.

  With most of my road-managing tasks handled by the Festival Express promoters, the concerts are easy for me. They transport us from the concerts to the train and from the train to the concerts. All I have to do is make sure Janis and the boys are ready to go onstage when the time comes.

  Onward to Calgary. In the bar cars, the music continues. Life on the train has become the norm. Day and night blend into a continuum. We sleep when we can’t stay awake, and wake up to get back on board the party. On the first night out of Winnipeg, I see northern lights in the sky and I haul members of the Grateful Dead to the platforms between the cars to take in the light show, as entrancing as the best of Headlights’ efforts at the Fillmore, even without music.

  Midday, a rumor sweeps the train: The bar cars are running out of liquor. Given the steady pace of the drinking, no one questions the story. Canadian National Railways no doubt stocked up as they would for a normal passenger run, but this is not a normal passenger run.

  I shift into road manager mode and locate Kenny Walker, the Walker in Eaton-Walker Associates. Is there a stop coming up anytime soon? Yes, Kenny says, we’ll stop at Saskatoon. Can you get the railroad to give us a car and a driver? He’s sure he can.

  I need something to collect money in. Fortunately, the women have been shopping in Toronto. What is always on the shopping list when a stylish woman is feeling frisky? Shoes. An empty shoebox is just the thing. I find my old Cambridge friend Tom Rush, another regular at the Club 47, and I enlist him in the cause. We walk the train from one end to the other, soliciting contributions: “Donations for the People’s Bar!” In fifteen minutes, we collect over three hundred dollars.

  Saskatoon, pearl of the prairie. Cultural hub of Saskatchewan. Chauffeured to a provincial liquor store by an obliging CNR official, Kenny Walker and I and a couple of volunteers who accompany us point at bottles on the shelves and fill cardboard cases. No beer, goddammit, we need booze! We’re stumped for how to spend the last thirty dollars until we spot an oversize bottle of Scotch. If it were wine, it would be something more than a magnum, maybe a jeroboam. Is that a display bottle? It’s real? We’ll take it. And we’re done.

  Back at the train, eager hands help load the liquor out of the trunk of the car onto the train. And as it turns out, the bar cars aren’t running out of booze after all, so we’re well provisioned for the final leg of the trip to Calgary.

  Late that night, our last on the train, Janis and Marmaduke and Rick Danko and I are among those who launch into a long and loud rendition of “Ain’t No More Cane on the Brazos,” a Southern chain-gang work song I first learned from Dick Fariña. It’s a haunting song, but haunting isn’t what we’re after tonight. We’re into volume and six-part harmony. It’s exhilarating at the time, but long afterward, when I see it in the documentary film Festival Express, well, let’s say it was a rendition best savored in the moment rather than preserved for posterity. You had to be there.

  We are not looking forward to our arrival in Calgary. This is too much fun. They can’t really take the train away from us, can they? Hey, I know, let’s hijack the train! We’ll take it to San Francisco! We elaborate the fantasies and eventually retire to our beds, and it may be that a majority of those aboard actually sleep during our last night on the train.

  In the morning, hangovers are plentiful as we roll into Calgary. Once the train comes to a stop, the engine is uncoupled and there is no power. The cars soon grow hot on the cloudless day. There is nothing to do but to pack our things and brave the sunshine to grab a taxi and head for the hotel.

  “Everybody was just wiped, and pale. You know. Looked like a bunch of junkies, just falling off the train.”

  Clark Pierson

  “I’ve never seen Jerry drunk like he got drunk on that train. That goes for Mickey Hart, Bobby Weir. . . . All of us are seriously hung over, sitting on the railroad tracks, holding our heads.”

  Rock Scully

  It’s the Fourth of July, but there are no stars and stripes waving in the breeze and there will be no fireworks tonight. Canadians are understandably reluctant to observe the United States’ success in casting off the British yoke, a process that for them is still incomplete.

  I register Janis and the Full Tilt boys at the hotel and I find messages from the office waiting for me. On the train, we’ve been out of touch. What I’ve got on my itinerary is that Janis will play tonight, Saturday, in Calgary, and tomorrow we fly to Seattle for a gig there. After that, we were scheduled for a few days off in San Francisco, but the office has thrown us a curve: They’ve booked a concert in Honolulu on Wednesday.

  I call Janis’s room. Lyndall Erb, Janis’s new roommate, has flown up to join us for the trip to Seattle and Honolulu, and she’s on the job as Janis’s guardian.

  Janis is trying to catch up on her sleep.

  Is she asleep right now?

  Well, no.

  I ask Janis to make one decision. No sense flying from Seattle to San Francisco on Monday only to get on a plane to Hawaii on Wednesday, right? How about if we take our days off in Hawaii instead? Janis goes for it. I cancel the flight to San Francisco and book us from Seattle to Honolulu. I call the promoter in Honolulu and let him know we’ll arrive early, on Monday. Can he adjust our hotel reservations for us? He can.

  With the changes made, I join George and the New York ladies for a little sightseeing and window shopping, which becomes actual shopping. I find a pair of genuine smoke-cured buckskin moccasins made by Canadian Indians, with reasonably authentic Plains-style beadwork. Real men shop for footwear too.

  Back at the hotel, Janis is up and about, and she and our road crew have hatched an outstanding idea. The equipment guys have bought a model Canadian National Railroad train, with a diesel engine, two passenger cars, and a caboose. They have labeled the cars “Festival Express 1970” and “Bar Car” with press-on letters. They have wired a section of track to a piece of two-by-eight plank about three and a half feet long and wired the train to the track.

  They have thought of everything, down to buying two Sharpie markers, in red and black, which Janis is using to letter on the plank, “WITH LOVE,” in letters three inches high. Janis’s plan is to pre
sent the model train to Kenny Walker at tonight’s concert, as a gift from the musicians and road crews.

  When Janis has finished her lettering, we head for the stadium. The Calgary show began at noon and will run until midnight or beyond. We keep the model train in our dressing room. Between now and when Janis goes on, it becomes my mission to get as many of the musicians and crew as possible to sign the plank before the concert starts, without letting anyone from Eaton-Walker see it. As on the Declaration of Independence, the early signers write large and the latecomers write smaller and find room where they can. The signatures become a network of names that cover the board. A few add grateful sentiments. Someone named Fudge writes “Hugs and Kisses.”

  The presentation is a great success. When Janis and the Full Tilt Boogie Band are introduced that evening, once the applause dies down, Janis calls Kenny Walker to the mike and holds up the model train on the plank for the audience to see before she gives it to him. Walker is surprised and touched. As he leaves the stage, Janis cues the band and launches into the most exuberant set of the trip. Backstage, someone has spiked the tequila with acid. Talk about a psycheholic high. A couple of the Full Tilt boys got dosed, but they are a band, a bonded unit, and the music hangs together.

  Afterward, we’re reluctant to leave the stadium. On the train we have become a tribe, united by the singular experience. Tonight we part from our traveling companions. Tomorrow it’s back to airplanes and rental cars.

  —

  THE SEATTLE GIG is in a big stadium, maybe as many people as the Toronto concert, but Festival Express was something out of the ordinary. From here on, it will take a lot to impress us.

  Early in my travels with Big Brother, I discovered, to my surprise, that for coast-to-coast flights the difference between a coach ticket and first class was sometimes as little as twenty dollars. I made the band aware of this bargain and, as their concert fees escalated, Janis and the boys agreed to try traveling in luxury. Once they got a taste of the free drinks, wide seats, and rolled tenderloin roast carved in the aisle by charming flight attendants, they were sold. Now Janis looks forward to any flight long enough that the first-class service is worth the extra cost. She has readily approved giving the Full Tilt kids a treat on the flight from Seattle to Honolulu. The boys are wide-eyed and smiling as we settle into our seats. “Something to drink, sir?” “Now, before we take off? Sure, why not.” Cocktails, champagne and wine, and a meal that a decent restaurant could serve without embarrassment, banish the End-of-the-Line Railroad Blues.

  The Honolulu promoter greets us on the tarmac with flowered leis in hand. He puts one around Janis’s neck and kisses her cheek. He places the next on Lyndall. As he moves toward one of the boys, Janis says, “Aren’t you going to kiss her?” and the promoter quickly corrects his oversight. It is such a Janis moment, making sure that no one is slighted.

  On an impulse, Janis takes the rest of the leis from the promoter and puts one on each member of the band and crew, her feather boas whipping around her head in the tropical wind. The other passengers take in this ceremony as they come down the steps from the plane. Why is no one offering them a lei? they wonder.

  Our accommodations are the Hilton Hawaiian Village on Waikiki Beach. The promoter apologizes in advance. He warns us that we will find the hotel full of “newlyweds and nearly-deads.” If “Hawaiian Village” suggests something rustic, like grass huts, we’re quickly disabused of this notion. The Hilton looms above the beach, two towers, thirty stories high, and we’re lodged on the twenty-eighth floor. Alone, so far as we can tell. We don’t see another soul on our floor for the length of our stay. Quarantine the hippies.

  “I had a corner room on the twenty-eighth floor, and there were two French doors on the other side of the room, like at forty-five degree angles to each other, and there was a sign on the wall saying ‘Beware of Trade Winds.’ I opened one door and saw Waikiki, spread out there for me, and it was calm, and I opened the other door, lamps fell over, bedsheets tore off, the table—everything fell over. It was about a seventy-mile-an-hour wind.”

  John Till

  Kenny Pearson collapses on the Hilton’s exclusive expanse of sand to recover from the generosity of Continental Airlines’ first-class beverage service, only to be prodded awake by two security guys he describes as Samoan Mau Maus, whose attitude is “Get the fuck out of here, dirty hippie.” Showing them his Hilton room key doesn’t adjust their attitude much, but they leave him alone to bake off his hangover.

  Janis would be happier in a funkier hotel where the cabana boys smoked Maui Wowie and responded in kind to her “Hiya, honey,” and come-hither smile. But she doesn’t complain. Instead, she settles for drinking mai tais in the Hilton’s cocktail lounge. She and Lyndall are so engaged the next afternoon when a male guest, closer to nearly-dead than newlywed, approaches them at the bar, his potbelly leading the way, and delivers his opening line: “Hey, how much do you girls want?” This may make up in some measure for the Dutchman’s rejection in Amsterdam, but Janis and Lyndall decline the offer.

  “The times that I went out with Full Tilt, we had a great time. She really had a fun time, offstage as well as onstage. I never had felt that way when I’d seen her on the road with other bands.”

  Lyndall Erb

  We lie on the beach, bodysurf, and discover a Hawaiian cocktail called piña colada. The concert in Honolulu takes place on the third day of our stay. After the concert, the band and equipment crew will loll about on the beach for two more days, but Janis and I are headed to Austin, Texas, for an event she has been looking forward to all year, a grand jubilee to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of Kenneth Threadgill, the country singer and bar owner Janis has revered since her first days in Austin.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  T for Texas

  EARLIER IN THE tour, before we boarded the Festival Express, Janis asked me to come with her to Texas for Threadgill’s birthday party. She doesn’t want to have to keep track of her ticket and deal with changing planes in Dallas at the crack of dawn, and all the things I handle on the road. She wants me along for companionship as well, a friend from the new life she has made for herself to show around the places where her music began, and because it will impress the shit out of her Austin friends that she’s traveling with her own personal road manager. She promises that we’ll have a chance to play music with these Austin friends, but even without that assurance I’m already on board.

  What I know about Ken Threadgill is that he’s a country yodeler who sings the songs of Jimmie Rodgers, the Singing Brakeman, America’s Blue Yodeler, which focuses my interest. Rodgers has been my special hero since I found a 78-rpm record of his in the closet of my father’s study in New York. “Hobo Bill’s Last Ride,” the label said. “Solo with guitar.” Since then, I have bought and learned a bunch of Rodgers’s songs.

  For Janis, Threadgill was a mentor and an inspiration. In his Austin gas-station bar and music club, she absorbed the roots of country music and bluegrass. Threadgill motivated her to play the guitar to accompany herself, and among Janis’s fondest memories are her early experiences playing in his bar for a couple of bucks and all the beer you could drink.

  It’s the first time we’ve traveled together, just the two of us. We leave Honolulu on a red-eye, nonstop to Dallas. After drinks and dinner, we burrow under our first-class blankets against the cool cabin air. We try to watch the movie, a turkey called Krakatoa: East of Java. (Never mind that Krakatoa is actually west of Java.) Janis is feeling affectionate. We make out during the movie and we fall asleep with her head on my shoulder.

  In Dallas we change planes—it’s very early—for the hop to Austin, where we’re met by Julie Joyce, an old friend of Janis’s since her brief stint at the University of Texas. It was Julie who alerted Janis to the date of Threadgill’s party and urged her to come. Julie is on the short side, with dark hair and glasses. She looks at Janis in a way
that suggests a history between them and uncertainty about how Janis will respond to her now.

  With Julie is a friend of hers, a blonde named Margaret. To meet us this early in the morning, they stayed up all night. Margaret is quiet and Julie is drunk. The reunion between Janis and Julie is muted by Julie’s intoxication and Janis’s exhaustion. Margaret’s role becomes evident when we get to the car—she’s the one who’s sober enough to drive.

  Where’s the party? Janis wants to know. Threadgill’s bar is way too small for the expected crowd. When Janis sang there with a few friends, they packed the place and played to fewer than fifty people. The birthday party, which is billed as the KT Jubilee, is expected to draw five hundred or more. It’s being held at an old barn out on the edge of Austin. The Party Barn, it’s called, “out by the Y at Oak Hill,” Julie says.

  That’s all we can absorb right now. Margaret and Julie take us to the Holiday Inn, a circular tower by the town lake, where Janis and I gratefully collapse into our rooms and crash for the rest of the day.

  Julie and Margaret come back about six in the evening to pick us up, accompanied now by Julie’s husband, Chuck—medium height, long hair, comfortable presenting himself as a member of Austin’s folkie-hippie community, which is still small at this time. Margaret and the Joyces are on the organizing committee. They’ve been out to the Party Barn, and there’s a hitch in the plans. During the day, a rumor that Janis is in town to attend the Jubilee has run wild. There are several thousand people gathered at the site and more on the way.

  Janis wants her appearance at the party be a surprise to Threadgill, not because she wants to make a splashy entrance but because she doesn’t want to steal the spotlight from a man she loves and admires. She’s going to borrow a guitar and sing just two songs.