On the Road with Janis Joplin

by John Byrne Cooke

  Paul takes an interest in a leather visor that would be great for playing poker under a bare lightbulb. We’re all trying hats on, including Janis. I’m taken by a kind of a hippie hat with a flat brim and a low crown. If the brim was rolled a little, it might look sort of Western, like those low-crown cowboy hats in Western TV shows from the fifties, which bore no resemblance to anything anyone ever wore in the Old West. I roll the brim, and it promises to hold the roll. I put the hat on, and everybody says, Boy, that looks great. Janis gets the idea that she’ll buy it for me. At first I’m reluctant to accept this generous impulse because I’m not sure I can become a hat person. I know I can’t accept the gift and never wear it. But Janis has her heart set on buying me this hat and she pays the guy as I examine the hat inside and out. I find no maker’s mark, so I say “Hey, man, do you have a pen?” He has just the thing, a Rapidograph with indelible ink. “Put your mark on it,” I ask him. “Would you do that?”

  He makes his mark, a backward R joined with a frontward B, like a Western brand. His name is Robert Bruce, locally known as Giant Man. When he’s done, I pass the pen to Janis. “You can give me the hat, but you gotta sign it.”

  Janis turns the hat in her hand, figuring out what she wants to write. She sets it on the table and goes to work on the brim behind the crown. She writes carefully, bending over her work, the same way she lettered “WITH LOVE” on the plank that held the model of the Festival Express train. I expect her to write “Love, Janis,” or something like that, but when she hands it to me I see that she has written, “To John, with love from Pearl.” There’s a heart next to “love” and half a dozen x’d kisses after “Pearl.”

  The next morning, over an even later breakfast than the day before, Paul is thoughtful. He and Janis never did talk business during our hours of carousing. I wonder if he still harbors doubts about his ability to work with her, but he puts my mind to rest.

  “John, I learned something wonderful yesterday,” he says, dead serious.

  “What’s that?”

  “Janis Joplin is a very smart woman.”

  Paul reveals his delight in this discovery. He is confident that Janis’s articulate intelligence will enable them to communicate, and communication is the key: If the lines of communication are open, if they share a common language and skill in expressing it, everything else is possible.

  —

  WITH THE CONNECTION to Janis established, Paul sets in motion a campaign he has been planning since Albert first spoke with him about producing Janis’s next album. Paul thinks the technology, the engineers, and the union requirements at Columbia Records studios are outmoded. He thinks the whole mind-set at Columbia lags behind where rock recording should be in the 1970s. If he has to work within those limitations, he doesn’t believe he can make a record that will sound the way Janis’s next album ought to sound.

  Paul has a plan, a way to prove to Columbia Records that he’s right. Albert supports Paul’s idea and they overcome the first hurdle when Columbia president Clive Davis agrees to let Paul record two demos with Janis and Full Tilt, one at Columbia’s L.A. studio, where some of Cheap Thrills and all of the Kozmic Blues album were recorded, and another at Sunset Sound, the independent studio where Paul wants to record with Janis.

  “Grossman not only said his clients were artists, he believed it, and they, not the manager or the record company, set the artistic and commercial agendas.”

  Fred Goodman, The Mansion on the Hill

  The third week in July, after a gig in Albuquerque, we’re in L.A. making the demos. The Hollywood Landmark is full up and we stay at the Tropicana, a motel on Santa Monica Boulevard that’s long been a favorite stopping place for musicians and artists of the middling ranks. It’s seedier than the Landmark, more exposed. Someone has called it L.A.’s answer to the Chelsea Hotel in New York. Any resemblance is definitely not architectural. The Tropicana is stamped out of the two-story-stucco California mold, but like the Chelsea, the Tropicana has its attractions. It houses Duke’s Coffee Shop, which serves the best burgers in Hollywood, and it’s just a block or two from Elektra Records’ L.A. studio, where I can drop in to visit with Fritz Richmond.

  Paul knows that to prove his point he has to make the best possible recording in the Columbia studio. He is convinced that even the best possible recording won’t be the kind of sound he wants—and Columbia should want—for Janis. Any trickery, any fudging to make the Columbia demo sound bad, will invalidate the exercise. Janis understands this. When she stands at the mike, she sings as if this is her next record for real.

  The members of Full Tilt Boogie, except for Brad Campbell, have very little experience in the studio. It takes time to establish working relationships with each member of a band, to discern their individual modes of communication, more time than Paul has in making these demos. But the Full Tilt boys are good musicians, and above all, they’re willing. They hang on Paul’s every word and on each take they do their damnedest. Their inexperience will affect both sessions equally, so it doesn’t tilt the outcome.

  When Janis shows an interest in the technical aspects of the recording, Paul explains what’s going on and how it affects the sound. He keeps her involved every step of the way. Even as he makes the crucial demos, Paul is expanding the relationship, laying the foundation for their work together.

  When we move from Columbia’s studio to Sunset Sound, a Columbia engineer sits in the back of the control room doing nothing, featherbedding. It’s part of the deal.

  In her downtime, Janis has a reunion with Kris Kristofferson, who is in town. One morning when we gather in the Tropicana parking lot to head for the studio, Janis is fully dressed and ready to go to work, complete with pink and purple feathers in her hair. Kris is barefoot and shirtless, left to lock up her room when he heads out for wherever he’s going next.

  With the dueling demos in the can, we fly east for a flurry of gigs. We play the tennis stadium at Forest Hills for a crowd of fifteen thousand. Janis appears on The Dick Cavett Show again and gives John Fisher’s Love Limousine service a big pitch. We play a rock festival in Highland Park, Illinois, north of Chicago. We play a peace festival at Shea Stadium that Peter Yarrow puts together for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Hiroshima A-bomb. Last year, in the ’69 World Series, the Mets lost the first game, then swept the next four, clinching their first world championship on the same field where Janis and Full Tilt Boogie are now rocking and rolling for peace. When it comes to the notion that sports provide appropriate metaphors for every detail of American life, I’m a skeptic, but I like the idea that although Janis failed in her first outing with a new band, she’s now on her way to clinching a championship of her own.

  We wind up the tour in Cambridge, Mass., for an afternoon show that’s part of a series of rock concerts put on in Harvard’s football stadium. Warned that rowdy fans have caused problems for the Cambridge police after some of the other shows, Janis suggests before her last song that if the fans have energy to work off when the show is over, they take their boyfriends and girlfriends home and work it off together. The line gets a round of applause and the concert leaves Janis and the fans in high spirits.

  When we get back to our Cambridge hotel, I head out on foot with a couple of the Full Tilt boys to eat. As we stroll along the brick sidewalk, four cops get out of a parked patrol car and start toward us. They call out a warning to get off the street. Huh? We’re just going to get something to eat. “Fuck off! Get along there!” The cops break into a trot, brandishing their billy clubs. “You fuckin’ maggots, get out of here!” They begin to run and so do we, beating a retreat to the hotel. The cops return to their squad car and circle the block, around and around, trying to catch us on the street again. I phone Cambridge police headquarters to request that the cops be called off. I say we’re in town with Janis Joplin to perform at Harvard Stadium and the lieutenant on the other end of the line says, “I heard from my o
fficer down there that she incited to riot.” I maintain my calm as I tell him she did just the opposite, she told the crowd not to make trouble. “We’ve had vandalism down in Harvard Square after some of these shows,” he says. I say, “Have you had any vandalism, any other problems in Cambridge this evening?” “Well, no,” he admits. A while later, the squad car is gone and the streets are safe for long-haired musicians.

  —

  THE DAY AFTER the Harvard concert, Janis flies from Boston to Texas for the high school reunion she told Dick Cavett about back in June, but she has no intention of attending the festivities alone. She wants a few friends along for the ride. She has enlisted me, Bob Neuwirth, and John Fisher to make up her cohort.

  Janis’s idea is for us to rent a limousine in which we will shuttle around Port Arthur in knock-’em-dead style. I have phoned every rental car and limo agency in Houston, but they all say the same thing: You can’t rent a limousine without a driver. Janis doesn’t want a driver she doesn’t know. We’ve got our own limo driver. So I reserve the biggest sedan we can get, a Chrysler Imperial.

  John and Bobby and I fly out of New York and land at Houston a day after Janis. There to meet us is Margaret, my lady from Austin, who I’ve invited to join us for the weekend.

  Before we hit the highway to Port Arthur, we make two stops. The first is at a Western apparel store, where John and Bob buy cowboy hats. Why they think cowboy hats are the thing to wear to a Gulf coast oil town, I’m not sure, but Bobby takes it into his head that we have to have hats, and he insists I buy one for Margaret too. I’m wearing the leather hippie-cowboy hat Janis gave me. Among the Western summer hats the others put on, mine would definitely give a genuine cowboy pause, but we encounter no cowboys in Houston.

  The next stop is at a liquor store, for a bottle of tequila. Thus prepared, we head across the flat coastal plains for Port Arthur, for what proves to be a fairly strange weekend.

  It begins with Janis’s parents taking us out to dinner at their country club. We’ve brought some semblance of dress-up clothes for the reunion—despite the crumbling of dress codes in the late sixties, Bobby and John and I still travel with sport jackets and ties in our luggage—and we do our best to appear respectable. The Joplins want to please Janis and they are gracious hosts, but they are somewhat ill at ease. With one exception, Janis has always visited Port Arthur alone.* It is easy for parents to treat an adult offspring returning home for a visit as the child she was, but when she arrives with her road manager and limo driver and another friend and confidant from the very different life she has made for herself, it’s a way of saying, I’m not your little Janis anymore.

  Margaret is the member of our group who handles the dinner best. Her father is an attorney and a Texas legislator. Dressed in a stylish pantsuit, sipping her before-dinner cocktail and chatting with the Joplins, she is totally at ease in a roomful of straight people.

  We are all on our best behavior, trying to establish common ground. It seems to me that Janis is a little standoffish with Margaret, which is in contrast to her attitude when we were in Austin last month. I remember Janis’s dictum from the Big Brother days: no old ladies on the road. We’re not exactly on the road here, but maybe Janis feels I’ve forgotten that injunction. Did I mention to Janis ahead of time that I was inviting Margaret? I can’t remember. I’m sure I didn’t ask her permission.

  In the course of the dinner, during which we order more drinks than the Joplins think is proper, Janis loosens up and accepts me and Margaret as a couple, and she gives me no further cause for concern.

  After dinner, the Joplins and Janis’s sister, Laura, go home. Janis takes her accustomed seat, riding shotgun in the big Chrysler, and directs us on the evening adventure she has planned. We are going to visit a landmark of her wayward youth, back when she and her Port Arthur friends would drive across the state line into Louisiana, where you could buy liquor by the drink and it was easy to get served underage. (In Texas, at this time, liquor is confined to private “clubs,” where the club sells setups—glasses with ice and mixer—and the liquor is poured by members from bottles they bring with them, or which are kept for them on the premises. It is an arrangement that keeps Negroes and Mexicans out of the places where white folks drink.)

  Freed from the constraints of the family dinner, Janis is in high spirits as we cross the Sabine River into Louisiana, recounting trips she made when she was a pimply, loudmouthed girl in the company of a few other misfits and outcasts.

  Our destination is a roadhouse west of Port Charles. It’s loud and it’s jam-packed, with a rocking country band on a small stage. We’re no sooner seated at a table when the band leader calls on Janis to get up and sing a song.

  This attention isn’t what Janis wants tonight. She wants to be an observer, as if she’s watching a movie of her rebellious youth. She wants to re-create within the privacy of our small group what it was like for her ten years ago, so she can take comfort in how far she’s come, but that is not going to be possible tonight. People crowd around the table, pushing against us, all trying to talk to Janis at once. It gets so bad, you can’t light a cigarette without burning the arm of some asshole who’s reaching out toward Janis, trying to get her attention.

  “That was when I first realized that, God, these poor people who are famous, the only people who will actually have the nerve to come up and talk to them are people you wouldn’t want to talk to. And the nicer people are not gonna bother you.”

  Margaret Moore

  Janis endures about ten minutes of this, then gets up and heads for the restroom in back. She is gone a long time. After a while I ask Margaret to go look for her. Margaret goes off in the same direction, and she too is gone for a long time.

  When they return at last, both of them very serious, Margaret suggests we leave. Later, when we have dropped Janis at the Joplin home in Port Arthur and we’re back at the motel where Margaret and I and Bobby and John Fisher are staying, Margaret tells me what happened in the women’s restroom at the roadhouse. She looked under the stall doors and saw Janis’s gold slippers. Margaret went into the adjoining stall and sat down. She said, “Janis, we were worried about you.” There was a pause, and then Janis said, “You just don’t know what it’s like.” And Janis told Margaret how she just wanted to show her friends the roadhouse and have a good time, and how hard it is sometimes to be the constant object of attention when you just want to be yourself. She talked about her life on the road, and how unhappy or lonely she was too much of the time. Margaret was half-afraid of this woman she didn’t hardly know, whose life she couldn’t imagine, who was just five years older than her twenty-two years but seemed so much older at this moment. Margaret pointed out that Janis had people around her who obviously loved her. Janis knew that was true, but what she was feeling at the moment was, You can’t possibly understand how hard it is to be me.

  For this one evening, Janis wanted to be a normal person out with her friends. When she found she couldn’t, she slipped into a well of despair.

  In the morning, the bayou blues brought on by our Louisiana excursion are forgotten. Arriving at the Joplins’ house for breakfast, we find Janis’s parents leaving for the wedding of a friend’s daughter and Janis in the kitchen melting pounds of butter to make hollandaise sauce for eggs Benedict. When I pull out my movie camera to record her culinary skills on film, Janis turns into Julia Child, smiling and talking a blue streak to the camera as she demonstrates her technique. Never mind that I’m shooting silent film. Janis is putting on a show. With an assist from Laura and Margaret, eggs Benedict for six appears on the table. Throughout the process, Janis is the bubbly hostess, giving no sign that the previous evening was anything less than a happy memory. As the perfect complement for eggs Benedict, she has selected Texas-brewed Pearl beer, served ice cold, in the bottle.

  When breakfast is over and the kitchen cleaned up—Janis is the good daughter and we are her du
tiful guests—it’s time to head off to the first event of the Port Arthur High School reunion. Which is, after all, the reason we’re here. On the way to the downtown hotel where the reunion events are scheduled, Janis makes a show of pointing out places where people treated her badly. “They wouldn’t talk to me, man! That’s what they thought of me.”

  This is where it comes from, the behavior that is so familiar to me, the quickness to take offense at any slight, the insistence that she is as good as anyone else, that she deserves respect. Her parents tried to instill in her a sense of propriety that Janis found too confining, but it was among her own contemporaries, the majority who were more accepting of the narrow, conformist views of the 1950s, that the triggers for Janis’s defensiveness were put in place. Her inquisitive intelligence saw the hypocrisy in conforming to get along, and she just wouldn’t hold her tongue.

  The reunion opens with a get-acquainted gathering in a featureless, windowless convention meeting room. Everyone is wearing adhesive name stickers and if they’re not talking to each other, they’re taking photographs with Instamatics.

  Janis is dressed in a long skirt with broad vertical stripes in different colors and a short-sleeved black blouse. She has on a floppy black hat with a bunch of white carnations tied with a ribbon and pinned to one side. For Janis, this is a conservative outfit. In the reunion crowd you can spot her across the room.

  Part of our role, as Janis’s entourage, is to be her defensive perimeter in public places. Unexpectedly, coming on the heels of our experience in the Louisiana roadhouse, her classmates at the cocktail mixer show no more interest in Janis than in each other. Janis stays close to us at first, but she looks around as if expecting—wanting—someone she hasn’t set eyes on since high school to come over and say hello.