by John Glatt
They made it to North Beach in just fifty hours, and Chet immediately took Janis to the Coffee and Confusion Club on Grant Street. It had recently changed from a beatnik hangout to one of the new North Beach folk clubs. During the next few days, Chet also introduced her to the regulars at the nearby Coffee Gallery, including Jerry Garcia, Jorma Kaukonen, Paul Kantner, David Crosby, and David Freiberg.
“Anybody could play,” explained Helms. “None of the performers were paid and if you wanted to go and strut your stuff you’d just put your name on the list.”24
Everybody loved Janis’s raw country blues songs, and she was soon making $50 a night from passing the hat, with as much beer as she could drink.
“I played with Janis briefly in 1963,” recalled Jorma Kaukonen, still two years away from joining Jefferson Airplane. “The Janis that I knew fairly well was the folky, bluesy Janis.”25
Word soon got around North Beach about this plump Texan girl with bad skin and tattered clothes who had an amazing voice. But when her future Big Brother and the Holding Company bandmates Peter Albin and Jim Gurley came to see her play, they were unimpressed, thinking her too weird.
When they had first arrived in San Francisco, Janis and Chet Helms crashed at a friend’s apartment, but Janis soon moved in with a girl named J.J. She collected unemployment and had several short-term jobs to augment what she made in the coffeehouses.
Janis soon started injecting speed and heroin and hanging out at the Amp Palace on Grant Avenue and a lesbian bar called the Anxious Asp.26 Although she found a boyfriend who went by JP, she was sexually adventurous with both men and women. She also tried to become a hooker, but with little success.
“We did so much dope,” recalled Helms. “We walked right into a speed crowd.”27
One night Bobby Cohen, who would later become Helms’s partner in the Avalon Ballroom, saw Janis singing at a coffeehouse and decided to record her.
“She was one wild lady,” he said. “Drank a lot, sung incredible and was just a very fun person. I told everyone there was going to be a big party at my house, dragged Janis over and recorded her.” 28
That summer Janis’s career seemed to be taking off. She played the Monterrey Folk Festival and sang live with the Dick Oxtot Jazz Band on Berkeley’s KPFA-FM Midnight Special radio show. In May 1964, she moved to New York to try to break into the flourishing Greenwich Village folk scene. Janis took an apartment on the Lower East Side, spending the summer shooting speed and reading Nietzsche and Hermann Hesse. At night she sang at Gerde’s Folk City and an East Village bar called Slug’s, accompanying herself on an old guitar.
By the fall, she was back in San Francisco and seriously addicted to speed. After being beaten up by a gang outside a North Beach Bar, she crashed her Vespa motor scooter and hit rock bottom. She even tried to check herself into a psychiatric ward at San Francisco General but was refused admission.
“She was freaking out a lot of her friends,” said Helms, “and became very aggressive.”29
By summer of 1965, Janis weighed just eighty-seven pounds and had ugly track marks up and down both arms. Concerned that she would die if she didn’t get off the streets, her friends threw a bus ticket party and sent her home to Texas.
Reunited with her family in Port Arthur, Janis vowed to clean up her act. She underwent psychiatric counseling and returned to Lamar College to finish her art course.
“She went into a complete makeover,” said Jim Langdon. “She wore her hair up in a bun and it was just really a kind of charade. I think she was honestly trying to go straight [because] that [San Francisco] experience had really scared her.”
Soon after returning, Janis threw a homecoming party at the Joplin home, only inviting her straight and sober friends. At the party she proudly announced she was now engaged to Peter de Blanc, a wealthy young man she’d met in San Francisco.
On August 21, de Blanc duly arrived in Port Arthur to formally ask Seth Joplin’s permission for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Seth and Dorothy both approved, thinking him very refined with some potential.
During the next few months, Janis would write her fiancé sixty love letters, even sending him home-cooked pralines. She enthusiastically wrote of filling up her hope chest, about shopping for a wedding dress with her mother, and the Texas-style quilt she was making for their marriage bed.
But by winter, de Blanc had broken off the engagement and jilted her.
That Thanksgiving, Janis Joplin channeled her heartbreak into her music, playing at the Half Way House Club in Beaumont. Old friends found her almost unrecognizable, with her neat dress and her brown hair piled up in a bun, as she sang Bessie Smith songs mixed in with some folk blues.
Jim Langdon, who now wrote a music column for the Austin American-Statesman, was in the audience that night and much impressed. He could not believe how far Janis’s singing had come in the two years since he had last seen her. He arranged for Janis to play the next weekend at the Eleventh Door Club in Austin and used his column to champion her.
“Janis just absolutely took the place down,” recalled Landon, “and she was wonderful.”
The next day he wrote a glowing review, calling Janis Joplin the “Best white female blues singer in America.”
“Of course nobody knew who she was,” he said. “She’d never cut a record.”30
In Janis Joplin’s absence, Chet Helms had been busy establishing himself in the San Francisco music scene. He now managed Big Brother and the Holding Company and had launched the Avalon Ballroom to compete with Bill Graham’s Fillmore Auditorium. By early 1966, Big Brother was starting to get known in San Francisco, and Helms decided Janis Joplin would be the ideal vocalist for them. Up to this point all the vocals had been shared by bassist Peter Albin and guitarists James Gurley and Sam Andrew. Helms believed the band sorely needed a female singer.
“Early in the game I had suggested the band try out Janis,” said Helms. “I knew she was in Austin and maybe we could get her.”31
But Albin and Gurley, who had seen her perform three years earlier, were against the idea. Finally, after months of auditioning girl singers, it was agreed that Janis should be given a tryout, and Helms dispatched his friend Travis Rivers to Port Arthur to collect her.
On June 4, 1966, Janis returned to San Francisco after a monthlong affair with Rivers. She had initially been reluctant to come back, not wanting to be exposed to hard drugs again. But Chet Helms promised her a bus ticket back to Port Arthur if things did not work out.
“So I told her in truth that most of these people were totally cleaned up,” said Helms. “She said, ‘How will I live?’ So I agreed to pay her basic rent for five or six months while she sorted it out.”32
The night she arrived, Helms brought her to Big Brother’s rehearsal room at 1090 Page Street, where drummer David Getz and guitarist Sam Andrew both had visions of the beautiful goddess that Chet Helms had told them about.
“And in comes Chet with this real scraggly-looking girl,” recalled Andrew. “And she was kind of tough. She was kind of scrappy. It would be like if you went out and got a cat out in the alley and dragged [it] in. She has her claws out.”33
But as soon as Janis started singing, everybody knew she was a perfect fit.
“When she opened her mouth,” said Getz, “it was apparent that she was the one. That she was the singer for this band.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Pieces Come Together
Janis Joplin first performed with Big Brother and the Holding Company at Chet Helms’s Avalon Ballroom in late June 1966, opening for the Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service. A week later, she played the Fillmore Auditorium for Bill Graham.
She was an instant sensation with her raw, earthy blues vocals, which seemed to come straight from her heart. Like Grace Slick, Janis had her own unique style and voice. But whereas Grace was always well groomed,
favoring a pantsuit or a sexy black leotard, Janis went braless in oversize men’s shirts and faded Levis.
When they first met backstage at the Avalon, Janis and Grace became instant friends, finding common ground as the only female rock singers in San Francisco.
“You’re so pretty,” Darby Slick remembered Janis telling Grace, as Big Brother was about to take the stage. “How do you make your hair look like that?”
Grace laughed, saying she had no idea but just messed it around with her fingers and sprayed on lacquer. Then The Great Society singer started sipping champagne from a brown paper bag as Janis brought out a bottle of Southern Comfort and took a slug, offering the bottle to Grace.
“Want to try some of this?” Janis asked. Grace “cringed” as she refused, telling Janis with a smile that she preferred champagne.1
Bill Graham initially disliked Janis. His rival Chet Helms managed her, after all. He would mockingly call her “That screaming witch,” only allowing Big Brother to play benefits at the Fillmore. So they mainly played at the Avalon, where they soon became the unofficial house band.
That first year Bill Graham ran the Fillmore Auditorium on a shoestring, using all his management skills he had honed at Allis-Chalmers. His girlfriend, Bonnie MacLean, was his “lady Friday,” answering phones and keeping the books. She also listed the bands coming to the Fillmore on chalkboards at the top of the stairs. And before long, with Graham’s encouragement, she did some of the first Fillmore posters, as well as overseeing local artists Wes Wilson and Alton Kelley, whom Graham paid a pittance.
His only other regular Fillmore employees were Jim Haynie and his cleaner/security guard, John Walker.
“Bill called me his right-hand man,” said Haynie, who was then twenty-six, “and I had a number of hats to wear. I ran all the concessions and I introduced the bands. I was in charge of all the technical shit.”2
Bonnie now rarely saw her boyfriend outside of the Fillmore, as he worked late every night and was up early the next morning, calling the New York agents to book bands.
“Oh my God he was driven,” recalled Bonnie. “He was working all the time. There was a hell of a lot of screaming going on. He was the boss. He yelled at me once and I slammed my hand on the tabletop, and told him not to talk to me like that. And he never did it after that.”3
Although the Fillmore Auditorium had a legal capacity of just a thousand, Graham regularly crammed twenty-five hundred people inside. After every show Bonnie would help fill his canvas knapsack with cash, taking it back to their apartment on his old Lambretta. He was at his most affectionate as they counted the night’s takings, piling it in stacks of $1, $5, and $10 bills. Then early Monday morning, Graham put a loaded handgun into his side pocket and took many thousands of dollars to the bank.
That summer, as the money rolled in, he splashed out $8,000 on a brand-new green Mercedes.
“That was a big deal,” said Bonnie, “because he was very frugal about what he wanted for himself. But he wanted that nice car and felt he could spare that money.”4
Many music-scene observers saw Bill Graham as a capitalist pig who was growing rich on the backs of the Love Generation. In an early issue of Rolling Stone, publisher Jann Wenner referred to him as “The burgeoning Howard Hughes of the dance scene,” leading to a bitter long-term feud between them. That accusation hit a raw nerve. And from then on even the suspicion of a negative whisper behind his back would unleash a torrent of Graham’s anger and abuse, followed by the culprit being physically thrown out of the Fillmore.
Among the regulars at the Fillmore Auditorium was fifteen-year-old Carlos Santana, who would sneak past Bill Graham to get in for free. He went every week, seeing blues legends B.B. King, Muddy Waters, and Otis Rush play.
“The Fillmore was a real education,” Carlos would later explain. “If you hung out at the Fillmore for a week, you didn’t have to go to the Berkeley School of Music if you really listened and learned.”5
Carlos Santana had now been living in the Mission District for three years and had his own blues band. But when he had first arrived, Carlos was so angry with his mother for kidnapping him that he had locked himself in his room and refused to eat.6 When he finally came out, Josefina Santana enrolled him in the James Lick Junior High School, where he learned English. But he found little in common with his classmates after his time at the El Convoy strip club.
“The stuff they were talking about was silly-ass corn shit,” he told Rolling Stone in 2000. “I’m hanging around a bunch of old guys talking about Ray Charles and the blues.”
Soon after arriving in San Francisco, Carlos checked out a guitar store that his mentor Javier Batiz had told him about while he had been back in Tijuana. He was enthralled, gazing longingly at the displays of gleaming Gibsons, Fenders, and Epiphone guitars.
“To me that was like what kids do with Playboy magazine,” recalled Carlos. “I was like, ‘I wonder what she smells like? I wonder what she feels like? I wonder what she sounds like?’ ”7
As he was eyeing the guitars, some sailors started screaming racist remarks at him, calling him a “Pancho Villa, chili-beany motherfucker.”
“I’m just a kid,” he said, “and I turned around and realized they were screaming at me. I was angry because I started feeling the sting of racism, the sting of ignorance directed straight at me.”8
Life was tough for the Santana family, with seven children sharing just two bedrooms. Carlos found an after-school job at the Tic-Toc drive-in diner on Third Street. He washed dishes and scrubbed potatoes, saving enough money to put down the deposit on a Gibson Les Paul.
Tragedy struck when a friend of his big brother Tony accidentally sat on the guitar and destroyed it. A fight ensued, and Carlos hit his brother and gave him a black eye.
The following night Carlos, who shared a bed with Tony, was expecting a beating. Nothing happened. But when Carlos came home from school the following afternoon, he found a brand-new white Les Paul and an amplifier waiting for him.
It would be the same guitar that Carlos Santana would play at Woodstock five years later, the instrument that would make him a star.
In fall 1964, Carlos Santana had enrolled at Mission High School and started a band called The Dynamics. They rehearsed in a garage, playing blues songs and Top 40 covers at weddings and bar mitzvahs. A year later, The Dynamics entered a local radio station’s “Battle of the Bands” at the Cow Palace, backing up soul singer Joyce Dunn and making it to the final three. Unfortunately, they got drunk at the final to calm their nerves and were eliminated.9
Most days, Carlos arrived for attendance at Mission High School before disappearing to jam with other musicians. He also discovered the Hungarian jazz guitar virtuoso Gabor Szabo, who would become a huge influence on his music.
“I didn’t hang out with my race,” he later explained. “Your race is like a fence, you know. I always tend to hang out with the people who are more soulful—or at least not always thinking about quads and carburetors and chicks and parties.”
In late 1965, Carlos Santana graduated from Mission High School and left home. It would be more than two years before his family heard from him again. He crashed on friends’ floors and slept rough in the park, busking around Haight-Ashbury for spare change and playing street fairs and parties.
“You used to see him walking down the street dragging his amplifier,” said percussionist Richard Segovia, who also lived in the Mission. “He was really quiet and reserved and he came out of his shell [later].”10
Carlos became close friends with a student barber named Stan Marcum, whose father owned a clothing store on Mission Street. Marcum, who was a couple of years older, loved music and had a great record collection. He introduced Carlos to his friend Ron Estrada, and the three of them got an apartment together.
During the next few months, Marcum became Carlos’s mentor, turning him on to LSD and jazz
musicians, especially Miles Davis and John Coltrane.
In early 1966, Marcum started taking Carlos to Bill Graham’s new Fillmore Auditorium. They soon became fixtures, soaking in all the new San Francisco bands, as well as the black blues artists Graham was starting to book. Then Carlos would go home and practice what he’d learned.
“I used to see him every time we played in the city,” recalled Jerry Garcia. “[He’d be] right down in the front, watching me play at the shows that we did at the Fillmore and the park.”11
Carlos loved going to the Fillmore and was usually tripping on LSD, mescaline, or magic mushrooms.
“They were expanding my consciousness, expanding my goals” he later said. “I wanted to try everything, just like a little child. You put him in front of a TV set and he wants to see what this knob does. It took me a long time to find out the difference between getting loaded and getting high.”
On August 15, 1966, Jefferson Airplane’s first album, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, was released and the band was in big trouble. Singer Signe Toly Anderson, who had a three-month-old baby daughter, was refusing to leave her child to play dates outside San Francisco. So the rest of the band had a meeting and voted to replace her. But the question was with whom?
“There were only two other girls singing in town,” explained Marty Balin. “One was Grace and one was Janis. And I said, ‘You know I can’t see Janis doing our thing. Grace . . . is a good singer but she’s got her own band.’ ”
Then bassist Jack Casady left the meeting to invite Grace to join Jefferson Airplane.
“And that night she was at our rehearsal,” said Balin. “She had left her band The Great Society—her husband and her brother—and joined up with us. And she brought “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit” with her. And the rest is history. Boom!”12