On the Road with Janis Joplin (21 page)

In the recent gigs, there’s a noticeable difference in the band that I attribute to Snooky’s influence on the rehearsals and his presence in the group. The horn section is more confident, more assertive, and the rest of the band seems to be falling in step behind the brass.

As we tour the boondocks, we become aware of changes in the attitude of our audiences that work against the spirit of celebration Janis tries to encourage. It’s the difference between the spirit of the kids who discovered the music on their own and those who are attracted to it because they have heard about the scene and the hippie dope-smoker dropout free-love lifestyle in the music media. Rock concerts aren’t celebrations of the counterculture anymore. They have joined the mainstream. In the spring of 1969, many of the kids are
coming to the concerts because it’s the thing to do, rather than from any real devotion to the performers or the music.

The effect of this evolution encourages neither undivided attention to the show nor a purely spontaneous response. Increasingly, Janis finds the audience’s expectations in conflict with her own. Nothing is more important to her than getting an honest response from the crowd, establishing a connection in which she and the fans are equal partners. If the communication is right, if there’s a little magic in the air, they’ll both get off. But increasingly the kids come expecting to get off every time, and they take less responsibility for helping to make it happen. They want it done
for
them. At the end of Janis’s set, the applause sometimes feels less like a celebration than a demand: Give us more.

When Janis feels that the crowd lacks the willingness, the openness, she wants, she fights back in ways that only aggravate the problem. She delivers harangues between songs. Even in conventional theaters with seats, she wants the audience to dance in the aisles. She wants to feel their energy the way she felt it in the Fillmore and the Avalon with Big Brother. With the new band, she’s trying to tell the audience how to behave, how to respond to the music, and her outbursts embarrass the band.

A weekend in mid-March is a logistical challenge. On Saturday morning, in New York, Janis and the band rehearse blocking for
The Ed Sullivan Show
at CBS-TV’s Studio 50. John Fisher has two cars waiting at the stage door. As soon as we’re done, we head to La Guardia and a flight to Detroit for a concert that evening at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. So far, so good. The flight is on time.

UM is like a remote province of California. These kids are hip. The UM campus has been a wellspring of student activism since the early ’60s and they are
ready
to hear Janis. Big Brother never played here. This is Janis’s first time in Ann Arbor, the students’ and faculty’s first chance to hear her. The reception is tumultuous, and the audience needs little urging to get up and dance. Janis is in her element,
grinning, shouting, boogeying to the instrumental breaks.
Okay!
This is how it’s supposed to be.

Afterward, we’re invited to a party. I am in a celebratory mood, but Janis heads off with a writer from
Playboy
in tow to see an old friend play harp in a black club and I have to get the band up early tomorrow because we have to be back in New York by midday for more blocking and rehearsals at the Ed Sullivan Theater. I head to bed early and urge the boys to do the same. This is something we absolutely must not fuck up. It’s
The Ed Sullivan Show
and it’s live TV.

The band understands. There is a minimum of griping when I roust everybody at eight fifteen the next morning. Janis was up until the wee hours, but there is no bitching. Her oh-my-God-it’s-too-early act is the humorous one, all blowsy and bedraggled, hopping into the shotgun seat on the lead car, ready to go.
We’re gonna be on
Ed Sullivan
! Can you dig it?

The return flight gets us to Newark on time, but . . . there is no John Fisher waiting. We mill about on the sidewalk outside the terminal. . . . Finally John shows up—not in his limo, but coming out of the airport terminal on foot. Somehow he missed us when we trooped past him in the concourse. And now John discovers that he has locked his keys in the limo. Not to worry, he has a magnetic key holder under a fender . . . but all he finds is the magnet; the rivet rusted away and the key box gone. I’m on the verge of hailing taxis for the band when Snooky extracts a wire coat hanger from his clothes bag and jimmies a door lock on the long black Caddy.

We’re late getting to the city, but at the Ed Sullivan Theater the rehearsals are running behind schedule and airtime is hours away. Whew. We’re going to be okay.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of getting booked by Ed Sullivan. Anybody remember the Beatles? Five years ago, they landed in New York on a Friday in February. Two days later, on Sunday, they were on
Ed Sullivan
and they drew the biggest audience the show ever
had. From that moment, the Fab Four were stars in America. Of course, they had some advance publicity. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” jumped into the American charts in January, reached number one on February 1, and held the top spot through the Beatles’ arrival, the Sullivan show, the month of February and most of March. In Cambridge, our first response was to laugh at the silly name, the “Beatles,” but when we heard “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” we sat up and took notice. Hey, man, listen to that harmony! Right there . . . I want to hold your
hand
! It’s the vocal harmonies I love most about bluegrass music, and the Beatles have taken harmony somewhere
else
.

On the Sullivan show, Janis sings “Maybe,” a bluesy, gut-wrenching tune, one of the new songs in her repertoire. The band nails the arrangement and Janis nails the vocal.

Janis knows things about the etiquette of
The Ed Sullivan Show
that I never imagined. When all the acts come onstage at the end of the show, Ed Sullivan takes Janis’s hand and he says, “Thank you.” Afterward, in John Fisher’s limo, on the way to Max’s Kansas City, Janis is beside herself. She bounces up and down so hard, the people on the street probably think some horny celebrities are getting it on behind the tinted windows. Did you see? she bubbles.
He shook my hand! You ain’t nobody if he doesn’t shake your hand, daddy! And he did it! He shook my hand!

Janis’s elation animates Max’s above the usual lively hubbub. The mix of artists, musicians, and free spirits who join the celebration includes Bob Neuwirth, who is often on hand to hang out with us when we’re in New York. Andy Warhol is here, and the painter Larry Rivers, a resident at the Chelsea. And where but Max’s would you see Tiny Tim and Salvador Dalí in the same room?

The celebratory mood doesn’t last for long.
The latest edition of
Rolling Stone
, just on the stands, has Paul Nelson’s review of the Fillmore East show in February, and it is not a rave. The cover story is titled “Janis: The Judy Garland of Rock?” Nelson didn’t like the band or Janis’s song list, with the exception of “Work Me, Lord,”
Nick Gravenites’s gift to Janis for the new group. As he savages the band, Nelson observes that Janis apparently lacks “the essential self-protective distancing . . . the necessary degree of cynicism needed to survive an all media assault. . . .”

We’re on a noon flight for San Francisco the day after the Sullivan show, which only brings Janis closer to the source of the criticism.
Rolling Stone
was founded and is still published in San Francisco. For the rock community, it’s the hometown newspaper, and Janis is booked for four days straight at Winterland and Fillmore West.

MAR. 20–23, 1969:
Winterland and Fillmore West

MAR. 27:
Sacramento

MAR. 28:
San Bernardino

MAR. 29:
San Diego

The San Francisco audience, like the black audience in Memphis, is curious about the new band, but curiosity isn’t going to get Janis to the next level. Ralph Gleason, who got Big Brother on the bills at the Monterey Pop Festival and the Jazz Festival, who has supported and promoted Janis from her first days with the band, writes a scathing review in which he suggests that Janis should go back to Big Brother “if they’ll have her.” With no influential voices raised in support of the new group, it seems that Gleason reflects the prevailing mood in the city, and the loss of his support wounds Janis deeply.
*
San Francisco is the only place she has felt she truly belongs. If her adopted hometown rejects her, where can she ever feel at home again?

It helps to have something to look forward to. Three days after the Fillmore/Winterland weekend we’re packing again for a trio of California gigs—Sacramento, San Bernardino, San Diego—but we won’t see the Golden Gate again until the middle of May. While we were in the East, Albert put together a tour of Europe, with concerts booked in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris, Stockholm, Copenhagen, and the Royal Albert Hall in London.

Before we leave our hearts in San Francisco yet again, we acquire our third trumpet player. Terry Hensley has tired of the road, or doesn’t think this band is for him, or he’s been let go because Snooky doesn’t think he can cut it. Whatever the reason, it’s a big change. The new man, Luis Gasca, was with Woody Herman’s band at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1967 when Janis and Big Brother played there, and he’s no slouch with a horn. He is short in stature but long on experience. He studied for two years at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. He has toured and recorded with Perez Prado, Count Basie, Stan Kenton, and Mongo Santamaria. Luis did all that, and more, before serving for two years in the U.S. Army. He was in and out before Vietnam heated up, and back on the road.

The motley makeup of Janis’s band may give Luis a moment’s pause, but he’s here for one reason: He wants to play with Janis Joplin, and Janis is heading for her first European tour. How can he turn it down?

There is virtually no time for Luis to learn the tunes, but while we were in New York, Albert’s office recruited a Harvard-educated musician named Warren to write out the band’s arrangements, and Luis can read charts. The California gigs are as good as any in recent memory.

On Monday afternoon, March 30, we’re at Los Angeles International Airport. Janis has invited Linda Gravenites along for companionship. We’re booked on Scandinavian Airlines, so our foreign experience begins when we board the 707 that will take us nonstop to Copenhagen, where we will change for Stockholm.

The Grand Tour

T
HE GREAT CIRCLE
route from Los Angeles to Copenhagen takes us over eastern Canada and the North Atlantic on a path that intersects the Arctic Circle. It’s a long flight, with plenty of time to sleep, but it’s interrupted, without much explanation before or after, when the captain tells us we’re going to make an unscheduled stop in Greenland.

We land after dawn and get off the 707 to stretch our legs. Janis comes down the gangway in her fur coat and a pair of low-heeled golden sandals that would be more appropriate on the Sunset Strip. There are patches of snow and ice on the tarmac and the land around the airport is white, but on the last day of March it’s not the land of perpetual winter we might expect. Legend has it that Eric the Red called it Greenland to attract Viking settlement.

The name of this place is Søndre Strømfjord. If there’s a town, we can’t see it. Outside the terminal there’s a signpost with signs that point hither and yon like arrows and give the distances in hours of flight time to places we know well, or will soon: Copenhagen and Los Angeles are near the top. Others point to London, Paris, and
Frankfurt, with New York, Moscow, and Tokyo thrown in for good measure. Only the last two cities will not figure in our travels this year. The names are in English, maybe because the airport began as an American air base built here in 1941. At the top of the signpost, an arrow points to the North Pole, which is closer than all the other destinations, although it is only twenty minutes closer than London, as the jet flies. We are almost seven hours from Los Angeles, just over four to Copenhagen.

We supplement the SAS in-flight service by having breakfast in the terminal. We are never told why this stop was necessary, but now we can say we’ve been to Greenland.

With the stopover in Greenland and a change of planes in Copenhagen, we arrive at Stockholm—nine hours ahead of L.A.—in the late afternoon, with our internal clocks turned upside down. We find that Swedish hotels have single beds that are built for very tall people. The rooms are equipped with heavy drapes to black out the lingering light of the short summer nights. Sealed off, we manage to get enough sleep to begin the adjustment to a time zone east of Greenwich.

We’re in Stockholm to tape a TV show, which functions as our first rehearsal in Europe. It’s a studio job, no audience. Because it’s on tape, there are retakes to correct glitches. The show will be aired before Janis and the band come back to Stockholm two weeks later for the concert here.

MAR. 31, 1969:
Arrive in Stockholm

APR. 1:
Stockholm, tape TV show

APR. 2–10:
London, rehearsals

APR. 11:
Amsterdam, Concertgebouw

APR. 12:
Frankfurt

APR. 14:
Paris, Olympia Théâtre

APR. 17:
Stockholm

APR. 19:
Copenhagen, Concert Hall, Tivoli Gardens

APR. 21:
London, Royal Albert Hall

Our next stop is London. Here the rehearsals get serious—again. There are nine days before the first concert, in Amsterdam. Warren is on hand with his sheet music. His mandate—from Albert? it’s never clear to me—is to help with arrangements and vocal harmonies, as well as committing the music to paper. Snooky doesn’t bother to hide his disdain. The fact that Warren is a Harvard-educated black man doesn’t impress him. In Snooky’s view, the band is playing the music correctly, but he doesn’t oppose rehearsing. The band needs the experience playing together as a unit, with Luis in the horn section, until the arrangements are second nature and the songs are tight.

The rehearsal space is the Rolling Stones’ rehearsal studio. We don’t set eyes on the Stones, but working in their studio is a validation that Janis and the band are playing in the big leagues.

In their off-hours, the musicians split off in twos and threes and become American tourists in London. Where’s Carnaby Street? Why do the pubs open and close at random hours? These English girls aren’t like the girls in California.

Luis is less wide-eyed than the others. He’s been here before, with Woody Herman.

Within the band, Snooky Flowers takes Luis under his wing and the two become a unit—nonhippie, nonwhite—sometimes to the discomfort of Terry Clements, the third man in the horn section. Terry is verbal, analytical, a good musician. Sometimes Terry’s British reserve is a barrier to revealing himself to the others, but he’s sociable, always ready to step out on the town with a few mates, and he’s a dedicated believer in the power of music to change the world.

Janis and Sam have adopted Richard Kermode, and Janis has taken Richard into her bed. He is a lover of convenience; at the gigs, Janis is still on the lookout for pretty boys. Richard evidently accepts his role as her fallback comforter.

A couple of the musicians and I discover an enormous flea market in a building that takes up a city block. Inside, there are scores of
shops and stalls in a warren of passages that angle this way and that. I am a sightseer, not a shopper, but this is like a Middle Eastern bazaar, full of things you’d never think to find in England. In one of the stalls I discover an extraordinary woman’s belt of finely wrought silver, decorated with rows of tiger claws, that was handmade somewhere on the Asian subcontinent. It is a fixed size. Not adjustable. As I hold it in my hands it comes to me that I should buy it, find the woman it fits, and marry her. The price is less than a week’s salary, but my thrifty New England genes kick in, abetted by my Libran nature (we are just, as James Gurley observed, but also indecisive). I decide to think about it until we come back to London for our concert here at the end of the tour.

In Amsterdam we are met at the airport by Knud Thorbjørnsen, the Danish promoter who has booked the gigs on the Continent. Knud is about thirty, soft-spoken and polite. He will travel with us for the next ten days, until we head back to London.

We’re here a day ahead of the concert. We have arrived in time to check the band into the hotel and still have some daylight left for a little sightseeing. Knud suggests a walk along the canals, and Janis jumps at the chance. She is ready for a break from the band, so we set out, the three of us, with Knud acting as our guide. In the gathering dusk, Knud calls our attention to illuminated windows on a street fronting a canal, where young women who are less than fully dressed sit in softly lit parlors. The few passersby, mostly solitary men, appraise the women frankly as they stroll past the windows. Some of the women are very attractive.

When Janis spies a man walking toward us, she says, “You guys go on ahead.” She slips into a doorway. Knud and I follow instructions. We walk ahead. When the man has passed us, we turn to watch. As the man draws even with her doorway, Janis hails him with a “Hiya, honey.”

What is she going to do if the guy goes for it, I’m wondering, but we’ll never know. The man keeps on walking. Janis rejoins Knud and
me, not really disappointed, but hurt that the guy would dismiss her with only a passing glance.

Arriving at the hotel the next morning from a transatlantic flight is another companion for our grand tour. Bobby Neuwirth had been dispatched by Albert as an extra pair of eyes and ears to report on Janis and the band in Europe. The assignment is nominal. Albert is generous with those he’s close to. He may simply have intuited that Bobby would like to come along for the ride. Covering his ticket and his expenses for a few weeks is the kind of thing Albert does for a friend.

In London, Janis and the band rehearsed for eight days straight. No one dared to suggest they should rehearse in Amsterdam on the day of the concert. It’s a free day, and the band scatters.

Janis wants to ride the canals in one of the tourist boats. Bobby and I escort her. We get directions from the hotel’s concierge and I remember to bring my movie camera. What we don’t see from the water, we see later on foot and by taxi.

The Concertgebouw, Amsterdam’s philharmonic hall, is a late-nineteenth-century gem. The interior is about 150 feet long under a ceiling 50 feet high. Backstage, the band members are bubbling with stories. Most of them have never been to Europe before. They tell tales of explorations and discoveries, several of them related to the tolerant local attitude toward smoking pot, even in some cafés, and the high visibility of Amsterdam’s prostitutes. No one, it seems, found just the right moment to do more than admire the offerings.

The Concertgebouw fills, and in high spirits, Janis and the band take the stage. And something happens. Janis cues the band and
bam!
Tight isn’t an adequate description. They’re playing like one person wailing on all the instruments. The energy level jumps into high gear and never slacks off. “Raise your hand!” Janis sings. The song is a rouser. Janis is smiling as she sings, which isn’t normal for her. Female vocalists in the big band era learned how to sing while smiling all the time like an ad for toothpaste. But Janis is not Rosemary Clooney.
Onstage, her expression reveals what she’s putting into a song. She’ll sometimes smile between numbers, acknowledging the applause. Here in Amsterdam, she’s grinning because she feels what’s happening. Finally, the band is together.

“Maybe” is followed by “Summertime.” Luis’s trumpet takes the high road in Sam’s Baroque introduction. I never thought his arrangement could sound as soulful with this band as it did with Big Brother, but tonight it comes close.

Snooky takes the mike from Janis. He gets to sing a song in the show. It’s an R&B rocker from Otis Redding called “Can’t Turn You Loose,” and Snooky makes the most of it. Janis dances with him on this song, to give herself something to do and to keep the audience focused on Snooky. This has become a regular thing, but tonight Janis’s dancing is purely spontaneous. She skips around the stage. She shakes her butt. She gets in Snooky’s face and the audience loves it.

One song after another, like a train coming down the track, the band keeps on rocking. They give a whole new life to Jerry Ragovoy’s “Try (Just a Little Bit Harder).” Sam sings “Combination of the Two.” Janis soars on “Piece of My Heart,” another of Big Brother’s hits, reinforced now by the horn section.

In the middle of the set, Terry Clements has so much fun on a solo that he just keeps going, extending the ride, and the band keeps going with him. Nobody’s thinking, Hey, that’s not the arrangement. Terry is tripping and the band is on his trip.

Nick Gravenites’s “Work Me, Lord” is a showstopper, and the closer. “Ball and Chain” is the encore.

After the concert, backstage, everybody is talking at once and nobody can stop grinning. Sam dares to believe that Frank Zappa was right: Don’t worry, it will come together in time.

Neuwirth is impressed. He heard the band in New York, at the Fillmore East. What he hears in Amsterdam is like a different band. During the show he took a seat in the hall and recorded the
performance on a small cassette recorder. Even on the machine’s tiny speaker, you can hear how good it was.

Has it really come together? Or was tonight’s performance a nonrecurring phenomenon? Time will tell.

Our next stop is Frankfurt. Knud says it’s a happening city. There are big American bases near Frankfurt. The audience will be full of Americans.

For most of us, it’s our first time in Germany. Knud has booked a minibus to bring us into the city from the airport. I don’t have to drive and I don’t have to find the hotel, so I’m free to sightsee. What I see here and there, as we pass through the older parts of the city, are walls that are pockmarked by bullets and shell fragments. As a boy, I saw all the Second World War movies I could drag my father to on Saturday afternoons. Only Westerns held more interest for me. Now I’m on enemy ground. This is where it happened.

The same awareness gives Roy Markowitz some cause for concern, because he’s Jewish. It’s hard to tell if his worry is genuine or if he’s playing it for effect.

Russian troops man the East German border seventy-five miles from Frankfurt. Sam and I share an awareness of the recent history that hangs heavy here—the hot war that produced the Cold War. Twenty-four years later, Germany is still divided and the Soviets rule the Eastern Bloc.

Our hotel is modern and classy. It overlooks the river Main, a tributary of the Rhine. In the afternoon, before the sound check, Bobby and I hang out with Janis and Linda Gravenites in their room. Janis is laid-back, relaxed, saving her energy for the performance. She touches up her nails with an emery board, and we take in the river view from ten floors above the Main.

At the concert hall we are met by a crew from Bavarian television, who will film the concert this evening. They greet us as we get off the minibus and follow us into the dressing room backstage. Janis, as
always, plays to the cameras—theirs and mine—while the rest of the band goes about their business.

The concert hall is nothing like the historic Concertgebouw. Frankfurt, like many German cities, was pulverized in the war. Here, as in the parts of London that were heavily bombed, much of the construction is new. The hall has a peculiar low-ceilinged lobby that’s washed with flat fluorescent light, but the hall itself is fine, fan-shaped, modern, with good sound. Knud and Bobby and I tour the building to familiarize ourselves with the layout.

When the audience is admitted, there are American military police outside and in the lobby. Not a lot of them; just enough to create a presence. Bobby and I cruise the crowd, admiring the girls. Judging by the bits of conversation we pick up, it’s a fair guess that about half the young men in the crowd are American. Some have German dates. Everyone’s in civvies, so it’s hard to tell.

Janis performs two shows back-to-back. The first is the regular show with the houselights off. Here again, the band is hot, and the audience is even more unrestrained in their admiration than the Dutch. When “Ball and Chain” is over, to quiet the demands of the audience for another encore, we announce that we’re going to do an abbreviated second show for the benefit of the Bavarian television crew. You’re all welcome to stay, we tell the audience. And they do, almost all of them. Play it again, Sam.