Hit the Road, Jack
WE’RE ON THE road within a few days of my arrival in California. For the month of December and into the new year, Albert is keeping Big Brother on the West Coast, in the wings, as he prepares to bring them east. He’s planning the band’s New York debut for midwinter. In the meantime, I’m grateful for a chance to learn the job in high school gyms and war memorial auditoriums up and down the San Joaquin Valley and in the kaleidoscope dance halls of San Francisco.
On December 10, Otis Redding dies in the crash of a chartered plane. Janis takes it especially hard. She first heard Otis perform live just a year ago, at the Fillmore. She and Dave Getz had been to a party in the city where someone spiked a bottle of Cold Duck with LSD. Janis enjoyed acid but took it rarely. On the other hand, she rarely turned down a bottle passed in her direction. When she learned what was in the duck she forced herself to throw up, but the bottle had been liberally medicated and she had already absorbed more than enough to get high. Being Janis, she wasn’t about to miss Otis Redding live just because someone had dosed the wine. Acid made her spiritual, contemplative, which was not necessarily how she might have chosen to approach hearing Otis live for the first time, but it turned out just fine. Janis and Dave sat on the floor in front of the stage at the Fillmore, and they dug Otis Redding.* The next day, Janis could sing half his riffs. His performance at the Monterey Pop Festival blew her away all over again.
From repeated viewings in Pennebaker’s screening room, I know Redding’s set by heart. It comforts me to imagine him now in an exclusive group, made up of musicians who have died in plane crashes, that entertains the Heavenly Choir on its days off. Otis sings in harmony with Buddy Holly and Richie Valens and J. P. “the Big Bopper” Richardson, and he gives a soul twist to the country melodies of Patsy Cline and Hawkshaw Hawkins. The backup band is conducted by Glenn Miller.
We play Fresno and Turlock, Merced and Modesto, small cities strung along U.S. 99, which traverses the San Joaquin Valley north-and-south, a strip of macadam that runs through the heart of America’s vegetable basket. The kids in the Valley aren’t quite sure what’s expected of them. Their hair is still short, but they’re on the receiving end of prevailing winds from the coast and they’ve picked up a contact high. The grown-ups have felt the vibe too, and it makes them edgy. Soothing the powers that be is part of my job from the start. We’re just a jolly bunch of long-haired musicians, sir—nothing to worry about.
Until my first gig with Big Brother, I’ve heard the band do only the songs they performed at Monterey, with “Ball and Chain” foremost in memory. Sam Andrew’s “Combination of the Two,” about the San Francisco dance-hall scene, is in the movie too. The lyrics include a play on “Fillmore” in a line directed to a girl who has caught his eye: “I’d like to feel you more, baby.”
In the band’s concert sets, which run forty-five minutes to an hour, there are songs from many backgrounds. I’m pleased to find a couple of traditional folk songs on the list. Clarence Ashley’s 1929 recording of “The Coo-Coo Bird” is on Harry Smith’s six-LP Anthology of American Folk Music, which was the Rosetta stone to the folk boom. I’ve heard Ashley perform the song live, at the Club 47 and Newport. More than thirty years after his original recording, he gives it new life each time. Big Brother’s version is faster, driving, but it has the right feeling, Janis singing up high, flying with the coo-coo bird. Peter Albin plays lead guitar. The band has combined “The Coo-Coo” with another song, “Oh, Sweet Mary.” When the vibe is right, Big Brother’s medley can run for a long time, like a Grateful Dead jam.
The band’s version of “Easy Rider” is very different from the slower, traditional bluesy version that was a staple of the folk revival. This one swings right along. Janis and James share the lead vocals and James sings a verse that was definitely not in the traditional version (nor is it on the Mainstream album): “I got a woman who walks like a duck; she ain’t good-looking but she sure can . . . dance! Easy Rider, don’t you deny my name! Oh, no!”
In the mild December of California’s Central Valley, the high school and college kids in Big Brother’s audiences are getting a dose of traditional American music, turbocharged by the San Francisco renaissance, as well as tunes from unexpected sources beyond the traditional canon.
An eerie song called “All is Loneliness” is unique, unlike anything I have heard before. I am astonished to learn that it was written by Moondog, an anachronistic apparition I have seen on Sixth Avenue in New York. He is very tall, has a long gray beard, carries a spear, and wears homemade clothes and a leather hat with horns that makes him look like a Viking. Finding that Big Brother does a song by this singular character from my hometown makes me feel connected to Janis and the boys in an unexpected way. Like my friends in Cambridge and Berkeley and New York, Big Brother has gleaned songs from far-ranging sources. Unlike many in the folk revival, they aren’t trying to replicate the original forms. With rhythms and vocal harmonies that are distinctly their own, Janis and the boys have brought the older songs beyond folk and folk-rock into the present moment, charging them with new energy and offering them to a wider audience than the folk boom reached even in its largest assemblies.
James Gurley was Big Brother’s lead guitarist at the band’s creation, and his unique style defined the group’s distinctive sound. By the time I join them, Sam has become the co-lead. He and James swap rhythm and solos, and you have to pay close attention to tell who’s doing what. The synthesis they have achieved is impressive, because they are in many ways polar opposites. Sam’s musical education is rooted in the classical tradition, while James has absorbed his music from the ether. He is unacademic, nonintellectual, and a thinker all the same. Like Sam, James is given to damping down excess cerebral activity with alcohol and drugs.
One of the songs they play together, a real surprise on the set list, for those who recognize the theme, is Sam’s arrangement of Grieg’s “Hall of the Mountain King,” from the Peer Gynt Suite. The original is less than four minutes long, but Big Brother’s version explores rambling variations on the theme that never occurred to Grieg.
At most of our shows I get to hear part of the set, but I have other responsibilities when the band is onstage.
Road managing is about logistics, communication, and money. The basics are simple: Get the band to the gig, see that they fulfill their obligations, see that they get paid. Ideally, the musicians can think about nothing but the music, while the travel arrangements and the business are handled so smoothly that they’re scarcely aware of it. Keeping the promoter satisfied is part of the job. So is seeing that he holds up his end of the bargain. It’s just what Neuwirth said: Get the band to the gig, collect the money, make sure everybody’s happy.
Early on the job, I establish as policy another piece of Bob’s advice: The road manager does not carry your guitar. You are the musician. You carry your own guitar. When you need cigarettes or booze, you will buy them yourself. “Don’t be their gofer,” Bob said. “If you’re running around getting them cigarettes or a bottle of whiskey, you won’t be able to do your job.”
The band’s equipment travels ahead of us in a beat-up van driven by Big Brother’s equipment man, Dave Richards. Dave carries only the stage equipment—the instrument amps and Dave Getz’s drums. The promoters provide the PA system. Checking that the PA is adequate is up to Dave. If he runs into an uncooperative promoter or some schmuck who thinks one mike and a fifty-watt amp is enough, Dave calls me and I get to play Bad Cop, but this is rare. Dave has been doing this job for a while. He’s got it covered.
When we arrive at the gig, I introduce myself to the promoter and get the band to their dressing room. I check with Dave to make sure he’s cool, then scout the layout of the hall. Where’s the box office? How many doors are there?
There are two kinds of gigs: flat-rate and percentage. The simplest, from a road manager’s point of view, is a flat-rate deal. If the band is getting paid a flat $3,000, the promoter can let the whole town in free and I don’t care. He has deposited 50 percent of the fee with Albert’s office beforehand. I collect the other half at the gig. A flat-rate gig is an incentive for the promoter to advertise the show effectively and make a bundle. Everything above our guarantee is his. It is to the band’s advantage, of course, to share in the profits if they draw a big audience. This is why, from my first days on the job, most of Big Brother’s gigs are percentage deals. On a percentage deal, the band gets a guarantee plus a percentage of the gross receipts. For these early gigs under Albert Grossman’s management, the guarantee usually ranges from $2,500 to $3,500 against 50 or 60 percent of the gross.
On a percentage deal, I have to know how many tickets the promoter sells and I have to calculate what Big Brother is owed, to make sure the promoter’s accounting is accurate. If the tickets are printed for the gig, I want to see the printer’s manifest. For roll tickets, I take the starting number on each roll. At the end of the show, I get the end numbers and we assume the promoter sold all the tickets in between, less a reasonable number of comps that he gave away. He’s supposed to have a written record of these, plus any comps issued to the band or our guests.
I’m still learning the routine when—Oops! Gotcha! On the seventh or eighth gig I discover a scam.
We’re playing a Saturday afternoon concert in the Valley. The promoter—I’ll call him Joe Promo—is selling roll tickets, nice little “Admit One” red jobbies just like Saturday afternoon at the movies. Each ticket is numbered. There are two box offices, the better to serve the eager fans. Joe has provided me with the starting numbers from two rolls of tickets, one for each box office. At the doors to the hall, the ticket takers are tossing the tickets into big wastebaskets without tearing them, which is okay—any ticket no longer attached to the roll is sold. Big Brother has attracted a good crowd and the mood is up. The kids are happy, Joe’s happy, the band’s happy, I’m happy. Until I pick up a handful of tickets from one of the wastebaskets by the entry doors to check the numbers. Egad, Watson, what’s this? Some of the tickets are from a roll my starting numbers know nothing about.
I stroll out to the box offices and check the stream of kids coming away from the ticket windows. “Could I see your ticket, please? Thanks.” The out-of-sequence tickets are coming from one of the two box offices.
I present the rogue tickets to Joe Promo. He turns red and storms off to talk to the ticket seller. He comes back with a story about his box office guy selling tickets from a third roll under the counter and pocketing the money. This may be true, but it’s just as likely that Joe himself was responsible for the scam. It’s not my job to determine who is the guilty party. In situations like this, the promoter is guilty until proven innocent.
I spend the first half hour of the concert sorting through the purchased tickets with the help of the ticket takers. I find the highest serial number from the third roll and assume all the tickets up to this number were sold, starting at 0000. Joe Promo accepts my calculations without complaint. For this gig, the tickets from the third roll make the difference between collecting just the other half of our guarantee and going into percentage.
When I send the proceeds to the New York office, I report the scam to Albert so he can decide if he’ll do business with Joe Promo in the future. Joe is a two-bit local promoter, but if I were to find a similar rip-off being run by a regional promoter, someone Albert does business with regularly . . . the responsibilities of the job just got bigger.
In San Francisco I am camping in a cream-colored stucco motel a block off Lombard Street in the Marina district until I can find a pad. West of Van Ness Avenue, Lombard is a commercial strip lined with restaurants, motels and businesses. I can get my laundry done or buy a meal within a few minutes’ walk of my motel, but it’s not a part of town where I want to live for long. I’ve got a station wagon from Hertz until I get a car, and I start looking for a place to rent on my days off.
My mornings are spent on the phone. Albert’s office has supplied me with an itinerary for the coming weeks and contracts for the gigs. I check the flights if we’re taking a plane, check the motel reservations, call the promoters. What time is the sound check? What time do the doors open? What time is the show? How long is the show? What time will Big Brother go on? In my spare time, I visit with friends in Berkeley or go to the Fillmore or the Avalon with members of Big Brother. Then I get a revised itinerary from Albert’s office with new gigs on it, and I’m back on the phone.
For the Valley gigs, I usually drive the band in the rent-a-station-wagon. Where it’s a toss-up between driving and flying, I call the band members to take a poll. Would you rather spend three hours in a car or three hours in airports and airplanes? Albert hired me, but I work for them. The band’s income pays my salary, and from the start I involve them in these decisions.
On a street map of San Francisco I chart a course from my motel to the band members’ homes in the Haight. The day before we travel I call them to let them know what time I’ll pick them up. I build a lot of extra time into the schedule. These are musicians. Their clocks run slower than mine. Sam is congenitally late. I tell him to be ready at eleven. He’s the last to be picked up because he lives on Oak Street, east of the Haight. From his house it’s a straight shot to the freeway on-ramp. When the rest of us pull up in front of his place at eleven thirty, maybe he’s ready. But this is a game two can play. Sam begins to allow for the fact that I arrive later than I tell him.
When someone slows us down, I can get wound up in a hurry. If Sam seems to be deliberately lagging, messing with me on purpose, my style of road managing becomes, shall we say, intense. When a member of the band wanders off in an airport and almost makes us miss a plane, my admonitory rant may turn heads in our direction. I vent my displeasure at volume, but I don’t hold a grudge, and I hope the band sees that my aim is to get us where we’re going. Just because I handle the plane tickets and drive the car like their parents did when they were children, that doesn’t mean they can get away with behaving like children now. They’re grown-ups. To their credit, they prove they’re grown-ups by viewing my flare-ups with humor, except for the one who’s bearing the brunt. In those moments, they take to calling me the Road Nazi, and in time they manage to make it an affectionate nickname.
Sam is the one who incurs my outbursts most often, but I can’t stay mad at Sam. He’s my first real friend in the band. He has played music since his early teens—jazz and classical, saxophone as well as guitar, all through his years as a student. Intellectual, sensitive, thoughtful, a die-hard romantic where women are concerned, Sam dropped out of graduate studies in linguistics at UC Berkeley to play rock and roll. Linguistics is like the philosophy and physics of language rolled into one discipline. Someone who is attracted to linguistics is someone who enjoys the life of the mind in its rarefied recesses. Sam landed in linguistics after earlier studies in philosophy and English literature. In Big Brother, Sam is in retreat from the life of the mind. It strikes me that he will have to find an outlet for his intellect somewhere along the way, or suffer the consequences of keeping it in confinement.
On our car trips, the band is like a bunch of kids. Are we there yet? I have to pee. Who’s got a joint? Can we stop and eat?
Well, yes, because I’ve planned a meal break. When the timing is right, we like to eat at the Nut Tree restaurant in Vacaville, just off Interstate 80, our route from the Bay Area to Sacramento and the Valley. The Nut Tree has been a California landmark since the twenties. In addition to the restaurant, there is a toy store and a small-scale railroad that gives kids rides from the toy store to the restaurant. Inside the restaurant there’s a glassed-in aviary. Big Brother likes the Nut Tree because the restaurant bakes its own bread and features fresh vegetables and fruits on the menu. It’s as close as we can get to a health-food restaurant in the Valley.
“Are there sprouts on the salad?” Janis wants to know. Janis is sporadically into healthy food. She fights a tendency to plump up on road fare. The boys eat like farmhands. I pay for the meals out of the road fund, and at first the band is horrified by the size of the tips I leave. We’ve run the waitress ragged for an hour—“Oh, miss, I asked for my coffee black.”
“Can I change my soup for a salad?” (This as she sets the soup on the table.)
“Could you get the chef to cook this steak for another thirty seconds on both sides?”
“Can I get ice cream on that pie?”—and they begrudge her a ten-dollar tip. Ten bucks looks like a lot of money lying there on the table. “Hey,” I tell them, “the bill was sixty dollars—ten bucks is fifteen percent rounded up to the nearest dollar.” Over time, I raise it toward 20 percent. Let’s leave a trail of goodwill behind the hippie musicians, instead of frowns and a muttered “Good riddance.” Oh, but we’re poor, man. We can’t afford it. Bullshit. They think this is 1966 and Chet is still managing them. Persuading them that they aren’t as poor as they think they are takes some time.
On one of our early trips to the central valley, I see a touchy side of Janis. East of the Berkeley Hills, we’re a band of long-haired hippies invading the Land of the Squares. Outside her hometown environment, Janis can be defensive. Something the waitress says, or something in her attitude, sets Janis off. “You know, you could be more polite to us. Our money’s just as good as these other people’s,” is the gist of her short lecture. Janis’s tone manages to combine righteous indignation with the feelings of a child who has been unjustly scolded.
On another occasion, the family in the next booth gawks at us and Janis is quick to get her dander up. “What are you looking at?”
At first, I think Janis is too quick to take offense, but I come to see that in these situations Janis’s reaction isn’t only personal—she’s taking offense for all of us. She is just as quick to jump in if someone else is mistreated. If we’re eating at a wayside restaurant in the Valley that doesn’t get as many long-distance travelers as the Nut Tree and a couple of young hippies come in, the girl barefoot, both of them bedraggled and out of place, they may not be greeted in the same way the straight people are welcomed. When Janis perceives the slight, she intercedes in their defense. She sides with the underdog. She stands up for what is right. It’s not right to treat people badly because they’re different. This perception becomes a useful key to my understanding of what makes Janis tick.
“She was very compassionate. And if she saw someone, an underdog, being treated badly—and she was totally capable of treating an underdog badly herself—but she would always really react to that. That would get her back up. Particularly if it were a woman. She would come to the defense of that person, very strongly. That was an enduring quality in her. She not only had that, but she consciously wanted to have it too, to project that to people.”
Sam Andrew
—
NOW THAT THE members of the band are living in individual pads in the city, the only time they’re all together and not playing music is when we’re driving to a gig in the Valley, heading to SFO to catch a flight, or hanging out backstage at a gig while the opening act is on. They take these opportunities to discuss band business that comes up, anything from the set list to whether to play a benefit for some cause or other, or whether the guys’ old ladies can come on road trips. Janis would prefer not, but sometimes, if we’re going to be in one place for several days or a week, the old ladies travel with us or fly in separately. Peter is married to Cindy. Dave Getz has an old lady, Nancy Parker. James has an old lady also named Nancy, whom I hear about but rarely see.
Big Brother is a democratic band. Everyone is equal. Everyone has a say, and they say it at length. Janis and Peter and Dave are the most forceful in stating their positions when there’s a disagreement within the group. Sam and James are a little more laid-back, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have opinions. The band’s decisions are made by voting. Good thing there are five people. If it were an even number, they’d be deadlocked all the time. Sam and Dave are the most flexible, the most willing to try something new. Peter and James usually resist change. Janis is the swing vote. She’s very articulate, and amenable to reason until she makes up her mind. Then her opinion is carved in stone. Until she changes it.
Janis and Peter like to press for a vote early in any discussion. “C’mon, let’s vote!” As one who observes the passionate disputes from a dispassionate remove, I see that most of the arguments are about small stuff. On the whole, the band shares a similar outlook on the world and its problems. They’re proud to be among the founders of the San Francisco rock scene. They’re proud to represent San Francisco and the counterculture at large when we play the straight towns of the San Joaquin Valley and farther afield. They delight in the scene that repeats itself almost daily when we’re on the freeways, as we’re passed by a big American station wagon with an American flag decal pasted to the window, driven by a crew-cut businessman or ex-military father, and the kids in the rear-facing backseat flash us the peace sign.
After a couple of band arguments leave someone feeling sour for the rest of the day, I begin to stick my two cents into the conversations, initiating what will be an ongoing effort to persuade the band that in a group of five people it’s possible to govern by consensus. Voting creates winners and losers. Talking over a problem until everyone’s willing to go along with what the majority wants takes a little longer, but it’s worth it. It’s like singing in harmony, even if it’s not your favorite song.
As I begin to get a sense of the band members as distinct individuals, it seems to me all the more remarkable that they have come together in this band they believe in so passionately.
Janis, of course, is one of a kind. Born in Port Arthur, Texas, on the Gulf coast, dropped out of college in Austin, played music, traveled around the country, but never really felt she belonged until June last year, when she came to San Francisco to join Big Brother. There’s a vortex of energy churning inside her. It manifests itself in her laughter, in her sometimes rapid shifts of mood, in the way she breaks into a conversation with a rap that nails the issues and states her position in a flurry of fast sentences. Some of the time she’s like a chain reaction on the verge of going critical. She is quick, smart, and often funny. She’s given to delivering lines with a W. C. Fields accent. So am I—we become dueling W. C. Fieldses.
Janis reads a lot. Her intellect isn’t disciplined or academically trained like Sam’s; it’s wilder, and it fires at will. The breadth and sometimes the depth of her interests is startling. She’s got an opinion about everything and states it forcefully, astutely, originally. When she really gets going she can weave her sentences into a stunning cascade of words that overwhelms anyone who disagrees with her, often winding up with a capper, a knockout blow that’s so neat it delights her as much as her listeners, and she’ll burst into a cackle of laughter at her own achievement. When the discussion settles on a subject that just flat doesn’t interest her, she drops out and acts bored until the talk moves on to something else.
Janis and Sam like plays on words, and the others sometimes join the verbal game. Favorites within the band include “Sam and Janis evening” to the tune of “Some Enchanted Evening,” and a variation on the band’s name: “Big Bother and the Folding Company.”
David Getz is an artist, taking time out to be a rock drummer. He showed exceptional talent for art early on. From Cooper Union in New York he was going to Yale, but a friend diverted him to San Francisco, where he attended and taught at the San Francisco Art Institute. He’s got a BFA and an MFA. He spent a year in Poland on a Fulbright fellowship. It’s an unusual pedigree for a rock-and-roller, but no more unusual than Sam’s. Dave forms rock-solid positions on the issues in the band, which he rarely changes, but he is slow to anger. Janis and Peter are far more volatile. When Dave’s ire is aroused, he can match them in intensity.
Dave was not Big Brother’s first drummer. When he first heard Big Brother, he thought the band was fantastic—except for the drummer. He had met Peter Albin, and every time he saw Peter, he’d say, “I can drum better than that guy with one hand tied behind my back. Why don’t you fire that guy and hire me?” Dave’s persistence got him a chance on a night when the band was short a drummer, and that gig got him the job.
Peter Albin is more typical of what I expect in a California rocker. He’s the group’s only folkie. He played folk music in college, then switched to amplified sounds. He’s been in half a dozen bands. Maybe this rather bland bio is what allows him to masquerade as the straight member of the group.
Bob Seidemann, a photographer who knew the members of Big Brother from the early days of the burgeoning arts scene in San Francisco, has a vivid memory of James at this time: “One day Nancy [later James’s wife] and I took LSD together and we were going back to my apartment to make love, and as we were walking up Grant Avenue and passed the Coffee Gallery, she looked in and said, ‘Just a minute, I’ll be right out,’ and walked in and came out and said, ‘There’s something I’ve gotta take care of. This guy here, rah, rah, rah, James,’ and ‘I’ll see ya later.’ Left me on the street. And the guy she walked away from me for was James Gurley. That was my first encounter with James, and he had his head shaved and was calling himself the Arch Fiend of the Universe.”
Bob Seidemann
Somehow I never learn much about James’s origins, or the information evaporates from memory because it doesn’t fit the here-and-now that he projects. He’s from Detroit, for what it’s worth, but James belongs in this time and place. It’s impossible to imagine him in khakis and a button-down shirt and a short haircut, looking like the other kids in a 1950s Detroit high school. It’s much easier to believe that he appeared fully grown in San Francisco in 1965, hair to his shoulders, with beads and jeans and boots, hung about with American Indian totems, sprung from the earth in Golden Gate Park, or risen, on the half shell, like Botticelli’s Venus, from the surf at Ocean Beach, and walking—on the water—to shore. A fanciful picture that becomes only a little skewed when I learn that in the folk days, when he played regularly at Leo Rigler’s Coffee Gallery in North Beach, James’s head was shaved bald.
James and I share a familiarity with Spanish. I take to calling him Jaime and he calls me Juan. Perfecto Garcia is a prominent brand of premium cigars. James has turned the name into an expression of approval. “Ah,” he says, “Perfecto, Garcia,” as if he’s addressing Jerry, of the Dead.
—
I COME HOME from the road trips with thousands of dollars in small bills in my briefcase. On Monday morning I separate the bills by denomination and “face” them, sorting them with the portrait right side up. This saves time at the bank, where I turn the cash into a cashier’s check that I send to Albert’s office along with my gig report. Often I keep back a thousand dollars or so for the road fund, out of which each member of the band draws pocket money of $125 a week and from which I pay our expenses on the road. I’ve got credit cards from Albert’s office for Hertz and Avis, but I pay for our meals and most of our lodging in cash, and I have to account for it all down to the last red cent. Nobody told me part of being a road manager was being a banker and an accountant.
On my days off I look for an apartment and I spend some of my money. My salary is $150 a week. It’s more than enough for a single guy to live comfortably, not enough to buy a Porsche.
Since Dick died, Mimi Fariña has moved to San Francisco. She lives on Telegraph Hill. We go out for dinner often when I’m in town. Mimi is an incomparable dinner companion. We dine mostly in North Beach, home ground of the Beats and the folkies. We eat on lower Broadway at Enrico’s sidewalk café, where live jazz harks back a short historical hop to the heyday of the Beats, when the café opened, or at Vanessi’s restaurant, where the waiters whip up sweet foamy zabaglione in copper bowls right at the table. Mimi goes into gales of laughter at my expression of bliss when I taste the zabaglione. (Time spent laughing with Mimi is added to the span of one’s life.) Sometimes we hop a cable car downtown for a fancy meal at a French restaurant.
For the first time in my life I’m feeling flush. On the road, all my expenses are covered—travel, lodging, food. The balance in my checking account rises steadily, offset by the occasional splurge. I feel like the sailor played by the character actor Edgar Buchanan in a World War II movie I saw on late-night TV. Back in Hawaii after a long stretch of sea duty, Buchanan tells the girl he’s dancing with that he’s got three months of back pay coming. “How are you going to spend all that money, sailor?” she asks suggestively. “Oh,” he says, “some on whiskey, some on women, and the rest frivolously.”
Recently, Mimi has decided to share the gift of laughter with a wider audience. She has joined the Committee, San Francisco’s resident satirical-improvisational comedy revue. The troupe was founded by Alan Myerson and Irene Riordan (later Jessica Myerson), two former members of Second City in Chicago. The company holds forth nightly from the Committee Theater on Broadway, San Francisco’s benign imitation of a sin strip, which divides North Beach from Chinatown. Unlike its New York namesake, this Broadway sports no movie palaces. It has restaurants, bars and pool halls, a few topless shows, and, since 1963, the Committee, just to keep everything in perspective.
Many of Mimi’s new colleagues lived through the Beat era in America’s artsy-intellectual ghettos, and most are connected in one way or another to the San Francisco music scene. One of the actors, Howard Hesseman, emigrated from Oregon to San Francisco for the jazz and lucked into a job taking money at the door for the Coffee Gallery on Grant Avenue in North Beach. It was a jazz and poetry joint at the time, but within a year of Howard’s arrival it had become a folk music club. A year after that, in walks a twenty-year-old girl from Texas named Janis Joplin, but she won’t sleep with the owner, Leo Rigler, who exercises his own version of a Hollywood casting couch to audition female singers, so he won’t hire her. Besides, she’s underage. Unlike the East Coast folk music coffeehouses, the Coffee Gallery serves alcohol, and the legal age is twenty-one. Howard, by now the bartender and night manager, lets Janis play when Leo’s in his apartment across the street.
“I would let her sing at the Coffee Gallery if whoever’s set it was would let her sit in, and most of these people were not silly enough to say, ‘No, thanks, I’d rather go it on my own.’ To play, to sing harmony, to share a stage with somebody who had so much going on was obviously a sort of a gift.”
Howard Hesseman
That trip was Janis’s first real foray beyond her native Texas, and Jack Kerouac was her guide. It was a pilgrimage to the Lourdes of the Beat scene, the city where the brightest lights of the Beat Generation started a renaissance, where Dean Moriarty, the alter ego of Kerouac’s pal Neal Cassady, ended up after his travels in On the Road. Frisco, Ferlinghetti, City Lights bookstore, the Six Gallery—where Allen Ginsberg premiered “Howl”—this was Janis’s destination, but it was the budding folk music scene, less celebrated at the time, where she made connections that would bring her back.
On that first visit, she played and sang on The Midnight Special, a broadcast hootenanny put on weekly by radio station KPFA-FM. One of the other performers on that show was a kid named Peter Albin. Peter remembers Janis singing in a Bessie Smith kind of style, and he remembers, vividly, that she was one of the first girls he had seen who didn’t wear a bra.
Janis was long gone when Bob Neuwirth and I visited the Coffee Gallery in November 1964, after driving a friend’s AC Cobra across the country from Cambridge at a high rate of speed, and it was Howard Hesseman we sat and chatted and drank with. Neuwirth stayed the winter in California and he became a regular on the Coffee Gallery’s stage. He sometimes managed to play simultaneous gigs on the same night at the Coffee Gallery and across the Bay at the Cabale, Berkeley’s answer to the Club 47, cruising across the Bay Bridge in the Cobra between sets.
After her first exploration of San Francisco, Janis crossed the country to New York, went home to Port Arthur, Texas, briefly, and came back to San Francisco, where she settled for a time and got badly enough strung out on speed that it gave her a real scare and sent her back home to Port Arthur to make a stab at being the good daughter her parents hoped she would be. It was this effort that Chet Helms interrupted by summoning Janis back to California to sing with Big Brother.
As Mimi’s friend and Janis’s road manager, I am doubly welcome at the Committee Theater. Soon I become a regular, passed through the door with a wave and a smile. (Shades of the Club 47.) Reconnecting with Howard among Mimi’s friends at the Committee and learning how the strands of coincidence weave together Cambridge and California, folk and jazz and Janis and Bobby and Mimi, is a minor marvel, akin to the many small-world connections I’ve experienced in the East Coast folk scene. It helps me see that San Francisco’s creative fraternities are parts of an extended family, an amalgam of hippies and beatniks, musicians and actors and artists who share a fellowship like the one I experienced in Cambridge. Here, it’s more broadly based, limited only by the line dividing the hip from the square, the freaks from the straights. Within the kinship of the arts, the connections are close and personal, maintained by intercourse both social and sexual.
When Janis learns that I know Mimi and Howard and I’m hanging out at the Committee on our nights off, she takes a new interest in me. Not that she’s been indifferent. After her dismissive comment about Libras at our first meeting, I didn’t expect a lot of attention from Janis, but of course I was wrong. She’s curious about everything new, especially guys, within her orbit. She flirts with me. Coming on to a new man is her way of checking him out. When I see that the flirting is real, I try to deflect her advances without offending her. She knows full well how much power she can exert over a man. I know just as surely that I’ll never maintain the authority I need to have as Janis’s road manager if I let myself become the latest notch in her spangled belt.
She doesn’t push it. Maybe she knows we have to get along as friends if this thing is going to work. Maybe I passed the test.
We’re still engaged in this dance when we head to L.A. for two nights at the Whisky a Go Go. From Baghdad by the Bay to Sodom in the Southland.
“I just remember that when I actually heard her, man, it was stunning. Stunning. Because again, there was all this kind of not-so-much world beat as world bend that Gurley and Sam and Peter and—those cats all, I mean it was such a weird fucking blend of stuff. And a lot of it was familiar to me. . . . It just wasn’t R and B and it wasn’t electric folk. It was something else going on. And then there was this just flat-out, balls-of-the-universe chick. Just singing her ass off.”
Howard Hesseman