What a Wonderful Town
WE HAVE TO wait until Thursday to learn that the weekly Village Voice also gives the Anderson show a rave. When the Times and the Voice are in agreement, you’ve got the bases covered.
I spend my most of my weekdays at Albert’s office on East 55th Street, making arrangements for upcoming gigs. “The office” is in a five-story town house between Park and Madison avenues. Albert has the fourth floor and part of the fifth. A genial staffer named Marty shows me a spare desk and phone in the room where he works, and this becomes my work space.
I could leave it to the office’s travel agency to book the flights and the motels and the rental cars, but they’re making arrangements for half a dozen acts on the road at any given time and they don’t always take the comfort of the musicians into account. After we experienced a few unnecessarily trying itineraries out west, I gradually assumed the duties of Big Brother’s travel agent. The basics are simple: Don’t wake the band earlier than necessary on a travel day, don’t book connecting flights when there’s a direct flight, and ask the band when there are choices to be made. We have a day off between gigs on the road; do you want to spend the layover in city A or city B? Getting an answer to any question involves consulting with all five members of the band, sometimes more than once. Democracy in action. But they appreciate the consideration, and building a consensus on logistical decisions is becoming easier.
Max’s Kansas City becomes our regular watering place. Dave Richards connects to a lovely waitress and the single guys avail themselves of the opportunities among the waitresses and the clientele. The guys who have old ladies at home sometimes behave like single guys on the road. These are the sixties, after all.
Janis is always on the prowl and vocal about it. Her most successful pickup line is “Hiya, honey,” delivered with a winsome smile. The ballsy-mama-on-the-town persona is a role she puts on partly to cover her insecurities, and because it’s part of who she wants to be. In her quieter moments, talking about men, Janis makes it clear that she’s really looking for true love, just like the rest of us.
Janis has been to New York before, in her speed-driven wanderings of the early sixties. She comments on the enduring aspects of New York life that she noticed then—the faster pace, the higher level of adrenaline in the streets. She was pool champ of Eighth Avenue, she tells me with a bravado that lets me know it isn’t a serious claim. Trust Janis to have ended up in Hell’s Kitchen her first time in New York.
Now she has returned in style, no longer scrabbling for a place to stay. The Chelsea is funky enough to win her approval. She likes the mix of artists, musicians, bohemians and beatniks that make up the long-term residents, but she regards New York as an alien environment.
The boys have their own reservations. At the end of a day on the town, James tells me, “I looked up at the sky and a rock fell in my eye.” The “rock” was a gnarly piece of urban grit that grated his cornea until he managed to extricate the offending particle.
“At first, [New York] seemed to have made us all crazy; it was dividing the unity of the band. The first three weeks here, we all got superaggressive, separate, sour. . . . San Francisco’s different. I don’t mean it’s perfect, but the rock bands there didn’t start because they wanted to make it. They dug getting stoned and playing for people dancing. Here they want to make it. What we’ve had to do is learn to control success, put it in perspective, and not lose the essence of what we’re doing—the music.”
Janis Joplin
A week after the Anderson Theater, Big Brother plays at the Psychedelic Supermarket in Boston. The Supermarket is as close as you can get to a San Francisco rock-and-roll ballroom on the East Coast, and it’s a reasonable facsimile. Janis and the boys feel more at home here than they did at the Anderson Theater, with its fixed seats. The audience fills the dance floor and Big Brother plays a spirited set, happy to feel something like their hometown connection to the dancers.
The other act on the bill is a new band formed by Al Kooper called Blood, Sweat and Tears. They’re not anything like a San Francisco band, but Janis is intrigued by the horn section. Al is trying to use horns in a new way, beyond how horns have traditionally been used by R&B groups.
The contrast between Boston and San Francisco becomes apparent when Dave Richards and Mark Braunstein come in on Saturday to find that a bunch of Big Brother’s equipment has been stolen since the end of the Friday night show. We routinely leave equipment in the San Francisco ballrooms, where Bill Graham and the Family Dog provide adequate security. Here, Dave and Marko have to scramble to beg, borrow, and buy enough equipment for us to play on Saturday night.
On Sunday we do a show at the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, to an enthusiastic crowd of stoned art students. Janis is delighted. “They’re just like hippies!” she says. It’s a flat-rate gig, so I don’t have much to do. During the performance I’m standing against the back wall of the student union, checking the sound and digging the set, when I feel a hand on my calf. I look down to see a lovely girl making out with her boyfriend. They’re sitting on the floor. Their eyes are closed, their lips are locked, and her hand is running up and down my leg! This probably has something to do with why, at the end of the show, I grab a mike, thank the crowd for being a great audience, and announce the address in Cambridge where I’m throwing a party for the band that night. A couple of carloads of adventurous RISD fans take me up on it and arrive to discover that the party is in an iron lung factory.
The summer before my freshman year at Harvard, I worked for my uncle Jack, my mother’s brother, in his funky three-story brick factory in a working-class section of North Cambridge. Jack was the family dropout. While his elder sister and two brothers followed in their father’s footsteps by attending Radcliffe and Harvard and going on to advanced degrees in the sciences, Jack quit college, started his own business, perfected the modern iron lung, and filed a couple of dozen patents for his inventions of mechanical devices that assisted doctors in caring for their patients, many of them related to breathing. In time, his father, my grandfather, a distinguished epidemiologist and a hard man to please, came to acknowledge that Jack had not wasted his life.
Two years ago, when I retreated to Cambridge from my abortive move to California, I lived in one of two apartments on the top floor of Jack’s factory. It became a celebrated party pad. The parties ran late and featured dancing to rock and roll on the hi-fi. With no one else living in the building, we didn’t have to worry about the noise bothering the neighbors, but the neighbors must have occasionally marveled at the number of cars coming and going from the parking lot of the J. H. Emerson Company late at night. For revelers who found themselves still there in the morning, there was bottled medical oxygen for a quick pick-me-up.
My sound system is still set up in my living room/bedroom and I haven’t yet shipped all my records to San Francisco. I have advertised the party through the Cambridge grapevine and it becomes a major event. Blood, Sweat and Tears are here in force. The Chambers Brothers are in Boston this weekend. Neuwirth has come up from New York. The living room is wall to wall with people dancing while James Gurley makes out on the bed with one of the girls from RISD.
In the back room, Neuwirth sets up a camera and tape recorder he has borrowed from Pennebaker. He isn’t sure what he’ll use the footage for, but his auteurial juices are bubbling. He calls people into the room, seats them in front of the camera, illuminated by the harsh light of a gooseneck table lamp, and interviews them. Sometimes he directs them in hysterical displays that will startle anyone who sees these shots without having experienced the party. He films Lester Chambers screaming like a banshee.
Before the party sighs to a close, in the wee hours, I am rewarded for inviting the RISD students. How can I put this discreetly? Let’s say that I share some private time—elsewhere in the factory—with the girl James was making out with earlier in a manner that both of us find pleasurable. Hail, hail, rock and roll.*
MAR. 1–2, 1968: Grande Ballroom, Detroit
MAR. 8: Fillmore East, NYC
MAR. 9: Dining Hall, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn.
MAR. 15–17: Electric Factory, Philadelphia
MAR. 22–24: Cheetah, Chicago
APR. 2–7: Generation, NYC
On the first weekend in March we play the Grande Ballroom in Detroit. It’s a homecoming of sorts for James, who was born in the Motor City. As our plane descends through the clouds on the glide path for Detroit Metro, James is sitting in the row behind me, peering out the window. A break in the clouds offers a glimpse of the city below. James casts a dubious eye on his hometown and reflects on the contrast with New York. “Ah,” he says, “from plethora to dearth in forty-five minutes.”
The city looks like a war zone. It was a war zone last summer, pacified only after more than twelve thousand paratroopers and National Guard troops quelled the rioters. Over the past few years, summertime urban race riots have become steadily more numerous. The outbreak in the Watts district of Los Angeles in August 1965 shocked the nation. The next summer saw more than three dozen riots, mostly in northern cities from Brooklyn and Baltimore to St. Louis and San Francisco. In 1967 more than a hundred cities experienced racial violence. Detroit was the worst. The official tally counted forty people dead, but some say the true toll was much higher. More than five thousand people were left homeless when their homes burned.
As in San Francisco, Detroit’s rock-and-roll counterculture sprang up near the ghetto. We drive through the combat zone on the way to the gig. There are bullet holes in the walls.
Big Brother and most of the California bands are less focused politically than my folk music compatriots. The folk scene was far more aware of politics, through its connection to the civil-rights struggle and protest songs about race, injustice, and war. Sam Andrew comments on the evidence of the riots as we pass through the Detroit ghetto, but Janis’s immediate concern is knowing that Columbia Records will be recording Big Brother at the Grande Ballroom.
The Grande (the e is not silent) is the center of the local rock scene. Once we’re inside we feel safer, and pretty much at home. MC5 is the house band, locally celebrated, not yet widely known. The names of the other bands on the bill for our Friday–Saturday gig would look right at home on a Fillmore poster—Tiffany Shade, Pink Peech Mob, and the Family Dump Truck.
The Grande’s manager, Russ Gibb, visited San Francisco a couple of years ago and saw a show at the Avalon. The Grande is his effort to create a similar scene in Detroit. In a town with the negative vibes of Motor City, he’s done as well as anyone could. Here, far removed from the Golden Gate, Big Brother hopes to conjure up some San Francisco magic.
Recording at the Grande is the band’s idea. Albert and Columbia are willing to give it a try. The hall is an open-floor ballroom like the Fillmore and the Avalon. It’s a well-intentioned effort that recognizes the band’s San Francisco origins and the relationship between musicians and audience that is unique to the city by the Bay.
Parked outside the Grande, a truck contains a rolling recording studio that is connected to the stage by a web of cables. For two nights, record producer John Simon and a Columbia engineer make a first attempt at capturing the band in live performance.
The shows feel good to me. Not as good as some, but okay. On our flight back to New York, Janis has some doubts, but she and the boys hope some of the spontaneity will come through on the tapes.
When Albert listens to the recordings, he finds the results less than impressive. He summons the band to his office. Sam arrives late. “Anybody got a joint?” he asks, figuring to get in tune with the music. “We don’t need that right now,” Albert says. Sam notices that the other band members, who have already had a preview of Albert’s disappointment, are stone-faced. Oh shit, he thinks, this is going to be a psychodrama.
No one in the band can defend the tapes. To a bunch of dancing fans, many of them stoned out of their gourds, the occasional missed chord or fluffed guitar riff passes unnoticed. A brief disagreement between the bass and the drums about just where the beat is going may not faze the audience, but the reels of tape spinning in the recording truck aren’t stoned and they aren’t dancing. They hear it all, which is why record producers hold recorded tracks to a higher standard than live performances. A recording has to hold up to repeated listenings, but just one listen to the Grande tapes is enough to persuade Janis and the boys that Albert’s harsh verdict is justified. The energy that Big Brother managed to ignite in the Grande doesn’t come through on the tape. The mistakes do. All too audible is the fact that the band played as sloppily as at any time in recent memory. Big Brother’s Curse strikes again.
“For years, it was our particular lot not to rise to a given occasion. Every time, when it was really necessary for us to play well, we didn’t, and the Grande Ballroom is the case in point. It was probably the worst playing we did in those particular months of playing.”
Sam Andrew
Sam is afraid that Albert will fire some of the band members on the spot, but it doesn’t come to that. What Albert is looking for is something more than technical competence. It’s authenticity, both in presentation and in the emotional content of the music, a unity that is honest and real above all, and at the same time free from obvious technical faults. There is nothing phony or insincere about Big Brother, but the emotional authenticity, the enthusiasm that drives the music, sometimes outstrips the technical abilities of the band, and it’s this imbalance that Albert seeks to correct.
To this end, he suggests some radical options. How about if Sam plays bass? (Unsaid, but Sam feels it is implied: because he can’t play guitar.) How about if Peter plays guitar? (Which he used to do before he took up the bass, and which he still plays on a couple of songs.) Possible remedies are discussed, hashed over, and ultimately rejected by the band. The only conclusion that comes out of the meeting is a clear understanding that Big Brother had better learn quickly to produce better results in a studio.
That effort commences at once. Between our weekend forays into the heartland, the band works under professional conditions in Columbia’s New York studios.
The producer, John Simon, is represented by Albert Grossman, as is Elliot Mazer, who will co-produce the album. Albert has chosen Simon to oversee Big Brother’s record for Columbia without consulting the band. Simon produced the hit single “Red Rubber Ball” for the Cyrkle, he has worked with jazzman Charles Lloyd, and he produced and wrote the arrangements for Leonard Cohen’s first album.
Simon yields to Big Brother’s wish to record “live” in the studio—all playing at the same time in the same room, although this method creates technical difficulties. There is “bleed,” each microphone picking up not only the voice or instrument it’s placed in front of, but the other voices and instruments as well. This makes it difficult, or impossible, to overdub a given voice or instrument to correct errors and improve a track.
Despite this concession, there is friction between Simon and the band from the outset. John is a musician himself, a pianist and composer, very much of the educated and disciplined school. He shows little curiosity about the colorful band of California eccentrics who have generated such interest since the Monterey Pop Festival. The band members feel that Simon is standoffish, sometimes condescending. Dave Getz finds it impossible to talk to him. Sam doesn’t get along with him much better. Janis feels that Simon rebuffs her attempts to strike up a dialogue. Peter Albin is alone in believing there is potential for a good relationship with Simon, if they stick with it.
“I think fundamentally he didn’t like Janis. You know, he didn’t like it that she practiced her riffs. This came out later. He said, ‘Blues artists don’t do that.’ I just thought, That’s ridiculous. I’ve heard Ray Charles practice a riff a million times. . . . And in his biography he says, ‘That was a riff, and I practiced that, and it was a good one.’ [Simon] just had this mental construct about the band. I think he wasn’t in sympathy with Janis.”
Sam Andrew
Since Monterey, Pennebaker has kept an eye out for another chance to film Janis. He has in mind that he might make a Dont Look Back–style film about her. He expresses interest in filming a recording session. He clears it with Albert, I clear it with the band, and I serve again as Penny’s soundman. What his inquisitive camera perceives is an omen. Just as a microphone captures onstage mistakes that become glaring in playback, the camera often sees in a scene what the real-life participants miss. Penny’s philosophy of documentary film trusts the ability of the camera’s impartial eye to ferret out the truth. In Columbia’s New York Studio E, it perceives that John Simon is out of sync with these free spirits from San Francisco.
On the day we’re filming, Janis arrives after the others. The boys are jamming on a tune that isn’t one of their regular songs, a spontaneous jam. Janis skips around the studio, dancing to the music. When the tune ends, she says, “You wanna hear how shitty some people can be?” and she launches into a story about this guy she just met, the guitar player for the Animals, who are in town. The guy was busted for dope a while ago in Vancouver, British Columbia, and was released on bail. He was supposed to fly out this week for his trial, but the Animals’ manager told him not to go. Then, without telling the guy, they wired to England for another guitar player to replace him when they fired him, which they did yesterday. And now they want him to play with the band tonight because the new guy isn’t here yet!
Janis lays out the whole story in a literal minute. “I’ve never heard of anyone being treated so shabbily!” she says. “And he’s not even mad, and I’m furious!” She’s righteously incensed, but her delivery of the last line recognizes that it has the potential to be funny. No one laughs.
Throughout Janis’s rap, John Simon is leaning on the studio piano, uninvolved. He looks exhausted, or maybe exasperated. Without moving or saying a word, he projects an aura of indifference masking annoyance. When Janis delivers her closing line, he says, “Let’s do ‘Summertime.’”
“It was very hard to work with John Simon. John Simon was put on us by Albert. Albert just said, ‘I’ve got the producer and this guy’s producing this other band, and he’s great, he’s a genius.’ And Albert drew up the whole contract. Albert gave John Simon two-sevenths of the [album] royalties. . . . Janis, I think her attitude was, she was gonna have fun anyway. And she was not gonna suffer as much as John wanted everybody to suffer, as much as he was suffering. And I was suffering as much as he was suffering. I think Peter to a certain extent was. I think James and Sam were getting so loaded that they just sort of created a cloud around themselves so that they were impervious to what John was putting out, the vibe that he was putting out. And I think Janis just—I think Janis kind of picked up on where he was at, and was just intentionally, very consciously, not gonna buy into it, and was just gonna go on with her merry little act. And so I think, to her credit, she may have handled it the best of anybody. And she was a consummate performer. When it came time to go in the studio and sing, Janis knew she could do it. She knew she had the facility to perform under those kind of pressure situations, whereas we didn’t.”
David Getz
Sam Andrew has arranged the Gershwin classic with guitar arpeggios that begin slowly, then ripple nimbly through an introduction that doesn’t reveal the identity of the song until Janis opens her mouth and sings the first word: “Summertime . . .”
James plays in a lower register. Together, the two guitars weave around Janis’s high, breathy rendition to create a wholly original interpretation of the song. Gershwin would have smiled. If there’s one song in Big Brother’s repertoire that should engage John Simon and win his approval, this is it.
The first take is a little ragged. The band listens to it in the control room, then returns to the studio. They debate whether to continue working on “Summertime” until it’s done, or include another song in this evening’s session. Janis wants to work until “Summertime” is in the can, however long it takes. The clock on the wall of the studio says 9:30. Dave Getz says let’s work on it until twelve and move on to something else if we haven’t got it by then.
Penny moves his camera from one participant in the discussion to another. I stay out of his way and aim the mike at whoever’s talking. John Simon makes no effort to guide the conversation or get the band focused on the work at hand. Once again, he’s off to one side, disconnected, waiting.
The only record producer I’ve spent much time with in a studio is Paul Rothchild. He produced the Charles River Valley Boys’ first album when he found out we didn’t have one. Paul was working for a Boston-area record distributor at the time. He came into the Club 47, heard us play, and said he’d like to handle our record. We don’t have a record, we told him. Paul came back a week later and said he’d like to help us make one. That was the start of his career as a producer. He made our record on his own label and later sold it to Prestige Records in New Jersey as part of a deal that got him a job as A&R (artists and repertory) man for the label. Before long he moved on to Jac Holzman’s Elektra Records in New York. In short order Paul produced a string of successful folk albums for Elektra, and he was instrumental in Elektra’s decision to become the first folk label to expand into recording electrified music. He has produced the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and the Doors.
In the midsixties, when I was in New York, I would check in with Paul and visit the Elektra studio if he was working with someone interesting. Without giving it much thought, until now, I have absorbed Paul’s manner in the studio as the model for how a record producer does his job. He guides the proceedings so gently, most of the time, that it would take a stranger a while to figure out who’s running the show. Paul understands musicians and gives them a lot of free rein. He wants them to be comfortable. He laughs with them, smokes pot with them, orders out for burgers with them, but he never lets the musicians forget that they’re in the studio to get some work done. However relaxed and gregarious he may be at any given moment, Paul is aware of the job at hand and he is guiding those present toward that goal. He is the captain of the ship.
Paul is not a musician. He can barely carry a tune. But he loves music and he has an uncanny ability to communicate with musicians who run the gamut from highly verbal to effectively mute. Paul can express musical concepts and suggestions so articulately that singer after singer and band after band have produced under his guidance definitive performances of their music, albums that stand up to repeated listening and enhance the artists’ reputations. In the studio, everything he does is focused on making the best possible recording with these musicians in this time and place.
I gain new respect for the effectiveness of Paul’s methods when I see Janis and the boys working with John Simon. From my viewpoint, this ship is caught in irons, with no one at the helm. Each time I visit the studio, John and the band are struggling. Despite the “live” setup, Janis and the boys find it hard to capture on tape the freewheeling sound and the exhilaration—the magic—that they generate in concert.
“I always felt that the studio recording was stifling. I just could not get off. ’Cause I get off playing to audiences, and there’s nobody there, you know? It’s very cold and calculated.”
Peter Albin
The work is frustrating and tiring. They need a break, something to give them a boost, and they get it. A week after the disappointing weekend in Detroit, Janis and the boys play in New York again, on the opening night of Bill Graham’s Fillmore East.
A few people in New York who care about rock music have urged Graham to open an operation in the city. Bill has resisted. San Francisco keeps him busy. He doesn’t want to fail in his hometown but he was finally persuaded to come take a look. He saw Big Brother’s show at the Anderson. The drab state of the theater and the indifference of the promoter to the music was just what it took to knock him off the fence. Anyone who knew Bill could see the wheels begin to spin: What this town needs is somebody to do it right!
Across Second Avenue from the Anderson is the Village Theater, formerly a 2,400-seat Loews movie house, and, like the Anderson, a Yiddish theater before that. A few rock shows have been put on in the Village Theater, but there was no regular operation. Graham bought the Village, with Albert Grossman and his new partner, Bert Block, putting up the capital as silent partners. Bill will run the show. Between Big Brother’s February 17 appearance at the Anderson and the eighth of March, Bill and his crew have completely refurbished the old movie house and rechristened it Fillmore East. The theater’s new technical director is Chip Monck, a lighting designer who illuminated the Newport Folk Festivals and who has moved into rock show lighting. Together, Graham and Monck have pulled off a miracle. It’s still a sit-down theater, but it has the welcoming atmosphere, and some of the ambiance, of the San Francisco ballrooms.
Big Brother headlines the opening night, with Albert King, Tim Buckley, and a San Francisco–style light show rounding out the bill. The manager of the Anderson prints counterfeit tickets to Bill’s show and gives them away on the street, but he fails in his effort to sabotage the party. The line at Fillmore East stretches around the block.
The show presents the kind of stylistic mix—Tim Buckley’s folk rock, Big Brother’s acid rock, and Albert King’s polished blues—that Graham is known for in San Francisco. Janis and the boys are happy to be working for Graham again in front of an appreciative audience. Big Brother rocks and Janis wows the fans. Among Graham’s ushers, clad in an orange jumpsuit, is Robert Mapplethorpe, just twenty-one, already an artist, not yet a photographer, utterly unknown, at this time living in impoverished bohemian bliss in Brooklyn with the equally artistic and unknown Patti Smith. Mapplethorpe came to work looking forward to hearing Tim Buckley, but he returns home late at night to announce to Smith that he has seen someone new, someone who is going to make it big. Her name is Janis Joplin.
Fillmore East’s opening night generates a lot of press and more good reviews for Big Brother. Variety covers the show, as well as Billboard, Cashbox, and Record World.
Good reviews are always good news, but they are too often a double-edged sword for Big Brother. Once again, the press and the public focus most of their attention on Janis. It’s her vocals, her dynamism onstage, that knock everyone out. Once again Robert Shelton proves to be the exception by singling out the band for praise in the Times. Mostly, the boys get mixed notices. Some reviewers, and some acquaintances unaware of the San Francisco music scene’s philosophy, the ethic embraced by the founding bands, have suggested Janis get better musicians.
Janis is loyal to Big Brother. They took her in and gave her a chance. The performances that won over the San Francisco fans and earned the great reviews at Monterey were all given with Big Brother behind her. And that’s the problem. Many observers see Big Brother behind her. They don’t give Sam’s vocals, and Peter’s and James’s, and the band’s unique sound, due credit for the success Janis and Big Brother have earned.
If enough people tell you how great you are and in the same breath suggest that your fellow band members don’t measure up, it’s understandable that you may begin to wonder if maybe they’re right.
Albert’s office has a publicist, Myra Friedman, working full-time on Big Brother for their first eastern tour. Myra is in awe of Janis, and she exacerbates the imbalance by devoting most of her efforts to her. In our first few weeks in New York, Myra arranges for Glamour, New York magazine, Eye magazine, and Life to do interviews or photo shoots with Janis. (Janis takes an attentive interest in her press coverage. She fires off salvos of clippings and quotes to her family in Port Arthur, along with effusive letters full of news about her rising reputation.)
Myra’s greatest coup is arranging for Janis to be photographed by Richard Avedon for Vogue, for a photo section about the happening people in show business. A few years ago, Avedon’s fashion photos for Harper’s Bazaar became so creative that the magazine was read and talked about within the folk music underground. Instead of shooting models looking bored, Avedon photographed them looking happy, being funny, even moving. He was a past master of black and white. As innovations in art and music blossomed in the sixties, Avedon took to using psychedelic colors and effects in his spreads. In 1966, Avedon left Harper’s Bazaar for Vogue.
Myra further endears herself to Janis by following up on an idea that Janis has been promoting for a while now: Think of all the publicity she has generated for Southern Comfort. Reporters mention Janis’s favorite drink in virtually every piece they write. Shouldn’t Southern Comfort give Janis something in return? Myra’s efforts produce an offer from Southern Comfort for Janis to visit a fur warehouse in New Jersey and choose whatever she’d like. Janis picks a three-quarter-length coat in Russian lynx and a matching hat that become her signature cold-weather traveling wear, even as she forsakes Southern Comfort in favor of drinks that don’t make her friends and drinking companions gag.
A week after the Fillmore East, we’re in Philadelphia again for three days at the Electric Factory in Old Town, for a guarantee of $6,000 against 50 percent of the gross over $12,000. Big Brother’s take-home is $12,160. In the band’s first month in the East, they have made close to $40,000. Albert’s guarantee of $100,000 in the first year is beginning to look modest, and Janis and the boys dare to believe there may be some money left over after the debt to Mainstream is paid off.
On the same weekend, the Charles River Valley Boys, with my predecessor, Clay Jackson, now back in the band on guitar and lead vocals, are at the Second Fret coffeehouse, the Philadelphia focus of the folk boom. After Big Brother’s show at the Electric Factory, I take them to the Second Fret and I sit in with the CRVB for most of a set. I slip back into the three-part harmonies as easily as putting on a familiar shirt, and this role reversal, with me onstage and Big Brother in the audience, makes more real for my new cohort the fact that their road manager had a life in music before he took up the reins of their traveling circus.
Janis has a bottle in her handbag from which she sips with just the right amount of discretion in the nonalcoholic coffeehouse. She sips liberally, however. When we get back to our hotel, I am in my road manager’s role once more as I half support, half carry her through the lobby and up the elevator to her room. It’s all part of the job.
The following weekend takes us to Chicago, where Albert Grossman, Paul Butterfield, Mike Bloomfield, and Nick Gravenites got their start in the music business. We make a pilgrimage to the fabled South Side, where the blues clubs still flourish, but the streets are uneasy in the wake of last summer’s ghetto riots here, and we don’t linger long.
New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago—we’re not in Fresno anymore, Toto.
Janis and the boys take it all in stride, but there’s often a gleam in their eyes. These early weeks of touring the East are exceeding their expectations of what working under Albert’s guidance might be like.
Janis’s professionalism, and the excitement of bringing her music to new audiences across the eastern and midwestern states, usually keeps her drinking within her customary pattern—just enough before a performance to give her the boost she needs to launch herself onto the stage. Sometimes, when the opening acts run long and Big Brother goes on late, she has trouble maintaining the preperformance edge, but when she steps onstage her adrenaline almost always powers her through.
After the shows, she drinks more, as do the boys, but carrying her into a hotel is the exception rather than the rule. The demands of the job keep my own drinking moderate. At the end of the day, my top priority is getting enough sleep so I can get up and eat breakfast in the morning before it’s time to phone the members of the band, room by room, to wake them and give them the time they need, individually adjusted, to get their acts together and be in the lobby when it’s time to go.
On the last day of March, we’re in New York when Lyndon Johnson goes on prime-time TV to announce a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam above the twentieth parallel, as a gesture he hopes will bring the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong to the negotiating table. At the end of the broadcast, Johnson drops a bombshell of his own when he declares that he will not run for reelection.
Since we came east, I have followed presidential politics with little support from Janis or the boys. At first, Gene McCarthy was given no chance of unseating Lyndon Johnson, but he placed a close second in the recent New Hampshire primary. Encouraged by this sign of Johnson’s vulnerability on the issue of Vietnam, and further motivated by the Tet Offensive, whose last battles were only recently concluded, Bobby Kennedy entered the race in mid-March, despite his earlier disavowal of interest. Johnson’s bowing out now throws the race wide open.
I go to Max’s Kansas City to celebrate by getting exuberantly drunk. If anyone had told me this evening that within a year I would miss Lyndon Johnson, I would have laughed in his face.
Sam and Peter show some interest in Johnson’s announcement, but for the most part the band members don’t see much hope for meaningful change in the traditional political process.
The next day, they’re back in Columbia’s Studio E, recording “Misery’n” and “Catch Me Daddy.”
On Tuesday, April 2, Big Brother goes into a New York club called Generation for a six-night stand with B. B. King. The club is on West 8th Street, a block from Washington Square Park. Backstage on opening night, Janis receives a delegation from Jazz & Pop magazine, who tell her that she has been voted best female pop vocalist of the year in the magazine’s annual readers’ poll, beating out the soul queen, Aretha Franklin, by fourteen votes out of almost eighteen hundred. “But I’ve only been singing for a year and a half!” is Janis’s astonished reaction. She’s not about to turn down the award, but “best female pop vocalist” strikes her as a bit much. “Best chick vocalist,” she offers. “How about that?”
On the third day of our gig at Generation, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., is assassinated in Memphis.