Downtown Nowhere
EVEN BEFORE NEWPORT, Janis was facing a decision she couldn’t put off for long. In Big Brother, she is one of four vocalists. Sam, Peter, and James each sing lead on one or more of the group’s songs. Janis is the lead vocalist, but she shares the spotlight with her bandmates. In the summer of 1968, a year after Monterey, her rising renown offers her a new possibility. It is something she dreamed long before Big Brother, a fantasy then. Now it might be a reality. She can claim center stage for her own, sharing the spotlight with no one.
“I love those guys more than anybody else in the whole world. They know that. But if I had any serious ideas of myself as a musician, I had to leave. . . . We worked four, six nights a week for two years doing the same tunes, and we’d put everything into them we could. We just used each other up. . . . I wasn’t doing anything but standing still and being a success.”
Janis Joplin
Janis has dreaded telling the boys she has decided to leave the band. She knows her decision will hurt Sam and James and Peter and Dave. She knows she will be criticized. She knows she might fail. But if she doesn’t make the attempt, she will never know if she has what it takes to succeed on her own.
For Sam, Janis’s announcement comes as no surprise. Janis told him of her decision before Newport, and she asked him to come with her in the new band she would form. At the meeting in the Chelsea, Sam senses something in her tone that makes him suspect Janis has changed her mind.
Peter takes the news badly, erupting in anger that doesn’t mask the fear sparked by the sudden collapse of his world. Dave Getz realizes that this is something he has almost been expecting.
“I think from Monterey on, early ’68 on, we all began to sense that there was the possibility that Janis would quit at some point. . . . Although it was never verbalized, never talked about. No one wanted—it was unthinkable, but I think everybody had it on their minds.”
David Getz
When the others leave, Sam stays behind, and Janis says, “I don’t want you to come with me either, Sam.”
“Big Bother and the Folding Company” isn’t funny anymore.
Soon after the band meeting, Janis takes me aside and asks me to stay as her road manager when her new band is formed. To me, Janis’s reasons are self-evident and inescapable. Staying with Big Brother is easy. Leaving them is much harder. Janis has chosen the more difficult course, the greater challenge.
My choice is easier than hers. Without Janis, there’s no certainty that Big Brother will continue to perform.
The band’s bookings extend through November. Janis will stay until these obligations have been fulfilled. At first it’s awkward, but the routines of the road are familiar. After a while it’s possible for Janis and the boys to continue as before, living in the Now of airplanes, rental cars, hotels, and gigs.
AUG. 2–3, 1968: Fillmore East
AUG. 9: Kiel Auditorium, St. Louis
AUG. 14: Indiana Beach, Monticello, Ind.
AUG. 16–17: Aragon Ballroom/Cheetah, Chicago
AUG. 18: Tyrone Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis
AUG. 23: Singer Bowl, Queens, N.Y.
A few days after Newport, we play the Fillmore East again, this time with the Staple Singers and Ten Years After. As the kids stream into the house, I spy Albert’s partner, Bert Block, standing at the back of the hall with a middle-aged guy in a suit. Bert’s an old hand in the music business. Tall, slightly stooped, bald on top, with a broad smile, he was a drummer and band leader in the big band era, an agent who had his own booking agency before he joined Albert to replace departing partner John Court. Since Bert came aboard, I’ve had frequent dealings with him about bookings and the day-to-day details of Big Brother’s schedule. “Hey, John!” he calls to me. “Come over here. I want you to meet somebody. John Cooke, Benny Goodman.”
I manage a handshake with the guy in the suit and mumble some inanity. What I may know, from seeing The Benny Goodman Story, but don’t have foremost in mind at this moment, is that in his day Goodman was as much a rebel as the San Francisco rockers of the sixties. He didn’t care about the waltzes and foxtrots that were considered respectable for white audiences. Goodman wanted to play what the black bands were playing. He broke the color barrier. He was the first bandleader to have an integrated band. He performed and recorded with black musicians. With Teddy Wilson on piano and Lionel Hampton on vibes, he started a revolution. Now Benny Goodman is in the Fillmore East in a suit and tie, looking like a businessman, because his daughter has the hots for Janis and Big Brother.
Janis sings the gospel song “Down by the Riverside” with Mavis Staples in a duet that brings down the house. After the show, Bert Block escorts Benny Goodman and his daughter backstage. Goodman fille meets Janis and gets the thrill of her life. What Goodman père thinks of the evening’s entertainment is later related by Bert to his wife, Barbara Carroll, a noted jazz pianist and vocalist.* “Janis, in her inimitable obscenity, shocked the pants off Benny Goodman,” Barbara told me. “Because Benny was kind of a straightlaced guy, and his daughter was a young girl, and for Benny to hear this in front of his daughter, or for his daughter to hear this—it was all kind of a ‘moment to be treasured,’ as Bert described it.”
We face a spate of gigs in the Midwest before we can look forward to some time in California.
Janis’s decision not to take Sam with her doesn’t end their friendship. As we travel from city to city he helps her think about her new band. “You know who you should get to go with you?” he says. “Jerry Miller, from Moby Grape. He’s one of the finest guitar players I’ve ever heard. He’s got a good sound.” After a couple more gigs, Janis tells Sam, “Let’s get Jerry Miller and you to come along with me.” Sam is back on board, and that’s the way it stays.
Sam is a link to the past, to Big Brother, to the band and the city that embraced Janis and made her feel at home. Janis and Sam write songs together and they sing together. This is a connection Janis needs. It’s too hard to cut at once all the ties that bind.
Peter and David and James didn’t know they almost lost Sam at the outset, so the news that he’ll go with Janis comes as an unwelcome aftershock. James, being James, accepts it as part of the cosmic inevitability. Peter and David express degrees of anger and resentment before the demands of touring and playing together paper over the disruption.
Cheap Thrills is released and it shoots up the charts. It goes gold in three days. The satisfaction Big Brother takes from the album’s success is bittersweet.
—
AS WORD OF Janis’s defection spreads among Big Brother’s fans in San Francisco, the consensus that coalesces is that Janis has betrayed Big Brother. Many see Albert Grossman as a Svengali who has pulled Janis away from the band, motivated by nothing but money.
These facile conclusions overlook Janis’s strength of will and Albert’s dedication to his artists. Albert understands what Big Brother means to Janis and what she owes them. Three times he tried to reconfigure the band to strengthen the music, but the band rejected each of his suggestions. Like Pennebaker, Albert recognizes that Janis is the incomparable element in the band, and his primary dedication is to her. His discomfort with the status quo has become evident to Janis and the implication is clear, even if he never states it explicitly: So long as she remains with Big Brother, she can’t know how far she might go as a singer.
“See, Albert deals in sensible things. . . . The artist is the magic, you dig? I learned that a long time ago. And it’s sensible to realize that without Janis, Big Brother was just another band. It was sensible to think that.”
Nick Gravenites
And if Albert ever did articulate the choice frankly, his view didn’t dictate Janis’s decision. The most succinct refutation of Albert as Svengali comes from Sam Andrew, looking back on these events long after the fact. He framed it as a rhetorical question: “Can you imagine anyone making Janis do something she didn’t want to do?”*
“[Albert] doesn’t direct me. He just finds out where I want to go, then he helps me get there.”
Janis Joplin
All the same, when we return to San Francisco before the Labor Day weekend, the boys take some comfort in the condolences offered by their friends.
For a time, my attention is diverted to politics as bad news breaks from the Democratic nominating convention in Chicago. The TV news film of convention delegates being manhandled and of newsmen and hippie demonstrators beaten by Chicago police is shocking. Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut condemns “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago” from the podium, inciting in Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley a rage that makes him look like a choleric gargoyle. Lip-readers interpret Daley’s response to Ribicoff, shouted from the convention floor, as “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch! You lousy motherfucker! Go home!” The mayhem dramatizes the divisions within the Democratic party and in the society at large, and it taints the anointing of Vice President Hubert Humphrey as the Democratic nominee.
Three weeks earlier, in Miami Beach, behind a wall of security that kept protesters at bay, the Republicans nominated Richard Nixon on the first ballot. On the evening of his acceptance speech, police and five hundred National Guard troops fought rioters in Miami’s black ghetto. They are still called “Negroes” in the summer of 1968, not yet “blacks” consistently in the press. Six miles away, in the convention hall, ringed by barricades and beyond the sound of gunfire and the smell of smoke, Tricky Dick soberly proclaimed, “My fellow Americans, the dark long night for America is about to end.” The Republicans’ Fortress Miami arrangements and the indiscriminate police violence in Chicago show that the Establishment is digging in for the long haul.
Big Brother’s first jobs back in California reaffirm what they have achieved together and encourage them to take the pleasure to be gained from living in the moment. A Labor Day weekend concert at the Palace of Fine Arts is a quintessential San Francisco gig—outdoors, with a view of the Bay, the fans generous in the welcome they accord one of the city’s signature bands.
A few days later, I pick up Janis and the boys for a flight to L.A., and a gig that is a milestone in Big Brother’s career. Since the Beatles sold out the Hollywood Bowl in 1965, it has become a major rock venue. On the Friday after Labor Day, 1968, Big Brother has top billing, with Iron Butterfly and the Fraternity of Man opening. Playing under the white arch of the historic band shell, looking out over the audience that fills the natural amphitheater, Big Brother plays like a band unified in their music and their mission.
“I always have a sense of history, as you do, John, so visiting the Hollywood Bowl was a big thrill,” Sam Andrew wrote. “All of the concerts that had taken place there, classical and otherwise . . . I remember standing in the wings, feeling all that history and seeing all those people and exulting.”
Sam Andrew
The next morning, I’m headed for Big Sur and this year’s folk festival.
Before the music begins, with the fog lingering along the coast, Mimi Fariña marries Milan Melvin, an announcer for KSAN, the hippest of the underground FM stations in San Francisco. Milan was Janis’s lover for a time soon after she joined Big Brother, when he was rooming in North Beach with Carl Gottlieb, of the Committee. Janis’s roommate and clothes maker, Linda Gravenites, created Mimi’s glorious wedding dress. Mimi visited Linda and Janis’s Noe Street apartment to plan and fit the dress. That was where she first met Janis. The connections among my Cambridge friends and the San Francisco community keep revealing themselves.*
The Big Sur festival is a world away from the Hollywood Bowl. For me it’s like a family reunion. The Charles River Valley Boys are on the program again, and I resume the role of bluegrass singer and picker as if I never put it aside. At some point in the afternoon concert I am at center stage with Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, Joan Baez, and the festival’s organizer, Nancy Carlen, singing a song whose name will escape me thirty-odd years later when a photo of the moment, snapped by Robert Altman (not the film director but the San Francisco photographer of the same name) appears in People magazine. The song may have faded, but not the feeling of being back in Big Sur on a few days’ holiday between Big Brother gigs.
The idyll is over too soon. Big Brother plays three days at Fillmore West, and then we are on a plane for L.A. again, this time for an even larger bowl—the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, seating capacity upward of ninety thousand, where it is evident that football can still outdraw an all-day rock concert. In the vast arena, the music fans fill only a fraction of the seats.
The event is billed as “An American Music Show.” Janis’s old flame Country Joe McDonald is here with the Fish. The rest of the acts are an eclectic assortment: Joan Baez, the Everly Brothers, the Byrds, the Junior Wells Band with Buddy Guy, the Mothers of Invention, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Albert King, and Wilson Pickett. Even in this company Big Brother closes the show, another measure of how far they have come in so short a time.
The stage is on the football field, but the audience is confined to the stadium seats, held in check by rows of Pasadena and state police. As ever, a seated audience is a challenge to Janis. She wants to put them in motion. The encore is “Down on Me,” the semi-hit single from the Mainstream album. Janis pleads with the cops to turn the kids loose, and she finally boosts the crowd’s energy to the level of spontaneous fission. Here they come, through the cops, over the railings and through the fence, an unstoppable wave.
This time Janis gets more than she bargained for. She comes to the edge of the stage to touch a few hands, but that only encourages the fans. By the time the song ends they’re all over the stage, surrounding her, touching her, grabbing at her, pulling on her beads and bracelets and her clothes. The police help Janis get into a limousine to take her from the stage to the dressing room. Sam is in the limo with Janis. The fans pile on the car, even on the roof. Sam is afraid the roof may collapse, but it holds. The fans don’t care about the members of the band who were left behind, so we follow on foot. We wait in the dressing room for the crowd to disperse before we make our escape.
NOW AND AGAIN, Janis likes to shop. On an expedition to Beverly Hills when we were here in the spring, she ventured into Paraphernalia, a happening boutique that features hip designer Betsey Johnson’s fashions. Clad in jeans and a T-shirt, Janis half expected to be tossed out as an undesirable. Instead, the manager recognized her and fell all over her, offering to have anything she wanted made up for her at off-the-rack prices.
After the show at the Rose Bowl, Janis shops in Beverly Hills again, this time accompanied by her attorney. Bob Gordon has a Porsche, and Janis has been in touch with him about finding her a car. He takes Janis to his German car dealer, where they show her a 1965 convertible—a cabriolet in Porsche terminology—that they have cherried out with a hand-rubbed paint job in pearl-gray lacquer. Janis falls in love with the car and within days it is hers.
SEPT. 27: University of California, Irvine
SEPT. 28: San Diego
SEPT. 29: Tape Hollywood Palace TV show, L.A.
SEPT. 29: Long Beach Sports Arena
During this month in California, Dave Richards decides he’s had enough of the road. Dave is confident that Mark Braunstein can take over responsibility for the equipment. Hire another guy and let Marko train him, and you’ll be fine, Dave tells the band. He stays on the job until somebody comes up with George Ostrow, a lean, sleepy-looking guy who seems bemused by the band and the job and the road, but he’s willing to learn. This transition is managed without my having to take part in it, beyond notifying Albert’s office of the change.
Life magazine reviews Cheap Thrills in its September 20 issue. The article is headlined “Singer With a Bordello Voice” and focuses most of its attention on Janis.
We tape a show for ABC’s Hollywood Palace. In a letter home, Janis alerts her family to watch it when it airs.
The work begins in earnest when we fly east in the first days of October.
OCT. 4, 1968: Public Hall, Cleveland
OCT. 5: SUNY, Buffalo, N.Y.
OCT. 11: War Memorial Auditorium, Syracuse, N.Y.
OCT. 13: Music Hall, Cincinnati
OCT. 15: Grande Ballroom, Detroit
OCT. 18: Pennsylvania State University, State College
OCT. 19: Spectrum, Philadelphia
OCT. 20: Alexandria Roller Rink, Alexandria, Va.
OCT. 25: Curry Hicks Cage, UMass, Amherst
OCT. 26: Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Mass.
Big Brother is accustomed by now to being based in New York during our eastern tours. They even look forward to returning to the city and the Chelsea Hotel after a weekend in Squaresville. At least in New York we move in the counterculture of arts and music.
Another bright spot is John Fisher, our New York limo driver. We found him in the summer, after Newport. John is New York born and raised. He’s cheerful and ready for anything. Janis took to him right away, and she quickly staked her claim to the shotgun position, sharing the front seat with John. John has driven Richie Havens and Dylan and the Band, all Albert’s clients. Why we didn’t learn about John sooner, I don’t know, but we’ve got him now. No more straight limo drivers from companies that would rather be shuttling business executives from one meeting to another. John’s company is Love Limousines. The rear windows of his personal limo are tinted mauve. From the backseat, it’s like looking out on the world through rose-colored glasses.
Earlier in the year, after our first East Coast tour, Sam Andrew wrote a song that is occasionally added to the set list. It’s called “Downtown Nowhere,” and it’s about the grind of touring, the days when you can’t remember what city you’re in or where you flew in from that morning. On the fall tour, even I sometimes find myself in Downtown Nowhere. In memory, October and November play in a palette of drab grays.
In Cleveland, a contingent of Hells Angels shows up. They know that Big Brother has played benefits for the Angels in San Francisco. By extension, the local chapter feels connected to the band. By implication, they’d like to get in free. Maybe they can help with security? The hall is packed and Cleveland is kind of a tough town. I talk to the promoter, tell him the Angels are our guests. Janis really gets the kids going and a thin line of Angels across the front of the stage seems like a good idea as Big Brother’s set reaches its climax. With us, and with the audience, the Angels are polite, never threatening.
A gig in Cincinnati falls on a Sunday when a film clip of the Beatles is scheduled on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. So no one has to miss it, Mark and George set up a TV set on the stage and Big Brother interrupts their set when the Beatles come on. With a mike held next to the TV, the band and the audience catch “Revolution” in between songs by Janis and the boys. After the concert, a delegation from the counterculture invites us to an after-concert party, where everyone in the band but Peter Albin shoots up smack.
NOV. 1–2, 1968: Electric Factory, Philadelphia
NOV. 3–5: Chicago? (Aragon? Cheetah? dates and venue uncertain)
NOV. 8: Warwick, R.I.
NOV. 9: Woolsey Hall, Yale University, New Haven
NOV. 10: White Plains, N.Y.
NOV. 11: Ridge Arena, Braintree, Mass.
NOV. 14: Hartford, Connecticut
NOV. 15: Assembly Hall, Hunter College, NYC
NOV. 16: SUNY, Stony Brook, Long Island, N.Y.
On November 2, Cheap Thrills hits number one on Cashbox magazine’s album chart. Three days later, Dick Nixon squeaks by Hubert Humphrey to win the presidency by half a million votes, less than one percentage point. I’m still registered in New York, where the black comedian Dick Gregory is the Liberal Party nominee. Unable to persuade myself to vote for Humphrey, I pull the lever for Gregory to register my feeling that a comedian has more integrity than either major candidate. When I see the election results, I realize that if a hundred thousand disenchanted Democrats in the right precincts had bitten the bullet and voted for Humphrey, we wouldn’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore.
Too late. You go to sleep, you miss your turn.
After the election, the schedule is murderous. Starting on November 8, Big Brother plays eight out of nine nights in a row in small to medium cities along a short stretch of coastal provinces, from Braintree, Massachusetts, to Jersey City. This marathon includes the only gig in New York City on the fall tour, at Hunter College, and ends the next night at the State University of New York out on Long Island. The accretion of gigs happened insidiously, one after another added to what started out as a reasonable schedule, filling in the days off until they were gone. Each time a new gig came up, I checked with the band. For the boys, the string of gigs means more money. Dave, James and Peter are facing the imminent end of their performing income for the foreseeable future. Janis recognizes their need and never puts her foot down to refuse a gig, but the demands of these nine days, capping thirty-some gigs in seven weeks, take their toll. At Hunter College, Janis is exhausted. After the SUNY gig, she falls ill and we are forced to cancel the first two of four gigs on a swing through her home state of Texas, which she has been looking forward to all fall.
NOV. 20, 1968: Austin Municipal Auditorium, Austin, Texas—CANCELLED
NOV. 21: Theater of Performing Arts, San Antonio—CANCELLED
NOV. 24: Coliseum, Dallas
NOV. 26: Denver Auditorium, Denver
NOV. 29: Seattle, Wash.
NOV. 30: Vancouver, B.C.
DEC. 1: Family Dog Benefit, San Francisco
Most of all, Janis was looking forward to playing in Austin. During her brief experiment with college life at the University of Texas, her fellow students, in an act of callous cruelty, voted her the “ugliest man on campus.” Performing there with Big Brother, rubbing her success in their faces, would be her revenge. But it’s Austin and San Antonio that are scratched.
After a week of rest, Janis rallies enough to sing in the Houston Music Hall. For this gig, her family, including her younger siblings Laura and Michael, will drive up from Port Arthur. Her mother phones ahead to reserve tickets, but there is no way Janis is going to let her parents pay to see her perform. I arrange comps and reserve a block of front-row seats for the family and some of Janis’s Austin friends.
After the concert, the Joplins experience firsthand the enthusiasm of Janis’s admirers as they join us in running from the backstage door to the cars when a group of young girls who have been waiting nearby spy Janis and give chase. For Laura and Michael, it’s an exciting glimpse of life in rock and roll, but their parents’ manner suggests concern that Janis is beyond their control in a world they do not and cannot understand. They share a late supper with her in the hotel restaurant before they pile back into the family car for the ninety-mile drive to Port Arthur.
After a concert in Dallas the next evening, we have a day off before a show in Denver. The band has chosen to spend the extra day in Dallas, for the warmer climate, and the weather cooperates. I drive to Dealey Plaza in the rental car, taking with me the Fuji 8-millimeter movie camera I bought early in our first eastern tour. It is five years almost to the day since President John F. Kennedy’s open limousine passed through the small park, and it is the same kind of day, mild and brilliantly clear. I film through the windshield as I drive past the spot where the bullets struck the president, and under the railroad bridge beyond. I double back, park the car, and film the Texas School Book Depository from several angles, zooming in on the window where Lee Harvey Oswald found his vantage point. I go behind the fence atop the grassy knoll, where conspiracy theorists believe a second gunman might have been, and I explore what lies beyond. There’s a broad expanse of dirt and gravel and three sets of train tracks. Plenty of space for a gunman to get away and be long gone in the minutes of panic and confusion after the shooting.
There are flowers at a small memorial in the park, wreaths and bouquets. “In Memory of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy, 1968,” says a handwritten card with some white carnations. A white ribbon laced among an expensive array of red roses says “Lest We Forget.”
I return to my car and retrace the motorcade’s route, continuing beyond the underpass this time. A sign directs me to Parkland Hospital, where they rushed the mortally wounded president. I film the route to the hospital and from there I find my way to Love Field, Dallas’s airport, where Lyndon Johnson took the oath of office in Air Force One before the plane took off to carry JFK in his coffin back to Washington.
—
AFTER DENVER, A two-day swing through the Northwest includes Vancouver, B.C., the only gig on foreign soil while I’m with Big Brother. A booking that would have taken us to Hawaii for Janis’s last show with the band has fallen through, and so, on December 1, Janis and Big Brother end where they began, in San Francisco, at a benefit for the Family Dog, which brings it full circle back to Chet Helms, who presided over the creation of Big Brother in the first place. This seems fitting, somehow, but it is not a night to celebrate.