Memphis, Tennessee
WHILE BIG BROTHER and I are powering through October and November, driven by the imperatives of the schedule, Albert is trying to cobble together Janis’s new backup band. He consults Janis, to be sure, but Janis is on the road. He enlists Nick Gravenites and Mike Bloomfield, his old Chicago friends, to propose musicians and help shape the sound.
Nick and Mike are both rooted in the blues. Mike left Paul Butterfield last year to found the Electric Flag, which included Nick as vocalist and songwriter. Mike wanted to create a band that would blend strains of jazz, soul, and blues into a new kind of electrified American music, and he achieved at least part of his vision. The Flag’s debut at the Monterey Pop Festival was well received. The group’s first album, “A Long Time Comin’,” performed well on the charts and got good notices. Mike wrote and the Flag provided the music for Peter Fonda’s feature film The Trip, about an LSD trip, which everyone I knew who ever took LSD found to be terminally strange and unlike anything they had experienced on acid. The Flag’s music got better reviews than the movie and the band seemed to be on its way, but just a year after Monterey, Mike, bedeviled by insomnia and heroin, took his leave. The Flag flapped on for a while without him, but by the time Janis and Big Brother go their separate ways, the Electric Flag is history.
What Mike attempted with the Flag bears a relationship to what Janis wants in her new band. She wants a band with horns and a keyboard that will evoke the soul sound of R&B without imitating it. It’s a fine distinction, one that confuses the musicians who are hired to fulfill the vaguely defined vision. Janis and Albert plan to debut the new band in the new year, after two months of rehearsals, but while Janis is still on the road with Big Brother, Albert manages to secure a slot for Janis at the Stax-Volt Christmas show in Memphis on December 21. This is potentially a brilliant stroke. It’s the kind of strategic move at which Albert excels. If Janis and her new band can win over the soul music crowd in Memphis, the reviews will validate her change of direction and help jump-start the next phase of her career.
Stax and Volt records are the premier labels of the Memphis sound, and the main competitors, in the world of rhythm and blues, with Detroit’s Motown. Otis Redding recorded for Stax. Albert King joined the label in ’66. Sam and Dave are turning out one hit after another for the label. Booker T. and the MGs are the house band. Wilson Pickett records at Stax, even though his label is Atlantic.
The Memphis sound is closer to the roots of the blues, more soulful, not as inclined to pander to white tastes as Motown’s slicker hits. Funkier. Which is not to say it’s any less professionally arranged, performed and recorded. In Memphis, Janis will have her work cut out for her to win over a predominantly black audience that regards the Stax and Volt artists as members of their immediate families.
When Janis awakens in her Noe Street apartment on the morning after her last performance with Big Brother, her next gig—her debut gig with the new, as-yet-unrehearsed band—is less than three weeks away.
Janis and the band rehearse first at Big Brother’s Warehouse, which makes poignantly apparent the love Janis and the boys have for each other. As wounded as David and Peter and James are by her departure, they make the Warehouse available. It belongs to Janis and Sam as much as to them. The money they all earned together still pays the rent.
Like the Electric Flag, Albert’s Canadian group, the Paupers, has also folded. The bass player, Brad Campbell, is brought in to anchor the rhythm in Janis’s new band. On alto saxophone is Terry Clements, an English expatriate who played briefly with the Flag in their declining days and just as briefly with the Buddy Miles Express, a group formed by the Flag’s drummer. Terry came to San Francisco early in the rock renaissance, and he is thoroughly assimilated. He looks more like a hippie than anyone else among the recruits, complete with long hair held in place by a bandanna around his head. Since playing with the Flag and Buddy Miles, Terry has had some gigs as a sideman, but he’s looking for something more comfortable, more permanent, more familial.
Marcus Doubleday is also plucked from the remnants of the Electric Flag to play trumpet. Marcus is an eastern urban musician, and it’s rumored that he has a drug problem.*
The organ man, Bill King, and Roy Markowitz, the drummer, are fresh from New York. King read in the press about Janis leaving Big Brother and took the initiative. He phoned Albert’s office and asked to be considered for her new band. The office set up an audition where Bill met Roy, and both of them made the cut. Bill seems out of place in San Francisco, but he’s a serious musician and maybe he’ll shine on the road. Roy is a New Yorker through and through. He’s a natural comedian and he takes on the role of the class clown.
Sam Andrew will discharge the lead guitar duties on his own. The idea to add Jerry Miller to the new band didn’t pan out. Sam and Janis are my friends, my points of reference in this new aggregation of what strike me as very disparate personalities.
The Warehouse is hard to heat on the rainy December days, and soon the rehearsals move to a synagogue that Bill Graham leases next to the original Fillmore Auditorium. Bill manages the Carlos Santana Blues Band, at this time only locally known. They use the synagogue as a rehearsal space. Through Bill’s good offices, Janis’s band shares it with Santana for the high-pressure rehearsals to prepare for the Stax-Volt show.
I’m in frequent touch with the office as Albert begins to plan the winter tour in the East. When I stop by the rehearsals, it seems to me that no one knows just what they’re supposed to be doing. Without much direction, the musicians are trying to figure out their job descriptions. Mike Bloomfield is here to help with arrangements, but Mike isn’t one to crack the whip and focus the band members on the task at hand.
Sam takes on the job of teaching the new guys the songs that Janis wants to keep from the Big Brother repertoire. He offers suggestions about how to fit the horns and the organ into the arrangements, but Sam is uncertain in his new role as Janis’s employee and he isn’t sure how far he can go in guiding the style of the new group. When it comes to the new songs, he’s as much in the dark as the others about how to proceed. What is painfully lacking is a coherent vision of how this band is supposed to sound.
Gone from the tentative playlist are “Coo-Coo/Oh, Sweet Mary” and “Easy Rider.” Among the songs the band is working on, there are no obvious connections to traditional roots, black or white, save for the fact that rhythm and blues, like rock and roll, is built on the solid foundation of the twelve-bar blues.
Bill King offers some ideas about the horn lines on the Bee Gees’ “To Love Somebody,” which Janis wants to include, and he recommends a song that was a staple in his previous band, Eddie Floyd’s soul hit, “Raise Your Hand,” for her consideration.
Janis herself has no idea how to lead the rehearsals. She can say, “That’s it,” when she hears something she likes. She may suggest that a song needs a stronger introduction or ending, but mostly she looks to Mike Bloomfield or Nick Gravenites when the tunes aren’t coming together.
In Big Brother, during my time with them, Janis was almost always confident and assertive, ever ready to put in her two cents, to argue a point or propose a course of action. In the band that took her on as lead vocalist she rose to become the first among equals, and she was comfortable taking that position when it suited her—about the music or anything else—because she knew Sam, Dave, Peter, and James were there to back her up or take charge when she faltered. Now, among the musicians and helpers recruited to form the backup band she has dreamed of, Janis is passive and uncertain, and there is no one to take up the slack.
She has the smarts and the force of personality to be the bandleader, but at this turning point in her career an old habit from her younger days holds her back. When she was growing up in Port Arthur, her intelligence was appreciated in her home. Her parents instilled in Janis and her siblings, Laura and Michael, respect for literature, art, and music, but these values were not common coin among Janis’s Texas contemporaries. In a Gulf coast oil town, displays of intellectual agility were not the surest way to make friends in the public school mainstream. Even among Janis’s small group of like-minded friends, being a whip-smart mouthy girl was not always the best strategy for earning peer approval. In San Francisco, there was no lack of cerebral wattage among the founders of the scene, but it has grown too fast for an intellectual tradition to keep pace. The philosophizing of the Beats has been reduced to simple platitudes like “Go with the flow” and “Let it all hang out.” At home and on the road, among promoters, fans, and members of the press, Janis often plays to the level of those around her, not condescendingly, but because she wants to fit in, to be one of the crowd. This habit has become so ingrained that she sometimes undervalues her own exceptional intelligence and the answers it might offer for her current problems.
“It has to do with a certain self-abnegation. She would put herself down to strong men. She liked men who knew what they were saying, who didn’t have a thousand self-doubts about the world and what they were. She liked men who would say things with a lot of conviction and knowledge and power and shit like that. She dug that. She dug powerful aggressive-type men. And she’d put herself down in front of those men, you dig? . . . She really depended on people to do things. People she felt know more than she did. Whether that is true or not is moot.”
Nick Gravenites
In the new band, Janis is on unfamiliar ground. This is nothing like her life with Big Brother. This is the Music Business.
When rehearsal is over for the day, Janis lets off steam by careening around the city in her Porsche convertible, often with a couple of the new boys crammed into the cockpit, as she shows off her uniquely repainted ride.
While we were on the road in the fall, Dave Richards took Janis’s new Porsche into Big Brother’s Warehouse, where he labored over it lovingly. Janis asked him for a custom paint job and left the rest up to him. Dave has covered every inch of the L.A. Porsche dealer’s pearl-gray paint job with hand-painted images of birds and butterflies and satellites and psychedelic mushrooms and undersea creatures and, along one side, a lovely pastoral landscape. A group portrait of Big Brother and the Holding Company adorns the left front fender.
“I actually found Janis’s Porsche for her. She was in L.A. and called me, and said that she wanted to buy a Porsche. . . . I had a Porsche, and had frequent dealings with a particular Porsche agency in Beverly Hills. They had a Porsche . . . and I went and saw it and then told Janis about it. It had seventeen coats of lacquer, kind of oyster lacquer. [The dealer] said it was the best paint job they ever did in their lives. And after Dave Richards finished his job, Janis went down there and showed them. And I never heard the end of it.”
Bob Gordon
—
WE FLY TO Memphis two days ahead of the Stax-Volt gig and hold a final rehearsal at the Stax studios in an old movie theater, where we are made welcome.
The rehearsal is intense. This gig is no tryout in an out-of-the-way place. This is Memphis, home of the blues, home of Gus Cannon’s Jug Stompers, home of the Memphis sound. Janis and the band work on getting three numbers nailed. Eddie Floyd’s “Raise Your Hand” has worked out well and it has become Janis’s favorite among the new songs. The Bee Gees’ “To Love Somebody” is ready too. For a finale, she’ll do “Piece of My Heart” or “Ball and Chain.” Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.
Friday evening, the night before the show, we’re invited to the home of Stax president Jim Stewart for a cocktail party. Janis and the band can’t wait to see what a cocktail party for the cream of the Memphis sound is like, and they are not disappointed. The house is a ranch-style mansion. It’s on the edge of town, surrounded by a plot of woods. Indoors, it is apparent that this is a select gathering. The partygoers are decked out in their flamboyant finest. Booker T. is here, and Stax’s number one songwriter and producer, Isaac Hayes, but our gang are even more impressed to meet Steve Cropper and Donald “Duck” Dunn, the MGs’ guitar and bass players, Stax-Volt’s premier sidemen. Janis’s guys rub elbows with these musical idols as they group around the dining room table to snack on shrimp, sandwiches, and chicken livers wrapped in bacon.
The music that Stewart has piped throughout the house keeps the party in a reflective mood; it is from unreleased tapes by Otis Redding. The first anniversary of his death has just passed, and in this setting his absence is still a wound not fully healed.
But Janis is always ready for a party. She drinks, laughs at the jokes, talks about music.
We considered names for the new band in the San Francisco rehearsals, but none of the suggestions won out. The Janis Joplin Revue (boring). Janis and the Joplinaires (funny, but not a serious proposal). Janis Joplin’s Pleasure Principle. Janis Joplin and the Sordid Flavors, a play on words that probably originated with Janis or Sam. For the Stax-Volt show, she’s billed simply as Janis Joplin. When Janis sees a poster for the show, she’s embarrassed to see that her name and photo are larger than those of the soul stars she hopes to win over.
The concert, billed as Stax-Volt’s “Yuletide Thing,” is at the Mid-South Coliseum, which is known as “The Entertainment Capital of the Mid-South.” The coliseum boasts ten thousand seats. The audience is overwhelmingly black, and they are dressed to the nines. The performers are even flashier. Everyone’s dressed up except our band and crew. Janis is decked out in a cherry-red pantsuit. She moves with apparent confidence among the other groups backstage, conscious of the attention she attracts from all sides. The other groups have matching outfits, but our band members have no unified style. Here, the eclectic haberdashery of San Francisco musicians doesn’t stand out as adventurous. They look like a bunch of guys picked at random off a street located far from Memphis.
The show moves like clockwork. One band leaves the stage and the next group comes out, they plug in, and they play. The changeovers take only a few minutes. Janis is next to last on the program. Mark Braunstein and George Ostrow have worked with the equipment men from the other bands to speed the changeover before Janis comes onstage. The plan that involves the least shuffling of equipment has our band set up in a mirror image of their usual layout. Mark talks to our musicians backstage to prepare them. “Can you guys just get on the stage and play, wherever the amplifiers happen to be, please. Everything’s backwards. Can you please just get up there and play? Plug in and play?”
When the time comes, the changeover would be considered fast for a show at Fillmore West, but here it seems to take forever as Janis’s guys sort themselves out and adjust this and that and check their tuning. In the Coliseum, the audience is growing restless. Offstage, Janis can’t keep still. She bounces around, getting herself worked up. As usual, she has tried to drink enough to give her the elevating boost she wants, staying on the upside of the curve until she’s onstage, where her own energy is released and sustains her through the performance. This evening she may have slipped over the top of the rise. “Come on!” she says, under her breath, then louder, until finally the announcement comes that launches her into the light.
The band is ragged, but they’re trying. The audience is curious to hear in person this white girl they’ve heard so much about. They’re polite, but this isn’t the Monterey Jazz Festival, where black and white Californians rose to celebrate a San Francisco band and their stunning female vocalist. The Memphis audience stay in their seats and the applause is—polite.
There may be a political edge to the audience’s indifferent reception. The loss of Martin Luther King and the rise of militant black power has made black Americans more wary of whites, less inclined to welcome white musicians riffing on black sounds. In the folk days we sang “Black and white together,” but the new theme is “Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud!”
When Janis wrings out the final notes of “Ball and Chain,” there are no cheers. It’s clear that the applause won’t warrant an encore. Standing with Janis and the band backstage, I’m about to say, “That’s it,” when Mark Braunstein comes backstage. He has reached the same conclusion. “No encore,” he says. Onstage, the changeover to the final act is already under way.
The winter solstice is the darkest day. That’s how it feels for Janis in Memphis, but the solstice also marks a turning toward the light.
—
IN SAN FRANCISCO, the band members disperse to their respective lodgings. Some go home for Christmas. Janis flies to Texas. There are no further gigs on the calendar. On January 2, the band will report for more rehearsals.
I remove myself to what has become my preferred retreat since I lived in Carmel. Three years ago, I was invited to a picnic in Big Sur for Joan Baez’s birthday. We sat on the grass at Esalen and ate and laughed and took in the great reach of the Pacific Ocean. I don’t remember if I was introduced to the sulfur baths that day, but that’s when I was introduced to Peter Melchior and his wife, Marya. Peter was working in Esalen’s kitchen and teaching ceramics workshops. By that summer, when I attended my first Big Sur Folk Festival on the Esalen grounds, Peter had become a friend. He and Marya live north of Esalen’s buildings, across a creek that tumbles down a steep gully, in a small house on the edge of an improbably well-kept lawn, across from an improbably substantial home that belongs to the Murphy family, who own all the habitable land on this broad ledge that was hewn from the Coast Range by tectonic shifts the present inhabitants hope not to experience.
Peter is close to some members of the Committee and some of the musicians I know from California and Cambridge in ways that take me years to unravel. He seems to know everyone, and everyone holds him in high regard. In December 1968, I know Peter and Marya well enough to call them and ask if I can come down for Christmas.
I sleep late, as they do, and I rarely look at a clock. The sulfur baths are part of the daily routine. On an evening in the week between Christmas and New Year’s there are ten or a dozen people in Peter and Marya’s living room after dinnertime, gathered around the fireplace. As the wine and joints and conversations flow, our thoughts turn to the remote world of politics and war, to this interregnum between the November election and the inauguration of Richard Milhous Nixon, and someone proposes that we throw the I Ching to see what it has to say. The question we ask is “What’s happening?” The hexagram we get is Po, the Splitting Apart. The implications are unsettling and uncanny: Inferior men are rising to positions of power. It is useless to oppose them. The wise course for the superior man is to remain quiet and take no part, for the condition of the time cannot be corrected by action, only by waiting for the condition to change. Careful reading of the interpretations reveals a glimmer of hope. Evil carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. This too shall pass.
For those with a grounding in folk music, there’s an equivalent wisdom: To everything there is a season. Turn, turn, turn.