CHAPTER NINETEEN

Little Girl Blue

AUG. 23, 1969: Convention Hall, Asbury Park, N.J.

AUG. 27: Saratoga Performing Arts Camp, Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

AUG. 29: Blossom Music Festival, Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio

AUG. 30: Texas International Pop Festival, Dallas International Speedway. Canned Heat, Chicago Transit Authority, Led Zeppelin, B. B. King, Sam & Dave, James Cotton Blues Band, Santana, Delaney and Bonnie & Friends, Herbie Mann, and more.

AUG. 31: New Orleans Pop Festival, Baton Rouge International Speedway, Prairieville, Louisiana. The Byrds, Canned Heat, Chicago Transit Authority, Country Joe & the Fish, Grateful Dead, the Youngbloods, and more.

SEPT. 9: Rehearse Music Scene TV show, L.A.

SEPT. 11: Tape Music Scene TV show, L.A., ABC-TV

SEPT. 19: Rehearse Tom Jones TV show, This Is Tom Jones, L.A.

SEPT. 20: Hollywood Bowl

SEPT. 21: Tape Tom Jones TV show, ABC-TV

OCT. 3: Tempe, Ariz.

OCT. 4: San Diego Sports Arena

JOHN TILL HAS been in the band for a month now. He’s quiet by nature, so we have no way of knowing that he still harbors doubts about whether we have accepted him and whether he is up to the gig.

After a show at the Blossom Music Festival in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, John is in the dumps. He’s convinced he played terribly. Later that evening, when John and Richard Kermode leave the motel to get something to eat, they’re spotted by two groupies hanging around the front office. John and Richard have seen the girls earlier, at the gig. They are not a dream team. John and Richard have to sprint to escape the determined pursuit. Later, when Richard tells the story to the rest of the band, he says, “Boy, John Till just won’t quit.” It’s an admiring comment, Richard’s way of saying that John ran like the wind, but John takes it amiss. He is unnerved by the disparate personal and musical trips in the band and by the musicians’ fractious relationship with Janis. He isn’t sure who to trust. Somehow, John interprets Richard’s remark as a hint that he should quit the band.

From Ohio, we’re headed for big pop festivals in Texas and New Orleans. John agonizes during the flight to Dallas. Backstage at the Texas International Pop Festival—an all-day marathon with a dozen top acts—John seeks out Janis. He finds her in one of the small dressing rooms we’ve been assigned, only marginally larger than portable toilets. He asks her if she wants him to leave.

Like the rest of us, Janis has accepted John as a member of the band, and his self-doubts take her by surprise. “No!” she says. “I want you to come to California with me. You can’t leave now, that will really screw things up.” She thinks a minute and says, “Have you ever been insane, or anything like that? Is it in your family?” It’s John’s turn to be taken aback. “No”, he says. “Well, I have some experience with that,” Janis tells him. “Believe me, it’s all in your head.”

Somehow this bizarre exchange banishes John’s doubts. Hereafter, he remembers this moment as the first time he felt close to Janis. When he tells the story, he says, “She really cooled me out.”

Janis saw a need in John, and she met it. This is one of her abilities, part of her better nature. Even amid the uncertainties with Kozmic Blues, she manifests this generosity often enough to win the respect of most members of the band. When she turns on them, going on her star trip, ranting that she deserves better, that they don’t give her what she wants, they avoid her as best they can. Her worst outbursts are still reserved for strangers—the waiter who doesn’t like longhairs, the curious onlooker at the airport, the reporter who comes on too strong, the audiences who don’t get it.* Janis is incapable of loosing her real fury at anyone close to her, not even at the band that can’t find the way to become what she can’t describe but desperately wants it to be.

This is the persistent problem: Sam’s departure and John Till’s arrival haven’t solved the lack of direction in the music. John brings new life to some of the arrangements, but he is just one of seven electrons orbiting Janis’s nucleus in random paths, only occasionally falling into a pattern with the others that permits the energy of the whole to be exerted in a unified way. The Kozmic Blues Band has acquired a stubborn identity all its own, one that endures despite changes in personnel.

Just a year after Janis made the difficult decision to leave Big Brother, she is facing the probability that her new band may be a failure.

ON SEPTEMBER 1, at long last, we fly back to California. Except for a few weeks’ vacation in the spring, the Kozmic Blues Band has been on the road since the beginning of February. They have played six concerts in Europe and more than forty in the U.S. outside California, against just seven dates there, including the depressing four-night stand in San Francisco back in March.

With Big Brother, every homecoming felt like a celebration. Now we slip into town like thieves. Some of the musicians have homes in the city or Marin County, north across the Golden Gate Bridge, which has become the preferred destination for rockers abandoning the Haight. Janis retreats into her Noe Street apartment and the company of her closest friends.

The band members get just a week to rest before we fly to L.A. to tape a performance for a new rock-pop TV show called Music Scene that will debut later in the month. The concept is that each week the show will feature artists whose songs are at the top of the charts. Columbia has just released the Kozmic Blues album. The expectation is that Janis’s appearance will air as the record hits the charts and give it a boost.

Janis and the band rehearse in the ABC studio on a Tuesday and return to tape the show on Thursday. The musical acts will perform in a concert setting, with Janis, as the headliner, scheduled last. She will sing three songs, of which the producers will choose two to air on the show. The opening acts are the comedian Pat Paulsen, folk legend Pete Seeger, and the English bluesman John Mayall, who has recently introduced a quieter, acoustic version of his Bluesbreakers band.

These are the early days of videotape, and the technology is cumbersome. The cameras are larger than 35-millimeter film cameras and awkward to move. It’s a convention that they not be seen on-screen, so repositioning the cameras requires a break in the taping.

The taping goes slowly. The Committee actor Carl Gottlieb is writing for the show, so we have a friend in-house. Carl keeps us amused in the green room. He tells us, when we are the only ones in the room, that the director is “a deaf old fart” from New York who’s got himself on the show as a co-producer so he can direct when he wants to. The guy has hearing aids in both ears and he’s used to directing old-style musical reviews. Tommy Smothers fired this director from the Smothers Brothers TV show, Carl says. He is not exactly up to rock and roll.

Janis paces her drinking through the hours of waiting. We arrived at the studio at three P.M. It’s almost eleven when Janis’s turn comes at last, but somehow she is raring to go. She and the band take the stage, they plug in, and Janis says, “Are you ready?” From the control room, the old-fart director gives the okay. “Good,” Janis says, “’cause I’m only doing this once. One, two, three!” She kicks out her leg, the band launches into the first song, and the cameras barely get tape rolling in time. Janis and the band play three songs in a row with scarcely a moment to draw breath between numbers. The live audience is alive. By Carl Gottlieb’s account, knowing he has to get it with no retakes gives the director such a boost of adrenaline that he does his best work of the seventeen shows Music Scene produces before it is cancelled.

Once again, by pure luck, a break in the schedule makes it possible for me to attend this year’s Big Sur Folk Festival. It has become for me an annual ritual of rest and renewal. The connection I feel with old friends among the performers, with the music, with the California coast, reinforce me in my decision to leave the rock-and-roll road.

Joni Mitchell is here again, and she bewitches the Big Sur crowd with a song she has written about Woodstock, the first time she has sung it in public. The irony is that Joni didn’t attend the festival because her manager thought keeping a date on The Dick Cavett Show was more important. Mitchell’s remarkable achievement is that she has not only captured the spirit of Woodstock, based on the account she heard from Graham Nash, her current lover (he’s here in Big Sur with Crosby, Stills and Young), and what she saw on television, but she has crystallized the lesson of the gathering: We have got to get ourselves back to the Garden.

At the end of the week it’s back to work for Janis and Kozmic Blues. A week after taping Music Scene, they report once more to the Los Angeles studios of ABC-TV, this time to tape the singer Tom Jones’s weekly show, This Is Tom Jones. In the green room, a bar in the corner is doing lively business in midafternoon. Some members of the Committee are on this show too—it’s our year to connect with them in TV studios. Janis and I launch into catch-up conversation with the actors. The guys in the band remember them from the Cavett show. The green room is ours, the atmosphere relaxed and lively.

Before long, Jones himself, still getting mileage out of “It’s Not Unusual,” his big hit of a few years earlier, wanders in with a drink in his hand. He says hello to Janis and soon wanders out again. He seems uncomfortable around beatniks and rockers. He has a small corner of the youth audience, enough to need some top rock acts on his show, but Jones is already edging toward his later position as the darling of the blue-haired set in Las Vegas.

Janis, giving credit where it’s due, admires Jones’s singing, if not always his choice of material.

Tom Jones could’ve been a real heavyweight in the music biz. I mean he could’ve really meant something in the music biz. He’s that talented. He sold out the minute they came to him, instead of letting his talent grow.”

Janis Joplin

Janis will do two songs on the show. The first, a duet with Jones on “Raise Your Hand,” presents no problems. The unusual setup has a few members of the audience seated on the floor behind the singers, and the band in front of them. It makes sense when we see how the cameras shoot through the band, toward the singers and the audience beyond. As seen on the studio monitors, it works. Jones and Janis have fun swapping verses and the energy is good.

Janis’s second song is the wistful Rodgers and Hart tune “Little Girl Blue.” Sam Andrew and Mike Bloomfield’s arrangement has caught the interest of Jones’s producers. The art director has dressed a corner of the huge soundstage as a garden, complete with a white picket fence and a trellis archway covered with plastic vines and flowers. The idea is to have Janis wander through the garden while she sings, followed by a boom mike. The band will be out of sight behind a gauze scrim.

When the director explains the concept to Janis I expect her to reject it out of hand, which she does, emphatically. She is used to singing mike-in-hand in front of her band and that’s that. To my surprise, when she cools down she reconsiders. She agrees to give the plan a try if the stagehands will strip the tacky props from the set so she will sing on an empty stage, backed by the scrim, with a mike on a stand. She wants something to hold on to.

With these conditions met, Janis dutifully runs through the song several times so the director can work out the camera moves. She is intrigued by the novelty of doing a number as a television torch singer, but when we leave the studio after the rehearsal, she wonders aloud if she should call off the experiment.

On the day between the rehearsal and taping of the Jones show, Janis and the Kozmic Blues Band headline at the Hollywood Bowl. Just a year after Big Brother’s triumph at the Bowl, this is Janis’s first L.A. appearance with Kozmic Blues, and the controversy over the new band has aroused a lot of curiosity. The Bowl is sold out and the stars are right. For Janis and the boys, it is the most satisfying concert since the Albert Hall show. From the first number, the audience is unreservedly enthusiastic. We’re all so eager for approval, one good gig makes us giddy with joy.

The next day, the taping of the Tom Jones show goes smoothly. During “Little Girl Blue,” small spots of light float across the scrim behind Janis, like drifting stars. Janis is satisfied with her performance, but she won’t rest easy until she has seen it on the air, and the air date is almost three months away.

For this busy weekend in L.A., we have a road manager trainee in tow. Joe Crowley has some experience promoting rock concerts in Seattle but no time on the road. He keeps close by my side and appears to be absorbing the essentials of the job. The show at the Hollywood Bowl is as big as anything Joe will have to cope with on Janis’s fall schedule. As he follows me around, I tell him more than he ever wanted to know about being a road manager, with special attention to Janis’s problems and peculiarities. Joe is attentive and willing, and I figure he has an even chance of becoming adequate in the job.

On the road for a two-state, three-concert foray in the first week of October, I shadow Joe while he takes on most of the responsibilities, and he acquits himself well.

The last of the three shows, back in San Francisco for Bill Graham, involves nothing like the tensions of Janis’s first hometown appearance with Kozmic Blues back in the spring. The local fans know by now that they are getting something very different from Big Brother and they come anyway, if not in such passionate throngs as in the past.

The San Francisco gig is my last day on the job, and my twenty-ninth birthday to boot. During September, Janis has approached me a couple of times to ask if I will stay with her a while longer. She and Albert have decided to call it quits with Kozmic Blues when the booked gigs are completed. “Can’t you finish the tour?” she asks. These requests come from the little-girl side of her personality, at her most winsome, hardest to resist because you want to do anything for her. But I manage to resist, and I take some comfort now in knowing that I’m leaving Janis in her hometown, the city she loves. Abandoning her out on the road was unthinkable.

She makes the evening a send-off party for me. When we say good-bye after the show, I ask her to take it easy on Joe Crowley until he has a grip on the job. She gives me a hug and a kiss and she promises to be good. The next day I fly to New York, feeling guilty about leaving Janis while so many uncertainties beset her, but trusting that I have left her in competent, if untried, hands.

I STICK TO my decision to leave Janis because a new prospect beckons. During the summer, I confided in Bob Neuwirth when I was thinking about leaving the road, and he didn’t try to dissuade me from quitting. Bob put in a lot of hours talking with Janis in late-night bars while we were in New York this year, and he knows that her problems will persist until she takes responsibility for them.

Bob too is contemplating new horizons. For several years he has been prospecting the New York art scene, deferring his core talent—painting—to experiment with fluorescent-light sculptures and other forms of avant art. He has mingled with the Warhol crowd, and squired for a time Warhol’s ingenue-of-the-moment, Edie Sedgwick, but he always maintained his autonomy. Bob offered Edie an escape, when she needed it, from the fawning attention of the Warhol Factory group. Among the folk and rock musicians whose company Bobby prefers, Edie was welcomed as his girl and she was treated kindly.

Now, casting about for a project that will fully engage his creative energies, Bob has come up with an idea for an underground movie to be filmed in Paris. His concept is neither a new form of cinéma vérité nor a variation on Warhol’s often boring, would-be avant-garde filmic exercises. The movie will be a feature film with at least the semblance of a story. We will film in 16-millimeter with Pennebaker’s shoulder-held cameras. It will be guerrilla filmmaking, shooting on the run, unimpeded by such formalities as getting permits from the Parisian authorities. We will do everything from writing to filming to dealing with the money and production budgets. All this suits me to a T. For two years, I’ve been shooting Janis and her bands on the fly. I have edited my films, created sound tracks from Janis’s recordings, and shown them to the bands in my living room. Bobby’s movie sounds like the perfect way to expand my filmmaking skills.

Bob has a title, around which we will shape the film: It will be called The Fool of Paris, and the part of the fool, we hope, will be played by Michael J. Pollard, still coasting on his Oscar nomination two years earlier for best supporting actor in Bonnie and Clyde. Bobby connected with Michael the same day he saw Bonnie and Clyde in New York with Brice Marden, a painter we have known since he was married to Joan Baez’s older sister, Pauline. Bob and Brice saw the movie the week it opened. They went to Max’s Kansas City afterward for a drink, walked into the place, and there was Michael J. Pollard with his wife, Annie, sitting in a booth. Bob never missed a beat. He went straight over to Michael and said, “We just saw you in the fuckin’ movie, man! It’s the greatest movie ever made! Blah-blah-blah-blah-blah.” Bob hung out with Michael from that day forward.

When I arrive in New York after bidding farewell to Janis and Kozmic Blues, we spend time with Michael and Annie, a gentle beauty, in their West Village apartment. Michael is up for something off the wall, something that will make the powers that be in Hollywood think of casting him in a wider range of parts than replicas of C. W. Moss, driver for Bonnie and Clyde.

Bobby gets a copy of a genuine Hollywood screenplay from a guy named Harry, the son of a labor lawyer who hangs out on the edge of the movie business. Harry wants to break into Hollywood through the back door and create a career for himself that’s independent from his father. He’ll be our producer.

I read the screenplay to learn the style and the format, and I write a screenplay of sorts for The Fool of Paris, more like an extended outline, so we have something on paper to show potential investors. Meanwhile, Bobby is trolling Wall Street for venture capital. We lunch with young financial types who wish they had the courage to tune in, turn on, and jump into the tail end of the sixties. We offer them a way to do it vicariously, and we have no trouble getting their attention when we mention not only Michael J. Pollard but also Janis Joplin. Bobby has pitched the movie to Janis—and Albert—effectively enough that he has secured a “letter of intent” from Albert, which says if we get financing for The Fool of Paris, Janis will take part. We get a similar letter from Michael.

Neither Bobby nor I has ever paid much attention to the national economy, but we get a primer from the Wall Street boys. In the spring of the year, while we were in Europe with the Kozmic Blues Band, the Dow Jones Industrials were flirting with the mythical 1,000 level. In October, the DJIA is around 850. By December it falls below 800. With every slip, the Wall Street playboys grow more cautious. Financial analysts are beginning to use the R-word: recession. While our potential investors wait for the economy to turn around, Bobby and I wind up most of our evenings at Max’s Kansas City, praying for an upturn.

Janis’s appearance on This Is Tom Jones is broadcast on December 4. “Little Girl Blue” is better than I expected. It was almost impossible to hear Janis’s voice on the huge ABC soundstage, but on TV she comes across soft and clear. Unseen behind the scrim, John Till adds his own poignant embellishments to the guitar obbligato composed by Sam Andrew and Mike Bloomfield, while Janis puts herself completely into the song. When she gets to the lines, “Oh honey, I know how you feel, I know you feel that you’re through / Ah, sit there, count your fingers, my unhappy little girl blue,” she embodies painfully, for me, the blue, unhappy, little-girl side of Janis.

While Bobby and I scout the concrete canyons for film funding, Janis and Kozmic Blues are touring the country. In October, Janis finally performs in Austin, at the University of Texas gym. In November, she’s in the South and Midwest. On the weekend after the Tom Jones broadcast, she is in Georgia and Virginia. By great good fortune, these bookings keep Janis from appearing at the Altamont Speedway in California’s central valley for a one-day rock festival organized by the Grateful Dead and the Rolling Stones. The bands hope Altamont will be Woodstock West, but the name Altamont becomes infamous as the antithesis of its peaceful forerunners, thanks to a crowd stoned on drugs, Hells Angels stoned on beer and who knows what else, and escalating violence that results in the stabbing death at the hand of an Angel of a whacked-out fan brandishing a pistol. Looking back on the event, Bill Graham will recall, “It was like a concentration camp for a day.”

Just a year after their uncertain debut at the Stax-Volt show in Memphis, Janis and the Kozmic Blues Band play their last concert, in Madison Square Garden. When I was a boy, the name had a magic ring for me. The Garden was where I saw the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus and the World Championship Rodeo, hosted by Gene Autry. Back then, the Garden was at Eighth Avenue and 50th Street, where it had moved in 1925 from its original location on Madison Square, farther downtown. Janis’s concert is my first visit to the new Garden, on Eighth Avenue between 31st and 32nd Streets. It opened in this location just last year, following the criminal demolition of the great public spaces of Pennsylvania Station.

The new indoor stadium is vast, modern, and sold out. The crowd is liberally sprinkled with celebrities, including New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath, with whom Janis caroused the night before.*

Backstage, Janis gleefully boasts that Broadway Joe couldn’t keep up with her hang-out pace. Linda Gravenites is back, she tells me, before I spy Linda backstage. She made me this outfit, Janis says, twirling like a ballerina, and she made the outfit I’m wearing to the party after. Wait until you see it. It’s all black and sexy.

You’re all white and sexy, I tell her. She laughs, and I realize how much I’ve missed her.

The band regales me with stories about the fall tour. Joe Crowley is still road-managing the show, but when he’s out of earshot the boys in the band tell me that my guarded confidence in Joe was premature. After I left, the self-assurance he manifested while I was showing him the ropes evaporated in the face of the first routinely difficult days he encountered on the road. The unexpected threw him for a loop and he found it hard to relate to the members of the band, who were accustomed to my insistent style. “People expected to be ordered out of bed, and if they weren’t they didn’t get up,” is how Terry Clements puts it.

The band reacted to Joe’s lack of aptitude by taking over the driving and many of the other logistical chores, leaving Joe to handle the box office during the concerts. As the musicians tell me about assuming these responsibilities, they try to make it sound like a great burden, but they are obviously proud of themselves.

The decision to disband the group has had a unifying effect on them. This belated coming together, a twilight relaxing of tensions, has helped them achieve their most satisfying musical moments since the European tour. A recent gig in Nashville was a highlight, and they’re raring to go out with a bang here in the Garden.

Not present for the swan song is Luis Gasca, who departed a few weeks ago. He is replaced by a trumpet player named Dave Woodward, the fourth to play with Kozmic Blues.

The Butterfield Blues Band opens the show. The Kozmic Blues Band plays a couple of instrumentals on their own, raising the energy before Janis comes onstage. Janis leads the audience in a rousing cheer for the Jets, but Namath hasn’t recovered his full vitality and they will lose their game the next day.

Late in her set, Janis sings Bo Diddley’s eponymous classic, “Bo Diddley,” as a duet with her fellow Texan, Johnny Winter. The song becomes an extended jam when Paul Butterfield joins them onstage, and the response of the audience is ecstatic.

At a postconcert party given by Clive Davis in his penthouse apartment on Central Park West, Janis finally meets another of Columbia’s gold-record stars. Like her backstage encounter with Joan Baez at Newport, the meeting with Bob Dylan is the coming together of two fundamentally different life-forms. They shake hands, speak haltingly, fall into an awkward silence, and go their separate ways.

Dylan is in his recluse mode. Once he finds a quiet place to sit he seems to disappear. I am reminded of a scheme he and his first road manager, Victor Maimudes, conceived at a concert on the upswing of Bob’s lone-troubadour fame. Besieged by fans outside the stage door, they came up with a fantasy solution: They would enter and leave the shows in an armored personnel carrier, dispensing autographs through a slot in the side. Here, Bob’s armor is invisible, but just as effective.

Janis tries to keep on rocking despite the lack of energy at the party, which after all is observing the demise of her band, but it becomes, for her, an early night.

With the Kozmic Blues Band, nobody gave it a chance, because nobody knew what to expect. Everybody was used to a bunch of little white boys up there playin’ some guitars and basses all loud and shit. They weren’t used to people playing music. And Janis wasn’t a rock-and-roll player, she was singing black music. So we came up with a band that played that kind of music, and it freaked some people out. . . . If they’d of just got out of the fuckin’ way and let the band play, we’d of been one of the baddest bands around.”

Snooky Flowers

The next day’s Times is generous in its praise and adds a final review to those that appreciate the Kozmic Blues Band. The critic, Mike Jahn, calls Janis’s set “an excellent performance.” “When her new band was first heard,” he writes, “its main fault was that energy was being sacrificed for precision. . . . That criticism did not apply last night. At the Garden, Miss Joplin’s accomplices gave a powerful and spontaneously happy display of brass blues and rock, and she let herself go in a very exciting way.”

Janis stays in New York for a few days after the concert, to confer with Albert about her future, and I spend an evening with her in her hotel room. The hotel, One Fifth Avenue, is within shouting distance of Washington Square Park, where Sunday gatherings marked the beginning of the folk boom. This fall, Janis decided she deserves something classier than the Chelsea.

At the Garden and the wrap party, Janis was in her public persona, expecting and prepared for close scrutiny. Here she is unguarded, and I am struck by how much worse she looks than when I left her in October. She is heavier; her face is puffy and her skin is clammy when I hug her hello. We reminisce about our times on the road and explore ideas about the part she might play in The Fool of Paris. She tells me she’s buying a house in Larkspur, in Marin County. She is excited and happy that Linda Gravenites has returned from London. They plan to move into the Larkspur house before leaving for a holiday in Brazil to check out Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. Her manic mood as she tells me how much she’s looking forward to moving into the house and the trip to Rio makes me realize that these things are all that she has to look forward to. For the first time since she joined Big Brother in June 1966, Janis’s career prospects are a blank slate. Even when she was touring with Big Brother in the fall of 1968, after she had decided to leave them, she was looking forward to the creating the band of her dreams. National touring was still relatively new to her, she was playing cities and venues that were new and exciting—the Hollywood Bowl, the Rose Bowl, Houston, Dallas—and it was still Big Brother. This fall, since she and Albert decided to give up on the Kozmic Blues Band, she has been repeating a routine she already knows, with no hope for a better tomorrow, a brighter future. Now even the familiar routine of touring is over.

Linda and the house are the only subjects that light Janis up, arousing her characteristic energy. When we turn to something else, she fades. We order drinks from room service. Vodka and Dubonnet on the rocks, a combination Janis is testing. But alcohol alone can’t satisfy her. Without much warning she gets out her works and proceeds to shoot up, sitting at the desk. It is the first time I have seen Janis get off, but not the first time I have witnessed the act. I will never forget a scene in Paris, in a cheap Left Bank hotel room, where a very young English junkie needed a fix so badly that he burst into tears when he couldn’t find a vein. A friend helped him, then held his head when the English kid gratefully vomited with the first rush. I have a short list of friends lost to heroin. I see the habit as degrading and destructive, the force behind it as insidiously malevolent, but I see it from the outside, with a perspective very different from an addict’s.

Janis is not surrounded by innocents. Albert, Bob Neuwirth, myself, Nick Gravenites, Mike Bloomfield, and others she turns to for advice have pertinent knowledge to draw on. Many of us drink too much, and we underplay the importance of alcohol in Janis’s pattern of self-abuse, but no one close to her, except other junkies—after Sam’s departure, there was no one in Kozmic Blues or the road crew with hard-drug experience—condones or approves her use of smack. When she asks us for advice, or when we offer it unbidden, we tell her, We love you, we care about you, we’ll do whatever we can for you. We want you to quit, but we can’t quit for you. You have to do that yourself.

Tonight I watch Janis get off without comment. The hit pleases her but seems to have little effect beyond making her more loquacious about her latest plans. She claims to be full of ideas for a new band that will replace Kozmic Blues, the group that will finally give her what she wants from a backup band, but much of her confidence is generated by the heroin, and underneath the brag talk I see a little girl lost.

As if she can sense my doubts, Janis’s rap trails off and she cooks up a second dose. I watch with morbid fascination as she urges the needle home again. This time I remember a friend who died several years earlier. Teddy Bernstein changed in a few months from a fast-fingered New York guitar picker who loved a joint of good grass into a death’s-head caricature of his former self who dreamily entreated me to give heroin a try. “It’s beautiful, man. It’s good for you.” A few months later he was dead of an overdose. In a perverse way, remembering the speed of Teddy’s decay gives me some hope for Janis. She has been flirting with heroin since I first knew her. This year the affair has become a full-fledged romance, but she doesn’t look so bad, compared to Teddy in his final days.

I feel a third presence in the hotel room. Janis’s habit’s coercive power is so strong, so insidious, it takes on a separate reality. Heroin is an entity in the room and it is possessively jealous of Janis. It demands and cajoles, requiring constant acknowledgment and regular maintenance. For a short time after the monkey is fed, Janis can give me her full attention. Even then she is speaking from within the embrace of the drug. I feel powerless against the invisible presence and I’m afraid Janis may never muster the strength to banish it. For the first time I consider the possibility that she may die before her time and that death may come by her own hand, accidentally or deliberately.

Heroin has some payoffs. Of course the negative side always begins to outweigh it by so much, but in the beginning, when one first uses heroin, there’s a certain kind of freedom that one gets. . . . All of a sudden all the pain and worry and stress is removed. And you’re totally relaxed, and you feel good, and you don’t have to do anything, you’re not tense, and . . . for a performer, for someone as high-strung as Janis, I’m sure for a long time it really had a very positive payoff. Then the debilitating effects start to take over.”

David Getz

The awareness makes me too uncomfortable to stay. I’ve got to get out of here. How can I make my excuses? As it turns out, I don’t have to.

The second hit gets Janis off for real. She curls up on the bed like a kitten who has just had a bowl of warm milk. Soon she is over and out. I leave her in the smell of cigarette smoke and alcohol and sweat and patchouli oil and I grab a taxi in the night, glad I left the road when I did, but sad too, because I’m not sure I will want to see Janis again. I love her too much to watch her destroy herself.

It isn’t until much later that I remember something she said that evening, between her two hits. She promised me she is going to kick heroin.