Brazilian Interlude:
Manha de Carnival

IN FEBRUARY 1970, Janis and Linda went to Rio de Janeiro for Carnival. Later that year I came into possession of a tape recording of a press conference that took place at the Copacabana Palace Hotel in Rio, where Janis was interviewed by representatives of the local press. On the tape, she sounds like the old Janis from the early days of Big Brother, but without the naïveté. Once again she represents the San Francisco music community as an articulate spokeswoman. She is focused on the future, enjoying a vacation but not seeking a prolonged escape. And she has fallen in love. David Niehaus is an American traveling in Brazil. They met on the Copacabana beach. During the press conference he is by Janis’s side.

Janis is disappointed to learn that the official Carnival lasts less than a week and that many of the events can be enjoyed only by tourists and well-to-do Brazilians—those with enough money to buy tickets. She is trying to organize a free concert in a park in Rio with “Carnival lasts all year long” as its theme. She talks of the early days in San Francisco when the rock bands gave free concerts in Golden Gate Park on Sundays, “and everybody would come and dance, and it was beautiful.”

There are no reminders of the wan and lonely girl I left in a New York hotel room only two months before. Janis is at her best, thoroughly comfortable with the press, fielding the questions confidently, revealing something about herself in every answer.

Q: Why did you come to Rio?

J.J.: Because I saw the movie Black Orpheus.

Q: Will you come back?

J.J.: I’d love to. I don’t think I’m gonna leave. (Laughter.)

Q: What do you think about Vietnam?

J.J.: I think each individual person ought to live the best life they can, to themselves and to other people, and if we did that we wouldn’t have any Vietnam. Everybody’d be happy and we’d all be dancing.

Q: What do you think about young people dropping out of school?

J.J.: Just keep your values straight. Find out what’s important to you. Learning how to multiply may not be as important as learning how to communicate.

Q: Do you like Brazil?

J.J.: I’m really glad I came, because people seem nicer to each other here than in New York. In New York they’re very aggressive and here people seem more gentle. I think it’s because of the sun.

Q: If you weren’t a singer, what would you be?

J.J. (without hesitation): I’d be a beatnik. I am anyway, only I make more money.

Someone explains to a puzzled Brazilian reporter that “beatnik” is the same as “hippie.” Janis overhears and quickly sets him straight: “Beatnik and hippie are different,” she says. “Beatniks are older.”

Q: Do you want to have children? If so, how many?

J.J.: Someday I’d like to have children. Every woman wants to have children. But the most important thing is don’t have too many or we’re gonna outgrow the world.

Q: Will your voice last for as long as you’d like?

J.J.: My voice is better now than it was four years ago. It’s getting stronger. And besides, I don’t care if I lose my voice. If I lost my voice I’d be something else. I don’t want to be a singer for the rest of my life. I’d be a beach bum. I don’t care, as long as I’m having a good time.

Before she went to Carnival, Janis had been struggling to kick heroin. Linda Gravenites’s vision of the trip was for Janis to experience a great time without dope. But there were lapses, and they cost Janis a great deal. She was using in Brazil. David Niehaus helped Janis get clean while they were together. Linda flew home ahead of Janis to oversee the carpenters working on the house in Larkspur. When David and Janis arrived at the airport in Rio to fly together to San Francisco, David was detained for overstaying his visa in Brazil. Janis went on alone, stopped over in L.A., and scored from her connection there. When David got to Larkspur two days later, Janis was stoned. For him, this was the last straw, and he left.

Later, when Janis spoke of David Niehaus, she described him as the lost love of her life. He was a man outside the usual pattern of her conquests, neither pretty boy nor mountain man, a man she admired, one who might have been able to influence her and guide her in the right direction. David was on his way to Africa when they met in Rio. He wanted to take her to Nepal, to the Himalayas. He was convinced seeing the Himalayas would change Janis’s life, but in this hope he may have been projecting his own experience on her. In the end, it wasn’t anything Janis and David did together so much as his leaving her that had the greatest, the most beneficial influence on her. The loss of this man who moved her so deeply, her new love, followed by the departure of Linda Gravenites, her longtime roommate, advisor, and best friend, who refused to live any longer in the company of heroin, was what finally forced Janis to confront her addiction and find within herself the strength to bring it under control.

“When I came back from England, she asked me what my attitude toward dope was then. That was the first thing she asked me. I said as long as I think you’ll quit sometime, I can stand it. But if I think it’s gonna be all the time forever, I can’t do it. You know. So, as long as I believe you’ll quit, I’ll stick around. Otherwise I’m gone. You know, and when she stopped to cop on the way home from Rio after her big quitting . . . I don’t know whether she believed me, that I wouldn’t stick around for her. Which was one of the reasons, of course, that I left, was for shock value, saying, ‘This is what you’re doing.’”

Linda Gravenites