T for Texas
EARLIER IN THE tour, before we boarded the Festival Express, Janis asked me to come with her to Texas for Threadgill’s birthday party. She doesn’t want to have to keep track of her ticket and deal with changing planes in Dallas at the crack of dawn, and all the things I handle on the road. She wants me along for companionship as well, a friend from the new life she has made for herself to show around the places where her music began, and because it will impress the shit out of her Austin friends that she’s traveling with her own personal road manager. She promises that we’ll have a chance to play music with these Austin friends, but even without that assurance I’m already on board.
What I know about Ken Threadgill is that he’s a country yodeler who sings the songs of Jimmie Rodgers, the Singing Brakeman, America’s Blue Yodeler, which focuses my interest. Rodgers has been my special hero since I found a 78-rpm record of his in the closet of my father’s study in New York. “Hobo Bill’s Last Ride,” the label said. “Solo with guitar.” Since then, I have bought and learned a bunch of Rodgers’s songs.
For Janis, Threadgill was a mentor and an inspiration. In his Austin gas-station bar and music club, she absorbed the roots of country music and bluegrass. Threadgill motivated her to play the guitar to accompany herself, and among Janis’s fondest memories are her early experiences playing in his bar for a couple of bucks and all the beer you could drink.
It’s the first time we’ve traveled together, just the two of us. We leave Honolulu on a red-eye, nonstop to Dallas. After drinks and dinner, we burrow under our first-class blankets against the cool cabin air. We try to watch the movie, a turkey called Krakatoa: East of Java. (Never mind that Krakatoa is actually west of Java.) Janis is feeling affectionate. We make out during the movie and we fall asleep with her head on my shoulder.
In Dallas we change planes—it’s very early—for the hop to Austin, where we’re met by Julie Joyce, an old friend of Janis’s since her brief stint at the University of Texas. It was Julie who alerted Janis to the date of Threadgill’s party and urged her to come. Julie is on the short side, with dark hair and glasses. She looks at Janis in a way that suggests a history between them and uncertainty about how Janis will respond to her now.
With Julie is a friend of hers, a blonde named Margaret. To meet us this early in the morning, they stayed up all night. Margaret is quiet and Julie is drunk. The reunion between Janis and Julie is muted by Julie’s intoxication and Janis’s exhaustion. Margaret’s role becomes evident when we get to the car—she’s the one who’s sober enough to drive.
Where’s the party? Janis wants to know. Threadgill’s bar is way too small for the expected crowd. When Janis sang there with a few friends, they packed the place and played to fewer than fifty people. The birthday party, which is billed as the KT Jubilee, is expected to draw five hundred or more. It’s being held at an old barn out on the edge of Austin. The Party Barn, it’s called, “out by the Y at Oak Hill,” Julie says.
That’s all we can absorb right now. Margaret and Julie take us to the Holiday Inn, a circular tower by the town lake, where Janis and I gratefully collapse into our rooms and crash for the rest of the day.
Julie and Margaret come back about six in the evening to pick us up, accompanied now by Julie’s husband, Chuck—medium height, long hair, comfortable presenting himself as a member of Austin’s folkie-hippie community, which is still small at this time. Margaret and the Joyces are on the organizing committee. They’ve been out to the Party Barn, and there’s a hitch in the plans. During the day, a rumor that Janis is in town to attend the Jubilee has run wild. There are several thousand people gathered at the site and more on the way.
Janis wants her appearance at the party be a surprise to Threadgill, not because she wants to make a splashy entrance but because she doesn’t want to steal the spotlight from a man she loves and admires. She’s going to borrow a guitar and sing just two songs.
Janis is crushed to hear that the surprise may be blown, but Julie, who is more sober today, says the rumor about Janis’s presence is just that, a rumor. No one is sure it’s true. Janis takes hope that we can salvage some element of surprise. We discuss our options and come up with a plan. If we arrive at the Party Barn after dark, we can sneak Janis to the stage. So far so good, but it won’t be dark for another few hours. What do we do in the meantime? This being the cocktail hour, we hit on the obvious solution and repair to the Holiday Inn’s cocktail lounge, which is located on the top floor of the tower, with a sweeping view of Austin and the lake.
On a small stage in one corner of the lounge, a diminutive young man with an electric guitar and a rhythm machine is providing background music. As the waitress delivers our first round of drinks, the singer launches into Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee.” Well, “launches” gives the wrong impression. The little guy more like strolls into the song.
At this point in time there is no connection in the public mind between Janis and “Bobby McGee.” Even if the little guy recognized Janis, there’s no reason he would think to play this song for her. Bob Neuwirth learned the song last fall and taught it to Janis. She performed it in Nashville in December with Kozmic Blues. The song wasn’t on the set list but Janis decided to do it on the spur of the moment, a spontaneous decision that had the best possible outcome: The band found the groove and Janis’s first public performance of “Bobby McGee” got a rousing reception in the capital of country music. She played it again at Madison Square Garden in December. Apart from the audiences at these two concerts, and at Janis’s shows this summer, the “Bobby McGee” that the public knows is Roger Miller’s recording. Kristofferson’s first solo album is only now in stores and making few waves. So why does the little guy pick this song to sing in this Holiday Inn on the day when Janis will sing it for Ken Threadgill at his birthday party? Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world . . . The cosmic disc jockey is on the job.
When the low-powered rendition comes to an end, Janis leans into the table and confides to us, “That guy can’t do that song worth a damn. Wait until you hear me. I can do that song.”
We time our departure from the Holiday Inn to approach the Party Barn as dusk is deepening. Oak Hill is just beyond the edge of Austin, in the countryside, the rising glow of the capital city behind us.
The mob of Janis-rumor-fans is alert. They peer into every car that approaches the site, and there’s no way to keep them from peering into ours. Janis is riding shotgun, her preferred seat. It’s too late to get her into the backseat where she could scrunch down to hide.
The car is mobbed, but so long as we keep rolling, we can still make progress. We want to get as close to the stage as possible. It’s set up outside the barn, and the pasture is fence-to-fence full of people.
Our only ally is the darkness. Beyond the crush of people around the car—on the car, some of them—no one knows what’s happening. When the crowd gets too dense to go any farther, we abandon the car and try to form a protective ring around Janis. Forming a protective ring with four people and trying to keep the mob from grabbing hold of the person in the middle, while simultaneously moving through a crowd as densely packed as rush-hour commuters on the New York subway, is challenging. But I am a New Yorker. I know how to deal with rush-hour crowds. I lead the way, weaving through the crush with Janis holding on to my belt, the others clustered around her.
There is no protected area around the stage, no “backstage,” no semblance of a green room. Behind the stage, the crowd is thinner—you can’t see the performers from here. We find a small area of sanctuary, a patch of grass, stomped by many feet, where we catch our breath. Chuck has brought a guitar for Janis. Janis is shaken by the intensity of our passage through the throng. Still, she has observed one aspect of the gathering that piques her interest: Look at all the pretty boys, she says, surveying the young men within range.
During our cocktail holding pattern in the Holiday Inn lounge, I had time to observe Julie’s friend Margaret and learn a little about her. She’s smart and she’s funny, and she’s good-looking. And smart. For me, smart triples the appeal of good-looking. Margaret graduated from UT Austin in the spring and she’s headed for law school in the fall, which impresses me no end. I took a course at Harvard called “The Role of Law in Anglo-American History” that held my interest as few others managed to do. I thought about going to law school. I fantasized becoming a latter-day Clarence Darrow or Oliver Wendell Holmes, but the folk revival seduced me from the halls of academe.
Chuck and Julie huddle with Janis as she tunes up the guitar, which frees me to pay more attention to Margaret. We can’t see much from here, so when Margaret says she’s going to try to get to the back of the crowd, I tag along.
We circle around to a good vantage point. The PA system, intended for a smaller gathering, is marginal but adequate.
Bands have been playing all day, a lively mix of country-flavored folk and folk-flavored country and just plain good old country music, but Threadgill himself is the main event. When he is introduced, the crowd roars. He sings “T for Texas,” Jimmie Rodgers’s biggest hit, and his yodel soars above the crowd. I find most performers of Rodgers’s songs wanting, but Threadgill does the Blue Yodeler proud.
Between songs in the middle of Threadgill’s set, Janis steps out on the stage, provoking an even louder outburst from the crowd. She appears to take Threadgill completely unaware, and he is clearly delighted, grinning from ear to ear.
“Kenneth was as big a ham as Janis, and the fact that five thousand people showed up instead of five hundred just tickled him to death and it didn’t matter why. You know what I mean? It was just a big rock-roaring success. I mean it was everything he had ever hoped for.”
Margaret Moore
When the applause dies down, Janis places around Threadgill’s neck a flowered lei she has brought from Hawaii. “I brought you a nice Hawaiian lei,” she says into the mike. Threadgill is tickled by this gesture and embarrassed by the play on words. His affection for Janis is manifest, even from our vantage point at the back of the crowd.
I’ve got a couple of songs to sing for you, Janis says. She tells the crowd that the songs are by a songwriter named Kris Kristofferson. If you haven’t heard of him, you will, she says. She sings “Bobby McGee,” and the great crowd gathered in front of the barn in the hot Texas night falls as close to silent as that many people can get.
Janis told the truth when she said she knew how to sing “Bobby McGee.” A great singer draws you in and connects you with the emotional content of the song. This ability, this gift, is at the heart of Janis’s popularity. She bares her emotions and makes the song her own. With “Bobby McGee,” she turns the story around, telling it from a woman’s point of view without changing a word, making it even more poignant than Kristofferson’s original recording.
Janis follows up with Kris’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down.” During the song, Margaret and I make our way back to the stage, to be there when Janis comes off.
“I just remember that she was just awesome. Her version of those two songs was just real impressive. I can remember sitting there thinking, Oh, my God, this is really memorable.”
Margaret Moore
When Janis leaves the stage, her manner is noticeably different than at the end of her own shows. Here, she isn’t basking in the ovation as a personal reward. She came here to honor a man she loves and respects, and she is satisfied that she has achieved what she came to do.
Somehow, while Margaret and I were out in the crowd, Janis has managed to pluck a semi-long-haired pretty boy from the mob. She is ready to get out of the crush and take the pretty boy with her. With Chuck and Julie we gather in a bunch and make our way to the car, Janis noticed by all and greeted by some, but our progress is easier now.
Performing at the Jubilee has Janis ready for some late-night rambles in Austin. It’s past closing time for public establishments, but we have our own bottle of tequila and it fuels the search for a suitable living room. Our first stop is a house that belongs to a husband-and-wife couple of liberal lawyers who own a music club called the Split Rail, where Threadgill’s band has been a fixture and where Margaret first heard him play. The lawyers offer drinks, which we accept, and Janis gets Chuck to let me play his guitar. Janis is in listening mode here, content to let me pick and sing, and she seems pleased by the Texans’ appreciative reaction to finding that Janis has a road manager who can hold his own with Ken Threadgill when it comes to singing a Jimmie Rodgers song, as well as a couple by Merle Haggard.
One guitar isn’t enough, so we move along to Chuck and Julie’s, where we can trade songs back and forth. Janis has more than music on her mind, though, and before long she lets it be known she’d like to head for the Holiday Inn. We bid the Joyces good-bye and navigate to the tower by the lake, where we discharge Janis and her catch of the day. When Margaret and I are alone in the car I take my fate in my hands and ask her to come up to my room. For a drink, I say, holding up the bottle of tequila, which has an inch or so left. This blatant euphemism for what I’ve really got in mind tickles Margaret’s Texas sense of humor. She says yes, and if we catch a few winks sometime before the hazy Texas dawn, they number fewer than forty.
I learn from Margaret that Janis told Julie she had to promise me a chance to play music in order to get me to come with her to Austin. Which wasn’t true, but the message Julie got was that this guy’s a VIP: If he’s not happy, Janis won’t be happy. Behind the stage at Threadgill’s Jubilee, when I was availing myself of the barbecue and beans and beer laid out for the performers and partygoers, Janis extolled my musical talents to Chuck and Julie and Margaret. As Margaret interpreted the state of things, “I thought it was pretty obvious that she was smitten with you, so I was not looking for attention from you.” By now Margaret has figured out that Janis’s concern for my welfare stems from friendship, not romance—always a fine line for Janis, but one she has chosen to draw a little more clearly this year.
I would gladly extend my reservation in this particular Holiday Inn indefinitely, trusting room service to keep us fed, but I’m a road manager and Janis has a gig later today in San Diego. When I leave Austin, I’m in love.
After our smooching on the red-eye, and what Margaret told me, I wonder if Janis is maybe a little jealous, but she hasn’t forgotten her resolution not to get involved with anyone on her payroll. On our flight to San Diego, she makes a point of letting me know she approves of Margaret. After all, I’ve had the good sense to fall for a Texas girl.
A week later, Janis receives in the mail a photograph of Kenneth Threadgill leaning against the bar at Threadgill’s. On the back, he has written “Threadgill’s, 7/15/70, to Janis from Kenneth Threadgill.” In the photo, he’s wearing a plain white apron and around his neck is the lei that Janis gave him at the Jubilee.