That Old Gang of Mine
JULY 11, 1970: Sports Arena, San Diego
JULY 12: Exposition Hall, Santa Clara County Fairgrounds, San Jose
JULY 17: Albuquerque, N.M.
AUG. 1: Forest Hills Tennis Stadium, Queens, N.Y.—RAINED OUT
AUG. 2: Forest Hills Tennis Stadium—played rain date
AUG. 3: The Dick Cavett Show, NYC
AUG. 5: Ravinia Park, Highland Park, Ill.
AUG. 6: Peace Festival, Shea Stadium, Queens, N.Y.
AUG. 8: Capitol Theater, Port Chester, N.Y.
AUG. 11: Garden State Arts Center, Holmdel, N.J.
AUG. 12: Harvard Stadium, Cambridge, Mass.
BEFORE JANIS AND I left the Full Tilt boys to bake on the sands of Waikiki, I put George Ostrow and Vince Mitchell in charge of getting everyone on the plane to San Diego. We were in touch once by phone while I was in Austin, but it’s a relief to arrive at the San Diego Sports Arena and find everything in place. The Full Tilt band is here, the equipment is set up, everybody’s ready to boogie.
The promoter, Jim Pagni, has been running rock concerts in San Diego since Janis and Big Brother played here. He has his act together, so I can devote some of my attention to a task that Albert has given me: The time to record Janis with the Full Tilt Boogie Band is drawing near, and Albert and Janis have chosen Paul Rothchild to produce the record. If—it’s a big if—if Paul and Janis agree that they can work together. Janis’s failure to form comfortable working relationships with her previous record producers has vexed both Janis and Albert. This time around they want to assure true compatibility—insofar as that’s possible—before they set foot in the studio.
When Albert tells me that Paul is in line to produce Janis, I wonder why he didn’t think of Paul sooner. I wonder why I didn’t think of Paul sooner. Paul is an independent producer now. He can work for any label. Albert says Janis thought of it. She remembers Paul from his effort to create a blues band around her and Taj Mahal and Al Wilson back in 1966. She remembers that Paul liked her singing.
Albert is aware of my friendship with Paul. He is asking me to act as an intermediary, to use that friendship to connect, or reconnect, Paul and Janis. He knows I can’t determine the outcome, but he hopes I can smooth the way. I told him I’ll do whatever I can.
In San Diego, that’s not much. The other band on the program is Big Brother and the Holding Company, with Nick Gravenites on lead vocals, so it’s a reunion with old friends. Paul gets to hear Janis live with Full Tilt. He likes what he hears, but backstage, before and after, there are too many distractions and not enough time for him to do more than exchange a few words with Janis.
The next day we fly up to San Francisco, and we go straight from the airport to San Jose for an evening concert there with the Joy of Cooking. We’ve been on the road for more than six weeks. Janis and I are fresh from Austin, where neither of us got enough sleep. Janis wants to get home to her house in Larkspur and sleep the clock around, if that’s what it takes to revive her, but even in this condition, powered by Full Tilt Boogie, she musters the energy to put on a first-class show at the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds. “I haven’t had so much fun since the first year with Big Brother!” she shouts as she takes the stage.
It’s late when we all get home. Paul stays with me in my Powell Street pad. In the morning, we’re groggy and Paul is concerned. He’s been around Janis for two days and he has no idea if they can communicate on the level that will be necessary if they’re going to make a record together.
Paul is convinced that Janis is an even better singer than either the world or she herself knows. His goal is to introduce her to the truly great singer inside her and to get that singer on tape for the first time. To do that, they will have to bond like soulmates. He reveals these concerns over a late breakfast, and the need to help him connect with Janis takes on new meaning for me. This isn’t just another job for Paul. He wants to take Janis to the next level.
I’m apprehensive about calling Janis this morning. We had a passing spat about something or other before we left the concert last night, but the minute Janis answers the phone, my worries go out the window. Everything is sunshine and roses. Janis is happy to be home and all is right with the world. Come up to the house anytime, she says. And bring a bottle of rum.
By the time we get ourselves across the Golden Gate to Larkspur, it’s afternoon. Janis gives Paul the nickel tour of the house and we go out to the long, narrow deck, where we sit in the filtered light of sunshine peeking through the redwoods. There is a short period of halting conversation as Janis and Paul size each other up. Both prefer to approach the matter at hand obliquely. Nobody’s saying, Well, do you think we can work together? but everybody knows why we’re here.
Janis, ever the gracious hostess, remembers the bottle of rum we delivered into Lyndall’s hands upon arrival. While in Hawaii, Janis learned how to make piña coladas from the bartender at the Hilton on Waikiki, and she is eager to demonstrate this new skill. She disappears into the kitchen and comes back a few minutes later with a pitcher and four glasses. The drinks go down easily. They’re like tropical milk shakes. Nothing to it, Janis says. Pineapple juice and coconut cream and rum whipped up in the blender with ice. She brings out her Gibson Hummingbird and sings “Bobby McGee” for Paul. Before long, it’s time for another pitcher of piña coladas.
The conversation is rolling nonstop. Nothing about making records, nothing about business. The doorbell rings and Lyndall conducts Shel Silverstein out to the deck. Just dropping by to say howdy. If we needed another catalyst, beyond the jolly milk shakes, to move the gathering toward unrestrained merriment, Shel fills the bill. He writes and draws cartoons for Playboy, he’s a poet, a composer, a songwriter—hell, he’s got more talents than our favorite jack-of-all-hipness, Bob Neuwirth. Shel wrote “A Boy Named Sue” for Johnny Cash, and “The Unicorn,” which gave the Irish Rovers their biggest hit. He’s currently working on the music for a film about the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly, which will star Kris Kristofferson and Waylon Jennings. (Shel’s songs, sung by Waylon, will survive the Hollywood process, but Kris is replaced by Mick Jagger.)
Shel gets right in the spirit of the piña coladas. He picks up Janis’s guitar and plays a couple of raucous tunes of his own creation, and we laugh until we ache.
When we run out of rum, we adjourn to Sausalito to drink dinner at the No Name Bar, where we find ourselves seated next to an exceptionally tall fellow who looks as if he may dwell somewhere deep in the redwoods, emerging only to have a meal and a drink in town on special occasions. He is clad in leather garments, apparently of his own making, and he has a few leather hats on his table. Paul asks him, “Do you make those hats, man?” He says, “Yeah, I make ’em.” “Well, can we see some?” He stands up, which takes a while—he’s got to be seven feet tall—and he goes outside to his car and comes back with a knapsack full of headgear.
Paul takes an interest in a leather visor that would be great for playing poker under a bare lightbulb. We’re all trying hats on, including Janis. I’m taken by a kind of a hippie hat with a flat brim and a low crown. If the brim was rolled a little, it might look sort of Western, like those low-crown cowboy hats in Western TV shows from the fifties, which bore no resemblance to anything anyone ever wore in the Old West. I roll the brim, and it promises to hold the roll. I put the hat on, and everybody says, Boy, that looks great. Janis gets the idea that she’ll buy it for me. At first I’m reluctant to accept this generous impulse because I’m not sure I can become a hat person. I know I can’t accept the gift and never wear it. But Janis has her heart set on buying me this hat and she pays the guy as I examine the hat inside and out. I find no maker’s mark, so I say “Hey, man, do you have a pen?” He has just the thing, a Rapidograph with indelible ink. “Put your mark on it,” I ask him. “Would you do that?”
He makes his mark, a backward R joined with a frontward B, like a Western brand. His name is Robert Bruce, locally known as Giant Man. When he’s done, I pass the pen to Janis. “You can give me the hat, but you gotta sign it.”
Janis turns the hat in her hand, figuring out what she wants to write. She sets it on the table and goes to work on the brim behind the crown. She writes carefully, bending over her work, the same way she lettered “WITH LOVE” on the plank that held the model of the Festival Express train. I expect her to write “Love, Janis,” or something like that, but when she hands it to me I see that she has written, “To John, with love from Pearl.” There’s a heart next to “love” and half a dozen x’d kisses after “Pearl.”
The next morning, over an even later breakfast than the day before, Paul is thoughtful. He and Janis never did talk business during our hours of carousing. I wonder if he still harbors doubts about his ability to work with her, but he puts my mind to rest.
“John, I learned something wonderful yesterday,” he says, dead serious.
“What’s that?”
“Janis Joplin is a very smart woman.”
Paul reveals his delight in this discovery. He is confident that Janis’s articulate intelligence will enable them to communicate, and communication is the key: If the lines of communication are open, if they share a common language and skill in expressing it, everything else is possible.
—
WITH THE CONNECTION to Janis established, Paul sets in motion a campaign he has been planning since Albert first spoke with him about producing Janis’s next album. Paul thinks the technology, the engineers, and the union requirements at Columbia Records studios are outmoded. He thinks the whole mind-set at Columbia lags behind where rock recording should be in the 1970s. If he has to work within those limitations, he doesn’t believe he can make a record that will sound the way Janis’s next album ought to sound.
Paul has a plan, a way to prove to Columbia Records that he’s right. Albert supports Paul’s idea and they overcome the first hurdle when Columbia president Clive Davis agrees to let Paul record two demos with Janis and Full Tilt, one at Columbia’s L.A. studio, where some of Cheap Thrills and all of the Kozmic Blues album were recorded, and another at Sunset Sound, the independent studio where Paul wants to record with Janis.
“Grossman not only said his clients were artists, he believed it, and they, not the manager or the record company, set the artistic and commercial agendas.”
Fred Goodman, The Mansion on the Hill
The third week in July, after a gig in Albuquerque, we’re in L.A. making the demos. The Hollywood Landmark is full up and we stay at the Tropicana, a motel on Santa Monica Boulevard that’s long been a favorite stopping place for musicians and artists of the middling ranks. It’s seedier than the Landmark, more exposed. Someone has called it L.A.’s answer to the Chelsea Hotel in New York. Any resemblance is definitely not architectural. The Tropicana is stamped out of the two-story-stucco California mold, but like the Chelsea, the Tropicana has its attractions. It houses Duke’s Coffee Shop, which serves the best burgers in Hollywood, and it’s just a block or two from Elektra Records’ L.A. studio, where I can drop in to visit with Fritz Richmond.
Paul knows that to prove his point he has to make the best possible recording in the Columbia studio. He is convinced that even the best possible recording won’t be the kind of sound he wants—and Columbia should want—for Janis. Any trickery, any fudging to make the Columbia demo sound bad, will invalidate the exercise. Janis understands this. When she stands at the mike, she sings as if this is her next record for real.
The members of Full Tilt Boogie, except for Brad Campbell, have very little experience in the studio. It takes time to establish working relationships with each member of a band, to discern their individual modes of communication, more time than Paul has in making these demos. But the Full Tilt boys are good musicians, and above all, they’re willing. They hang on Paul’s every word and on each take they do their damnedest. Their inexperience will affect both sessions equally, so it doesn’t tilt the outcome.
When Janis shows an interest in the technical aspects of the recording, Paul explains what’s going on and how it affects the sound. He keeps her involved every step of the way. Even as he makes the crucial demos, Paul is expanding the relationship, laying the foundation for their work together.
When we move from Columbia’s studio to Sunset Sound, a Columbia engineer sits in the back of the control room doing nothing, featherbedding. It’s part of the deal.
In her downtime, Janis has a reunion with Kris Kristofferson, who is in town. One morning when we gather in the Tropicana parking lot to head for the studio, Janis is fully dressed and ready to go to work, complete with pink and purple feathers in her hair. Kris is barefoot and shirtless, left to lock up her room when he heads out for wherever he’s going next.
With the dueling demos in the can, we fly east for a flurry of gigs. We play the tennis stadium at Forest Hills for a crowd of fifteen thousand. Janis appears on The Dick Cavett Show again and gives John Fisher’s Love Limousine service a big pitch. We play a rock festival in Highland Park, Illinois, north of Chicago. We play a peace festival at Shea Stadium that Peter Yarrow puts together for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Hiroshima A-bomb. Last year, in the ’69 World Series, the Mets lost the first game, then swept the next four, clinching their first world championship on the same field where Janis and Full Tilt Boogie are now rocking and rolling for peace. When it comes to the notion that sports provide appropriate metaphors for every detail of American life, I’m a skeptic, but I like the idea that although Janis failed in her first outing with a new band, she’s now on her way to clinching a championship of her own.
We wind up the tour in Cambridge, Mass., for an afternoon show that’s part of a series of rock concerts put on in Harvard’s football stadium. Warned that rowdy fans have caused problems for the Cambridge police after some of the other shows, Janis suggests before her last song that if the fans have energy to work off when the show is over, they take their boyfriends and girlfriends home and work it off together. The line gets a round of applause and the concert leaves Janis and the fans in high spirits.
When we get back to our Cambridge hotel, I head out on foot with a couple of the Full Tilt boys to eat. As we stroll along the brick sidewalk, four cops get out of a parked patrol car and start toward us. They call out a warning to get off the street. Huh? We’re just going to get something to eat. “Fuck off! Get along there!” The cops break into a trot, brandishing their billy clubs. “You fuckin’ maggots, get out of here!” They begin to run and so do we, beating a retreat to the hotel. The cops return to their squad car and circle the block, around and around, trying to catch us on the street again. I phone Cambridge police headquarters to request that the cops be called off. I say we’re in town with Janis Joplin to perform at Harvard Stadium and the lieutenant on the other end of the line says, “I heard from my officer down there that she incited to riot.” I maintain my calm as I tell him she did just the opposite, she told the crowd not to make trouble. “We’ve had vandalism down in Harvard Square after some of these shows,” he says. I say, “Have you had any vandalism, any other problems in Cambridge this evening?” “Well, no,” he admits. A while later, the squad car is gone and the streets are safe for long-haired musicians.
—
THE DAY AFTER the Harvard concert, Janis flies from Boston to Texas for the high school reunion she told Dick Cavett about back in June, but she has no intention of attending the festivities alone. She wants a few friends along for the ride. She has enlisted me, Bob Neuwirth, and John Fisher to make up her cohort.
Janis’s idea is for us to rent a limousine in which we will shuttle around Port Arthur in knock-’em-dead style. I have phoned every rental car and limo agency in Houston, but they all say the same thing: You can’t rent a limousine without a driver. Janis doesn’t want a driver she doesn’t know. We’ve got our own limo driver. So I reserve the biggest sedan we can get, a Chrysler Imperial.
John and Bobby and I fly out of New York and land at Houston a day after Janis. There to meet us is Margaret, my lady from Austin, who I’ve invited to join us for the weekend.
Before we hit the highway to Port Arthur, we make two stops. The first is at a Western apparel store, where John and Bob buy cowboy hats. Why they think cowboy hats are the thing to wear to a Gulf coast oil town, I’m not sure, but Bobby takes it into his head that we have to have hats, and he insists I buy one for Margaret too. I’m wearing the leather hippie-cowboy hat Janis gave me. Among the Western summer hats the others put on, mine would definitely give a genuine cowboy pause, but we encounter no cowboys in Houston.
The next stop is at a liquor store, for a bottle of tequila. Thus prepared, we head across the flat coastal plains for Port Arthur, for what proves to be a fairly strange weekend.
It begins with Janis’s parents taking us out to dinner at their country club. We’ve brought some semblance of dress-up clothes for the reunion—despite the crumbling of dress codes in the late sixties, Bobby and John and I still travel with sport jackets and ties in our luggage—and we do our best to appear respectable. The Joplins want to please Janis and they are gracious hosts, but they are somewhat ill at ease. With one exception, Janis has always visited Port Arthur alone.* It is easy for parents to treat an adult offspring returning home for a visit as the child she was, but when she arrives with her road manager and limo driver and another friend and confidant from the very different life she has made for herself, it’s a way of saying, I’m not your little Janis anymore.
Margaret is the member of our group who handles the dinner best. Her father is an attorney and a Texas legislator. Dressed in a stylish pantsuit, sipping her before-dinner cocktail and chatting with the Joplins, she is totally at ease in a roomful of straight people.
We are all on our best behavior, trying to establish common ground. It seems to me that Janis is a little standoffish with Margaret, which is in contrast to her attitude when we were in Austin last month. I remember Janis’s dictum from the Big Brother days: no old ladies on the road. We’re not exactly on the road here, but maybe Janis feels I’ve forgotten that injunction. Did I mention to Janis ahead of time that I was inviting Margaret? I can’t remember. I’m sure I didn’t ask her permission.
In the course of the dinner, during which we order more drinks than the Joplins think is proper, Janis loosens up and accepts me and Margaret as a couple, and she gives me no further cause for concern.
After dinner, the Joplins and Janis’s sister, Laura, go home. Janis takes her accustomed seat, riding shotgun in the big Chrysler, and directs us on the evening adventure she has planned. We are going to visit a landmark of her wayward youth, back when she and her Port Arthur friends would drive across the state line into Louisiana, where you could buy liquor by the drink and it was easy to get served underage. (In Texas, at this time, liquor is confined to private “clubs,” where the club sells setups—glasses with ice and mixer—and the liquor is poured by members from bottles they bring with them, or which are kept for them on the premises. It is an arrangement that keeps Negroes and Mexicans out of the places where white folks drink.)
Freed from the constraints of the family dinner, Janis is in high spirits as we cross the Sabine River into Louisiana, recounting trips she made when she was a pimply, loudmouthed girl in the company of a few other misfits and outcasts.
Our destination is a roadhouse west of Port Charles. It’s loud and it’s jam-packed, with a rocking country band on a small stage. We’re no sooner seated at a table when the band leader calls on Janis to get up and sing a song.
This attention isn’t what Janis wants tonight. She wants to be an observer, as if she’s watching a movie of her rebellious youth. She wants to re-create within the privacy of our small group what it was like for her ten years ago, so she can take comfort in how far she’s come, but that is not going to be possible tonight. People crowd around the table, pushing against us, all trying to talk to Janis at once. It gets so bad, you can’t light a cigarette without burning the arm of some asshole who’s reaching out toward Janis, trying to get her attention.
“That was when I first realized that, God, these poor people who are famous, the only people who will actually have the nerve to come up and talk to them are people you wouldn’t want to talk to. And the nicer people are not gonna bother you.”
Margaret Moore
Janis endures about ten minutes of this, then gets up and heads for the restroom in back. She is gone a long time. After a while I ask Margaret to go look for her. Margaret goes off in the same direction, and she too is gone for a long time.
When they return at last, both of them very serious, Margaret suggests we leave. Later, when we have dropped Janis at the Joplin home in Port Arthur and we’re back at the motel where Margaret and I and Bobby and John Fisher are staying, Margaret tells me what happened in the women’s restroom at the roadhouse. She looked under the stall doors and saw Janis’s gold slippers. Margaret went into the adjoining stall and sat down. She said, “Janis, we were worried about you.” There was a pause, and then Janis said, “You just don’t know what it’s like.” And Janis told Margaret how she just wanted to show her friends the roadhouse and have a good time, and how hard it is sometimes to be the constant object of attention when you just want to be yourself. She talked about her life on the road, and how unhappy or lonely she was too much of the time. Margaret was half-afraid of this woman she didn’t hardly know, whose life she couldn’t imagine, who was just five years older than her twenty-two years but seemed so much older at this moment. Margaret pointed out that Janis had people around her who obviously loved her. Janis knew that was true, but what she was feeling at the moment was, You can’t possibly understand how hard it is to be me.
For this one evening, Janis wanted to be a normal person out with her friends. When she found she couldn’t, she slipped into a well of despair.
In the morning, the bayou blues brought on by our Louisiana excursion are forgotten. Arriving at the Joplins’ house for breakfast, we find Janis’s parents leaving for the wedding of a friend’s daughter and Janis in the kitchen melting pounds of butter to make hollandaise sauce for eggs Benedict. When I pull out my movie camera to record her culinary skills on film, Janis turns into Julia Child, smiling and talking a blue streak to the camera as she demonstrates her technique. Never mind that I’m shooting silent film. Janis is putting on a show. With an assist from Laura and Margaret, eggs Benedict for six appears on the table. Throughout the process, Janis is the bubbly hostess, giving no sign that the previous evening was anything less than a happy memory. As the perfect complement for eggs Benedict, she has selected Texas-brewed Pearl beer, served ice cold, in the bottle.
When breakfast is over and the kitchen cleaned up—Janis is the good daughter and we are her dutiful guests—it’s time to head off to the first event of the Port Arthur High School reunion. Which is, after all, the reason we’re here. On the way to the downtown hotel where the reunion events are scheduled, Janis makes a show of pointing out places where people treated her badly. “They wouldn’t talk to me, man! That’s what they thought of me.”
This is where it comes from, the behavior that is so familiar to me, the quickness to take offense at any slight, the insistence that she is as good as anyone else, that she deserves respect. Her parents tried to instill in her a sense of propriety that Janis found too confining, but it was among her own contemporaries, the majority who were more accepting of the narrow, conformist views of the 1950s, that the triggers for Janis’s defensiveness were put in place. Her inquisitive intelligence saw the hypocrisy in conforming to get along, and she just wouldn’t hold her tongue.
The reunion opens with a get-acquainted gathering in a featureless, windowless convention meeting room. Everyone is wearing adhesive name stickers and if they’re not talking to each other, they’re taking photographs with Instamatics.
Janis is dressed in a long skirt with broad vertical stripes in different colors and a short-sleeved black blouse. She has on a floppy black hat with a bunch of white carnations tied with a ribbon and pinned to one side. For Janis, this is a conservative outfit. In the reunion crowd you can spot her across the room.
Part of our role, as Janis’s entourage, is to be her defensive perimeter in public places. Unexpectedly, coming on the heels of our experience in the Louisiana roadhouse, her classmates at the cocktail mixer show no more interest in Janis than in each other. Janis stays close to us at first, but she looks around as if expecting—wanting—someone she hasn’t set eyes on since high school to come over and say hello.
In Michael Lydon’s article for the New York Times Magazine the year before, Lydon asked Janis about Port Arthur and she told him, “Man, those people hurt me. It makes me happy to know I’m making it and they’re back there, plumbers just like they were.” Home for the reunion, Janis is finding that confronting the actuality of the people she left behind is not as uplifting as contemplating it from afar.
Most of her classmates look older than Janis, older than Bobby and John and me. It’s not just how they look, but how they act. There is something in their attitude. It’s as if the last time they had fun was in high school and they don’t expect to have fun ever again. Except for one young couple with a two-year-old boy in the mother’s arms who would look right in place in Golden Gate Park, Janis’s contemporaries seem to have accepted, in their late twenties, that what follows high school is middle age.
Janis becomes more venturesome. She moves through the crowd, doesn’t find anyone she wants to talk to, and says let’s go get a drink. Three male classmates have latched onto her during her foray. They tag along when we head out into the heat of the day to find the nearest “membership club.” From the way these three hang on Janis’s every word, and the looks they give each other, it’s obvious that they’re only interested in Janis because she’s a rock star. I wonder why she’s wasting her time with them until I realize that these bozos are the types she has come to Port Arthur to impress. They’re the ones who made fun of her in school, who didn’t understand her, who made her miserable, and who gravitate to her now because she has escaped in such a spectacular way the small-town life they’re stuck in. She has come home to take her revenge, but it isn’t as satisfying as she thought, and after a couple of bar stops we leave the three hangers-on standing in the street when we head back to Janis’s house and our motel to get ready for the reunion dinner that evening.
Before the dinner, there is a press conference. Members of the local press have asked for a chance to interview Janis. The reunion committee has set up a table in one corner of the windowless conference room, with bright lights to facilitate photography. Here, for a short time, Janis is in her element, despite some questions that summon painful memories.
Q: What do you remember most about Port Arthur?
J.J.: (Laughs, hesitates) Ah, no comment.
Q: What do you think young people are looking for today?
J.J.: Sincerity, and a good time. . . . I think they’re looking for people not to lie to them.
Q: Will you come back more often now?
J.J.: Oh, I can’t say, because you see I live in San Francisco, and you can’t get any looser than that.
Q: Did you entertain in high school, when you were back here in high school?
J.J.: Only when I walked down the aisle. (Laughter.) No, I was a painter, and sort of a recluse in high school. I’ve changed.
Q: What happened?
J.J.: I got liberated. No, I started to sing, and singing makes you want to come out, whereas painting, I feel, really keeps you inside.
Q: How were you different from your schoolmates?
J.J.: I don’t know. Why don’t you ask them?
Asked about the nickname “Pearl,” which has been widely reported in recent weeks, Janis sets the record straight: “That name was not supposed to reach the press. . . . That name’s a private name for my friends to call me so they won’t have to call me Janis Joplin.”
The reunion dinner is a step down from the rubber-chicken circuit much bemoaned by campaigning politicians. The roast beef is cooked to the consistency of shoe leather. We load up on salad and vegetables instead. As Bob Neuwirth makes his way back to our table, his selection draws some taunts from Janis’s classmates. “What’s the matter, you don’t eat meat? You like that rabbit food?”
There are some halfhearted speeches, and a few tales of high-school pranks. We figure we can’t leave until it’s over, and so Janis is on hand to receive the prize for having come the longest distance to get to the reunion. They give her a bald tire. At least it’s painted gold.
It’s meant to be funny, but it makes Janis feel the way she felt too often when she was in school with these same people.
On her first day back in Port Arthur, Janis and Laura met with the reunion committee at their request, at one of her classmate’s homes. “What do you want?” they asked Janis. Being polite, Janis said, “Oh, nothing.” Of course she wanted something, an acknowledgment of her presence and how far she had come, both literally and figuratively, to get there. She doesn’t want it to be all about her, but a moment of recognition would be nice. If the committee had an ounce of imagination among them, they would have organized some gesture, something to make her feel welcome without being fawning. But they took Janis too literally, and the bald tire is all she gets.
Dancing is scheduled after the drab dinner, but we are seeking livelier entertainment. Jerry Lee Lewis is playing at a roadhouse out toward Beaumont. A bottle of tequila and some rock and roll by the Killer will lift our spirits. We are ever optimistic.
The roadhouse has a box office, where you pay to see the show. Janis announces, “I’m Janis Joplin,” but that doesn’t get us in. Informed we’ll have to pay like everybody else, Janis pulls out the cash and slaps it down and in we go.*
This is a genuine Texas roadhouse with an unlikely name, the Pelican Club. Smoky and rowdy and drunk from wall to wall. Jerry Lee is onstage, shouting out the rocking blues and making the piano ring. Now and again he hollers instructions to the young bass player.
This is not the first time Janis has set eyes on the bass player. When we played Louisville, Kentucky, back in June, we had a day off after Janis’s Friday night concert. On Saturday, Janis and Clark Pierson and David Dalton went to see a big country show starring Jerry Lee and George Jones at the civic auditorium. Backstage, Janis made a blatant play for the bass player, who might be all of seventeen, embarrassing him no end.
Bound to continue her quest tonight, Janis leads the way backstage at the Pelican Club when Jerry Lee and the band take a break. The atmosphere in the cramped, sweaty band room is not festive. There are two or three guys in the room who are not members of the band. They’re the heavies. Whatever the details of their role, they are here as muscle. Somebody is counting out money on a small table, and that’s part of the heavies’ job, to guard the money. One of the guys has a pistol stuck in the back of his waistband.
Lewis himself does not smile, does not react to our group entering his domain, except to follow Janis with a cold stare. In Louisville, he wasn’t exactly welcoming. Here, he’s downright hostile.
“And I remember Janis was kind of tinkly and giggly and she walked up to Jerry Lee Lewis, who I thought behaved like an absolute prick from the get-go. I mean he was not gracious about anybody being there, and I immediately thought, This is not good. We really shouldn’t be back here. This does not feel right. The reception was not friendly.”
Margaret Moore
Janis is oblivious to the signs. She waves a Hiya, honey, at the young bass player and leads Laura over to meet Jerry Lee. “Hey, Jerry Lee,” she says, “this is my hometown, and I want you to meet my little sister, Laura. Isn’t she pretty?” Jerry Lee looks at Laura and he’s quiet for a long moment, and then he says, “Not really.”
And Janis goes straight for Jerry Lee and clips him a flailing smack upside the head and without a second’s hesitation, he slaps her right back. Bobby and I grab her, and she’s cursing Jerry Lee, calling him a motherfucker and he’s responding in kind. Margaret and Laura are out the door and the rest of us aren’t far behind. Out to the parking lot and into the car, and so much for the Pelican Club.
“And she was foul-mouthin’ him, ‘Yeah, motherfucker, whatever you say, motherfucker,’ so like he said, ‘Don’t talk to me like a man or I’ll treat you like a man.’ Just two south Texas rednecks going at each other, man.”
Bob Neuwirth
We were in the back room longer than that, and maybe Janis took a few minutes to chat up the bass player, who, it turns out, is Jerry Lee’s son, but that’s the way it plays back in memory, both later that night and long after the event.
All in all, not as much fun as Ken Threadgill’s birthday party. Yet despite Janis’s disappointment that she hasn’t gained the satisfaction she was hoping for from her reunion weekend, the next morning, when Bobby and John Fisher and Margaret and I hug her good-bye before we hit the road for the Houston airport, she seems to be centered and calm, as if her not-so-triumphant return to the scene, and the company, of her adolescent difficulties has helped her put at least some of the lingering resentments behind her.
Janis is looking ahead, and she has much to look forward to. She will stay with her family for a few more days before she flies home to San Francisco for two weeks’ vacation. After that, we go to L.A. to begin recording with Paul Rothchild. Before the reunion, while we were touring in the East, we got word that Paul played the July demos for Albert and Clive Davis and the Columbia executives in a blind hearing. Nobody knew which demo was made in which studio. Sunset Sound won hands down.