A Woman Left Lonely
AS SOON AS Paul Rothchild returns to Los Angeles from his trip to the Bay Area in July, he puts out the word to songwriters and music publishers that he will be producing Janis’s next album and she needs material.
Songs arrive by the bucketload, on cassettes and demo discs and reel-to-reel tapes. With help from his housemate and sometimes engineer, Fritz Richmond, Paul goes through the material, looking for anything that might appeal to Janis. A representative of MCA Publishing, with a misguided sense of initiative, shows up at Paul and Fritz’s house on Ridpath Drive at eight thirty one morning, barges through the big wooden gate, jangling the bell that’s wired to it, and knocks on the door of the house. When Paul mumbles, “Who is it?” from the bedroom, where he is a couple of hours away from his usual rising time, the guy calls out, “I’m from MCA. You might have heard of us.” To which Paul replies, “Get the fuck out of here!” No songs from MCA are considered for the album.
At the upper end of professionalism is the Motown representative, who calls for an appointment and arrives at the house on the dot, with reel tapes, discs, and his own cassette player that he plugs into the stereo. He has lyric and lead sheets and he has Paul’s and Fritz’s full attention throughout his presentation.
Another question on which Paul enlists Fritz’s expertise is how best to record Janis’s exceptional voice. They talk about different types of mikes they’ve used for recording different singers, and they hit on the idea of using an RCA ribbon mike, an old-fashioned mike from between the wars that produces a very mellow sound. By capturing Janis’s voice, which is anything but mellow, with the RCA mike, Paul may get a more manageable signal to work with.
Janis and Full Tilt Boogie arrive in L.A. before Labor Day and settle into the Landmark Hotel for what could be two months of recording. Janis has driven down from the Bay Area in her Porsche. George Ostrow has decided he’s put in enough time on the road. Vince Mitchell and Phil Badella are handling the equipment for these sessions. They have brought the Boogie Wagon, which will be the band’s taxi.
In the first week, Janis and Paul Rothchild settle into a routine. Janis drives up to Paul and Fritz’s house in Laurel Canyon around eleven in the morning. Paul makes a pot of coffee and they listen to the songs he and Fritz have selected, to see what Janis likes and to decide which song they will work on in the studio that day.
Paul schedules the sessions at Sunset Sound on musicians’ hours. Work begins sometime after midday and ends in time for a late supper and drinks at Barney’s Beanery. At the end of each day’s work, Paul tells Janis and the band when to show up the next day. It’s less than a mile from the Landmark Hotel to Sunset Sound. Sometimes the band members walk. Sometimes I shuttle someone in my car. Often Phil or Vince or one of the Full Tilt boys drives the Boogie Wagon.
On some days Paul needs just Janis in the studio, or just the band, but Janis likes to have the band on hand when she’s laying down vocal tracks. (The RCA ribbon mike proves to be just the thing, and Janis sings into the forty-year-old mike throughout the sessions.)
As Paul develops his working relationship with Janis, he is also getting to know each member of the band, which for him is an essential part of the producer’s job.* He learns how to talk with them. He teaches them the difference between playing in live performance and playing in the studio. When they have questions or suggestions, Paul listens. He makes them feel like an important part of the process.
“Rothchild is . . . a little bit above the musicians. You know, he just seemed to know how to relate to each musician. And get their ideas in, but also not put anybody down or—you know, he just kept it so fucking comfortable. . . . If I were to ever make another record again, he’d be the first person I would call.”
Brad Campbell
I spend more time in the studio than I did with Big Brother or Kozmic Blues, because this time it’s fun.
Late one afternoon I come back to the Landmark to find Janis sitting by the pool. She’s on a chaise on the shady side, looking alone and serious—maybe blue? She’s thinking hard. I can almost hear the wheels spinning. I sit beside her. “What’s happening, Pearl?” She shakes her head. “Boy, that guy,” she says.
“What guy?”
“Rothchild.”
I feel a chill. If Janis has decided Paul isn’t the right producer, we’re in deep shit. “What about him?” Janis shakes her head, still doesn’t look at me. “He’s really something.” She starts to talk now—the serious Janis, explaining something that’s important to her—and my fear gives way to a rush of relief as she tells me how much she’s learning from Paul, how well it’s going. For the first time, she’s experiencing recording—the long hours spent in the studio—as a high in itself, rather than a trial to be endured. She never dreamed the relationship between a singer and a producer could be like this.
Paul has been talking to her about how she uses her voice, onstage and in the studio. He has helped her understand that different techniques are required, but he isn’t telling her to put anything less than her full commitment into a song. This is something Janis will never do, and Paul’s not asking her to do it. He’s asking her to explore the different voices she has at her command, the different parts of her range, to experiment with modulating her vocal power and considering more critically when to use it at full force.
Janis talks about these things with something close to a sense of wonder. Paul has opened doors to possibilities she didn’t know existed. Maybe she doesn’t have to blow her voice out within a few years. She likes to joke that when she loses her voice she’ll buy a bar in Marin County and settle down. This is what she has always expected, but maybe it doesn’t have to be that way.
I remember what Paul said to me in San Francisco, about wanting to introduce Janis to the truly great singer inside her. Paul is proceeding at his own pace, in his own way, and from everything Janis tells me the plan is on track.
“You know what he told me?” Janis says, and now she’s got that little-girl-who-got-an-A-on-her-homework look. “He said I’m the only woman he’s ever met who could be a record producer.” She’s proud, and well she should be. If Paul said that, he meant it.
During breaks in the recording and over the occasional meals and drinks we share, I get Paul’s side of the story. He says that working with Janis is going better than he dared hope. His experience with lead singers is that they are self-indulgent children who show up at the studio late, sometimes drunk or stoned, and sometimes you have to send out search parties to find them in a bar or in bed with a groupie. Not Janis. She always shows up within half an hour of the appointed time, which for a rock singer is on the dot. She never gives less than everything she’s got, and she always lets her affection show for the boys in the band, which puffs them up with pride and makes them redouble their efforts to please her.
Paul is impressed by Janis’s capacity for storing information and using it. In the studio, she often sits beside him in the control room while the band is recording. Whenever she expresses curiosity about some aspect of the recording procedure, Paul fills her up with as much information as she wants. That she takes an interest in the technical aspects of recording adds another dimension to his respect for her, while the center of his focus remains her voice. Since the start of the sessions he has become convinced that Janis has yet to develop her full range. He tells me of a conversation they had recently. Paul asked her, “Come on, Pearl, what do you really sing like?” And she said, “I’ll show you.” What happened next pleased him no end. “She sang me stuff out of the church choir. Like she used to sing back in the church choir, when she was a teenager, a young teenager. And I heard this pure, straight, white voice. Clean, clear, no vibrato, no fur, no broken glass and rusty razor blades, just ‘Ahhhh,’ soprano. And I said, ‘Right, you can sing, fantastic.’” For Paul, the revelation that Janis has this voice has far-reaching implications for her career, and for his. Paul is never less than self-interested. He knows his work with Janis can benefit his reputation in both the short and the long term. But the long-term benefits will only be realized if he can help Janis develop in a way that is best for her long-term prospects as well.*
Paul and Janis have been spending time together outside the studio too—not just having drinks or a meal after work, but talking about cars and driving their Porsches along Mulholland Drive, the twisty road that winds along the crest of the Hollywood Hills, at a high rate of speed.
Paul is an automotive enthusiast. When I first knew him in Cambridge, he drove an Alfa Romeo convertible. His present car is a Porsche 911S. The way Janis drives tells him she understands her own Porsche as a finely tuned machine. She doesn’t share his interest in the detailed workings of the internal combustion engine, but she understands the coordination of the engine, the gears and the steering. “She drives like a man,” he says, and from Paul there is no greater compliment. (He is something of a chauvinist, in these times that are still more than a little chauvinistic.) Paul knew beforehand that Janis is a very emotional person. That’s where the music comes from. But she also understands machines. She can examine and analyze and articulate abstract concepts and things in the physical world. Right brain, left brain, both up and running. In a woman or a man, this is a rare combination.
In a few weeks, Paul has become one of the handful of intimates with whom Janis will drop the tough-woman-of-the-streets style she assimilated in San Francisco. He perceived at once how we use her “Pearl” nickname. Paul uses it as we do, and Janis accepts it. She is willing to reveal herself to him, her hopes and fears, the little girl as well as the woman who is not so tough as she pretends.
She trusts him.
Yet all of this positive energy gives rise to a paradox. Janis’s commitment to the work, her excitement at the possibilities she sees opening before her, make her off-hours even harder to bear than usual. She has always complained about the downtime during recording. She gets bored. She doesn’t like Hollywood. She’d rather be home in the Bay Area, close to her friends. Here, she’s got no one to call when she gets lonely. It seems especially unfair now because she has a boyfriend, a new love, and he’s only in L.A. on the weekends. What is she supposed to do the rest of the time?
Seth Morgan was at the tattoo party in Janis’s house back in the spring. He’s a student at UC Berkeley. He’s a rich kid hiding his privilege under a biker-punk veneer. He rides a Harley, has coke in his pocket, drinks Wild Turkey, and enjoys flouting convention with the best of them.
In the summer, after we got back from Hawaii and Ken Threadgill’s birthday party and before we headed out for the gigs in the East, Janis and Seth reconnected. She was attracted by his insolence. He doesn’t give a shit that she’s Janis Joplin. He is neither a pretty boy nor a mountain man. He’s not David Niehaus, but neither is he a return to her old pattern. The pretty boy/mountain man dichotomy represents two extremes in Janis, neither of which is the place where she should settle down. The pretty boys are lapdogs. They fawn over her, give her pleasure, and tell her how great she is. With them, she can do no wrong. The mountain men counterbalance the pretty boys. They’re big, they’re strong, they won’t take any of her bullshit, but they’re not often equipped to give her the comfort, and the counsel, she needs. For these things, Janis turns to her oldest friends in the San Francisco community, the ones who knew her before she was famous. Linda Gravenites, her surrogate mother. The boys in Big Brother. And a few others. Whether Seth Morgan can earn a place in this select circle remains to be seen.
With Seth, Janis falls for the punk and comes to love the inner man. She finds that beneath the bad-boy exterior there is a perceptive intellect. They connect through the drinking and the brag talk and, to their mutual surprise, they discover that they like quiet times together too. They find that they enjoy each other’s company as much, maybe even more, if they don’t go out drinking. They spend mornings reading the newspaper over breakfast on the deck and talking about the news. Seth is surprised to learn that Janis reads the whole front section of the paper every day, that she is aware of current events, that she reads books—Thomas Wolfe, Herman Hesse.*
They talk about books and ideas and the doings of the world. They drive around the countryside, see a movie, have dinner out with just a glass or two of wine and go home early. When they do go out for a rocking good time with Janis’s Bay Area or music business friends, Seth notices that Janis never displays to others the current-events and intellectual interests she has revealed to him.
When Janis returned to the Bay Area in August, after her high school reunion, she and Seth talked of marriage. They considered how they might make a life together that won’t be subservient to Janis’s performing career.
Seth made it clear from the outset that when the two of them are together they are separate from her professional life. Like David Niehaus, Seth is not from the music world and, like Niehaus, Seth is not about to be drawn into Janis’s scene as a hanger-on.
A visit to L.A. early in the recording reinforces this conviction. At the Landmark, or sitting in the control room to watch a recording session, Seth feels like a fifth wheel. He is close to finishing his degree at Berkeley and he doesn’t want to blow it. He comes down most weekends and he tries to time his visits when Janis will have a day off.
“I felt very out of place down at the Landmark and in recording sessions; I just didn’t belong there, as much as she wanted me down there.”
Seth Morgan
This arrangement doesn’t satisfy Janis. Her head can understand Seth’s reasons for keeping a distance, but her heart wants him here, and without him she is lonely.
In Seth’s absence, Janis receives another visitor. One day when the band and I are making waves in the Landmark pool, Peggy Caserta comes to the gate of the chain-link fence that encloses the pool, with Janis close behind. They’re going out to dinner and they stop by to say hello. Peggy was banished from Janis’s house in the spring, along with the rest of Janis’s druggie friends. So far as I know, Peggy hasn’t been welcome in Larkspur since then. The unease I felt when Peggy was with Janis at Woodstock returns.
On September 18, Jimi Hendrix dies in London of a drug overdose—his girlfriend’s sleeping pills, apparently, too many taken accidentally, because he didn’t know how strong they were. As with any death like this there’s a shadow of suspicion that it might be accidentally on purpose.
Is this what triggers Janis to put aside her caution and her pride in controlling her most dangerous habit? When Janis and Sam Andrew heard Nancy Gurley was dead from an OD, their first reaction was to get high. Is it before the news of Jimi’s death, or after, that I find Janis by the pool on another evening? What I see in her face this time gives me a chill. Like Sam, Janis can’t hide the telltale signs when she’s on smack. Her eyes say “I’m stoned” like a flashing neon sign. The pupils are sharp and cold, and there’s a gossamer mask over her face that cloaks her emotions. She retreats inside, hiding, hoping you won’t notice what’s so plain to see. But I see it, and she sees my disappointment. It’s just for now, she says. Drinking to moderate her boredom affects her performance in the studio. A little smack helps her maintain the high she needs for the long hours, the take after take of the same song. This is her excuse.
I’ve heard this rationale before. The junkie logic doesn’t convince me for a New York minute, but you can’t tell anybody what to do. You can only tell her how you feel. I tell Janis how happy I’ve been since she quit. I tell her how it makes me feel to see her high. I tell her I love her.
Most days, Janis displays the same energy she’s had all summer. And she is planning for the future. She’s serious enough about marrying Seth Morgan to consult Bob Gordon about a prenuptial agreement. This is simple prudence, but it also reflects Janis’s lingering fear of being ripped off. Whether she inquires about the extent of Seth’s resources isn’t something I think to ask at the time. It’s possible that his exceed hers. He’s an heir to the Ivory Soap fortune. Be that as it may, Bob Gordon recommends and draws up an agreement that will exempt Janis’s income from being considered part of community property under California law.
The recording doesn’t stop on weekends. The schedule may get a little lighter, but the pressure from Columbia to get the album done is humming in the background.
Since I played music aboard the Festival Express and in Austin with Janis after Threadgill’s Jubilee, I’ve been feeling it’s time to find myself a new guitar to replace the one that was stolen last year out of the Chelsea Hotel. I’ve put out the word among my friends in L.A., and someone tells me that a music store in Huntington Beach has a prewar D-18 (“prewar,” talking about Martin guitars, means made before the Second World War). I hop in the Volvo. Down 101 to the 110 to the 405 to Huntington Beach. The guy at the store says no, we haven’t had any used Martins in a while, but I think there’s a store in Hollywood that’s got one. He makes the call. Yup, he’s got a D-18. Back up the 405 to the 110 to the 101, and I end up, two hours after I set out, on Sunset Boulevard less than ten blocks from the Landmark. But the trip is worth it. The D-18 is five years old. It’s been cracked and repaired. But when I strum an E chord, I know it’s a winner.
There’s a range of tonal qualities in top-quality acoustic guitars, Martins as much as any other brand. The tone depends on the wood, the age, how much the guitar has been played, and other, intangible factors that make every guitar different. When you pick up a guitar for the first time and play a chord, the first impression can be decisive—good, bad or indifferent. On this Martin, the E chord rings like bells, and I trust my first impression. I shell out three hundred dollars and I take it back to the Landmark. It was worth running down to Huntington Beach and back to get this guitar.
A few days later, on Sunday, I’m in my room in the afternoon, talking with an old friend from Cambridge, Dave Barry. Dave is a talented guitar and piano player and he has taken up songwriting since he’s been living in L.A. He has written a song he wants Janis to hear and he has talked to her about it. He plays it for me on my new Martin. He was supposed to meet Janis at the Troubadour last night, but she lingered at Barney’s Beanery and they missed connecting. Dave has come to the Landmark today hoping to see Janis before she goes to the studio. We’ve tried her room, but got no answer.
The phone rings. It’s Paul Rothchild, calling from the studio. Janis was supposed to be there an hour ago. It’s not like her to be late. Paul tried her room and got the same result I did. I tell him I’ll have a look around.
Before we leave my room, the phone rings again. This time it’s Seth. He’s flying down to Burbank this afternoon. He can’t reach Janis. She’s supposed to meet him at the airport or send someone to get him.
Around the pool and the patio there is no sign of Janis. We run into Vince Mitchell and Phil Badella. The Full Tilt boys took the Boogie Wagon to the studio. Can they hitch a ride with me? I figure we might as well go to the studio and see if Janis shows up there.
The four of us pile into my Volvo in the Landmark’s underground garage. When I pull out onto the short driveway that curves past the Landmark’s entrance, I see that Janis’s Porsche is parked there. Above the Porsche, there’s a light in Janis’s window.
Janis, as is her custom, has taken a single room with a kitchenette in the front building, down the hallway from the hotel lobby. Why she would pick a room overlooking Franklin Avenue, with the morning and afternoon rush-hour traffic, instead of on the back side, facing the courtyard and the pool, is beyond me, but it’s her choice.
It is a little past sunset, only just dark enough now that Janis might turn on a light in the south-facing room. Maybe she was out somewhere and got back to the hotel in the last few minutes. Maybe she forgot she’s supposed to be at the studio.
I back up into the garage so the car isn’t blocking the driveway. Wait here, I tell the guys.
As I pass through the lobby, I stop at the desk and get a key to Janis’s room from Jack Hagy, the manager. A couple of times since we’ve been here, I’ve gone to her room to get something she forgot and wants down at the studio. I can’t say just why I get the key now. I think Janis is in her room, so why do I need it? What if she’s in the shower? Some such idea may pass through my head, but mostly I’m saving time. If I knock and she doesn’t answer I’ll have to come back for the key.
When I open the door to room 105, there’s no one there. That’s the feeling I have even as I see Janis lying on the floor beside the bed. Before I touch the unnatural flesh I know that this is only the vessel. The spirit has departed.