TO TELL THE story of road-managing Janis Joplin, John Byrne Cooke draws on his experience as a musician and his skill as a writer. He played music from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to New York, Berkeley and Los Angeles. He recorded two albums before Janis made her first. He traveled with all three of Janis’s bands, from 1967 until her untimely death in 1970. Cooke has written award-winning historical novels and a critically acclaimed book of nonfiction. As Laura Joplin’s Love, Janis, is the only book that reveals Janis’s life from within the perspective of her family, On the Road with Janis Joplin is the only book that tells the story of Janis’s brief, spectacular career from inside her life on the rock-and-roll road.
In the folk music boom of the 1960s, John Byrne Cooke was a member of the Cambridge, Massachusetts, bluegrass band the Charles River Valley Boys. Joan Baez and Bob Dylan were among his friends and contemporaries. When rock and roll displaced folk music, John was in the right place at the right time. He was a member of D. A. Pennebaker’s film crew at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, where Janis and Jimi Hendrix became overnight sensations. When Albert Grossman signed on a few months later to manage Janis and her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, he hired John to road-manage them. When Janis left Big Brother in the fall of 1968, she asked John to stay with her as she formed her new group, the Kozmic Blues Band. John was with Janis and Kozmic Blues when they toured Europe in the spring of 1969, and at Woodstock in August.
Janis’s 1970 tour with her last (and best) band, Full Tilt Boogie, included the famed Festival Express train trip across Canada. John was Janis’s only companion when she went to Austin to celebrate her mentor Ken Threadgill’s sixtieth birthday, and John was with her when she attended her tenth high school reunion in Port Arthur, Texas.
John Byrne Cooke is also an award-winning author of five previous books, a photographer, and an innovative filmmaker. He lives in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Visit him online at johnbyrnecooke.com.