On the Road with Janis Joplin (27 page)

She makes the evening a send-off party for me. When we say good-bye after the show, I ask her to take it easy on Joe Crowley until he has a grip on the job. She gives me a hug and a kiss and she promises to be good. The next day I fly to New York, feeling guilty about leaving Janis while so many uncertainties beset her, but trusting that I have left her in competent, if untried, hands.

—

I
STICK TO
my decision to leave Janis because a new prospect beckons. During the summer, I confided in Bob Neuwirth when I was thinking about leaving the road, and he didn’t try to dissuade me from quitting. Bob put in a lot of hours talking with Janis in late-night bars while we were in New York this year, and he knows that her problems will persist until she takes responsibility for them.

Bob too is contemplating new horizons. For several years he has been prospecting the New York art scene, deferring his core talent—painting—to experiment with fluorescent-light sculptures and other forms of avant art. He has mingled with the Warhol crowd, and squired for a time Warhol’s ingenue-of-the-moment, Edie Sedgwick, but he always maintained his autonomy. Bob offered Edie an escape, when she needed it, from the fawning attention of the Warhol Factory group. Among the folk and rock musicians whose company Bobby prefers, Edie was welcomed as his girl and she was treated kindly.

Now, casting about for a project that will fully engage his creative energies, Bob has come up with an idea for an underground movie to be filmed in Paris. His concept is neither a new form of
cinéma vérité
nor a variation on Warhol’s often boring, would-be avant-garde filmic exercises. The movie will be a feature film with at least the semblance of a story. We will film in 16-millimeter with Pennebaker’s shoulder-held cameras. It will be guerrilla filmmaking, shooting on the run, unimpeded by such formalities as getting permits from the Parisian authorities. We will do everything from writing to filming to dealing
with the money and production budgets. All this suits me to a
T
. For two years, I’ve been shooting Janis and her bands on the fly. I have edited my films, created sound tracks from Janis’s recordings, and shown them to the bands in my living room. Bobby’s movie sounds like the perfect way to expand my filmmaking skills.

Bob has a title, around which we will shape the film: It will be called
The Fool of Paris
, and the part of the fool, we hope, will be played by Michael J. Pollard, still coasting on his Oscar nomination two years earlier for best supporting actor in
Bonnie and Clyde
.
Bobby connected with Michael the same day he saw
Bonnie and Clyde
in New York with Brice Marden, a painter we have known since he was married to Joan Baez’s older sister, Pauline. Bob and Brice saw the movie the week it opened. They went to Max’s Kansas City afterward for a drink, walked into the place, and there was Michael J. Pollard with his wife, Annie, sitting in a booth. Bob never missed a beat. He went straight over to Michael and said, “We just saw you in the fuckin’ movie, man! It’s the greatest movie ever made! Blah-blah-blah-blah-blah.” Bob hung out with Michael from that day forward.

When I arrive in New York after bidding farewell to Janis and Kozmic Blues, we spend time with Michael and Annie, a gentle beauty, in their West Village apartment. Michael is up for something off the wall, something that will make the powers that be in Hollywood think of casting him in a wider range of parts than replicas of C. W. Moss, driver for Bonnie and Clyde.

Bobby gets a copy of a genuine Hollywood screenplay from a guy named Harry, the son of a labor lawyer who hangs out on the edge of the movie business. Harry wants to break into Hollywood through the back door and create a career for himself that’s independent from his father. He’ll be our producer.

I read the screenplay to learn the style and the format, and I write a screenplay of sorts for
The Fool of Paris
, more like an extended outline, so we have something on paper to show potential investors.
Meanwhile, Bobby is trolling Wall Street for venture capital. We lunch with young financial types who wish they had the courage to tune in, turn on, and jump into the tail end of the sixties. We offer them a way to do it vicariously, and we have no trouble getting their attention when we mention not only Michael J. Pollard but also Janis Joplin. Bobby has pitched the movie to Janis—and Albert—effectively enough that he has secured a “letter of intent” from Albert, which says if we get financing for
The Fool of Paris
, Janis will take part. We get a similar letter from Michael.

Neither Bobby nor I has ever paid much attention to the national economy, but we get a primer from the Wall Street boys. In the spring of the year, while we were in Europe with the Kozmic Blues Band, the Dow Jones Industrials were flirting with the mythical 1,000 level. In October, the DJIA is around 850. By December it falls below 800. With every slip, the Wall Street playboys grow more cautious. Financial analysts are beginning to use the R-word: recession. While our potential investors wait for the economy to turn around, Bobby and I wind up most of our evenings at Max’s Kansas City, praying for an upturn.

Janis’s appearance on
This Is Tom Jones
is broadcast on December 4. “Little Girl Blue” is better than I expected. It was almost impossible to hear Janis’s voice on the huge ABC soundstage, but on TV she comes across soft and clear. Unseen behind the scrim, John Till adds his own poignant embellishments to the guitar obbligato composed by Sam Andrew and Mike Bloomfield, while Janis puts herself completely into the song. When she gets to the lines, “
Oh honey, I know how you feel, I know you feel that you’re through / Ah, sit there, count your fingers, my unhappy little girl blue,” she embodies painfully, for me, the blue, unhappy, little-girl side of Janis.

While Bobby and I scout the concrete canyons for film funding, Janis and Kozmic Blues are touring the country. In October, Janis finally performs in Austin, at the University of Texas gym. In November, she’s in the South and Midwest. On the weekend after the
Tom Jones broadcast, she is in Georgia and Virginia. By great good fortune, these bookings keep Janis from appearing at the Altamont Speedway in California’s central valley for a one-day rock festival organized by the Grateful Dead and the Rolling Stones. The bands hope Altamont will be Woodstock West, but the name Altamont becomes infamous as the antithesis of its peaceful forerunners, thanks to a crowd stoned on drugs, Hells Angels stoned on beer and who knows what else, and escalating violence that results in the stabbing death at the hand of an Angel of a whacked-out fan brandishing a pistol. Looking back on the event, Bill Graham will recall, “
It was like a concentration camp for a day.”

Just a year after their uncertain debut at the Stax-Volt show in Memphis, Janis and the Kozmic Blues Band play their last concert, in Madison Square Garden. When I was a boy, the name had a magic ring for me. The Garden was where I saw the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus and the World Championship Rodeo, hosted by Gene Autry. Back then, the Garden was at Eighth Avenue and 50th Street, where it had moved in 1925 from its original location on Madison Square, farther downtown. Janis’s concert is my first visit to the new Garden, on Eighth Avenue between 31st and 32nd Streets. It opened in this location just last year, following the criminal demolition of the great public spaces of Pennsylvania Station.

The new indoor stadium is vast, modern, and sold out. The crowd is liberally sprinkled with celebrities, including New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath, with whom Janis caroused the night before.
*

Backstage, Janis gleefully boasts that Broadway Joe couldn’t keep up with her hang-out pace. Linda Gravenites is back, she tells me, before I spy Linda backstage. She made me this outfit, Janis says, twirling like a ballerina, and she made the outfit I’m wearing to the party after. Wait until you see it. It’s all black and sexy.

You’re all white and sexy, I tell her. She laughs, and I realize how much I’ve missed her.

The band regales me with stories about the fall tour. Joe Crowley is still road-managing the show, but when he’s out of earshot the boys in the band tell me that my guarded confidence in Joe was premature. After I left, the self-assurance he manifested while I was showing him the ropes evaporated in the face of the first routinely difficult days he encountered on the road. The unexpected threw him for a loop and he found it hard to relate to the members of the band, who were accustomed to my insistent style. “People expected to be ordered out of bed, and if they weren’t they didn’t get up,” is how Terry Clements puts it.

The band reacted to Joe’s lack of aptitude by taking over the driving and many of the other logistical chores, leaving Joe to handle the box office during the concerts. As the musicians tell me about assuming these responsibilities, they try to make it sound like a great burden, but they are obviously proud of themselves.

The decision to disband the group has had a unifying effect on them. This belated coming together, a twilight relaxing of tensions, has helped them achieve their most satisfying musical moments since the European tour. A recent gig in Nashville was a highlight, and they’re raring to go out with a bang here in the Garden.

Not present for the swan song is Luis Gasca, who departed a few weeks ago. He is replaced by a trumpet player named Dave Woodward, the fourth to play with Kozmic Blues.

The Butterfield Blues Band opens the show. The Kozmic Blues Band plays a couple of instrumentals on their own, raising the energy before Janis comes onstage. Janis leads the audience in a rousing cheer
for the Jets, but Namath hasn’t recovered his full vitality and they will lose their game the next day.

Late in her set, Janis sings Bo Diddley’s eponymous classic, “Bo Diddley,” as a duet with her fellow Texan, Johnny Winter. The song becomes an extended jam when Paul Butterfield joins them onstage, and the response of the audience is ecstatic.

At a postconcert party given by Clive Davis in his penthouse apartment on Central Park West, Janis finally meets another of Columbia’s gold-record stars. Like her backstage encounter with Joan Baez at Newport, the meeting with Bob Dylan is the coming together of two fundamentally different life-forms. They shake hands, speak haltingly, fall into an awkward silence, and go their separate ways.

Dylan is in his recluse mode. Once he finds a quiet place to sit he seems to disappear. I am reminded of a scheme he and his first road manager, Victor Maimudes, conceived at a concert on the upswing of Bob’s lone-troubadour fame. Besieged by fans outside the stage door, they came up with a fantasy solution: They would enter and leave the shows in an armored personnel carrier, dispensing autographs through a slot in the side. Here, Bob’s armor is invisible, but just as effective.

Janis tries to keep on rocking despite the lack of energy at the party, which after all is observing the demise of her band, but it becomes, for her, an early night.

The next day’s
Times
is generous in its praise and adds a final review to those that appreciate the Kozmic Blues Band. The critic, Mike Jahn, calls Janis’s set “
an excellent performance.” “When her new band was first heard,” he writes, “its main fault was that energy was being sacrificed for precision. . . . That criticism did not apply last night. At the Garden, Miss Joplin’s accomplices gave a powerful and spontaneously happy display of brass blues and rock, and she let herself go in a very exciting way.”

Janis stays in New York for a few days after the concert, to confer with Albert about her future, and I spend an evening with her in her hotel room. The hotel, One Fifth Avenue, is within shouting distance of Washington Square Park, where Sunday gatherings marked the beginning of the folk boom. This fall, Janis decided she deserves something classier than the Chelsea.

At the Garden and the wrap party, Janis was in her public persona, expecting and prepared for close scrutiny. Here she is unguarded, and I am struck by how much worse she looks than when I left her in October. She is heavier; her face is puffy and her skin is clammy when I hug her hello. We reminisce about our times on the road and explore ideas about the part she might play in
The Fool of Paris
. She tells me she’s buying a house in Larkspur, in Marin County. She is excited and happy that Linda Gravenites has returned from London. They plan to move into the Larkspur house before leaving for a holiday in Brazil to check out Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. Her manic mood as she tells me how much she’s looking forward to moving into the house and the trip to Rio makes me realize that these things are all that she has to look forward to. For the first time since she joined Big Brother in June 1966, Janis’s career prospects are a blank slate. Even when she was touring with Big Brother in the fall of 1968, after she had decided to leave them, she was looking forward to the creating the band of her dreams. National touring was still relatively new to her, she was playing cities and venues that
were new and exciting—the Hollywood Bowl, the Rose Bowl, Houston, Dallas—and it was still Big Brother. This fall, since she and Albert decided to give up on the Kozmic Blues Band, she has been repeating a routine she already knows, with no hope for a better tomorrow, a brighter future. Now even the familiar routine of touring is over.

Linda and the house are the only subjects that light Janis up, arousing her characteristic energy. When we turn to something else, she fades. We order drinks from room service. Vodka and Dubonnet on the rocks, a combination Janis is testing. But alcohol alone can’t satisfy her. Without much warning she gets out her works and proceeds to shoot up, sitting at the desk. It is the first time I have seen Janis get off, but not the first time I have witnessed the act. I will never forget a scene in Paris, in a cheap Left Bank hotel room, where a very young English junkie needed a fix so badly that he burst into tears when he couldn’t find a vein. A friend helped him, then held his head when the English kid gratefully vomited with the first rush. I have a short list of friends lost to heroin. I see the habit as degrading and destructive, the force behind it as insidiously malevolent, but I see it from the outside, with a perspective very different from an addict’s.