On the Road with Janis Joplin (43 page)

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The rumors were true, as Mark Braunstein became aware. “I think that probably that rehearsal with Marcus Doubleday was the first inkling I had of heroin use. Remembering Marcus Doubleday falling asleep at rehearsal. Nodding out at rehearsal. I was pretty naïve.” (Author interview with Mark Braunstein, September 9, 1997.)

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Although he was ungenerous on this occasion, Gleason wasn’t blind to the reasons behind Janis leaving Big Brother. In an interview after her death, he said, “I really dug [Big Brother] together, as a group, but it was perfectly obvious that you couldn’t have a partnership, you know, a cooperative group, with everybody as an equal partner, if you had a star. . . . It was perfectly obvious that Janis was gonna leap out of that thing and be a star.” (Author interview with Ralph J. Gleason, October 3, 1973.)

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Sam feels that “Little Girl Blue” shows Janis’s voice at its best. “Whenever I encounter jazz musicians who are condescending about Janis’s vocal ability I play them ‘Little Girl Blue.’ If they can’t hear that, they can’t hear.” (E-mail from Sam Andrew, January 3, 1999.)

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The many pop festivals produced this year offered fans some extraordinary aggregations of talent, as these listings show.

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Accounts differ on the length of Havens’s set, which began shortly after 5:00
P.M.
Some claim he played for nearly three hours, but more sober souls point out that movie film and still photographs show that the two acts that followed Richie both played in daylight, and that the sun set about 8:00
P.M.

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Terry Clements was embarrassed when Janis took out her discomfort on the audience: “She was on a really weird trip with the audience, you know, swearing at them and—you know, she could say some pretty strange things to them sometimes that weren’t relative to bringing about a true renaissance of spirit in the world, which I was hoping to be committed to, in that scene.” (Author interview with Terry Clements, January 24, 1974.)

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This fall, Janis took to using our limo driver, John Fisher, for her personal transportation around the city. On the night before the concert at the Garden, Namath was Janis’s guest at her hotel, which was not the Chelsea for this stay. Fisher parked nearby and dozed through the night because Janis had to be somewhere early in the morning. When Janis appeared, she got into the front seat, tossed a football autographed by Namath into John’s lap, and informed him cheerfully that Namath was “flabby.” (Author interview with John Fisher, November 15, 1997.)

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Last year, after Kozmic Blues played at the Texas International Pop Festival, Janis brought Snooky Flowers to visit her family in Port Arthur on his way to his hometown of Lake Charles, Louisiana. Snooky was the first black man received as a guest in the Joplin home. During his visit, he took Janis to black music clubs in Port Arthur, where she had never before set foot. (Laura Joplin,
Love, Janis
, 258.)

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Normally, when I was escorting Janis, I would pay for everything from food and drink to transportation and entertainment. In this instance she paid for all of us out of her own pocket.

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“I have to get to know the people, the artist in particular. And when you’re dealing with a band I have to get to know each and every person to find out what their language is. Once I know what their language is I can speak to them about their music in their language. I love verbal communication, mostly because it’s so difficult.” (Author interview with Paul Rothchild, March 19, 1974.)

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Recalling this conversation later, Paul explained his goal: “I was pointing out to her that that voice was her salvation and it was towards that voice that she had to evolve her next voice. You know, a good singer—a singer’s voice goes through evolution, and develops. They all do. And she should start working towards a pure sound. Because she can’t—she couldn’t do the ‘Ball and Chain’ Janis Joplin at age forty. It would be ludicrous, right? And these are things we discussed, and she loved this because it was talk about real direction, what she should do with her vocal career and her future, and what to aim for. . . . To me it was as if my entire career was pointed at working at that record—working on that record and working with Janis. And when Janis and I would sit down and talk about the future, I would be saying things to her like, ‘Now, you see, Janis, you don’t quite get it. When you’re fifty-five I want you to be making your best records. With me. And here’s how we’ll do it.’ You know, ‘Here’s the thirty-year plan.’” (Author interview with Paul Rothchild, March 19, 1974.)

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Committee member Carl Gottlieb recalls similar mornings at the San Francisco apartment he shared with Milan Melvin in 1967, when Milan and Janis were lovers, when he and Milan would make breakfast for Janis and Carl’s girlfriend and they would read the newspaper and discuss politics and news of the world. (Author interview with Carl Gottlieb, August 7, 1997.)

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In an earlier will, when she had few assets, Janis left everything to her brother, Michael. Bob Gordon suggested, and Janis agreed, that the will be revised now to divide her estate equally among her parents and siblings.

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In recognition of Full Tilt’s achievement in finishing the record, and all the joy they gave Janis, Bob Gordon proposes to her family that the band should receive a small percentage from sales of the album. Like Sam Andrew’s effort to get something for the Kozmic Blues musicians from that album, this one fails.

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At the time, I believed that Janis had misjudged the dose of heroin she could tolerate.
When I later learned from Laura Joplin’s
Love, Janis
that the heroin she took was unusually strong, and that others among her dealer’s customers had died of overdoses in the same week, I saw that Janis’s share of the responsibility for her misstep was smaller than I had imagined, and this made her fate seem all the more disproportionate.