On the Road with Janis Joplin (5 page)

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O
N
M
ONDAY
MORNING
the stragglers melt away into the postpsychedelic mists, carrying fragments of the festival’s spirit out into the world, while county workers set about raking up the wilting orchids. The dreaded fifty thousand failed to materialize, but Chief Marinello figures the three-day crowd at thirty-five thousand, with more than ten thousand able to hear the music coming from the stage at any given moment, including those outside the arena on the fairgrounds.

Janis and Big Brother aren’t the only ones who achieve sudden renown at Monterey. Jimi Hendrix becomes an overnight sensation. A measure of how little known he was before Monterey is his third billing, below Jefferson Airplane and the jazz guitarist Gabor Szabo, on the poster—printed before Monterey—for his scheduled appearance at the Fillmore in San Francisco that follows the Pop Festival.

And Otis Redding has brought soul music a giant step closer to the mainstream by knocking the socks off a musical generation that is leavening the pop charts with songs about subjects far beyond teenage heartbreak.

In the immediate aftermath of the festival, it is Janis who gets the most notice, the biggest boost. The fact that Big Brother was the only act to perform twice gains them an extra measure of attention from the fans and the press. In many of the articles about the Pop Festival that bloom in newspapers and magazines across the land, there’s Janis, hair flying, singing her heart out with such conviction that even in a still photograph you can feel her power.

Less noticed, except by some of us who remain connected to Janis through the months and years that follow, is the fortuitous confluence of events that combined here to produce her sudden rise in the popular consciousness. It is not just the fact that a film was being made, but that the filmmaker was Pennebaker, that his reaction to Janis boosted the effort to offer them a second chance, that Penny knew Albert Grossman, and that the need to have Janis in the movie brought Albert and the members of Big Brother to each other’s attention in a way that probably contributes to Albert’s signing to manage Big Brother before the year is out. So many apparently random ripples flow together to create the perfect wave.

My own presence at the festival is in no way related to Janis’s rise to prominence, but if I hadn’t been at Monterey, if I hadn’t known Bob Neuwirth, who knew Pennebaker, if I hadn’t reacted to Janis as everyone who heard her reacted, I wouldn’t be able to tell the tale that follows.

In the elevating afterglow, the Monterey Pop Festival reveals itself as something more than the launching pad for new beginnings. It is the culmination of a movement that began when the first inspired soul of the post–World War II generation—inspired by Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, the Weavers, Burl Ives, and Josh White, among others—picked up a guitar and strummed out a folk song. In the fifties, teenagers supported the creation of a new kind of pop music. In the sixties, many of those same teens, now in their twenties, are making it. American popular music has become a do-it-yourself
enterprise, and it has extended its appeal to a broader demographic. Assembled at Monterey, the leading lights of the new music, in company with their fans, have demonstrated the magnanimous force of music, love and flowers.

As the Pennebaker crew packs up to head for the airport, those who have found Monterey to their liking have got the Leavin’ California Blues. I sympathize as best I can, but my exploration of the Summer of Love is just beginning. My bluegrass band, the Charles River Valley Boys, is booked for a California tour.

More Pretty Girls Than One

O
N
M
ONDAY MORNING,
Ralph Gleason reports in the
San Francisco Chronicle
that Monterey’s chief of police, Frank Marinello, now considers hippies his friends. “These people have proved flowers and love are a symbol of what they really believe in,” Gleason quotes the chief. The festival’s ticket director pays the audience a similar tribute: “I’ve never seen a crowd like it. These people are polite and patient and gentle.”

In his own words, adopting a favorite word of the flower children, Gleason sums up the festival in a glowing review. “
The first annual Monterey International Pop Festival this weekend was a beautiful, warm, groovy affair which showed the world a very great deal about the younger generation. In the first place, the music was fine, the staging was excellent and the shows were good. You know they are when the audiences stay until well after 1 a.m. But beyond that, it showed something else very important—you can have 35,000 long-haired, buck-skin and beaded hippies in one place without a hassle. . . . Saturday night was the biggest crowd in the arena in the history of the fairground. . . . So much for an inadequate description of one
of the most remarkable scenes in contemporary American history, a giant musical love-in which set a standard of peacefulness and sobriety for the entire country. It was the greatest assembly of contemporary musical talent in history.”

Bob Siggins and Joe Val, my fellow Charles River Valley Boys, are due to fly into San Francisco a few days after the Pop Festival. Until then, Pennebaker and Neuwirth and I reconnoiter the San Francisco scene. Penny is sufficiently curious to stick around for a day or two, and Bobby has decided to ride along on the CRVB’s California tour. We find a place to crash at a friend’s house in Berkeley and set off to scout the Haight-Ashbury.

The Haight is south of the Panhandle, a narrow extension of Golden Gate Park that juts to the east. The great park itself is more than three miles long and half a mile wide, a sylvan retreat that offers informal camping to hundreds of young nomads each night.

Since the first Human Be-In was held in the park in January, the national press has focused a spotlight on San Francisco, sensationalizing the long hair and outlandish clothing, the free love and the acid rock and the drugs, luring a generation that’s hungry for new experience. Summer’s here, school’s out, and the kids are arriving by the thousands.

The park and the Panhandle have been the settings for dozens of free rock concerts since the scene began to percolate a couple of years ago. If these lush green spaces are the playground for the Haight-Ashbury community, the junction of Haight Street and Ashbury Avenue, two blocks off the Panhandle, is the civic center. The streets are as crowded as New York’s Fifth Avenue at lunch hour, but here ties and coats are even rarer than beads and tie-dye on the upscale streets of the Big Apple. The kids sit on the stoops of the houses, the fenders of parked cars, the curbstones. They smoke joints and cigarettes, they make out, they play guitars and drums and flutes and instruments contrived of found objects. What do they hope to find here? Drugs and sex, for sure. A place where they can be as
stoned or freaky as they want and nobody will think the worse of them. Beyond that . . . ?

What Bobby and Penny and I see is what’s already changing, but it’s all new to us and we don’t perceive the metamorphosis that’s under way. We have been drawn here by the TV news, the pieces in
Time
and
Newsweek
, the same coverage that brought all these kids, and, like them, we’re digging it for the first time. For the pioneers who created the upwelling of music, theater, art, and creativity, the eruption of a whole new, gaudy, outrage-the-straights, to-hell-with-limits lifestyle in San Francisco over the previous two years, this is the beginning of the end. What arose as a community where creative spirits of many descriptions could live together—young hippies, older beatniks, musicians, potheads, artists—an enclave within the broader society, removed from the scrutiny of parents and disapproving authorities, has become the focus of the press and the whole damn country. Among the founders, the exodus has already begun, as residents of the Haight decamp for Marin and Sonoma counties, the East Bay, and more remote refuges.

We’re looking for what lies beneath the hubbub, hoping to find the genesis of the spirit we felt at Monterey, but we have no one to guide us, no insider to take us beyond the flow of wandering explorers and runaways. At midweek, we miss Big Brother and the Grateful Dead playing at a summer solstice celebration in Golden Gate Park because we’re not yet plugged into the rock underground.

A few days later, Penny is airborne for New York and Bobby and I are southbound with Bob Siggins and Joe Val, heading back to Monterey and beyond, past Carmel, where I was living just a year ago, and down the coast to the headlands of Big Sur, where the Charles River Valley Boys will perform at the country’s smallest, best-kept secret on the festival circuit.

This tour, our first and only venture to California, came about by accidents as lucky as those that brought me to Monterey with Pennebaker. Manny Greenhill, our Boston manager, has customarily
booked his artists in the Berkeley Folk Festival, an annual event that has been around even longer than the convocations at Newport. During my year in Carmel, I learned of the much smaller folk festival in Big Sur, also held in midsummer. I knew a few folk music coffeehouses in Berkeley, and the Ash Grove in L.A. has a national reputation equal to that of the Club 47. Could Manny put together enough gigs to make a California tour worthwhile? He could, and he did.

Bob Siggins is a founding member of the CRVB, a Harvard graduate whose postdoctoral studies in neuroscience at Boston University pretty much allow him to set his own schedule. Joe Val is a maestro of the mandolin who plays and sings like Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass music, with a Boston accent. In his day job, Joe is mild-mannered Joseph Valiante, a typewriter repairman whose boss has belatedly recognized that Joe is his most valuable employee. When the idea for taking the CRVB to California came up, Joe’s boss agreed to let him go.

At the helm of the VW bus that is carrying us southward on Highway One is Peter Berg, a Berkeley musician Neuwirth and I have known since the early sixties, when Peter was in a group that played string band music and country songs and some bluegrass of a sort, but they felt it wasn’t as refined as bluegrass so they called it crabgrass. The Crabgrass Band featured Toni Brown on guitar and vocals. In the summer of 1967, Toni is better known as half of the Joy of Cooking and our Peter Berg is “the Berkeley Peter Berg,” to distinguish him from the San Francisco Peter Berg, who was one of the motivators behind the San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Diggers, and is altogether a different person.

Our Cambridge bass player, Everett Alan Lilly, wasn’t able to make the trip. To replace him, we have recruited Peter, who will be the CRVB’s first electric bassist.

In a whimsical moment, Peter has decided to assume an alias for his tour with the Charles River Valley Boys. He has a pair of blue jeans that turned purple when they were accidentally washed in hot
water with some bright reds. Neuwirth lends him a purple corduroy jacket cut short like a Levi’s jacket. Peter comes up with a purple cape and dubs himself Purple Man.

After the intensity of Monterey, the Big Sur Folk Festival is like a weekend at a summer camp for hippies. Big Sur is a place out of time. Access is by the two-lane coast road, California Route 1, from north or south, except when it is washed out by winter rains. It’s a second- and third-gear road with a few long straightaways, an invitation to spirited driving. Even in summer, when the flow of tourists makes cruising the coast road at optimal speed unlikely, Big Sur feels remote from what we call civilization.

The audience at this festival is a drop in the bucket compared to Monterey. You can count the fans in the hundreds. They park along Highway One and come trooping down the entrance road to the Esalen Institute, where the festival is held. During the rest of the year, Esalen hosts retreats and workshops featuring a grab bag of current philosophical and humanistic studies aimed at expanding what Aldous Huxley called “human potentialities.” Gestalt therapy and transactional analysis are current favorites in the counterculture’s explorations of mind and body. Seminars are hosted by resident and guest gurus that have included Fritz Perls, Alan Watts, and Eric Berne. Richard Alpert and Tim Leary have visited Esalen. So have Linus Pauling and B. F. Skinner. Attendees make reservations in advance and pay handsomely to have their consciousness raised. The Folk Festival, in contrast, is the least formal event of the year, a come-one, come-all event that brings a colorful collection of latter-day pilgrims leading kids by the hand and carrying picnic supplies and psychoactives by the bagload. They’re mostly locals from a hundred-mile stretch of coastline, joined by a handful of devotees who make the trek from Berkeley and San Francisco and L.A. The daytrippers spread out on the thick lawn below the main building, facing the terraced pool, and it is there on the terrace, with batik banners
blowing in the wind and the Pacific Ocean as backdrop, that the celebrations commence.

Joan Baez is the reigning spirit of the festival, the beacon that attracts well- and lesser-known musicians from far afield. Barely a year after I first heard her sing in the Club 47, Joan moved to Carmel. Big Sur has become her hometown folk festival. This year she sings with her sisters, Mimi Fariña and Pauline Marden. Judy Collins makes it a foursome. Al Kooper, who contributed the distinctive organ riff to Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” backs up the Baez-Collins quartet on keyboard.

There has been little, if any, bluegrass in Big Sur hitherto, and the change of pace the Charles River Valley Boys provide is warmly welcomed. Bob and Joe and I have been playing together for the better part of five years, briefly interrupted by my recent California sojourn. Bob and Joe are in top form instrumentally, and our three-part vocal harmonies approach sibling symmetry. The audience is surprised to find that our repertoire includes Beatles songs. Last year, the CRVB put out an album on Elektra called
Beatle Country
, a dozen Beatles songs done bluegrass style, recorded in Nashville, the capital of country music. The infusion of bluegrass-country harmonies and rhythms earned Elektra an appreciative letter from Paul McCartney. When I returned to Cambridge from my unrequited quest on the left coast, I learned the Beatles repertoire, and soon I was as happy singing songs by Lennon and McCartney as I am with tunes I learned from Flatt and Scruggs.

Last year I saw the Big Sur festival as an observer; now I’m here as a performer, enjoying the perfect day and the reunion with friends from Carmel. Of these, Mimi is the one I hold most dear. Since I met her as a fifteen-year-old waif at the Baez home in Belmont, Massachusetts, she has blossomed into a rare beauty and a seasoned performer. Five years ago, I introduced Mimi to her husband-to-be, Dick Fariña, in Paris, in the backseat of my brand-new white Volvo, when
Dick was still married to the folksinger Carolyn Hester. Within two years, Dick and Carolyn divorced and Dick married Mimi. Just last year, Dick died on Mimi’s twenty-first birthday, which was also the publication date of Dick’s novel,
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me
. At a publication party in Carmel Valley, Dick climbed on the back of a friend’s motorcycle for a joyride and never came back. The guy driving the bike survived the crash, but Dick broke his neck.

Even in this out-of-the-way gathering, the pop revolution is represented by ambassadors who have come to make pacts of friendship with the folkies. The Chambers Brothers, who won the hearts of everyone in Cambridge on their first visit to the Club 47, have come up from L.A. Simon and Garfunkel have segued from Monterey Pop to Big Sur. Paul and Art seem to enjoy the low-key gathering and the spectacular setting. Rumor is they’re playing for free (the Big Sur festival sure can’t afford what they might reasonably ask) just to dig the scene.

Before leaving San Francisco, I borrowed Pennebaker’s movie camera. In Big Sur I shoot a little music festival footage of my own. The sight of a professional rig on my shoulder triggers the paranoia of a crew from L.A. who are here to film the festival for TV. They want to rip my film from the camera, but my friend Peter Melchior, Esalen’s assistant director, cools them out. Let him alone, he tells them, and they do.

At the end of the afternoon concert, I welcome the opportunity to initiate a foreigner to a pleasant rite of the California lifestyle. The Chambers Brothers’ drummer, Brian Keenan, is good-hearted, pink of cheek, and infused with all the modesty of the British Isles, whence he comes. Rock and roll is his life and he’s ready for whatever it has to offer—almost. At Big Sur, it’s the custom for the musicians to adjourn to the sulfur baths following the afternoon concert. Knowing what lies in store for him, I fall in beside Brian as we move that way when the music is done. Come on, I say, we’re all going to the baths.

Before the handful of buildings and cabins perched on this grassy ledge with the coast range at their back and God’s own Pacific panorama spread out before them became the Esalen Institute, they were known collectively as Big Sur Hot Springs, for the natural sulfur water that flows from fissures in the coastal cliffs at about 115 degrees Fahrenheit. Down a sloping pathway from the swimming pool and the festival stage are the baths. The building is a rudimentary structure, like many in Big Sur, slapped together out of native timber and set on a concrete foundation, open to the west with only a guardrail between the bathers and a couple-of-hundred-foot drop down the cliff face to the rocks below, which are washed by breakers that roll all the way from Japan.

Brian and I follow a gaggle of musicians down the path: Joan and her sister Mimi, in long colorful dresses, laughing in the midst of Joe, Willy, Lester, and George Chambers. They turn into the doorway of the bathhouse. I usher Brian in ahead of me and he finds himself confronted by a few dozen people of both sexes, every one of them stark bare-assed naked, except for the Baez sisters and Chambers brothers, who are in the process of getting that way.