On the Road with Janis Joplin (7 page)

Linda knows Albert. She doesn’t know him well, but she knows a lot about him from people who are close to him, people who believe in him. Linda’s former husband, Nick Gravenites, is a blues singer and songwriter from the mean streets of Chicago, where he was
known as Nick the Greek and carried a gun. Nick is tight with Paul Butterfield and Mike Bloomfield. He’s one of Albert’s inner circle of confidants from the early days.

When Janis asks Linda who she thinks would be the best manager for Big Brother, Linda says, “
If you want to stay in San Francisco and play around and have a good time, it really doesn’t matter. But if you want to be an international phenomenon, Albert. No question.”

Others offer conflicting advice. A New York manager! Are you crazy? The San Francisco paranoia about being ripped off is a formidable obstacle to any kind of business deal with someone who isn’t a hippie: Don’t go to Monterey, you’ll get ripped off. Don’t be in the movie, you’ll get ripped off. Don’t sign a record deal, you’ll get ripped off. Don’t be on TV, you’ll get ripped off. And, hey, don’t sign with a New York manager, man, you’ll get ripped off for sure.

Well, yes. Somebody might make some money
off you
. But that’s the way it works! Somebody makes money off you, and if they’re good at what they do, they help you get seen and heard by more people than will ever see and hear you if you scurry for your hole every time the possibility comes up that somebody else will make money off you. Yes, a manager gets a percentage of your earnings, but he only makes money when you make money, and
you make more than he does
.

No one in Big Brother has accepted all of this as gospel yet, but for the band even to consider approaching Albert Grossman to manage them represents a sea change. They have recognized that they need businesspeople, not hippies, to handle the business.

Albert comes to San Francisco. Janis and the boys can’t get over the fact that he looks like the guy on the Quaker Oats box. It amuses them, and it kindles in them the first glimmers of affection for this taciturn man who has expanded his influence so surely, so apparently effortlessly, beyond folk music into the realm of rock.

He’s funny too. The humor is bone dry, understated, but some of the band members, Janis and Sam in particular, pick up on Albert’s wordplay and note the comic spark in his eyes.

The meeting is in Janis’s apartment on Lyon Street, between Haight Street and the Panhandle. The living room is furnished in a Beat-Victorian style that is uniquely Janis. Posters and pieces of fabric are hung on the walls and more odd bits of fabric are draped over the furniture and the lamps.

Albert is a past master at Socratic inscrutability. When the guys in the band ask him a question, he asks one in return.

As our manager, what will you do for us?

What do you want?

They tell him, and he listens. His eyebrows are slightly raised behind his round glasses, giving him the expression of a curious owl.

Big Brother is contractually bound to Mainstream. That is something Albert will have to deal with, because they have no intention of recording for Bobby Shad again. Earlier in the year there were feelers from Warner Brothers. Julius fielded them and they went nowhere.
More recently, Columbia has expressed interest. At the Monterey Jazz Festival, Columbia’s legendary producer, John Hammond, Sr., who signed Bob Dylan to the label, invited Janis and Peter Albin to sit in his private box. Big Brother is ready for a real manager and a real record deal. They want to see the world beyond the San Francisco Bay. They want to find out how far they can go.

Sitting with them in Janis’s living room while they lay this out for Albert is Bob Gordon, an attorney who represents Albert on the West Coast and has also represented Big Brother, independently, in some recent matters.

Bob earned his law degree in Berkeley, at Boalt Hall, in the fifties, when the campus was a bastion of peaceful conformity. He is now a partner in a Los Angeles law firm that boasts former California governor Pat Brown on its letterhead. Of those gathered in Janis’s living room, Bob is the one who looks most out of place, the only one wearing a tie. He presents the appearance and demeanor of a solid citizen. A square. But beneath the traditional exterior lies a more individualistic spirit. For a time, Bob represented A&M Records. The
founders, Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss, set out to establish a company that would be scrupulously fair to musicians and songwriters and represent their interests in a business that was not noted for giving artists—the creative spirits—their due. With the phenomenal success Alpert and his band, the Tijuana Brass, achieved by the midsixties, it seemed to Bob Gordon that Moss and Alpert became focused on making every deal bigger than the last and lost sight of their altruistic ideals, and Bob found himself less interested in working with them.

By then, Bob was traveling often to San Francisco on business and he became fascinated by the growth of the music scene there.

Early in 1967, before the Pop Festival,
Bob represented Big Brother when they were asked to appear in director Richard Lester’s film
Petulia
, starring Julie Christie and George C. Scott, which was shot in San Francisco. Lester had directed the Beatles in
A Hard Day’s Night
, so Big Brother jumped at the chance to work with him when he was recruiting bands for
Petulia
. The contract that Warner Brothers, the film’s producers, presented to Big Brother would have transferred to Warner Brothers the copyrights of the songs Big Brother performed in the film.

Excuse me, Bob Gordon said, what are you trying to pull here? You don’t get the copyright. All you get is a sync license.

The Warner Brothers lawyers smiled and said, Oh, sure, of course, while under their breath they were muttering, Curses, foiled again. Warner Brothers offered union scale for Big Brother’s performance in the film. Bob got them more. This negotiation won Bob Gordon a lot of points with the band.

Between the Pop Festival and the Jazz Festival, Julius Karpen called on Bob to accompany him to Columbia Records’ annual convention, held in L.A. Julius was invited as Big Brother’s manager. He asked Bob to come along to protect his back. They met with Columbia president Clive Davis to discuss Big Brother, but the existence of the Mainstream contract posed an obstacle that was not overcome at the convention.

In the matter of Albert’s management contract with Big Brother, Bob has told Albert that Big Brother needs his advice more than Albert does. Bob represents the band, while Albert’s New York lawyers can oversee his side of the contract. Big Brother knows all this and they trust Bob to protect their interests.

The band wants an escape clause that will get them out of the management contract if things don’t work out.
They ask Albert to guarantee that he will make them an outlandish amount of money in the coming year. Name your price, Albert says. The figure the band has in mind is $75,000. Albert smiles his enigmatic smile. “Make it $100,000,” he says, and then he has a better idea. “I’ll tell you what,” he says. “If I don’t make you that much money, I won’t take my twenty percent. I won’t take anything, and you can fire me.”

Janis and the boys sign on the dotted line.

Gonna Lay Down My Old Guitar

O
N OUR RETURN
to New York after the Pop Festival and the Charles River Valley Boys’ cruise through the Summer of Love, Neuwirth and I feel that we have been expelled from the initiates’ level of paradise to the midregions of purgatory. The return to the East is a rude reminder that the rest of America hasn’t yet received the message that music, love and flowers are here to stay. We cushion the shock of reentry by ensconcing ourselves in the screening room at the offices of Leacock Pennebaker, in the company of friends who still glow in the dark with memories of Monterey, and we let the celluloid images transport us back. They’re all there, Paul and Art, John and Michelle and Cass and Denny, Otis and Ravi and Grace. And Janis. On repeated viewings, “Ball and Chain” loses none of its power.

Within a few days, Bob and I are festival-bound again, off to Newport, where the barricades are still manned against amplified music that is too far out for the traditionalists. The Chambers Brothers startle the old guard with their break-out, space-out hit, “Time Has Come Today,” but the brothers are fully fledged members of the folk family and the audience welcomes “Time” as a breath of fresh
air. Buffalo Springfield’s ticket to Newport is “For What It’s Worth,” which carries the folk tradition of protest into electrified pop music. The rest of this summer’s Newport roster is down-the-line folk, old-time, gospel, bluegrass, and blues—Joan Baez, Maybelle Carter, Bill Monroe, Pete Seeger, Judy Collins, the Staple Singers, Grandpa Jones. The wild card this summer is country music star Dave Dudley, whose trucking song “Six Days on the Road” has caught the ear of folkies and rockers alike.

It is pleasant to sit in the sun in Peabody Park and listen to the musicians, uniformly excellent, but it is hard to escape a feeling that Newport has become a something of a backwater. Just two years after Bob Dylan shocked the old folkies by playing an electrified set at Newport, the musical offshoots that took so much inspiration from Dylan’s amplified sound have gathered strength and spread across the land. The focus has shifted westward, leaping the heartland to settle on the Pacific shore. Is it possible that Monterey marked not the beginning of the shift, but its completion?

Tonto comes east to join Bobby. We take her up to Cambridge and show her the town. We spend time in Cambridge sitting in outdoor cafés on brick sidewalks and soaking up the summertime vibes. The Club 47’s calendar is heavily tilted toward blues of the jumping variety—Howlin’ Wolf, the Siegel-Schwall Blues Band, Buddy Guy and Junior Wells—along with the Kweskin Jug Band and the far-roaming Chambers Brothers. Close your eyes, and the sounds from the small stage on Palmer Street could be coming from grander platforms. Just to keep the mix interesting, the Club has booked the jazz pianist Mose Allison for a week. Allison’s love of the blues makes him an appropriate bridge between Buddy Guy and Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys.

My schedule with the Charles River Valley Boys isn’t enough to keep body and soul together. We play a gig here, play a gig there, but the folk boom is spent. Between bluegrass gigs I spend my time in New York, where Pennebaker is assembling a rough cut of the
Monterey footage. Some film work seems like just the thing to take up the slack. Penny and Ricky’s office manager hires me in an undefined role. “Don’t worry,” he says, “we’ll find something.” I finish a transcription of the
Dont Look Back
sound track, which is to be published as a book. I help put together a photo collage that will become the endpapers. I enlist Neuwirth and a couple of the back-room crew to contribute improvisations for some very off-the-wall radio spots Penny uses to promote the film’s New York debut.

Until the small hours of the morning, we’re often at Max’s Kansas City, a restaurant and bar on Park Avenue South that was formerly renowned, possibly apocryphally, for feeding goldfish to a tankful of piranhas at cocktail hour.

Max’s is a steak house. The sign out front announces “Steak, lobster, chick peas.” The place is long and narrow, the art on the walls is eclectic, and the banquettes, the tablecloths, the napkins—everything but the white walls—are red. A round table in the back room is the late-night rendezvous for Andy Warhol and his crew from the Factory. In the back room, even the lighting is red. After a few drinks, it’s like being in a photographic darkroom with the safelight on.

Max’s became a favorite hangout for artists when the owner, Mickey Ruskin, began accepting paintings in payment for bar bills. Soon the visual artists were joined by musicians and actors.

The balance of my life has shifted. After almost ten years of living in Cambridge and visiting New York, I’m spending most of my time in New York and making the run up to Cambridge to play with the CRVB. Neuwirth and I talk about sharing an apartment. We look at pads on the Upper West Side—not yet trendy—where rents are cheap. Three hundred bucks a month for five or six rooms with an eye-of-the-needle glimpse of the Hudson River. Whew. Steep. A full-time job at Leacock Pennebaker fails to materialize and I find it hard to settle into any kind of routine. I’ve been through the looking glass. I’ve glimpsed a new dimension. I’m not just hoping for a chance to make another trip to California. I want to live there.

As summer gives way to fall and the first gusts of winter probe the rectilinear ravines of New York City, the idea of becoming a road manager is the furthest thing from my mind—until a day when Neuwirth takes me into a cutting room at the Leacock Pennebaker offices on West 45th Street and informs me, in the kind of undertones usually reserved for conveying nuclear launch codes, that Albert wants to have dinner with me.

I don’t have to ask “Albert who?” A couple of months after hitchhiking aboard Bob Dylan’s springtime road trip, I was splashing in Albert Grossman’s swimming pool in Bearsville, New York, just up the road from Woodstock. The house is the first Albert has ever owned, the first house he has lived in. Growing up in Chicago, he always lived in apartments, and he took to the role of country squire as if to the manor born. (A fondness for the bear image may be why Albert bought property in Bearsville instead of Woodstock. He briefly owned a club in Chicago called the Bear, where he often appeared in a huge fur coat, like the raccoon coats from the ’20s, taking on the physical presence of a bear. He will later establish the Bear Café and Bearsville Sound Studios in his adopted hometown.)

The summer of ’64 was Albert and his new wife Sally’s first summer in the house, and they hosted a revolving-door parade of musicians and friends as lord and lady of the sylvan estate. Dylan was in residence, considering finding a house of his own somewhere nearby, but in no hurry. For a time, when Albert was away on business, Dick and Mimi Fariña house-sat for the Grossmans. Calls went out to Cambridge. Hey, come on over! Paul Rothchild and Neuwirth and I joined Dick and Mimi and Bob and Sara-who-would-eventually-become-Bob’s-wife for the summer solstice.

Albert recognizes Cambridge as an important way station on the folk circuit, and he has visited several times. On one occasion he made use of the guest room in the Reservoir Street pad that I shared with Fritz Richmond. A few days after Albert’s departure, we received as a thank-you gift the Elektra album
Music of Bulgaria
, whose
stunning harmonies graced our late-night listening for a long time to come.

Since traveling with Dylan, Neuwirth has become Albert’s confidant. He’s not supposed to forewarn me about Albert’s invitation, but he wants me to be prepared. Dinner is fine with me, I say. Albert is a convivial host. Bobby tells me there will be more to it. Albert has signed to manage Big Brother and the Holding Company, he says. This gets my attention. And (pause for effect) Albert is looking for a road manager.

It is not Albert’s practice to send his musicians out on the road unattended. Not long after Bob Dylan committed himself to Albert’s keeping, Albert decided that Bob should have a road manager. In the spring of 1964, Dylan arrived in Cambridge in a Ford station wagon driven by Victor Maimudes. Victor was the first road manager anyone in folk music had ever seen, and we were duly impressed. Jazz bands had road managers. Scruffy folk troubadours got lost driving from New York to Boston and were usually late for their gigs. Not Bob Dylan.

Bob and Victor used Cambridge as their base of operations for the better part of a week. Dylan liked the company of kindred souls, which in those days included many of the folks who lived at the heart of the Cambridge music scene.

Several of us went with Bob and Victor to Providence, Rhode Island, where Bob played at Brown University. We hung out backstage at a concert in Boston. We took another day trip to Amherst, where Bob played UMass, and where we met a student named Henry Fredericks, but we didn’t know that was his name because a couple of years earlier he had a dream about Gandhi, and India, and started calling himself Taj Mahal. Taj could definitely play the blues, and more. He had absorbed the folk boom and was finding his own music.

Beaujolais was the drink of choice during these New England rambles. Genuine French Beaujolais for $1.95 a bottle. Victor made
sure there were always a few bottles in the car. The Beaujolais went well with pot. Dylan laughed a lot, and he never gave a thought about where he was going or what time he was supposed to be there. Neither did the crew of hangers-on. Victor road-managed all of us. He drove the Ford station wagon, he made sure we got there on time, he got us in backstage at the gigs, and before the gig was over he disappeared briefly to collect the money.

I thought Victor had the coolest job in the world.

By now, in 1967, having a road manager is a mark of success both among the harshly winnowed ranks of folk performers and in the booming electrified free-for-all. With no pool of experienced candidates to draw from, what Albert is looking for is someone who can do the job but doesn’t know he can do it. Bobby has assured him I have the requisite potential.

Albert and I dine at Max’s Kansas City. I smile at the waitresses and try to make small talk with Albert, which is not easy. He prefers to listen more than he talks. In negotiations, or conversation with those he regards as opponents, silence is his preferred weapon and he wields it without mercy. Reluctant to reveal himself, he is adept at getting others to reveal
them
selves. When an adversary is done delivering his pitch at great length, Albert will nod ever so slightly. He’ll say, “Mmm,” as if what he heard is worthy of consideration, and he will sit there, waiting for more. His interlocutor, burdened with responsibility for the silence, will step in to fill the void, trip over things he hadn’t intended to say, and prostrate himself before the Sphinx.

In congenial company, Albert often uses his natural reticence for humorous effect, capping the conversation of others with a pithy comment that gets the biggest laugh. When I come to know him better, I realize that Albert has turned the natural demeanor of a shy man to his advantage.

With me, Albert has always been friendly, rarely intimidating. Maybe he recognizes me as a fellow member of Shy People Anonymous. I’m not often tongue-tied, but with Albert I don’t want to
rattle on like an imbecile. I want to say things that interest him, things that make him think well of me. Things that make him laugh. I want to impress him. As a consequence, I’m tongue-tied.

“So, John,” Albert says, when a silence grows long. “How would you feel about going on the road?”

He surprises me by saying that he has three groups in need of supervision—the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the Electric Flag, and Big Brother and the Holding Company. Bobby didn’t warn me I’d have to make a choice. Maybe he didn’t know. Albert doesn’t reveal all his cards, even to his intimates.

I pretend to think it over. Butterfield is from the Chicago blues scene, a long way from the Club 47 in Cambridge. As a white guy playing black music, Butter is a phenomenon.
Invited to sit in with Junior Wells at the Blue Flame Lounge, a black club in Chicago where Paul was a regular—kind of a novelty act, like “Watch this white boy play the harp!”—he blew Junior Wells off the stage so thoroughly that Junior put on his hat and coat and left the club. The crowd wouldn’t let Paul go, but they let Junior go without a peep. This is Junior Wells, the guy who
defines
the Chicago style of playing harp. Junior didn’t come back until the next night, invited Paul to sit in again, and
the same thing happened!
Paul blew him away just like the night before. Junior put on his hat and coat and was out the door.

Paul not only plays blues harp, he can
sing
. He brought the Chicago sound—electrified, contemporary, urban black music—to the white folk fans that have become the core audience for the rock-and-roll explosion. I love Paul’s music, but the Butterfield band plays two-week club dates in places like Detroit where I will die of boredom. The urban blues scene isn’t my first choice for hanging out.

The Electric Flag is already notorious within Albert’s office for some band members’ propensity for serious substance abuse. No, thank you. I tell Albert that Big Brother impressed me at Monterey, and I’ve always liked San Francisco. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

If Albert finds either irony or pleasure in the fact that the son of
immigrant Jewish tailors from Riga, Latvia (his mother), and Odessa (his father) is hiring a Harvard-graduate bluegrass singer who is the son of Alistair Cooke to be a rock-and-roll road manager, he keeps his feelings to himself. (Few Americans are aware that my father is the chief American correspondent for the British newspaper
The Guardian
, or that for more than twenty years he has written and broadcast a weekly radio program,
Letter from America
, for the BBC. At this time, he is somewhat known in the United States as a television “personality,” a term he loathes, because from 1952 until 1961 he hosted
Omnibus
, a ninety-minute variety program of a type never seen before or since, that ran on Sunday afternoons. In November 1967,
Omnibus
is six years in the past and
Masterpiece Theatre
four years in the future.)