On the Road with Janis Joplin Read Free

in the interest of getting serious about the rest of my life. For now, I will help others devote themselves more fully to their music while I handle the money and logistics. I have exchanged my guitar for an attaché case. It contains itineraries, contracts, and the promise of loud music, late nights, and loose women.
    To Peter Albin, I reveal none of the giddy high that the waters of the Bay, the sight of Coit Tower, a glimpse of the Golden Gate Bridge, arouse in me. With Peter, I’m all business. I’m cool. He takes me to a motel on Columbus Avenue, in North Beach. A few years ago, the North Beach coffeehouses were the focus of San Francisco’s folk scene, and before that, the home of the Beats. I wonder if any unamplified music survives in the city that has become the wellspring of American rock and roll, but satisfying this curiosity will have to wait. Right now, I’ve got to pass inspection by my prospective employers. Peter gives me half an hour to come down from thirty thousand feet, then picks me up again and takes me to meet the band.
    They rehearse in a third-floor loft in a building they call the Warehouse, close by an off-ramp where the Central Freeway dumps traffic into the city streets. When Peter and I enter the loft, the four other members of the band are sitting at a round oak table by the windows. There’s a bed covered with a madras spread, the ubiquitous, versatile fabric by which a generation of bohemian youth is enriching the textile magnates of India. There are amps and instruments and a drum set off to one side, random sticks of furniture, and enough floor spaceto hold a dance competition. A few oil paintings adorn the walls. They’re by the drummer, David Getz, I will learn. David has set his painting aside for a venture into rock and roll.
    The space could be any number of artists’ lofts where I’ve been to late-night parties in New York, but, except for the paintings, the art in progress here isn’t visible, and the quintet scrutinizing me now is pure San Francisco. This is the moment of truth. The truth is, I’m nervous, which is a condition I customarily conceal beneath a reserved exterior.
    I recognize Janis, of course, but Peter is a polite fellow and he introduces her first. It was Janis who took the audience’s breath away at Monterey, this Texas white girl who belts the rocking blues like no one else, propelled by one of the founding bands of the San Francisco Sound.
    Sam Andrew and James Gurley are the lanky guitar players, sprawled in their chairs with legs askew. Tight-fitting black jeans. Pointy-toed boots.
Long
hair. Way longer than any East Coast beatnik’s. Theirs is down past their shoulders, combed straight like Janis’s. I’m six-feet-one-and-a-bit, and I judge that Sam and James, upright, will inhabit the same altitude. Peter is a couple of inches shorter. David is more compact. He falls into the range that eyewitnesses describe as average height. At this meeting he sits squarely on his chair, all his attention on me, just as he sits at his drums onstage, centered and balanced. David’s hair, and Peter’s, is a little shorter than Sam’s and James’s, pageboy haircuts gone to seed.
    Janis is watchful. In repose her face is unremarkable, not what you’d call pretty. Only her eyes betray the vitality she releases in performance. They are clear and alert, and when the introductions are over it is Janis who speaks first.
    “What sign are you?”
    “Libra.”
    “That sounds just,” James says. This is a generous reaction and I’mgrateful to him, but Janis is looking me up and down with all the distrust appropriate for greeting a newcomer from the East, a road manager imposed on the band by Albert Grossman, the personal manager they barely know and for sure don’t fully trust.
    Janis shrugs. “I don’t care much about Libras one way or the other.”
    But I’m cool. I take no offense, because they accept me. Cautiously and with reservations, to be sure, but