On the Road with Janis Joplin Read Free Page A

they accept me. I’m a rock-and-roll road manager. When I got off the plane it was only make-believe.
    Now it’s real.
    “I remember Janis took to you right away, man. She thought you were cute.”
    Sam Andrew

CHAPTER TWO
    California Dreamin’
    T HE POET-NOVELIST R O BERT Penn Warren wrote, “I eat a persimmon and the teeth of a tinker in Tibet are put on edge.” He liked to watch the far-reaching ripples of unpredictable cause and effect spread from that crystalline moment when the stone hits the still surface of the pond.
    There are times and places where the flow of events becomes focused through an accidental lens—an experience, an event that becomes a turning point in many lives. Our generation is entranced by synchronicity, yet only those most attuned to the flow recognize these confluences for what they are at the time, even when they blunder into them head-on. The Monterey Pop Festival was such a moment for Janis and Big Brother. Their presence at the festival and the effect of their performance were the result of many decisions and turning points, any one of which might have yielded a different result.
    For my part, if I hadn’t been at the Pop Festival, I wouldn’t have become the road manager for Big Brother and the Holding Company. That’s as close to fact as you can get in the realm of “what if?”
    What if Big Brother hadn’t played at Monterey? They might not have signed a management contract with Albert Grossman later that year, maybe never. They might still have achieved the wider renown that launched Janis to even greater fame as the first woman superstar in rock music, for she was a powerful force, probably uncontainable at that point in the evolution of American popular music.
    But the alternatives were roads not taken.
    We were there, the band and I, borne by ripples set in motion at points far separated in geography and time, and the effect for each of us was life-changing. As a result, I moved from Cambridge to California as the focus of the counterculture shifted from east to west, and I continued to be a participant—in a new capacity—in the music that was pied piper to a decade of innovation and upheaval. For Janis and Big Brother, the attention they gained at the Monterey Pop Festival launched them toward their destiny and summoned the forces that would eventually pull them apart.
    At this remove in time, Monterey seems to me the jewel in the crown of the sixties. It was not the largest festival, but the brightest, the most finely formed, where all the benevolent potency that musicians and fans could generate together was made manifest, briefly, like a rainbow, or a ring around the sun, a vision impossible to fix in the physical world, but one whose glow endures in memory, freighted with emotion and meaning.
    I’d like to claim that I understood the full significance of the Pop Festival while I was following D. A. Pennebaker around the Monterey County Fairgrounds with a Nagra tape recorder slung from my shoulder, but that would be an abuse of the storyteller’s power. Much later, when I traced how the Pop Festival came about, how Big Brother came to be included and how Pennebaker came to film it, I marveled at the winding paths we followed, each strewn with many “What if?” moments, where a different decision, a different opportunity at any step of the way could have changed everything.
    The seeds of the landmark gathering were sown by a quartet ofwould-be rock entrepreneurs from Los Angeles whose names sounded like a promising law firm: Wheeler, Taylor, Pariser and Shapiro. The idea was simple and visionary—corral as many of the reigning pop stars of the moment as could be persuaded to work for a small fraction of their regular fees to play at a three-day festival that would unfold at the county fairgrounds in Monterey sometime in the summer of 1967. Enlist nobody but headliners. Shoot for the stars. Dazzle the music world and reap the harvest.
    Things didn’t work out