Another Little Piece of My Heart by Richard Goldstein

Author:Richard Goldstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620408896
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-01-13T16:00:00+00:00

Even when she was a certified superstar, Janis was far more accessible than her equivalent would be today. You might see her mingling with the audience before a set, and you could probably worm your way backstage if you tried. I didn’t have to carry a press card. I just caught up with the band. In those days, an emerging group like Big Brother and the Holding Company would play in venues that were often old theaters, sometimes with the seats ripped out so people could mill around. In Philadelphia they performed in a huge converted garage. Their sets were long and rarely rehearsed. It was an exhausting ordeal, with little to keep the musicians grounded except one another. The guys who made up Janis’s band were very good at creating an umbra of warmth, even in a strange dressing room. They kept a close eye on her, much as one might watch an insecure sister diving off the high board. They weren’t doing it because she was their rainmaker. They cared for her—it was obvious and it moved me. Unlike the members of the Doors, who had a simmering contempt for Jim Morrison and his bouts of drunken release, these musicians respected Janis’s need to be intoxicated. They didn’t drink, but they also didn’t judge.

Her fragility was hard to miss up close, but before a performance it was especially intense. Waiting to go on in Philadelphia, she stalked around the dressing room, her fingers drumming on a tabletop. “Oh, shit,” she said, looking out at the crowd. “We’ll never be able to get into those kids. Want to see death? Take a look out there.” The crowd was an undifferentiated herd of hippies—the usual. I had the sense that she was like this at every show. She looked like she was trying to jump out of her skin. For someone as self-conscious as Janis, stepping onstage must have been a very charged sensation.

She reached for her trademark, a bottle of Southern Comfort. In those days it had a lower proof than most alcoholic concoctions, but she could guzzle an uncanny amount of the stuff. “I don’t drink anything on the rocks,” she told me. “Cold is bad for my throat. So it’s always straight or in tea. I usually get about a pint and a half down when I’m performing. Any more, I start to nod out.”

As a nice Jewish boy I’d never seen anyone drink like that, and it was hardly the drug of choice for a hippie. But liquor is famous for its disinhibiting effect on shy people, and, as countless alcoholic writers will attest, it can loosen up the associative parts of the imagination, as can other drugs with hazardous side effects. Some musicians are lucky enough to get there from the act of performing itself, but many do their best work in an altered state. I cringe when media wags gloat over a performer’s overdose. They demand greatness, but they won’t accept what it takes to achieve it.

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