On the Road with Janis Joplin by John Byrne Cooke

Author:John Byrne Cooke [Cooke, John Byrne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-10-28T00:00:00+00:00

FEB. 14, 1969: SUNY, Albany

FEB. 15: University of Vermont, Burlington

FEB. 16: Toronto, Ontario

FEB. 21: Colby College, Waterville, Maine

FEB. 22: Clark University, Worcester, Mass.

FEB. 23: Queens College, Flushing, N.Y.

FEB. 28: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

MAR. 1: Duke University, Durham, N.C.

MAR. 7: Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill.

MAR. 9: Toledo, Ohio

Janis gets a day to rest before we launch into a three-week itinerary that starts off in Albany, Burlington and Toronto, and ends up in North Carolina, Illinois and Ohio. It’s the hinterland tour again, except for Toronto. In the year that has passed since Janis traveled these regions with Big Brother, the kids have been growing their hair and buying funny clothes and trying to get hip.

We rent two cars at each airport. I train a couple of the band members as follow-car drivers so we won’t lose half the band before we get to the hotel. Here’s the drill: Pretend there’s a fifty-foot rope between my lead car and the follow car. I know you’re back there, so you can follow me closer than you’d follow some stranger in traffic. If you need to stop, flash your headlights.

Terry Clements is one of the better drivers. Sam is fine, but he doesn’t really want the responsibility. The proof that I haven’t got the follow-car driver adequately trained comes when I blow a front tire on an interstate off-ramp near Albany. My car jumps the curb and careens across the mowed lawn that landscapes the interchange until I can bring it to a stop, but the follow car never leaves the pavement. Once it’s clear that we’re all okay, the guys in the band tease the driver without mercy. You’re supposed to follow him, man!

Monday to Thursday, most weeks, we’re in New York. For the trips to and from the airports, John Fisher brings a second limo.

Not long after the band settles into the Chelsea Hotel, their number is expanded by the arrival of Snooky Flowers. Snooky has been playing sax with Mike Bloomfield and another Butterfield alumnus, Mark Naftalin, since Mike left the Electric Flag. Janis heard Snooky rehearsing with Bloomfield in San Francisco, and Snooky stopped by the synagogue to check out Janis’s new band. Until then, he had never heard Janis live, and her singing impressed him. The band did not. He figures he’s just the guy to whip them into shape.

In the New York rehearsals, Snooky tries to exert an organizing influence. He has more experience than some of the others, and the ego to run rehearsals the way he thinks they should be run. It helps that he is the sole black member of the group. To Snooky’s way of thinking, Janis isn’t a rock-and-roll singer; she sings black music. She’s got the blues in her white soul, she wants a band with an R&B sound, and it takes a black man to run the band. “This is a horn band,” Snooky says. You gotta rehearse a horn band in a particular way. He’s a horn man himself, and his big baritone sax gives authority to the horn section that it lacked before.

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