Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin by Echols Alice

Author:Echols, Alice [Echols, Alice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2000-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

8

Little Girl Blue

On December 21, 1968, just three weeks after her last show with Big Brother, Janis and her new soul band made their debut in Memphis, Tennessee. The band had not been named and the players—Sam Andrew, Brad Campbell, Terry Clements, Bill King, Roy Markowitz, and Marcus Doubleday—had been hurriedly assembled, yet the opportunity to perform at the second annual Stax-Volt Yuletide Thing seemed too good to pass up; it was the ideal place to unveil Janis Joplin’s new group. Though Stax Records, the sponsor, had lost its star, Otis Redding, and most of his backup band, the Bar-Kays, in an airplane crash a year before, the label was still “Soulsville, USA.” Stax was it, the real thing. To smug San Franciscans who thought their music scene was the hippest of all, Janis declared that Memphis was “where it’s at!” Like Jimi Hendrix, Janis didn’t have many black fans, but, banking on her crossover appeal, Stax nevertheless invited her to play their big year-end bash. Janis was the only non-Stax artist to appear and she received major billing, ahead of the Staple Singers, Booker T and the MG’s, Albert King, and everyone else except Johnnie Taylor, whose megahit “Who’s Making Love” earned him the coveted closing spot.

Even with the tightest band, Janis would have been up against very stiff competition. But Janis didn’t have a tight band; she barely had a band at all. Her friends Nick Gravenites and Michael Bloomfield, who had left the Electric Flag, a horn-based soul band similar to the one she wanted behind her, and Elliot Mazer, the record producer, had helped pick the musicians, but the group hadn’t begun rehearsing until a week before the Memphis show. It was all very unnerving—Gravenites and Bloomfield, who went to Memphis to lend his support, wouldn’t be available forever, and this was supposed to be Janis’s group. She’d never fronted a band of professional musicians. How could she tell them what to do when she didn’t even have the vocabulary to describe what she wanted to hear? “It was her constant fear that she’d look bad behind a bunch of good musicians,” explains Mazer. “None of us thought the band was ready,” he says of the Stax show, “but they had the gig and they wanted to go.” Moreover, Albert had advised Janis against letting too much time elapse before hitting the road with her new group.

As she and the musicians stood backstage watching the other acts, they began to comprehend the enormity of their mistake. Memphis, it turned out, was a lot more like Las Vegas than San Francisco, where everyone but Bill Graham collaborated in the fiction that what they were doing wasn’t show business. Bay Area audiences wanted realness, not slick displays of showmanship. Janis’s group realized the extent of the chasm separating them from the other acts when the re-formed Bar-Kays came out wearing “zebra-striped flannel jumpsuits.” Janis was dressed up, too, wearing a cherry-red jersey pantsuit with matching red feathers at the cuffs.

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