Free On the Road with Janis Joplin by John Byrne Cooke Page B

several songs suddenly eluded me midverse. Tonight I cast my fate to the wind. If I forget the words, I’ll make up new ones.
    Our imaginations, fueled by intoxicants consumed during the Malibu cocktail hour, lead us to a new plane of psychedelic bluegrass. We call on Neuwirth’s artistic talent: Before we go onstage, Bob paints our faces. The style is more appropriate to an acid test than the warpaths of the Old West. We announce to the audience that the evening’s entertainment will be a bluegrass opera, but it’s a narrative only in the most free-associative sense, a tale that Aldous Huxley could follow more easily than Puccini. We introduce each song witha story that’s made up on the spot. The next singer picks up the story and carries it forward to introduce the next song. That’s the idea, anyway. Along about midevening the narrative threads grow exceedingly thin, but our Ash Grove audience is ready for anything. If by chance anyone recorded the proceedings, please contact me by Galactic Express Priority Overnight.

CHAPTER FIVE
    Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay
    J ANIS AND B IG Brother are frustrated by a feeling of a bright promise delayed. After their spectacular success at Monterey they are touring the same circuit of gigs that has become familiar to them. They play the Avalon, the Fillmore, the California Hall. They play the Straight Theater and Golden Gate Park. They play around the Bay.
    In August, their first record album hits the stores, but the record isn’t all they hoped it would be and its appearance now is bittersweet. They signed with Mainstream—a small label known mostly for blues and jazz—over a year ago. At the time, the recording contract seemed like confirmation that the group was bound for bigger things, and it had the more important effect of solidifying Janis’s connection to the band.
    Big Brother was first approached by Bobby Shad, the owner of Mainstream, in the summer of ’66. The band had been playing together for eight or nine months, but Janis was a new addition, called up from Texas by her fellow Texan, Chet Helms, who had midwifed the birth of Big Brother and the Holding Company, and whohad functioned since its beginnings as the band’s manager without portfolio.
    Shad was in San Francisco to check out the new rock groups. He expressed interest in recording Big Brother, but he triggered all of Helms’s distrust of outsiders from the Music Business, and Chet rebuffed the offer.Chet’s out-of-hand dismissal of Shad’s interest proved to be the catalyst that led Big Brother to dissolve their informal management arrangement. Chet had established Family Dog Productions within a hippie commune of the same name. It was a catch-as-catch-can organization, very much in the spirit of the times, that managed the Avalon Ballroom and associated events. Big Brother felt their needs were playing second fiddle to Chet’s other interests. It was time for someone a little more professional.
    Soon after parting from Chet, the band took a monthlong booking at a club in Chicago called Mother Blues, but Janis wasn’t sure she would go.
    “I have a problem,” she wrote to her parents in Port Arthur, Texas. She told them what she had not yet told the boys in the band: She had been approached by a record producer named Paul Rothchild. Paul worked for Elektra Records. He had produced a handful of folk artists including Tom Rush and Tom Paxton. He produced the Butterfield Blues Band. The first record Paul ever produced was the Charles River Valley Boys, but he had no reason to mention this bit of arcana to Janis. In the summer of 1966, Paul had sold Elektra’s president, Jac Holzman, on an idea: He would assemble a group of young urban interpreters of the blues, pay their expenses for six months, and see if the effort produced a viable band. Jac came to San Francisco with Paul, they auditioned Janis, and Jac liked what he saw.
    Paul gathered several musicians in a living room in Berkeley. Among