"Piece of My Heart" by Janis Joplin (and Big Brother & the Holding Company): Everything You Didn't Know

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
And Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the
show that brings you the secret history is in lone,
fascinating facts and figures behind your favorite movies, music, TV
shows and more. We are your two Texan blues shouters
of trivia, your hate Ashbury Heites of Hote hypocrypha, You're

(00:25):
Holding Company of Holy crap. Those guys are annoying. I'm
Alex Heide, your hate Ashburyites of Hate. I mostly meant
we're annoying, not like, oh, the hate Ashbury types were annoying,
although they were.

Speaker 1 (00:37):
You're Jordan and I'm Jordan. Run Talk, Thank you and Jordan.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
Today we're talking about an album that is a bit
of an odd man out in the world of San
Francisco Capital t Capital s the sixties music, mostly because
the majority of people who made it were eventually subsumed
wholly into the larger story of their powerhouse singer. That
is right, we're talking about Mungo Jerry's No We're talking
about cheap y rills by Big Brother and the Holding Company,

(01:02):
who are today sadly mostly known as Janis Joplin's first band.

Speaker 1 (01:07):
Sadly I don't think sadly eh, Okay, So let's get
into it.

Speaker 2 (01:11):
Big Brother and the Holding Company were indeed a band
before the summer of nineteen sixty seven. They had years
of gigging, They had independent San Francisco fans, they had
their own full length record like already out there. But
they were left in the dust by one of the
most singular and powerhouse live performances of the twentieth century,
Janis at Monterey Pop in June of nineteen sixty seven.
Janis herself would describe the weekend as one of the

(01:33):
highest points of my life, and it was a similar
high point for the San Francisco music scene. It was
when the music industry at large took notice of what
was happening a little further up north in San Francisco
and basically launched most of the canonical sixties bands with
like the exception of the Dead. Is that fair to say?
And I guess Jefferson Airplane were already pretty big going

(01:53):
concern in San Francisco.

Speaker 1 (01:55):
But is that accurate? Yeah, I mean canonical North Bay band.

Speaker 3 (02:00):
But then you know a lot of the acts that
were playing there were from England. I mean, you got
the who they famously broke through in America at Monterey
and then everybody thought Jimmy Hendrix was an English band
because he had to go over there to make it
big and then come back here, right.

Speaker 2 (02:14):
I forgot, Yeah, sorry, I forgot it was the Who
and that Jimmy Hendricks was also considered an English band
at that point.

Speaker 3 (02:20):
So basically it was just the new vanguard of pop music.
The Thamesman era of pop bands were on their way out,
and then you had this new radical psych rock hippie
ish crew coming in.

Speaker 1 (02:31):
That's kind of a pat way to say it, but
it's pretty much true.

Speaker 2 (02:34):
But you know, sadly, for Big Brother, this meant that
they were going to become the quintessential overnight success gone awry,
and within a year, the searing spotlight that had subsequently
been trained squarely on Janis Joplin would much like No Doubt.
I mean, it's the no Doubt story, right, Like You've
got this dynamic front woman and then the guys.

Speaker 1 (02:55):
I'm just one of the out of focus guys. Yeah.
But also I'm.

Speaker 3 (02:59):
Sorry, I know going to get into it, but this
is a rare example where I'm going to be a hater.

Speaker 1 (03:03):
Shush, a shush, shush, a shush.

Speaker 2 (03:05):
I have so much more intro to get through. Before
all that happened, they were able to turn out Cheap Thrills, which,
whatever else you think of, it is a accurate snapshot
of a certain sound that happened at the time, while
also being a wonderful, pitch perfect example of the commodification
of the fading hippie dream, which was by itself already
in the.

Speaker 1 (03:25):
Review mirror by the time it hit the national stage.
You know. O.

Speaker 2 (03:29):
Sensibly, Cheap Thrills is a document of those magical wild
San Francisco nights that the rest of the nation was
hearing about and subsequently migrating towards. But it was actually
crafted in a studio run by the largest record manufacturer
on the planet, with an industry veteran at the helm.
It dropped during the Capital Y Capital O Capital U
Year of Unrest in the sixties nineteen sixty eight. A

(03:51):
Dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun.

Speaker 1 (03:56):
One day we'll retire that bit, but today's not the same.

Speaker 2 (03:58):
Nope, Well, I think so, I might just switch over
to all along the watch Tower instead of instead of
fortunate son in there. So, oh whatever, there's a lot
of in here that you wrote that is pretty good.

Speaker 1 (04:11):
So do you want to just take over? Thank you? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (04:15):
I mean the fact that Janis recorded a mournful version
of Gershwin's Summertime on this album that came out in
nineteen sixty eight really kind.

Speaker 1 (04:23):
Of little on the nose. Huh yeah, yeah, I mean,
the summer of sixty seven was the summer love. The
summer of sixty eight is sort of the summer of hate.
A week after this album's release, police would beat up
demonstrators at Chicago's Democratic National Convention.

Speaker 3 (04:42):
Earlier that summer, RFK was assassinated. That spring, Mark Luther
King Junior was assassinated. Not a great time, shall we say,
And then a month later the end of the summer,
Janice would leave Big Brother in the holding company. And
then a little over two years after that, Janice would
be dead and Big Brother a footnote in one of

(05:03):
the so called twenty seven Club's earliest members lives.

Speaker 2 (05:08):
So all in all, a bummer Yeah, yeah yeah. Jordan
her thoughts on Janis, I think we're actually quite I
think the only thing we're actually going to differ in
this episode is sort of the respective talents of the
band Big Brother, but you know hit me.

Speaker 3 (05:25):
Oh yeah, I mean, I've always had an affinity for Janie.
I feel for her in the same way that I
do Amy Winehouse. She was a sweet and vulnerable person
made hard by the world, specifically the world of showbiz
that her talent led her into. I'm hard pressed to
name another singer who so clearly embodied the archetype of
somebody who sought an audience as a substitute for love

(05:48):
that she'd felt she'd been denied early in her life,
and it's heartbreaking. I had the chance to speak with
Janis's brother and sister younger brother and sister a few
years back when they were publishing a scrap book that
Janis kept during her rise to fame from nineteen sixty
six to nineteen sixty eight. Scrap booking was very big
in the Joplin household, which I find very cute.

Speaker 1 (06:09):
That is very cute.

Speaker 3 (06:10):
Her younger brother, Michael, pointed out the way that Janie
walked off stage after a starmaking performance at Monterey after
striking this hardened blues MoMA pose. After this gutbucket version
of ball and chain. She does a little jubulant skip
off stage. Janis's brother Michael told me Janis nailed it,
and she knew it. That little dance is so sweet

(06:31):
and innocent. It's like I did it. I love it
because it makes her so human and approachable. Anyone can
relate to it. Even though she's a stranger from another
decade who lives a different lifestyle. You can recognize that
emotional moment. It's a beautiful thing. And the notes that
Janet's read to her family, which are included in the
scrap book, are just adorable. They're charmingly childlike because she's

(06:54):
just so clearly giddy as she's ascending into rock royalty.

Speaker 1 (07:00):
Firstborn's really doing great in the music business. Starts one.
Did I tell you about all my reviews? Can I
tell you again? This is all so exciting to me.
Jesus Christ, Yeah, I know, it's painfully sweet. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (07:13):
You know, as predisposed as I am to dish out
a lot of hate for this era, I have none
of it for Janis. You know, she was part of
that generation that was force fed on us by the
boomer nostalgia industrial complex, as I've referred to it so
many times, and I just never took any issue with her,
and I still kind of remember the moment that it

(07:34):
like crystallized for me was like after all the clips
of her like catterwauling and doing all the bullshit, like
all the history onic not but doing all the historyonics
and all this stuff that like Capital J Janie, it
was when I was first listening to Pearl and that
Mercedes bands and just it just went. It opens with
her just going I can do this one one take?

Speaker 4 (07:57):
Is it tape moving? I could do this one a
one take?

Speaker 2 (08:03):
And it's just so like there's these little moments of
like humanity that you get with certain singers. My favorite
one for Lou Reid is in like the interminable Middle
of Street Hassle, which is his like eleven minute multi
sweet ode that has like a Bruce Springsteen spoken word track.
It's a really amazing song, but it is also like

(08:24):
peak Lou in that it's this like high concept thing
that is like clearly he's like, I'm doing my poetry thing.
I studied with Delmore Schwartz. Did you know that rock
and roll can be poetry?

Speaker 1 (08:34):
Did you know that?

Speaker 2 (08:35):
But there's a moment in there when he just delivers
like the most emotional thing I think I've ever heard
him sing, which is like the line is like come
on baby, let's slip away, and you just hear him
like every ounce of ironic detachment and misanthropy and trauma
that ever weighed on him, like just fall away and
he just goes, come on baby, and it just crushes me.

Speaker 1 (09:01):
Come on, slib.

Speaker 4 (09:06):
Come on baby, Why.

Speaker 1 (09:09):
Don't just live away?

Speaker 2 (09:11):
You know, there's so much artifice and show business and
there's so much nonsense, but like I still carry with
me every time something like that breaks through, and so
with Janie, that's in pearl for me, and you know,
even just but like the more the lie of the
sixties is kind of peeled back, and as the more
you dig into it, it really pisses me off how

(09:32):
poorly women were treated. That's coming to the four a
lot more. But when we were growing up and reading
about it, there was such a male slant to take
on it, where it was like, ah, you know, but
women were liberated because they could have sex, and nobody
talks about how like this whole communal living thing was
basically born on the expectation that women were still going
to do all the domestic work, and that even the

(09:53):
women who were ostensibly liberated and breaking this mold, Grace
Slick and Janice, were still at the absolute bottom of
every pecking order that they could find themselves in at
that time.

Speaker 1 (10:05):
And in Janis's case, it broke her.

Speaker 2 (10:08):
Like I mean, you can argue that she was predisposed,
she did not have the best coping mechanisms to enter
into the music industry, but we're ultimately talking about someone
who got kind of on for twenty five years and
had a two and a half year career and died.

Speaker 1 (10:24):
And that's heartbreaking. And that's all I have to say
about that.

Speaker 2 (10:29):
Because I'm because it'll it'll, it'll, it'll just break me up,
you know.

Speaker 1 (10:33):
Yeah, it's curely in the episode for that.

Speaker 3 (10:35):
Yeah, But I mean the fact that a very similar,
if not the same thing happened to Amy Winehouse forty
years later, almost exactly in about the same time span.

Speaker 1 (10:47):
I guess she had a slightly longer career public career.

Speaker 3 (10:50):
I should say, Yeah, that's pretty scary that that still
goes on. I would like to say that in the
last ten years or so, we've gotten better in media
specifically but general as a culture and knowing how to
recognize and treat people who are going through those issues.

Speaker 1 (11:06):
And just treating women better.

Speaker 2 (11:07):
Yeah, I mean, it's just another big thing for me
that was like not actually part of this boomer thing
was reading in Uh Please Kill Me, which is like
such a foundational tone. It's like Legs McNeil's oral history
of proto punk and sort of classic generational punk, and
it's just still like even the MC five, who actually
have a connection to this story because they knew big

(11:29):
Brother guitarist James Hurley from Detroit, but like even the
MC five who were like, oh, white Panthers, you know,
like we're with the struggle and everything. Like everyone in
that band was like the only reason that they were
able to be a band was because they just treated
women like unpaid help in their like communal house. And
they were just like, yeah, you guys just do everything
and will like foment insurrections by playing loudly and smoking

(11:53):
a lot of weed. Same with the Stooges, like same
with any time of band is like in kind of
a communal setup or communal living institution in this in
this and as modeled as some kind of a utopia.
The quiet part out loud is always that there there
were romantic partners who were expected to do all the work,
and it just drives me up.

Speaker 1 (12:12):
A goddamn wall.

Speaker 2 (12:13):
Okay, I have a note here that says change to
much brighter tone of voice. So from the house that
launched the hate Ashbury to the securitiest route Janis took
to becoming a San Francisco icon, to the technical limitations
of Big Brother, to Janis's final departure from the band.
Here's everything you didn't know about Big Brother and the
Holding Company's cheap throats.

Speaker 4 (12:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (12:39):
Sorry, did you want a Big Brother yet? No, we'll
get to it. We'll get to I'm sure I'll find
the place. I bet you will. Okay.

Speaker 2 (12:49):
The story of Big Brother actually begins in the late
eighteen hundreds, when not long before an earthquake and fire
would reshape much of San Francisco into what it is today.
The Big Victorian House at ten ninety Paid Street was
built by either a habitdasher or a furniture merchant accounts ferry.
It was quite modern by the standards of the day.
It had speaking tubes, a doorbell that rang on each
floor and gas lighting sconces on the walls where the

(13:12):
electricity went out most germane to this story, the house's
basement was a full size ballroom with a stage in
one alcove, which naturally became a jazz speakeasy during prohibition.
By the nineteen forties, however, it was no longer a
private residence and was functioning as a twenty two room
boarding house, with a period where it may have also
been a brothel somewhere in there again accounts very hilariously enough.

(13:33):
It was also featured in a nineteen sixty one Life
magazine article charmingly titled the Irish in America, which featured
a large spread of thirty quote typical Irish working stiffs
and the then landlady and Missus Minton leaning out of
ten ninety pages windows. Not long after that photo was

(13:53):
taken in the spring or summer of nineteen sixty four,
the Beatles, etc. At Sullivan, Rodney Alban's uncle bought it.

Speaker 1 (14:02):
Now.

Speaker 2 (14:02):
Rodney's uncle originally wanted to convert ten ninety page into
federally funded senior housing, but his nephew convinced him that
it would be faster and easier, not involving as much
red tape. To turn it into student housing, Rodney guaranteed
him at least six hundred dollars a month that would
be coming in from San Francisco State students like himself,
and Rodney's uncle was convinced. Rooms started at fifteen dollars

(14:23):
per month, and in relatively short order, ten ninety Page
became one of San Francisco's original hippie houses. Rodney's brother,
Pete Albin, who is the bass player for A Big Brother,
was staying at ten ninety Page naturally, and also living
there was an experimental filmmaker named Lauren Means, who, one night,

(14:44):
inspired by the jamming and musical activity that often took
place in the basement of the building, decided to screen
one of his films there. Peter pitched the idea of
having it accompanied by improvisatory live music, which actually makes
this contemporaneous to Andy Warhol and the exploding plastic inevitable
in New York which birthed the Velvet Underground, So that's

(15:06):
kind of an interesting bit of cross coastal synchronicity. Peter
had just gotten an electric bass and he knew a
quote unquote surf style drummer, which I assume just means
just surf music, so hilariously limited and yet so beloved.

Speaker 1 (15:32):
Oh I can see you loving it.

Speaker 2 (15:34):
I love Dick Dale because Dick Dale was also like
I'm going to get a black belt in martial arts
and do nunchuck ro gines on stage. Aside from playing
like ungodly loud. You know, the Ventures have some cool
arrangements in terms of like their virtuosity and stuff, but
I ultimately think it's about as funny as people who

(15:56):
like fetish eye like Andrew's Sisters pop, or like extremely early,
extremely early like let's go to the hop fifties rock
and roll, where I'm like, this is such a quaint,
incredibly limited form of music, and people lose their minds
over it, especially in the guitar in the gear industry,

(16:18):
Like there is so much the GDP of like retro
surf style effects that are all essentially aping like the
guts of three or so years of Fender amps and
specific Fender guitars. Could it's probably more than like Puerto Rico.
You know, it's just insane that people are like, oh, yeah,

(16:41):
surf music that was the thing for like three years.
I will dedicate my life to this. That said, I've
seen some really amazing surf bands. There's dikaiju Our Hoous
in Brooklyn. Seth Applebaum and Greg Hansen had a band
called Mad Doctors that had some it was like surf punk.
I also saw the surfer Jets a few months ago

(17:01):
in San Francisco. That was the band that is most
famous for doing the surf cover. It's all female band.
They do a surf cover of Toxic that went really viral.
Oh yeah, he killed it. I have to say like
they were extremely sick musicians. All of their arrangements were
like pitch perfect and finally tuned, but it's still dumb.

(17:21):
It's I'm sorry, it's it's like it's like a skiffle band.
It's like being a skiffle band in twenty twenty five.
I'm sorry. Uh Anyway, digression over. Pete called his pal
Sam Andrew, who lived a block away, and then, in
this period of the day before you had dedicated bassing
guitar amps, they just both plugged into one channel of
one Gibson amp. Sam Andrew is an interesting character. He

(17:44):
was twenty three at the time and he'd been playing
in bands since his teens as he was an army
brat in Okinawa, and he also studied languages and philosophy
at both the University of San Francisco and the Sorbone
friend of the pod the Sorbonne, proving that even er

(18:04):
hippies weren't averse to capitalism. The three of them along
with chet Helms, who is a promoter and man about
town who is sometimes referred to as the father of
the Summer of Love for his role in managing Big
Brother early promoting shows around San Francisco. I believe he's
also credited with having the first live like oil light projection.

Speaker 1 (18:23):
Oh the Joshua Light Show or whatever. Yeah, yeah, I
don't know, fulsating lava lamp on stage kind of deal. Yeah,
hippie shit.

Speaker 2 (18:31):
They decided to turn this into a recurring event with
themselves as the house band and charge fifty cents for
people to come in and jam or sing or play
harmonica over them or whatever. It got popular enough that
they started charging seventy five cents sellouts, sellouts.

Speaker 1 (18:46):
Man.

Speaker 2 (18:47):
Eventually this scene was infiltrated by the non peace and
Love crowd and the evenings faded away. Of course, I'm
alluding to drugs and you know, nom well, you know
these things happened. But Chuck Jones, Peter Rubin, and Sam
Andrew decided to stay at trio with Helms managing them.
Helms brought in another guitar player into the fold. Who

(19:09):
is this self taught guitarist named James Gurley from Detroit,
who an alarming number of people seemed to hold up
as like like I've heard multiple people referred to him
as like the father of psychedelic guitar, which is stupid.
That's a stupid thing to say. The whole log line
on him is that, like everybody in this period of

(19:29):
the sixties, all of these guitarists had suddenly heard late
Coltrane and Albert Eiler and Ornett Coleman, and they were
all like, ooh, how can.

Speaker 1 (19:37):
I do that on guitar?

Speaker 2 (19:38):
Naturally, lacking the chops, they would just play as loudly
and fast as they could. This is you hear this
on aload of Velvet Underground recordings at the time. Lou
Reed had this crazy guitar. I think it might have
been a silver tone that had a bunch of on
board effects. You can actually still find these They have
like a tremolo circuit built into the guitar that you

(19:59):
can flip on.

Speaker 1 (20:00):
So what Lou would do.

Speaker 2 (20:01):
Is flip that on, crank it as high as possible,
and then just scramble his hands around the fretboard.

Speaker 1 (20:07):
He was like, it sounds like we're Nott Coleman.

Speaker 2 (20:09):
There's actually a quote where in like early Velvet Underground coverage.
I think you can find this in like the Rough
Guide to the Velvet Underground book where he calls it
quote the fastest guitar playing ever, which is so stupid
and anyway you can tell. As a jazz dork, I
have feelings about guitarists being like, oh I saw him
a cold train by just being like anyway, the second

(20:34):
of my diversions over God, I'm two grafts in. It's
gonna be a long seventeen pages, folks. They got a
loan from none other than San Francisco Music. I had
gone Philmore owner and all around impresario Bill Graham for
new equipment and now suitably amplified. They practiced in the
basement until Rodney Albin, of all people, their landlord, essentially

(20:56):
kicked them out over the racket. But the band played
it's first gig in January of nineteen sixty six and
got a new drummer out of the audience at that gig.
Chet Elms then installed them as the house band at
his club, the Avalon, where he was booking. They were
playing like these long, meandering instrumentals, because again, they were
doing this thing where they're like, oh, we're hip to

(21:17):
Ceciar Taylor, We're hip to Albert Isler, We're hip to
or Nick Coleman, We're hip to son Raw. Never mind
the fact that Cecil Taylor is like one of the
most sweet, generous geniuses of the twentieth century on keyboard.
Never mind the fact that Son Raw has a universe
unto itself. Of course, these white nerds just garbling bullshit

(21:38):
on their guitar.

Speaker 1 (21:38):
We're like, we're doing that too, So why are you
fighting me on my opinion that this is a terrible band,
minus Jennis.

Speaker 2 (21:47):
Because I don't think they're a terrible band. My issue
is with this era of white guitar player.

Speaker 1 (22:00):
It's Heigels woke corner.

Speaker 2 (22:02):
There's a constant through line with white musicians, and your
beloved Paul McCartney is not exempted from this of being like,
oh yeah, I've heard al but Ida now, so he's
going in. He's we'll put them a bit of him
in the new Insultant Peppas. No you're not okay. I'm sorry.
Any guy plugging into Gibson amp and just scraping his

(22:23):
fingers across the strings as fast as possible is not
in the same universe of understanding of John Coltrane. So
I just want to put that fly to bed. At
least Jerry Garcia, God loved him, was like I played banjo,
he was, I mean, like, he did not have this
rhetoric about being able to play free jazz, although or
any jazz, even though the Grateful Diad did play with

(22:43):
Fornette Coleman. It's a very specific trigger for me. It's
just this white, middle class musician patronizing attitude that I
just despise from this generation, especially because a lot of
black guys were coming back from World War Two as
a Tuskegee airman or whatever and going to college on

(23:04):
the GI bill, and that's why we had such a
generational explosion of jazz talent following the war. So now
all these in middle class student losers are like, oh yeah,
I heard John Coltrane, and now I play like John
Coltrane on the guitar.

Speaker 3 (23:20):
Well, speaking of white people doing the blues. Janice Lynn Choplin.
She was born in the oil refinery town of Port Arthur, Texas,
on January nineteenth, nineteen forty three, apparently coming into this
world on the wrong foot, as you write, where she
stayed until the end of her tragically short life.

Speaker 1 (23:40):
She just did not get a change. I know, so sad.
It just kills me.

Speaker 3 (23:46):
It's a big part of Janis's legend that growing up
in Port Arthur sucked, and it did, but not just.

Speaker 1 (23:52):
For the reasons you'd expect it being Port Arthur, Texas.

Speaker 3 (23:55):
Yeah, but also she was Janis Joplin and never the
Twains shall meet. I said in Texas, I was a beatnik,
a weirdo, and since I wasn't making it the way
I am now, my parents thought I was a goner.

Speaker 1 (24:06):
She's talking to Rolling Stone and nineteen sixty eight.

Speaker 3 (24:09):
Texas is okay if you want to settle down and
do your own thing quietly, but it's not for outrageous people.
And I was always outrageous. I got treated very badly
in Texas. They don't treat beatniks too good. In Texas,
Janis was bullied for nonconforming, among other things. She was
very vocally opposed to segregation, and she took solos among

(24:30):
other outcasts, one of whom introduced her to blues records
by the likes of Bessie Smith and Mal Rainey. She
began singing blues and folk music with friends at Thomas
Jefferson High School, but was ostracized and bullied over her
weight and acne, which left her with deep scars which
required derm abrasion. They put me down, man, those square
people in Port Arthur.

Speaker 1 (24:50):
Janis later said in a way that probably sounded a
lot cooler than I just said it.

Speaker 2 (24:55):
I have to admit I have been mocking big brother
white hippie speech in every single one of these subject headers.

Speaker 1 (25:03):
Yeah, can you read them every time? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (25:05):
Okay, we're currently intersection that is titled hey, come on, mama,
I got demoed. Shouldn't be talking like this blues again.
The previous one was okay, Mama, let's boogie or whatever
stupid shit they would have said.

Speaker 1 (25:19):
We will shout these out.

Speaker 3 (25:20):
As the episode continues, Janna said, they put me down
those people in Port Arthur. They called me a slut,
they threw rocks at me in class, But all I
was looking for was some kind of personal freedom and
other people who felt the way I did. Yeah, there's
this great interview with Janis on the Dick Cavett Show
where she tries to convince Dick to accompany her to
her high school reunion, and he, without missing a beat, goes, well,

(25:43):
I'd love to, but I don't think I have many
friends in Port Arthur, Texas, and.

Speaker 1 (25:47):
She immediately replies, well, neither did I.

Speaker 3 (25:50):
They laughed me out of class, out of town, and
out of the state, and now I'm going home. And
she has this little, like mischievous, almost impish look in
her face, and the crowd in the audience at the
TV studio loses their mind.

Speaker 1 (26:07):
It's like, it's very very sweet. I urge you all
to look this up.

Speaker 3 (26:11):
She was on the Dick Cavit Show a number of times.
I can't remember which one this would have been, but it's.

Speaker 1 (26:16):
Look them all up. They're all great. I also heard
a story, and I don't know how true this is,
that she and Dick Cabot had a little like affair together,
which I find adorable. Yeah, I mean, I'm such a
little like square. Yeah. I mean I didn't.

Speaker 2 (26:33):
Put a ton of bout Janis's entanglements in here.

Speaker 1 (26:37):
No, no, nor should you. But I just like their
relationship because he's such a little nerd and he clearly.

Speaker 3 (26:43):
Like adores her and deeply respects her. I want to
say he had her on a show like many many
times now.

Speaker 2 (26:50):
I think my favorite was just when I was reading
the when I was having my Dead phase in college,
and I read the Dead biography like they were she
pops up in there because they were just like in
the in the day house in hate Ashbury, they were
just like Yeah, that period when pig pen Ron McKiernan,
the original grade for Dead keyboardist and Janis were dating

(27:10):
was especially terrible because they were just get wasted and
sing the blues and have sex in like the back
corner of the house and it was just like the loudest, grossest,
Like I know, it smelled crazy in there, but it
was like Bob Weird full less like everyone else in

(27:31):
the house was just.

Speaker 1 (27:31):
Like that was a rough couple of months.

Speaker 3 (27:36):
Was this before or after she broke a battle over
Jim Morrison's head for being a jerk.

Speaker 2 (27:41):
Oh man, I'm not familiar with that, but god, lover
couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

Speaker 1 (27:47):
I have to look those up very quickly.

Speaker 3 (27:49):
Hang on, They're at a party in Hidden Hills, Los Angeles.
Producer Paul Rothschild, who worked with the Doors, suggested that
they both arrived at the party sober so they could
remember meeting one another. The drinks began to flow, and
roth Child remembers Morrison becoming quote a cretn, a disgusting drunk,

(28:09):
and was just generally obnoxious.

Speaker 1 (28:11):
Yeah, no precedent for that. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (28:13):
Morrison apparently made some advances to Joplin which she did
not appreciate, and she ended up trying to leave. And
then Jim grabbed Joplin by the hair and tried to
pull her out of her car when she was leaving.
Oh boy, Janice, acting instantaneously grabbed the bottle of Southern
Comfort and promptly hit Jim across the head, sending him

(28:35):
sprawling to the ground.

Speaker 1 (28:37):
That's shock.

Speaker 2 (28:39):
We didn't get to that in the Doors episode. I
actually don't think i'd heard that.

Speaker 1 (28:42):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah cool. I think they might
have made up years later. I think kind of in
the circuit. It's also I never mind, Oh well, it's
also believed that the drug dealer, the same drug dealer,
is essentially to blame for both their deaths.

Speaker 2 (29:01):
Oh right, I forgot. That's one of your one of
your cottage theories. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes.

Speaker 1 (29:06):
I wrote about it for people.

Speaker 2 (29:08):
It was some kind of Moroccan ne'er do well rich
fail son.

Speaker 1 (29:13):
He was a count. He was a French count. Yeah,
I was close, and he was young.

Speaker 3 (29:21):
He was like yeah, he was like a jet setting
fail Son and he was He made money selling heroin
that he just didn't test.

Speaker 1 (29:30):
Essentially, he had no real quality control over it.

Speaker 3 (29:33):
And so, for example, when Janis died in October in
nineteen seventy, there were like some phenomenal number of heroin
overdoses in that same area the weekend she died because
this guy sold heroin that was like dangerously pure because
he didn't test it.

Speaker 1 (29:48):
Count Jean de Portrial is his name, Rick, and it's
believed that he also sold Jim Morrison the lethal dose
of heroin a year later, and he himself died of
a an overdose, I want to say, in nineteen seventy two,
throwing a scarfer in my neck going and that's the
end of that chapter. Who's the nineteen twenty star who said,

(30:11):
all right, my friends said, now I shall go off
to glory. As she like left the party and she
had a huge scarf on, and right after she said that,
the scarf like got caught in like a car door
that was daser to or a duncan you're referring to. Yeah,
I think so.

Speaker 2 (30:24):
I did not realize that that was her her last words.

Speaker 1 (30:27):
All right.

Speaker 3 (30:28):
Then her silk scarf dripped around her neck, became entangled
in the wheel well around the open spoked wheels and
rear axle, pulling her from the open car, breaking her neck.

Speaker 1 (30:37):
Her last words were, farewell, my friends, I go to glory.
We're getting there anyway, We're getting there. Okay, where the
hell was I? Oh? Yeah, So Jennis was trying to
get Dick Cavitt to go with her to her high
school reunion now that she was rich and famous. Apparently
it didn't go. This is sad to me. She did
end up going to her high school reunion and like

(31:00):
they still didn't accept her or like her now that
she was rich and famous. Yeah, I was.

Speaker 2 (31:05):
I mean, we get into this at the end, but
it was her last public appearance.

Speaker 1 (31:09):
Ah yeah, Janis. She was an interesting kid. Her family
actually wasn't.

Speaker 3 (31:14):
There's this picture painted of her as like, you know,
prototypical hippie in the fifties and sixties with square parents.

Speaker 1 (31:20):
Her parents were actually kind of cool. They were both
frustrated artists.

Speaker 3 (31:24):
Their dad went to art school and was forced to
get a day job, and their mom was actually an
operatic soprano whose vocal cores have been wrecked by an
operation as a young woman, and so she wasn't able
to pursue her dream of.

Speaker 1 (31:36):
Being a singer. Jesus Christ.

Speaker 3 (31:38):
Yeah, and Michael Joplin, Janis's younger brother, told me that
their parents were quote cut off from their passion at
a young age, so they allowed us to experiment and
I think this is cute. Instead of buying them store
bought games, for example, the Joplin children were handed blank paper, crayons,
and pieces of wood and encouraged to make their own
goals and rules. And that's basically how Janie and the

(32:00):
rest of the Joplin kids approached life. It was a
very literate household. The highlight of each week was a
trip to the library, and as a teen, Janis shared
her ideas through writing. She won an award for English.

Speaker 1 (32:11):
Journalism in junior high and she even wrote letters to
the editor of Time magazine.

Speaker 3 (32:16):
When she was a student, which I think is really cool.
She started singing around the house on Saturdays because that
was cleaning day, and so when the family were all
doing their chores, they would put on a record and
all just sing along to it. Janis's mom preferred show tunes,
and she instilled in Janice a lifelong love of the
Gershwin classics summertime. She mentioned earlier that would become a

(32:38):
staple over concert repertoire. Her dad's tastes ran towards the classical,
and Jani's sister Laura told me he would say, sit down,
sit down, listen, just listen. He would play a particular
phrase on a classical LP and then he would look
at you with this question can you feel it?

Speaker 1 (32:56):
Can you? And like for a dad in the fifties,
like that, are you feeling it now, mister crabs? I
don't know. I just think that's like a cool, like
a weirdly advanced thing for like a dad in the
fifties to do. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Speaker 3 (33:10):
Janis's mom was more focused on the mechanics of singing.
She taught her daughter about how important was to sing
from her diaphragm and an enunciate.

Speaker 1 (33:19):
So I just think that's really cool. You've got like
the emotional component of music coming from her dad and
all the technical mechanical stuff coming from her mom. I
just think that's really interesting. The Port Arthur music scene
wasn't as horrible as you might expect. Go on Michael Joplin.
Her younger brothers would say.

Speaker 3 (33:39):
There was music everywhere at every night club. The Johnny
Winters brothers played every other Saturday at the roller skating rink,
and zz Top played my high school prom.

Speaker 2 (33:49):
I didn't forget zz Top were like a band before
the Beatles. Oh that's I mean, that's an exaggeration, but
like they were.

Speaker 1 (33:56):
They were around for a long long time.

Speaker 2 (33:58):
Those guys were like came out of the earth in
Texas playing playing blues.

Speaker 3 (34:03):
I mean, Jimmy Hendrick's famously said that Billy Gibbons was
his favorite guitarist.

Speaker 1 (34:07):
Do you think I have no No, But I have no.

Speaker 2 (34:10):
Idea who that actual quote is about, because that quote
is said about it Terry Cath from Chicago.

Speaker 1 (34:16):
Terry Cath from Chicago, Roy Clark, Robbie Robertson, uh Ry
Gallagher Like, I don't know the actual source of that quote.

Speaker 2 (34:26):
I'm going to Snopes it right now anyway.

Speaker 3 (34:28):
But yes, but do you think they cross paths like
on the Chitpland Circuit or down in Texas when Jimmy
was back in like the Isisley Brothers or little Richard
that scans.

Speaker 2 (34:38):
I mean, I'm pretty sure the zezy Top guys knew.
They knew like thirteenth floor elevators too. Janie also knew, right,
so chance was going to be in the thirteenth floor
elevators At one point I thought, yes, so yeah, I mean,
I don't know. Yeah, Texas, Texas is not that. Texas
isn't a big place. I like, I think like the
musical parts of Texas are small commune. I don't know,

(34:59):
I'm talking about keeper, shut up, don't look at me.

Speaker 3 (35:03):
Port Arthur in the late fifties was still racially segregated
as we touched on earlier, and whites were not welcome
in venues that catered to black patrons. So Janis and
her like minded friends ventured across state lines to Louisiana,
sneaking to blues and Cajun clubs while under age. These
illicit late night trips across the border drew the attention
of local police on at least one occasion, which solidified

(35:26):
a reputation.

Speaker 1 (35:27):
As a quote bad girl and an outcast.

Speaker 3 (35:30):
Janas spent most of her adolescence ostracized by her community,
and she resented it.

Speaker 1 (35:35):
For the rest of her life. Michael Joplin told me,
we all wanted to get out of Port Arthur immediately.
It was hell. Our parents even said you need to
leave as soon as you can. It was just nasty.
I got beat up because I wore bell bottoms. It
wasn't good. I'm Phillian new a new enemy of the
Pod coming on, But poor.

Speaker 2 (35:54):
Arch Texas, Port Arthur, Texas Enemy of the Pod, Port
Arthur tech Sis.

Speaker 1 (36:01):
Okay, here's that Snopes thing. Okay.

Speaker 2 (36:03):
When someone asked Eric Clapton what it was like to
be the greatest guitarist in the world, he responded, I
don't know. Ask Prince. That sprung up in the wake
of Prince's death in April twenty sixteen.

Speaker 1 (36:16):
Really, well, that's how recent that was Oh I thought
that was like an old no.

Speaker 2 (36:21):
But there, But you know, Snopes has correctly identified it
as a quote that is allegedly asked to Jimmy Hendricks,
and apparently Jimmy Hendricks was on The Tonight Show one
time in the late sixties. Johnny Carson asked h how
it felt to be the greatest guitarist ever. Hendricks quickly
responded with, I don't know. You'd have to ask Phil Kegy.

Speaker 3 (36:37):
Jimmy Hendricks was on the Tonight Show. I know he
was on Dick Cavin. I cannot imagine he was on
the Tonight Show.

Speaker 2 (36:43):
Wow, Okay, Phil Kegy is a Christian guitarist. At that time,
he would have been playing it as a member of
the band Glass Harp.

Speaker 3 (36:51):
Oh wait, it was a night when Johnny wasn't there,
and the guest that was was Flip Wilson. Okay, that's
kind of cool.

Speaker 1 (36:57):
That is correct.

Speaker 2 (36:58):
Yes, the amp blew up on Jimmy and he walked
off stage, leaving a session drummer and bass player alone
on stage. Hendrix did sing the praises of Billy Gibbons,
who is then in the moving sidewalks during a Dick
Cavitt Show, so at least he did. He did say
it about Billy Gibbons, but it has also been attributed

(37:20):
to Jimi Hendrix saying that about Irish guitarist Rory Gallagher,
who is a heat Like if you think Eric Clapton
is a good blues guitarist and I don't know, but
listen to Roy Gallagher.

Speaker 1 (37:31):
Roy Gallagher.

Speaker 2 (37:33):
Is everything that Clapton wishes he could be and can't
and isn't and never will be. John Lennon supposedly said
after seeing Rory Gallagher, I've seen the future of rock
and roll and it is Roy Gallaher. So anyway, there's
another bullsh thing that we maybe learned more about.

Speaker 1 (37:52):
That's the stinger on every episode. That's all. We're gonna
close every episode now.

Speaker 2 (37:58):
Jane has graduate from high school and night teen sixteen
attended Lamar State College of Technology in Beaumont, Texas, and
then later the University of Texas at Austin, UT hookem horns.

Speaker 1 (38:09):
Are they the aggies?

Speaker 2 (38:10):
I hate Texas? Sorry, we have listeners there, presumably, what
are they gonna do? Get sunburned at me?

Speaker 4 (38:17):
Well?

Speaker 2 (38:17):
Friend of the pod, Dora, Oh no, sorry, shouts to
friend of the pod Dora who is in Texas, and
also Willie Nelson. There's cool guys for Texas. My cousin Cameron,
Jordan's cousin Cameron and the rest. If you live in Texas,
you listen to those shot get in touch.

Speaker 1 (38:35):
We'd love to hear from you.

Speaker 2 (38:37):
We're not talking about you when I say Texas sucks,
but having driven through Texas on tour, Texas sucks.

Speaker 3 (38:44):
Friend of the pod Dora sent me a postcard from
the Texas school Book Depository Museum where Kennedy was assassinated
from alleged lee and wrote on it because he was
driving down Elm Street, and she wrote on it talk
about a nightmare on Elm Street. And I can't believe
that joke never occurred to me and I just need
to share that publicly and a truly amazing, irreverent joke.

Speaker 1 (39:06):
I told my dad that joke and he laughed, and
he's a tough audience. You know. We we have great fans.
We have wonderful fans, and some of them live in Texas. Yeah. Anyway.

Speaker 2 (39:17):
The newspaper of The Daily Textan ran a profile of
Janis in their July twenty seventh nineteen sixty two issue,
headlined she dares to be different?

Speaker 1 (39:25):
Is that where Devo got their thing? Uh? Just kidding,
they didn't. But there's a dare to be stupid anyway,
that's weird. Al is there to be stupid? He's weird?
Al doing Devo parody?

Speaker 2 (39:38):
Jesus Christ, I'm so tired. She goes barefooted when she
feels like it, wears Levi's to class because they're more comfortable,
and carries her autoharp with her everywhere she goes so
that in case she gets the urge to break into song,
it will be handy. Her name is Janis Joplin. Campus
journalism in the sixties, you get what you pay for.

Speaker 3 (39:58):
Only one of those things is remotely different. Now, carrying
an auto hoop around is sort of a weird move,
but surely there are apps on your phone, so you know,
in a way, we all carry an auto hoop around
with us in case we get the earage to break
into song.

Speaker 2 (40:11):
Yeah, whither the auto harp?

Speaker 1 (40:13):
I know it never really, you know, it never delivered
on the promise that mid sixties folk pop bands really
set up. I mean, eleven Spoonful had one. Surely there
are others.

Speaker 2 (40:26):
I think Carter Family, Dolly Parton played one. It was
a big country thing too.

Speaker 1 (40:30):
Yeah, yeah, But it wasn't all getting autofile auto harps
and getting profiled by her college newspaper because she wanted
to wear jeans and go barefoot when she felt like it, which, honestly,
I'm sorry.

Speaker 3 (40:44):
If my like college newspaper just did a profile on
me because I was weird and then stuck it on
the front of the paper, I would be kind of mortified.
Like I know, in retrospect, there's a poignancy to you know,
that she dares to be different headline.

Speaker 1 (40:56):
But that's kind of horrifying. I really don't like that.

Speaker 3 (40:59):
But this is even worse. This is a famous bit
of Janie's law. I'm sure that some of you have
heard before. I'm sure you've heard or Heigel. She was
nominated by the frat boys she went to school with
for their annual Ugliest Man on Campus competition, and this
is sort of in janice law is positioned as the insult.

Speaker 1 (41:21):
That pushed her to pursue stardom, the inciting incident.

Speaker 3 (41:25):
Some in her life later insisted that this didn't really
affect her, and even her sister Laura said, I think
it was easily within the realma possibility that Janis nominated
herself as ugly man as a joke. But Janis's mother
recalled to a biographer that she received an anguish letter
about the incident from Janie and a male friend. Speaking

(41:45):
in a twenty sixteen PBS American Master's documentary, burst into
tears recalling the incident, saying that the sight of a
wounded Janice was quote the saddest thing I ever saw.

Speaker 1 (41:57):
That's a tough part of that documentary. I think it's
called Little Girl Blue. It's a great American Master's documentary
on Janis. So yeah, Savagery continued against this poured on
conformist soul.

Speaker 2 (42:09):
And Texan frat boys. You know they're probably all in
fortune five hundred CEOs right now. Damn we're dead. Well
one is better than the other.

Speaker 1 (42:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (42:20):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (42:21):
Jana Is saying folk music piled around with the staff
of the campus humor magazine shows that recorded her first song,
What Good Can Drink and Do to tape in December
of nineteen sixty two at another UT student's home.

Speaker 4 (42:32):
This is a song called What Good Drink and Do
that I wrote one night after drinking myself into a
stupor what good Candering, What good Candy?

Speaker 1 (43:02):
Allan and recorded.

Speaker 4 (43:04):
But the nexttid there's a glass on the table.

Speaker 1 (43:12):
This is Gonni's on.

Speaker 2 (43:17):
This is another thing that I think people don't necessarily
know about Janis is that she had one unsuccessful dry
run at San Francisco before she became Miss San Francisco,
along with you know, Grace Slick. She went there in
January nineteen sixty three, accompanied by the aforementioned father of
the Summer of Love and big brother manager Chet Helms.

(43:38):
This did not go particularly well. She cut some blues
standards with Yorma Kacannon, who is Jefferson air playing guitars
and a fantastic traditional blues guitars. He studied with the
Reverend Gary Davis, who is you know, makes him a
primary source to like that actual pre war generation of
blues and musicians where a lot, a lot a lot

(44:00):
of sixties blues musicians weren't. But yeah, your mccona, tremendous
fingerstyle player listened to Hot Tuna.

Speaker 1 (44:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (44:07):
Anyway, Janis was arrested for shoplifting the same year she
moved there, and she spent the next two years injecting
methamphetamine and developing her trademark fondness for Southern comfort. She
was down to a horrifying eighty eight pounds when her
friends eventually raised her in a bus fare to get
home to Port Arthur. Back in Port Arthur, Janis did

(44:29):
a one to eighty. She quit meth and drinking, She
got a beehive hairdoo, and re enrolled in college. She
was still driving out to Austin to sing. She would
accompany herself on guitar. She even got engaged to a
guy that she met in San Francisco. He worked for
IBM in New York, but he visited her frequently enough
that they proposed, though he did break off the engagement

(44:50):
not long afterwards. Jani's also attended counseling sessions like psychiatric
counseling sessions in Beaumont, where she spilled to her therapist
that she feared she wasn't going to be able to
pursu sue a career as a singer without falling back
into drug and alcohol abuse pause for minor key turn
in backing music. He reassured her that that wasn't a
foregone conclusion, and in nineteen sixty five, she recorded seven

(45:12):
songs accompanying herself, singing on acoustic guitar. So Big Brother
manager chet Helms had seen Joplin perform at these gigs
in Texas and floated her as a front woman for
the band. This is what's hilarious to me is that
he literally just sent a buddy to Austin and was like,
go find Janis Joplin and bring her to San Francisco
and bring her to me.

Speaker 1 (45:31):
Yeah, bring me the head and body of Janis Joplin
and Laryx and there. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:40):
That was supposedly when she was mullying joining the thirteenth
Floor Elevators, which honestly kind of would have preferred that. Yeah,
like not that I Don't Love You're Gonna Miss Me
and Kingdom of Heaven and like three other great thirteenth
Floor Elevator songs. But imagining a world where Janas was
fronting like the single greatest Texas garage rock band ever

(46:01):
and maybe Rocky Ericson didn't get institutionalized for ten years
is a fantastic what if. But yeah, so this guy
kidnapped and or coerced Janis to drive back from Austin
to San Francisco, which is like a fifteen to seventeen
hour drive, I'm guessing, and off they went. Janis told
her parents that she was still living in Austin, and

(46:22):
they only found out otherwise when she wrote them after
her first performance with Big Brother a year later in
the summer of nineteen sixty six. Chet Helms's decision to
push Janis Joplin on Big Brother was in no small
part due to the success of Grace Slick and the
Jefferson Airplane. As people have occasionally insisted on Colin, I
always love that when people add the extraneous s. There's

(46:42):
like old interviews where you can hear people talking about
like like you know, what the Cream were doing with
their extended improvisations, or like what the Black Sabbath was
doing with their down tuning. Anyway, the Pink Floyd, The
Pink Floyd guitarist Sam Andrew Brother guitaris Sam Andrews in
two thousand and six interview that we were doing this

(47:03):
woman in favor to even.

Speaker 1 (47:05):
Let her come sing with us. That's man too, there
we go.

Speaker 2 (47:09):
Yeah, she came in and she was dressed like a
little Texan. She's saying, real, well, what it was, but
it wasn't like, oh, we're bowled over. It was probably
a pretty equal meeting. She was real intelligent. Janis was,
and she always rose to the occasion. She sang the songs.
It wasn't like this moment of revelation that you would
like it to be like in a movie or something.
It wasn't like, oh my god, now we've gone to heaven.
We've got Janis Joplin.

Speaker 1 (47:30):
But you did.

Speaker 2 (47:31):
I mean, she was good, but she had to learn
how to do that. It took her about a year
to really sing with an electric band. That's the most
fair statement that I think is in there. I mean,
I don't know, dude, how would you feel? They were
the house band of the Avalon. They had like a
whole thing, and then like this woman shows up from
Austin that their manager kidnapped. Was like, here's your new singer.

(47:52):
Wouldn't you be mildly miffed?

Speaker 3 (47:54):
I would be until I heard her sing? Right, But
we don't have any either. Have you heard some of
those early ties. They're really good, the acoustic stuff. Yeah, yeah,
I have no doubt of that. But I agree that
learning to sing with an electric man is an entirely
different thing. Okay, especially back in those days when everyone
was just winging it this live sound.

Speaker 1 (48:15):
You know.

Speaker 2 (48:16):
The one thing that I've heard about Janis that was
a bit of a knock on her was and this
is just a just a complete digression. I didn't think
of anywhere to actually stick this was. Forget who was
talking about it. It might have been John Simon actually,
who was like early on she came off a little
bit too studied.

Speaker 1 (48:31):
Oh, I think it was him or someone else who was.

Speaker 2 (48:33):
Talking about her in the studio when they were recording
Cheap Thrills or otherwise with some of the other bands,
where she would be like, it would come time to
do like a scream, and she would be like, well,
here's how Tina Turner would do it, or here's how
Bessie Smith would do it, or here's how Big Mama
Fulton would do it, and people were like, just do
it like Janis would do it.

Speaker 1 (48:52):
You know. So there's a bit of a thing there
that I can like, I can understand. I mean, she
was finding her footing.

Speaker 4 (48:57):
You know.

Speaker 2 (48:57):
But yes, obviously the we were doing her a favor
doesn't smack particularly well.

Speaker 3 (49:03):
No, No, I love that her parents didn't even know
that she left Texas and it had gone out there.
When eventually they did learn, they took a like a
family trip out there. I think they drove out there
in the summer of sixty seven, like mom, dad, brother, sister,
and her brother and sister told me about like how.

Speaker 1 (49:21):
Fun that was. Her sister said, Dad just wanted to
make sure she was all right.

Speaker 3 (49:26):
And Michael, her little brother, said, I remember thinking it
wasn't strange is here up on stage. They went to
go see her perform at the Avalon Ballroom, which was
like the other ballroom that wasn't the film r in
San Francisco and in the mid to late sixties, watching her,
it just seemed perfect.

Speaker 1 (49:42):
It seemed like it's fitter and it did. At last,
she belongs. People were listening to her. I love this part.
This is my favorite, party said. I remember turning around
and watching the audience more than watching Janis. We'd heard
her sing a million times, so that wasn't an unexpected event.
But looking around, I thought, oh my god, she's really
reaching these people. The way she touched the rest of
the audience was very moving to me, as her brother,

(50:05):
imagine having Janice Joplin as your older sister. He would
talk about how cool it was as a kid like
struggling to be a hippie in Port Arthur, Texas, to
have Janice to look up to. And she really encourages
artistic side by sending him San Francisco concert posters, you know,
the crazy Wes Wilson swirly psychedelic graphics. And when he

(50:26):
painted a mural for a local youth club and sent
her a picture of it, she sent this like really
effusive letter back, Honey, just congratulations. I'm so proud. I
have so much love for you and your work. And
you can see this is in the scrap book that
they published a few years ago. It's just really really sweet.
And then for her younger sister, she was recommending books
like Rosemary's Baby or different Tolkien stuff and offering like

(50:49):
sisterly style tips from hair and makeup. I don't know,
I love that stuff. I love to hear about Janice
Joplin big sister. Yeah, that's that's a very heartwarming to
mention of her. Sometimes I wish I had a big sisters.
Is that a weird thing to admit on air?

Speaker 2 (51:01):
No, all the big sisters that I knew were very
physically abusive though, like you were their siblings both, well,
I guess not all, but I'd like no, I had
one like big sister friend, like of a friend who
would just wail on us. I mean she was like
not even that much older, but she would just frequently

(51:23):
beat the shit out of me.

Speaker 1 (51:26):
No wonder I was in love with her. Yeah, yeah,
I was in love with my friend's older sisters too,
but I went about it in a very different way. Anyway.

Speaker 2 (51:39):
As you meditate on that, we'll be right back with
more too much information. After these messages, Big Brother and

(52:02):
Janis reinstalled themselves in Laginitis, now the home of a
famous microbrewery with a wide range of impressively discussing IPAs,
where in Sam Gurley's guitarist Sam Gurley's words, they quote
got into country living. He continued, it was a growing
together thing for all of us. The rest of us
were still new to each other, and Janis was a catalyst,
brought people out, made it really easy to talk. Janis

(52:25):
added to Rolling Stone in nineteen sixty eight, Chet told
me the Big Brother was looking for a chick singer,
so I thought I'd give it a try. I don't
know what happened. I just exploded. I'd never sung like
that before. I stood still and I sang simple. But
you can't sing like that in front of a rock band,
all that rhythm and volume going. You have to sing
loud and move wild with all of that and back
in you. It happened the first time, but then I
got turned onto Otis Redding, and I just got back

(52:46):
into it more than ever.

Speaker 1 (52:48):
Now.

Speaker 2 (52:48):
I don't know how to perform any other way. I've
tried cooling myself off and not screaming, and I've walked
off feeling like nothing. The band and Janis initially progressed together.
Janis honed their rambling improvisations into more structured songs, and
the band, largely through volume, helped her become the full
fledged shower that people came to know her as things
were off to her quick I'll be a bumpy start.

(53:09):
Shortly after Janis joined, the band went to Chicago for
four weeks of shows in August of nineteen sixty six,
but found themselves literally stranding when the promoter, having not
made enough from the engagement, couldn't pay them. Imagine being
stranded in Chicago for a month in the sixties when
you didn't like you had at best ten phone numbers
that you had to pay and like a po box

(53:32):
number to navigate the world with, Like how much would
that suck? Chicago where they were gonna beat people's skulls
in two years later and you're like from San Francisco.

Speaker 1 (53:42):
Good lord.

Speaker 2 (53:44):
So as a stopgap solution, Big Brother in Janis signed
with Bob Shadd's record label, Mainstream Records. They recorded for
the label in Chicago in September, again after being essentially
alone in this city for a month.

Speaker 1 (53:56):
That's one way to get a record label. Please, we
have no money? Who were stuck? Please? I need to eat? Yeah,
they said it was not.

Speaker 2 (54:03):
I haven't actually listened to that because why would I.
But they said it was a really bad fit because
Bob Schad was like a jazz guy and he was like, what.

Speaker 1 (54:10):
Are you doing?

Speaker 2 (54:11):
Stop this at once. But eventually they got back to
San Francisco and they resumed gigging. They eventually recorded two
tracks in LA that were released by Mainstream Records as
a poorly selling single, and then they went back to
Los Angeles to record ten tracks in December of nineteen
sixty six, which appeared on the band's debut album in
August of nineteen sixty seven. Now, of course we move

(54:34):
on to a section that I've titled hey Hey now
now Mama, just hey hey now now a little little Mama.
I listened to the Big The Cheap Throws album actually
like earlier today, and I remember one of the things
that I find so annoying about it, which is that
the other guys in the band are just constantly yelling
something like a bunch of people watching like a bunch

(54:55):
of drunk guys watching Janice sing on TV and ca.

Speaker 1 (55:01):
It sounds like they're in severe intestinal distress, is really
the main Yeah, now we've got to talk about the Monterey.

Speaker 3 (55:08):
Pop Festival in June nineteen sixty seven. Smack at the
top of the Summer of Love as you write, and
that's one way I've never heard that described smack.

Speaker 2 (55:17):
Because of the heroinclaim so many lives. No, I actually
didn't write that, but we were talking a lot about
heroin overdoses earlier.

Speaker 3 (55:24):
So organized in a scant seven weeks by John Phillips
or The Mamas and the Papas, record producer Lou Adler,
event producer Alan Parsier, and Beale's publicist and Beach Boys publicist,
I might add Derek Taylor. The festival is planned on
the site of the long running Monterey Jazz Festival, an
attempt to, as you say, graft some of that legitimacy

(55:44):
onto rock, soul and psych music. Nason psych music, we
should say, although it's now remembered as a watershed moment
in the Capital t capital s the sixties, responsible for
breaking and showcasing hot quote unquote new musicians, Rabbi Shankar.

Speaker 1 (56:01):
Who is not actually new, in fact, he was in
his forties he was performing there.

Speaker 2 (56:05):
My favorite thing about Monteri Bob is that everyone was
so like earnestly, like knew that they should be into
Rabbi Shankar, and it was like, oh, you know, he
like indie music is very hip right now, dig get baby,
that's my bag. That they were just tuning on stage
and people like tentatively like started applauding the tuning of instruments.

Speaker 1 (56:25):
And didn't he say, like, if you like that, you'll
love the real song.

Speaker 2 (56:28):
Yeah, yes, yeah, yeah, you know he couldn't keep it
in his pants. And he was a god awful father
to many many women. But he was well aware of
what was happening to him at the moment.

Speaker 1 (56:41):
I yes, say yes.

Speaker 3 (56:43):
And then of course Jimmy Hendricks is there too, who'd
been like grinding it out on the Chiplin circuit for
what five.

Speaker 1 (56:50):
Years at very least by that point, So yeah, probably
got ran out.

Speaker 2 (56:53):
It probably got literally chase playing. Little Richard's band in
the Deep South was probably literally chased out at gunpoint
from a lot of the cities.

Speaker 1 (57:00):
Yeah, and then the Who was huge in England for years.

Speaker 3 (57:03):
So yeah, all these bands that were allegedly discovered at
Monterey have been around for a while.

Speaker 1 (57:08):
I mean, same with you know, same with Freakin' well
sorry we oh yeah.

Speaker 3 (57:12):
Otis Redding was I mean Otis Reading I thought was
fairly big already when he performed there.

Speaker 2 (57:17):
But well, but there's the question of I mean, what
the the unspoken part of this is is literally always
just new to white people. Yeah, because we're not that
far from having a separate billboard chart for race records
at this point in time. So like, obviously Otis Redding
would go into you know wherever Georgia and sell out,
but he had to perform in front of a bunch

(57:39):
of white people in northern California for people to suddenly
be like.

Speaker 3 (57:42):
Oh, Steve Miller bands, Jefferson, Airplane, he Mesa Keila, Country
Joe on the Fish, cant Heat and the Birds also
were there.

Speaker 1 (57:51):
Country Joe on the Fish are so damn funny to me.
I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 (57:54):
Like people talked about that band like they were the
fucking second. They're all over this era of music and
day were like they did that stupid fixing to Die song, right,
I mean, seriously, what is am I missing something about
Country Joe and the Fish.

Speaker 1 (58:07):
I don't. I don't know. I don't think so. Anyway,
what can we say about uh, Steve Miller fairly serious
blues guitarist. I know. Again, That's why I don't.

Speaker 2 (58:17):
I would be to say about Steve Miller Man Millers like, yeah,
come on, dude. First of all, I love him because
he's like, those songs are stupid, but they are also
like some of the purest expressions of stupidity, and that's
an art form.

Speaker 1 (58:37):
And he hates the rock and roll Hall of Fame. Yeah,
can I hate him? Yes?

Speaker 3 (58:44):
My favorite Sea Miller story is Paul McCartney was recording
with the Beatles. They're making Abbey Road, and it was
right when everything was starting to come apart and they
had a big fight in the studio about business stuff
and everybody, but Paul stormed out and he was really depressed,
and he was like slinking around the studio always and
he just like heard in a studio like music and

(59:06):
he popped his head in because he's Paul McCartney. And
that's the kind of thing you can do if you're
Paul McCartney, just pop your head into other people's sessions and.

Speaker 1 (59:12):
People are really happy to see you. And it was
Steve Miller.

Speaker 3 (59:15):
He was recording in England in late nineteen sixty nine
or like the summer of sixty nine, and they ended
up doing a song together. They ended up just like
jamming and recording a song called My Dark Hour with Paul.

Speaker 1 (59:26):
On drums and uh, and it's not bad. It was released.
I think I'm sure it's bad.

Speaker 2 (59:37):
And they stayed friend Paul McCartney, fucking handsome millionaire to
the stars.

Speaker 1 (59:43):
Ooh my dog.

Speaker 2 (59:47):
This live to Jonty Soul and that sounds a bit
like the good old music holl Days my youth.

Speaker 1 (59:51):
It's called My Dog Hour. Blink like all right, it's
not bad. It's got like. The drums are good.

Speaker 3 (59:58):
I almost think that the riffs from Fly Like an
Eagle originated in that song.

Speaker 1 (01:00:03):
I could be wrong. I haven't heard it in a while.

Speaker 2 (01:00:05):
Its fin Like an Eagle Ghost fucks so hard, those
fucking mogues like ugh, that's like I want to listen
to that remastered in like an him Fox Hide point one.

Speaker 1 (01:00:16):
I just want the Maxell commercial.

Speaker 2 (01:00:18):
I want to be the guy in the chair while
the since from Fly Like an Eagle rearrange of my guts.

Speaker 1 (01:00:24):
All right, give me a second, Liens. It's not bad. No,

(01:00:57):
it's a cool jam. Where the fun were we?

Speaker 4 (01:00:59):
All right?

Speaker 3 (01:01:00):
So we talked earlier about how the Monterey Pop Festival
was sort of a sea change in pop music.

Speaker 1 (01:01:05):
In Oh No, you know you had this whole the
also ran the no shows. Yeah, that's what getting in them.

Speaker 2 (01:01:11):
Okay, Jesus Christ, I'm so sorry you had me chasing
down B sides with Paul McCartney.

Speaker 1 (01:01:18):
Damn, let me live partially.

Speaker 3 (01:01:22):
You had, like we just mentioned, all these bands that
white kids from northern California you'd never seen before.

Speaker 1 (01:01:29):
But also notable were the huge stars of the day
that were no shows.

Speaker 3 (01:01:34):
You know, they always say that this was the time
in the sixties where the headquarters of American music shifted
from Los Angeles to San Francisco. And probably the best
example of that is the fact that the Beach Boys
backed out at the last minute of the Monterey Pop Festival.

Speaker 1 (01:01:49):
This was supposed to be their big.

Speaker 3 (01:01:52):
Hour, coming into their own as a serious pop band.
That because Brian Wilson had been hard at work on
his Smile album, which was going to be his follow
up to his Pet Sounds Orchestral Meister work, and he'd
spent I think at the time more time than anyone
had ever spent recording this album in a modular style.
They just had a huge hit with good vibrations that fall,

(01:02:15):
which was assembled in the way that like movie directors
put films together, instead of just doing what most musicians
at the time, they would just sit down and get
in the studio and play a song while the guy
up behind the glass press record. He was recording little
like ten second fragments that he would just assemble together
at the tape desk, recorded in something like some phenomenal

(01:02:35):
number of studios when I say, like six or seven
studios in La and no one had ever done that before.
That seems like kind of a standard thing to do now,
especially in a post hip hop world where you weave
together all these sounds from disparate times in different places
and different mediums. But now he was the first one
to do that. It was hard enough with one song
with good vibrations, with the most expensive single ever made,

(01:02:55):
and it took a months to do it, something like
six months to try to do it without the eight
of any kind of digital software to help them like
arrange all this stuff over the length of a full
album almost killed Brian. I mean, that was what basically
led him to have it sidelined him pretty much for
the rest of his life. I would argue that was

(01:03:16):
kind of the last time he ever tried one hundred percent.
And it was supposed to be issued around May of
sixty seven, and their appearance the Monterey Pop Festival was
going to be their big like you know, this was
worth it, their coronation, their coronation as like the Hippus
band in America. And when he pulled the plug on
his album Smile and basically retreated from the spotlight, the

(01:03:41):
band backed out of their performance at Monterey and their
reputation really never recovered.

Speaker 2 (01:03:48):
And he ate a lot of burgers, and he ate.

Speaker 1 (01:03:51):
A lot of burgers, a lot, a lot of burgers.

Speaker 4 (01:03:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:03:54):
So the Beach Boys were probably the most consequential no
show of the Monterey Pop Festival, Brian, although he was
on the board of the festival.

Speaker 1 (01:04:01):
You have people like Paul McCartney.

Speaker 2 (01:04:03):
That's the kind of the funniest thing to me about
it is that like, uh, no, I was recording I've
recorded a teenage symphony to God.

Speaker 1 (01:04:11):
Okay, that's nice, but okay, man, just well frustrated.

Speaker 2 (01:04:15):
How frustrating it must it have been for like black
people and women to deal with any straight white man
who is an artist in the nineteen sixties. Okay, man, sorry,
your symphony to God didn't work out or whatever. I
guess we'll all just pick up the pieces like we
always do. I know he's your boy, his sadness, teenage

(01:04:38):
symphonies to God.

Speaker 1 (01:04:39):
He had lots of problems. Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah,
I know. Jesus Christ's where Iikle tells Brian Wilson, some
people have real problems.

Speaker 3 (01:04:49):
Yeah, come on, sad man in a sandbox in a
baby cranp piano.

Speaker 2 (01:04:53):
Yeah. Sorry, you were at the top of a food
chain in an era of unprecedented prosperity in the music industry,
and and what you couldn't get the thereman sounds right,
I guess, yeah, retreat out of public life for twenty years, sure, man,
but no, totally.

Speaker 1 (01:05:09):
It's great. So glad I have to keep hearing about
you because of it. That was mean. There's a new book,
oral history, the Making of Smile, that just came out
by the great Beach Boys historian David Leif just came
out like that.

Speaker 2 (01:05:24):
Job you can have. Never mind the fact that libraries
don't get funded. The NYPD gobbled up New York's entire
library budget, But no, Beach Boys and historian.

Speaker 1 (01:05:37):
Is a job you can have. He's old, He's sorry.

Speaker 2 (01:05:41):
I smell a downvote coming, not even a downvote. I
smell a one star review coming.

Speaker 1 (01:05:45):
We got a lot of five star reviews for oops,
all digressions. I did hear that.

Speaker 2 (01:05:50):
Yes, thank you, folks, Glad you liked that.

Speaker 1 (01:05:52):
Very very kind, very very kind. Sees.

Speaker 3 (01:05:55):
The Beach Boys didn't appear at the Monterey Pop Festival.
Neither did Donovan for some reason of drugs.

Speaker 2 (01:06:01):
Oh yeah, that was the funniest thing is that like Donovan,
these all these other three guys like these Lovin, Spoonful,
Donovan both missed it because of drug investigations. And the
Kinks really got.

Speaker 1 (01:06:14):
Over the US. Yeah, oh yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:06:17):
The Rolling Stones had it so bad that they had
to go become tax exiles. The Kinks were banned by
the American Musicians Union for like two years during the
peak of British Mania, like over what. I don't even
remember what the inciting incident it was. It was just
they were too British, they were too mean, Like what
got them banned?

Speaker 3 (01:06:36):
I think it was related to the fact that their
managers were really inexperienced, and I think they may have
inadvertently pissed off the union, yeah basically, And I don't
know the specifics of it, but I think it had
to do with the fact that their management quite possibly
just didn't grease the right palms. Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah, no. Anyway,
So anyway, those people did not play at Monterroy Pop

(01:06:59):
the they brother in the Holding Company featuring Janis Joplin.

Speaker 1 (01:07:01):
Did twice twice.

Speaker 3 (01:07:04):
Bill Graham, the legendary godfather of the San Francisco music scene,
who ran the Filmore Auditorium and Winterland, and I'm sure
he had his fingers and all sorts of other I
wish I didn't use that phrase.

Speaker 1 (01:07:16):
I'm sure. I think he was the manager for Jefferson
Airplane too. He was evolved in all. He was an octopus.
The man was an octopus. The man was an a.

Speaker 3 (01:07:26):
Yes, he remembers Janis being obsessed with Otis readings, he
told Rolling Stone after she died. Otis was there for
three nights at the old Filmore Auditorium, and all the
local groups wanted to play with him. We we had
a different group each night. But the thing about Janis
was that each night she asked me ahead of time.
She said, Bill, please, can I come to early before
anybody else so I can be sure to see him?

(01:07:47):
Because she idolized Otis. And every night she had come
into the ballroom at six o'clock and sit herself down
on the main floor, right in the middle, right in
front of the stage. She was there before we even
opened the building. So just Janis in an empty auditorium
watching Otis Redding do sound checks at the film wore
That's adorable. I love that Janis and big Brother in
the Holding Company apparently followed a tepid canned heat canned lukewarm.

Speaker 1 (01:08:13):
Ah, God, it was right there, yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:08:17):
Who opened the festival's Saturday performances as filmmaker Da Pennybaker,
who was on hand to document the weekend remember the
Rolling Stone in twenty nineteen. The first time I saw
her was when she came out for the first time
and sang, Paul and Chain, We've been told we couldn't
film it because her agent wanted money or something.

Speaker 1 (01:08:33):
Sam Andrew, one of the members, a big brother in
the Holding.

Speaker 3 (01:08:35):
Company, who I don't care to learn what he played,
because I don't think they're a good band, reinforced this
in a two thousand and six interview. Our then manager,
Julius Carpen was telling us, no, he's our manager. So
we said, let's go ask Albert Grossman. He knows everything.

Speaker 1 (01:08:52):
He manages Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary and Joan Biaz.
He knows. So he went to him and said, Albert,
what should we do?

Speaker 2 (01:09:00):
And the air suddenly got colder in the room, and
the darkness started encroaching in at the edges of their vision.
As Albert Grossman turned his horrific gaze upon them, and.

Speaker 1 (01:09:09):
He said, you should be in the film. Definitely. The
kids should stay in the picture. We haven't done it.
We haven't done a cigar chomping executive in way too long.

Speaker 2 (01:09:17):
Well, we're gonna be talking about it. We're gonna be
talking about Clive Davis.

Speaker 3 (01:09:20):
And Albert Grossman. Albert Grossman is truly one of the prototypical.
He's up there with Louis b. Mayer in terms of
industry scumbags. He said, you should be in the film, definitely.
So after their initial afternoon performance, Janis and Big Brother
performed again, this time for the benefit of Da Penny
Baker's cameras, and they were in the final documentary go on, Oh,

(01:09:43):
this is.

Speaker 1 (01:09:44):
The best part. Favor one of my favorite parts. I
actually sent this as a reaction gift to somebody recently.

Speaker 3 (01:09:49):
After Janis performs, they cut to Mama Cass in the
audience just murmuring wow.

Speaker 1 (01:09:56):
And it's great.

Speaker 3 (01:09:57):
I mean, I think occasionally throughout the performance they just
cut to her and her mouth is just hanging wide open.

Speaker 2 (01:10:04):
It must have been so cool to get those moments
in like a pre you know. Now I look at
my phone and there's forty six of those moments queued
up for me. Yeah, but like imagine just like getting
that in real time and being like uh oh, like
I such a mix of like we're boned and also
like complete mutual at like just be like artistic respect

(01:10:27):
and just being like like this tectonic shock of just
being like holy shit, would I just watch you know?

Speaker 1 (01:10:32):
It's funny.

Speaker 3 (01:10:33):
I don't know if Mama Cass and Janie had much
of a relationship or a friendship, like I would assume
they were very different.

Speaker 1 (01:10:40):
I was gonna say, did you read the next paragraph?

Speaker 2 (01:10:43):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (01:10:45):
Emphasizing the Los Angeles San Francisco divide, Pennymaker said that
quote Janis was the most interesting to shoot because I
had not been prepared for her at all.

Speaker 3 (01:10:53):
She was from San Francisco and I've been hanging out
with the Las. There was this thing between them. They
had to sniff each other out of litle little bit.
There was a feeling that they weren't really good friends.
It was wonderful to watch them sit and watch each
other play. When she first stood there and belted that
thing out, I thought, Jesus, this is incredible.

Speaker 1 (01:11:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:11:11):
I think it was like a I mean especially with
Janis in particular. I think it was like an acid
culture and a drinking.

Speaker 1 (01:11:17):
Did you read the following paragraph?

Speaker 2 (01:11:21):
No, because this was.

Speaker 1 (01:11:24):
How diould you read the following paragraph?

Speaker 4 (01:11:27):
Well?

Speaker 1 (01:11:27):
I just so rarely get to pull that one on you.
It's funny that it happened all this from something I
wrote originally, so I didn't think I had to tend
to add it about ten pages. Anyway, you did.

Speaker 2 (01:11:38):
Guitarist Sam Andrews said as much in a two thousand
and six interview. The big story in Monterey was there
were all these people from LA who were really professional.
They're really slick, and they've got a lot of money,
and they know what's going on. They know everything about
show business, like John Phillips with the Mamas and the
Poplar Papa's and Lou Adler.

Speaker 1 (01:11:54):
They know everything.

Speaker 2 (01:11:55):
And they thought, what are these people doing up in
San Francisco. There's something going on up there. We keep
hearing about it. Maybe we should humor them and have
this festival near them and invite them down. We'll be professional,
we'll show them what a professional event is. We'll show
them what's going on. Andrew continued. They patronized, well, this
is a bit of an idiosyncratic phrasing. He says, they
patronized the south of California towards the north, so maybe

(01:12:20):
that there's like an air in Comma that should be
They patronized Comma the south of California towards the north.

Speaker 1 (01:12:26):
He said that southern LA people.

Speaker 2 (01:12:28):
Were patronizing towards northern California people. Jesus Christ quote. They
came up and put on this festival. They said, oh,
here's a big brother. We'll put them on in the
daytime when it doesn't really count. Yeah, but the mamas
and the papas, they are going to play at night
when all the spotlights are on. We went on, and
the other San Francisco bands went on, and the Los
Angeles people were just stunned and astounded. They had no
idea what we've been doing. And then they saw it

(01:12:49):
in front of them on stage. They saw they were
going to have to change their whole thing. They were
playing with these kind of little nursery songs, and Janis
totally astounded them. That is a s yeah, because that
is mama's the papa's compared to Janis. That's what she
makes them sound like.

Speaker 3 (01:13:07):
I mean a lot of the supposed headliners were studio bands.
I mean, Mama's and Papa's were probably, next to the
Beach Boys, the best example of an LA studio band
that I can think of, and it didn't really translate
to a live performance. Sure, Yeah, Mama's and the Papas
following Jimmy Hendrix.

Speaker 1 (01:13:26):
I mean yeah, that pairing is sort of sums it
up for me.

Speaker 2 (01:13:31):
Yeah, And I mean this is what does get me. Like,
this is why I still have some vestige of affinity
for like this San Francisco thing, because, like you know,
before it became this commodified and packaged product, it was
such a breath of fresh air for these people who
were like, uh, well, you know you kind of you
make bands in the studio, and then they completely I
mean that's sort of the big crazy innovation of not

(01:13:54):
innovation because obviously black people have been doing it for decades,
but like that was sort of what San Francisco did
that really flip the script on live music in the seventies.
Was it was like not suddenly about, well, we have
a record to sell, so we might as well perform live.
It was suddenly about there's this incredible live energy happening
how can we make money off of that in a.

Speaker 1 (01:14:15):
Way that how can we get control of that?

Speaker 2 (01:14:18):
You know, because it was I mean we've talked about
this before on the show, where it was like at
certain phases of the record industry, man, they didn't even
care if the guy who sang the song was the
one performing it. They would literally be like, you're in
the neighborhood, like get out there and sing this song
and will lie you know. So this idea of rejiggering
the entire structure of the music industry around live performance

(01:14:41):
and around like things that were happening in the moment
and dragging it back into God help me, the Jim
Morrison like Dionysian theater like aspect of it. That was
That is really what's so groundbreaking about It wasn't the
music warmed over blues and noodlely bullshit. It was just
this idea that you could you suddenly replacing these live

(01:15:03):
moments before a little piece of plastic that you went
down to the shop and bought every week, you know,
you know, man, like really they were innovators, man.

Speaker 3 (01:15:14):
But I mean The Grateful Dead is the prototypical example
of like, yes, San Francisco and like name three songs
that they record.

Speaker 2 (01:15:22):
Yeah, you know, oh that first Grateful Dead record is
a atrocity. Yeah, and the very first self titled one.
I mean that's why they don't even you know, it's
so they're so fascinating because like Live Dead is sixty
nine or whatever, and that's like the first like that's
like the er text of like Grateful Dive live documents.
But pig Pen doesn't even play keyboards on that. Like

(01:15:45):
this Tom khn Stanton who then wasn't in the band
as they progressed, you know, I don't think he plays
on American He might play on American Beauty. I don't
know that he plays on working bands. And then by
the time it's Live seventy two, it's a completely different
It's it's Godow, the Godhaws have already moved in. So
it's just like to their detriment, they never even caught
up with what the live's on record. The live of

(01:16:06):
the record's never even caught up remotely with what was
happening live.

Speaker 1 (01:16:10):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:16:11):
I think that's just an interesting read that doesn't get platformed.
So much of this idea that like the suits were
put on their back foot by what was actually happening,
which should happen more often? And then Clive Davis came
in and waved a bunch of money around everything up.

Speaker 3 (01:16:26):
Yes, it was in Monterey that Janis would meet two
people who would become her surrogate father figures who would
also contribute to her death.

Speaker 1 (01:16:36):
So your mileage may.

Speaker 2 (01:16:38):
Faery whichever side of the death arrows drive if you're
a Freudian, if you're Youngian in.

Speaker 1 (01:16:44):
Our way, don't all of our surrogate fathers almost.

Speaker 2 (01:16:47):
Kill us sometimes literally your real father?

Speaker 1 (01:16:50):
Yeah, talked about Marvin Gay on the show, right, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:16:52):
Yeah, So this leads us into a section I've decided
to call Come on, squares, now, get up and boogie
to this old boogie downjive heat boogie.

Speaker 1 (01:17:01):
Lady.

Speaker 2 (01:17:02):
Albert Grossman belongs to a mount rushmore of cartoonishly evil,
if effective rock and roll managers. Next to Colonel Tom Parker,
led Zeppla manager, Peter Grant, an Eagles manager, and ex
ticketmaster CEO Irving angis off about whom Don Henley, of
all people, once said he may be satan, but he's
our satan. Grossman most famous for repend Dylan who dumped
him after he found out that Grossman had servetipitiously assigned

(01:17:25):
fifty percent of Dylan's publishing rights.

Speaker 1 (01:17:28):
Oh Albert was a brutal negotiator.

Speaker 2 (01:17:31):
Who fearlessly went to bat for his clients against promoters
and record label executives, while also similarly fearlessly helping himself
to the largesse, fringe benefits, and liquid assets of his
artists whenever he could. Aside from launching Peter, Paul and
Mary and at some point John by his aunt Jernis Joplin,
Grossman also managed John Lee Hooker, Odetta Todd Rudgren, the

(01:17:53):
band Gordon Lightfoot, and the short lived but influential Electric Flag, who,
as you correctly note, whip Yeah they're great. Honestly, in
a more just world, would have had the career that
the Cream had. Yeah, Electric Flags, interracial band. Everybody slapped
in it. Buddy Miles went on to.

Speaker 1 (01:18:14):
It.

Speaker 2 (01:18:14):
Yeah, yeah, Bloomfield, the Jewish intellectual guitar hero that this
country should have had instead of Eric Clapton listened to,
never listened to the I think it's actually might be
at Monterey when when Bloomfield's doing his like wrap to
the crowd where he's like very obviously wired on speed,
but just like so excited to be there, and he's like, yeah, cats,

(01:18:36):
you know this is your happening it and you.

Speaker 1 (01:18:38):
Gotta dig it because it really does like it's a trip.

Speaker 2 (01:18:40):
Man Like it's just so enthusiastic. And then they go
into a tune called Spodiodeo drinking Wine. But he is
he whips man. I mean, Bloomfield is one of the
true like undersung electric guitarists of that generation. Again like
should have everything Eric Clapton does, minus the Dead Kid.

Speaker 1 (01:19:02):
He backed, he backed Dylan at Newport.

Speaker 2 (01:19:06):
He's, well, he's on parts of Highway sixty one, but
he backed Dylan at Newport.

Speaker 1 (01:19:11):
Famously, I think he's on Michael wrong Stone too. Yeah yeah, yeahah.

Speaker 2 (01:19:16):
Anyway, by the time Grossman got to Janie, he had
been a manager for nearly ten years, and the sort
of narrative around this part of his career that he
was spreading himself a little thin. That, however, did not
stop him from latching onto Janis after her performance and
promising her the world starting in motion the chain reaction
of her leaving big brother and eventually dying. The pair
did have a cute relationship at first. Big Brother guitarist

(01:19:38):
Sam Andrew wrote in two thousand that Albert and Janice
developed a tender relationship. They touched each other a lot,
in a very loving and unself conscious manner. She would
give him a massage when there was a lot of stress,
and he would often have his arm around her. But
Japlin confidant Maya Friedman, author of the Janis biography buried alive,
told Musician magazine after Grossman's death that Albert had been
quote unwilling to give Janis the kind of direction that

(01:20:01):
could have made a difference in saving her life. She
added to Rolling Stone after Joplin died that the capital
J Janis image she sometimes cultivated and sometimes had forced
on her by people like Grossman and yes, Clive Davis,
this wild and fancy free no given blue showder was
not entirely accurate. Myra said, I think Janice knew that

(01:20:22):
wasn't really where she was at. Maybe part of her
believed that, but I think the most honest part didn't.
She wasn't a conservative girl, That's ridiculous, but she had
a lot of needs that were just like everyone else's.
I had met her at the Chelsea Hotel. J always
stayed there. When she was in New York, she'd been
reading a book.

Speaker 1 (01:20:38):
I saw.

Speaker 2 (01:20:38):
It was Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolfe. She told
me she read it a lot. But don't tell anybody
what is.

Speaker 3 (01:20:45):
Reading Being literate at to do with being like a
badass wild and free blues showder that makes me send,
I know.

Speaker 1 (01:20:53):
Such was the tenor of the times. Yes. The other
complicating factor in Janis's professional life, Clive Davis, also appeared
at Monterey.

Speaker 2 (01:21:02):
Let's talk about Clive Davis. Yes, yes, how many bodies
on old Clive? Wait, we'll get there, Okay, Sorry chomping
at the bit a little.

Speaker 1 (01:21:13):
Clive told Music Connection in twenty nineteen at Monterey, I
was really just getting my feet wet when Janis took
the stage. It was an unknown group.

Speaker 3 (01:21:21):
To me, totally big brother in the holding company, and
right from the outset it was something you could never forget.
She took the stage dominated and was absolutely breathtick, hypnotic,
compelling and soul shaking. You saw someone who not only
had the goods, but was doing something that no one else.

Speaker 1 (01:21:37):
Was doing, And I thought I could make a lot
of money off that.

Speaker 3 (01:21:42):
He continued so I quietly obviously had to negotiate the
Big Brother contract out of Mainstream Records, the record contract
they signed when they were.

Speaker 1 (01:21:50):
Stranded into Chicago. It wasn't that Albert Grossman was their
manager at the beginning.

Speaker 4 (01:21:54):
He was not.

Speaker 3 (01:21:55):
He ultimately came in as their manager. But it was
after he came in that we came up with a
solution buying their contract. He added a billboard in twenty nineteen,
I bought their contract for two hundred thousand dollars. We
agree that half of it would be unrecoupable by Columbia
and half would be repaid through the band's royalties. In
that same article, the musician Johnny rivers Are also performed

(01:22:15):
that Monterey said it Monterey, I saw Clive Davis jump
out of his seat. I was standing in the wings
of the stage. And after that, man, he was on
Channis like a cheap suit.

Speaker 1 (01:22:27):
Yeah. Clive added to me in twenty twenty two that
after hearing.

Speaker 2 (01:22:30):
Janna, I want to go ahead and say give I'm
giving you an out because Clive Davis.

Speaker 1 (01:22:35):
Knows who you are and where you live. It's fine.
I don't think he knows where he lives at this point. Oh,
I have no reason to assume that he is in
ill health right now.

Speaker 2 (01:22:47):
I mean, he's one hundred and seventy years old and
evil i've him. I don't care like if he is.
And I did I tell you what I remember your
Clive Davis story, Yes, but I don't know if you've recounted.

Speaker 1 (01:22:58):
It on this I don't think I have. So.

Speaker 3 (01:23:00):
Clive dam was, for some reason I've inexplicably interviewed like
maybe seven times.

Speaker 1 (01:23:05):
I don't know why. That's He's probably the person I've
interviewed the most.

Speaker 3 (01:23:08):
They're always offering him to me, and I'm like, cool,
tell me the Whitney story again. First time I interviewed him,
it was him and Aretha Franklin on stools in front
of me, which was crazy, but to be honest with you,
Aretha kind of took up my view. I wasn't looking
at Clive when Aretha was right there.

Speaker 1 (01:23:26):
She sang to me. She sang a little bit of
Rolling in the Deep by Adele, which is weird, which
I wasn't expecting.

Speaker 3 (01:23:33):
Well, she was covering it at that way she was covering,
but it was she was like demonstrating a point, and
to demonstrate that point she sang a line or two
from it, like, you know, six feet away from me,
which was which was fun for me.

Speaker 1 (01:23:45):
Yeah, And so it was over. I think I was
interviewing her.

Speaker 3 (01:23:48):
It was like a thing on camera and I was
behind the camera reading questions, and it was over. Clive
like waves me over, and I approached him and he
waves me to come closer, and I do keep coming closer.

Speaker 2 (01:24:01):
Jordan thinking some great secret about that. Clive recognizes him.
He's like, Jordan, you've put so much work into interviewing me.
At this point, I'm gonna I'm gonna give you some
advice about this this filthy world, this music industry.

Speaker 1 (01:24:12):
He keeps. So this happens like three or four times,
Come closer, Come closer, Come closer, And I'm like, I
literally put my head down because I think he's gonna
like whisper something to me. And he uses me as
a human crush, and he puts his hand on my
shoulders so we can get off his stool, and then
he pats me on the back literally and walks away.

(01:24:34):
No words were exchanged, but then I entered a bunch
after that, So now you know how it felt to
be a woman. Yeah, Wow, yeah maybe, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:24:44):
In his management, yes, yes, anyway, how many bodies does
Clive have on him?

Speaker 1 (01:24:49):
Yeah? Talk about this woman. I don't think I realized.
I never really put this together until listening to you.

Speaker 2 (01:24:54):
Yeah, well, you know this fucker has has the music
industry like you know, stranglehold. I mean, there's all this
important to remember that, you know, he was also Ditty's buddy,
which by literal virtue of Clive as Davis being like,
I don't know where I am. He's successfully managed to
avoid any of that. But trust me, that fucker knows

(01:25:15):
enough to land him in bars. But yeah, so if
we're buying, if we're accepting this idea that, you know,
this sort of loosely constructed narrative that Clive signs Janis
and then quickly becomes more obsessed with Aretha, And we're
also accepting the narrative that Clive signed Whitney and then
stop paying so much attention to her when she became

(01:25:36):
inconvenient for him. And we're also accepting the notion that
Clive got TLC signed to Arista and more or less
blacklisted them and was responsible for their bankruptcy. And we
could probably throw Lisa left Eye's body on there as well.

(01:25:59):
That's a but you know, just do yourself a favorite.
Google things like Angie Stone, Clive Davis, who maybe was
blacklisted by him for not towing the party line entirely.
If you look up a lot of his dealings with
as part of Arista when he was running with Babyface
and a lot of the R and B guys, it

(01:26:21):
doesn't really paint the best picture of this rich white
guy swornen around.

Speaker 1 (01:26:26):
Kelly Clarkson had a lot to say about him that
wasn't nice. I don't have anything. Do you have? Do
you have that?

Speaker 2 (01:26:31):
I mean, someone literally called him I forget. I think
it might have been God. What was this woman's name?
I was doing some research about this. Yeah, Angie Stone
cut him off because of how she alleged that he
treated Alicia Keys when he signed her. He made Kelly
Clarkson cry yes allegedly, yes, yes. She said that he

(01:26:53):
didn't think she possessed the ability to write songs. She
wrote a song for her second album, Breakaway, called because
of You, and she said in an interview with Variety,
I was told that was a song because it didn't rhyme.
A group of men thought it was okay to sit
around the young woman and bully her. I was told
to shut up and sing five.

Speaker 3 (01:27:10):
Davis in his memoir described her as bursting into quote
hysterical sobbing over their disagreement on including Since You've Been
Gone on her second album. Clarkson rejected the notion that
she was hysterically sobbing, and she wrote on a blog post,
I refused to be bullied, and I just have to
clear up his memory lapses and misinformation for myself and
my fans. It feels like a violation. Growing up is

(01:27:31):
awesome because you learn you don't have to coward to anyone,
even Clive Davis.

Speaker 2 (01:27:36):
Yeah, this woman n Jaguar Wright, who's a songwriter. I mean,
she lumped him in with Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein. She
called him one of the most dangerous people she's ever met. Oh, sorry,
that was ditty she called that. But she said that
Clive Davis was largely responsible for protecting Diddy for thirty
years or so. The guy she said that too, called

(01:27:57):
her a conspiracy theorist. But I think she did call
him the devil. Clive Davis. Yeah, I don't know, man.
A lot of it's not actionable. A lot of it's
hush hush, but it's here's a okay. But let's just say,
let's keep it in the boardroom, let's keep it professional.
Let's keep it to things that have actual government investigations

(01:28:20):
into them, such as cocaine and heroin trafficking and being
in bed with the mob. Did you know that Clive
Davis was once fired from Colombia three years after Janis died.

Speaker 1 (01:28:31):
I knew that.

Speaker 3 (01:28:32):
I thought it was because he was accused of taking
corporate money to pay for his son's barmits. There was
some trumped up thing that he later claimed was rejected. Well,
that's exactly right. That is one thing that he did do.

Speaker 2 (01:28:44):
But this was related to investigation of one of his
buddies at Columbia, a guy named David Winshaw, who is
vice president of AR at Columbia, Winshaw was referred to
as Clive's royal procureur slash Clive's pimp slash doctor fuel Good.
So basically, in February of seventy three, there was a

(01:29:07):
reported fifteen million dollar drug bust in Montreal that involved
this woman named Francine Berger, who was a receptionist at
Columbia and a guy named Pascali Falcone forty one, who
was identified himself as a manager of two Nashville based
Columbia acts. Falcone has ties to the Genovesei crime family

(01:29:30):
and was supposedly in possession of papers that implicated this guy,
David Winshaw in like essentially international drug dealing facilitated by
Columbia records in the music industry. That's all in Neila Times,
that's all in Rolling Stone. That's all just out there.
But here's an illustrative and hilarious anecdote from this Rolling

(01:29:52):
Stone arcle I got all this from. So again we're
recapping Clive Davis's fixer at Columbia was part of the
Genevezi crime family and involved in a a international drug
smuggling operation along with a Columbia receptionist.

Speaker 1 (01:30:05):
So continue.

Speaker 3 (01:30:06):
I just want to say, I'm sorry, but in the
mid to late sixties and early seventies, if you have
to have a corporate fixer, I would argue that there
is a greater than fifty percent chance that said fixer
became a fixer because they were involved with the underworld.

Speaker 1 (01:30:23):
And that's cool.

Speaker 2 (01:30:26):
No, all I'm saying is that there is a lot
of money floating around, and some of it was apparently
connected to dealing heroin, a thing that a lot of
people died from, including one of Clive's siginees. Any who,
here's an illustrative anecdote from that Rolling Stone investigation. Paul Simon,

(01:30:47):
of all people, was so turned off by Clive's arrogance
that he once strode into a sales meeting at Columbia
in April of nineteen seventy three and slammed a copy
of the book The Light of Krishna, about the Guru
Jake krish Namurdi, published in nineteen seventy one onto a
table in front of Davis, telling him, you need to
read this book more than anyone I know.

Speaker 1 (01:31:08):
I've never heard, so it's amazing. So I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:31:14):
Maybe Clive Davis kills women if you'r Diddy's buddy in
the record industry. Let's see, how would the New York
Times report this if he were a young black teenager
killed by a police.

Speaker 1 (01:31:25):
Clive Davis was no angel. Also, Albert Grossman was a
piece of shit.

Speaker 2 (01:31:29):
When Albert Grossman signed Janis and Big Brother in nineteen
sixty seven, he said he would not tolerate any intravenous
drug use, and all five of them agreed to abide
by the rule. However, upon discovering in spring of nineteen
sixty nine that Joplin was injecting drugs anyway, Albert Grossman
did not confront her.

Speaker 1 (01:31:46):
Guess what he did.

Speaker 2 (01:31:47):
Instead tell us he took out a life insurance policy
on her, ensuring that he would receive two hundred thousand
dollars in the event that she died in an accident.

Speaker 1 (01:31:55):
His yearly premium was thirty five hundred dollars, which.

Speaker 2 (01:31:58):
Meant that he stood to gain quite a profit about
one hundred and twelve thousand dollars actually in nineteen seventy
four money when Janis died and after the litigation where
the insurance company was attempting to prove that her death
was a suicide not an accident. So then Grossman, as
part of the testimony, lies and says that he had
never known the extent of joplin substance abuse when she

(01:32:20):
was alive, and that he secured her accidental death policy
quote with air crashes in mind.

Speaker 3 (01:32:26):
I'm in no way shape or forum siding with insurance companies,
right now, I'm actually surprised that they count drug overdose
as an accidental death.

Speaker 1 (01:32:36):
You're missing the forest for the fucking trees here, buddy,
he took out an insurance policy, or after he found
out she was shooting up, I'm instead of putting her,
instead of putting her in rehab.

Speaker 3 (01:32:47):
The scumbaggery of the music industry doesn't surprise me. The
fact that there is a loophole in the insurance company
that surprised.

Speaker 1 (01:32:55):
Yes, that does.

Speaker 2 (01:32:57):
Okay, all right, let's let's change the mood a little
bit lighter, moving on to a section I like to call, Hey, y'all,
let's have a good time and get down and boogie
to some real old time, get down, good time boogie.
For Janis, a major label contract was the culmination of
a lifelong dream, and she went to show Davis her

(01:33:17):
own unique brand of gratitude. In his two thousand memoir,
if I did it, I would have no Sorry, it's
called soundtrack of my life. Other people's talent, the soundtrack
of my life.

Speaker 1 (01:33:30):
I don't think I realized you hated him this much.

Speaker 2 (01:33:32):
Who else other than him is like up there as
far as like having this gilded Mitus touch. Yeah, but
I'm at Erdigan was like ten years younger than him
and legitimately like a music fan.

Speaker 1 (01:33:45):
Oh yeah, no, I agree.

Speaker 2 (01:33:47):
I don't disagree that Clive Davis likes music, but this
idea that like an executive is anything other than a
bank that like, why are we all participating in this,
this laundering, this reputation law, especially now with this ditty
shit out, Like, oh sorry, this is gonna be a
tough edit. I know you're trying to get this back

(01:34:07):
on a Wednesday. In his twenty thirteen memoir Soundtrack of
My Life, Davis recounts a surprising phone call from Abbert
Grossman on behalf of janis. She's talked about meeting you,
Grossman supposedly told him, and she thinks it only fitting
and proper that she balled you to cement the deal
for all of his business acumen, Davis was at a loss.

(01:34:28):
I think it was a little too formal just to
sign a document to say we'd be working together. So
she has to sleep with me to make it more personal,
he reflected in a twenty fourteen interview with the Guardian.
I took it as a big compliment, although I turned
it down. He ultimately agreed to a kiss.

Speaker 1 (01:34:42):
I don't like that. I don't like him telling that story.
Good Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:34:48):
For their first major label appearance, it was felt that
a live album would be a better showcase for Big
Brother's abilities. John Simon, the album's producer, said in twenty
fifteen they had a reputation for inspiring a level of
excitement in their audience that was as much of a
part of their show as their performance. In order to
capitalize on that excitement, they were eager to record a
live album, so they rented a remote recording console and

(01:35:10):
recorded two shows at the toy It's Grande Theater beginning
on March first, nineteen sixty eight.

Speaker 1 (01:35:17):
Unfortunately, they hit a series of snags off the bat.

Speaker 3 (01:35:20):
The ear splitting volume of their live performances pushed the
recording meters permanently into the red. What's more, the audience
response was effectively non existent. Engineer Fred Cateros had an
Alice Ecoles Janis Joplin bio Scars of Sweet Paradise. They
never heard a woman's sound like that. Every time she
finished a song, people were just like huh.

Speaker 1 (01:35:42):
There was no reaction.

Speaker 3 (01:35:44):
Even more troubling for producer John Simon, the band's quote
avalanche of energy couldn't mask the quote mistakes of plenty
that he heard. The producer decided to move sessions to
a formal recording facility, Columbia Studio B in New York,
where bumnotes wrong on chords or fluff lyrics could be
remedied with surgical precision. But retreating to the studio presented

(01:36:06):
another problem, albeit one of a non musical variety. Word
had spread and already a live recording a big brother
of the holding company was enthusiastically expected.

Speaker 1 (01:36:15):
Some recalled I.

Speaker 3 (01:36:17):
Didn't want their fans to be disappointed, so instead they
endeavored to make a studio album that sounded live, which
is like kind of revolutionary.

Speaker 2 (01:36:26):
I think, well, no, Cannibal Atterly did it with a
record called record. I think it's called Live at the Club.

Speaker 1 (01:36:38):
You're doing the Peter Griffin thing. It's like, I can't
think of it.

Speaker 3 (01:36:43):
I can't think of Cannibal Latterly's live album, Cannibellatterly Live
at the Club.

Speaker 1 (01:36:48):
Well, it's it's okay.

Speaker 2 (01:36:49):
First of all, you I love Cannibell Adlely, greatest alto saxophonist.

Speaker 1 (01:36:55):
This live album that I butchered. The title of is
because it is so hilariously long.

Speaker 2 (01:37:01):
It's called Mercy, Mercy, Mercy, exclamation point live at in
quotes the club the liner notes said that it was
recorded at this club in Chicago, but it was recorded
at Capitol's Hollywood studio. They just invited an audience and
put up an open bar. So it is like one
of the most live sounding jazz records of all time.
It came out in sixty seven, and it's just like

(01:37:24):
you literally hear people will be like like like yelling,
like at Jozavinol, who's in Weather Report and wrote actually
the title cut and a couple other great ones from
when he was in Cannonball's band. You know, he starts
playing and you just hear somebody like, go ahead with it, Joe.
It's like you look at Joe's Avinol and he's this
very straight laced, like white Austrian man, but he was

(01:37:46):
just so obsessed with like black what he called black
American music. Anyway, it's a great record, but it's one
of the first fake live records, so you these white
boomers didn't do it first.

Speaker 1 (01:38:03):
Sorry, that'll be fun. In the edit, where were we
well recreating.

Speaker 3 (01:38:07):
The excitement of a swirling San Franciscan's Psychedelic Odyssey and
an airless and sterile midtown Manhattan recording facility would pose
a challenge. The methods of studio tracking ran counter to
the way Big Brother and the holding company preferred to
make their music. That is to say, loose and sloppy
and up and untrained bassist Peter Album observed in the

(01:38:29):
books Scars of Sweet Paradise. Everything's fairly isolated. You have
headphones on. The vocalist is in a soundproof chamber. The
drummers baffled in like crazy. It's a very non together
way of recording. That's true. That's why it sounds good.
In the hopes of improving the overall vibe, a stage
was assembled in a live room, complete with lowered curtains,

(01:38:52):
a spotlight, and even the band's PA system, in an
effort to mimic the idea that they were playing at
a club and not in an airless studio in mid
tamp Manhattan. To enhance the effect on record, though, producer
John Simon created tape loops of fake audience reactions with secretaries, engineers,
and assorted members of the group's entourage enlisted as the crowd.

(01:39:12):
We gave them tambourines and whistles and stuff and said,
can you stand out here and whenever you feel like reacting,
just whoop and holler and shake your tambourines and blow
your whistles. People at clubs don't have tambourines and whistles.
That's the fatal flaw in this plan. Okayed in San
Francisco right well. The album credits claim that the live

(01:39:33):
material in quotes was tape that Bill Graham's legendary Filmore auditorium.

Speaker 1 (01:39:37):
The Soul concert.

Speaker 3 (01:39:38):
Recording, a nine minute version of Ball and Chain with
a new guitar solo trek in the studio was made
at Graham's other local stronghold, the Winterland Ballroom. Later, sight
of the Last Waltz starring the band and co John
Simon was good. He came up with a real concept
for the album that worked. Drummer Dave Getz said it
created a picture for people who had and been in

(01:40:00):
the San Francisco ballrooms. Even the intimate Turtle Blues was
treated with ambient noise, recorded at Barney's Beanery, a bar
on Hollywood Santa Monica Boulevard that was one of Janis's
favorite watering holes. She famously carved her name into her
favorite table, and following her death, I don't think you
get to this later she had left money in her

(01:40:23):
will to throw a party for her friends at Barnes
after she died, and they sent out invites to it
that said drinks on pearl with the date and the dress.

Speaker 1 (01:40:34):
Yes, and that table is still there. It's not on
the floor.

Speaker 3 (01:40:37):
They have it like hanging from the ceiling upside down
so you can see Janis's name carved into it.

Speaker 1 (01:40:42):
But it's still very nice.

Speaker 2 (01:40:43):
Yeah, yeah, Well, not to take that away, but I
don't think they used that recording. Sam Andrews said in
two thousand that they returned to the studio, collected some
pals like Bobby Newarth, Howard Hessman, and John Cook, and
proceeded to just get drunk for the microphone. Bobby Neworth
smashed a bottle of Southern Comfort in trash can. Janis

(01:41:04):
cackled away over the whole scene, and I laughed so
hard as out of breath. This became the background of
the quote live version of Turtle Blues.

Speaker 1 (01:41:10):
Bobby Newarth, a Dylan associated right mid sixties.

Speaker 2 (01:41:14):
Eat the document right yeah, I think I don't know.
Oh you just SI Bobby Neworth.

Speaker 1 (01:41:20):
Wow, I do know. If he's in hell, you would
probably know better than name.

Speaker 2 (01:41:24):
I don't have nothing to say about him. Three of
the seven tracks on Cheap Thrills were covered that, in
bassist Peter Abby's words, been Big Brother Eyed Jordan might
charitably refer to them as made worse.

Speaker 1 (01:41:36):
They're not a good band. They're fine if you I'm
giving them a pass. I know. I can't blame Shackle
and Charming because I don't.

Speaker 2 (01:41:46):
Here's the thing, man, I only get annoyed when bands
are acting above their station. Aside from the whole father
of psychedelic guitar thing, I don't think Big Brother ever
actually worked.

Speaker 1 (01:41:56):
Jana should be feel lucky to have sang.

Speaker 2 (01:41:58):
With using words in his mouth. What he said was
we were doing her a favor, which is ostensibly true
for an established four piece band with a house residency
auditioning an unknown folk singer from Texas. Fun anyway, Fine,

(01:42:20):
that's all fine, anyway. Among their covers were the previous
mentioned of Summertime, minor key reimagining of Big Mama, Thornton's
ball and Chain stretched out to psychedelic lengths, which means
long after anyone should be paying attention. Chief among these, though,
is Piece of My Heart, the two that would become
the band's first and only top twenty hit. The song

(01:42:42):
had been written by producer and Bang exclamation Point Records
founder Burt Burns and his collaborator Jerry Ragovoy. Burt Burns,
another person who is in record industry, Hell initially passed
it along to Van Morrison, who was then in his
famously abusive Bang exclamation Point Records contract then and declined
one of the stupider.

Speaker 1 (01:43:01):
Things that he did.

Speaker 2 (01:43:02):
I feel like because this is when he was writing
like Bedbug Blues and like I've got the cooties and
to get out of the contract, right.

Speaker 3 (01:43:10):
Yeah, he burned through his contract because I think it
was he had to produce a certain number of songs,
so instead of making them, the contract didn't say they
had to be good songs, and we wrote songs about
like was someone that was like I want to bagle
or something.

Speaker 1 (01:43:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:43:22):
But so I'm saying, like maybe he should have kept
one of the ones that was a hit for somebody else.

Speaker 3 (01:43:27):
But I mean, I'm sure he probably had a really
terrible royalty deal in that label, and he probably didn't
want to hit that he was going to get like
next to nothing for and gonna make the other person rich.

Speaker 1 (01:43:36):
That's fair. All people should know a thing or two
about spikee Choices, That's true.

Speaker 2 (01:43:42):
I should, and Van Spiite choices. Yeah, I was gonna
say Van got a lot further with that than I
ever did. Anyway. The track went from Van Morrison to
Irba Franklin, Aretha's elder sister, who had all but retired
from music after a string of unsuccessful singles earlier in
the decade. By nineteen sixty seven, she was working as
an administrator for IBM when Burt Burns coast her back

(01:44:05):
with this new composition.

Speaker 1 (01:44:06):
What if she was working for the guy who jilted
Janis who worked at US?

Speaker 2 (01:44:10):
I was going to say, what if she was catfishing Janis?

Speaker 1 (01:44:14):
Anyway?

Speaker 2 (01:44:17):
The piece was originally something of a calypso feel, but
it was given a sort of big, strident soul treatment
that sent it to number sixty two in the Billboard Charts.
Nice number four hundred and twenty of the Billboard Charts.
Full length album was planned for Franklin, but Burns's fatal
heart attack on December thirtieth, nineteen sixty seven, the true

(01:44:38):
end of the Summer of Love threw the label into turmoil,
and the follow up never materialized. The members a Big
Brother in the Holding Company. We didn't mention how they
got their name.

Speaker 1 (01:44:47):
It was literally as stupid as you think it was.

Speaker 2 (01:44:50):
It was chet Helm's filled two notebook pages worth of
nonsense phrases and told them they could pick one from
one page and the other. Oh, like literally that seed
in Last Waltz when Richard manuel Is gagged and hammered
talking about like chocolate rishwatch marshmallow overcoat as like sixties

(01:45:15):
cliche ban is, that's literally how they got a big
brother in the Hope Company. Big brother was of course
from nineteen eighty four, and holding Company was a pun
on you Holden as well as you know, there were
all these multinational corporations that had started to develop into
the into the fifties and sixties, and said the idea
of a shell corporation or holding corporation had come into

(01:45:36):
sort of the popular consciousness. So they were tweaking the
language of big business with a drug reference, because that's
what the hippies did man uh, they psychedelic sized it.
Peter Albin later said, we didn't want to imitate Irma, Franklin.
Irma's Peace of My Heart had delicacy and a sense
of mystery that was just beyond us.

Speaker 1 (01:45:57):
See sort of self awareess.

Speaker 2 (01:46:00):
Big Brother's rendition, with Janis's soulful wailing at the four
and all those out of tune backing vocals, overshadowed the
original completely commercially and became what many feel is now
the definitive version of the song. If having this song
taken away from her bothered Franklin, she tried not to
let show inn interviews, she told Blues and Soul in
nineteen seventy three, presumably a magazine not the discrete genres

(01:46:22):
of music. To be honest, I never even recognized the
song when I first heard Janis's version on the car radio. Naturally,
it would have been great to have gotten the exposure,
airplay and sales that she got, But her version is
so different from mine that I really don't resent it
too much. I'm gonna go ahead and say that was
with a hefty tongue in cheek.

Speaker 1 (01:46:40):
That's sad. That makes me sad. It is very sad.

Speaker 2 (01:46:44):
Once again, the dream of the sixties was built on
the backs of black people.

Speaker 3 (01:46:49):
Another legendary recording from the album is Janis's version of Summertime,
precluded by Sam Andrews rendering a Bach prelude in C
minor from the composer's seminal Well temper Lavier, Well, didn't
you like that?

Speaker 1 (01:47:05):
Lavier? Now put a classical quote in it. I don't
care your hatred. This is so funny.

Speaker 2 (01:47:11):
I really wish I would have known this before I
agreed to do this, because it's so much funnier that
you're the bad cop in this episode.

Speaker 1 (01:47:19):
They're not a good band, that they're fine, they're perfectly.

Speaker 2 (01:47:23):
Have you ever heard the Grateful Dead on an off night?
Have you ever heard Jefferson Airplane live? Have you ever
heard any sixties band live?

Speaker 1 (01:47:31):
Ever? They were all bad. Jordan Janis deserved a good one. Yeah, man,
so did everybody.

Speaker 2 (01:47:37):
I just don't understand your singular vitriol in Big Brother,
like these bands were all garbage live, dude.

Speaker 1 (01:47:43):
Jefferson Airplane was okay. That Dead were at least sometimes okay.
But just as would Bill Graham say, they're not the
best band in the world. But they're the best grateful
dead band in the world or something like that. That's fine.
I just love you playing bad cop. It's very wanting
to me.

Speaker 3 (01:48:00):
Yes, I'm not very impressed with the backing track of
Big Brother in the Holy Company's version of Summer Tommy.

Speaker 1 (01:48:06):
You know who else wasn't impressed? Richard Rogers ever heard
of him. I'm not saying that I was as good
as Richard Rogers, but we both think that Big Brother
in the Holy Company suck. Minus Janis. Actually he also
didn't much care for g He didn't like Janne. Richard

(01:48:26):
Rogers of Rogers, and she just does that. She does
that fucking crazy David Lee Roth.

Speaker 2 (01:48:33):
She's overtone singing where she gets that, like you get
the fundamental and then you get an overtone in that
ocke Summer So good it is anyway, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:48:46):
Richard Rogers of Rogers and Hammerstein happened to drop back
Columbia's New York headquarters one day in nineteen sixty eight
to have lunch with company big wig Goddard Lieberson and
discuss funding for his upcoming musical. He was still doing
musicals by nineteen sixty eight.

Speaker 3 (01:49:00):
That must have sucked as the Broadway icon waited, Clive
Davis approached and introduced himself. Over the course of the
brief conversation, Davis invited Richard Rodgers into his office to
hear an advanced tape, a Big Brothers version of Summertime.
Clive Davis thought that the older gentleman would appreciate this
fresh take on the Poorgy invest classic.

Speaker 1 (01:49:20):
Richard Rodgers took a seat in Clive Davis's office and
leaned back in the chair and waited to be enraptured
by musical wonderment. Gim me Rodgers and Hammerstein song I
can reference right now. I heard a melody, He heard
a melody. He's gonna wash that bad sound right out
of his hair.

Speaker 2 (01:49:38):
Klang Klang, Klang went to trolley and sing, zing zing,
went these heartstrings in.

Speaker 1 (01:49:43):
The sound of Oklahoma. Yeah, but father styth in Texas.

Speaker 2 (01:49:47):
I don't like musicals.

Speaker 1 (01:49:49):
Really.

Speaker 2 (01:49:49):
Yeah, we've covered this yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:49:50):
Yeah. He listened without expression.

Speaker 3 (01:49:53):
Clive Davis wrote in his memoir when the song ended,
he didn't say anything, which unnerved me, Fearing that the
Summertime was a little too close to Roger's theatrical wheelhouse
for an unbiased response, Clive decided to try something different.

Speaker 1 (01:50:07):
He said, I've decided to play a piece of my
heart for him.

Speaker 2 (01:50:11):
Now, not my actual heart. I have none and have
never produced anything of artistic value. But I did write
a check for a song called piece of my Heart?
Would you like to hear it? What an idiot? Of course,
fucking Rogers didn't want to hear that. He was just
a wealthy, secret idiot the whole time.

Speaker 1 (01:50:27):
He wasn't wealthy. He wasn't wealthy. He was an orphan.
He's a Brooklyn orphan.

Speaker 2 (01:50:31):
Oh okay, smallest violin in the world he was. By
this point, it is seriously, you get these tapes and
you're like, oh, I think one of the most celebrated
Broadway composers of all time will get a kick out
of this.

Speaker 1 (01:50:44):
Read the fucking room.

Speaker 3 (01:50:46):
I understand him playing Summertime, deciding to play piece of
my Heart not so much.

Speaker 1 (01:50:51):
Clive would later say that was a mistake.

Speaker 3 (01:50:54):
Within ninety seconds, the composer of Oklahoma the Sound of
the Music and the King and I asked him to
turn the tape off.

Speaker 1 (01:51:01):
Clive wrote, he.

Speaker 3 (01:51:02):
Told me that not only did he not understand what
he was hearing, but he could not understand why anyone
would like it. As for Janiss singing, it was impossible
for him to imagine why anyone would think she was talented.
By this point, Richard Rodgers had apparently worked himself into
a frothing lather of len me.

Speaker 1 (01:51:20):
Yes, yes, he's frothing at the mouth. He told Davis.
If this means I have to change my writing, or
that the only way to write abroadway musical is to
write rock songs, then my career is over.

Speaker 3 (01:51:31):
A flustered and quite embarrassed Clive Davis dropped the issue
and accepted that Rogers quote.

Speaker 1 (01:51:37):
Simply couldn't hear the new sounds? Did Richard Rogers die
nineteen seventy nine? Wow? So he was like here he
was sunk here.

Speaker 2 (01:51:45):
Jergio Moroder I was gonna say he was subjected to
quite a lot of the new sounds.

Speaker 1 (01:51:50):
He heard the Bay City rollers. Wow. We're going to
take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more.
Too much information and just a moment on.

Speaker 2 (01:52:13):
Some early printings of The Cheap Thrills cover the words
Harry Krishna spelled like not the way that they spell it,
exclamation point parentheses, d gets are faintly visible beneath Art
Colon R. Crumb in the speech bubble, emanating from a
man wearing a turban. We're We're just not even gonna

(01:52:34):
get into Crumb right now.

Speaker 1 (01:52:35):
Can we not. I don't know much about Crumb other
than he's a countercultural icon with a weird, weird lens
on black culture and women's bodies.

Speaker 4 (01:52:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:52:47):
A version of Happy Birthday was also reportedly elbowed aside
by Columbia Brass, but it was Paul Simon who put
the kaibosh on another.

Speaker 1 (01:52:54):
Arrangement, not Paul Simon, John Simon. That was so funny.

Speaker 2 (01:52:58):
Paul Simon showed up and he was like, Fucky, I'm
going back to playing stickball, but I wanted to say this.
A version of Happy Birthday was also reportedly vetoed by
Columbia Brass, but it was John Simon who put the
kybosh on another arrangement of an old war horse. Guitarist
Sam Andrews tried to sell a producer on a probably
really run through of the Star Spangled banner, but the

(01:53:20):
idea was quickly dismissed, much to his dismay. A year
or so later, Jimmy Hendrix did an instrumental version. Andrews
said in Pearl the obsessions and passions of Janis Joplin,
But how much more revolutionary would Janis is singing of
this song been a year earlier. I'm gonna go ahead
and say not so much. Sam, Probably not so much,

(01:53:41):
all right, I'm coming around on Sam Andrews. While on
the topic of cover art, the initial cover of Cheap
Throws was slated to feature the entire band naked in bed,
a nod to Janice's of the time relationship with her bandmates.
I slept with all of them, she once said, of
a big brother brethren, my family. I've bawled them all.

Speaker 1 (01:54:02):
Zo Wait, I've slen with all of them. They are
like my family.

Speaker 2 (01:54:07):
Nope, just it's dude, Okay, it's on paper. The initial
concept to cover concept depicting the bandmates tucked up in
bed together almost have seemed like a perfect choice, but
when they arrived at Columbia creative director Bob Cato's New
York set, they found an embarrassment to hippie crash pads
on Madison Avenue's idea of domestic pinks and swirling Peter

(01:54:29):
Max Prince frills. Joplin took one look and shrieked, let's
trash it, boys, as they did to the American Blues. No,
I'm kidding, and trash it they did, tearing down the
offending accouterments and replacing all of them with detritus from
around the studio to get that true I know it
smelled crazy in there, hate Ashbury Edge. Then we took

(01:54:49):
off all our clothes, jumped in bed and smiled for
the camera. Sam Andrews said in Pearl, it was a
very merry morning. In the photos taking that day, a
carton of Marlborough's, Joplin's ever present bottle of Southern Comfort,
and a candle supposedly for cooking heroin are all visible
among the nude bodies. It was all a bit too
much for the label executives, who decided to scrap the idea.

(01:55:10):
A cartoon by zap Comics Cultiro R. Crumb, originally destined
for the back of the jacket, was used instead.

Speaker 3 (01:55:18):
The original cover wasn't the only thing that was too
hot for the record company. Columbia also balked at the
band's initial choice of a title Sex Dope and Cheap Thrills,
which I believe.

Speaker 2 (01:55:29):
Was that also the White Panther Parties slogan of the
aforementioned MC five affiliate that I don't know sex dope
in the streets? Was there stupid manifesto that John Sinclair
stupidly went to jail for, or whatever I've been forced
to believe about them?

Speaker 1 (01:55:45):
Was interesting. I thought it was.

Speaker 3 (01:55:47):
Taken from an anti drug propaganda film, Reefer Madness, the
Midnight movie classic, but the phrase had taken on a
special significance For guitarist Sam Andrews. We looked on it
as an anecdote to being overly serious about our music
and what the movement was doing. It was a way
of saying, lighten up, being tongue in cheek about the

(01:56:08):
whole thing. But uh yeah, this was an era when
The Mamas and the Papas couldn't have a toilet seat
on their album cover, and The Stones the same year
in nineteen sixty eight, with also battle with their record
company about having a toilet on the cover of Begas Banquet.
Having sex and dope in a title was not going

(01:56:28):
to fly for Columbia, and the titular phrase was shortened
too simply cheap thrills.

Speaker 1 (01:56:34):
We were both half right.

Speaker 2 (01:56:35):
You were correct about the Big Brother thing being from
reformandnis I was correct that John Sinclair of the White
Panther Party, the MC five affiliate. The manifesto he wrote
was Dope, Guns and in the Streets.

Speaker 1 (01:56:47):
Wow, Johnstonclair.

Speaker 3 (01:56:49):
I think John Lennon wrote a song about him to
try to get him out of prison, because he got like,
oh did it work?

Speaker 1 (01:56:54):
Yeah it did?

Speaker 3 (01:56:55):
Oh, it actually did because he was given something like
twenty years in prison or the line of the songs
they gave him for two So I think they gave
him ten years for two joints.

Speaker 2 (01:57:03):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, No, I got so he's so Lennon's like,
what one for forty?

Speaker 1 (01:57:10):
We gave a piece of chance and ultimately decided.

Speaker 2 (01:57:14):
It was not in the interest of our bottom line.

Speaker 3 (01:57:17):
Two weeks of sessions in New York in March of
nineteen sixty eight resulted in only three completed songs, so
John Simon, the producer, and the band DeCamp to Columbia's
Los Angeles studio in April to finish the album. The
thought of this album being recorded in Los Angeles is
deeply offensive to me.

Speaker 1 (01:57:34):
For some reason. It's so San Francisco by which I
mean ragged. Gross.

Speaker 3 (01:57:41):
Recording continued in Los Angeles for nearly a month, but
work was still far from complete. Complicating matters was the
fact that Simon's perfectionist streak was seriously at odds with
the bands what we'll charitably call laid back style. Fellow
producer Elliott Maser would recall, here's the dude from Princeton
with per pitch telling them that they're playing their guitars

(01:58:02):
out of tune and telling Janie that she's singing out
of tune and making them do a million takes.

Speaker 1 (01:58:07):
Obviously, this did not go over well. Guitarist Sam Andrew added,
John Simon shouldn't have been the producer of this album.
He was a keyboard player.

Speaker 3 (01:58:15):
He made these really nice records and all that, but
he didn't understand guitar stuff at all, and that's what
we were. He just kind of thought we were crazy.
I don't think he thought much of Janie. He just
didn't get it. He didn't get what we were doing.

Speaker 1 (01:58:28):
He would have been more at home with well, like
the band, who were extremely good musicians.

Speaker 3 (01:58:33):
He wanted to be in that band. They're like a
string quartet and they're so good. Everything is in tune
and fits together. We weren't that kind of band. We
were really messy and autitune. Guitar is going all over
the place, Janie screaming and going over the top.

Speaker 1 (01:58:48):
I'm sure he was going, oh my god, how did
I get into this? That's what we thought too. I
think that's a fair characterization of the band. They were
all like kind of weird and wonky and autismal.

Speaker 2 (01:59:00):
Yes and no, because I did think about this quite
a bit. I'm sure you did, he said, with barely
disguised venom.

Speaker 1 (01:59:11):
No, I mean you're right that the band are like that.

Speaker 2 (01:59:13):
They were like country bumpkins to a man who grew
up playing like barroom rock in you know, Ontario, which like, okay,
I know, like ooh, the Ontario folks scene was pretty rough,
but like whatever. They were also very much like not
about playing it on godly high volumes, I mean the
because they did have to hear each other so well

(01:59:35):
and specifically. I remember one of the cool things about
the second record is that guitar solo that Robbie takes
on King Harvest.

Speaker 1 (01:59:44):
They it's like a point of production.

Speaker 2 (01:59:47):
Notes that they turned the fender that that amp literally
as low as possible, like just to get it to
sound above the sound of his epiphone semi hollow, which
is why it's incredible that it always bowled me over
that he was still getting those pinch harmonics, those false
harmonics to sing that crazily with something that is on
the lowest possible gain setting.

Speaker 1 (02:00:09):
But I understand his point.

Speaker 2 (02:00:10):
I mean, and also, like if you read Across the
Great Divide and some of the other band things, like
John Adams was very much a band fanboy.

Speaker 1 (02:00:18):
I mean he literally was like, I wish I had
been in this band, but you're.

Speaker 2 (02:00:23):
Right, you know it's yeah. I mean, I'm sure it
was jarring. It's starring to listen to. I don't know
what if I like in the studio trying to be
like you guys want to do another one. Fine, this
is the thing that our guarfrond coals studio, but where
you just get the guy.

Speaker 1 (02:00:39):
Got you want to see what I want?

Speaker 2 (02:00:43):
I want to move on or anyway. It was probably
a relief to all concerned, but Simon then had to
depart in June to honor his commitment to produce the
band's second album. So now it was Maser's job to
take cheap thrills across the finish line, and it's a
sizeable part of his duty was fending off the anti
Columbia execs who wanted the project app asap. Maser was
still in the midst of quote trying to figure out

(02:01:03):
how to put the second side together, when he got
a phone call from Satan himself, Clive Davis, informing him
that the album, which did not technically exist yet, had
already been certified gold for shipping five hundred thousand advanced units.
That's the last thing I'd ever want to say to
a band trying to finish a record, Maser told Janni's
biographer am Burn. Joplin and Sam Andrews spent a marathon,

(02:01:24):
thirty six hour session with engineers trying to mix the
final record a day and a half with no sleep
and very little to eat. Andrew recalled, but he still
felt the grueling sessions were worth it, adding we felt
like we had something. We thought there was a good
chance it would be well received. Moving on to a
section title I call I can say the N word right.

(02:01:45):
I don't actually have any history of Janis doing that,
but white people in the sixties were quite liberal with
this in a way that I suspect would have gotten
their jaws broken were they not frequently in a position
of power. Fortunately, the seeds of Janet Oh sorry, I'm up,
I gotta go, Jordan, can we get the keyboard pad?
Where the major key?

Speaker 1 (02:02:06):
This is what the part in the Behind the Music
special goes from major to minor? Do I have you right? Yes? Yes, correct.

Speaker 2 (02:02:13):
Unfortunately, the seeds of Joplin's departure from Big Brother were
sown before the band ever set foot in the studio
to record Cheap Thrills.

Speaker 1 (02:02:20):
Oh do you tell the dog story?

Speaker 4 (02:02:22):
No? Oh?

Speaker 1 (02:02:24):
Five Davis killed a dog? No?

Speaker 2 (02:02:27):
No.

Speaker 3 (02:02:27):
They like when they were like kind of on their
way out and the band was splintering, I guess one
of the band members kind of mocked Janis on stage
for like some of her howls and said something like
ladies and gentlemen lassie or something, and Janis took this.
I mean, it's not a nice thing to say anyway,
but Janis took this as him calling her a dog,

(02:02:48):
and it didn't go well. And I think there was
like some kind of on stage fight.

Speaker 1 (02:02:52):
That's pretty bad.

Speaker 2 (02:02:53):
Yeah, Albert Grossman and the rest of The new management
team made their intent clear with press kits in which
the guys and Big Brother were effectively phantoms. Concert billings
suddenly became Janis Joplin, with Big Brother in the holding company,
and Grossman kept turning up the heat behind the band's back.
The first thing Albert told her was to get rid
of Big Brother, says musician and jap. Joplin associated the
aforementioned electric flag wead singer Nick Gravinidi's He came at

(02:03:17):
her with a record deal and said, I can get
you a quarter of a million dollars, but it's strictly
for you. The deal doesn't include Big Brother.

Speaker 1 (02:03:25):
Think it over.

Speaker 2 (02:03:26):
Joplin also faced mounting pressure from outside the band's circles.
Nineteen sixty eight progressed. Once we left warm and cozy
San Francisco, the critics attacked Big Brother because we were
very limited musically. Gets admitted to eccholes. Ultimately, that's what
split up the band. The Los Angeles Free Press insisted
the Joplin was quote two full of soul for the
holding company partners, and Rolling Stone called one of the

(02:03:46):
band's Boston gigs messi and a general musical disgrace. Joplin
herself tried to laugh it off, freely admitting that the
band were lousy musicians and interviews, but proclaiming that they
were like family, you know, family that you sleep with
and hate, in other words, the South cheap shot. But
Janis knew that in order to progress towards this sort
of soul review horn based sound that she wanted to

(02:04:08):
get like at a James and Otis Redding, she had
to go her own way. In mid September, weeks after
the release of Cheap Thrills, Grossman issued a press release
announcing her quote amicable split with Big Brother and the
holding Company. They played their last show together on December first,
nineteen sixty eight, the end of the sixties, in San Francisco.
It was a very sad thing, Man Joplin told Rollingstones

(02:04:30):
David Dalton in nineteen.

Speaker 1 (02:04:31):
Seventy, which you'll note is not the sixties.

Speaker 2 (02:04:33):
I was gonna say in nineteen seventy, the end of
the nineteen sixties. I love those guys more than anybody
else in the whole world.

Speaker 1 (02:04:40):
They know that.

Speaker 2 (02:04:41):
But if I had any serious idea of myself as
a musician, I had to leave. See but she took
your boy with her. Sam Andrew, who went on with
Janis to her second band, The Cosmic Blues Review or
whatever stupid she was called, said she fought the split
for a long time. People were telling that she was
better than the banned very early, but it didn't make

(02:05:02):
any difference. Then it got pretty intense for six months.
Albert was coming on heavy to her. One night at Winterland,
I don't know, a couple guys were sick or something,
but afterwards she said, man, I go out there and try,
and those guys aren't trying.

Speaker 1 (02:05:14):
It was this one night.

Speaker 2 (02:05:15):
It was when I noticed the change. And that was
the year of Soul too, okay, the year that everyone
was into horns and shit. It wasn't hard feelings, it
was pretty natural. We all saw it coming for quite
a while. That is a fucking white guy, that's the
thing to say. It was the year of soul, the

(02:05:36):
year that everyone was into horns and shit, can cracker.
Moving on from Big Brother, Janis enlisted Electric Flag guitarist
Mike Bloomfield and singer Nick Gravinades to help her assemble
the next iteration of her backing band, The Cosmic Blues Band,
spelled with a K because everything was so much stupider
back then. Sam Andrew, who, as I mentioned moments ago,

(02:05:58):
came with her from Big Brother, was blunt about it.
Janis wanted to be like Aretha Franklin or Tina Turner.
She wanted to have a big band with keyboard, organ
and horns in it. So that's what we were going for.
We had some great musical night, but it just wasn't
quite what Janis wanted. It was messy, the personnel was
changing all the time. She was using too many drugs.
I was using too many drugs. After Big Brother, which
was one family unit, it went to the opposite extreme.

(02:06:21):
The sad part about all of this is that people
were not very kind to Janice about the backing band
once it evolved from Big Brother to Cosmic Blues to
the full tip boogie ban. So the people that were
all whispering in her ear being like, you need to
dump Big Brother then immediately panned her. When she did
Rolling Stones, Paul Nelson slammed a set of post Big
Brother shows, describing Joplin as the Judy Garland of rock

(02:06:43):
who quote strangled songs to death. Six weeks later, when
she performed back in San Francisco. After a set of
road date at Bill Graham's Winter Land, her San Francisco
crowd did not call for an encore, which was a
literal first for her in her hometown. Afterwards, in the
dressing room, as John Bower's noted, Janis is pale as
if in shock, saying San Francisco's changed?

Speaker 1 (02:07:04):
Man?

Speaker 2 (02:07:05):
Where are my people? They used to be so wild?
I know, I sang, well, I know I did. One
of her earliest fans is Steam Jazz critic Ralph Jade Gleeson,
advised her in his San Francisco Chronicle column to quote,
scrap this band and go right back to being a
member of Big Brother if they'll have her.

Speaker 1 (02:07:22):
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Speaker 3 (02:07:23):
She does a killer version of maybe that Chantelle's song,
m Well do up song.

Speaker 1 (02:07:30):
That's like, I think my favorite song. She does? You
know that version?

Speaker 2 (02:07:34):
Okay, No, I don't.

Speaker 4 (02:07:35):
Oh.

Speaker 1 (02:07:35):
She does an amazing version of it on Sullivan.

Speaker 3 (02:07:38):
It's really it's like the most raw thing I've ever
seen on Ed Sullivan, Like it doesn't belong there.

Speaker 1 (02:07:44):
It's really really amazing. That's online.

Speaker 4 (02:07:47):
I just.

Speaker 1 (02:08:20):
What's the full version? Later, she looks in pain. As
she's singing it it's really really was well, yeah, that's true.

Speaker 3 (02:08:28):
Janesis heroin habit increased as she processed this new reality,
which obviously is never a good decision, and even less
so was somebody with jenesis pre drugs temperament. In April
nineteen sixty eight, she told writer Nat Hentoff, I never
seemed to be able to control my feelings, to keep
them down. My mother would try to get me to
be like everybody else, and I never would. But before

(02:08:49):
getting into this band, it tore my life apart. When
you feel that much, you have super horrible downs. I
was always victim to myself. Now, though I've made feeling
work for me, maybe it won't last as long as
other singers. But I think I can destroy you now
by worrying about tomorrow. But I think you could destroy
your now by worrying about tomorrow. Wow, that's a that's

(02:09:13):
a sixties phrase.

Speaker 1 (02:09:14):
I was gonna say the sixties.

Speaker 3 (02:09:17):
Yeah, chillingly, she added, If I hold back, I'm no
good now, and I'd rather be good sometimes than holding
back all the time. Like a lot of my generation
and younger, we look back at our parents and see
how they gave up and compromised and wound up with
very little man. If it hadn't been for the music,
I probably would have done myself in. Guitarist James Gurley

(02:09:38):
told Guitar Player magazine in nineteen seventy eight.

Speaker 1 (02:09:41):
Janis was temperamental. I mean, one day she'd be up,
the next day she'd be down. You never knew what
to expect. It was crazy days for everybody that whole period.
It just seemed like everything was happening at once. It
was just all happening so fast it was hard to
keep track of things. At times, she.

Speaker 3 (02:09:58):
Could be great to work with because was very intelligent.
She was really smart, a very smart woman, had a
lot of understanding about things. But also she could just
get really petty and bullshit about something for seemingly no reason.

Speaker 1 (02:10:11):
I guess we all do that.

Speaker 3 (02:10:13):
We were all developing and the band was just breaking out.
Everybody's going crazy with all this. Even Rolling Stone acknowledged
in his own pages the impossible expectations placed on Janis
and It's April nineteenth, nineteen sixty nine issue, the Random
Notes column reported the whole Janis Joplin hype has grown
to outrageous proportions whereby impossible goals have been established for her.

(02:10:35):
No singer could deliver an absolute organ with every phrase huh,
not Billie Holiday, not efp Off, not Aretha, And yet
somehow Janie is supposed to do it.

Speaker 2 (02:10:46):
Just insane to me that these people like they knew,
like they were chronicling what happened to her in real time.

Speaker 1 (02:10:53):
Yeah, and you find well, I mean you look at
the coverage of Amy Winehouse, and I mean I remember
when she died. My main feeling was everything that we
thought was going to happen happened. I didn't think it
actually like would, but of course it did, you know
what I mean, Like, you thought it was so obvious
that you thought somebody would intervene and pull them out

(02:11:14):
of it.

Speaker 2 (02:11:15):
Well, that's the thing, right, I mean, it's always everybody
at some point. And this is what everyone that people
say frequently when they're talking about overdose deaths or these
kinds of tragic deaths, is that everybody goes. I thought
someone else would do it. Yeah, Yeah, The aver mentioned
Rolling Stone reporter Paul Nelson once sagely observed janis one
gets the alarming feeling that Joplin's whole world is precariously

(02:11:36):
balanced on what happens to her musically, that the necessary
degree of honest cynicism needed to survive an all media
assault may be buried too far under the immensely likable
but tremendously under confident naivete. As we mentioned earlier, Janis
Joplin's last public appearance anywhere was in September of nineteen seventy.
She showed up in Port Arthur, Texas, for the tenth

(02:11:57):
annual reunion of her graduating classnineteen sixty Thomas Jefferson High School.
She wore flowing pink and blue feathers in her hair,
purple and white satin velvet, gold embroidery sands painted toenails, rings,
and bracelets. She and her entourage swept into the Good
Hue Hotels drab Petroleum Room, Same Wow, and commandeered the bar.

(02:12:22):
When she asked for vodka, having switched to gin and
vodka from Southern Comfort about a year ago, the bartender
said he had nothing but bourbon and Scotch. God, she said,
somebody go out and get a bottle of vodka.

Speaker 3 (02:12:36):
Well, I'd like to end it on a slightly happier
note if there is a happy note to end the
Janis Joplin episode on I was talking to Janie's younger
sister Laura when they published janiss scrap Book under the
title Days in Summer, and Laura said that putting the
scrap book together was actually really cathartic for her and
her brother. She said, it's nice to see what a

(02:12:57):
good time Janis was having. She had a short life,
but at least she was having a really good time.

Speaker 1 (02:13:04):
And Michael concurred. He told me Janice loved to laugh.
She was the center of the party. She always was.

Speaker 3 (02:13:11):
She laughed loud, and she laughed hard. She was out
to enjoy herself. I'm hearing her laughter right now. She
had a great cackle. And you know, at the start
of the episode, you mentioned the very beginning of the
track Mercedes Benz, which was recorded just days before her death,
and you mentioned the opening when she's calling to the engineer.

(02:13:32):
I always liked the ending of that song concludes with
her saying that's it, and then she gives this great
little cackle, and I think that is the last thing
she ever recorded. So I think that's a nice full
circle moment for this episode right now. It is a
great laugh.

Speaker 2 (02:13:49):
That's it.

Speaker 1 (02:13:52):
Out.

Speaker 2 (02:13:55):
Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry. I let my Clive Davis file
really run away with that one. But poor janis Man
Yeah yeah yeah, little Girl Blue.

Speaker 4 (02:14:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:14:09):
I mean, there's one lesson you can have from this.
And obviously not everybody's in the record industry and sees
this happening to your friends and peers.

Speaker 1 (02:14:16):
But don't assume someone else will take care of it.

Speaker 2 (02:14:21):
Yeah, if you see this kind of thing happening to
any of your loved ones, because very often they don't. Yeah,
I gotta, I gotta think of something the hate again,
Bring me up, Bring me back up.

Speaker 1 (02:14:40):
Don Henley, Don Henley in uh did they cross pass?
They might have? When did you move the when did
you move to California?

Speaker 2 (02:14:49):
Oh god, I don't know. I was thinking about Don McLean. Okay,
that's good. Let me see there are any good Don's.

Speaker 1 (02:14:58):
Don Everley was okay, but they he was also, that
wasn't his name though, that was his title. That's true,
that's true, that's true. Other dons famous Don Pardo.

Speaker 2 (02:15:08):
I like Don Don Pardo, great voice, famous dons in history.
Now this is just giving me mom bosses.

Speaker 1 (02:15:14):
Okay, Al Capone, Don Johnson, A lot of bad dons,
Don Henley, Don Johnson, Don mcclan, Donald Fagan is a
good bad down. You know what I mean. It's true,
but he doesn't go by Don Fagan. That's true.

Speaker 3 (02:15:27):
Uh, Don Lemon, Don Rickolls is a good bad down.
Don No, that's true, is a good bad down. Don Adams,
that's fine, Don Shula.

Speaker 1 (02:15:40):
Don King? Where does Don King fall? Bad?

Speaker 2 (02:15:43):
Don?

Speaker 1 (02:15:43):
Okay? Don Cheatle We like Don Cheedle, We like Don Cheadle. Yeah.
Donald Sutherland, Oh, I like Donald Souther. I just saw
it again? Do you know?

Speaker 2 (02:15:56):
Don Cornelius, our president Jesus Christ. All Right, I'm gonna
go off and eat a bullet. This has been too
much information. Stay tuned for our list.

Speaker 1 (02:16:06):
Of Don's everything to know about. Down Down guys, Name Down,
Any fans named Don get in touch. We want to
hear from you.

Speaker 2 (02:16:16):
Yeah, proved to us that there are good Dons who
aren't members of who probably didn't buy heroin for Clive
Davis at one point in the nineteen seventies. Fine, that'll
hold the little less obs for a while. Get out
of here. Do want me to go live your lives?
Get out of here? Can't you see we Don't want

(02:16:36):
You Go, and I'm Jordan run talg We'll catch you
next time.

Speaker 1 (02:16:47):
Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (02:16:50):
The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan run Talk.

Speaker 1 (02:16:53):
The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June.

Speaker 2 (02:16:56):
The show was researched and written and hosted by Jordan
run Talk and.

Speaker 1 (02:17:00):
With original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.
If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave
us a review. For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the
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Host

Jordan Runtagh

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}"Piece of My Heart" by Janis Joplin (and Big Brother & the Holding Company): Everything You Didn't Know