Another Little Piece of My Heart (18 page)

Why was I drawn to pseudo-events like this? The answer had less to do with covering things that made good copy than with my fascination for fakes and failures. It was like watching a cripple and feeling good about your flabby legs. There was an Antoine within me—that’s what I believed—and I had to be careful or he would burst out in a song and dance.
Very
careful. A local news show wanted me to review rock concerts. When I pointed out that these concerts often lasted past midnight, while I would have to be on TV at eleven
P.M.
, the producer shrugged and said, “So leave early.” I flashed on a musician getting electrocuted onstage (this would actually happen to several rockers) as I blithely praised his playing on-air. I turned the gig down, another chance to break into the big time rejected because of the agita I felt at moments like that.

My agent accused me of feeling guilty about making real money. I knew he was right—the Oedipal fear of besting my father welled within me. But I also needed to preserve my self, or what was left of it. The connection between writing and my emotions, which had been such a solace in my life, would be lost behind the flattening demands of television. I would end up as a velvet-caped exotic, canceled after a season, no doubt. I would never be the writer I wanted to be. My talent, such as it was, depended on connecting with my passions, and TV was the enemy of real emotions. In those stunted days before the Internet, every entry into the mass media demanded stylization, the thing I dreaded most. It was a betrayal of erotic labor and an argument for clinging to the
Village Voice
, though it paid bubkes. Like many of its writers, I needed the freedom to make my own mistakes in the name of sincerity. My agent was undeterred. He took me to lunch, and, over dessert, he chirped, “Don’t say anything—just think about this.” Then he revealed that he’d heard from a music publishing company. (Libel laws prevent me from naming it here.) I’d be paid $25,000—a very significant sum in 1967—to give a few lectures at their conferences. But that was just the pretext; it was understood that I would favor their artists in my column. In other words, payola! I excused myself, and in the toilet I barfed up the food.

There would be other, nearly as repugnant offers. In 1968, the Hollywood producer Otto Preminger took me to lunch and asked whether I was interested in writing the book for a musical he wanted to bring to Broadway. It would be called
I Protest
, and the opening scene, as he described it with glistening eyes, would feature students marching down the aisle, carrying signs, to the heroic strains of Beethoven. This time I managed to avoid a trip to the toilet, but, needless to say, I never got back to Preminger.

By then I’d stopped returning my agent’s calls. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was caught on a hook, lured by the glitter of a bauble bobbing in the sunlight. I reacted by railing against hype. No hustle escaped my wrath, and when I wasn’t venting I proclaimed a generational uprising, an intifada of the kids. But the more I fulminated, the greater the demand for me. I thought I was protecting myself by refusing big money, but the attention was much harder to resist. Why was I making all these pronouncements about youth culture, swinging wildly? I asked myself that question many times, until I recalled an incident from when I was maybe seven. A child had run away, and I said I’d seen
him. Suddenly I was surrounded by police and by the anguished mother pleading for details. I can still see her face as it became clear that I’d lied. I longed for the spotlight. Everything threatening dissolved in its magic beams; I was special after all. I remember how thrilling it was to be famous in the housing project, even for a moment—and how ashamed I was to need that.

A ball of terrified fury, sustained by charcoal pills for chronic indigestion, I chose my friends from outside the pop milieu, and only when stoned with them could I briefly relax. Sex? I had more than I deserved, considering how jittery I was. But the idea that I might have an affair, or even a close friendship, with a rock star seemed more fanciful than even the offers my agent had dangled before me. Just as I was sinking into the routine of interviewing people who were afraid of being unmasked by me; just as I was resigned to feeling riven; just as I felt my style grow heavy with alliterations that passed for passion; just then I got a call from the bass player of Big Brother and the Holding Company. He hadn’t forgotten the time we’d spent together at that house in Daly City. The band was about to embark on its first tour of the Northeast. Would I like to join them in Philadelphia? In the words of my favorite literary character, Molly Bloom:
Yes I said yes I will Yes
.

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

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

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

As a nice Jewish boy I’d never seen anyone drink like that, and it was hardly the drug of choice for a hippie. But liquor is famous for its disinhibiting effect on shy people, and, as countless alcoholic writers will attest, it can loosen up the associative parts of the imagination, as can other drugs with hazardous side effects. Some musicians are lucky enough to get there from the act of performing itself, but many do their best work in an altered state. I cringe when media wags gloat over a performer’s overdose. They demand greatness, but they won’t accept what it takes to achieve it. In the sixties this puritanical reflex was suspended; unfortunately, it was replaced by a reluctance to intervene no matter how self-destructive the behavior. In that respect Janis was a typical victim of the decade’s worst sin: indifference to consequences. But as long as she remained attached to her band, she was safe.

No one makes great art out of contentment with the world, and Janis had the requisite rough youth in Texas. She was the town slut, a victim of the nasty collusion between sex and contempt for women who crave it. No need to go into detail about her biography; it’s pretty well-known—her time in Austin, where she was part of the boho music scene that seeded the San Francisco sound; her journey west with Chet Helms, who would run one of the city’s two major music venues, the Avalon Ballroom; her appearance at the legendary Trips Festival. “We
were just interested in being beatniks then,” she told me. “Now we’ve got responsibilities, and I guess you could say … ambitions.”

Too much attention is paid to the flash of great sixties rockers and their larger-than-life lives; not enough to their craft. If you listen beyond her famous shrieking you’ll realize that every note Janis sang was shaped. She was a serious student of blues, especially the music of Bessie Smith, the great stylist of the 1930s. Janis’s greatest achievement—and it influenced the entire range of rock vocalizing back then—was to blend Bessie Smith’s expressiveness with the drive of Otis Redding. “See, Bessie, she sang big open notes in very simple phrasing,” Janis explained to me. “But you can’t fall back on that in front of a rock band. I mean, you can’t sing loose and easy with a big throbbing amplifier and drums behind you. The beat pushes you on. So I started singing rhythmically, and now I’m learning from Otis how to push a song instead of just sliding over it.”

Sexual politics didn’t come up in our conversations, but her articulation of desire and frustration was certainly something a proto-feminist could identify with. And she had more than booze in common with Jim Morrison. Both were “erotic politicians,” to use his phrase. They were dedicated to the idea of music as an intoxicant of liberation. I would call that the best instinct of the sixties—the Whitmanesque urge to sing the body electric. But Morrison’s allure depended on a certain distance. I never felt close to him, not when I heard him sing or when I met him. With Janis I had the feeling that I knew her issues intimately.

There was an edge of doubt to her performance of herself, and I understood it well. That was how I’d felt as a kid and how I felt years later as a media sensation. It was easy to see the writhing and swaying of her body as a woman in the throes of orgasm, but orgasm contains so many emotions that complicate the question of ecstasy. The sexual spectacle she made of herself was clearly the effect she intended, but it wasn’t the only thing she wanted. Validation, degradation, possibly cessation—all of that was in her voice. Thinking of her now, I can’t help wishing that she’d grown up in a place like Queens, where she would have had friends who didn’t regard her as a tramp just because of her sexual appetite. If she’d been part of a scene with kids who had creative compulsions like hers (kids like, well, me) she might have had the strength to resist her fate. What I’m trying to say is that I wish I could have saved her. She is one of the ghosts that haunt my memory of the sixties, the ones I cared for who died before their time.

Janis was the most self-conscious performer I’d ever met, about her shape, her breasts, and especially her hair. She made Morrison’s fragility seem puny and my own body issues trifling. I didn’t know about her bisexuality (an attribute of Bessie Smith as well), and I didn’t mention mine, though it was surely part of the reason why we clicked. As for heroin, I never saw any telltale signs in her. But I was acutely aware of how hard she found it to connect with men. Being an emblem of unleashed female emotion hardly helped with the dudes who made up her core audience. “I never end up with a guy on these tours,” she groused. “I mean, you saw me dancing out there between sets. All these guys were standing around, panting in the corner. Finally I had to say to one of them, ‘Well, do you wanna dance or not?’ and he comes on waving his arms around like a fucking bat. Now, why do things like that always happen?” She sighed. “They’re all afraid of me. Shit.”

Just as she was bemoaning her fate, a man in a fur suit sauntered into the dressing room. His name was Gary the Gorilla, and he’d been hired by the club to stoke the crowd. Janis offered him her bottle, and he pulled off his ape head to chug from it. Then he unzipped his belly and passed his paws around. Suddenly she leapt into his lap, and she sat there buzzed and contented until it was time to go on. I watched her empty her guts into song after song, howling need and frustration, stomping out the beat and the pain. “Ball and Chain” was her signature number, and she regarded it as the hardest of her songs. “I have to really get inside my head, every time I do it,” she said. “Because it’s about feeling things. There’s this big hole in the song that’s mine, and I have to fill it. So I do. And it really tires me out. But it’s so groovy when you know that the audience really wants you. They yell back at you, call your name, and like that.”

When the set was over and the band bounded into the dressing room, sweaty with the sizzle of playing, I watched Janis throw herself at Gary the Gorilla, who was waiting patiently. I have a vivid memory of her nuzzling his furry chest, burying herself in his faux-hairy folds, and opening another bottle.

I saw Janis several times after that tour. Once I accompanied her to a party celebrating her new contract with Columbia Records, which came with an enormous advance. Her annual income would soon top $1 million in today’s dollars, and in New York nothing draws the glitterati like new money. Amid the glad hands, Janis gazed at herself uneasily
in a mirror. She shook out her hair only to confront an elegant woman out of
Harper’s Bazaar
, who covered up her drink and hissed, “Do you mind?” To which Janis replied, “Fuck off, baby.” It was a show of bravado, but later I caught her pouting into that mirror. “Face it,” she muttered. “You’ve got ratty hair.” At that point, of course, her hair had become a style millions of young women imitated, but to her it was still what it had been in Texas, a symbol of her otherness.

We never had a date or anything like that, but I did take her to the Jewish dairy restaurant Ratner’s. It was right near two major downtown rock venues, the Fillmore East and the Anderson, and after a concert the place was full of hippies stoned on music and whatever they could score. Ancient waiters delivered blintzes and tea with hands shaking so badly that most of the liquid was in the dish under the cup. I expected a mob scene when we walked in, but everyone was zombie-faced. She loved the ambience, and we stayed for hours. I remember strolling with her at dawn, the sky glowing dark blue over damp and empty streets. It was the kind of early morning that makes New York look like a movie set. We kissed lightly. It was more than a buddy peck and less than an invitation. I was way too shy to ask what was on her mind. But I left with a feeling more gripping than even sexual arousal. I realized how deeply I cared for her.