Kozmic Blues

by Dan Wakefield

GOING DOWN WITH JANIS
by Peggy Caserta and Dan Knapp
Lyle Stuart, $7.95

BURIED ALIVE
by Myra Friedman
Morrow, $7.95

I have only two regrets about my public life as a writer and a citizen (as opposed to regrets about my private life, which number something like the sands of the Nile); they are (1) that I didn’t work for Robert Kennedy’s campaign for President in the spring of 1968, and (2) that I postponed calling up Janis Joplin to ask if I could meet and do a story about her for so long that by the time I got around to it she was dead.

These regrets are not on the scale of any Mailer-like illusions that I could have saved either one of them; that I could have helped Bobby Kennedy get elected or shielded him from the bullets of his demented little murderer, any more than that I could have forestalled Janis Joplin’s headlong, heartbrokenand-breaking plunge into the only escape she knew from an almost relentless personal pain. The regrets are selfish, because I missed what to me would have been the honor of having in some way of word or deed stood by these two rare and almost opposite public personalities whose work in different ways enriched my own life as well as the lives of millions of others.

I have used the word honor, and I anticipate already those readers who will feel it is perhaps an appropriate term to use in one’s appreciation of a public servant, but surely not of a popular singer, especially one who so wildly flouted every code of her society’s ethics, and morals and manners. Nevertheless, I honor those people who live, if only briefly, with a deep personal anguish and produce from it some kind of art that, if only temporarily, eases the pain of others. I can explain at least part of my feeling by quoting from an essay by Joan Didion in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, where in describing a zealous young leader of a tiny Marxist splinter group she comments, “I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.”

Indeed any notion of honor will be especially hard to reconcile with one of the two new books about the life of Janis Joplin that have been published this summer. This book can best be described by the words emblazoned on the jacket: “A RAW AND SCATHING PORTRAIT OF JANIS JOPLIN BY HER FEMALE LOVER . . .

Going Down With Janis, by Peggy Caserta as told to Dari Knapp.” Its tone is True Romance, with pulpish purple passages such as “the two of us were in love with, and occasionally balling, the same silver-tongue devil of a man.” It is a dirty book not because of sexual details or frankness but because of its cheap exploitation of the intimate relationship of a former lover and alleged “friend,” who keeps bragging about her own erotic talents in the manner of what might be appropriately called a bisexual chauvinist.

When I first received galleys of another book about Janis Joplin, titled Buried Alive and labeled a biography, I confess I was not too optimistic, especially since the author had worked in public relations for Albert Grossman, Janis’ manager, and was a former publicity writer for Columbia Records. Books about pop music stars by former pop music publicity people are not likely to be literary landmarks, and I assumed this might well be another though different exploitation bit, a puff job by a star-struck and ambitious PR person who probably wrote in press-release prose.

But when I began the first chapter concerning the background of Janis Joplin’s hometown of Port Arthur, Texas, I immediately had the feeling that this was a book that had been seriously and sensitively researched by someone who had an eye for social nuance, an ear for speech, and a sure command of a clear, hard prose that drove forward with purpose. And, later on, when the author told of her accidental entry into the world of pop music and the employ of Albert Grossman, I knew that she was peculiarly suited to write the first serious biography of Janis Joplin.

It seems clear that Myra Friedman was in the pop music world but not of it. Growing up in St. Louis, she studied classical piano, and later majored in music at Northwestern University. Even though she had worked for Decca and Columbia record companies, she had never been part of the rock scene. The Grossman office was the Vatican of the rock hierarchy, handling such a hallowed name as Bob Dylan, and Miss Friedman reports that suddenly “being in the center of the rock world had me far adrift from the universe I knew.”

She went to work there in January of 1968, just a few weeks before one of Grossman’s new clients, Janis Joplin, came for her first New York performance. Miss Friedman came to know this new star professionally and as a friend, and writes of her:

Janis lit my life in innumerable ways for almost three years, as she dominated it too. If the zany creature that the public saw, all that campy, trivial bluster, was real enough in its way, it was far from the substance of her deeper glow. The hysteria, the extravagance, and the foolish noise were a barren fuss embraced by barren hearts, and it was a lost child who would kick up such rubbish to gain entrance into rooms so empty.

As Miss Friedman guides us through the grossness and glitter of the cult world of rock, she makes us aware of how empty are its rooms; we see it through Miss Friedman’s cold eye in what so often is its deadly and arch pretentiousness, its slickness and greed. She says of the members of Janis’ entourage:

They were “cool,” thus uninvolved; “collective,” thus impersonal; “hip,” thus uncommunicative; “free,” thus irresponsible; and much of the time “stoned,” thus usually incapable of making sense. Naturally there were individual differences, but that was the tone of it all, an insignia of manners and morals as salient as a Legionnaire’s cap, with “keep on rockin’" the emptiest of prayers, and the style, emotional atrophy.

That is the essence of the hip style of The Sixties that reached its ultimate form in the rock scene. Janis Joplin was a part of it, indeed a high priestess of it, but she did not create it, nor was she created by it.

Her own rebellion and its resulting artistry and tragedy seem to me to belong to a much older, deeper, classical tradition, that of the artist as outcast, rejecting and rejected by established society, torn between the desire to be part of it and the inability to conform to it. That tradition, in America, has its roots in adolescence, in the crucial, and for so many, the crucible-like experience of high school.

Janis grew up and went to high school in the small oil refinery town of Port Arthur, Texas, and reached her teens in 1956, long before the voice of the Beatles had been heard. She was exceptionally bright and talented; she read and painted and expressed strange ideas, such as that maybe racial integration was all right. She was a kind of Tomboy Zelda, defying the mores of the town by hanging out with a group of four boys into which she insinuated herself, a group that aroused suspicion by reading books unassigned in the classroom, listening to jazz, going out on hot summer nights drinking beer and singing and, in sweet daring defiance of the flat land they found themselves in, “they climbed the water towers.”

It seems part of the legend of which I am speaking, of which Janis was a part, that the beautiful artist springs from the ugly duckling, the butterfly from the worm, if it indeed can survive the wormhood, one that came to Janis in the traditional physical adolescent afflictions of both boys and girls: “Her chubbiness bloated to a hefty bigness; she developed a terrible skin condition, far beyond anything that could be termed a teenager’s siege of acne. . . The other students called her “Pig,” and she took to drinking and swearing and wearing outlandish clothes—though before the onslaught of her physical change, she had tried to conform, had joined clubs and activities, and one of the many beautiful and heartbreaking pictures in this book shows her in graduation cap and gown, a grinning girl in the school yearbook. Beside her name are no queenly mentions or popularity crowns, but the maintenance of a B average membership in the Future Teachers of America, the Future Nurses of America—and, God bless her, in The Slide Rule Club.

She had tried to be like the others, but it didn’t work. Once her mother was called to school and was “asked why she couldn’t get Janis to be ‘average.’ ”

Later, Janis’ father tells Miss Friedman of some of the letters he exchanged with his daughter when she had fled far from Port Arthur and was heavily into methedrine, though her parents knew only that she was in trouble. Mr. Joplin said, “She just felt nothing was good and she wanted to know ‘Is this all there’s gonna be?’ And I explained ‘Yes, that’s all and you’ve got to find out how to live with it. This is life, and you’ve got it.’ ”

I shuddered as I read those lines, and recalled the feeling James Agee described in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men when he was driving on a sweltering summer Sunday afternoon through the dusty, deserted towns of Alabama, past the white frame houses with the shades drawn and the porches “empty beyond any idea of emptiness.” In a way it seemed to him like the end of the world but then it struck him as worse than that: “For this was not the end of the world, it was contemporary . . . and this dread was imposed by Sunday, only for a space, and this was what life was like, the only world we have.”

I think that somewhere in here is a definition of what is meant by “average,” in the way Jams’ teachers wanted her to be. Perhaps the acceptance that “this is what life is like,” that “this is what there is,” is the mark of the average or normal person, and that those who find that condition unbearable, who rage against “the way it is,” are those who are not and can never be “average” or “normal”; they are no better than other people but indeed are different, and are the ones who may turn out to be murderers or artists. If such people have only the rage inside them, they become the Mansons and Oswalds; if they have a talent or genius to forge that rage into art, they are the James Agees and Janis Joplins.

And at some point in Janis Joplin’s anguished adolescence, as she walked around inside her bloated body and scarred face, she called up a friend and said, “Hey! Guess what! I think I can sing!”

The singing must have helped, the release and the attention, but it didn’t spare her from such continued lethal assaults as occurred when, attending the University of Texas at Austin, the Greek-led set of collegiate socialites fraternally voted her “The Ugliest Man on Campus.”

You wonder that her musical style was often a scream?

Indeed, no amount of applause and adulation could convince her that she was not the “pig” her peers had branded her, and at the height of her fame as a singer and even a sex symbol, when young men rushed to the stage to touch her, she called Myra Friedman and said, “If I just wasn’t so ugly . . . Well I am ugly, I am!” And in spite of all her frantic couplings with men and with women, with pretty boys and girls and celebrities and stars, she was to complain drunkenly to Tuesday Weld, “I’m a big star, and I can’t even get laid!” When after a triumphant concert a friend tried to assure her that everyone loved her, she said, “Doesn’t it occur to you that I just don’t believe that?”

The scars of Port Arthur and Austin, of high school and college, and her responses to them, were nothing peculiar to The Sixties. In some essential way, her story was not so much a story out of EasyRider as it was of Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield, and Mick in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Where it enters the mythology of The Sixties is in the legend that finally such lost and running people, such outcasts and aliens of straight society, suddenly had some place to go, some place where even they could belong, observe their own rituals and customs, be loved by kindred spirits.

It was heard in the land that such people could even gather and be different together, be happy and whole, in a magic city called San Francisco, which had within it a haven called Haight-Ashbury which some of its starry-eyed—and soon stony-eyed—inhabitants regarded as being “just like a Christian community in Rome.”

It was a bright new dream, a soothing dream, and, as Miss Friedman describes it:

The believers in this one thought they could love everybody and that the mechanical designs of modern society need not extend to all. They would purge themselves of envy. They would cleanse their hearts of greed. The separate boundaries of the self they would erase, so that they would lovingly dissolve into the ego-less mass. . . . They would turn to the past but revel in the present: neon, day-glo, electricity, chemicals—all would bring the Kingdom of God.

After running from Port Arthur and Austin, running across the country, to Venice, California, and New York City and San Francisco, and even back again to Austin and to Port Arthur, where she made one last desperate try to conform, and told her parents she was going to marry and made a Lone Star quilt while her mother sewed a wedding dress, only to have the prospective groom change his mind; after all that running and singing and drinking and doping, she returned once again to San Francisco, in 1966, when, as Miss Friedman explains, there was a current there that “produced some of the most marvelously energetic, celebratory popular music the world has ever known. It also brought about a verbal soddenness by which measure the beat generation was positively scholastic, and it brought the abuse of some very destructive drugs.”

In her first stay in San Francisco in 1962, Janis had gotten heavily into dope, and Miss Friedman believes this happened because “dope would bring her belonging, and that above all, was what she was after, always.”

But she also, more deeply, was always after any way she could find to ease her own personal pain, and this is reflected in the kind of dope she most favored. She didn’t much care for grass, and was terrified of the psychedelic drugs. Yet those were the core drugs of the hip mystique, the drugs that would have brought the most sense of belonging.

She took acid once of her own free will, and after that when she swilled down some wine and was told it had LSD in it she screamed and rushed to the bathroom and made herself vomit. She was also vehement in her anger toward the hippie trick of putting acid in the food or drink of unsuspecting people, and raged at a groupie who thought this was “groovy,” saying, “Hey, if somebody wants to screw up their own head, maybe that’s their business, but I’d like to know what the difference is between people who fuck with other peoples’ brains, and cops who get called ‘fascist pigs’ when they go around smashing skulls. Now you wanna tell me the difference?”

The drugs most important and eventually deadly to her were alcohol and heroin, drugs that do not “expand” the brain but numb it, do not “raise” consciousness but help blot it out. For a while she kicked heroin but she couldn’t get off alcohol. And finally, alone in a room in the Landmark Motel in Los Angeles, she took an overdose of heroin, whether by design or accident will never be known, but certainly the design of her life was leading toward it one way or other, one time or other.

It is part of her legend, to some extent created by herself, that she didn’t worry about her singing, just stood up and screamed and “felt” the music; but in spite of the drugs and the booze and the punishing life she led, she worried and cared and worked at her music. Elliot Mazur, who did editing and sound mixing for Janis’ album Cheap Thrills, told Miss Friedman: “She was incredibly on top of it. For two weeks, only Janis, myself, and the engineer would stay, from two in the afternoon until seven in the morning. Anything about her just having a good time and not working at it is just bullshit! I never knew an artist that worked harder.”

In her later recordings that work and artistry became even more evident, and those who accuse her of only being able to “scream” have never listened to her plaintive rendition of “Little Girl Blue” on the Kozmic Blues album, or the power and irony of the song she wrote herself on the Pearl album, “Lord Won’t You Buy Me a Mercedes Benz.”

The music is what she has left us, and I happen to believe it will last a long time, and it is also my opinion that the music sustained rather than destroyed her. When, near the end, a friend pleaded with her to stop, if stardom was causing such chaos, she said of her singing, “It’s the only thing I have.” And, as brutal as the world of rock may be, it does not necessarily lead to its stars’ demise. At the time of this writing, the Beatles are alive and well and wealthy, as are Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones, and in fact all of them except Janis, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison. I would say the mortality rate among poets is as high, and in either case I have never believed in “cultural” explanations of self-destruction, such as Kenneth Rexroth’s accusation on the death of Dylan Thomas: “You killed him in your Brooks Brothers suits.”

Janis Joplin’s anger and depression and hurt and the beauty she wrenched from them were fitted out in the trappings of her time and place, the feathers and fringe and bright colors, booze and speed and smack and promiscuous mating so recklessly and desperately used to try to drown the loneliness and get through the day, but beneath all of that was an older, deeper story, the human predicament that some can never accept, that a few make music of and so make it easier for others to bear, the “Kozmic Blues” brought up to date, articulated for their own particular time. Like all the genuine ones who have sung the story for their own generation, Janis Joplin did not go gentle into that good night.