On the Road with Janis Joplin by John Byrne Cooke

couple of the back-room crew to contribute improvisations for some very off-the-wall radio spots Penny uses to promote the film’s New York debut.
    Until the small hours of the morning, we’re often at Max’s Kansas City, a restaurant and bar on Park Avenue South that was formerly renowned, possibly apocryphally, for feeding goldfish to a tankful of piranhas at cocktail hour.
    Max’s is a steak house. The sign out front announces “Steak, lobster, chick peas.” The place is long and narrow, the art on the walls is eclectic, and the banquettes, the tablecloths, the napkins—everything but the white walls—are red. A round table in the back room is the late-night rendezvous for Andy Warhol and his crew from the Factory. In the back room, even the lighting is red. After a few drinks, it’s like being in a photographic darkroom with the safelight on.
    Max’s became a favorite hangout for artists when the owner, Mickey Ruskin, began accepting paintings in payment for bar bills. Soon the visual artists were joined by musicians and actors.
    The balance of my life has shifted. After almost ten years of living in Cambridge and visiting New York, I’m spending most of my time in New York and making the run up to Cambridge to play with the CRVB. Neuwirth and I talk about sharing an apartment. We look at pads on the Upper West Side—not yet trendy—where rents are cheap. Three hundred bucks a month for five or six rooms with an eye-of-the-needle glimpse of the Hudson River. Whew. Steep. A full-time job at Leacock Pennebaker fails to materialize and I find it hard to settle into any kind of routine. I’ve been through the looking glass. I’ve glimpsed a new dimension. I’m not just hoping for a chance to make another trip to California. I want to live there.
    As summer gives way to fall and the first gusts of winter probe the rectilinear ravines of New York City, the idea of becoming a road manager is the furthest thing from my mind—until a day when Neuwirth takes me into a cutting room at the Leacock Pennebaker offices on West 45th Street and informs me, in the kind of undertones usually reserved for conveying nuclear launch codes, that Albert wants to have dinner with me.
    I don’t have to ask “Albert who?” A couple of months after hitchhiking aboard Bob Dylan’s springtime road trip, I was splashing in Albert Grossman’s swimming pool in Bearsville, New York, just up the road from Woodstock. The house is the first Albert has ever owned, the first house he has lived in. Growing up in Chicago, he always lived in apartments, and he took to the role of country squire as if to the manor born. (A fondness for the bear image may be why Albert bought property in Bearsville instead of Woodstock. He briefly owned a club in Chicago called the Bear, where he often appeared in a huge fur coat, like the raccoon coats from the ’20s, taking on the physical presence of a bear. He will later establish the Bear Café and Bearsville Sound Studios in his adopted hometown.)
    The summer of ’64 was Albert and his new wife Sally’s first summer in the house, and they hosted a revolving-door parade of musicians and friends as lord and lady of the sylvan estate. Dylan was in residence, considering finding a house of his own somewhere nearby, but in no hurry. For a time, when Albert was away on business, Dick and Mimi Fariña house-sat for the Grossmans. Calls went out to Cambridge. Hey, come on over! Paul Rothchild and Neuwirth and I joined Dick and Mimi and Bob and Sara-who-would-eventually-become-Bob’s-wife for the summer solstice.
    Albert recognizes Cambridge as an important way station on the folk circuit, and he has visited several times. On one occasion he made use of the guest room in the Reservoir Street pad that I shared with Fritz Richmond. A few days after Albert’s departure, we received as a thank-you gift the Elektra album
Music of Bulgaria
, whosestunning harmonies graced our late-night listening for a long time to