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

imbecile. I want to say things that interest him, things that make him think well of me. Things that make him laugh. I want to impress him. As a consequence, I’m tongue-tied.
    “So, John,” Albert says, when a silence grows long. “How would you feel about going on the road?”
    He surprises me by saying that he has three groups in need of supervision—the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the Electric Flag, and Big Brother and the Holding Company. Bobby didn’t warn me I’d have to make a choice. Maybe he didn’t know. Albert doesn’t reveal all his cards, even to his intimates.
    I pretend to think it over. Butterfield is from the Chicago blues scene, a long way from the Club 47 in Cambridge. As a white guy playing black music, Butter is a phenomenon.Invited to sit in with Junior Wells at the Blue Flame Lounge, a black club in Chicago where Paul was a regular—kind of a novelty act, like “Watch this white boy play the harp!”—he blew Junior Wells off the stage so thoroughly that Junior put on his hat and coat and left the club. The crowd wouldn’t let Paul go, but they let Junior go without a peep. This is Junior Wells, the guy who
defines
the Chicago style of playing harp. Junior didn’t come back until the next night, invited Paul to sit in again, and
the same thing happened!
Paul blew him away just like the night before. Junior put on his hat and coat and was out the door.
    Paul not only plays blues harp, he can
sing
. He brought the Chicago sound—electrified, contemporary, urban black music—to the white folk fans that have become the core audience for the rock-and-roll explosion. I love Paul’s music, but the Butterfield band plays two-week club dates in places like Detroit where I will die of boredom. The urban blues scene isn’t my first choice for hanging out.
    The Electric Flag is already notorious within Albert’s office for some band members’ propensity for serious substance abuse. No, thank you. I tell Albert that Big Brother impressed me at Monterey, and I’ve always liked San Francisco. Yadda, yadda, yadda.
    If Albert finds either irony or pleasure in the fact that the son ofimmigrant Jewish tailors from Riga, Latvia (his mother), and Odessa (his father) is hiring a Harvard-graduate bluegrass singer who is the son of Alistair Cooke to be a rock-and-roll road manager, he keeps his feelings to himself. (Few Americans are aware that my father is the chief American correspondent for the British newspaper
The Guardian
, or that for more than twenty years he has written and broadcast a weekly radio program,
Letter from America
, for the BBC. At this time, he is somewhat known in the United States as a television “personality,” a term he loathes, because from 1952 until 1961 he hosted
Omnibus
, a ninety-minute variety program of a type never seen before or since, that ran on Sunday afternoons. In November 1967,
Omnibus
is six years in the past and
Masterpiece Theatre
four years in the future.)
    Albert wants me on the West Coast by the first of December. Thanksgiving is just a week away.
    By the next day I’m—well, I’m not really having second thoughts; I want to do this gig, but I’m wondering if I can. Neuwirth reassures me: Hey, man, nothing to it.
    Yeah, well what do I do?
    Simple: get the band to the gig, collect the money, make sure everybody’s happy. Bob has one piece of serious advice: Don’t be a fan, he cautions. Sometimes you’ll have to tell the band what to do. If you’re a fan, they won’t listen to you. Be the road manager. Don’t be the guy who runs to buy them cigarettes. Be the guy who knows all the shit they don’t know.
    Great, but I don’t know all the shit they don’t know.
    Pretend you do. *
    I fill up on Thanksgiving turkey in Cambridge, play a final gig with the Charles River Valley Boys, spend a few days in New York to see my parents, and on November 30 I catch a cab for JFK.
    Just like that, my California visa has fallen into my lap. I don’t tell