CHAPTER ONE
If You're Going to
San Francisco
November 30, 1967
THE 707'S WHEELS touch down at San Francisco International Airport and with few regrets I leave behind the East, where my mother's family has lived since they arrived on the New England coast aboard a vessel that followed in the wake of the Mayflower. There they landed and there, for the most part, they stayed, close by the Atlantic shore. In five hours I've covered what it took the emigrants of the nineteenth century's great westward migration months of peril to travel. Like those early travelers, I'm casting off the old and hoping to find in California the magic pathway to the rest of my life.
Go west, young man.
In my case, it is Albert Grossman, not Horace Greeley, who points the way.
The southwest wind is roiling the shallow waters off the airport runway, turning them muddy emerald. It has been a cold fall in the East. By comparison, the California air feels springlike as I cross the tarmac to the terminal. The hills that surround the Bay are
greened by the rains that return to the coast with autumn. Autumn in the East forces the flora into retreat and quiescence. To an easterner, green hills in November signal rebirth ahead of its time, a resurrection that fills me with hope. The breeze carries the scent of growing things. Mixed with the jet fumes, I can smell salt water, and something more exotic—patchouli oil, maybe, or pot.
Peter Albin greets me at the gate. We have talked on the phone in recent days, to discuss logistics ("My flight gets in at ..." "I'll pick up and we'll ..."). I know Peter by sight because I saw him, back in June, at the Monterey International Pop Festival, standing his ground at stage right as a member of Big Bother and the Holding Company, the band that knocked the audience back on its collective heel. Peter's feet don't move much when he plays the electric bass. His body sways to the beat, sometimes curling over the instrument to wring from it insistent riffs that propel the songs forward, sometimes standing bolt upright, his back arched, shaking the bass so the notes fly from the stage with that much more force.
In the airport, face-to-face, Peter is friendly, open, welcoming. He moves with angular looseness and has a lopsided smile. At twenty-three, he's the youngest in the band. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I have lived for the past nine years, Peter's shoulder-length hair would earn him derisive shouts of "Hahvahd fairy!" from the townies, their ducktails rigid with Brylcreem. In SFO, he attracts surreptitious glances from the servicemen emplaning for Vietnam and the businessmen in their suits. It would surprise them to know that Peter is a junior executive, dressed for rock and roll. He is the member of Big Brother who signs the contracts, the one who comes to pick up the guy dispatched from New York by Albert Grossman—creator of Peter, Paul and Mary, manager of Bob Dylan and a host of lesser folk luminaries—to oversee the band on the road. As the music of the counterculture has evolved from folk to folk-rock—the Mamas & the Papas, Simon & Garfunkel, Buffalo Springfield—to full-bore rock and roll, Albert has kept pace.
When Peter's car crests the rise where Highway 101 leaves South San Francisco behind and comes in view of the city proper, I see the white houses dancing up and down the hills and I feel at home. San Francisco is my favorite American city. I have been here often over the years, most recently in June, when I landed at SFO as part of D. A. Pennebaker's film crew, on my way to Monterey for the Pop Festival, fired then, as now, with the sense of moving toward the promise of things to come, ready to do my part to make the promise come true.
...
For more excerpts, see http://www.esquire.com/blogs/culture/janis-joplin-on-the-road-excerpt?src=soc_fcbks
And here she is with Big Brother, performing (did I say "performing"? more like freaking killing!) "Ball and Chain" at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 (video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bld_-7gzJ-o
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