All She Needs is Love

After she had become famous and was living atop a hill in San Francisco, the picture was pinned to the wall, along with a sooty American flag, a Dylan for President banner and a poster of archhippie James Gurley in American Indian dress. It shows her as a shiny-cheeked girl in Mary Jane shoes and white bobby socks, hair cropped short. She stands before a white frame house, her eyes squinching up in telltale fashion, as she proudly holds up a Sunday-school graduation certificate from the First Christian Church of Port Arthur, Texas.

A generation or two have come and gone since the picture, and Janis Joplin, one of the world's leading pop singers, is now 27. Her albums Cheap Thrills and Kozmic Blues are both gold records, having sold over $1,000,000 worth each. She was voted top female vocalist in the 1970 Playboy Jazz & Pop Poll. Her style has been called blue-eyed soul and sometimes rock-blues, and those are fine definitions, though hardly complete. Hear her once and you can't quite forget her--even if you try.

I heard her for the first time several years ago, when she was appearing at a ratty, three-quarters-filled ex-movie-house in New York (not the Fillmore East) with Big Brother and the Holding Company. Her performance then was memorable, but what impressed me most was the style of the person--a white, caramel-haired girl with a strong Texas twang, dressed in seam-splitting red-velvet slacks, swigging booze onstage like a stevedore and saying the first breathy little thing that popped into her head. She has since outgrown Big Brother. She has traveled to Europe, appearing before record crowds in London, Paris and Stockholm, and this past December caused New York's Madison Square Garden nearly to cave in under the weight of all the frenzy and jumping around going on.

A year ago last spring, she was on an important tour--important and pivotal because she had left the Big Brother group not long before and was in the process of forming her own background group. There were those who predicted--even hoped, perhaps--that she would lose the old magic away from Big Brother. She is still making changes in her background group--a new drummer or horn player seems to come and go every day--but by now, she has proved that it makes little difference what hirsute collection is gyrating behind her, at least as far as her popularity goes.

The night she played before a college-aged audience in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was typical of that spring tour. (The college audience has become crucial to many performers, one they must reach and capture--witness Bob Dylan--if they are going to climb above the hungry many in show business.) Since I had first seen Janis, I had often wondered if she comported herself offstage as she did on. After all, comedians can be dour away from the footlights; handsome screen lovers can be as queer as three-dollar bills. I wonder no longer about Janis, for I was with her night and day on that tour. Here is how it went at Ann Arbor:

In the communal dressing room for her and her group--a gymnasium locker room with a faint jockstrap aroma left in the air--she can't sit still. For a moment, she bends her torso and flings her arms out in a unique kind of Joplinesque warm-up. As she bends forward in her skintight black-silk slacks, those of us to the rear are treated to an arresting imprint of her panties. (She does not, of course, wear a girdle. At one point, she debated whether or not to forgo underwear entirely, but a vote from her band members said her panty ridges looked better onstage than complete smoothness.) Warm-up completed, she goes for the brown, glittering bottle of B & B that has just been brought in for her private use.

She tries unsuccessfully to pull out the bottle top with her hands, and then sticks it between her back teeth. The cork snaps, half of it still stuck in the bottle, and she ends up having to sink a hole through it with a coat hanger. Then she has her drink, bringing the bottle up and down with both hands, frowning and shaking her head.

"Look, J. J., I want you to do one thing for me tonight," John Cooke says, coming up in a whirlwind. A Harvard graduate, the son of journalist Alistair Cooke, he was Janis Joplin's road manager at the time. He has intense eyes, white, well-cared-for teeth and a deceptively boyish smile. "When you get out there before this audience, please, for once, don't say motherfucker. You've got to realize that words are communication, and some people--"

"Hey, like, man, that whole scene is beyond my comprehension. What kind of uptight bullshit you trying to lay on me? Hey, I ain't buying any of that, man. I don't give a shit who's out there."

"This is the University of Michigan, and we don't say fuck--"

The word hangs in the air like a rifle report as two men in clerical collars stroll in. Both are amiable, part of the university's welcoming committee, asking if there is anything Janis or the band needs. One is a pleasant, graying cleric. The other--quite star-tlingly--has curly, hippie-style hair that balloons out from his head about a foot. When Janis sees him, she does a double take and then breaks out in a laugh that affects her entire body. Her feet, in silver slippers, go up and down. Her head goes back. Her eyes crinkle and the laugh comes spontaneously from her stomach up her windpipe. Even her nose seems to move independently. Her laugh is filled with all kinds of "wheees" and "wooos" and "heh-heh-hehs" and can stop as swiftly as it begins.

"Hey, too much, man. A freak for a priest. I don't believe it, no, I don't believe it, man." Then, suddenly embarrassed, she squirms about and will not look the cleric in the eye. The other members of the troupe also begin to show decorum. Snooky Flowers, the ebullient baritone-sax man, stops the process of changing his pants. But as soon as the clerics bow out politely and the door snaps shut, Janis says, wide-eyed, "Hey, can that freak cat ball? I want to know, man, can he ball?"

"If he is an Episcopalian, which I believe he is," John Cooke intones, "he can ball."

"Wheee wooo, heh-heh-heh!"

"Out of sight, man, out of sight," Snooky says. He peels off bell-bottom dungarees, revealing a pair of jaunty black drawers that go well with his mahogany-colored skin, and then dons a pair of green-velvet trousers.

It is now nearing showtime and a muted, expectant rumble can be heard from the vast gymnasium every time the door opens. Roy, the drummer, beats his sticks on a warm-up block. Transcendental Terry, the bearded and long-haired trumpet player, goes through yoga breathing exercises with his eyes shut. Sam Houston Andrew, the only holdover from Big Brother, picks out chords on his guitar. Janis is seated one moment; the next, standing and hitching up her slacks. Absently, she runs her hand over the back of the organ player's neck. This is Richard Kermode, whose lush beard and thick wild hair make one think he is older than he is (he's 22). He returns the caress to the back of Janis' neck, his clear-blue eyes staring out at nothing. The atmosphere now is charged and tense--in keeping with this locker room for athletes.

"OK, we're on," John Cooke says, bursting in once more. "Everybody out! Come on, move! Don't lag behind, Richard! Go!"

They charge through a heavily guarded passageway, like bulls in the chute to the ring, and climb aboard a creaky, temporary bandstand. Only a few vague lights glow; but out in the audience, there are cries when this funny girl in the tight slacks and wild hair is sighted among the shadows: "That's her. ... There she is!"

The band blows scales for the standard, interminable time, the amps whine and screech, and then, suddenly, a purple flood--Janis' favorite light and color--bathes the stand and the music starts. With feet apart and blowing hair away from her face with the side of her mouth, Janis furiously whacks a stick on a black chock to the rhythm, warming up and letting go. The faces out front stretch to the high gymnasium ceiling and a horde of open mouths crowds around the apron of the stage. A rubbery-limbed youth begins a dance that could be an epileptic seizure to the left of the bandstand. And there is that sudden, swift rapport with an audience that Janis seems to crave most of all. She sings about wanting and misery, and she sings as if she means it. The audience gives her back appreciation and--there is no other word--love.

• • •

Janis never quite found this rapport in the town she grew up in: Port Arthur, Texas, population 67,000. Her father is an engineer for Texaco. She remembers him as a "strong, silent Texas type," generally easygoing, but a person one paid attention to when, on rare occasions, he got angry. Her mother works as a registrar at the local business college, and Janis seems to have had a fairly typical mother-daughter relationship with her. (The next day, before her appearance on the Ed Sullivan show, she called her mother and said, "Momma, Momma--guess what they're paying me for this one show?" And when her mother heard the amount, she said, "You're worth every penny of it, darling.") Janis has a younger sister whom she describes as "straight, a sorority girl in college," and there is a younger brother who resembles Janis a great deal.

It was around the onset of puberty that a deep resentment began to build in Janis, a loss and unsureness and rebellion that perhaps only poetry or one of her songs can explain--this from a cherub who used to sing soprano in the church choir and lift her eyes to heaven. She became a beatnik, later a hippie, the only one in Port Arthur. "They put me down, man, those square people in Port Arthur. They called me a slut. They threw rocks at me in class. But all I was looking for was some kind of personal freedom and other people who felt the way I did."

For a while, there were brief periods of middle-class conformity, followed by sudden wild flights into bohemia, like an alcoholic who falls off the wagon. Janis went to college--three of them. She lived for a few months on New York's Lower East Side and for longer stretches in North Beach, San Francisco. She hitchhiked between places. She worked as a key-punch operator and she drew unemployment checks. She served beer in a bowling alley in Texas and, according to her, was a very good waitress until she got bored (she gets bored easily). And it was in Texas that she heard a recording of Huddie Ledbetter ("Leadbelly"), fell in love with his music and began developing a singing voice that was soon to become notable. "I had always sung, what little singing I did, way up there in a high register," she says, giving a trill of demonstration. "But then one night before friends. I lowered my voice way down here, like this, imitating Leadbelly. Everybody was amazed. They didn't know I had that voice. Neither did I."

The first time she sang in public, in Texas, she got two Lone Star beers. And for several years afterward, she didn't earn much more from her singing. She sang country-and-western at Mr. Threadgill's, a beer parlor that had been converted from an old filling station on the outskirts of Austin. In San Francisco, she played one-night gigs at any joint that needed a temporary singer. By 1965, she felt she had had enough of scruffy street living and went back home "to go straight." For a year, she wore unspectacular clothing, attended Lamar State College of Technology and started preparing, with good grades, to become a teacher--her parents' ambition for her. But it was not meant to be. When Chet Helms, a Texas musician she had met at Mr. Threadgill's, told her that Big Brother and the Holding Company needed a chick singer in San Francisco, she went flying. She hasn't looked back since.

She came onto the scene just when the movement was coming together in Haight-Ashbury--the flower children, the acid freaks, the psychedelic, overly amplified music. Big Brother and the Holding Company soon became a standard item at the old Avalon ballroom, where the hippie-rock dances began. Those who heard them in the old days--when it was experimental, totally fresh--say it was a stunning experience. Janis and the band members made $200 a night, which they split five ways right down the line. At the 1967 Monterey Jazz Festival, with Janis wailing a memorable Ball and Chain, Big Brother stole the show; and a short time later, Albert Grossman became their manager. Grossman, who has a suite of informally run offices in New York, guided the career of Bob Dylan. He appears in the Dylan film Don't Look Back, the graying, heavy-set man who softly chews out an English hotel clerk in a manner that makes your blood run cold. Today, he is not so heavy and his gray hair is much, much longer (held in the back by a rubber band). Except for his large luminous eyes and his chic contemporary clothes, he bears a striking resemblance to George Washington. To reporters, he is as elusive as Greta Garbo. But to others, he is, like Washington, a father figure.

"He doesn't direct me," Janis says. "He just finds out where I want to go--and then he helps me get there. And he's there to comfort me when I need it. Man, that's important. I don't like to admit I need help--like, I need someone to help me across a snowy street--but I do, I do. Sometimes I go a week without talking to him; other times I'll talk to him three times a day for two weeks."

In many ways, the Grossman operation is highly casual, people coming and going as a loosely knit family does to the old homestead. "Everybody knows Albert," John Cooke says. He himself ran across Grossman during the period Bob Dylan used to hang out at the Club 47 in Cambridge and John was a student at Harvard. And then, a few years later, when John needed a job, Grossman was around. "Sure," Grossman told him. "What group would you like to travel with?" He named several and John chose the Janis Joplin outfit, because he remembered her well from the Monterey Festival. Everything casual, unlikely--and perfect.

When Janis left Big Brother to form her own backup band in the fall of 1968, the parting was amicable, everyone realizing that she had become a star and it was inevitable for her to strike out on her own. Her group at present is simply called Janis Joplin's band. The crowds flock to see her, no matter where, and her bookings leave her little time to herself. She is not sure how much she makes, but it is undoubtedly a hell of a lot. The Grossman organization gives her $300 a week to live on and the rest goes into something called the Janis Joplin Corporation. Every now and then, she asks to see the accounting but gives up when the figures become complicated. "It beats," she says, "selling beer."

One cold wet evening in New York, I talked to Janis about her past and current life. It was after 9:30 when she finished rehearsing in a baroque, mirrored hall on 57th Street. (During the last part of the rehearsal, everyone seemed to lie arguing at once and only the one who screamed loudest--usually Janis--got through.) Immediately, on the street she took my arm--not like a New York girl, as if ready to pull it off, nor like a Southern girl, lightly, as if you might bruise her. Janis held on for support, snugly, like a child. Slipping down her nose was a pair of large wire glasses without lenses. She wore a foxy fur coat, blood-red-velvet slacks, a saber dancer's fur hat and, from somewhere on her, a series of tassels that hung to the ground like drapery cords. Over one shoulder she held a Sony recorder that blasted out her numbers from the rehearsal. Only twice have I seen New Yorkers rubberneck on the street: at Moondog in green Nordic garb on Sixth Avenue and at Janis Joplin that night on 57th Street.

We ended up in the Carnegie Hall Tavern, a sedate, lightly humming place. Janis ordered gin and orange juice, and then called to the young, healthy-faced waiter, "Hey, buddy, make it a double!"

She smoked a Marlboro, she fidgeted, she noticed two women at a nearby table. One had long blonde hair, the other, bobbed strawberry hair--and they had their heads close together. "Hey, man," Janis whispered furiously, "are those two Lesbians? Are they really?"

"I don't know."

A fat man in pince-nez and banker's gray sat facing us at another table. His eyes never left Janis, and once I saw his mouth fall open. "You asked what I think of Port Arthur," she said, after a couple of drinks. "Here's what I think of Port Arthur." And then, on yellow note paper, she drew a heart and a kind of scrollwork that is found on current psychedelic posters. The lettering read: Janis Loves (Tee-Hee) Port Arthur as much as Port Arthur Loves her.

"They hurt me back there, man. They made me miserable. And I wanted them so much to love me."

"How did they hurt you? Why were you so miserable?"

She thought awhile. "I didn't have any tits at fourteen."

Soon, though, she was talking about some fast friends from the town. "There were these five guys, you see. They read books and had ideas, and I started running around with them. We thought of ourselves as intellectuals, and I guess we were in that place." They all went swimming at night in the Gulf, letting green oozy plankton cover their bodies. Then they would climb to the top of an old abandoned lighthouse. It was before them, in the lighthouse, that Janis first lowered her voice and imitated Leadbelly.

When she talked about Mr. Thread-gill's beer joint, her face lit up. "He wore an apron and had this big pot gut, and he would come from behind the counter and sing like you never heard before. He yodeled, man, and sounded a lot like Jimmie Rodgers."

"I'd like to hear you sing country-and-western," I said. I meant later.

" 'Silver Threads and Golden Needles--' "

"Hey, hey, how is your voice holding up these days? Do you think you're wrecking it?"

"I'll tell you something, man. I started off screaming, I really did. I can't stand to hear a recording of my voice from those early Big Brother days. I didn't like the album of Cheap Thrills--oh, I'm somewhat satisfied with Summertime and Turtle Blues, but that's all. I'm trying to develop into a singer now and make it, oh, more dramatic. I'm not wrecking it."

The drinks kept coming, and she suddenly referred to a recent enemy of hers as an anal retentive, not using a more colorful phrase from the argot. (Somewhere within Janis there still lurks a college girl, a girl who reads Freud and likes to argue ideas over candlelight. Still deeper--and closer to her core--is a person who uses "righteous" as a devout Christian does. Her face is always solemn when she utters the word.) She said she started singing the blues because it allowed her to show the feelings she had. With country-and-western, she was just singing tunes.

"But why are you working so hard these days? What are you after?"

"It sure as hell's not the money. At first, it was to get love from the audience. Now it's to really reach my fullest potential, to go as far as I can go. I've got the chance, man. It's a great opportunity. ..." She took a long swallow and another gin and orange juice was on the way. "But I need somebody to direct the fucking band, I really do. How can I do everything? And those West Coast critics should know I need help now and shouldn't go about tearing me down. That fucking Rolling Stone made me cry, man, bawl, what they wrote. They should know. ... Oh, hell, all any girl really wants is just love and a man. But what man can put up with a rock-'n'-roll star?"

"Do you ever get erotically aroused onstage? I've wondered."

"Like, hot? Hey. do I ever. Sometimes. Once I did this marvelous set, God, and was that audience with me. I came offstage and this boyfriend I had threw a cape over me right away and led me past performers, stagehands and autograph seekers, right out the back door and into the back of his Volkswagen bus for some balling. Was that great!

"What happened to the guy?"

"Oh, he ran off with another chick. When you love somebody, they always love somebody else."

A drink vanished in three swallows. She lit a Marlboro and discovered that a layer of New York grime had covered her hands since the last washing. She showed me a tattoo on the outer side of her right heel. It was a blue sunflower that had been embedded there by a boyfriend, an Englishman, who woke her up one morning to say that she had lived long enough without a tattoo. The Englishman ran off with somebody else; the tattoo remained. "Now I want a rose tattoo. One right here on my left breast. I'm going to do it when I get back to San Francisco. Hey, they hurt like hell when they put them on, man."

She played a small segment of one of her numbers on the Sony, and then thought she heard a bad note. Swiftly, impetuously, she turned up the volume. " 'Down Ooonnn Meeeee!!!!' "

• • •

Forks paused in mid-air in the Carnegie Hall Tavern. Light chatter stopped with a snap. The bartender froze with a fifth at a 45-degree angle. "Please. Sorry," the waiter with the healthy face said in a German accent, "you must not do this here." Which meant, of course, that now she did. The third time in this haven for members of the New York Philharmonic and we were thrown out onto the wet side street, a mean wind whipping our faces.

At the corner, a taxi driver would slow, spot this little funny girl in her outrageous outfit and then speed by with a paralyzed neck, as if in a trance. The only thing to do was grab the door handle when one slowed sufficiently. He could then either bounce you off a light pole or admit you to his domain. We made it, the gnomelike driver seeming to squeeze one degree more into himself every time an expletive from the back seat assaulted his sensibilities. If the (continued on page 172)All She Needs(continued from page 118) good burghers of New York felt this way about her, what must it have been like in Port Arthur, Texas? • • •

In Ann Arbor, they bring her back tumultuously for an encore. She takes a dazed, groping stroll to the organ for a sip or two of B & B from a Styrofoam cup. She feels a need to spit and does so behind the organ. "You're beautiful, Janis!" a short fat youth yells. The encore is Piece of My Heart, an old favorite from Big Brother days, and the rubbery-legged dancer to the left of the stage is now peculiarly on his back, with arms and legs flying in the air. The applause is so strong it seems an extension of the amplified music, and Janis is ready to perform till she drops. But inadvertently, the switch is thrown for the house lights and another gig has ended. "We could have kept going, going!" she wails. "They loved us! What dumb asshole is on the lights?"

I move through the huge audience, getting reactions to her performance. A cheerleader-type blonde, with dimples in her cheeks: "There's absolutely no one like her. When she sang that Summertime, I cried, it got me so. She reveals herself and it makes you so less ashamed of your own minor hang-ups."

A stocky, finger-snapping girl: "Dynamite, man, dynamite."

They love her so much in Ann Arbor that someone steals her black pants less than five minutes after she changes into purple ones. It is still early in the evening for a musician, and Janis--armed with a bottle of gin against a late-night drought and wondering where her black pants went--goes to Detroit to hear a close white friend play in a small club in the Negro district. It is almost pitch-black inside--some customers using flashlights--and it is far from full. Jeff Karp is Janis' friend, and he plays the harmonica and directs a small group. He has a slight, wiry body, a great bush of hair and a polite, very friendly manner. In a wild, uninhibited set, he makes great sweeping motions, almost touching the floor with his instrument. His head goes back and forth, his elbows in and out, and when he finishes, he can hardly move his lips. It is a marvelous, quite unexpected performance.

"Man, he's good," Janis says. "And you know how much he's getting here? Twenty-five dollars. Twenty-five! I'm never going to bitch again when Albeit says talk to somebody or I have to ride in the front seat of a limo. No, sir!"

A Negro group comes on to play Shotgun and you know the stops are out. Only one mistake is made. Janis is asked to do a number; the applause is moderate; but when she ambles up to the mike, the Negro band does not know her numbers. She nods thanks to the people and goes back to her seat. At 4:30 in the morning, when she stands to leave, the white manager steps up and says, "It was a pleasure having you here tonight, Jan-is. Please come back and see us."

"Listen, man, that was a low-class thing you pulled, so don't think you're getting away with it. You knew those guys didn't know my music. Just getting me up there was all you cared about. Low-class-ass tiling to do, man, and you can go to hell."

In the car, her anger passes as swiftly as her smile appears. One thing that cheers her up is being able to play a tape of her Ann Arbor performance on the Sony. "Hey, listen to that, man," she says to Jeff, who is with us on the drive back to the motel. "I blew this note here. Listen to it."

Jeff listens but wants to rap about how he came into town yesterday morning with only pocket change. "One of these days, I'm going to be discovered," he says, half mockingly. He is 20. "Man, I am ready."

Janis runs the tape back, puts her ear near the speaker. She thinks she has heard something new. "Hey, listen, listen to what some guy is yelling in the audience. Man, too much!" And, sure enough, quite clearly in the background, a fresh adolescent voice comes faintly over the music: "Oh, fuck me, Janis, fuck me!"

At the motel, John Cooke has left a tray with a half-eaten meal outside his door. Janis squats and goes after bits and pieces with her fingers--a crust of hard bread here, a limp green vegetable there. She is trying to keep her weight down and skips as many regular meals as possible. But it's hard for her to pass up food that's just lying there, begging. It is minutes from dawn and a jet passes over so close that the building vibrates. Janis is pinning her hair atop her head, making her look like one of those strong women from pioneer, covered-wagon days. She has placed a scarf over the motel lamp to give a slight illusion of home. A travel clock rests by her bed.

At 8:15 on the nose, John Cooke rouses all hands in no uncertain terms. Then the motel hallway is like a George Price cartoon: heads out of doorways, an arm going down, a leg going up, girls, musical instruments, a thin dazed frame in only Jockey shorts appearing and disappearing. Everyone assures me that they never get up this early in the usual gig, but Janis and the band are to appear on the Ed Sullivan show this Sabbath and rehearsals start in New York at 11. In the front seat of the second car streaking toward the airport, Janis says, "I wanted to look as funky as I could for Ed Sullivan tonight, but damned if I don't think I may be too funky now."

At Newark airport, which looks almost identical to the Detroit airport, there is no limousine waiting at the curb. They sit on luggage, instruments snuggled between their legs, watching businessmen and West Point cadets clip by. Finally, their regular limousine driver, a young man who looks terribly hung over, appears from the waiting room. He had been standing inside and failed to see any of them pass by. "Jesus, how could that happen?" he says, and then discovers that he has locked the keys to the limousine inside, the motor running. "I don't believe it. How can this happen to me?" After an hour, it is Snooky Flowers who uses a bent coat hanger to open the door.

"I knew my past training would come in handy someday. Shee-it!"

"Reminds me of how I used to bust into cars down in Texas," Janis says.

The boatlike car glides toward the sunny Manhattan skyline and the driver puts on an Aretha Franklin tape. It is at a moderate volume, but everybody tells him to turn it down--particularly Snooky. It seems peculiar that people who play such earsplitting music themselves in public cannot bear it loud in their off-hours, but this is the case. Janis herself does not really like to listen to other people's music when she's free--except, on rare occasions, to friends like Jeff Karp. When she is relaxing, she prefers it quiet.

In downtown Manhattan, the driver stops at a delicatessen to get Janis some orange juice as a peace offering for fouling up earlier. (Her friends bring her orange juice as some girls are brought flowers and candy.) At the Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway, she is given a private dressing room high above the street, but she can't stay in it long. She prefers to jump around backstage; and, as the hours pass, her color comes back and the tiredness seems to leave her face. By eight that night, showtime, she is blowing hair away from her face, getting the motor going. She goes on, taking the black stub of a mike as if it belonged to a human body and wildly letting go. A cluster of freaks in the balcony goes mad, while a graying man in the orchestra shades his eyes and screws up his face, as if pierced by heartburn.

Ed Sullivan shakes her hand after her two numbers but does not ask her to say a few words, as he does some of the acts. Janis' face shows a little hurt. She feels she has given a tremendous performance--knows she has--and she doesn't want to be brought down. With an entourage that includes members of the New York City Ballet, which also appeared on the show this night, Janis rushes down to Max's Kansas City to celebrate and "juice." In the past 48 hours, she has had one and a half hours' sleep. Tomorrow at 11, she flies to San Francisco, where a most important test awaits her.

• • •

The city where it all began has changed. Haight-Ashbury--even on a clear, perfect day--has a mean, used-up look, like the littered ground after a rock festival has ended. People who used to walk freely through it at midnight, handing out flowers, now say you have a 50-50 chance of living if you appear there after dark. The hippies--now called freaks or crazies--have spread out into the far reaches of this unique city. Dead-eyed young girls in love beads say, "Got any spare change, mister?" along Market and through North Beach. Long-haired youths in Mackinaws and Indian headbands stride along with their olive-drab sleeping bags, as if a fresh resting place might be just around the corner. And music that used to be special and underground is heard continuously over the popular radio stations.

I climb the steps to Janis' apartment in the Mission district. (She has since moved to a home of her own near Sausalito--equipped with pool table and a bank of glass walls that look out over a forest of redwoods.) Linda, one of her two roommates, greets me. She is tall, dark-haired and built with many outstanding curves. She came to San Francisco eight years ago, put up with one day of officework and then fled. She modeled for cheesecake and lost interest; she married and that didn't work. She grew up an orphan. The front door flies open and Janis falls in, with groceries in both arms. "Hey, grab this, man. Take this here." Behind her is Sunshine, the second roommate. Sunshine is a blonde with a very loose, hip-swinging stride. She is a quarter Indian and for a while lived on a reservation in Wisconsin. Her childhood left much to be desired and high school, while it lasted, was miserable. She has known Janis since the days when both were "on the street" but has been a member of the household only a few weeks. Liberated is not exactly the word for the two roommates. They are ballsy, down to earth--but beneath are a vulnerability and hurt that go unarticulated, except sometimes through their eyes. All three girls are Capricorns.

"Man. what a bummer today!" Janis says, and then tells how she and Sunshine couldn't get service in the Buena Vista, a fashionable bar near Fisherman's Wharf. The waitress had giggled at their outfits and wouldn't serve them. Finally. Janis had to call the manager and tell him who she was. They got free drinks then.

The girls have their own rooms in the apartment. Linda has a long table in hers for sewing. Sunshine sleeps in what doubles as the living room and in which stands a mammoth ivory-colored phallus, a piece of artwork Janis picked up and is proud of. Her own room has a large low bed with a sultan's canopy. All her windows are covered, no light piercing from the outside, and pink-satin sheets adorn her bed.

This is the evening before Janis' first opening in San Francisco without Big Brother, and the girls decide to go out on the town. Janis drives her Porsche, which is painted blue, yellow and red. with a landscape painted on one side and mushrooms and butterflies on the other. Linda sits beside her, while Sunshine and I perch on the back ledge. The car roars oft, and then there are leaps over the tops of hills, flashes of intersections and the passing of everything moving in a grinding of gears. It reminds me of the chase scene in Bullitt. At a red light, I see a black lift up his fist. God, he's after us--but, no, it's the revolutionary sign. He recognizes Janis. We all give him back a peace sign and barrel away. We eat a turkey dinner in a bar-restaurant where they all know Janis, and then she finds the only parking space in North Beach.

We shoot pool in a place that has a poster of Janis on the back wall. She bridges the cue in her curled forefinger and shoots like a man. While the jukebox plays Piece of My Heart and Down on Me, a line of. people come up to hug either Janis or Sunshine or both. It seems Sunshine is as well-known in North Beach as Janis. Finally, at a late hour, Linda walks off down a North Beach street to look in on friends, while I stagger off for a hotel bed. Janis and Sunshine continue on into further reaches of the night.

The following night is raw and wet and the crowd that mills around outside the Winterland arena in the Fillmore district resembles the rabble on fight nights at the Cow Palace or Madison Square Garden--except for their dress. They move through the dark high tiers inside in ponchos, floppy hats and leather vests. One youth has taken off his shirt and strolls bare-chested. Joints are passed at nearly every knot of people and gray smoke climbs like steam through the spotlights focused on the far-off stage. The voices are muted, as if in anticipation of something spectacular, and the expressions are blank and unjoyful.

"Look at 'em out there," Janis says in the dressing room backstage, hitching up her slacks, not able to sit still. "They're out there like crows, just ready ... to pounce on something!"

It is a communal dressing room again and band members are flopped down, saving their energy. A mirror covers one wall and the ceiling slants, as in an attic. It is lit by candles. Janis swigs from a bottle of B & B while a procession enters. They embrace and kiss her, and then try to find squatting room. There is James Gurley, an original member of Big Brother. He wears buckskin, recently having spent a month in a cave in a national park, and he embraces Janis much longer than most. Here is Susie, a good friend from the early days. She is an ex-ballerina and is outfitted in a beret and peek-a-boo blouse without brassiere that makes it a joy to watch her lean over. She likes to ride Harley-Davidsons and can take a car engine apart as well as the average mechanic. She, too, hated high school--and ran away from home in the Midwest as soon as she could pack a bag.

"I met Janis the night she tried out for Big Brother," Susie says. "It was in an old firehouse one of the guys was living in. She didn't know anyone there--and she seemed so, I don't know, scared ... trying to please ... wanting so much to belong. ... I felt so sorry for her."

Janis goes on this night and her voice has never been better. A changing light show flashes on a huge screen behind her. The strobes blink. A red balloon bounces up and down over heads. The huge black amplifiers, looking like leftover air-raid sirens from World War Two, send out shock waves of music, so loud that the whole body reels. The liver vibrates, as well as the eardrums.

Everything is there--but the audience does not respond and does not call her back for an encore. Some say she should have sung some of her old songs (every selection was new to San Francisco). Others say the band didn't back her up well. A few say she was too tense, although admitting that her voice was superb. In the dressing room, she is pale, as if in shock, saying, "San Francisco's changed, man. Where are my people? They used to be so wild. I know I sang well. I know I did!"

"Bad set," says John Cooke.

The next morning, Bill Graham, the rock impresario who owns Fillmore East and West and who is staging the Joplin concerts at Winterland, sits at a cluttered desk in his office overlooking Market Street. There is a weathered rug on the floor and a red-velvet couch for visitors. Graham does not resemble Sol Hurok or David Merrick, looking a shade on the order of a freak, except that his hair is not quite long enough. He usually speaks in a series of explosions, but now he says softly, pausing frequently and gazing out onto Market Street, "When she was an amateur was when it was real. All this traveling she does and all this attention she's getting from the media is inevitable, perhaps. But it rubs off--no matter how honest and real she is--it rubs off. Last night was not like the old days. She should have at least sung one of the old songs. ..."

The second night. Janis loosens up a bit, sings Summertime and has toned down one or two of the musicians. The audience is much better but still is not as excited as those at Fillmore East or in Ann Arbor. Yet it is an improvement, and Janis jumps around backstage, jabbering happily about going off with a married man who has broken free for a few late-night hours.

The next day--a sun-drenched Saturday--I drop by her apartment at noon. It is an imposition. I know, calling on a musician at such an early hour, and I bring two quarts of orange juice. She is terribly pale, quiet at first, clutching a long wine-colored robe around her. Then swiftly, something strikes her funny and she goes, "Woowwww," throwing back her head. I ask her if she thinks she represents a movement, if that is why unbelievable mobs of young people flock to see her.

"I don't stand for any movement, man. I'm just myself. But I'll tell you what I believe in. I believe you should treat yourself good. Get stoned, get laid. Unless it kills you, do it. Every minute is your own. You should be happy." The phone rings and it is a news photographer wanting to shoot pictures of her in the afternoon. "Look, man, this is my only free day in a month! I have it off! For once, I want to do some of my own things. ...OK, OK ... shit ... come on over, then."

She looks sour for a moment but begins to relax slowly under the inevitable. She is on top now and everyone wants a piece of her time, if not her heart. It has taken a lot of struggles to reach where she is, too. But it is never quite enough, is it?

A shaft of clear San Francisco light floods her pale skin and she squinches up her eyes as she did long ago in the photo of herself holding the Sunday-school certificate. There is still much of that same little girl in her face. She is still looking up for approval.