Me and Janis

October 24, 1969. I was 20 years old, working as the manager of the Hour Glass, a hippy-student bar in Wichita, Kansas, and for a few months the sometime music writer for the underground Wichita Free Press, a mimeographed publication of several pages. Janis Joplin was performing that night at Henry Levitt Arena, with the James Cotton Blues Band opening. I couldn’t afford a ticket to the concert (a then-steep $4), and the Free Press was not afforded press passes, but someone at the paper heard that the bands were staying at the Holiday Inn on north Broadway. So about noon I drove down to the hotel just to see what I could find. And what I found were members of the Cotton band having lunch in the hotel’s restaurant. Somehow I intruded on them, they invited me first to join them at lunch and then to come up to one of their rooms to smoke some pot. At one point James Cotton joined us, and a couple of Joplin’s band members. Time and dope fog my memory of that afternoon, there were guitars and harmonicas played, but at some point I was asked if I was going to the concert, I said that I didn’t have a ticket, and the Cotton band invited me to come along with them. So in the backseat of a station wagon, with half of the James Cotton Blues Band, I rode into the backstage area of Henry Levitt Arena. (Joplin and her band would be coming along later.)

In the Cotton dressing room (a locker room), there were practice amps and guitars, and at one point I actually jammed a bit with a couple of the guys in the group. When the show started, I stayed at the mouth of the tunnel to the floor where the stage had been set up, listening to the music. After a couple of songs, behind me the doors to the backstage area opened and Joplin’s cars drove in. There were no other press (if I could be called press) allowed backstage, but I was already there and a couple of Joplin’s band members who had been in the Cotton hotel room that afternoon recognized me and that provided me my introduction to Joplin herself.

She was shorter, smaller than I had expected. Most all of the photos and film of her are taken from below stage, which makes her seem taller, and the clothes she mostly wears are loose fabrics, which hide her slightness. She was unexpectedly pleasant to me, inviting me into the band’s dressing room (another locker room). There was a rack of costumes for her and the band and a pint of tequila (not Southern Comfort, which she was noted for) on the floor. We sat on locker room benches and talked about what I have no idea. It was just passing the time and felt perfectly out of the ordinary. Not for a moment did I stop and think, “Shit, I’m sitting here talking with Janis Joplin in her dressing room!” It’s hard to imagine now, but back then the rock world really wasn’t that distant from the fans. After a while, she jumped up, saying she really liked the song the Cotton band was playing, and we together went out of the mouth of the tunnel and listened. A photographer for the Wichita Eagle (who wasn’t allowed backstage) took a photo of the two of us, documenting the moment for me, though when it appeared in the paper the next morning, I’d been cut out of the shot (the photo was sent to me whole the next week by the entertainment reporter for the Eagle, who knew me). We went back to the dressing room, but after a short while, she told me she had to dress and that I’d have to leave (in her Texas way, she referred to me as “Honey”).

I only heard a few of the songs from Joplin’s set. After her show started, I joined the Cotton band back in their dressing room, the backstage being much more interesting to me. But at the end of her set, Joplin was heard coming backstage, ranting and cursing and pissed that her feather boa had apparently been taken by someone in the audience. She was not at all the “peace” and “love” persona of her music. She went back for an encore and appealed to the crowd in what I, having seen the backstage tirade, took as a hypocritical “love plea” to return the boa. I don’t know if she got it back or not. I left with the Cotton band back to the hotel before she was finished. I learned the next day that she had gone to the exclusive Wichita Club (one could only get hard liquor in private clubs in Kansas then) and bought rounds all night for the oil and beef bank businessmen, mounting a bill of more than $1000. I don’t know how much of that is true – I do know that she did go to the Wichita Club, though, which in itself is counter to her counter-culture image. And that is what remains for me of what should be one of my great brushes with fame – not the aura of greatness, but the whiff of a diva, shorter and smaller than I had expected.