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.

Wichita Braves

Each year in March, as Spring Training begins, my mind returns to my early teen years as a sometime pitcher and sometime outfielder and mostly bench-warmer on my Little League team, the Braves. Our team was fashioned on the Milwaukee Braves (Hank Aaron, Warren Spahn, Eddie Matthews) and to a lesser extent on the Wichita Braves, Milwaukee’s single-A affiliate at the time, our uniforms, not our abilities, being the sole hint at any connection. The fact that our coach owned a Dairy Queen where we would go for free ice cream after every game, win or lose, added to our prestige in the league.

I was not by far the best player on the team. That would have been Will Robinson, David Goodpasture, Ronnie Kaiser, or the coach’s son, Mike Lindley. But I wasn’t the worst, either. (That probably would have been my cousin, Allen, who when he was in a game was consigned to right field where he spent most of his time picking either dandelions or his nose. He’s now the Economic Development Director for a medium-sized city in the Midwest, dispelling any idea that performance in Little League is a predictor of future success. Last I heard, Ronnie Kaiser was dealing blackjack in Vegas.)

The only lasting memory I have of playing for the Braves was a game in which I fouled off 12 pitches against Benny Banta of the Yankees before grounding out to second base for the ninth and final out, called because we were behind by more than 10 runs after our bat in the third inning (it’s called the “mercy rule,” sometimes the more accurate “slaughter rule”). This at-bat was actually the highlight of my Little League career. The Yankees were the perennial champions of our league (as the major league Yankees most often were as well back then). They rarely, if ever, lost. And Benny Banta was by far the best pitcher – the best player – in the league, the size of most of the coaches, a power hitter, and a strikeout pitcher with a fastball, curve, and slider, when most of us other pitchers were just glad if we could fling it somewhere near the plate without hitting the batter or throwing it over the backstop (as I once actually did).

Our coach chose me to pitch this particular game, which was why (among other reasons) I was batting ninth. “Fat chance” wasn’t a concept I was familiar with then, but I’m sure our coach was. The game went pretty much as every parent in the stands and player on the benches could have foreseen: The Yankees’ sides of the innings would last perhaps an hour, my tossing up pitches that they would either take for eventual walks or if I somehow got a pitch anywhere near the plate they would smack to one of my teammates for an error or just knock it neatly over the fence. Our sides of the innings were brief affairs, mostly Benny Banta hurling three-pitch strikeouts, occasionally a weak pop-up or maybe an infield groundout. When I came up to bat in the bottom of the third, it was Yankees 10+, Braves 0, there were two outs, Benny Banta was pitching (another) perfect game, and there wasn’t a person in attendance (myself included) who thought I would do anything except strikeout, finally ending the game. But to everyone’s surprise (and I suppose some parents’ annoyance), I began swinging at everything Benny Banta gave me, thinking that he isn’t going throw anything but a strike, and I successfully (today they call it, positively, “extending the at-bat”) was able to foul off 12 pitches. I could hear encouragement coming from my father in the stands and my coach and teammates on the bench, as if somehow fouling off all these pitches was a sign that we were somehow going to make up the 10+ runs that we were behind. But of course that wasn’t to be. I did, however, connect with a pitch, and the ball rolled (in my memory it’s a hot grounder) to second base, and I was thrown out to mercifully end the game (or slaughter).

But I’d fouled off 12 pitches from Benny Banta. And I’d grounded out, not struck out. And not for that game, but at least for that at-bat, I’d been successful. That’s one of the things I like about baseball, and maybe it’s this experience that instilled the idea in me: Success is not just in winning. It can come in small, tiny, inconsequential moments, moments when the context of the game allows for success, even if personal and fleeting