Janis Joplin, February 1972 Rolling Stone

UPDATE ON THE PARKING ENFORCEMENT ISSUE, HERE ON GRAVENHURST'S MAIN DRAG

READER THINKS SELECTIVE PARKING ENFORCEMENT "O K A Y"  - TWO HOURS JUST PERFECT TO HAVE LUNCH AND A SHOPPING GIG

     I don't generally get into "Letter to the Editor" pissing wars, that might, for gosh sakes, go on for half a year, and finally have to be ended with binding arbitration, without anything clearer than the stupidity of it all, and lots of spatter, to show for it; at the end of the effort on clarity's behalf, no one is the wiser! So seeing as we got a response to a recent submission, we sent to The Banner, re: $20 parking ticket, it's clear in the letter writer's mind, we most definitely deserved the punitive measure, in ticket form, for violating the two hour parking limit, by that whopping five minutes. Hey, everyone deserves a shot at rebuttal. It's the kind of response I was anticipating, from the enablers out there, who help the town maintain their pecarious hold on the status quo they value so dearly. The rule, "Cause we said so!" The big issue here, other than the fact the town only enforces the parking bylaw during the tourist season, is that in legal terms, it's pretty hard to defend a part-time bylaw; that's good for one half of the year but not the other. As for parking meters, well, although I'm against them, it at least allows the visitor, to get an absolute time on the meter, to allow for a stress-free lunch, or shop to shop browse through main street businesses, without having to run out in the middle of a sandwich or a sales transaction, to check out the tire marking; or if they've let you slide for another wee bit! In Gravenhurst your time begins when the bylaw officers mark your tires, and who knows when that might be? Got to be ever-watchful if you park here. It's not a good system of parking enforcement, and the town knows it! At some point this issue will be in front of the courts, when someone, with a hat full of moxy, who feels they have been ticketed unfairly, seeks the clarification on whether the town's parking bylaw, even has a wobbly leg to stand on. In the meantime, until they can figure it out, how about giving main street shoppers the same parking freedom, as those visiting The Wharf. Now that's progressive and free time in a bundle.Now wouldn't that be wildly fair to all?

   

   
FEBRUARY 27TH, 1972, "ROLLING STONE" ISSUE NO. 102 -

JANIS JOPLIN IN RETROSPECT, AND "JOHN & JERRY & DAVID & JOHN & LENI & YOKO"

     When Andrew and Robert were still enjoying the precious charms of childhood, Suzanne, sensing another long, hot summer, trying to keep the lads entertained, decided one afternoon, the time had arrived to integrate, ever so slowly, more music into their lives. At this same time, after our television blew-up (popsicle stuck in the back), and we didn't have the money to buy a replacement, we would listen to old records at dinner, and afterwards, we welcomed them to play records that interested them. Suzanne had hundreds of 45 rpm records, that she had been given, as a teenager, by the owner of the juke box, her parents rented for The Skipper, the snackbar above the family marina in Windermere. Mr. Arney, as Suzanne knew him, would give Suzanne the discs that had been replaced on the Juke Box he tended every few weeks, and it was how she built a small but significant collection by time the business was sold later in the 1970's. She gave it all to the boys, and it was the starting point, let me tell you, for everything that has happened today, to put these same lads in the middle of the contemporary music business, as both instrument suppliers, record retailers, and on the recording side, possessing a studio that gets quite a work-out, only a few feet off the main street of our hometown. Did music influence these chaps? Of course it did. From record collectors, they then branched out as musicians-with-high-hopes, trying to mimic the songs they admired most, of their newly expanded record collection. It's not a front page biography, best suited to the Rolling Stone, but by golly, it still reminds me rather poignantly, a self professed historian, just how important it is to have healthy roots in the profession you happen to belong. When a visitor to the shop, makes some demeaning comment, about both boys being too young to be mouthing off about the roots of music, well, all I can say, is like me today, with these Rolling Stone magazines, the boys have never been standoffish about immersing in what they love. And they love music.
     Once again this morning, I started my day with a cup of locally purchased java, (hot and flavor-full), a quick glance at the local weekly newspaper, and yes, even enjoyed a day-old scone, I had hidden behind some crackers in the bread-box, the day before; and then settled into the pile of unread Rolling Stone magazines, son Andrew purchased a couple of weeks ago, as part of a job-lot that came through the door (as happens frequently). I've spent the past two weeks, investing any spare moments, here in the Gravenhurst sound studio, buried in these great vintage publications, dating back to the late 1960's, up to the mid 70's. As I inch my way toward the big "6-0" in July, (in a minor panic) I gravitate toward anything that makes me feel youthful. I get a lot of things thrust at me, these days, that remind me how old I am, including my wrinkled brow, and whitening beard, but very few that relieve the vibrant sense of elder-statesmanship, frankly I could do without. These back issues are great fun to browse through, but what is most remarkable, is how they've become such amazing sources of new-age enlightenment; how's that for a contradiction? Something old-time, written and published before my first real date as a teenager, that is so contemporary in spirit and sensibility, it could be published as part of a brave new world, in almost any modern day publication. Stories that would be appropriate to the new music consumer, who has never confessed to self doubts, about why they spend the way they do, to entertain themselves. I think there are lots of stories offering enlightenment, and of this, I am a willing student. I missed the period when these magazines first hit the news-stands in the 1970's, because I was deep into sports and a lot less into music; the listening part, yes, but there was no analysis on my part. To arrive at this time in my life, and realize I have little knowledge of the music of my youth, gives me every reason to dive into these incredible archives now, offered for my reading pleasure. Andrew pointed this out to me, with a wink and nod, when he handed me the box, shortly after buying them, "Hey day, this will remind you of the good old days. Do you even remember that far back." Smart ass! But, truthfully, I was too embarrassed to let him know the truth. I was ignorant about ninety percent of what was making music news when I was a teenager. I was however, willing to brush-up, and in no time at all, I was conversing with son Robert, about the music news I found most compelling. I was excited by my music re-boot, which was really a case of entertainment education 101. Here are some of the articles that caught my attention. I have read them all the magazines cover to cover, but there were highlights I wanted to share with you folks. Let's walk down memory lane together.

     "NEW YORK - John sat propped up on the bed next to Yoko, who was wailing away on her tom-tom. John's rimmed eyelids and the neck of his new fibreglass Mitchell Special, along with the steel soundbox, stared directly into the mouth of Muhammed Ali, brought into their new West Village flat, and the foot of the bed, through the courtesy of New York's public tube facility, channel 13. Muhammed's mouth was moving, obviously he was saying something, but it could not be heard over the piercing scare-the-devil screams of Bible Belt crusader, Dr. Jack Van Impe, recorded live at Landmark Baptist Temple, Royal Oak, Michigan."
    This was the work of Rolling Stone writer, Stu Werbin, responsible for the front page story beneath the heading, "JOHN & JERRY & DAVID & JOHN & LENI & YOKO." The large photograph above, shows Janis Joplin wearing beads and bangles and nothing else. There is a huge, multi-page story, published inside issue No. 102, as a sort of entertainment post mortem of the rock singer's tragically short life.
     Stu Werbin reports, the television broadcast, of Dr. Van Impe, stating that "Nineteen Hundred and Seventy Four is the year they are planning for sex on the street in every major city from coast to coast. And get ready for a shocker. The music they are planning to use to crumble the morals of America is the rotten, filthy, dirty, lewd, lascivious pink called rock and roll. God help you compromising preachers who allow this rock beat into your pulpits on Sunday just because it has 'Jesus Saves' tied to it. It isn't just the words, it's the beat." The television doomsayer, goes on to state, "Four hundred girls in the Detroit area, interviewed as to why they had illegitimate babies said it was not just the words but the beat. The fertility rights of the jungle are the same beats recorded into the modern rock to stir them up." According to Werbin, "Dr. Jack used a portion of his speech to re-acquaint John and Yoko with the lives and writings of another couple, also seated in the flesh around the bed. 'You say I don't know what I'm talking about? The White Panthers leader Sinclair, is now in prison for selling marijuana; he was the leader of Michigan's biggest rock and roll group, MC 5. This is a revolutionary group. You're not hearing from a preacher now, you're hearing from the White Panther leader planning a revolution, a sex revolution by 1974 and all through rock music. Don't you dare defend it. In my city-wide crusade, I preach against immorality, sex, liquor, I can preach against tobacco, name it, they take it. But I've had two churches pull out of my crusade because I hit on rock and roll music. Brother, if it makes the Devil that mad, there has to be something wrong with it'."
     The Rolling Stone article continues, "John Sinclair, at the edge of the bed, laughed so hard that the huge abdomen heaved up and down like a whale breaking waves. His wife Lori, bobbed on his arm with every heave." And "Right on right on right on, Yoko tapped defiantly on her tom-tom."
     In the page 43 article, entitled simply, "Janis," written by David Dalton, the story preamble, by Jonathon Cott, explains how and why the writer began research on Janis Joplin toward the end of her music career.
     "I'm going to write a book about you, David Dalton told Janis Joplin, when she was beginning her first tour with her Full Tilt Boogie Band in Louisville, Kentucky. 'Honey.' Janis replied, in partying manner, and with an eye to the future, 'If you can pay for the plane tickets, then you can follow me around for the rest of my life.' In the beginning of July 1970, David (David Dalton) and I were riding the Festival Express, the amazing communal train trip from Toronto to Calgary, on which Janis played a funky Eleanor of Aquitaine - Catherine the Great, queen to a court of jamming musicians, including the Grateful Dead, Delaney and Bonnie, Buddy Guy, Eric Anderson and Ian and Sylvia. One afternoon as the train sped through the Saskatchewan plains, Janis and Bonnie Bramlett were conversing in the bar, having invited David and his cassette machine to record the dialogue, when David's tape ran out. Janis was just beginning to recount her experiences, of being on stage for the first time with the Big Brother and the Holding Company."
     "They threw these musicians at me, man, and the sound was coming from behind, the bass was charging me, and I decided then and there, that was it. I never wanted to do anything else. It was better than it had been with any man, you know. Maybe that's the trouble....hey where's David?' 'He went to get a tape,' I said. "Goddamn, he's missing great stuff here. Hey, David! Get back on in here!"
     Jonathon Cott concludes, "The night before we reached Calgary, Janis was dressed up for the journey's most glittering and happiest hours. A 'bacchbanalian Little Red Riding Hood, with her bag full of tequila and lemons, lurching from car to car like some tropical bird with streamline feathers', as David described her, she sat with about fifteen musicians and sang renditions of 'You've Got to Hide Your Love Away," and "Bobby McGee." Finishing a song she said something and cackled, then turned around to David, asking, 'Are you remembering what I just said, honey?' Transported and in deep reverie, David mumbled a complaisant 'Sure Janis,' - a Boswell caught thinking of everything but the ineluctable modality of the visible and audible."
     On page 63 there is a full-page article headed on the page, "A New Year's Message from Terry Night," for the inset article, republished from the December 23, 1971, issue of "The Village Voice," entitled "Culture unrecycled "The Next Big Thing," is the next dead thing," by Harold Carlton. It begins, "Remember when culture used to have a capital 'C'? Or when music on the radio used to be just that? There were record albums to buy in stores, too, but nobody expected each performer to launch a whole new culture, an alternative life style, to be a fashion article or to lead a revolution."
     Carlton writes with a crisp assault on the trending of the day, noting, "When I lived in New York City, from 1964 to 1966, it felt as if the whole city would collapse if the radio stations went off the air for too long. We all needed that big beat to wake up to, go to work on, go to sleep to; the best was the beat was the pulse of New York, throbbing through the air like electricity or oxygen, like caffein in coffee, out of laundromats, out of transistors tucked into the bosoms of cleaning-ladies; on the stoops of Harlem where everyone seemed to have a mysterious pre-arranged agreement, to tune into the same station. A few cents' worth of batteries made you feel part of the whole listening audience."
     "There is an annual lecture series on the BBC, called the Reith Lectures. Often more original than (Marshall) McLuhan and more thought provoking than books like 'Future Shock,' they are written by experts and professors, some times pertaining to our wonderful world of media. In that hesitant, modest, British way of university dons, the lectures are delivered without fuss and quietly reprinted in something known as 'the BBC's own organ,' a thin newspaper called the Listener. One lecture-series some years ago was dedicated to the idea that the media, far from propagating the arts, was helping to destroy appreciation of them. Amongst other examples, it stated that owning a recording of, say, a Beethoven symphony, could be harmful, since repeated listening to a recording established a pattern in the listener's mind. When he heard the symphony live, at a concert, he would be disappointed if the live performance did not tally exactly with the version on his recording. Certainly everyone reading this, has had that happen to him at least once, either at a concert or an opera. Or perhaps when seeing a group so attuned to sessions, in the studio, that they cannot perform live, or singers who rely over-much, on engineering effects, to amplify their often meagre voices."
     He goes on to opine, that, "Today, even more than ruining our culture by over-dissemination, we are cutting it off almost at its source. I want to use James Taylor as an example, although half a dozen other uneasy examples would do as well. I want to write of the kind of music which eight years ago, might have been played a few times on the radio, bought in modest quantities in recordings, and been allowed to grow slowly to maturity. Instead James Taylor is playing and singing disposable music. Thanks to a star-hungry public too greedy to allow its stars to be born, every singer must almost immediately, be termed a superstar, or aspire to be one. Only huge worldwide success, is good enough. Let a genuine talent attempt to sing to a small public, and he might find Time Life, or record-company spies in the audience, all of them on the track of 'The Next Big Thing.' Singers are not the only artists being eaten alive by the process; actors, directors, writers also suffer, but singers suffer the worst because a big record can happen much faster than it takes a book to be published, or a film to be completed. I would suggest that if we can get away from the concept of 'The Next Big Thing,' we'd have a healthier arts scene. Like the commercialization of health foods, one begins to wonder whether all those vegetables, fruits and eggs can possibly all be organic."
     The writer concludes, "Two decades ago, and we might as well say a century ago, people bought Rosemary Clooney and Doris Day records, for humming along to. Those were the days; when pop was pure pop. The first rock 'n roll records were outbursts of energy rather than genuine protest. Dylan made pop literary. Dylan records were bought mainly for their lyrics, their poems. A James Taylor record does not represent music exactly, or just lyrics, but a life style, an attitude. Playing James Taylor on your record player is showing, in the vaguest, least committed way possible, which side of the gap you're on. Which gap" Any one you'd care to name."
     "So music as music is not being appreciated; not through its notes, its melodies, or is rhythm. Rather through its lack of rhythm, as in James Taylor's supine, weary cadence; a conscious rejection of modern-life pressures, opting out, music-to-feel-sorry-for-yourself-to; hippie Muzak. They are going to make a fortune out of it."
     Gads, how incredibly relevant this is today. The names of performers have changed, but not the point of the argument. The bottom line of the story stays the same. "They (the industry) are going to make a fortune out of it!"
     Stay tuned to this blog, for yet another vintage "Rolling Stone" review, tomorrow, because, well, it's so much fun researching this kind of ancient history. As ancient as I am, thank you very much.
     Thanks for taking the time to visit.