BOOK: ‘On the Road With Janis Joplin’ by John Byrne Cooke
At the beginning
of John Byrne Cook’s On The Road With Janis Joplin, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it appears to be more about Cooke’s memories of the ‘60s scene rather than Joplin herself, who’s barely mentioned for the first 50 pages. But, told more like a diary than a biography, Cooke craftily sets the scene and slowly introduces his leading lady, allowing the reader to gradually get to know Joplin as he does.
We meet her as an unsure, budding superstar, suspicious of her new road manager and, as Cooke tells the tale, we grow to love and respect this iconic character as a flawed but hugely likeable human being: a simple but hugely talented girl struggling to be loved and to live up to a persona that eventually overwhelmed her.
Cooke certainly has a superb pedigree himself: the son of legendary journalist and broadcaster Alistair Cooke, he eventually followed in his father’s footsteps to become a writer and novelist himself. More importantly, he was a successful folk musician with the bluegrass outfit the Charles River Valley Band during folk’s heyday and not only witnessed the ‘60s music scene from the inside but was also friends with some of its most famous, interesting, and important characters from Bob Dylan to Albert Grossman to Judy Collins to D.A. Pennebaker. Cooke could easily write a book based on his many experiences during this decade alone but his relationship with Janis Joplin is without a doubt particularly fascinating.
So many books have been written about Joplin but, like Laura Joplin’s excellent Love, Janis, what makes this superior to most is that Cooke actually intimately knew his subject, and this of course raises it above the majority of Joplin biographies out there. Cooke first witnessed Joplin’s power as a performer while helping to film the infamous Monterey Pop Festival where she and her band Big Brother and the Holding Company became one of the show’s most talked-about acts. Their breakthrough performance led to a management deal with Albert Grossman — the man behind Dylan — and it was upon Grossman’s request that Cooke got his first job as a road manager for Joplin and the boys.
Cooke then relates the tale of what being Joplin’s road manager entailed, from organizing every detail of the band’s life on the road to eventually becoming a close friend and confidante, all the while witnessing some incredible and often legendary performances. Cooke became so essential to Joplin that it was he to whom she turned when she wanted to attend her tenth high school reunion in her hometown of Port Arthur, Texas, which Joplin pictured as a great homecoming but instead ended in disappointment. There are also priceless stories of fights with Jerry Lee Lewis (who was particularly rude and unkind to Joplin) and a nasty Jim Morrison, which resulted in her smashing a bottle of drink over the Lizard King’s drunken head.
These tales live up to Joplin’s legendary reputation as the tough, cackling, whisky-swigging rock ‘n’ roller, but Cooke also reveals the softer side of her: the girl who read the newspapers cover to cover every day and was startlingly intelligent, who fell head over heels in love and looked forward to being married, who was funny and sweet and often full of doubt. Anyone looking for all the dirt on all the drugs she took and who made it into her bed will be disappointed, because this is a book more about Joplin as a working artist and as the person beyond the public image that she projected, to who she really was to her family and close friends.
Cooke was also there at the very end: he was the first person to discover her body and poignantly describes that heartbreaking day and having to tell the devastating news of her death to her family and friends. Like the rest of the book, this is approached in a beautifully sensitive way that only a friend could tell and proves to be incredibly moving.
Throughout the book, Cooke also doesn’t rely on just his own memories, as the stories are supplemented with many revealing interviews and insights from various band members and friends around at this time who also knew and worked with Joplin. The book even ends with six pages of memories from those he interviewed over the years, which makes a lovely postscript to it all.
In On The Road With Janis Joplin, Cooke provides a superb insight to Joplin as a performer and as a person giving us an insider’s view of the world she inhabited and her daily life while touring and recording. It makes a brilliant companion piece to Laura Joplin’s excellent aforementioned biography (which beautifully reveals Joplin’s early years and home life) with Cooke showing Joplin as the professional, the artist, the pop star in a way that only someone who experienced it with her could. Because of this, Cooke has provided one of the best books on Janis Joplin to have been written so far.
(Cover photo by John Byrne Cooke.)
