Janis Joplin

Lurking in Some Obscure Corner

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Like a shortwave radio attempting to tune into a remote overseas station, my threadbare synapses sometimes spit out static as I try to remember the point of story I’m trying to tell. 

Maybe it’s the cannabis, maybe the onset of dementia, or to harken back to Big Brother and the Holding Company, “a combination of the two.”

For the uninitiated, “A Combination of the Two” is the opening track of Big Brother’s album Cheap Thrills featuring the incomparable Janis Joplin. I had always assumed that the song was a live recording, but as it turns out, the audience noise and Sam Andrew’s introduction of the band, “Four gentlemen and one great, great broad,” have been dubbed in to create the illusion of a live recording. Well, it certainly had me fooled for over a half century.

BTW, the great Robert Crumb did the cover art.

In my novel Today, Oh Boy, as Will Waring is popping Cheap Thrills into his van’s 8-track tape player, he says out loud to himself, “Four gentleman and one great, great broad.”  Recently, when Rodgers Nichols interviewed me on his podcast Cover to Cover, he mentioned the allusion, said as a former radio DJ he really appreciated it.[1]

Anyway, what was my point?

Oh, yeah, forgetfulness.

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

“Forgetfulness” by Billy Collins

[1] You can catch the interview HERE.

The Omission of Blue Cheer

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In my last two years at Porter-Gaud, I taught a class called “America in the Sixties,” a history elective I felt unqualified to teach.  Sure I came of age in the Late Sixties and Early Seventies, yes, I was suspended from school for wearing a black armband on Moratorium Day[1], and, um, sure, I could offer firsthand insight of what it is like to ingest lysergic acid diethylamide. On the other hand, my knowledge of the Freedom Riders, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, and the Great Society agenda was on par with Mike Pence‘s knowledge of the poetry of Charles Bukowski.

The one topic we covered I felt confident about was music.  Thanks to the sophistication of the latest technology, I could embed short videos into Keynote slide shows that covered the roots of rock, Early Sixties music, Mo Town, Stax, the British invasion, and finally the San Francisco sound.

But even here I was somewhat derelict because in the San Francisco piece I failed to mention the seminal acid blues rock band Blue Cheer, whom some identify as the very first heavy metal band.[2]

My pal, the late Gordon Wilson, turned me on to Blue Cheer in ’69.  The band, which borrowed their name from a variety of LSD, had released a really arresting album, Vincebus Eruptum, the year before.   Its most successful single, a cover of Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues,” actually peaked at #14 on Billboard, though I don’t remember ever hearing it on the radio. Also featured on the album was the blues standard “Rock Me, baby,” made famous earlier by Muddy Waters and BB King.

Eddie Cochran

So what you got was the blues all hepped up on goofballs.

Here’s a video.  Note the relentless drumming and wailing guitar.

 

 

Anyway, I think “Summertime Blues” holds up fairly well, though I doubt if many of my students in the Sixties course would have dug it.  When I first started teaching at PG in the mid-Eighties, students were obsessed by Sixties music.  In fact, I dubbed them “the re-generation.” However, nowadays hip hop and country have replaced rock as the most popular genres, and most of those students of mine last year would prefer to hear Beyoncé over Janis Joplin.

[1]15 October 1969

[2]Maybe, but isn’t the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” at least a heavy metal song, even if you wouldn’t call the Kinks a “heavy metal band?”