On the Road with Janis Joplin

One of Parade's Top Ten Rock n' Roll Reads

As a road manager and filmmaker, John Byrne Cooke helped run the Janis Joplin show—and record it for posterity. Now he reveals the never-before-told story of his years with the young woman from Port Arthur who would become the first female rock-and-roll superstar.

In 1967, as the new sound of rock and roll was taking over popular music, John Byrne Cooke was at the center of it all. As a member of D. A. Pennebaker’s film crew, he witnessed the astonishing breakout performances of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix at the Monterey Pop Festival that June. Less than six months later, he became road manager for Janis and her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and from then on, Cooke was a constant presence behind the scenes as the woman called Pearl took the world by storm.

This intimate memoir spans the years he spent with Janis, from Monterey to Europe, Woodstock and Festival Express. Cooke tells the whole incredible story as only someone who lived it can.
 
INCLUDES PERSONAL PHOTOGRAPHS“The story of the woman who skyrocketed to fame as the first female rock superstar and left it at a tragically young age—from someone who had a front-row seat.”—New York Post 

“The best book about Janis [Joplin]."—Sam Andrews, Big Brother and the Holding Company

“[Cooke] is a gifted writer, letting Joplin’s vivaciousness and intensity shine throughout the work.”—Library Journal

"Janis Joplin was absolutely a barnstormer and a complete groundbreaker. She wasn't just a great woman in rock—at the time she was the woman in rock. Janis really created this whole world of possibility for women in music: Without Janis Joplin, there would be no Melissa Etheridge. Without Janis, there would be no Chrissie Hynde, no Gwen Stefani. There would be no one." —Rosanne Cash

“[Janis Joplin] perfectly expressed the feelings and yearnings of the girls of the electric generation—to be all woman, yet equal with men; to be free, yet a slave to real love; to [reject] every outdated convention, and yet get back to the basics of life.” —Lillian Roxon, rock critic

“Joplin belonged to that select group of pop figures who mattered as much for themselves as for their music. Among American rock performers, she was second only to Bob Dylan in importance as a creator-recorder-embodiment of her generation’s mythology.” —Ellen Wills, rock journalistJohn Byrne Cooke was Janis Joplin’s road manager from 1967 until her death. He is an award-winning author of four previous books, a performing musician with decades of experience, a photographer, and a filmmaker. He has written book reviews for the New York Times, Washington Post Book World, and the Los Angeles Times. He lives in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

SO MANY PEOPLE have helped in so many ways to bring this book, at long last, into the light of day, that I approach the task of acknowledging them with the certain knowledge that I will forget one or more whose names should be recognized here. I ask your forgiveness at the outset for any omissions, and I promise to rectify them when I can.

Laura and Michael Joplin, Janis’s sister and brother, have shepherded Janis’s legacy through the years with care and love. They have supported the use of my photographs and films of Janis in many projects, and I am grateful for their support for this one. Jeff Jampol, the manager of Janis’s estate, has been similarly supportive; he has preserved and enhanced Janis’s legacy through a variety of creative projects and he provided valuable assistance and advice in moving this book along the path to publication.

Candace Lake, my agent and friend for almost four decades, guided the effort to find a home for this book, and provided the vital link that helped us arrive at Anthony Mattero, of Foundry Literary + Media, who expertly planned the final steps that led us to Berkley Books. Their support and friendship is ongoing, and deeply appreciated.

Authors do not choose their editors. I have been very fortunate in the editors who have chosen to work with me, never more so than in the case of my present editor, Denise Silvestro. Her encouragement, advice, and innovative solutions to every vexing question have improved this book in ways I never imagined possible. Denise’s assistant, Allison Janice, labored valiantly over the source notes and performed countless other chores without ever making me feel that any other books or authors needed a minute of her time. Managing editor Michelle Kasper kept the book on schedule. She and many others at Berkley Books and Penguin Random House have made me feel very lucky to be with this publisher.

Stacy Kreuzmann Quinn and Nancy Reid, of Acid Test Productions, who published Janis Joplin: A Performance Diary, encouraged me to tell my own story of these years and provided helpful suggestions and insights.

Earl Crabb and David Swift scanned research pages and early drafts of this book into my computer before I knew anything about scanning. Earl has contributed so many hours of computer diagnosis, problem-solving and advice over the course of thirty years that I can never adequately repay him, but I will try my best to channel Albert Grossman and pick up the check anytime we break bread together.

Many of Janis’s friends and mine, among them many of the people who knew Janis best during her years of national and international touring, contributed their insights and knowledge by agreeing to sit down for recorded conversations with me. Excerpts in the book are credited as “Author interview with,” but these were truly conversations that followed wherever the pathways of memory took us, rather than a prepared list of questions, although I had those too. None of these contributors were more consistently helpful than Sam Andrew, of Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Bob Neuwirth. Dave Getz and Peter Albin, the other surviving members of Big Brother, also deserve special mention. Thanks also to Mark Braunstein; Kozmic Blues Band members Brad Campbell, Terry Clements, Snooky Flowers, Richard Kermode, and John Till; Full Tilt Boogie members Richard Bell, Ken Pearson, and Clark Pierson; and Committee members Alan Myerson (director), Howard Hesseman, Carl Gottlieb, and Garry Goodrow.

I would like to write individual words of thanks to all the others who helped me, but in order that the reader can move along a little sooner to Janis’s story, I list them here with my heartfelt thanks to each: Dave Barry, Peter Berg, Barbara Carroll, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Lyndall Erb, Mimi Fariña, Barry Feinstein, John Fisher, Dave and Vera-Mae Fredrickson, Charlie Frizzell, Ralph J. Gleason, Bennett Glotzer, Bob (Robert E.) Gordon, Allison Caine Gottlieb, Bill Graham, Linda Gravenites, Nick Gravenites, Debbie Green, Sally Grossman, Robert L. Jones, Al Kooper, Jon McIntire, Milan Melvin, Margaret Moore, Seth Morgan, Geoff Muldaur, D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, Frazer Pennebaker, Peter Pilafian, Fritz Richmond, Paul Rothchild, Rock Scully, Bob Seidemann, and Mary Works.

Thanks to one and all, and God bless us, every one.

—

PETER ALBIN, DAVE Getz, and Sam Andrew continue to perform music together as Big Brother and the Holding Company, and in other combinations. Robert Altman, D. A. Pennebaker, and Bob Seidemann generously contributed photographs that are included in this book. Mary Works’s film The Life and Times of the Red Dog Saloon beautifully chronicles the origins of the San Francisco rock-and-roll ballroom scene in the midsixties. You can follow their activities and see their work at these websites:

Official Janis Joplin website: janisjoplin.com

Big Brother and the Holding Company: bbhc.com

Robert Altman Photography: altmanphoto.com

Pennebaker-Hegedus Films: phfilms.com

Bob Seidemann Photography: bobseidemann.com

Mary Works: reddogsaloonfilm.com/Red_Dog_Saloon_Film/Welcome.html

AUTHOR’S NOTE

A FRIEND OF mine likes to say that history is what you remember. Memories are fallible, of course. Our impressions of the past are subjective and selective. They summon up what we want it to be as well as what it was. In preparing to write this story I spoke with many people who experienced the same events I did, and many who were present at times and places where I was not. We all saw the sixties from different perspectives. For many of us, the friendships we formed in those years have proven to be lifelong; we share similar memories of the music and the seemingly unlimited possibilities that characterized the times.

Aided by the recollections of others, this narrative relates my personal experience, focused through my memory and shaped according to my sensibilities. Any errors of fact or interpretation are mine alone.

John Byrne Cooke
Jackson, Wyoming
2014

THE BANDS

BIG BROTHER AND THE HOLDING COMPANY

Janis Joplin—vocals and percussion

Sam Andrew—guitar and vocals*

James Gurley—guitar and vocals

Peter Albin—bass, guitar and vocals

Dave Getz—drums

Road Crew

Big Brother had no road manager until Albert Grossman managed the band.

John Cooke—road manager

Dave Richards—equipment

Mark Braunstein—equipment

George Ostrow—equipment

Management

Chet Helms (1965–1966)

Julius Karpen (1966–1967)

Albert Grossman (1967–)

John Court—Albert’s partner (1967–1968)

Bert Block—Albert’s partner (1968–1969)

THE KOZMIC BLUES BAND

Musicians playing each instrument are listed in the order in which they played with this band.

Janis Joplin—vocals and percussion

Sam Andrew—guitar and vocals

John Till—guitar

Brad Campbell—bass

Roy Markowitz—drums

Lonnie Castille—drums

Maury Baker—drums

Terry Clements—alto saxophone

Snooky Flowers—baritone saxophone and vocals

Marcus Doubleday—trumpet

Terry Hensley—trumpet

Luis Gasca—trumpet

Dave Woodward—trumpet

Bill King—organ

Richard Kermode—organ

Road Crew

John Cooke—road manager (Dec. 1968–Oct. 1969)

Joe Crowley—road manager (Oct.–Dec. 1969)

Mark Braunstein—equipment

George Ostrow—equipment

Vince Mitchell—equipment

Management

Albert Grossman

Bert Block—Albert’s partner (–1969)

Bennett Glotzer—Albert’s partner (1969–)

FULL TILT BOOGIE

There were no changes in personnel during the life of this band.

Janis Joplin—vocals and percussion

John Till—guitar

Brad Campbell—bass

Ken Pearson—organ

Richard Bell—electric piano

Clark Pierson—drums

Road Crew

John Cooke—road manager

George Ostrow—equipment

Vince Mitchell—equipment

Phil Badella—equipment

Joel Kornoelje—equipment

Management

Albert Grossman

Bennett Glotzer

CHAPTER ONE

November 30, 1967

THE 707’S WHEELS touch down at San Francisco International Airport and with few regrets I leave behind the East, where my mother’s family has lived since they arrived on the New England coast aboard a vessel that followed in the wake of the Mayflower. There they landed and there, for the most part, they stayed, close by the Atlantic shore. In five hours I’ve covered what it took the emigrants of the nineteenth century’s great westward migration months of peril to travel. Like those earlier travelers, I’m casting off the old and hoping to find in California the magic pathway to the rest of my life.

Go west, young man.

In my case, it is Albert Grossman, not Horace Greeley, who points the way.

The southwest wind is roiling the shallow waters off the airport runway, turning them muddy emerald. It has been a cold fall in the East. By comparison, the California air feels springlike as I cross the tarmac to the terminal. The hills that surround the Bay are greened by the rains that return to the coast with autumn. Autumn in the East forces the flora into retreat and quiescence. To an easterner, green hills in November signal rebirth ahead of its time, a resurrection that fills me with hope. The breeze carries the scent of growing things. Mixed with the jet fumes, I can smell salt water, and something more exotic—patchouli oil, maybe, or pot.

Peter Albin greets me at the gate. We have talked on the phone in recent days, to discuss logistics (“My flight gets in at . . .” “I’ll pick you up and we’ll . . .”). I know Peter by sight because I saw him, back in June, at the Monterey International Pop Festival, standing his ground at stage right as a member of Big Brother and the Holding Company, the band that knocked the audience back on its collective heel. Peter’s feet don’t move much when he plays the electric bass. His body sways to the beat, sometimes curling over the instrument to wring from it insistent riffs that propel the songs forward, sometimes standing bolt upright, his back arched, shaking the bass so the notes fly from the stage with that much more force.

In the airport, face-to-face, Peter is friendly, open, welcoming. He moves with angular looseness and has a lopsided smile. At twenty-three, he’s the youngest in the band. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I have lived for the past nine years, Peter’s shoulder-length hair would earn him derisive shouts of “Hahvahd fairy!” from the townies, their ducktails rigid with Brylcreem. In SFO, he attracts surreptitious glances from the servicemen emplaning for Vietnam and the businessmen in their suits. It would surprise them to know that Peter is a junior executive, dressed for rock and roll. He is the member of Big Brother who signs the contracts, the one who comes to pick up the guy dispatched from New York by Albert Grossman—creator of Peter, Paul and Mary, manager of Bob Dylan and a host of lesser folk luminaries—to oversee the band on the road. As the music of the counterculture has evolved from folk to folk-rock—the Mamas & the Papas, Simon & Garfunkel, Buffalo Springfield—to full-bore rock and roll, Albert has kept pace.

When Peter’s car crests the rise where Highway 101 leaves South San Francisco behind and comes in view of the city proper, I see the white houses dancing up and down the hills and I feel at home. San Francisco is my favorite American city. I have been here often over the years, most recently in June, when I landed at SFO as part of D. A. Pennebaker’s film crew, on my way to Monterey for the Pop Festival, fired then, as now, with the sense of moving toward the promise of things to come, ready to do my part to make the promise come true.

I have a family connection to the Bay Area, an uncle who is a professor of botany at UC Berkeley. When I drove across the country for the first time, in the summer after my sophomore year at Harvard, my uncle’s Berkeley home was my destination. In recent years, it is music that has brought me often to the cities by the Bay. From the first time I stepped into the Club 47 coffeehouse in Cambridge and heard Joan Baez sing, music has defined my friendships and my life. I discovered bluegrass music and became a member of Cambridge’s homegrown bluegrass and old-time band, the Charles River Valley Boys. In the spring of 1963 I drove across the country again, this time with two friends from Cambridge, and we discovered in Berkeley a folk community that was welcoming and familiar.

In the folk music revival, Berkeley and Cambridge were united by enthusiasm for the traditional roots of American music, black and white, and the innovations that creative players could derive from those themes. Some of my Cambridge friends made the journey to California regularly. A few moved here. The kinship forged on the Cambridge-Berkeley axis was based on sharing the music and shunning competition. We believed ourselves to be quietly superior to what we saw as the more commercially oriented pickers in New York and L.A. Our image of the prototypical New York guitar player was a guy who turned toward the wall when he played his hottest licks, so you couldn’t see how he did it.

Since that first visit to the Berkeley folk scene in 1963, I have come back whenever I can, to play music and smoke dope and drink Jack Daniel’s Tennessee whiskey and Rainier Ale—Berkeley’s preferred boilermaker, known locally as JD and Green Death—and to experience the brilliant, preternaturally focused California days that inspire us to throw some bread and cheese and wine into a backpack and take acid and spend the day somewhere on the coast.

A couple of years ago I moved to California for what I thought would be forever, but it turned out I was chasing the Wrong Girl. This time, I’m here to stay. I have left behind the life of a performing musician in the interest of getting serious about the rest of my life. For now, I will help others devote themselves more fully to their music while I handle the money and logistics. I have exchanged my guitar for an attaché case. It contains itineraries, contracts, and the promise of loud music, late nights, and loose women.

To Peter Albin, I reveal none of the giddy high that the waters of the Bay, the sight of Coit Tower, a glimpse of the Golden Gate Bridge, arouse in me. With Peter, I’m all business. I’m cool. He takes me to a motel on Columbus Avenue, in North Beach. A few years ago, the North Beach coffeehouses were the focus of San Francisco’s folk scene, and before that, the home of the Beats. I wonder if any unamplified music survives in the city that has become the wellspring of American rock and roll, but satisfying this curiosity will have to wait. Right now, I’ve got to pass inspection by my prospective employers. Peter gives me half an hour to come down from thirty thousand feet, then picks me up again and takes me to meet the band.

They rehearse in a third-floor loft in a building they call the Warehouse, close by an off-ramp where the Central Freeway dumps traffic into the city streets. When Peter and I enter the loft, the four other members of the band are sitting at a round oak table by the windows. There’s a bed covered with a madras spread, the ubiquitous, versatile fabric by which a generation of bohemian youth is enriching the textile magnates of India. There are amps and instruments and a drum set off to one side, random sticks of furniture, and enough floor space to hold a dance competition. A few oil paintings adorn the walls. They’re by the drummer, David Getz, I will learn. David has set his painting aside for a venture into rock and roll.

The space could be any number of artists’ lofts where I’ve been to late-night parties in New York, but, except for the paintings, the art in progress here isn’t visible, and the quintet scrutinizing me now is pure San Francisco. This is the moment of truth. The truth is, I’m nervous, which is a condition I customarily conceal beneath a reserved exterior.

I recognize Janis, of course, but Peter is a polite fellow and he introduces her first. It was Janis who took the audience’s breath away at Monterey, this Texas white girl who belts the rocking blues like no one else, propelled by one of the founding bands of the San Francisco Sound.

Sam Andrew and James Gurley are the lanky guitar players, sprawled in their chairs with legs askew. Tight-fitting black jeans. Pointy-toed boots. Long hair. Way longer than any East Coast beatnik’s. Theirs is down past their shoulders, combed straight like Janis’s. I’m six-feet-one-and-a-bit, and I judge that Sam and James, upright, will inhabit the same altitude. Peter is a couple of inches shorter. David is more compact. He falls into the range that eyewitnesses describe as average height. At this meeting he sits squarely on his chair, all his attention on me, just as he sits at his drums onstage, centered and balanced. David’s hair, and Peter’s, is a little shorter than Sam’s and James’s, pageboy haircuts gone to seed.

Janis is watchful. In repose her face is unremarkable, not what you’d call pretty. Only her eyes betray the vitality she releases in performance. They are clear and alert, and when the introductions are over it is Janis who speaks first.

“What sign are you?”

“Libra.”

“That sounds just,” James says. This is a generous reaction and I’m grateful to him, but Janis is looking me up and down with all the distrust appropriate for greeting a newcomer from the East, a road manager imposed on the band by Albert Grossman, the personal manager they barely know and for sure don’t fully trust.

Janis shrugs. “I don’t care much about Libras one way or the other.”

But I’m cool. I take no offense, because they accept me. Cautiously and with reservations, to be sure, but they accept me. I’m a rock-and-roll road manager. When I got off the plane it was only make-believe.

Now it’s real.

“I remember Janis took to you right away, man. She thought you were cute.”

Sam Andrew

CHAPTER TWO

THE POET-NOVELIST ROBERT Penn Warren wrote, “I eat a persimmon and the teeth of a tinker in Tibet are put on edge.” He liked to watch the far-reaching ripples of unpredictable cause and effect spread from that crystalline moment when the stone hits the still surface of the pond.

There are times and places where the flow of events becomes focused through an accidental lens—an experience, an event that becomes a turning point in many lives. Our generation is entranced by synchronicity, yet only those most attuned to the flow recognize these confluences for what they are at the time, even when they blunder into them head-on. The Monterey Pop Festival was such a moment for Janis and Big Brother. Their presence at the festival and the effect of their performance were the result of many decisions and turning points, any one of which might have yielded a different result.

For my part, if I hadn’t been at the Pop Festival, I wouldn’t have become the road manager for Big Brother and the Holding Company. That’s as close to fact as you can get in the realm of “what if?”

What if Big Brother hadn’t played at Monterey? They might not have signed a management contract with Albert Grossman later that year, maybe never. They might still have achieved the wider renown that launched Janis to even greater fame as the first woman superstar in rock music, for she was a powerful force, probably uncontainable at that point in the evolution of American popular music.

But the alternatives were roads not taken.

We were there, the band and I, borne by ripples set in motion at points far separated in geography and time, and the effect for each of us was life-changing. As a result, I moved from Cambridge to California as the focus of the counterculture shifted from east to west, and I continued to be a participant—in a new capacity—in the music that was pied piper to a decade of innovation and upheaval. For Janis and Big Brother, the attention they gained at the Monterey Pop Festival launched them toward their destiny and summoned the forces that would eventually pull them apart.

At this remove in time, Monterey seems to me the jewel in the crown of the sixties. It was not the largest festival, but the brightest, the most finely formed, where all the benevolent potency that musicians and fans could generate together was made manifest, briefly, like a rainbow, or a ring around the sun, a vision impossible to fix in the physical world, but one whose glow endures in memory, freighted with emotion and meaning.

I’d like to claim that I understood the full significance of the Pop Festival while I was following D. A. Pennebaker around the Monterey County Fairgrounds with a Nagra tape recorder slung from my shoulder, but that would be an abuse of the storyteller’s power. Much later, when I traced how the Pop Festival came about, how Big Brother came to be included and how Pennebaker came to film it, I marveled at the winding paths we followed, each strewn with many “What if?” moments, where a different decision, a different opportunity at any step of the way could have changed everything.

The seeds of the landmark gathering were sown by a quartet of would-be rock entrepreneurs from Los Angeles whose names sounded like a promising law firm: Wheeler, Taylor, Pariser and Shapiro. The idea was simple and visionary—corral as many of the reigning pop stars of the moment as could be persuaded to work for a small fraction of their regular fees to play at a three-day festival that would unfold at the county fairgrounds in Monterey sometime in the summer of 1967. Enlist nobody but headliners. Shoot for the stars. Dazzle the music world and reap the harvest.

Things didn’t work out quite the way these visionaries planned. They needed one act to commit before the rest, as a bellwether, a stalking horse. Get the bandwagon rolling, they thought, and others will jump on board. They approached the Mamas and the Papas and Simon and Garfunkel, separately.

You want us to play for a small fraction of our regular fee? Who else have you got?

The would-be promoters named a bunch of names tinged with stardust, none of whom had yet pledged themselves to the festival. Forget it, said the Mamas and the Papas and Simon and Garfunkel, separately. The would-be promoters pleaded, and their enthusiasm kindled a spark of light in Papa John Phillips. The Taylor of the firm was Derek Taylor, formerly a tabloid journalist in his native England, more recently the publicist for and a good chum of the Beatles. Taylor was slight and fastidious, whereas Phillips was long and loose. They both had genuine smiles, honest charm, and a way with words. Phillips sensed in Taylor a kindred spirit. I’ll tell you what, Phillips said. I’ll talk to Paul (Simon) and Art (Garfunkel), and if they say yes we’ll say yes.

Already a crucial change had taken place. Instead of the would-be promoters trying to sign up musicians, one of the musicians was talking to other musicians to consider how a new kind of music festival might come to be.

A meeting took place at Jeanette MacDonald’s Bel Air mansion, which John and Michelle Phillips had recently purchased, thanks to John’s way with words and harmonies and chord progressions. (A new day had surely dawned when folk-rock stars could buy real estate only movie stars—and a few popular music stars of a very different style—could previously afford.) The main house, a mansion deserving of the name, encouraged everyone to believe that music could build castles in the air.

Attending the summit were John and Michelle and Paul and Art, the would-be promoters, and another quartet—Adler, Melcher, Turetsky and Somer—that in fact included two lawyers. This was, after all, L.A., the land of greed and profit. True, it had welcomed or given birth in recent years not only to the Mamas and the Papas but also to Buffalo Springfield and the Chambers Brothers and the Byrds and the Beach Boys. Hippie chicks with stars in their eyes and love in their hearts flocked to the Sunset Strip, where the promoters and the agents camouflaged themselves with bell-bottoms and hair newly permitted to grow past ears and collars, but the bottom line was still the bottom line.

There was magic in the air at Jeanette MacDonald’s castle, and magic carried the day. The musicians decided they absolutely definitely positively would not play for a fraction of their usual fees, but they would play for free, and from that moment the musicians ran the festival.

Within a few days, the Beach Boys, the Byrds, the Who, the Association, Dionne Warwick, and Buffalo Springfield had added their names to the list of performers, with the Mamas and the Papas and Simon and Garfunkel at the top. Within a week, the festival was christened the Monterey International Pop Festival and it boasted among its board of governors Paul McCartney of the Beatles, Jim McGuinn of the Byrds, Mick Jagger and Andrew Loog Oldham of the Rolling Stones, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, John Phillips, Lou Adler—formerly the record producer for Jan and Dean, now producing the Mamas and the Papas—Smokey Robinson, Paul Simon, and Johnny Rivers. An eclectic assortment of talents, heavily inclined toward the L.A. cosmology. The festival would be set up as a nonprofit, with the proceeds to go to causes that benefited popular music, applications to be reviewed by the board.

The momentum began to build, the bandwagon fired up a head of steam, and more talent, from far and near, lined up to climb aboard. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Eric Burdon and the Animals. Booker T. and the MGs, Canned Heat, Hugh Masakela, the Electric Flag, Laura Nyro, the Blues Project, the Paupers, Jimi Hendrix. Otis Redding! Ravi Shankar! Enough stars, well known and lesser known, to establish a new galaxy and open it up for business.

Okay, what’s missing?

The festival directors knew that a bunch of bands with funny names had sprung up in San Francisco in the past couple of years. They knew because Jefferson Airplane already had a hit—“White Rabbit”—whose references to drugs had put a generation of wary parents even more on their guard, and because one of the best-respected music critics of the day was championing the Northern California rockers.

The San Francisco Chronicle’s Ralph J. Gleason would not have been out of place in a thirties spy movie by the brothers Warner. He was a between-the-wars character, trench-coated, armed with a sardonic manner, his cigarettes screwed into a short black holder. He looked with amusement on the excesses of the young, and at the same time reveled in the present moment. Gleason had written a jazz column since the day after the Creation. When he blessed a jazz album with liner notes, he bestowed the imprimatur of a recognized authority. He had alarmed his hepcat readers in the early sixties by writing the occasional column about folk music. Joan Baez caught his eye and ear. So did Bob Dylan. Gleason was that rarity among critics, a music lover who dared to applaud new music that he deemed worthy, even if the newcomers were displacing the cherished sounds of his own generation.

Gleason led the way, among the established critics, in recognizing and extolling the unique sound of the San Francisco rock bands. The scene in San Francisco had been percolating for a couple of years, mostly keeping to itself. Bright-eyed kids flocked to the Avalon and the Fillmore, Depression-era ballrooms now levitating to a new beat, where fans gyrated around the dance floors and the bands played the dancers like an instrument. When the energy of the dancers encouraged the songs to run long, the symbiosis offered flashes of enlightenment. There were light shows and acid tests, and the sexual revolution was enlisting eager recruits by the thousand.

The civic authorities, alarmed, resuscitated an archaic bit of municipal code that prohibited dancing at concerts of live music. Gleason lobbied in his column to overturn the code. At his urging, the Chronicle editorialized in support