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Backstage With Janis Joplin: Doubts, Drugs And Compassion
November 29, 2014
Janis Joplin felt a sense of outsider isolation throughout her life. She once said, "On stage, I make love to 25,000 different people. Then I go home alone."
But she wasn't alone — she had John Byrne Cooke.
Cooke was Janis Joplin's first and only road manager, from 1967 until her death from a heroin overdose in 1970. He was the one who found her body. In a new memoir, On the Road With Janis Joplin, he details the electrifying performances — and the drugs — that marked Joplin's tours.
When he started the job, Cooke says, he didn't know anything about managing a rock band. In 1967, he was fresh out of Harvard when legendary rock manager Albert Grossman asked him to fly out to San Francisco to help manage this up-and-coming singer and her psychedelic blues rock band Big Brother & the Holding Company.
Joplin switched bands over the years, but kept Cook as her road manager — so he witnessed the changes that came with each new backing group.
"Janis' progression from one band to the next was really the dramatic arc of the three years that I was with her," he tells NPR's Eric Westervelt. "Three years, three bands — and it actually resolves into three dramatic acts."
Listen to whole piece http://www.npr.org/2014/11/29/366614537/backstage-with-janis-joplin-doubts-drugs-and-compassion
November 29, 2014
Janis Joplin felt a sense of outsider isolation throughout her life. She once said, "On stage, I make love to 25,000 different people. Then I go home alone."
But she wasn't alone — she had John Byrne Cooke.
Cooke was Janis Joplin's first and only road manager, from 1967 until her death from a heroin overdose in 1970. He was the one who found her body. In a new memoir, On the Road With Janis Joplin, he details the electrifying performances — and the drugs — that marked Joplin's tours.
When he started the job, Cooke says, he didn't know anything about managing a rock band. In 1967, he was fresh out of Harvard when legendary rock manager Albert Grossman asked him to fly out to San Francisco to help manage this up-and-coming singer and her psychedelic blues rock band Big Brother & the Holding Company.
Joplin switched bands over the years, but kept Cook as her road manager — so he witnessed the changes that came with each new backing group.
"Janis' progression from one band to the next was really the dramatic arc of the three years that I was with her," he tells NPR's Eric Westervelt. "Three years, three bands — and it actually resolves into three dramatic acts."
Listen to whole piece http://www.npr.org/2014/11/29/366614537/backstage-with-janis-joplin-doubts-drugs-and-compassion
