On the Road with Janis Joplin by John Byrne Cooke Read Free Book Online Page A

of the Pennebaker crew are focused on the performances at hand. On Saturday evening, Otis Redding is the highlight, but the Airplane, theByrds, Hugh Masakela, and Booker T. and the MGs also work their magic.
    On Sunday morning, Chief Marinello sends home half the officers he has mustered to police the festival.
    Ravi Shankar is the sole performer on Sunday afternoon. In this gathering where the other performers are mining mother lode veins of rock and roll, R&B, folk, and jazz, the crowd—a scattering of blues and jazz and folk fans among the dominant mass of beatniks and hippies and flower children—accords Shankar the status of guru-for-the-day.
    For this performance, I take control of the button that will turn on the red light and signal the cameras to roll. Our tripod cameras have twelve-hundred-foot magazines that run for half an hour without reloading, but the others—the free-roaming cameras on our catwalks alongside the stage—have four-hundred-foot rolls that last just ten minutes. Penny has decided to film Ravi’s final raga, which will surely run longer than that. My job is to guess when the tune is within ten minutes of its end, so the shoulder-held cameras can shoot without interruption until it’s over.
    My qualifications for undertaking this responsibility are late nights in Cambridge that ended up stoned to the gills and zoning out to the recordings of this very same wizard of the sitar, or to Ali Akbar Khan, equally adept master of the sitar’s first cousin, the sarod, in the company of my roommate Fritz Richmond, washtub bassist for the Charles River Valley Boys and the Jim Kweskin Jug Band—whose mastery of the washtub approaches Ravi’s on the sitar, relatively speaking—and our frequent guest, Bob Neuwirth.
    At Monterey, I stroll the arena during Shankar’s early pieces, absorbing the music on the move. Ravi feels connected to the audience. He introduces each piece at greater length than is his custom before a Western audience. The crowd is with him all the way. In the front rows of seats reserved for performers, a cluster of musicians—Mike Bloomfield, Jimi Hendrix, Al Wilson of Canned Heat, Michelle Phillips—listen raptly.
    Today the coastal clouds have hung around, and colors glow more brightly in the diffuse light.A plan to have bagsful of the festival’s signature pink orchids tossed from a hot-air balloon above the arena has gone awry because of the fog bank, so instead the ushers have placed an orchid on every seat before the concert begins. During Ravi’s set, the flowers, threaded through buttonholes, tucked behind ears, held in hands, or woven into long hair, glow like radiant, oversized fireflies that have alighted throughout the audience.
    As the final raga begins, I return to the catwalk at the edge of the stage, all my attention on Ravi and his accompanists. I shoot some photos. . . . I wait . . . and wait, through the languid, hypnotic exposition of the opening themes. Almost imperceptibly, the tempo of the music increases, the rhythms of the tabla—the small hand drums played incomparably by Alla Rakha—gaining speed, Ravi effortlessly keeping pace. The tempo becomes insistent . . . and still I wait . . . until I dare not wait any longer. I switch on the red light and the cameras roll, ten minutes of film spooling off at twenty-four frames a second.
    The interplay between the sitar and the tabla grows steadily more complex as Ravi initiates the phase where the sitar calls to the tabla and the drums answer—short phrases, simple at first, then more complex, drawing smiles of delight from Alla Rakha, answering smiles from Shankar and from Kamala Chakravarty, who fills out the sound with the mesmeric monotone of the tamboura. Toward the end, the tabla and sitar join together, the players’ hands flying over the strings and drumheads in a blur, impossibly fast, until the elation that this music from halfway around the world brings to this arena, this audience,