Janis Joplin
I was living in Colorado in the summer of 1970, when a group of friends and I decided to go to the Calgary, Alberta, Canada concert stop of the Festival Express, a train-touring rock and roll concert featuring the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, The Band, and other sixties rock stars – about a thousand miles away. We didn’t buy tickets. We didn’t think we’d need them – we’d been to Woodstock and had seen how the crowd had crashed though the gates.
When we got to the concert area in Calgary, after our 1000 mile drive, we saw that the concert promoters didn’t want another Woodstock-type invasion of ticketless freeloaders and had fortified the perimeter with enormous, well-guarded fences.
We then decided to enact our own version of “The Great Escape,” burrow under the fences, and sneak in. We managed to dig and crawl our way into the concert area, but were immediately apprehended by the concert’s guards. Somehow we convinced them we were looking for work as members of the lighting crew – hey, we’d been to Woodstock! – and were given jobs setting up lights on the scaffolds for the concert.
The music was great, and on the last day of the Festival, we were told by some girls that they were going on the concert train with the bands to the next show in Vancouver. We told our crew chief we also wanted to ride on the train to Vancouver. He said, “If you get there, we’ll hire you, but you’re not going to ride on the train.” When we pointed out that some girls had told us that they we’re going on the train, he said, “Man, they’re girls.” “Oh,” we said, “Like groupies?” The crew chief looked at us like we were absolute idiots and walked away.
We then figured we had to find a female rock star to take us on the train as her groupies. That meant going to see Janis Joplin.
We found her sitting alone and drinking in a tent version of a dressing room. She was drunk, stoned and very friendly. “Sit down and have something to drink, boys,” she said with a raspy Texas drawl. And when we asked her to take us with her to Vancouver, she said, “Sure, you boys are comin’ along with me.”
We were drinking Southern Comfort with her and imagining how incredibly cool hanging with Janis was going to be when a very large, very fat, bearded guy appeared. He didn’t seem happy to see us. “What the fuck are you doing here?” he asked. “Get the fuck out.”
Janis pleaded with him to let us stay, but whoever the fat guy was, he was calling the shots, not her.
“Bye, boys,” Janis said to us. “See you in Vancouver.”
We never made it to the Vancouver concert. Janis Joplin died of an overdose of drugs and alcohol three months later.
This post was submitted by Jonathan Strange.
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This is a great story!!! My uncle was there. He had been hitchhiking around and was hired to hang concert posters. He ended up with two extras and still has them!!! Wish I was born 20 years earlier!