In an unusual, disconnected flock of days, there seemed to blossom a series of notable small and large events tagged by one observer as “reach-back days.” And it was, to younger people, a long reach – touching the Sixties. For people of a certain age, it was yesterday. Locally, this coincidence of like-minded events was initially noted with the appearance of the Lakeside Little Theatre’s September 19-October 7 performance of “Quartet,” an amusing and touching story of four successful, and now aging, opera singers who unexpectedly come together at a musician’s retirement home in England.
October 6, a friend attended a performance of “One Night with Janis Joplin” – a concert\theater play – at the Arena Stage of Washington D.C.’s Kreeger Theater. He called me the day afterwards, ecstatic. He and a good many others attended to mark Joplin’s death 42 years ago, in October 1970. “The Queen of Rock’n Roll,” “The Queen of Psychedelic Soul” was 27 years old when she died 16 days after male rock icon Jimi Hendrix died, also of an overdose of heroin.
Another species of reach-back recently appeared in U.S. bookstores. This was “Subversives; The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Ronald Reagan’s Rise to Power” by Seth Rosenfeld, former reporter for the San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Chronicle. “America never got over the ‘60s,” begins one review of “Subversives,” and goes on to prove it, citing Rosenfeld’s use of a trove of 300,000 newly declassified FBI documents. They detail the U.S. government’s campaign against the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, among other felonies, and Reagan’s special relationship with J. Edgar Hoover. That relationship began in the 1940s when Reagan became an FBI informer, listing actors he suspected of being “subversive.” His relationship increased, Rosenfeld shows, when he became president of the Screen Actors Guild, and later when he was California’s governor. FBI reports aided in destroying liberal – not communist – students’ lives and abetting the firing of Clark Kerr, the president of the UC Berkeley’s president. (At one point the documents show Reagan’s snitching was as petty as it was cowardly and reckless: he snitched on a pretty young actress just because she embarrassed him at a cocktail party. The FBI repaid him with favors, often feeding him information, some of it false.)
Janis Joplin’s career was as stunning and rough as her voice could sometimes be--and as sad. Her “leave-blood-on-the floor” style of singing (as it’s been called) later seemed an intimation to audiences that those spectacularly molded notes were propelled in significant part by hurt and despair. ( Note her version of “Piece of My Heart.)“One Night With Janis Joplin” speaks of Joplin’s growing up in Port Arthur, Texas, where she did not fit. She hung out with a group of outsiders, one of whom introduced her to recordings of such black blues greats as Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey. By high school, she had put her painting aside and made up her mind to become a singer. She joined in the local choir, and began listening to singers such as Billie Holiday, Big Mama Thornton, and a younger singer, Odetta. White Texas was a bigoted milieu, and her enthusiasm for black female singers emphasized her independence. She later said: “I was a misfit. I read. I painted. I didn’t hate niggers.” Her white high school classmates called her a “freak,” “creep,” and the usual obscenities. When she attended the University of Texas at Austin, the school newspaper wrote a profile of her, headlined, “She Dares to be Different.” It begins: “She goes barefoot when she feels like it, wears Levi’s to class because they’re more comfortable, and carries her autoharp with her ... in case she gets the urge to break into song it will be handy. Her name is Janis Joplin.”
She soon headed for San Francisco and shortly found fame and, unfortunately, heroin. Heavy consumption of alcohol and drugs had been a well-known tradition among performers in all genres for more than a century by the time Joplin was born. (Laudanum – a combination of opium alkaloids that dissolved quickly in alcohol – had long been prescribed as a cure-all.) Despite the heavy toll taken by drugs, a great number of jazz musicians believed one couldn’t play well or inventively without them. This belief, bolstered by the fame such drug-taking musicians as Billie Holiday, Charlie “Bird” Parker and Thelonious Monk, among many others, later became a part of the ethos of rock ’n’ roll. Besides, they made you feel good, though many could kill you.
Laudanum (discovered by Paracelsus, a 16th century Swiss-German alchemist) was prescribed by doctors well into the 20th century, particularly in western parts of the United States. Many addictive medicines were used well into the “modern time.” The development of new medicines was costly and moved slowly because of its conservative practitioners and chemists. Opium tinctures relieved many ills that doctors had no way of curing. And, even when new pharmaceutical products did come on on the market, they tended to be both expensive and mistrusted by patients. The hold of known medicines on patients was strong because of popular dependence on “proven” folklore cures possessing centuries of familiarity. The leading medical concept at the beginning of the 20th century was still to relieve pain. The capability to cure many wounds and most diseases was still a wide-spread mystery. In rural western United States, alcohol was widely perceived as a good cure for whatever ails you well into the 1950s. With the end of World War II came a slew of medicinal breakthroughs, featuring the “miracle drug,” Sulfa, which was powdered on every kind of wound conceivable during and after the war. Nevertheless, the hold of addicting drugs continued. They made pain – physical and psychological – go away, and that’s all a majority of patients wanted. This was true in the performing arts, which tended to place great physical and mental demands on performers who were constantly traveling. That and the traditional social habit, particularly among musicians, to depend on drugs, prescription and otherwise. Then something new happened: lysergic acid diethylamide. That “medicine” changed rock ’n’ roll, and many other things immediately. Think of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” among an avalanche of other compositions.
“One Night with Janis Joplin,” written and directed by Randy Johnson, dwells on her magnetic singing and music. Playing in D.C. through November 4, it features two outstanding singers: Mary Bridget Davies, who takes on a startling resemblance to Joplin, even bringing into being that soaring screech that seemed to begin at the bottom of Joplin’s feet and churn up into her throat, igniting a joyful audience’s amazement. Another singer, Sabrina Elayne Carten, creates the varied blues greats that inspired Joplin: Nina Simone, Etta James, Odetta and Bessie Smith.
A majority of the audience, my friend reported, was made up of people old enough to have attended a Joplin concert. There were a lot of surprised tears, he said, from people who hadn’t realized how much they had missed “Pearl.”
These three emphatically divergent occurrences are telling slices of the sixties phenomenon, much of which are still with us, whether more recent generations realize it or not. Those acting in – and many associated with – LLT’s production of “Quartet,” written by Ronald Harwood, produced with the permission of the venerable Samuel French, Inc., are a part of that phenomenon, though they may have been scattered across the globe. One actor performed during his career in a production of Ken Kesey’s first published novel, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Nothing could be more thematically sixty-ish than that. (Note: The mention of Joplin’s troubled life and the drug-laced counter culture commonly associated with the sixties – which actually began in the 1950’s and reached into the 1970s – implies no participation in that “purple haze” by anyone associated with “Quartet.”)
The documented pursuit and harassment of members of the California’s student movement, whose spirit quickly surged across the country and into other countries, reveals a damning portrait of unfortunately rigid, bigoted and dishonest “establishment” governments That, in a somewhat different guise, note many political observers and historians, seems to be continuing today.