JOHN BYRNE COOKE
On The Road With Janis Joplin
Berkley Books

www.penguin.com
 

The Harvard-educated son of apprized British broadcaster Alistair Cooke and great-grand-nephew of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 74-year-old John Byrne Cooke is an award-winning author of Old West epics, an accomplished folk/bluegrass musician (the Charles River Valley Boys), an acclaimed photographer and innovative filmmaker as well as an occasional actor. But it’s his three year gig at the tail-end of the 1960s as road manager for the young blues belter from Port Arthur, Texas, known as Pearl – who would become the first female rock and roll superstar – that is the focus of this intimate, detail-laden memoir that, all things considered, is not only a love-letter to the counterculture but a heartfelt paean to the Summer of Love and a series of salient snapshots of the psychedelicized generation that created music unlike anything heard before. Complete with a clutch of Byrnes’ own never-before-seen photos and a “Memories” coda of insightful afterthoughts from the likes of Howard Hesseman, Paul Rothchild and Nick Gravenites.

Byrne was there at the outset of Joplin’s national emergence – working as a member of D.A. Pennebaker’s film crew for her legendary breakthrough performances at the Monterey Pop Festival through to her ultimately tragic, final days recording with her new Full Tilt Boogie aggregation in Los Angeles – and offers a uniquely revealing, behind-the-scenes, character filled and picaresque portrait of an unforgettably adventurous musician who never lost track of her community-oriented roots. I found the sections dealing with her early, Haight-Ashbury based days fronting Big Brother and the Holding Company, a European tour in the spring of 1969 with the Kozmic Blues Band, her ballyhoo-ed experience at her tenth high school reunion in Port Arthur, an appearance on the “Ed Sullivan” television show (“He shook my hand!”), her Woodstock visitation and the trials and tribulations of the Festival Express train trip (“a rolling hootenanny’) across Canada particularly intuitive.

A conversationally-toned, worthy adjunct to 1992’s Love, Janis tome by her younger sister Laura.

— Gary von Tersch