On the Road with Janis Joplin

January 5, 2015
From 1967 to 1970, Cooke was the tour manager for Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, giving him a first-hand view of Joplin's ascent to stardom, her reaction to fame, and her untimely death from a drug overdose. As someone who worked for and also befriended Joplin, Cooke has a unique perspective, writing both about his own experiences on the road and painting a picture that covers the full spectrum of Joplin's personality as an artist and a person, as well as the world she lived in. An accomplished musician himself, Cooke is able to write about Joplin's music with not only the critical precision of an expert but also the unmitigated joy of a peer who knows exactly how amazing her talent as a singer and performer really was. The key to Cooke's success in writing about such a dynamic character lies in the fact that he, too, is a strong presence. His own story, which includes working at the Monterey Pop festival where he first saw Joplin perform, fighting for his job when Big Brother wanted to fire him, and finding Joplin's lifeless body in her hotel room, gives a weight to his writing that makes this work poignant and important. Though it only covers the last three of her 27 years, all these factors combine with Cooke's insider perspective to make this the most thorough exploration written about Joplin's life. B+W photos

October 15, 2014
A memoir of the author's time working for the spellbinding Janis Joplin. Most of the action in former road manager Cooke's narrative takes place in venues like Monterey, the Chelsea Hotel and the Haight, but it's when Joplin is at home in the Lone Star State, among straights and squares and beehive-haired classmates, that Cooke's account takes off: "Most of her classmates look older than her," he writes of an ill-fated reunion. "It's as if the last time they had fun was in high school and they don't expect to have fun ever again." Though fretful, fearful and worn down by her well-known dependencies on the needle and the bottle, Joplin was all about making fun for herself and those around her, and though there's a certain inevitability throughout these pages that things aren't going to end well, Joplin emerges as someone we all might like to have known. That said, there's also a gulf between Cooke and his subject; part has to do with her reserve and her unwillingness to get involved with an employee (airplane make-out sessions notwithstanding), but part has to do with Cooke's failure to be in the right place at the right time. He chose not to stay at the Chelsea ("a decision I will later regret"), set up house on North Beach rather than in the Haight and otherwise exercised counter-countercultural tendencies ("I'm a beatnik, not a hippie") that led Big Brother and company to hold him at arm's length. Still, if his portrait of Joplin herself doesn't shed much new light, Cooke is good on the politics of the music business and the decisions that might not have been in her best interests. Significant for ardent devotees of Joplin; less than essential for others.

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December 1, 2014

Singer Janis Joplin (1943-70) may have only lived to the age of 27, but she packed an awful lot of living into that short span. In the last five years of her life, she played in three different bands, recorded nearly 200 songs, and performed all over the world, most famously at Woodstock. At her side was Cooke (The Snowblind Moon), her road manager through most of that period. Cooke provides an intimate, affectionate look back at his time with Janis in his newest book. Joplin is a legend and it is all too easy to forget that legends are also people of their times and environments. Cooke's book is a valuable insight into the performer as a living, breathing person, with her own all-too-human strengths and vulnerabilities. The author may be one of the few people left in the world with that kind of perspective on her, so it's a good thing that he is a gifted writer, letting Joplin's vivaciousness and intensity shine throughout the work. VERDICT Rock music fans will love reading this up-close view of Joplin. The end of the book feels like losing her all over again.--Brett Rohlwing, Milwaukee P.L.

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