On tour with Janis Joplin — an insider’s view

John Byrne Cooke strides across Washington Square, a place familiar to him because he lived around the corner of 45 years ago when he was road manager for Big Brother and the Holding Company.

“The guys in Big Brother all wanted to know why I didn’t live in the Haight,” he says, “and I told them 'I’m a beatnik, not a hippie.’”

Tall and lean, Cooke, 74, these days looks more cowboy in his faded yellow button-down shirt, jeans and boots, which may owe something to his living the past 30 years in Jackson Hole, Wyo. But beneath that craggy, unassuming style is quite a civilized character — author, musician, occasional actor, Harvard-educated son of erudite British broadcaster Alistair Cooke, great-grandnephew of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

He is out of the mountains and back in town readying the release of his new book, “On the Road With Janis Joplin” (Berkley Publishing). Not only is Cooke uniquely qualified to provide one of the most intimate possible perspectives on the short, meteoric career of the incendiary Joplin — he served as road manager for all three of her bands and had the unpleasant experience of discovering her body at Hollywood’s Landmark Hotel — but, as author of three epic historical novels set in the Old West, he also brings an literary touch to the world of rock music memoir.

In Cooke’s telling, Janis Joplin had regained control of her life and was headed to even greater personal and musical success when she died of a heroin overdose at age 27 in 1970. He is aware that the prevailing narrative holds that Joplin died the lonely, sad, inevitable death of a self-destructive junkie.

“That’s not what happened,” he says over lunch in North Beach. “The downward spiral ends, then everything starts to go right.”

According to Cooke, when he came back to work for Joplin during the last six months of her life, she was proudly free of drugs, had taken control of her finances, and had freshly invigorated confidence in her abilities as a vocalist and performer. “The summer of ’70, she was getting it right,” he says. “The last months of her life were the happiest of her life.”

His account, which also draws from many interviews of other Joplin intimates and associates, treats her problems with drugs candidly, but Cooke came to believe through research uncovered through the L.A. coroner’s office that Joplin died from an especially toxic batch of heroin, also responsible for a rash of other overdose deaths in Los Angeles at the time.

“We understand a lot more about addiction now,” he says. “We know the twisted logic of the junkie — 'I’ve got this under control and I’m just going to give myself a little reward.’ She was chipping. And she ran into some bad heroin. In a way, I felt better.”

The book features many previously unseen photos of Joplin that Cooke took and, at one upcoming book signing in San Francisco, he will show some of the five short films he made from 8mm home movies he shot (he will also be playing music with former members of Big Brother).

During the ’60s folk boom, Cooke belonged to the Cambridge-based Charles River Boys and joined filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker’s crew to shoot the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, where he witnessed the star-making performance by Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company. Within weeks, he found himself flying to San Francisco to take a job with the band, which at the time was only starting to play on the road outside the San Francisco ballrooms. He was the first outsider to work with the group.

“He kind of hung out a while,” says Big Brother bassist Peter Albin. “We found him somewhat standoffish, a Harvard guy. But we knew he was a musician, so he couldn’t be all bad. We wondered what he was doing with a bunch of crazy San Francisco hippies.”

But Albin said Cooke’s cultured East Coast style with the sports coat and slacks soon meshed with the band’s road operation. “He dressed appropriately,” says Albin, “like he was doing business with business guys, and I think it got him respect.”

Cooke first started preparing material for a book more than 20 years ago, planning a full-scale biography. But he decided it would no longer be necessary after the 1992 book by Joplin’s sister, Laura Joplin. He finally decided to return to the project only last year. “I realized the one story I could tell that nobody else could tell was her life on the road,” he says.

Like all those who actually knew the quicksilver, vulnerable Joplin, Cooke is astonished at the enduring — and even growing — power of her legacy, especially among a generation not yet born when Joplin died. He cites her social media register with a sense of benign wonder: 1 million hits a week, 7.2 million likes on Facebook. He can’t quite offer a satisfactory explanation.

“The only thing I can say — and it’s way too simple — is that an effective singer involves you in the emotional content of the song. Janis did that. She made every song biography. From the git-go, Janis grabbed you.”

Joel Selvin is an author and former pop music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Take a look at the slideshow about to see other great musicians from Texas.