'That night I was in England making a ham sandwich for Mama Cass'




Every newspaperman gets interesting letters. This one, for example ...

No, I wasn't with Janis the night she died. We didn't get along nearly well enough for her to want me with her on her special night. (Besides, that night I was in England making a ham sandwich for Mama Cass.) Janis and I had a Southern Comfort and Coke one time, her cough syrup-like drink, and that was one thing I don't care to do again (ever try one?) And I did see what Janis looked like first thing in the morning one time, hung over, in desperate need of makeup, a comb, coffee and, um, well, Clearasil, clumping down a motel corridor wearing a scowl and a cotton housecoat with little pink flowers on it. But hell, it was at Woodstock, or near Woodstock at any rate, and we all looked a little raggedy-assed. Apparently unaware that it's wrong to collar critics before their morning coffee to ask their opinions, she asked what I thought of her new band ... the first post-Big Brother and the Holding Company band. This was the band that she told me, during the Southern Comfort and Coke, that she wanted to name "Janis and the Jackoffs." I was stupid enough to tell her that I thought they were a little so-so.

Very un-Janis-like, she sniffed "Well, that goes to show how much some people know!" and huffed off, housecoat flying.

I felt a bit let down. Janis's reputation for being a barroom bad girl should have endowed her with more substantial epithets. Jeez, Louise, would you just imagine what Courtney Love would say?

Within months Janis agreed that "the Jackoffs" lived up to the name she wanted to call them. She dumped them and formed a new backup band. A year after Woodstock, Janis came to town backed by Full Tilt Boogie. I loved them and said so in The Times.

She died before we could run into each other again and she could say, "well, I guess that some people aren't so dense, after all."

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