I was 26 years old in December of 1969. I was working as a music photographer in London, small publications mostly. But I had press credentials for the ATV studios that night. December 4th. Tom Jones was taping his show and Janis Joplin was the guest. I had seen Janis perform before, San Francisco 1967.
I knew what she was. But that night, watching her walk out onto Tom Jones’ stage, it was like watching a wildfire walk into a very expensive room. The song was Raise Your Hand. 3 minutes and 58 seconds. And when it ended, Tom tried to hug her. She stepped back, just like that. One hand up. They both laughed.
But what nobody knows, what nobody has ever reported, is what Tom said to his band afterward, in the dressing room with the door closed. I was there. I wasn’t supposed to be. And I have never forgotten what I heard. I want to tell you something that happened on a December night in London, 1969. I’ve kept this story for 55 years.
Not because I was ashamed of it. Not because I was protecting anyone. But because some things feel like they belong to the room they happened in, to the people who were there. And I’ve been trying to decide for a very long time whether it was mine to share. I was 26 years old in December of 1969. I’d grown up in California, Berkeley originally.
I moved to London in the fall of 1967, the year everything was happening everywhere, and London was one of the places where everything was happening. I was working as a music photographer. Nothing glamorous. Small magazines, press passes, the kind of work that gets you into rooms through the service entrance while everyone else is at the front door.
I’d been to the Fillmore. I’d photographed Hendrix at the Marquee. I’d been in enough rooms with enough extraordinary musicians to know the difference between a great performer and something rarer. I had seen Janis Joplin perform in San Francisco in 1967, Fillmore West. She was still with Big Brother.
I was 24 years old, and I had my camera, and I walked into that venue, and by the end of the first song, I had forgotten I was holding a camera. I just stood there. I have been a professional photographer my entire adult life. That has never happened before or since. So, when I found out that Janis Joplin was going to be on the Tom Jones television show, December 4th, ATV Studios, I called in every favor I had to get a press credential.
I got it. Now, before I tell you what happened after the show, I need to tell you what happened during it. Because you can’t understand the dressing room without understanding the stage. And you can’t understand the stage without understanding what Tom Jones was in December 1969 and what Janis Joplin was and what it meant that they were on the same stage at the same time.
Tom Jones in December 1969 was untouchable. Not just famous, untouchable. The Welsh coal miner’s son who had been told for years that his voice was too raw, too powerful, too influenced by black American soul for a white kid from Pontypridd had become by 1969 the definition of what mainstream success looked like.
It’s Not Unusual had gone to number one in 1965. He hadn’t stopped since. The television show was running simultaneously in America and the United Kingdom. Women threw their underwear at him during concerts. This was not metaphor. It was literally happening. He was 29 years old. He was everything the entertainment industry said a male performer should be.
The voice, the presence, the looks, the charm. He had all of it. And underneath all of it, he was carrying something. He knew that the people who really mattered, the serious musicians, the critics who decided what counted, had put him in a box. He was entertainment. He was not art. He was someone your mother liked at a time when being someone your mother liked was not a compliment.
He had been carrying that for four years. Then Janis Joplin came to his rehearsal room the day before the broadcast. She told his people beforehand, “I don’t do variety shows. I’m only doing this because it’s him.” She watched him sing. She listened. And then she stopped. She looked at him directly and she said, “Jesus, you can really sing.
” Three words from Janis Joplin. He said later that he thought, “Thank God people like Janis Joplin had taken note.” Because she was the one whose opinion meant something to him. Not the chart positions, not the television ratings. Her. The woman who had been carrying the blues tradition on her back for 3 years.
The woman who had stopped the world at Monterey. The woman who sang like someone for whom there was no distance between the feeling and the voice. That person had walked into his rehearsal room and told him he was real. The broadcast was that night. December 4th, 1969. Raise your hand. A song made for exactly this kind of shared performance.
Advertisements
Two voices, call and response. The specific electricity of two people who are not competing but are pushing each other somewhere neither would have gone alone. Tom Jones elevated by what was beside him. Reaching for notes he did not always reach for. Giving more than a variety show usually asked him to give. And Janis Joplin doing what Janis Joplin always did. Not performing.
Not managing. Not adjusting herself for the format. Just singing from the inside of the song with everything she had. One witness wrote about it afterward. Tom held his own and kept up beautifully as he was swept up in the storm that was Janis Joplin’s stage presence. This wasn’t your regular variety show.
But then again, nothing was ordinary after Janis was through with it. The studio audience was on its feet before the song was finished. And then the last note. And then Tom turned toward Janis with his arms slightly open. The natural gesture. The warmth of a shared thing. She stepped back, one hand raised, the lightest possible no, thank you. They both laughed.
The audience laughed. The perfect ending to the perfect performance. She picked up her things. She said something brief to him. She walked toward the exit. Tom Jones watched her go. I was in the corridor outside his dressing room. I shouldn’t have been there. My press credential covered the studio floor and the wings, not the talent corridors.
But I had followed at a distance, not to intrude. I just I wasn’t ready for the night to be over. Tom walked past me. He didn’t see me. He went through the door. His band was already inside. I could hear them settling in. The specific sounds of musicians coming down after a live broadcast.
Jackets coming off, ice in glasses. And then the door swung back without latching fully. I stood very still. It went quiet inside. Not the ordinary quiet of people winding down. Something different. The kind of quiet that means someone is about to say something. I held my breath. Tom’s voice, very quiet, said, “Gentlemen, tonight we were in the presence of something that doesn’t come along twice.
” Nobody responded. I stood there for another 10, maybe 15 seconds, then I walked away. I never told anyone until now. Something that doesn’t come along twice. He said it to four musicians in a dressing room with the door almost closed. Not for the cameras, not for the public, for the people who had been on that stage with him, the people who knew.
Tom Jones had performed with extraordinary artists. He had shared stages with the best musicians of his generation. He had been in rooms with Stevie Wonder and the Rolling Stones and artists who would define the era. And he sat in a dressing room in London on December 4th, 1969 and told his band that what had just happened was singular, unrepeatable, something that doesn’t come along twice.
Read that sentence again. He was not being modest. He was not performing humility. He was saying quietly to the four people who had been on that stage with him the truest thing he could say about the woman who had just walked off it. She was not just great. She was the kind of thing that visits a stage once and then is gone.
He felt it while it was happening and in the dressing room, when she was no longer there, he named it. He had recognized it the day before in the rehearsal room when she had told him, “Jesus, you can really sing.” He had understood immediately that this was not a compliment from a peer. This was a recognition from someone whose recognition meant something because her standard was different from everyone else’s standard.
She heard something real in him. And in saying so, she told him something about herself. She only gave that recognition to what deserved it. And on stage that night, he had tried to give back what she had given him. He had reached further than he usually reached. He had given more than a variety show usually asked because she was beside him.
And you cannot stand beside Janis Joplin and give less than everything you have. Nine months later, October 4th, 1970, Janis Joplin died in Los Angeles. She was 27 years old. Tom Jones received the news the way everyone received the news, suddenly. He had been right. She was something that didn’t come along twice.
And now there was no second time. There was never going to be a second time. He has been saying her name ever since in every decade, in every interview where someone asks about that performance. God bless her. She saw through the format and came anyway. She made it into something. Three words, God bless her.
The simplest possible tribute. He is 84 years old. He is still performing. He still says it. And 14.7 million people have watched the clip of that performance on YouTube. They all watched the same moment. Not the peak of the song. The five seconds after. The step back. The hand raised. The laugh. The most perfect ending.
The last image of something that doesn’t come along twice. I stayed in London for two more years after that night. I kept photographing musicians. I was in the room for a lot of extraordinary things. But I never forgot that corridor. Nine months after December 4th, Janis was gone. I was 27 years old when she died.
The same age she was. I’ve thought about that sentence for 55 years. Something that doesn’t come along twice. Tom Jones said it. He was 29 years old. He had been performing for five years at the highest level. He had shared stages with the greatest artists of his time. And he sat in that room and said those words.
He knew what he was saying. I photographed a lot of people in those years. Hendrix, the Stones, Joni, Leonard Cohen. People whose names you know. I never saw anything like Janis Joplin. Not one other time. In 50 years of doing this work. There was no gap between what she felt and what she showed. None at all.
Every other performer, even the great ones, had some distance, some management, some craft between the interior and the exterior. She had none. When she was in pain, you felt the pain. When she was joyful, you felt the joy. When she stepped back from Tom’s arms and laughed, that laugh was real, completely, entirely real.
That’s what Tom was naming in that dressing room. He said it to four musicians who already knew what he meant. Nobody published it. Nobody wrote it down. I was in that corridor. I was 26 years old, and I remembered. Now you know.
