The security team had May’s camera. They had her film. All they needed was Janice Joplain to say the word and it would be finished. The film exposed, the images gone. May escorted out of the building. Janice asked to see the photographs first. May was 22 years old and had been shooting music photography for 18 months.
She had gotten backstage that night the way young photographers got backstage in 1969, through persistence and a fearlessness that hadn’t yet been tempered by enough bad outcomes to become caution. She had taken photographs she was not supposed to take, and one of them had captured something that changed what happened next. What Janice saw when she looked at that photograph was something she had never seen before.
Not a performance, not the face the crowd saw, something else entirely. The show had been in San Francisco, late 1969. The Cosmic Blues Band was on the back half of a long touring stretch, tight from the road, rough at the edges, running on the specific fuel of a band that has been playing the same rooms long enough that the music has started to live in their bodies rather than their heads.
May had been photographing music shows for a year and a half. She had started with small clubs in the Bay Area, local acts, the specific chaos of a music scene generating more talent than any available infrastructure could manage. She had developed an eye for the moment between moments, the breath before the note, the expression that surfaces between songs when the performer doesn’t know anyone is watching.
Getting backstage required a press credential through a small alternative publication that was more interested in her work than in whether she had formal authorization. Getting past the secondary barriers required the specific confidence of someone who moves as if she belongs somewhere until the moment someone asks her to prove it.
She had been backstage for 40 minutes before someone noticed she didn’t belong there. They brought her to a production manager. The production manager made a phone call. The outcome of that phone call was that May was told to wait in a side room while someone went to find Janice Joplain. She waited for 12 minutes.
She sat in a folding chair in a room that smelled of cigarettes and stage makeup and the particular sourness of a venue that had been full of people all night. She held her camera on her lap. She had not handed over the film because no one had directly asked her to. They had said they would be back and had not specified what with.
When Janice came into the room, May said she did not look angry. She looked tired and curious in roughly equal measure. She looked at May the way you look at a situation that has arrived in your evening that you did not anticipate and are now deciding how to feel about. She asked what May had been photographing.
May told her the show backstage, the band between songs. She said she had been trying to get images that weren’t the standard concert photographs. Not the performance face, not the crowd, but the other moments, the in between. Janice looked at her for a moment. Then she said she wanted to see what May had. They didn’t have a dark room.
This was 1969. The film hadn’t been developed. What May had the negatives and a contact sheet from a previous role she had shot at an earlier show that she carried as a reference. She showed Janice the contact sheet. Janice took it and held it up to the light. She looked at it for a long time, long enough that the silence in the room began to have a texture.
On the contact sheet, among the standard shots, the stage, the crowd, the band in motion, was a frame that was different. It had been taken between songs. Janice was at the microphone, not performing, not speaking. She was just standing at the mic with the specific expression of someone who has just given something away and is standing in the space where it used to be.
Not sad, not depleted, something more precise than either of those. The face of someone in the exact moment of return, returning to herself from wherever the song had taken her, a face that had no performance in it at all. Janice set the contact sheet down on the table between them. She looked at it for another moment without picking it up again.
She said she had never seen that. She said it quietly without drama. She meant the face, her own face in that particular moment. May said she didn’t know what to say to that. She was 22 and had not thought about what it might mean to be a person who was photographed constantly and had never seen herself in that specific unguarded instant.
She said she understood it more later. Janice pushed the contact sheet back toward May. She said she could keep the film. She said the only thing she asked was that if May ever printed that frame, the one between the songs, she would want to see it first. May said yes without hesitation. She said later that she wasn’t sure whether she had agreed because it was a reasonable request or because she would have agreed to almost anything in that room at that moment. Janice stood up.
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She asked May how long she had been doing this. May said 18 months. Janice said she should keep going. She said it not as the reflex encouragement of a famous person to a young one. She said it the way you say something you mean as a specific observation. You should keep doing this because you are doing something real.
Then she left the room. The security team let May out of the building a few minutes later. She still had her film. Janice Joplain died on October 4th, 1970. She was 27 years old. May spent the following decades working as a photographer, mostly outside the music industry. She kept the contact sheet.
She kept the negative from that frame. She said in the account she eventually gave that she had thought about Janice’s request many times over the years, that if she ever printed that frame, Janice would want to see it first. She said she had never printed it, not to honor the letter of the agreement, but because printing it had always felt like something she wasn’t ready to do yet, something that required a weight of occasion she hadn’t found.
The face in that frame, the face between the songs, the face with no performance in it, is something May described once in careful language as the most honest thing she had ever photographed. Not the most dramatic, not the most technically accomplished, the most honest. the face of a person in the exact moment of being no one but themselves.
Janice Joplain spent her entire career giving that face to audiences. The unguarded confessional unmanaged self poured into the songs. May caught it in the silence in the breath between. when the song was over and the next one hadn’t started and there was no performance to inhabit and she was simply standing at the microphone being the person she always was when the music wasn’t covering her.
May never printed the frame, not because she was honoring the letter of the agreement, because it had always felt like something that required a weight of occasion she hadn’t found. The negative still exists. The contact sheet still exists. The image, Janice at the microphone between songs, face bare, returning to herself from wherever the song had taken her, still exists as a small rectangle on a strip of film somewhere, unseen by anyone who wasn’t in that backstage room in 1969.
Janice Joplain gave away that face every night in every song in every performance in every room where she stood at a microphone and let the music take everything she had. She gave it willingly, completely without reservation. May caught the moment just after the giving when there was nothing left to perform and she was simply standing there herself.
That is the paradox that May understood more clearly than anyone who was never in that backstage room. The most public performer of her generation was also in the silences between songs the most private. The face the crowds never saw was the same face that made everything they did see feel so real. If these are the moments that matter, the ones that happened when nobody was supposed to be watching, subscribe.
