Almost nobody tells this part of the story. The feather boa, the southern comfort, the banshee whale, the Port Arthur wound given full volume. All of that, you know. But there was a band in San Francisco, a band that lived down the street, a band that partied in the same rooms and played on the same stages and built the same world that Janice Joplain was building.
a band that when she died cancelled their tour and flew back across the country to honor her, the Grateful Dead. And within The Grateful Dead, there was one person who was closest to her, who shared with her the specific preference, whiskey over acid, blues over psychedelia that made them different from almost everyone else in their world.
His name was Ron Mccernan. The world called him Pigpen. He was 27 years old when he died. 3 years after Janice. This is the story of the band that honored her most and the man who understood her best. 1966 Hate Ashberry, San Francisco. The Grateful Dead lived at 710 Ashberry Street. A Victorian house in the heart of the neighborhood that was becoming the center of everything.
Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Croozzman, and Ron Mccernan, Pigpen lived there together in the specific communal arrangement of the San Francisco scene. Big Brother and the Holding Company lived nearby. Janice Joplain had just joined them. Both bands were at the same parties.
Both bands played at the same venues, the Fillmore, the Avalon Ballroom, the outdoor concerts in the park. Both bands were part of the same experiment in collective living and collective music making that the Hate Ashbury scene was conducting. And at some point in late 1966 or early 1967, Janice Joplain and Pigpen found each other.
Pigpen was different from the other members of the Grateful Dead in a specific and important way. The dead were by temperament and preference a psychedelic band. LSD was the sacrament of the scene, the substance that the hate ashberry community organized itself around, the chemical that was supposed to expand consciousness and dissolve the boundaries between self and world and music. Pigpen did not take LSD.
He had nothing against it philosophically. He simply preferred whiskey. His musical influences were not the same as the rest of the band. Garcia and the others had come through folk music and jug bands and had absorbed psychedelia as a natural next step. Pigpen had come through the blues.
Bobby Blue Bland, Muddy Waters, T-Bone Walker, The Voices from the Roadhouses, and the Juke Joints. He was in the summer of love the member of the Grateful Dead who was most fully formed by black American blues. So was Janice Joplain. In a scene full of people who were choosing acid and Eastern philosophy and the expansion of consciousness, two people had chosen whiskey and the blues and the specific wisdom of the wound.
They found each other. They had a brief romantic relationship. It did not last long. But what followed the brief romance was something more durable. the specific friendship of two people who understand each other in a way that most people around them do not quite manage. In 1967, photographer Irving Penn came to San Francisco on assignment for Look magazine.
He photographed both bands together, The Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company, both positioned for a joint portrait. The photograph exists. It is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution. Garcia in the back, Janice on the far left, the two bands arrayed between them.
The photograph of the San Francisco scene at its moment of greatest possibility. Joplain was described in the look assignment notes as the most staggering leading woman in rock. Garcia was described as best known for his extended guitar improvisations. Both descriptions are accurate. Neither fully describes what was in that photograph. June 7th, 1969.
Filillmore West, San Francisco. The Grateful Dead were playing a set that had already run for several hours. The Dead did not play short sets. The set list included Dark Star and St. Steven and the 11 and a series of songs that built on each other the way the Dead sets always built.
At the end of the set toward midnight, Pig Pen launched into Turn on Your Love Light, Bobby Blue Bland’s song. The song Pigpen had made a cornerstone of the Dead’s live shows, a call and response blues that expanded and contracted based on the energy in the room. And from the wings, Janice Joplain appeared.
She had not been announced. She had not been invited exactly, or she had been invited in the loose way that the hate ashberry scene invited things. The door was open. The stage was there. The song was happening. She took a microphone. She joined Pig Pen. They sang Turn on Your Love Light together.
Two blues voices, two people who had chosen Whiskey and the Wound singing a call and response that had been written for exactly this kind of moment. One voice calling, one voice responding. The full emotional architecture of the blues tradition in a room full of people who felt it even if they couldn’t name it. They performed together one more time after that.
July 16th, 1970. The Euphoria Ballroom, San Raphael, California. The same song, the same two voices. Pig pen calling. Janice responding. Neither of them knew it was the last time. 80 days later, Janice Joplain was dead. October 4th, 1970. The Grateful Dead were on the East Coast. A tour was underway.
Venues booked, audiences waiting, the machinery of a touring band in full operation. The news arrived. They canled the tour. They flew back to San Francisco, not for a press opportunity, not because their publicist advised it, because Janice Joplain had been their neighbor and their friend and Pigpen’s closest musical kindred spirit, and the specific community they had all built together in San Francisco was the kind of community that shows up.
They attended her wake at the lion’s share in Sanelmo. They were there in the room with the rest of the people who had made that world and were now gathering to mark its specific loss. Garcia did not make speeches. He was not by temperament a speech maker. He was present. That was the tribute he knew how to give.
In the weeks and months after Janice’s death, Robert Hunter, the dead’s primary lyricist, the man who had written the words to Dark Star and Trucken and so many others, wrote a poem. Jerry Garcia set it to music. The song was called Bird Song. It was debuted in concert shortly after Janice’s death and remained in the dead set list for the rest of Garcia’s life.
All I know is something like a bird within her sang. All I know she sang a little while and then flew on. That is the tribute, not a press release, not an industry statement. A song written by the people who had been in the room with her since the beginning, giving her the most honest form of memorial they knew how to give.
A piece of music that would be played thousands of times, for decades, carrying her name. There is one more piece to this story. Pigpen. After Janice died, Pigpen continued with the Grateful Dead, but his health had been deteriorating for years. The whiskey that he and Janice had both preferred over acid had been doing to his body what heavy drinking does to a body over a decade of performing.
His liver was failing. He knew it. He performed less frequently through 1971 and 1972 as his health declined. the man who had been one of the most physically commanding presences on any stage. The full blues voice, the harmonica, the keyboards, the specific authority of someone who had absorbed the blues as a second language became increasingly someone who watched from the side.
On March 8th, 1973, Ron Mccernan, Pigpen, died. He was 27 years old, the same age as Janice, from the same territory, the territory of giving everything to the music without saving enough for the body that was making it. He and Janice had been kindred spirits in life. They were kindred spirits in the statistics that the music industry would spend decades trying to make sense of.
Jerry Garcia, who had written Bird Song for Janice and then watched Pigpen follow her three years later, would die in 1995 at 53. The cause was a heart attack in a drug rehabilitation facility in Forest Nolles, California. He had spent 25 years after Janice’s death playing bird song.
All I know she sang a little while and then flew on. Here is what this story asks you. When you lose someone, who is the person that comes back? Not because they have to, not because it’s expected, but because the connection was real and the loss is real and some debts are paid in presence. The Grateful Dead cancelled their tour.
They flew back to San Francisco. They showed up. Garcia wrote her a song that he played for the rest of his life. Pigpen, who had understood her better than almost anyone else in the scene, followed her at 27. And bird song is still played. At dead shows across America, thousands of people who were not alive when Janice Joplain was alive, hear the words that Garcia and Hunter wrote for her.
All I know is something like a bird within her sang. She sang a little while, then she flew on. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you
