Before the performance that changed everything, there was a moment that almost no one knows about backstage at the Monterey Pop Festival, June 17th, 1967. Janis Joplin was trembling and Lou Rawls was telling her it would be fine. To understand what this moment meant, you have to understand two things. You have to understand what Monterey was and you have to understand who Lou Rawls was.
And then you have to understand what it means that one of them found the other shaking backstage and said, “It’ll be fine. Don’t worry about a thing.” The Monterey International Pop Festival took place June 16th through 18th, 1967. It was, in retrospect, the moment when American music understood what it was becoming. The Beatles had sent a representative.
The Who were there. Jimi Hendrix was there. Simon and Garfunkel were there. The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Otis Redding. The lineup was the definition of what the music world considered important in the summer of 1967. Big Brother and the Holding Company were scheduled to play on Saturday, June 17th, during the afternoon concert, the underground day, as it was informally known, featuring mainly Bay Area bands and a few other acts that the industry had not yet fully processed. They were B-listers. They had
not yet been recognized as anything more than a promising San Francisco band with an exceptional singer. Outside of the Bay Area, almost no one had heard Janis Joplin perform live. She was 24 years old. She was about to change that. First, though, she had to get through the fear.
John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas was backstage at Monterey. He was one of the organizers of the festival. Along with Lou Adler and others, he had conceived and built the event that was now happening around him. He remembered what he saw backstage before Janis went on. He said, “She was so nervous it was crazy.” He said, “She was rattling, just shaking.
” And then he said the thing that is the whole story. Lou Rawls was telling her, “It’ll be fine. Don’t worry about a thing.” Lou Rawls, in 1967, Lou Rawls was one of the most recognized voices in American music. He had grown up in Chicago, had sung in gospel quartets as a child, had been in a car accident in 1958 that put him in a coma for 5 days, and from which he emerged still able to sing.
He had recorded 17 albums. He had a voice, a deep, warm, controlled baritone that embodied everything the American singing tradition knew how to do. He understood stages. He had been on them his whole adult life. He understood fear before stages. He had felt it and conquered it and learned to use it. And he found Janis Joplin shaking backstage at Monterey, and he told her it would be fine.
Not because he knew what was about to happen. Nobody knew what was about to happen. Because he was a musician who recognized another musician in a moment of need. And he said the thing that needed to be said, “It’ll be fine. Don’t worry about a thing.” Batharice, I can six us. The specific kindness of that gesture, the specific quality of a veteran performer taking a moment to reassure someone who was about to do something enormous, is the whole story. He didn’t have to.
He could have been in his own preparation, his own thought, his own version of whatever performers do in the hours before they perform. He saw her shaking, and he came to her, and he said, “It will be fine.” He was right. He was right in ways that even he probably didn’t anticipate. John Phillips watched her walk from the backstage area toward the stage, and then he watched what happened.
He said, “Just as soon as she hit that stage, she stomped her foot down and got real Texas. She stomped her foot down and got real Texas.” Six words. John Phillips describing the specific moment when the woman who had been rattling backstage became the woman who stopped the world. The foot stomp, the declaration, the specific physical commitment of someone who has made a decision in the last available second.
The decision to be completely, entirely, without reservation, exactly who they are. She was from Port Arthur, Texas. She had been trying to leave Texas behind in various ways since she was 19. She had gone to San Francisco to become something that Texas couldn’t contain. And in the moment that mattered most, she stomped her foot and got real Texas.
Texas was the blues records she had grown up on. Texas was the isolation that had made music the only honest thing. Texas was the specific wound that had become the specific voice. She stomped her foot and all of that came through. What happened on that stage in the next several minutes has been documented in the D. A.
Pennebaker film, in photographs, in the accounts of everyone who was there. She sang Ball and Chain. The song that Big Mama Thornton had written, that she had made her own, that she was about to make the world’s. Mama Cass Elliot was watching from the side of the stage. The expression on her face in the Pennebaker footage has become one of the most recognizable images from that era.
The face of someone who cannot believe what they are witnessing. 7,000 people. The performance that made her famous overnight. The performance that led to the Columbia Records deal, to Cheap Thrills, to Piece of My Heart on every radio in America. Everything that followed, every concert, every album, every life she touched with that voice, everything traces back to the moment she stomped her foot down on the Monterey stage, and the moment before that, the moment that allowed the stomp to happen, was Lou Rawls saying, “It’ll be fine.
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Don’t worry about a thing.” The relationship between encouragement and greatness is not always linear. Some people perform better with no words at all. Some people need to be left alone in their fear until the fear becomes fuel. But, Janis Joplin, in the most important backstage moment of her life, was shaking.
And, Lou Rawls came to her and said the simple human thing. We don’t know what she said back. John Phillips didn’t record her response. What he recorded was the outcome. She hit that stage and stomped her foot down and got real Texas. Whatever Lou Rawls’s words did inside her, whether they calmed her, whether they gave her something to push against, whether they were simply the last human contact before the transformation, the transformation happened.
She was rattling. She stomped her foot. The world stopped. Lou Rawls continued his career for 39 more years after Monterey. He recorded over 60 albums. He was known for his annual telethon for the United Negro College Fund. He had a voice that remained recognizable and powerful into the 21st century. He died on January 6th, 2006.
He was 72 years old. In none of the documented accounts of his life, does he appear to have mentioned the backstage moment at Monterey. It was, from his perspective, perhaps simply a small act of human decency to a fellow musician. It’s possible he didn’t know what followed. It’s possible the performance he witnessed from the wings, if he watched from the wings, was simply one more extraordinary performance among the many he had seen in a lifetime in music.
Or it’s possible he knew exactly what he had been present for. Either way, he said the right thing at the right moment. He found her shaking. He said, “It’ll be fine.” It was more than fine. She stomped her foot down. She got real Texas, and 7,000 people understood all at once that they were in the presence of something that would not come again. Subscribe.
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