The Tree JANIS JOPLIN Planted Is Still in Golden Gate Park. Here’s the Story.
The Tree JANIS JOPLIN Planted Is Still in Golden Gate Park. Here’s the Story.
[cough and clears throat] >> There is a tree in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco that has been there since the 1960s. It has no official sign, no plaque, no marker of any kind. But every day, people walk across the park specifically to find it, to sit under it, to take a photograph of it. Because that tree has a name, and the name belongs to a woman who used to sit under it with a guitar. Before the world knew who she was. January 1963. Janis Joplin was 20 years old. She had grown up in Port Arthur, Texas,
a flat, hot, working-class town on the Gulf Coast, where the refineries ran day and night, and the social rules were as rigid as anything that had come before them. She had been told her whole life that she was too much, too loud, too opinionated, too interested in the wrong music. She left in January 1963, the way she left everything, completely, and without looking back. She hitched a ride with her friend Chet Helms, who was heading to San Francisco. They traveled for 50 hours. When she arrived, she had a guitar, a
voice, and very little else. She was 20 years old. Nobody outside of Port Arthur had ever heard of her. The Coffee Gallery was on Grant Avenue in North Beach. A small room, low ceilings, the smell of coffee and cigarettes. Janis began playing there almost immediately after arriving. She played folk music, blues standards, Bessie Smith, Lead Belly. She played them in her own way, which was already something different from how anyone else was playing them. There were no drums, no amplification beyond the room itself,
just Janis and an acoustic guitar, and a small group of people who stopped talking when she started singing. That was the thing people remembered, that the room went quiet, not because they had been asked to be quiet, because the voice made the room quiet on its own. By 1966, San Francisco had changed. The Haight-Ashbury neighborhood had become the center of something that did not yet have a name, but would soon be called the counterculture. The Grateful Dead were at 710 Ashbury Street. Janis was at 635 Ashbury,
a pink Victorian building a few doors down. She had joined Big Brother and the Holding Company. The first rehearsal was loud enough that the neighbors called the police. San Francisco police officers knocked on the door. The band told them not to worry. It was just their new singer. The officers left. Janis kept singing. Golden Gate Park in 1966 and 1967 was something closer to a city onto itself. People camped there, gathered there, played music without asking permission. Hippie Hill was a gentle grassy slope
just off Kezar Drive. Janis found her way there. She would sit under a particular tree at the base of the hill. She would take out her guitar. She would sing. Not for a crowd, exactly, not for an audience in the formal sense, for whoever happened to be there. Children playing in the grass, adults lying in the sun, strangers passing through who stopped because the voice made them stop. Janis Joplin sitting in the grass of Golden Gate Park in 1966 and 1967 is not in any official record. There was no photographer assigned
documented, but the people who were there remembered it and they kept remembering it for decades. There’s a story about a morning in the summer of 1967. The Panhandle of Golden Gate Park was full of people. Full in the specific way that summer 1967 was full of things. One morning, Jimi Hendrix appeared in the Panhandle. He had a generator. He had a large amplifier. It was 9:30 in the morning. He plugged in and started playing. Thousands of people gathered around. And sitting on top of the amplifier,
because that was the most available seat, was Janis. She sat on Jimi Hendrix’s amplifier in the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park at 9:30 in the morning. Then a man from a nearby apartment appeared. He shut off the generator. He said it was too early. Jimi Hendrix had less than 4 years left. Janis Joplin had less than 4 years left. Neither of them knew this. The man from Oak Street knew only that it was 9:30 in the morning. He walked back to his apartment. The music stopped. Nobody knows exactly
when the tree got its name. Trees do not arrive with names. They acquire them the way places acquire their names through the accumulation of enough moments in enough people’s memories. The story of how the tree came to be there at all is the kind of story that gets told in San Francisco by people with long white hair and a certain specific knowledge of how things actually happened. One night, sometime in 1967 Janis Joplin and a friend were riding bicycles through the city under the influence of LSD.
They came across some small potted trees. Janis saw one she liked. She took it. She balanced it on her bicycle seat and tried to carry it home. It was heavier than she had anticipated. She left it near the base of Hippie Hill. The next morning some people found it there. They liked the look of it. They took it out of its pot and planted it in the ground. The city park workers found it later and tried to remove it. They were met with a protest from thousands of people. The federal gardeners agreed with the
protesters. The tree stayed. It has been there ever since. June 1967 the Monterey Pop Festival. Janis Joplin walked onto the stage with Big Brother and the Holding Company and sang “Ball and Chain”. D.A. Pennebaker was there with a camera. Cass Elliot Mama Cass was in the crowd. The Pennebaker footage shows Cass watching Janis perform. Her mouth is open. She mouths two words “Wow.” “Heavy.” The night before Janis had been someone who played under a tree in Golden Gate
Park for whoever happened to be walking by. The morning after she was someone the whole world was going to know about. The tree in Golden Gate Park did not change. Janis Joplin did not entirely change either. She was still the woman from Port Arthur who had come to San Francisco with a guitar and a voice and nothing else. She was just famous now. Which is not the same as changed. It is just louder. The years between Monterey and her death in October 1970 were years of extraordinary music and extraordinary cost.
Cheap Thrills, The Cosmic Blues Band, the tour that never stopped, the Southern Comfort that was always in her hand. She gave everything to every room she walked into. That was not a performance choice. That was the only way she knew how to do it. People who saw her in 1968, 1969, and 1970 remembered it the same way. They said she was the most present performer they had ever seen. Present in the sense that there was nothing between Janis and the music. No management, no calculation, no decision about what to give and what
to hold back. Everything. Every night. The tree in Golden Gate Park was still there during those years. She may have walked past it. She may have sat under it again. Nobody documented it if she did. But it was there. October 4th, 1970. The Landmark Motor Hotel, Hollywood, California. Room 105. Janis Joplin was 27 years old. She had been recording Pearl, the best album of her career, though she did not know yet that it would be called that. She had been happy, genuinely and specifically happy, in a way the people around her had not
seen in a while. She had been talking about the future. And then she was gone. In San Francisco, the city she had arrived in with nothing in 1963, people heard the news and went to the places that were hers. Some of them went to the park. Some of them went to Hippie Hill. Some of them sat under the tree. Not because anyone told them to, because they needed somewhere to put what they were feeling. And the tree was there. The tree is still there. It has been there for almost 60 years now. It has no official sign, no plaque, no
marker of any kind from the city of San Francisco. But it has a name. The Coffee Gallery is called something else now. The apartments at 635 Ashbury are private residences. The Panhandle where Hendrix played his amplifier at 9:30 in the morning is just a park again. But the tree is there. And the name is there. And people keep coming. Because some things do not need a plaque to be remembered. Some things just need to have been real. And the woman who sat under that tree in 1966 and 1967 and sang the blues for whoever stopped
to listen, she was as real as anything that has ever happened in that park. She is still there. In the roots, in the branches, in the name that nobody officially gave the tree, and that nobody has ever been able to take away.
