I “met” Janis Joplin, for the second time, at the Cabale, a coffee house on, I think, San Pedro Street in Berkeley, sometime in the winter of 1963. I put “met” in quotes because I didn’t really have an exchange with her, at least at first, since she was onstage and I was in the audience. However, by the end of the night I was playing backup guitar for her, an honor I bestowed on myself with a stunt of real musical sleaze.

The first time I remember meeting Janis Joplin was in the winter of 1963 during a dope break on the sidewalk outside The Cabale, a Berkeley coffee house where my bluegrass band, The Ridgerunners, was playing. This was before she was known to more than a tiny handful of people who themselves had just met her.