BOOKS

JANIS

Written and Edited by David Dalton Simon and Schuster

DIANA

(THE MAKING OF A TERRORIST) Thomas Powers Bantam Books

“Listen, man, one day I finally realized it ain’t all right and it ain’t never gonna be all right, there’s always something going wrong. ”

Janis Joplin

That’s life. Nothing profound but plenty realistic, if you can come to terms with it. The question in these two books (more specifically these two women) \is “Did they?” The picture painted in Janis and Diana points to them as hopelessly idealistic romantics gone sour.

But the important question is whether the authors accomplished what they set out to do, which appears to run along the lines of biographical eulogy. Here are two books about two women who died recently (dead people are automatically legendary) and belonged to the “counter-culture” (added ammunition).

Janis and Diana (the books at least) have a lot in common: loaded with lotsa before and after pictures, they’re eulogies for women who died as a direct (?) result of their profession, both describe the life and person but mainly deal with the profession - Rock and Roll biz with Janis Joplin and The Weatherman with Diana Oughton. These authors seems to have an ax to grind without really discussing any issues (moral, social or political). Under the guise of writing about two particularly interesting people involved in particularly interesting aspects of a new life-style they avoid talking in depth about either the people or their gig. They miss.

Thomas Powers does the better job. He definitely bases his book on the Weatherpeople. Though he cops an attitude, he does attempt to show a truly comprehensive picture of this political ,group with some understanding. We get a glimpse of Diana but, as in Janis, it’s a superficial and subjective view. Each author conveniently builds a person he wants to talk about instead of letting her speak for herself. Dalton inserts passages of Jams’ tape-recorded conversations (the best part of the book) but all too often sloppily gives his flowerly offensive vision of Earth Mother Janis in “Tough-hooker threads, gaudy baubles, exaggerated . . . cannot conceal her matronly regality — a fertility figure.”

“I hope you’re going to edit this stuff — It’s like do you know what’s wrong with most interviews? They’re always too long.” But Dalton wasn’t writing the book for Janis Joplin’s benefit (so her ghost wouldn’t haunt him for eternity) -David Dalton wrote Janis for you to buy and for him to read. He wrote and edited; frankly it fails because he needs an editor. Constantly dipping into fictive blabberings and a reflective poesy about the scenic train ride through Canada, he bombards the pages with passages from Kierkegaard, John Ruskin, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Rolling Stone.

In fact, one of the book’s sections contains excerpts on Janis from Rolling Stone (part of the narrative was serialized in R.S. also). The other parts, besides photos (any of which should replace the blurred cover) and the narrative, include songsheets and a 33 rpm record of Janis Joplin singing, talking and dancing in her familiar, exuberant manner.

Dalton is trying to expose the parallels to Zelda and F.Scott Fitzgerald that Janis’ other self was so absorbed in by contrasting it to her public self, but it’s too gimicky a premise to come off. His messy metaphors just slither out as self-indulgent tangents. The four part narrative entitled “Southern Tales,” “Mechanics of Ecstasy,” “The Caterpiller on the Leaf” and “Entrain’d Seas” average eight titled sections each but the whole thing covers only 75 pages. Now that’s fleshing it out!

Diana, The Making of a Terrorist is a 95c paperback as opposed to the $4.95 paperback, Janis. (It is also a bestseller.) Diana Oughton, the Weatherwoman blown up in the NY townhouse on March 6, 1970 with her own bomb is, at least, honestly portrayed from several viewpoints. It also demonstrates why her particular choice of careers was an inevitability.

The book is obviously an excuse to explain more about the Weathermen phenomenon than Diana — how it grew from SDS, to violence, finally going underground. Although the book was serialized by the author (who did it on assignment for UPI) this political faction is examined fairly. Perhaps too neutrally. Powers reveals Weathermen as a kind of “moral crusade” whose “crisis was the collision of good and evil.” He sees spoiled, willful, rich kids who, after seeing poverty and injustice compared to their upbringing, climb down the Social Register aboard the righteous, rhetorical road to social change. They welcome any change gained through violence, even a sort of fascism — as an improvement to American society. Keep in mind, this is a straight, serious study. Powers doesn’t quite follow a lot of his statements through; yet he manages to give a good overall picture of the evolution of the revolution while following Diana from the Bryn Mawr campus, through the peacenik Guatamalean Peace Corps days to her committment to SDS and tragic death.

Diana, is described as “a young woman of uncommon character and seriousness, independant in her thinking and strong in her commitments” — but a “victim of history.” Janis is also a “victim” - of the dedicated blues singer’s life. Both Powers and Dalton intimate that their life-styles killed Joplin and Oughton a kind of self-destruction. Or maybe, as suggested by Country Joe McDonald of Janis (in Janis Joplin, Her Life and Times by Deborah Landau, a trashy but less pretentious portrayal of Queen Pop Star Supreme) trying to suceed in a male-orien ted organization/industry caused their downfall. “Women is Losers.”

Diana and Janis born in January 1942 and January 1943, repectively, grew up in the same tempestuous era. Symbols of the 60’s, a soft-spoken confused girl and a supposedly “get-itwhile-you-can-girl,” each wrapped up in her fantasies of what life should be; each devoted to making her own that way. Each dedicated to serving people and both sadly empty with the results. Not to demean their importance, but that sounds awful schmaltzy, really. After all, “You don’t need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

Robbie Cruger

CARAVAN OF LOVE AND MONEY

Thomas King Forcade

Signet

You could’ve purchased this book, or most of it, for 35 c, in either CREEM or Fusion (and in half the underground press, as well) a year and a half ago. Tom Forcade claims he got $12,000 for it, and I hope he has to give Abbie Hoffman a couple thousand copies, just to make good on the 1,000 of Steal This Book Forcade was given (but refused to take) by a “people’s tribunal” — Forcade chose to take the case to court, instead, blaming the “people’s tribunal” for being Hoffman-packed. (In fact, the juror — or jurist, whomever — who Forcade attacked most bitterly was the one Forcade, himself, had chosen.) All that was over a bogus claim to some kind of distribution agreement between Abbie and Forcade’s UPS Syndicate.

It’s a shame that books like this appear in the first place; it’s nothing more than a padded, poorly edited version of the UPS article. (And in all the literature from UPS one gets, screaming rip-off at Rolling Stone and everyone to - the right of bohemian backpacking, I’ve never seen one word about Caravan.)

But fortunately, the Caravan was such an insignificant event that even Forcade’s counter-hype is probably doomed to disappear amidst the muck he would like to rake. Don’t just stay away from this book; don’t even steal it. Retreat in the face of it.

What happens when the posturingrighteous turn out to be rip-off artists?

Dave Marsh