Janis Joplin dies.
Check back tomorrow to read about Janis Joplin and her biker connectiion with 'Freewheelin' Frank' and 'Sweet William'.
Part II
Janis Joplin was a favorite of the Hells Angels since her Big Brother & the Holding Company days. The HA put on numerous shows in San Francisco with Big Brother that also included The Merry Pranksters, Blue Cheer, The Diggers, etc. And let's not forget their 1967 album "Cheap Thrills" with 'Approved By Frisco Hells Angels' on the front cover. The first public appearance of her band Full Tilt Boogie in 1970 she played a show for the them for only $260, Janis exclaimed to the journalist Al Aronowitz "Two hundred and sixty fucking dollars! Man, I could make $260 a minute but the Hells Angels are friends of mine."
From the bands relationship with the Angels two other relationships were cemented - Janis and her sometime, on-again, off-again boyfriend Frank 'Freewheelin' Frank' Reynolds and Bill 'Sweet William' Fritsch, both San Francisco HA.
According to Aronowitz... "Janis was Sweet William's idea of a lady.
I don't know whether they ever shared the same motorcycle seat but the way people talk, you'd think that Sweet William always bowed with his hand over his heart every time Janis walked by.
Sweet William had a lot of style, even if it was the kind you picked up working 12 years on the docks as a longshoreman. Otherwise, Sweet William had all the tenderness of a dump truck. His hair was long and black. There was a satanic goatee on his chin. His face had a way of making you think there was a knife clenched between his teeth. Sweet William was a Hells Angel. Janis loved them all.
They'd met a long time before, after Janis first came up to San Francisco from Port Arthur, Texas, hanging out in Haight-Ashbury, looking for a band to ball. Sweet William was busy helping organize the Diggers then, a band of hippie thieves who used to rob the wholesale commission markets of beef and vegetables so they could give free meals to all the freaked-out kids roaming the streets. Later he joined the Hells Angels and became vice president of the San Francisco club.
"Oooowwhheeee!" you could hear him saying after watching Janis sing. 'she's so beautiful and loose! She makes her voice sound like a Harley-Davidson Seventy-Four tear-assing a warp in the continuum. Pearl's always in fourth gear and don't give a good goddamn whose nickel-dime mind she bombs."
To Sweet William, Janis was a lady. The last I heard of him, he was shot in the back of the head during a gunfight after stopping in for a drink at a friendly neighborhood bar in Fresno. He had parked his bike outside. He wasn't looking for trouble. He was alone with his girlfriend but he was wearing his colors. He was paralyzed afterwards with the bullet still in his brain. It happened on the very day that they scattered Janis' ashes from the Golden Gate Bridge."
And then there's Texas biker, Rick Fairless, who has done both panhead and shovelhead pscychodelic Janis Joplin Full Tilt Boogie bikes based on her 1965 Porsche 356C Cabriolet.
Today in motorcycle history proudly supports the National Association for Bikers with a Disability (NABD). www.nabd.org.uk
