Janis Joplin, San Jose, CA © 1968 Bruce Steinberg

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In May of 1968, a musical event took place at the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds in San Jose that was billed as the “1st International San Jose Pop Festival.” Clearly positioned to be the cultural successor to 1967’s Monterey Pop Festival, and sandwiched about halfway in between that watershed event and 1969’s yet-to-be Woodstock, it should have attained at least some of the historical notoriety of both of those other bookend events.

But no one seems to have heard of it these days despite the host of top-flight artists who appeared there, including The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother & the Holding Company, Country Joe and the Fish, and others, many of whom were memorialized in films about the other two festivals. There’s no trace of it in any web search, and the few posters that were produced to promote it are extremely rare.

If the 1968 San Jose Pop Festival is an obscure footnote in Bay Area musical history for lack of an adequate filmic record, it’s no fault of the dozens of still photographers like myself who were squeezed into a holding pen between the stage and the rest of the audience behind us, elbowing each other to get shots of each band as they performed.

Of all the acts that performed there, I was most impressed with Big Brother. Janis Joplin was still with them, and she never looked or sounded better than she did that day.

Watching and shooting her at close range confirmed something that had always puzzled me about her pictures. No two photos of her ever looked the same, and now I could see why. Not only was her face dynamic and constantly changing, but even statically she just looked completely different from any new angle. Some people have certain features that dominate their appearance from any perspective, but Janis had a face in which each feature took its turn. Straight on, you might notice her eyes only. At three-quarter view her nose took over, and at full profile her chin forced you to reassess her eyes and nose in terms of a new geometry, hooded eyes becoming gaunt and the broad nose becoming almost beaked.

Even her complexion changed with the angle of incident light, changing from conspicuously rough to inconspicuously smooth with the tosses of her head, at which time her hair might fall into any one of a dozen unrelated configurations. I started to understand analytically what all of these girls understood intuitively: Janis was the composite of them all.

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