Kacee Clanton is one of two performers who play rock icon Janis Joplin in a classic jukebox musical; Vice's content tends to skew male, so it's targeting women with a new online channel; Will Geer started producing theater in Topanga Canyon more than 60 years ago, and his family is keeping up the tradition.
'A Night with Janis Joplin': Inside one performer's 14-year relationship with the singer
It's one thing to portray a famous person in one stage show — it's another thing entirely to portray that same person over the course of multiple shows spanning over a decade. But that's what singer Kacee Clanton has done, first playing Janis Joplin in the show "Love, Janis," and now in the musical, "A Night with Janis Joplin."
The show is so demanding vocally that it requires two singers. On weekends, when there are two shows daily, Clanton shares the role with Mary Bridget Davies. But Clanton is no understudy. She also shared the role on Broadway, she's fronted Joplin's band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, she's sung backup for Joe Cocker, and she's released two albums of her own music.
When Clanton joined us at The Frame studios, she told us about the first time she portrayed Joplin, her secrets to surviving the vocal wear-and-tear of replicating the singer's intense style, and how her relationship with Joplin still changes, despite having played her for almost 15 years now.
Interview Highlights:
Prior to this incarnation of Janis in "A Night with Janis Joplin," you starred in a different Joplin-themed musical, "Love, Janis." You've played with Big Brother and the Holding Company, and you're even wearing the bandana, the beads, the earrings— so at what point does your life stop and Janis Joplin's life begin? Or are they one and the same at this point?
[laughs] There's definitely a Kacee that's wholly separate from Janis. I was raised in Northern California and my parents had a VW bus with daisies on the side, and I think I was just raised to be a little bit bohemian.
Later in my life, when I was approached about doing "Love, Janis," I didn't really understand what they saw in me that suggested Janis, until I started studying footage and getting a little more in-depth. Then I thought, Oh, my, I do kind of remind myself of her! [laughs]
What did you discover? What did you stumble upon?
Mannerisms in general, just watching the way she cued her band, or the way she did her hair. That's when I understood what they were seeing, and I hadn't understood that when I first started.
But then as I got much deeper into her and her life, and as I've played her for many years, I just keep learning more and more about her. I've lived on the road for so long that I think that whole loneliness thing, and the isolation she experienced, that's very much a part of my life, so I've found her in all of that.
Is it possible for anyone to do this show every night of the week?
[laughs] I don't think it's healthy, and that's the reason there are two of us. I'm there to give Mary Bridget Davies a break. She's the other Janis and she also got the Tony nomination on Broadway!
Joplin's way of singing is almost beyond imitation, so how conscious are you of creating a sound that's close, but not a copy? Are you creating something that's unique to your own voice?
Absolutely. Our director's very specific about us not imitating — he wants us to emulate, not imitate. Thank goodness for that, because I don't know that anyone could imitate her. Janis was one of a kind, and I don't think that she'll ever be repeated. But what Mary and I have both discovered over the years is that, initially, you have to have a bit of that gravel in your voice, but your vocal cords have to be strong enough to withstand it.
Beyond that, Janis told the truth at every moment that she was on stage, because she had no other story to tell. She was young, inexperienced, and catapulted into this place of legend before she knew what was going on. [laughs] I think that forced her out on the edge, and she had to be completely 100% honest. And when you do this show, if you walk out on stage and you tell the truth through the whole show — as cliché as it sounds — that's the truth of Janis, and that's what the audience will take home with them.
Why do you think Janis has such an enduring appeal? When I saw the show, while there were people there who clearly grew up listening to her, there were also a lot of people who were too young to have ever known her. So what is it that people still find so captivating?
Again, I want to say that she was a truth-teller, a storyteller, and a force to be reckoned with, and I think that appeals to a lot of people. But even beyond that, it's about the songs. I have to tip my hat to all these people like Jerry Ragovoy [co-writer of "Piece of My Heart"], Bob Neuwirth [co-writer of "Mercedes Benz"], and everybody that was writing all these incredible songs. And her interpretation of them just appealed to so many people.
I read that, as a child, you studied Gospel and Contemporary Christian music. This seems a little different from that, so how does one beget the other?
Janis was raised on Nina Simone and various gospel artists, and back in the day when I was doing "Love, Janis," I was growing into my Janis and getting to know her over the years. But it wasn't until I did this particular show that I realized where Janis and I truly meet: we were both raised on the same stuff. I listened to Nina Simone and Odetta and Bessie Smith, and I think that's how I found her. It wasn't that I grew up always listening to Janis — it was that we both grew up listening to the same kinds of music. In different eras, but the same artists, and that's how I know her.
"A Night with Janis Joplin" is at the Pasadena Playhouse until Aug. 23.
Broadly: Vice's new women-centric site nixes the comment section to avoid trolls
Vice Media Inc. has debuted its 11th digital channel, Broadly, which caters to women as a feminist media outlet. Broadly's new editor-in-chief and director of content is Tracie Egan Morrissey, who pitched the idea to Vice CEO Shane Smith. Morrissey previously worked on Gawker Media's feminist website, Jezebel.
Broadly, like other Vice outlets, will deliver material to its audience using everything from documentary-style videos to in-depth editorials and features.
Vice has been widely criticized in the past for delivering content from a male perspective. Morrissey believes that for the past couple of years, Vice has been working hard to combat that notion.
"The perception of Vice is that it skews male," Morrissey says. "They actually have been doing really great coverage of women's issues. But it was hard to shake that image. I pitched them this idea about a year ago. Shane hired me on the spot. Every since then we've been going at it."
Interview Highlights
You come from the website Jezebel, which is Gawker's women-centric site. How would you say Broadly will be different from Jezebel?
Well, the first thing is that we do original video content, documentary stuff. The other thing is that Jezebel does a lot of aggregation and we're not doing any aggregation.
We also are not doing what is known in the industry as "hot takes," which is a combination of a rant and an op-ed. So, everything that we do is reported. It's either reported or it's humor pieces. There is no real in-between.
Do you feel that what you call "Hot Takes" were becoming a commodity — that everybody was having an opinion about something without adding meaningful conversation or facts to the conversation?
This isn't to say that Jezebel is crappy or anything like that. Jezebel is an excellent website and they do great work. I just no longer wanted to be reactionary. I didn't want to just react to the news that was going on in the world. I wanted to drive discussion instead of join into a conversation that was already taking place.
It also seems like Broadly is going to focus a lot on advice, on guidance, and on things you should or might consider doing. You just did a piece yesterday on power suits. Now this is the kind of advice that you might encounter in different formats, other places. Outside of the occasional f-bomb that is in that piece, how would you describe what Broadly's take is on that story?
I wouldn't say that we actually give advice at all. I actually wanted to steer away from being prescriptive. The woman in that piece who is trying on the power suit has green hair. With her wearing a power suit, it's not ironic, but it's just a little bit out of place. It creates a sort of texture to a conversation.
Unlike Jezebel, Broadly for now, as far as I could tell, doesn't feature a comment section. I have to say part of the appeal of Jezebel and a lot of the Gawker sites was reading through the comments and the conversations people were having in the comments. Is that an intentional choice or have you just not activated the comments section?
No, I never wanted comments. I f---ing hate comments. It's so easy for a commenter to go onto a site and just totally take a dump on this really well-reported story that someone has done. Also the thing is, with women on the Internet, it is very difficult because you get it from all sides.
You get other feminists telling you that you're not doing feminism right. You get [mens' rights activists] calling you a "fat whore." People are totally within their right to say that stuff, but they are not going to say it on my property, on my time.
You're in the first week in the launch of Broadly. You're probably paying a little bit of attention into how many people are checking out your articles and your videos. Ultimately, how will you measure the success of Broadly?
I will measure the success of Broadly if every single day I want to read everything that is on there. I've spent so much time reading the Internet in my career that the bar is set pretty high for me on what I want to click on. As long as it is something that I want to read, that to me is a success.
Marking the 50th anniversary of Bob Dylan's 'Like a Rolling Stone'
The summer marks the 50th anniversary of Bob Dylan's release of his landmark "Like a Rolling Stone," which some consider the greatest rock 'n' roll song of all time. The song came out in 1965 and remained on the U.S. charts for 12 weeks after its release.
David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker and a devoted Dylan follower, was just starting school when the song was released.
"'Like a Rolling Stone' I probably heard when I was in kindergarten," Remnick told The Frame.
Fifty years later, Remnick recalls how the song has followed him throughout his life.
"Even as young as I was, 'Like a Rolling Stone' — with that first shot of the drum, and the very length of the song — was just revelatory," Remnick says. "When I was a teenager I was in a band, or a series of bands — none of them any good — but we always played that song. It was thrilling just to sing those words — as badly as I sang them."
"Like a Rolling Stone" delivers a whopping six minutes and 13 seconds of complex lyrics that many have found confusing as well as profound. For Remnick, the song's prestige moves past merely the lyrical content.
"It's a song in many ways about romantic resentment," Remnick says. "That is not what spoke to me when I was seven years old, and it's not even necessary what speaks to me now — happily. [Bruce] Springsteen describes hearing that song for the first time, that bang of the snare drum that sets it off, then Al Kooper's organ, Mike Bloomfield's guitar, and the absolute exhilaration of Dylan's voice.
"It is the sound of it. It is not lyrics printed out on a page. It's not the band independent of those lyrics. It is the overall fury of that song. It's just incredibly thrilling — like a certain kind of weather."
How the Hollywood Blacklist led to an award-winning theater venue in the woods
In the late 1940s, Will Geer was an actor with a pretty bright future. He was landing roles in big westerns like “Winchester '73” and lived in Santa Monica with his wife and three children.
Soon though, it became much harder to be a liberal actor in Hollywood. At the height of the McCarthy era, the House Un-American Activities Committee shifted its focus to the entertainment industry and Geer was one of many called in for questioning.
“My father took the fifth amendment," says Ellen Geer, his oldest daughter. "He was not in any way going to victimize any of his friends. He refused to testify and he wouldn’t say whether he was a communist or not. Papa never joined anything.”
After refusing to testify, Geer was blacklisted and suddenly had no work. With dwindling funds, he had to make some big changes. He sold his house and bought a small plot of land for cheap in Topanga Canyon. With few other options, Geer fell back on his degree in horticulture.
“He was gardening like crazy, trying to feed the family,” Ellen says. “We lived off the land here. He was a survivalist.”
But Geer didn’t abandon his love of acting. He began organizing small plays on his Topanga property and dubbed his informal theater the Theatricum Botanicum. Before long, other blacklisted actors and musicians flocked to participate.
The Geer children grew up in the Theatricum, surrounded by famous actors and musicians. It became an accidental artists colony. Their childhood memories are of being bounced on Woody Guthrie’s knee and rehearsing plays with the likes of Burgess Meredith.
As the paranoia of the McCarthy era slowly faded, Geer started acting in Hollywood again, and soon he snagged the biggest role of his life — as the grandpa on the hit TV show, “The Waltons.”
(Will Geer (top left) as the perpetually overalls-clad grandpa in "The Waltons.")
The huge success of “The Waltons” meant money, and Geer eventually found a way to put it back into the Theatricum. In 1973, he reopened it as a weekend workshop and offered free performances to the public. The audience grew so quickly that it soon became a successful community theater, sometimes staging three plays a day. They hosted big folk concerts too, with acts like Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie.
“Papa died in ‘78," Ellen says. "We just all looked around, tried to figure out what to do. We didn’t have money. To make a decision to keep something like this going — it’s not a decision you make, it’s something that happens to you. So we decided to make it a non-profit and to serve the community.”
Today, Ellen is the artistic director of the award-winning theater — and it’s just as much a family business as ever. Her children have all grown up acting in Theatricum plays. You can even see some of her grandchildren on stage at the theater this summer.
(Ellen Geer's granddaughter, Willow, left, and half sister, Melora Marshall, on stage. Courtesy of Will Geer's Theatricum Botranicum.)
“We’re theater folks," Ellen says. "We’re theater trash and we love it. And even if we have to go off and make money in other ways, this is what we do. I’m hoping we can leave this place as a bit of a legend for papa, passing on a bit of what he gave to us.”
Visit the Theatricum Botanicum's website for more information and to view a current schedule of performances.