Meet Dave Richards, Porsche artist

Really, the car was perfect. It was head-turning, low-slung sexy, and it fit Janis like a tattoo. If Janis' voice was her soul, her psychedelic car was the banner she waved as she careened around the streets of San Francisco. In 1968, with the first real money she made, Janis chose--not a Mercedes--but a used Porsche. Its sensuous lines and aerodynamic elegance were tasteful, but altogether too spare for her flamboyant tastes. The queen of rock needed a car more in tune with her befeathered, bracelet-jangling style. Big Brother roadie and friend Dave Richards turned his multi-faceted talents to the project.

"She just gave me the car and said paint it," Richards remembers. "She pretty much left it up to me, but she wanted her sign on it somewhere." Janis was a Capricorn and very much identified with her astrological sign--she and a couple of her friends were known by their crowd as "the Capricorn ladies." Richards describes his design as "what was going on in all our heads at the time; influenced by a lot of LSD and lot of marijuana and the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement." Painted in rivers of orange, pink, yellow, and turquoise, the car's hood featured the gods-eye symbol identified with the band, and a '60s-style assortment of flowers and butterflies. On the front left fender was a portrait of the band. On the back, Richards painted a sun face with a Capricorn symbol on it. It was a traffic-stopping sight and Janis loved it immediately. "She was overjoyed," said Richards. His psychedelic artistry netted him about $500, a lot of money by the standards of the time.

San Franciscans knew that car. When Janis parked in the city, she would often return to find fan letters and gifts scattered over the hood. Some gutsy thief/obsessed fan (you know who you are) stole the Porsche once and had begun to cover the distinctive paint job with primer by the time police found it.


Unstifle yourself

In the '60s, creativity flourished and that the band's roadie was also a self-taught painter was not particularly unusual. "A lot of people were painting then," Richards said. He was the band's first equipment manager, hired on originally at $25 per week. "At the time, that was plenty," he said. Rent in those days was $75 a month, and with food stamps and the occasional jewelry-making he and his girlfriend did on the side, that was enough to get by. "It sounded like fun to me--I knew Peter, the bass player; and Jim Gurley, the guitar player, just from hanging out on the street."


Living at the core of the '60s

In the mid 60's, Haight Ashbury was a village, a core community of several hundred people where everybody knew everybody else, at least by sight. The residents of the Haight, remembers Richards, were mostly students and artists, drop-outs from various political movements. "San Francisco was a magnet for those kind of people," says Richards. "It attracted people who had been involved in social protests and were tired of preaching about it." They came to San Francisco, he said, "to be what they were talking about." Later stereotypes aside, the early hippies were thoughtful people involved in an attempt to change consciousness, to live their principles. In the Haight, in the '60s, it was all possible. "It was a formative time," said Richards. "I'll always be affected by it."

For a few years, the Haight was magical. "In the early days, it was just absolutely beautiful in the way people treated each other," said Richards. "I met people there, very young people who were some of the wisest people I've ever met in my life--I'm still trying to digest some of the things I learned from them."


Beyond the legend

In 1966, Janis hit San Francisco like a shot of high-grade speed. Recruited by a friend to audition for Big Brother, she left Texas with nothing but a promise of bus fare back home if it didn't work out. It did, of course. "Everybody recognized that Janis had enormous presence," said Richards. "That became apparent right away." Some people, however, weren't pleased by any change to the band's traditional "freak rock" sound. "When they brought Janis in, a lot of Big Brother fans and stalwarts said they ruined the band by getting a girl singer," said Richards. "That dropped away pretty fast."

Later in her career, Janis adopted the nickname "Pearl," a term inspired by the pearl barley Richards saw one night at a health food store. Although many fans equated Pearl with the hard-drinking, blues mama image Janis wore for concerts, it was only one facet of her personality. "Janis was an intellectual," Richards said. "She pretended to be just a good old girl, but she was really very well read--literature, philosophy, history. She had a lot of style and a great sense of herself. I remember when she did the Dick Cavett show--she just charmed the hell out of him and that was early on. It was fun to watch."

By 1970, Janis was with her third band and Richards had gotten out of the roadie business. He turned his talents to carpentry and Janis hired him to remodel the house she had bought. "I would see Janis on a regular basis because I was working on her house--she was constantly doing stuff to it," he said. "At the time she died, I was about to build a flying saucer carport for the porsche." Even at 27, Janis was thinking about retirement. "Today we have the Rolling Stones, but in those days, your life in rock and roll wasn't terribly long," Richards said. Janis talked of buying a biker bar in Larkspur with a piano and a pool table and "just mellowing into old age."

Janis never got the chance to mellow and today, Richards is a cabinet-maker, living just outside San Francisco. He thinks Janis would be amused at the proliferation of web sites devoted to her life and music. "She would be laughing her ass off," he said. "Probably she'd be flattered too, but she'd think it was funnier than hell." Janis' exuberant cackle was as legendary as her feather boas. "I miss her a lot," Richards said. "I expected to know her all my life. I expected to get old with her."

Dave unfortunately passed away unexpectedly in the summer of 2000. He is missed by many.