Janis Joplin’s Last Song Has No Voice on It — He Set Up Her Microphone the Night Before D

Marty Cole set up a microphone on a Saturday night in October 1970. And for the rest of his life, he could not walk past an empty vocal booth without stopping. He was 23 years old, the youngest man on the crew at Sunset Sound Recorders on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. And his only job that weekend was to have everything ready for a singer who was coming in the next morning.

He hung the microphone. He set the stool. He put a glass of water on it because someone told him she liked one there. Then he cued a tape, wrote a time on the box, and went home to wait for Sunday. What happened between that Saturday night and that Sunday morning is why a reel of tape sat in Marty’s closet for 39 years, and why he could never bring himself to throw it away.

rewind. One day, Marty had been at Sunset Sound for seven months. He swept the floors when there was nothing else to do. He ran for coffee, and on good nights they let him thread the big machines and mind the levels while the real engineers listened. He was the tape operator. His hands touched every reel that came through the room, and his name was on none of the records.

He came from Bakersfield. His father repaired refrigerators and did not understand the job. So you press the button, his father had said on the phone. That’s the whole thing. You press the button when they tell you. Marty had tried to explain that it was more than that. That you had to feel the song coming.

That you had to be ready before the singer was ready. that half a second late and you lost the take forever. His father had gone quiet on the line. Well, he said finally, “Don’t be late then.” Marty was never late. It was the one thing he had. That Saturday, the producer pulled him aside. A big man named Paul Rothschild, who had made records everyone in that building would have died to make.

“Tomorrow’s an easy day,” Rothschild said. “The band’s already cut it. All we need is her voice on top. You just have her booth ready. Water, warm, quiet. She’ll do it in two or three passes, and we’ll all be home for supper.” Yes, sir, Marty said. You know who she is. Yes, sir, Marty said.

Everybody knows who she is. The band had been in all week. Full tilt boogie, her boys, the tightest group she had ever had. And you could hear it in the room, even with the door shut. That Friday and Saturday, they had laid down a hard driving track, a thing written by a friend of hers named Nick Grainitis, and it cooked.

But there was a hole in the middle of it. Marty noticed it the way you notice a missing tooth with your tongue. The song drove and drove and drove, and right where the voice should have been, there was nothing. just the band playing their hearts out under a silence exactly the shape of a woman. He said it out loud once to the second engineer without thinking.

It sounds like it’s waiting for somebody. The engineer laughed. That’s the idea, kid. She comes in tomorrow and fills it up. You’ve never heard anything fill up a room like her. So on Saturday night, after the band packed their cases, Marty stayed behind to make the booth ready. He did it slowly, the way you set a table for a guest you are afraid of disappointing.

He hung her microphone at the height they told him. He set the wooden stool, and he carried in a glass of water and set it where her hand would find it. Then he loaded the reel with the finished track, the one with the hole in it, so it would be cued and ready the second she walked in. He labeled the box in pencil, the name of the song, the date, and the word vocal with a line under it, meaning the voice went here, meaning tomorrow.

He turned off the lights. The last thing he saw before the door closed was the microphone hanging in the dark over an empty stool and a full glass of water. He would see that exact picture behind his eyes for the next 39 years. Sunday morning, Marty was at the studio 40 minutes early, the way he always was.

He made the coffee. He warmed the room. He checked the water glass and because it had sat overnight, he poured it out and filled it fresh. Paul Rothschild arrived a little before noon. Marty knew the instant the big man came through the door that something was wrong because Rothschild was not carrying anything.

He always carried something. This time his hands were empty and hanging, and his face was the color of the tape. He did not go to the control room. He stood in the doorway and looked at the booth Marty had set, the microphone, the stool, the glass, and he took his glasses off and pressed the heel of his hand against his eyes.

She’s not coming, he said. Marty did not understand. Is she sick? Should I? She’s not coming, Marty. And then quieter, the words landing one at a time like something set down carefully so it wouldn’t break. She died last night at the hotel. They found her this morning. She had been across town at a place called the Landmark Motor Hotel.

The whole time he was hanging her microphone. While he set the stool and filled the glass and turned off the lights on the empty booth, she was already gone. The band’s track was still on the machine, ceued, waiting. The hole in the middle of it exactly the shape of a woman who was not going to come and fill it.

That’s when Marty understood what he was standing in front of. Not a delay, not a rescheduled session, a silence that was now permanent. They did not record anything that Sunday. Grown men who had made a hundred records stood around the room not knowing what to do with their hands. Somebody made calls.

Somebody else just sat on the floor with his back against the wall. Late in the afternoon, when most of them had drifted out, Paul Rothschild came and found Marty at the tape machine where the boy had not moved. The reel was still loaded. Neither of them had been able to take it off. “What do I do with it?” Marty said it wasn’t really a question. the track.

She never I know. Rothschild said there’s a hole in it. I know, son. They stood there together looking at the slow reels. And then Rothschild made the decision that a lot of people later would call brave and a few would call foolish. “We leave it,” he said. When the record comes out, we leave the song exactly like this.

The band and the whole and no voice. We do not have somebody else sing it. We let people hear the space where she was supposed to be. Marty stared at him. An instrumental on a Janice Joplain record. No. Rothschild said, “Not an instrumental. A song with the singer missing. There’s a difference. And everyone who ever loved her is going to feel it in one second flat.

” He was right. When the album came out the next year, they called it Pearl. That track sat in the middle of it, driving and rolling and mean with a hole in it. exactly the shape of a woman, and it did not need one word to say what it said. But this is the part almost nobody knows. Before Marty left the studio that Sunday night, the worst night of his young life, he did the thing that would follow him for the rest of it.

He was supposed to file the reel, log it, box it, shove it in the vault with the others. Instead, when the room was finally empty, he threaded up a blank and made a copy. The band’s track, the whole thing, the whole and all. He wrote no label on it. He put it under his coat. He never told anyone. Not Rothschild, not the engineers, not his father.

He was not stealing a hit. The finished song would be on the record for the world. He was taking the silence, the raw floor reel of a song waiting for a voice that never came, made on the last night he ever set a microphone for Janice Joplain. He could not have told you why. He was 23, and something enormous had happened 3 ft from him, and he needed to keep one true piece of it in his own two hands.

He took it home to a one- room apartment off Fountain Avenue and put it on the top shelf of the closet, and there it stayed. Marty Cole had a whole life. He stayed in the business four more years, then left it. He said later, that after that Sunday, every empty vocal booth looked the same to him, and he couldn’t keep walking past them.

He went home to California’s Central Valley, took over his father’s shop when the old man’s hands got bad, and learned at last to fix a refrigerator. He married a school teacher named Diane. He had two daughters. He coached a girl’s softball team for 11 years, and was, by every account, a quiet and reliable man who did not talk much about the years he had spent in Los Angeles.

But every so often, his daughters would remember, their father would hear a certain song come on the radio, that hard driving track with the hole in the middle of it, and he would stop whatever he was doing, stop with a plate half dried in his hand, and stand very still until it was over. Once his younger daughter, maybe 10, asked him why there was no singing in that one.

Marty was quiet for a while because she was supposed to sing it the next morning, he said, and the morning came and she didn’t. The girl didn’t understand. How could she? But she remembered the way her father said it. And years later, when she did understand, she said it was the saddest true sentence she had ever heard a grown man say in an ordinary kitchen.

The reel stayed in the closet through all of it. A flat unlabeled circle of tape on a high shelf behind the winter coats holding a silence exactly the shape of a woman. Here is the part that survived. In 2009, a young archavist working on the reissue of Pearl was tracking down everyone who had been in the building during those last sessions.

Most of them were gone, but somebody remembered a tape kid named Cole, and a phone number led to a refrigerator shop in the valley, and one afternoon the archavist drove 3 hours north and knocked on the door of a tired man of 62. Marty made him coffee. They talked for an hour about levels and machines and men long dead.

And then near the end, Marty stood up without a word, went to the hall closet, reached up behind the coats, and brought down a flat metal reel with no writing on it. He set it on the kitchen table between them. The archavist’s hands began to shake before he even understood what he was looking at. It’s the floor take, Marty said.

from that Saturday. The band and the hole and no voice. I set her microphone up. That was my job that weekend. I set it up and I filled the water glass and she never came. They played it that afternoon on borrowed equipment in a small kitchen in a valley town 3 hours from where it was made.

The band came up out of the speakers, driving and rolling and alive, playing their hearts out under a silence exactly the shape of a woman. A silence 40 years old, and not one day quieter. At the spot in the middle where the voice should have been, the old man’s hand rose to his mouth, and he stayed like that until the end. When it was over, the archavist asked him the question anyone would have asked.

Why had he kept it? Why, of all the tapes he had touched in his life, this one, the one with nobody singing on it. Marty thought about it for a long time. Because everybody remembers the voice, he finally said, “The whole world’s got the voice. Somebody had to keep the room she was supposed to walk into. He gave the reel away that day, and it went where such things go, into the careful, climate controlled dark where the last work of the dead is kept.

But before it left his kitchen, Marty put his hand flat on the metal box one more time, the way you’d put a hand on a shoulder, and said the thing his father had said to him 40 years before. “Don’t be late,” he said very quietly. to the real, to no one, to her. If these forgotten moments stay with you, take a moment to subscribe and leave a like.

It helps stories like Marty’s find the people who still remember them. And tell us in the comments, have you ever made a place ready for someone who never arrived and carried the memory of it for years? We’d love to read