Lou Rawls Found Janis Joplin Trembling Backstage at Monterey and Said It’ll Be Fine D

Before the performance that changed everything, there was a moment that almost no one knows about backstage at the Monterey Pop Festival, June 17th, 1967. Janis Joplin was trembling and Lou Rawls was telling her it would be fine. To understand what this moment meant, you have to understand two things.

You have to understand what Monterey was and you have to understand who Lou Rawls was. And then you have to understand what it means that one of them found the other shaking backstage and said, “It’ll be fine. Don’t worry about a thing.” The Monterey International Pop Festival took place June 16th through 18th, 1967.

It was, in retrospect, the moment when American music understood what it was becoming. The Beatles had sent a representative. The Who were there. Jimi Hendrix was there. Simon and Garfunkel were there. The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Otis Redding. The lineup was the definition of what the music world considered important in the summer of 1967.

Big Brother and the Holding Company were scheduled to play on Saturday, June 17th, during the afternoon concert, the underground day, as it was informally known, featuring mainly Bay Area bands and a few other acts that the industry had not yet fully processed. They were B-listers. They had not yet been recognized as anything more than a promising San Francisco band with an exceptional singer.

Outside of the Bay Area, almost no one had heard Janis Joplin perform live. She was 24 years old. She was about to change that. First, though, she had to get through the fear. John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas was backstage at Monterey. He was one of the organizers of the festival. Along with Lou Adler and others, he had conceived and built the event that was now happening around him.

He remembered what he saw backstage before Janis went on. He said, “She was so nervous it was crazy.” He said, “She was rattling, just shaking.” And then he said the thing that is the whole story. Lou Rawls was telling her, “It’ll be fine. Don’t worry about a thing.” Lou Rawls, in 1967, Lou Rawls was one of the most recognized voices in American music.

He had grown up in Chicago, had sung in gospel quartets as a child, had been in a car accident in 1958 that put him in a coma for 5 days, and from which he emerged still able to sing. He had recorded 17 albums. He had a voice, a deep, warm, controlled baritone that embodied everything the American singing tradition knew how to do.

He understood stages. He had been on them his whole adult life. He understood fear before stages. He had felt it and conquered it and learned to use it. And he found Janis Joplin shaking backstage at Monterey, and he told her it would be fine. Not because he knew what was about to happen. Nobody knew what was about to happen.

Because he was a musician who recognized another musician in a moment of need. And he said the thing that needed to be said, “It’ll be fine. Don’t worry about a thing.” Batharice, I can six us. The specific kindness of that gesture, the specific quality of a veteran performer taking a moment to reassure someone who was about to do something enormous, is the whole story. He didn’t have to.

He could have been in his own preparation, his own thought, his own version of whatever performers do in the hours before they perform. He saw her shaking, and he came to her, and he said, “It will be fine.” He was right. He was right in ways that even he probably didn’t anticipate.

John Phillips watched her walk from the backstage area toward the stage, and then he watched what happened. He said, “Just as soon as she hit that stage, she stomped her foot down and got real Texas. She stomped her foot down and got real Texas.” Six words. John Phillips describing the specific moment when the woman who had been rattling backstage became the woman who stopped the world.

The foot stomp, the declaration, the specific physical commitment of someone who has made a decision in the last available second. The decision to be completely, entirely, without reservation, exactly who they are. She was from Port Arthur, Texas. She had been trying to leave Texas behind in various ways since she was 19.

She had gone to San Francisco to become something that Texas couldn’t contain. And in the moment that mattered most, she stomped her foot and got real Texas. Texas was the blues records she had grown up on. Texas was the isolation that had made music the only honest thing.

Texas was the specific wound that had become the specific voice. She stomped her foot and all of that came through. What happened on that stage in the next several minutes has been documented in the D. A. Pennebaker film, in photographs, in the accounts of everyone who was there. She sang Ball and Chain. The song that Big Mama Thornton had written, that she had made her own, that she was about to make the world’s.

Mama Cass Elliot was watching from the side of the stage. The expression on her face in the Pennebaker footage has become one of the most recognizable images from that era. The face of someone who cannot believe what they are witnessing. 7,000 people. The performance that made her famous overnight.

The performance that led to the Columbia Records deal, to Cheap Thrills, to Piece of My Heart on every radio in America. Everything that followed, every concert, every album, every life she touched with that voice, everything traces back to the moment she stomped her foot down on the Monterey stage, and the moment before that, the moment that allowed the stomp to happen, was Lou Rawls saying, “It’ll be fine.

Don’t worry about a thing.” The relationship between encouragement and greatness is not always linear. Some people perform better with no words at all. Some people need to be left alone in their fear until the fear becomes fuel. But, Janis Joplin, in the most important backstage moment of her life, was shaking.

And, Lou Rawls came to her and said the simple human thing. We don’t know what she said back. John Phillips didn’t record her response. What he recorded was the outcome. She hit that stage and stomped her foot down and got real Texas. Whatever Lou Rawls’s words did inside her, whether they calmed her, whether they gave her something to push against, whether they were simply the last human contact before the transformation, the transformation happened.

She was rattling. She stomped her foot. The world stopped. Lou Rawls continued his career for 39 more years after Monterey. He recorded over 60 albums. He was known for his annual telethon for the United Negro College Fund. He had a voice that remained recognizable and powerful into the 21st century. He died on January 6th, 2006.

He was 72 years old. In none of the documented accounts of his life, does he appear to have mentioned the backstage moment at Monterey. It was, from his perspective, perhaps simply a small act of human decency to a fellow musician. It’s possible he didn’t know what followed.

It’s possible the performance he witnessed from the wings, if he watched from the wings, was simply one more extraordinary performance among the many he had seen in a lifetime in music. Or it’s possible he knew exactly what he had been present for. Either way, he said the right thing at the right moment. He found her shaking.

He said, “It’ll be fine.” It was more than fine. She stomped her foot down. She got real Texas, and 7,000 people understood all at once that they were in the presence of something that would not come again. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you before.

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The Real Griselda Blanco Was The Most Dangerous Cocaine Queen Behind ‘Griselda’ Series – YouTube Transcripts: September 3rd, 2012, 6:15 in the evening. Metalene, Colombia, the Cardiso Butcher Shop on 29th Street. Griselda Blanco walked out carrying a slab of meat wrapped in white paper. She was 69 years old, stooped, gay-haired, a grandmother in flat shoes. The motorcycle came from her left, two riders. The passenger raised a 9mm. He fired twice. One round entered her skull above the left ear. She dropped onto the sidewalk beside her pregnant daughter-in-law. Blood pulled into the gutter. The motorcycle vanished into traffic. The whole hit took seconds. This wasn’t just another cartel hit. The woman bleeding out on that meddling sidewalk had been linked to more than 200 murders. She’d helped build the Miami cocaine pipeline before Pablo Escobar was a household name. She’d buried three husbands, motherthered four sons, and earned a nickname that terrified men twice her size. The black widow, Ladrina, the cocaine godmother. And here’s the part that mattered most. The motorcycle drive by killing that ended her life. Her own gunmen were among the first to make it famous. This is the story of how a poor girl from Medeline helped build a cocaine empire on Miami concrete. how she outkilled most of the men around her during the deadliest decade in American crime history. How she made enemies of cartels, federal agents, and her own family. And how her own methods finally circled back and put her in the dirt. But here’s what the documentaries gloss over. Griselda wasn’t just a drug dealer. She was an architect. She helped draw the blueprint that the cartels who came after her, Escobars included, would follow. And for a brief blood soaked window in the late 1970s and early 80s, she moved cocaine into the United States on a scale few of her male rivals could match. You have to understand where she came from to understand what she became. Griselda Blanco Restrepo was born February 15th, 1943 in Cartahena, Colombia. When Griselda was three, the family moved to Medelene into a hillside slum. No running water, no electricity, dirt floors. Children ran the streets like packs of dogs. According to her own later associates and the lore that surrounds her, Griselda was picking pockets young. And by her former lover’s account, at 11, she allegedly took part in kidnapping a boy from a wealthy neighborhood, demanded ransom, and when the family didn’t pay, shot him. 11 years old. Allegedly, she survived by hustling, prostitution as a teenager, forged paperwork. By her early 20s, she’d taken up with her first husband, a document forger named Carlos Trujillo. They had three sons, Dixon, Uber, and Oswaldo. The marriage ended the way most things in her life ended with Carlos gone. Some accounts say she had him killed over a business dispute. Others say he died of cerosis. The accounts genuinely vary. What’s clear is that by the early 1970s, Griselda was a mother of three with a growing taste for the trade and for violence. Then she fully partnered with Alberto Bravo and everything scaled up. Bravo was a mealene smuggler with ambitions bigger than his territory. They married. They moved cocaine north. At first, it was a few kilos at a time, hidden in the false bottoms of suitcases. But Griselda saw something the men around her didn’t. She thought industrial. By the early 1970s, she and Bravo had set up shop in Queens, New York, Jackson Heights. The Colombian neighborhood that would become the beach head for the South American cocaine invasion. This is where Griselda’s genius started showing. She hired a designer in Medolene to make custom bras and girdles with hidden compartments. Each one could carry up to 2 kilos. She recruited women, stewardesses, tourists, housewives, grandmothers. They flew commercial from Bogotaa to JFK wearing the merchandise on their bodies. Customs barely looked twice at middle-aged Colombian women in modest clothing. The operation ran for years, moving steady volume into New York and feeding the city’s exploding appetite for the drug. But that’s not the crazy part. The crazy part is what she did with the money. She didn’t bank it the way the Italians laundered theirs. She buried it in coffee cans, in safety deposit boxes under fake names, in the walls of safe houses across Queens. The cash piled up faster than she could hide it. Then came the indictment. April 30th, 1975. A federal grand jury in the Southern District of New York charged Griselda Blanco and 37 others the result of an early DEA operation called Banshee. It was one of the biggest cocaine cases US prosecutors had built to that point. By the time the indictment came down, Griselda was already back in Colombia out of reach. She left behind safe houses, bodies, and a half-built empire. But she also left behind a blueprint. The Queen’s operation became the model for everything that came next. Back in Colombia, things got ugly fast. Griselda and Alberto Bravo were sitting on millions in cash and accusing each other of skimming. In 1975, they met outside a Bogota nightclub to settle accounts. According to multiple accounts, Griselda pulled a pistol and shot Bravo. His bodyguards opened fire. She caught a bullet in the stomach. When the smoke cleared, Bravo was dead along with six of his men. Griselda survived. She walked out holding her stomach with one hand and took control of his share of the business with the other. Husband number two, buried. Here’s the thing about Griselda that nobody quite understood at the time. She wasn’t running from anything. She was building toward something. By the late 1970s, she’d married her third husband, Dario Sapulvida. She’d had a fourth son, Michael Corleion Blanco. Yes, she named her child after the Godfather character, and she’d moved her entire operation to a new city, Miami. Miami in the late 1970s was a sleepy retirement town. Pastel hotels, shuffleboard, a police department that wasn’t ready for what was coming. Griselda saw all of it. the geography, the Cuban exile community, the endless coastline, the lazy federal presence. She set up in a mansion in the wealthy suburb of Pinerest and she went to work. This is where Griselda became something new, a woman running a paramilitary cocaine army. Let me break down how the Miami operation worked because the mechanics matter. Step one, the opportunity. Miami had three things no other American city had. Direct ocean access to Colombia, a large Latin American immigrant population that gave her foot soldiers cover and a banking sector hungry for cash deposits with few questions asked. Step two, the muscle. When Castro emptied his jails and let roughly 125,000 Cubans sail from the port of Marielle in 1980, a small but violent minority had criminal records. Griselda recruited some of the hardest of them, killers, enforcers. She paid them, gave them apartments, cars, and women. Step three, the structure. She built cocaine cells across Miami Dade County. Each cell handled a different function. Importation, cutting, distribution, collection, enforcement. No cell knew what the others were doing. Step four, the money. At her peak around 1979 and 1980, Griselda was moving an estimated 3,400 pounds of cocaine per month into Miami. At the height of her operation, that translated into as much as $80 million a month. Step five, the problem. Griselda enjoyed killing too much and it would eventually destroy everything. Because here’s what made her different. Pablo Escobar killed for business. Carlos later killed for territory. The OOA brothers killed when they had to. Grisel de Blanco killed because she liked it. Her gunman helped pioneer the modern point blank motorcycle hit. Before Griselda’s cruise, cartel killings leaned on parked cars, ambushes, kidnappings. Her people put shooters on motorcycles in pairs. The driver weaved through traffic. The passenger fired through car windows at stoplights. By the time witnesses processed what they’d seen, the bikes were three blocks away. Her enforcers, the pistols, are credited with some of the first of these motorcycle assassinations, a method that became a hallmark of the cartels who followed. Between 1979 and 1982, Miami Dade County experienced what people later called the cocaine cowboys era. The murder rate climbed to the point where the medical examiner’s office was so overwhelmed it reportedly leased a refrigerated trailer just to store the bodies. By the early 80s, Miami led the nation in homicides, and a significant share of those killings traced back to one woman. The Dayland Mall shooting. July 11th, 1979. A liquor store called Crown Liquors beside the mall in South Miami. 2:30 in the afternoon, shoppers everywhere, children, families. Two of Griselda’s gunmen walked in carrying machine pistols. Their target was a Colombian cocaine dealer named Herman Jimenez Panesso. They cut him down along with his bodyguard, Juan Carlos Hernandez. By the time they walked out, two men were dead. The storefront looked like a war zone, and they were gone. They fled in a van police later nicknamed the war wagon, its sides lined with weapons and bulletproof vests. The day land hit shocked America. It was the moment the country realized something new had arrived. Open warfare on American soil, machine guns at a shopping mall, and the woman behind much of the bloodshed was sitting 45 minutes south. But that’s not even the worst of it. In 1982, Griselda’s men went after a rival named Jesus Castro. They opened fire. They killed Castro. They also killed his two-year-old son, Johnny struck by a bullet meant for his father. According to her former enforcer, Jorge Ayala, who later testified against her, she wasn’t bothered by it. By his account, she said the boy would only have grown up to be like his father. Here’s where it gets darker. Because while Griselda was building this empire of blood, her personal life was unraveling. Her third husband, Dio Sapulva, wanted out. He wanted to take their son, Michael Corleion, back to Colombia and live a normal life. Griselda refused. So, Dio kidnapped his own son and fled to Bogotaa. Griselda allegedly put a bounty on her own husband’s head. In 1983, a team of Sakario cornered Dario in Colombia. They posed as police officers, pulled him over, and shot him to death in front of his driver. Michael Corleó was returned to Miami. Griselda raised him as though nothing had happened. Husband number three, buried. By the mid 1980s, the pressure was building. The DEA had hunted Griselda since the 1975 Queen’s indictment. Agent Bob Palumbo had been tracking her movements through informants, wiretaps, and financial records for years. He knew she’d left Miami. He suspected California. He just couldn’t prove it. She’d moved to Irvine, California, a quiet suburb. Lawns, white picket fences. She rented a house under a fake name and told the neighbors she was a widow. She lived with her sons and ran her operation by phone. She thought she was invisible. She wasn’t. February 17th, 1985, around 5:30 in the morning, DEA agents and Irvine police surrounded the house. Bob Palumbo was there. He’d waited years for this. They breached the door. Griselda was asleep in a back bedroom. She didn’t resist. She just looked at Palumbo and said in English, “You got me.” The arrest took minutes. She was extradited to New York to face the 1975 indictment. And here’s a detail most retellings get wrong. There was no guilty plea in New York. A jury convicted her at trial in the summer of 1985. The judge sentenced her to 15 years in federal prison and fined her $25,000. And here’s where most stories would end. But Griseldas didn’t because while she sat in federal prison, Miami prosecutors built a new case against her in the mid 1990s. Three murder charges, including the death of 2-year-old Johnny Castro. The death penalty was on the table and the star witness was her former chief enforcer, Jorge Rivy Ayala. Ayala was ready to testify. He had detailed knowledge of dozens of hits. He could put Griselda on death row. But here’s where it gets unbelievable. While in protective custody, Ayala carried on phone sex with secretaries from the state attorney’s office. They got caught. The scandal blew up the case. With its star witness compromised, the state offered Griselda a deal. In 1998, she pleaded guilty to three counts of secondderee murder and was sentenced to 20 years to run alongside her federal time. She dodged the electric chair because the prosecution couldn’t keep its own witness under control. Griselda served her time. By 2004, she was released and deported to Colombia. She was 61 years old. The empire was gone and so one by one were her older sons. Dixon, Uber, and Oswaldo had all followed her into the trade and all three were killed reportedly in retaliation for the violence she had caused. Oswaldo was gunned down outside a Medeline nightclub in 1992. The exact dates and circumstances of Dixons and Uber’s deaths were never clearly documented, but both were dead before their mother. Only Michael Corleó survived. He eventually settled in Miami, got into reality television, and built a lifestyle brand around the family name. Back in Medí, Griselda lived quietly. She rented a modest place. She kept a low profile. By some account, she’d become a born-again Christian and said she was tired, that she just wanted to be with her grandchildren. Some people believed her. Most didn’t. You have to understand in the cocaine business there’s no retirement. There are only enemies you haven’t met yet. And Griselda had spent 40 years making enemies across two continents. Take your pick. September 3rd, 2012, 6:15 in the evening, Griselda walked into the Cardiso butcher shop on 29th Street in Medelene. Her daughter-in-law, 7 months pregnant, was nearby. Griselda bought meat for dinner. She walked out into the dusk. The motorcycle came from her left. Two riders, black helmets. The passenger raised a 9mm. He fired twice. One round hit her in the head just above the left ear. She was dead before she hit the pavement. The motorcycle accelerated into traffic and vanished. Police recovered the shell casings. They never identified the shooters. The case remains officially unsolved. The cocaine godmother killed by the same kind of hit her own gunman helped make famous motorcycle. Two riders head shot at close range. The exact method that had terrorized Miami three decades earlier. What did 40 years of bloodshed actually produce? Let’s count it. Grisel Blanco has been linked to somewhere between 200 and 250 murders. Her organization is estimated to have moved tens of thousands of kilograms of cocaine into the United States across her active years, a flow worth, in today’s terms, well into the billions. She generated enormous tax-free profits. She buried three husbands and three sons, and she died with almost nothing. The cash was gone, the properties were gone, the respect, the fear, the empire, all of it gone. Her legacy isn’t the money. It isn’t even the body count, though the body count is staggering. Her legacy is the template, the cellular structure that compartmentalized risk. The use of women as smugglers to exploit law enforcement’s blind spots. The motorcycle assassination, the willingness to kill anyone, including children, to send a message. The cartels who came after her, Escobar included, inherited and refined those methods. Bob Palumbo, the DEA agent who finally caught her, has called her one of the most dangerous criminals he encountered in decades of federal law enforcement and said the male cartel bosses looked tame by comparison. Here’s the truth about Griselle Delanco. She wasn’t a feminist icon. She wasn’t a misunderstood mother. She wasn’t a victim of her circumstances. She was a calculating, sadistic operator who happened to be a woman in an industry that didn’t think women could do what she did. And she used that underestimation as a weapon. She moved more product than most. She earned more cash than most. And when the end came, it came the way she’d always known it would, on a sidewalk, two riders on a motorcycle. The method she’d helped perfect used against her with precision. She lived by the gun. She built an empire with the gun. And the gun, in the end, owed her nothing. If this story pulled you in, hit subscribe. We drop a new mob and cartel breakdown every week. Drop a comment below. Who’s the next cartel figure you want us to cover? We’re reading every reply.

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Lou Rawls Found Janis Joplin Trembling Backstage at Monterey and Said It’ll Be Fine D

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