Live at the Fillmore East and West

by John Glatt

  At the beginning of November, the Grateful Dead finally dosed Bill Graham with LSD. It was during a weekend run at the Fillmore West, and although Graham and his staff at both Fillmores never ate or drank anything unless they’d brought it themselves, the Dead’s so-called “Assassination Squad,” finally hit their number-one target.

  “That was . . . during my 7Up era,” Graham later explained. “We’d put plastic barrels full of soda and ice in the dressing rooms. And they took the 7Up cans on top of these barrels and used a hypodermic needle. To put in their goodies.”

  The Grateful Dead figured that eventually “Uncle Bill,” as they called him, would drink one of the doctored cans.

  “I picked up a can of 7Up,” he said. “Just about the time they were going onstage, it hit. Rather heavily.”

  As a smiling and very stoned Bill Graham stood in the wings digging the powerfully psychedelic Grateful Dead music, drummer Mickey Hart invited him onstage to join them, handing him a cowbell.

  “I spent the next four and a half hours onstage with the Dead,” said Graham. “I just had one of the great evenings of my life.”10

  The following weekend, Country Joe and the Fish headlined the Fillmore East. They were in New York recording a new album, and their record company, Vanguard, wanted photographs of the band playing naked for an album cover.

  “So we went to the Fillmore East,” recalled keyboard player David Bennett Cohen, “and we took off all our clothes and played.”11

  While onstage playing, a photographer shot still photographs, but Joshua White was also there secretly recording the action on 16 mm film.

  “I was the only person that didn’t have an instrument in front of them,” said Country Joe McDonald. “So I’m completely just frontal nudity there.”

  Although there were strict instructions not to go into the theater, all the female staff sneaked in to watch the naked band. At Country Joe’s next Fillmore East show, they were in the middle of the “Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” when McDonald noticed that members of the audience were staring up at the Joshua Light Show screen behind them.

  “And I remember turning around,” he said, “and seeing the projected image of us playing naked.”12

  On Tuesday, November 19, Jefferson Airplane band members were in New York to shoot a scene for the film One American Movie, being made by French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard. In bitterly cold conditions that afternoon, road manager Bill Laudner set up the band’s equipment on the roof of the Schuyler Hotel at 57 West 45th Street. One floor below, the film’s stars, Rip Torn, a close friend of the band, and Paula Matter, were perched dangerously on the sill of a bedroom window, to be woken up by the sound of the live music.

  Directly across the street from the window of D. A. Pennebaker’s studios, Godard called “Action,” and his crew started filming.

  “Hello New York!” screamed Marty Balin, as the rest of the band in heavy winter coats were tuning up. “New York! Wake up you Fuckers! Free music! Get some free Love!”

  Jefferson Airplane then launched into a menacing version of “The House at Pooneil Corners,” as heads started appearing out of nearby office windows to see what was happening.

  Soon a large crowd had gathered in the street below, and they were shouting for more. Then, as the band started playing a new song, “We Can Be Together,” a New York City cop appeared on the roof and ordered the music to stop.

  “Neither playing nor filming stopped,” reported Renata Adler in the next morning’s New York Times, “and the policeman retired to a place in the background of the shot.”

  Several minutes later, more police arrived and ordered the Airplane to stop playing. Again, no one took any notice and the filming across the street continued. Finally Rip Torn and Paula Matter, wrapped in a white sheet, came out onto the roof for their next scene, as the Airplane struck up “Somebody to Love.”

  “There were some angry words and some pushing,” wrote Adler. “Mr. Torn [was] placed under arrest. The filming continued.”

  Godard would eventually shelve the project, though it was completed by D. A. Pennebaker and shown briefly in art houses.

  Just two months later, the Beatles—well aware of Jefferson Airplane’s rooftop gig—would play their final show on the roof of their Apple offices in Savile Row, London, a performance that was filmed for their 1970 documentary, Let It Be.

  The night before Thanksgiving, Bill Graham threw a private dinner for the key players in the San Francisco music scene. After his staff served a roast turkey buffet inside the Fillmore West ballroom, Graham came onstage to a round of applause, to introduce the evening’s musical entertainment.

  He proudly announced to his guests that his new Millard Booking Agency would be representing Santana and It’s a Beautiful Day, who were the entertainment that night, and the next wave of San Francisco music.

  It’s a Beautiful Day played first, with “White Bird” climaxing their ethereal set. Then Bill Graham introduced his protégés—Santana.

  “Then these hard asses from the Mission came on,” wrote Jim McCarthy in his book Voices of Latin Rock. “No one then realized they were the spike of this huge cultural revolution.”13

  After the show, Bill Graham caught the red-eye back to New York for the Jefferson Airplane and Buddy Guy’s Thursday to Saturday run of Fillmore East Thanksgiving shows. Once again the Airplane would be recording the performances for a live album.

  “We recorded the shows at both Fillmores,” explained Jack Casady. “We wanted the recording of the East Coast aspect as well. I remember thinking at the time that we played as a band really well outside of our own environment. When you’re at home sometimes you get kind of hung up because it’s home. And out on the road there’s a certain kind of aggressive attitude in the musicians’ part . . . and we enjoyed that.”14

  As another stunning set-piece to open the Jefferson Airplane show, an NYU Film School student suggested projecting the final scene from the 1933 King Kong movie onto the Joshua Light Show screen.

  “And that was our cue to go on,” said road manager Bill Laudner. “That [became] a regular feature.”

  Then with the movie’s final words, “Ah no . . . It wasn’t the Airplane. It was beauty that killed the beast,” Jefferson Airplane launched into “Three-Fifths of a Mile in Ten Seconds.”

  “Bill Graham had a bit of that Cecil B. DeMille thing going,” said Laudner, “where he wanted to have these grand productions.”15

  Those sold-out Thanksgiving shows were a huge success, and some of Jefferson Airplane’s best shows ever.

  “That album recording,” said Jorma Kaukonen, “was done in my opinion at the peak of the Jefferson Airplane’s live performance career. We did it when we were hot. Thank God it was recorded then and as a result it lives on.”16

  The next morning, Graham laid on another Thanksgiving dinner for all the bands in town, key agents, bookers, and his Fillmore East staff. It was served buffet style on a long trestle table in the Fillmore East lobby.

  “The Thanksgiving show—I mean what a concept,” said Kaukonen. “And of course nothing could compare with a Thanksgiving Dinner.”17

  Later, in the dressing room before going onstage, Paul Kantner gave Joshua White his first snort of cocaine.

  “It was in a 16 mm film can and it was completely filled,” recalled White. “He paid about $400 for it. If I had that film can now, I could retire.”18

  On December 2, New York Times music critic Mike Jahn penned a glowing review of the Thanksgiving shows.

  “Jefferson Airplane flies on stronger than ever,” he wrote, “nearly two years after the San Francisco hippie scene that launched it was abandoned for lack of interest.”

  Although the Airplane performed Grace’s two “superhits,” “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love,” Jahn said the band was never “simple and obvious.”

  “Alw
ays it is complex and dreamy,” he wrote. “Sometimes it is nightmarish, rather like a Fellini movie.”

  And Grace Slick’s life was also beginning to resemble a Fellini movie. On the last night of the Fillmore East run, a drunken Spencer Dryden grabbed a groupie out of the audience and brought her back to the hotel with Grace in their limo. When they got to their room, Dryden and the girl went inside, leaving Grace standing alone in the hallway.

  The next morning, she flew back to San Francisco with the rest of the band while Dryden remained in New York. When he finally came home, he discovered Grace was in Los Angeles and their apartment had burned down. Dryden then moved into 2400 Fulton Street, where he took up residence.

  Prior to the Thanksgiving festivities, Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company played at Hunter College. It would be their final New York performance. After several months on the road, everybody in the band was on edge that Friday, November 15. Janis and Sam Andrew had now distanced themselves from the rest of the group, spending their time shooting speed, writing songs, and making plans for their new band.

  Several weeks earlier, Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart had approached Janis about forming a new supergroup with him, Jerry Garcia, and Jack Casady. Janis turned him down flat.

  “Can you imagine me turning around and seeing you guys behind me?” she quipped.

  The Hunter College show was a hot ticket. Myra Friedman, who was doing Janis’s public relations, was swamped with requests for press passes, and a local TV station wanted to film the concert.

  The night before the show, Janis, who had been up speeding for days, took two Seconals to try to get some sleep. But they didn’t work and she was awake all night. By Friday morning she was in a terrible state, convinced that she had a throat infection and wouldn’t be able to perform.

  Three hours before she was due out onstage, a doctor examined her and could find nothing wrong with her throat. Back at Hunter College, Janis started drinking Southern Comfort and felt a little better. She and Sam Andrew even worked on a new song on a backstage piano, as Rick Danko and Richard Manuel of The Band watched.

  That night, Janis rose to the occasion and sung her heart out. By the end of the show, the audience was dancing in the aisles.

  “Janis was astounding,” Friedman later said. “Seconal, speed, and God knows what else all pumping through her system, she lacerated that hall with notes that flew up from her dancing feet, spiraled from her pumping hips, and gushed from her throat.”19

  Janis was having such a good time onstage that during David Getz’s drum solo, when the rest of the band left the stage, she walked out carrying a gaudy tiger-skin drum as a joke. Getz, who had dropped acid before the show, was furious and kicked the drum across the stage. Thinking that he’d kicked it at her, Janis screamed “Fuck you!” and stormed offstage.

  After the show, Janis laid into Getz and accused him of humiliating her in front of the audience, when she was just trying to be nice.

  “You fucker!” she told him. “You embarrassed me in front of three thousand people.”20

  The next morning, Janis was rushed to the hospital with acute bronchitis. Still, she must have felt vindicated about leaving Big Brother, after reading Mike Jahn’s review of the Hunter College show.

  “The band was severely disjointed,” he wrote. “Miss Joplin was fine. Big Brother may be coming to an end, but Janis Joplin is just beginning.”21

  After New York, Big Brother’s farewell tour snaked through Houston, Denver, Seattle, and Vancouver, before the ultimate show on December 1 at a Family Dog benefit at the Avalon Ballroom.

  Over the last few weeks, Albert Grossman had put out the word that he needed musicians for Janis Joplin’s new backup band. Canadian pianist Bill King was playing a small Greenwich Village club when he heard Grossman needed a keyboard player. After auditioning for Grossman with his drummer friend Roy Markowitz, King was appointed Janis’s musical director and keyboardist. He and Markowitz were then flown to San Francisco to start rehearsals.

  They were put up in an apartment in North Beach, where they met Canadian bassist Brad Campbell, who would also be in the band. Soon after arriving, Janis invited them to the Noe Street apartment she was now sharing with Nick Gravenites’s ex-wife, Linda.

  “As soon as I walked in through the front door she handed me a joint and a Seagram’s 7,” recalled King. “I didn’t drink or smoke anything, and she started laughing when I told her. She got a kick out of it.”

  Janis told them she was looking for a Memphis rhythm and blues–type sound, somewhere between Sam and Dave and Otis Redding.

  “This was the big move,” said King, “and she loved Stax records and that whole sound from the South. She wanted to get away from the Big Brother thing and go somewhere else.”22

  As they were leaving, Janis invited them back later for dinner, saying there were some friends of hers they should meet.

  “When we arrived [that evening],” said King, “it was apparent a party was brewing in a nearby room. As we reached the dining room Janis charged in.”

  Over the next hour, a succession of heavily-tattooed denim-clad bikers arrived, as the three musicians became more and more uncomfortable.

  “[We] looked like choirboys at a prison picnic,” recalled King. “Janis journeyed from lap to lap kissing and hugging each man. Eventually . . . she introduced us as her new handpicked band, and the men in denim as the Oakland Chapter of the Hells Angels.”23

  After the hard drugs and liquor started flowing, the three musicians made their excuses, telling Janis they would see her tomorrow.

  The rehearsals for what was being called “The Janis Joplin Revue” were held at the old Fillmore Auditorium. The band had now been supplemented by Marcus Doubleday on trumpet, Tony Clemons on tenor sax, and Sam Andrew on lead guitar. Whereas Big Brother had always been a straight five-way split, Andrew was now a salaried employee, making $150 a week.24

  Bill Graham was a constant presence at the rehearsals, as his new acts Santana and It’s a Beautiful Day were also rehearsing at the old Fillmore.

  “We all became friends,” said King. “After we got done rehearsing, we’d run down and listen to Santana, who were miles ahead of our newly assembled unit.”

  At the beginning, Sam Andrew taught the new band members all the Big Brother crowd favorites, like “Ball and Chain” and “Piece of My Heart,” but he felt a little out of his depth musically.

  “These musicians were trained and had been around the block,” said Andrew. “I was kind of ‘wow, these guys are really different than Big Brother.’ ”

  And Janis, with no idea of how to be a bandleader, was spending hours on the phone with Albert Grossman every day, asking for advice.

  With the new group booked to play their first show at the Second Stax Volt Christmas Show in Memphis in just five days time, a nervous Grossman asked Mike Bloomfield and Nick Gravenites to take over the rehearsals. Soon afterward The Band’s Levon Helm arrived to join them.

  “The whole thing [was] not coalescing,” said John Cooke, who had stayed on as Janis’s road manager. “Mike Bloomfield did as much as anybody to try and make that band.”25

  Each day after rehearsals, Janis would hang out with her new band, drinking and playing pool. One night she took Bill King to see a Small Faces show at the Fillmore West.

  “We caught the set and we were blown away by Rod Stewart singing,” recalled King. “So afterwards she says, ‘Let’s go back and say hi to the band.’ ”

  When Janis went backstage, Stewart and his guitarist Ron Wood kept their distance.

  “They were really cold,” said King. “And Janis just flipped out and said, ‘You British guys are all alike. Fuck you!’ and stormed out of the dressing room.”26

  Years later, Rod Stewart would reveal why he and Ron Wood had given her the cold shoulder.

  “Janis Joplin
was always chasing me and Ronnie around the place,” he explained in 2013, “trying to shag one or the other of us, though without success. We were terrified of her and would hide.” 27

  Soon afterward, Janis managed to deflower Fleetwood Mac’s original guitarist Danny Kirwan, who was still a virgin.

  “Janis suffered from a reputation of eating men alive,” said Mick Fleetwood. “Danny . . . looked like a little English choirboy with blond hair. Janis basically summoned him to her room. And Danny at that point I don’t think had had sex with anybody. So he turned up the next morning [having] been ravaged by Janis. He had fingernail marks all over him, of which he was quite proud. She was one hell of a girl.”28

  On Friday, December 20, Janis Joplin and her new band flew into Memphis to prepare for the Stax Volt Christmas Show. During the limousine ride from the airport to the Lorraine Hotel, where they were staying, Janis announced that she needed a drink. When the limo driver got lost trying to find a liquor store, Janis screamed at him.

  But during that same ride, Janis saw a billboard for the Christmas show with a huge photograph and her name in large letters, far bigger then her Stax heroes, who were also on the bill, Rufus and Carla Thomas, Booker T. and the M.G.’s, and the Bar-Kays.

  “Janis was flabbergasted,” said King. “The thought of headlining amongst such prestigious talent sent her into an apologetic rant.”

  When they finally arrived at the hotel—where Martin Luther King had been gunned down a few months earlier—they were welcomed by Mike Bloomfield, who was holding a garbage bag full of marijuana.

  That afternoon, there was a final rehearsal at the Soulville’s USA Studios, with Bloomfield and Albert Grossman in attendance. Then they headed to the Mid-South Coliseum, where the concert would be held Saturday night.

  “The soundcheck was a disaster,” remembered Bill King. “You would have assumed the promoters would have spent decent coin to rent adequate amplification. Enough wattage for a sermon but not enough to carry the power of a raucous singer.”29