by John Glatt
The feature, by writer Paul Nelson, put Janis under the psychological microscope, finding her lacking the necessary mental armor required to survive stardom.
“Janis seems that rare kind of personality,” wrote Nelson, “who lacks the essential self-protective distancing that a singer of her fame and stature would appear to need.”
Nelson ended the article saying it was too premature to pass definitive judgment on Janis and her new band, and that although her Fillmore East opening wasn’t a success, it wasn’t a disaster either.
“One wishes nothing but good things for her,” he wrote. “It would be tragic if she were allowed to become the Judy Garland of rock.”35
In late March, Janis Joplin played three sold-out nights for Bill Graham at the Fillmore West and Winterland, grossing $75,447 ($480,000). After the first night’s show, Janis went downstairs to a garage to collect her beloved psychedelic Porsche, only to discover it stolen.
“She was in tears,” recalled Graham. “She really loved that car. That was her escape into faraway places.”
Graham took charge, using his contacts on San Francisco radio stations and going on air himself to appeal for listeners to help find Janis’s car.
“We put out an all-news bulletin,” he said. “[Janis] was just sitting all night long. Just a little lady who’d lost something precious to her.”36
At seven o’ clock the next morning, they received a call that the Porsche had been found abandoned in Oakland and the thief arrested.
And the shows went on. In reviewing them, San Francisco Chronicle critic Ralph J. Gleason noted that the audience at Winterland had not even brought her back for an encore.
“Her new band is a drag,” he wrote. “The best things that could be done would be for her to scrap this band and go right back to being a member of Big Brother . . . If they’ll have her.”37
When Janis read his review she was mortified, scoring some heroin with Peggy Caserta on the street outside the Fillmore West to dull the pain.
On March 28, former US President Dwight D. Eisenhower died, bumping Janis off the cover of Newsweek, which she had been looking forward to. Later, when she was shown the discarded cover photo of herself, she threw a tantrum.
“God-dammit, you motherfucker!” she screamed in anger. “Fourteen heart attacks and he has to die in my week. In my week.”
Two days later, Janis left for a European tour with her still-unnamed band, hoping things would be a little calmer across the Atlantic.
At the beginning of March, Jefferson Airplane rented a castle in Hawaii while they played a show at the Honolulu International Center. Grace and Spencer Dryden were now making a final attempt to salvage their two-year relationship, but the drummer mainly stayed in their hotel room, drinking himself into a stupor.
One afternoon, Grace left him and went down to the pool, where Paul Kantner gave her some orange sunshine acid. During their trip, the two realized they were in love, although nothing happened at that time, as Kantner had brought a girl with him.
When they returned to San Francisco, Jefferson Airplane began rehearsals for their next album—Volunteers. One night after Grace cooked him dinner, Paul Kantner invited her upstairs to his bedroom to share a bottle of champagne. The next morning, Bill Thompson arrived at the mansion to start work.
“And Grace came down from the third floor smiling from ear to ear,” said Thompson. “That’s when they started.”38
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Go Ride the Music
April to June, 1969
In early April 1969, Bill Graham received a registered letter stating that he would have to vacate the Fillmore West building by January 1, 1970, as it was being demolished to make room for a Howard Johnson’s hotel. When he had signed a five-year lease with Bill Fuller nine months earlier, he believed it was airtight. But it had a “demolition” clause, which allowed the landlord to serve him nine months’ notice if he decided to tear down the building.
“I had no reason to believe this would happen,” Graham later wrote in an editorial in his Fillmore East program. “However, even before I signed the lease, and unbeknownst to me, he was negotiating for the sale of his lease to a large corporation. I just wish he could have been upfront with me when I signed the lease.”
Graham wrote that his Fillmore West meant a lot to the San Francisco community, and it would be a tragedy if it were replaced by a giant hotel.
“This will be the 583rd Howard Johnson’s in America,” he railed. “I don’t like their hotels, and I never liked their foods, but the transaction was legally correct.”1
Graham appealed to the San Francisco community to stop Howard Johnson’s razing the Fillmore West to the ground.
“A Fillmore is important,” he said. “A place that can present the kinds of shows we’ve put on. It doesn’t make any difference whether I’m running it or somebody else. The scene needs this focal point—the Fillmore has more connecting points to the electrodes of the scene than any place else.”2
Soon afterward, Graham brought in Keeva Kristal, an old friend from his Catskills days as a waiter, to manage the Fillmore West and his other West Coast operations. Kristal knew nothing about the music business and was disliked by the staff from the beginning.
“Keeva was the guy who ran the coffee shop at the Concord,” said David Rubinson. “And he was the quintessential penny-pinching, money-grabbing Catskills fuck.”3
Six thousand miles away in Europe, Janis Joplin and her new band were finally jelling. Away from the intense scrutiny and pressure of the American critics and audiences, Janis was more relaxed and delivering some of her finest performances. Her new brass section, consisting of saxophonists Snooky Flowers and Terry Clements and Luis Gasca on trumpet, were a perfect foil for her unique vocal style.
“That’s when we played our best,” said Sam Andrew. “We really hit a good gear and that’s when you sense, ‘Oh yeah, now Janis is really becoming this big star.’ ”4
The early April shows in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris, Stockholm, and Copenhagen were all triumphs, receiving rave reviews.
“Everything came together in Europe,” said John Cooke. “The band was good. The concerts were good. It showed everybody what [the band] could be, but nobody saw it but us and the European audiences.”5
The third week of April, Janis arrived in London for a sold-out show at the Albert Hall. There was huge anticipation in England to see Janis, and reportedly a pool of musicians vied to be the first to sleep with her.
Prior to the performance, Janis met London Evening Standard music writer Ray Connolly in a bar for an interview. She told him she had been drinking Gordon’s Gin all day, after Mick Jagger had snubbed her concert, saying that if he wanted to hear black singing, he’d listen to black singers.
“She’s cut to the quick,” wrote Connolly.
As the interview progressed, Janis became drunker and drunker as her band members looked on in disapproval.
“Nobody ever asks me about my singing,” she told Connolly. “All anyone ever wants to know is about fellas and booze and sex. I want to be known as a singer.”
She also revealed that her doctor had recently warned her that her liver had become swollen from too much drinking.
“Man,” she declared, “I’d rather have ten years of superhypermost than live to be seventy sitting in some goddamn chair watching TV. And you know what I wanted most in the world? I wanted to be on the same bill with Otis Redding. It was all arranged, and then he was killed. He was my idol. I wanted him to tell me I was good.”6
The afternoon of the show, writer Mark Williams of the underground newspaper International Times was at the Albert Hall to see Janis rehearse.
“She was obviously nervous,” he later wrote, “dashing from one cat to another, laughing, shouting and gesticulating wildly.”
Back in her dressing r
oom, Janis knocked back tequila shots with American singer P. J. Proby while complaining about the lack of limes at her hotel.
“Janis announced that it was her private ambition to own a bar,” wrote Williams, “where she could entertain her friends and make lots of new ones.”
Then Janis invited everybody back to her hotel, so they could “freak out all those straights.”7
At the show that night, Janis was in top form, bringing the six thousand fans to their feet with a dynamite set featuring: “Maybe,” “The Combination of the Two,” “Summertime,” “Work Me Lord,” and “Ball and Chain.”
Eric Clapton watched from a box with photographer Bob Seidemann as Janis exhorted the audience to loosen up.
“I don’t want to offend propriety or anything,” she declared, “but if you want to dance then that’s what it’s all about.”
Janis brought the house down after the last encore, leaving the audience on their feet screaming for more. A few minutes later, she held a press conference in her dressing room.
“We did it! We did it!” she shrieked triumphantly, “and a room of pressmen ain’t going to bring me down.”
Then she announced she had to leave. She had a party to go to.
“I’m not sitting here talking to you,” she told the reporters. “I’m going out to have a ball. I’m so happy!”8
Back at her suite at the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington, Janis held court with Clapton and other English musical celebrities.
“Eric Clapton was very complimentary,” said Andrew. “We played a good gig that night so everybody was happy.”
Someone at the party had heroin and discreetly led Janis and Sam Andrew into a bedroom to shoot up. Suddenly the lead guitarist turned blue, and Janis helped take him into the bathroom and put him in a cold-water bath to bring him around.
Several days later, Janis was invited to dinner at George Harrison’s country house in Esher, Surrey. After the meal she cozied up to him.
“Hey, man,” she told the Beatle, “I’ve been wanting to make it with you for years.”9
At the beginning of April, after several unsuccessful attempts to record their first album, Santana found the last piece of its musical jigsaw puzzle. Michael Carabello, who had rejoined the band, was jamming in Aquatic Park when he first saw Nicaraguan timbales player José “Chepito” Areas.
“It was, ‘Oh my God,’ ” recalled Carabello, “ ‘this guy plays his ass off.’ ”10
That night he brought Carlos Santana and Gregg Rolie to the Nite Life club, where Chepito was performing with his band, the Aliens. He was a Latin music virtuoso, also playing congas, trumpet, and drums.
“He was a complete firecracker of a player,” recalled Michael Shrieve, “who just brought the house down, dressed in those big frilly shirts with the huge collars and greased-back hair.”11
Carabello then introduced Chepito to Carlos, and they spoke to each other in Spanish, as Chepito’s English was almost nonexistent at that time.
“And Santana came to see me play,” said Chepito, “and he liked the sound of Latin rock. They said, ‘We’re going to record an album and we like this kind of sound that you’ve got. If you could teach us how to play Latin rock it would be good.’”12
The newly minted Santana was an extraordinary ethnic mix that should never have worked on paper in 1969, but did spectacularly. There was a Mexican, an African American, a Puerto Rican, a Nicaraguan, and two white boys from the suburbs.
“And we looked cool, you know,” said Michael Shrieve. “We were really the American band, as opposed to Grand Funk Railroad or something like that.”
When Chepito joined Santana, he was told to stop wearing fancy suits and ties. Such attire didn’t fit in with the band’s rough image.
“They looked like a lot of dirty hippies who needed shaves,” explained Chepito. “They gave me blue jeans with holes and a shirt all ripped-up.”
According to Shrieve, five-foot-tall Chepito was culturally like “a fish out of water,” but an “incredible and natural” musician.
And once he started rehearsing with the band, that’s when the unique Santana sound was born.
“The rehearsals started taking on a whole new vibe with the advent of the timbales and two conga players,” explained Shrieve. “Between their new drummer, me, and their new percussionist, Chepito, the band . . . felt an incredible surge of new energy. Chepito’s musicianship and sound had an incredible influence on the band.”
In May, Santana went into the studio for their third attempt to record their first album. This time they recruited a friend named Brent Dangerfield, who did the sound at the Straight Theater in Haight-Ashbury, to produce the album. He had absolutely no previous studio experience.
“We were real prima donnas,” explained Carlos Santana, “but we wanted a lot more freedom . . . we didn’t want to be controlled.”13
Bill Graham attended many of the recording sessions, pressing the band to become more radio-friendly and stop playing long jams. Chepito was a huge musical influence in the studio, adapting many of the songs to Latin rock.
“Carlos didn’t know how to play that style,” said Chepito. “They were starting to do ‘Evil Ways,’ ‘Black Magic Woman,’ and ‘Oye Como Va.’ I taught them to play the Latin rock.”
During the recording, Santana played half a dozen Fillmore West shows, as well as a show with the Jimi Hendrix Experience at the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds. Somebody there dosed Chepito with LSD, and he would always suspect Carlos of doing it. The timbales player had such a bad trip that Carlos had to take him home and nurse him until he came down.
In early 1969, an ambitious young promoter named Michael Lang had joined forces with former Fillmore East employees John Morris and Chip Monck to organize a music festival in Woodstock, New York. During the next few months, Lang, who had staged the Miami Pop Festival a year earlier, booked the entire Fillmore East’s summer schedule of groups for his upcoming Woodstock Festival. When Graham found out, he was furious. The event put attendance at all his summer shows in jeopardy.
“He threatened to pull [Woodstock],” said Lang. “He was afraid that we were going to wipe out his Spring and Summer, so he was trying to bully us. Bill had one of the great egos of our industry and [Woodstock] was going to put him in the shadow.”
In May, Lang met Graham for breakfast at Rattner’s to try to work something out. At the meeting, Lang agreed not to announce any of his Woodstock bands until after they had played the Fillmore East.
“We had a nice chat,” said Lang. “I think we had six or seven acts in common. I invited him to come up on one of the days and he said he would. We left on friendly terms and his parting comment to me was, ‘I guess we can’t play god on the same day.’ ”14
Throughout the next few weeks, Graham lobbied Lang to book Santana for Woodstock, although they still did not have an album out. According to Graham, Lang was having problems booking the Grateful Dead and needed his help.
“I said they could use my name,” said Graham, “in return for Santana being put on the show on Saturday night. During prime time. I didn’t want them on at seven in the morning or three in the afternoon.”15
On Sunday, April 13, Jefferson Airplane hosted a lavish wedding reception at their mansion for KSAN-FM radio boss Tom Donahue’s wedding to Rachael Hamilton, a close friend of Grace Slick. The food and champagne punch had been spiked with LSD, and many of the guests, including plenty of San Francisco’s social elite, were dosed.
KSAN DJ Dusty Street was at the reception and had a six-hour radio show that night.
“Now I didn’t realize they had put acid in everything,” she said, “and as my fiancé was driving me to the radio station, I turned to him and said, ‘Gee, you know I think I’m coming onto acid.’ And he said, ‘Of course you are. There was acid in everything.’ ”
By the time Dusty w
ent on the air she was flying.
“And I went to read the first commercial,” she remembered, “and it was for Woodstock and the opening line was, ‘How would you like to take a really far-out trip?’ And I went off onto some tangent and [somehow] realized that I was out there somewhere in the cosmos. So I very quietly turned the microphone off and didn’t talk again for another five and a half hours.”
A few hours later, her boss, Tom Donahue, called her from the Biltmore Hotel, where he was spending his wedding night.
“Street, you’re doing a great job, man,” he told her.
“And I’m sitting here having figured out how to queue this thing up,” she said, “and just dropping it on the album and hoping it hits the cut. Really free-form radio.”16
Two weeks later, Jefferson Airplane went into Wally Heider’s brand-new studio in San Francisco to record their next album, Volunteers. Now that Grace Slick and Paul Kantner were a couple, the band’s whole dynamic had changed. It was during this time that Kantner started writing more overtly political songs, speaking out against the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon’s drug policies.
“A lot of changes happened in the world,” Kantner explained. “I mean for me it started off with the assassination of John Kennedy, which turned my focus around, and I think probably a lot of our generation, from relying on the government. And there’s a lot of shit going on. And this is reflected in most of the songs that I wrote then.”
The opening song on the album was Kantner’s “We Should Be Together”—a call to arms for young people to “tear down the walls, motherfucker.” It was the first use of the word “fuck” on an album, and the Airplane knew they would have to battle RCA to bring it out. Another controversial track was “Eskimo Blue Day,” with Grace’s music and lyrics cowritten with Kantner. The refrain: “Doesn’t mean shit to a tree.”
