Live at the Fillmore East and West

by John Glatt

  “People call us protest singers because of Volunteers,” said Kantner, “but we weren’t really protest singers, so much as just mentioning what’s going on in the world. And here’s something you should think about and maybe come to your own conclusions, rather than us telling people what to do. And we got away with it.”

  Paul Kantner still resented Spencer Dryden for firing Bill Graham, believing it had been a big mistake.

  “I was never good friends with him since,” said Kantner. “I’m still pissed off with him for getting rid of Bill Graham so superficially. Because that was a big downturn from my point of view.”17

  After his split from Grace, Dryden’s days in the band were numbered.

  The first weekend of April, the Chambers Brothers played the Fillmore East with the Hello People and Elephants Memory. In a subsequent New York Times review, critic Mike Jahn applauded the band’s “exciting musical fusion,” but criticized the “rough” Fillmore East audience.

  “Friday night the house seemed filled with the type of people who go to stock car races hoping for accidents,” wrote Jahn. “They booed and otherwise interrupted a beautiful, sensitive intertwining of jazz rock and mime by the Hello People, a New York City group.”18

  Two days after the review came out, a fuming Bill Graham wrote to the New York Times’s music editor, Raymond Ericson, demanding to know Jahn’s musical qualifications to review his shows.

  “I am infuriated by the slanderous remarks he leveled at one recent artist,” wrote Graham. “May I have the courtesy of hearing from you at your earliest convenience.”

  Ericson replied by return of mail.

  Dear Mr. Graham:

  The New York Times always satisfies itself regarding the qualifications of its writers before engaging them. This was true in the case of Mike Jahn, and I believe that that should be a sufficient guarantee for you.

  Yours truly,

  Raymond Ericson

  Music Editor

  A couple of weeks later, Bill Graham ran both his and Ericson’s letters in his Fillmore East program.

  “This was prompted by our feelings of frustration at the hands of one critic whose background we attempted to question,” he explained.19

  Mike Jahn would continue to review Fillmore East shows for the New York Times until its close.

  In mid-April, Bill Graham finally persuaded The Band to play Winterland, followed by more dates at the Fillmore East a month later. The deal Graham signed with The Band’s manager, Albert Grossman, paid them $20,000 ($127,400) for the three West Coast shows.

  On Wednesday, the day before the first sold-out show, Robbie Robertson came down with a high fever and was too sick to attend the soundcheck. When Winterland opened for the show the following night, the lead guitarist was sick in bed and could hardly move.

  “We were giving him all the shots and vitamins we could,” said Bill Graham. “By the late afternoon, Albert started wondering if hypnosis might work, so I got the yellow pages and found a 24-hour hypnotist.”

  As the Ace of Cups opened, a hypnotist arrived and put Robertson into a deep trance, telling him he was feeling great and could play that night.

  And when The Band took the stage, the hypnotist was in the wings to offer encouragement. As they started their set, Robertson could barely stand, leaning against Garth Hudson’s organ for support, while the hypnotist kept shouting, “Grow! Grow!”

  After just seven songs The Band left the stage to boos and did not return. When Bill Graham came out to try to pacify the crowd, they turned on him.

  “Well, there must be a lot of tourists here tonight,” Graham told them, “because San Francisco people just don’t act this way.”20

  By the next night, Robertson had fully recovered and The Band played a great show to thunderous applause, with rock critic Greil Marcus calling their encore of the old blues song “Slippin’ and Slidin’,” one of the “great moments in the history of rock ’n’ roll.”

  On Friday, May 9, The Band made their East Coat debut at the Fillmore East. There was great excitement about the four sold-out shows, and usher Allan Arkush got his NYU Film teacher Martin Scorsese tickets for Saturday’s late show.

  “He was crazy about The Band,” recalled Arkush, “and we had to get him really good seats.”

  The Band took the stage, playing most of their hit album Music from Big Pink, which they called “mountain music.” They performed an hourlong set with three encores.

  “In their first set Friday,” wrote Mike Jahn, “it took them two or three songs to really warm up, but when they did they played with great freshness and ease. The members of The Band are coolly professional. They appeared onstage wearing suits (of all things) and worked into a rocking fever of an intensity seen only occasionally.”21

  The last week of April, Led Zeppelin played four nights at the Fillmore West on their second US tour. Bill Graham paid the band a flat fee of $10,000 ($64,000) for two forty-five-minute shows each night, payable in full before the first show. Bill Graham grossed a total of $72,441 ($462,000) for the performances.

  Things got off to a bad start when Led Zeppelin arrived at the Fillmore West for a soundcheck to find Bill Graham shooting hoops on the stage with some of his staff. When a Led Zeppelin roadie politely asked if they could start setting up equipment, Bill Graham lashed out.

  “Who the hell are you speaking to, fella?” he yelled, waving his index finger at the astonished members of the band and their manager, Peter Grant. “When I’m ready to talk to you, I’ll talk to you. Can’t you see I’m right in the middle of something.”22

  Then Led Zeppelin patiently waited for Graham to finish the game before setting up and doing the soundcheck.

  Bill Graham was determined to keep the Fillmore West from being demolished. He had been mobilized by a San Francisco Chronicle editorial that applauded him for bringing the city to “the front of the national rock scene.” A month after receiving his marching papers, Graham vowed to fight, describing his landlord’s order to vacate as “a solid right cross to the jaw. I been down before but this time I ain’t coming off the floor too quick.”

  He told Rolling Stone in May that he had not considered an alternative venue and would probably close down if he had to move. Asked if he would still keep the Fillmore East open if that happened, Graham threw a tirade.

  “New York is gutter warfare,” he shouted. “Industrial psychology. There’s no salt and pepper for me . . . but this is where I’m from, I would keep this operation going.”

  The reporter then asked about a rumor that he was planning to open up a Fillmore in Los Angeles.

  “Never, ever, ever, ever will I go to Los Angeles,” he barked. “I hate that fucking place so bad.”

  He then calmed down, saying he was fed up with the music business and dreamed of just sailing away on a big sailboat.

  When the reporter questioned why he did not, as he could easily afford to, Graham exploded.

  “Look,” he snarled, “when circumstances put you on top of the mountain and you got a whole industry—a whole fucking industry—trying to pull you off . . . well, no motherfucker is gonna do that to me.”23

  In mid-May, Jefferson Airplane went back on the road for a short three-city tour. In Chicago they played a huge free concert in front of fifty thousand dancing fans in Grant Park. During the show, Grace Slick told the fans to “buy acid with the $5 you would have had to spend for this concert.”

  At their next stop in New Orleans, cops burst into their hotel room, busting Jack Casady and Bill Thompson for two suspect cigarettes.

  “Louisiana is a very uptight state,” Thompson told Rolling Stone. “If you sell grass to someone under eighteen, it’s punishable by death.”

  At the final stop at an outdoor concert in Miami, the police turned the power off at eleven o’clock in the middle of the Airplane’s set, causing
a near riot.

  “Wait ’til we burn down your society,” Paul Kantner told a cop, before promptly being arrested for disturbing the peace.

  On Friday, May 16, The Who premiered Pete Townshend’s new Rock Opera Tommy at the Fillmore East, the day before its US release.

  “On the opening night I was more excited than usual,” recalled Townshend, “and we were bullish that we’d have a good show.”24

  To get in the mood, each band member had a bottle of brandy backstage, as well as another on Keith Moon’s drumhead for refreshments during the performance.

  Toward the end of their first show, somebody hurled a Molotov cocktail into the Lion Supermarket that shared a wall with the Fillmore East. As firefighters arrived to put out the three-alarm blaze, fire chiefs reassured Bill Graham there was no imminent danger to his audience. So he decided to wait until the end of Tommy before evacuating the theater.

  Fillmore East usher Allan Arkush smelled smoke and then looked outside to see flashing lights and firemen all over Second Avenue.

  “And the smoke got thicker,” he recalled, “and Pete was singing ‘Listening to you, I get the music.’ The focus in the theater was on them and the energy of it [was] lifting everyone.”

  Suddenly a plain-clothed tactical force detective appeared from the wings at the right of the stage and tried to grab the microphone out of Roger Daltrey’s hands, yelling, “Give me the mike!” Without missing a beat, Townshend lined up a kick to the detective’s testicles with his Doc Martens.

  “He came from nowhere,” said Arkush, “and Townshend kicked him in the balls. Somebody from the stage crew grabbed him and dragged him off and the entire audience jumped to its feet. It was positively a Roman spectacle.”

  As more police raced toward the stage, The Who carried on playing as if nothing was happening. The audience thought the thickening smoke inside the theater was all part of the show.

  “But the adrenaline level was beyond,” said Arkush. “The blood pressure level was huge. And they finished Tommy with that fantastic note, and the audience went crazy. Then The Who just counted off and lit into ‘Summertime Blues.’ Just like that.”

  Finally, Bill Graham managed to get Townshend’s attention and went onstage to tell him about the fire next door.

  “And I could see them whispering,” said Arkush, “and The Who kind of brought it way down. It was like a rocket ship turning off its boosters and the audience is standing there panting. What’s going on. Then Graham went to the microphone and was so cool. He said, ‘We have a little problem.’ ”25

  He announced that the ushers were going to clear the theater until it was safe to return, and then The Who would finish the set.

  “That building was empty within three minutes,” said Arkush. “And of course there was no late show, as the smoke was really too thick in the theater.”26

  Later that night, Townshend was charged with assaulting a police officer, and a warrant was sworn out for his arrest. The next morning he turned himself in, spending a few hours in the tank until Bill Graham bailed him out.

  On Saturday and Sunday nights, The Who were back at the Fillmore East, playing four more sensational shows.

  In the next edition of the Village Voice, Annie Fisher reported the fire in her “Riffs” column, calling Bill Graham “Field Marshall Von Fillmore,” and labeling the Fillmore East as a “fascist state.”27

  When Graham read the piece he went crazy, calling Fisher “a fucking vicious ratfink scumbag,” and complaining that her paper was even worse than “those crumbs” at Rolling Stone.

  A couple of weeks later, a New York City court fined Townshend $75 for a misdemeanor.

  On June 17, The Who played the first of three nights at the Fillmore West. This time Pete Townshend told Bill Graham they would play only one show a night instead of two.

  “But he was intractable,” said Townshend. “We made our first set very short as a challenge to his so-called ‘authority,’ so he had a disgruntled audience on his side, too.”28

  Finally, Graham backed down, and The Who never played more than one show a night for him again.

  The first weekend in June, the Grateful Dead played four shows at the Fillmore West. One night backstage, the Dead’s Psychedelic Hit Squad dosed all the apple juice with extra-strong Owsley LSD.

  “[This] may have been the first occasion since the Trips Festival in ’66 that so many people were dosed so hard for so long,” wrote Dead bassist Phil Lesh in his autobiography, Searching for the Sound.

  Hanging out in the dressing room that night was Janis Joplin and her sax player, Snooky Flowers, who drank some of the LSD. He ended up in the hospital, with Janis holding his hand for six hours until he came down.

  Janis was furious, later attacking the acid king Owsley Stanley, putting him up against a wall and yelling, “You motherfucker! You killed my bass player!”29

  On June 16, Janis and her band went into Columbia studios in Hollywood to record an album. Since their European trip, Janis and Sam Andrew had become strung out on heroin, and their shows had lost their spark.

  “It was the non-returning phenomenon,” said road manager John Cooke. “It wasn’t something that could be replicated once we were back in America.”30

  During the ten days of recording, producer Gabriel Mekler wrote a song for it called, “I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama!”

  “All of a sudden they just grabbed hold of that phrase ‘Kozmic Blues,’ ” said Cooke. “And then the band became the Kozmic Blues Band.”31

  Janis wanted to record the Bee Gees hit “To Love Somebody,” which she had been performing at shows. So she called up writer Robin Gibb for permission.

  “We got a phone call,” recalled Gibb, “and it was Janis, who said she loved the song. And she was very complimentary about it and wanted to know if she had our sanctification. We said, ‘Yeah, go ahead.’ She did [it] unlike anybody’s ever done and I was surprised. She had the ability to put her stamp on a song.”32

  One night in Los Angeles, Janis summoned Sam Andrew to her room at the Landmark Hotel in West Hollywood. Then and there, she fired him.

  “She offered me some heroin,” said Andrew, “so we literally were shooting heroin while this was happening. We were kind of numb, but yeah, it was devastating.”

  When Janis asked if he wanted to know why she was firing him, he said no because he already did.

  “We were going to write a lot of songs together,” he explained, “and we didn’t because we were stoned. That particular time was deadly.”

  Soon after, Janis took Sam Andrew to bed for a one-night stand to commiserate.

  “After she fired me,” he said. “I let myself have a romantic thing with her. It was just one night.”33

  On Friday, June 20, Santana headlined the Fillmore West while the Grateful Dead rocked the Fillmore East. As usual the backstage area was awash with LSD, and most of the Fillmore East crew would be dosed over the two nights of shows.

  “One night we turned off all the lights in the theater,” said Allan Arkush, “and just had the light show screen. And then the ushers turned on their flashlights and aimed them at the Grateful Dead. They would play those first notes of ‘Dark Star,’ and there would be a cheer, and then [the Dead] would settle in. That’s how you ended up with thirty-minute-long ‘Dark Stars.’ ”34

  At another Dead show during the run, lighting technician Candace Brightman was so high she turned off all the spotlights, plunging the stage into darkness. The Grateful Dead loved it, immediately hiring her to be their lighting designer.

  The Grateful Dead finished playing at three o’clock on Sunday morning. Then the Fillmore East stage crew moved all their equipment uptown to the Great Lawn in Central Park, where Bill Graham had arranged a free concert for them and Jefferson Airplane that afternoon. After the show, Graham donated dozens of trash cans, as well as
his Fillmore East staff, to clean up the Great Lawn.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Three Days of Peace, Love, and Music

  July to September, 1969

  One afternoon in early July 1969, Grace Slick strolled into the stately British Motor Cars showroom in San Francisco. A huge fan of the James Bond movies, Grace had fallen in love with the Aston Martin DB5. Agent 007 had driven it in Goldfinger. So she zeroed in on the $18,000 gleaming blue sports car on display at the dealership.

  “Wow, what’s that?” she asked a salesman. Not recognizing her and thinking she was hippie, in her sandals and scruffy hair, he was dismissive, saying it was an Aston Martin DB5 with an automatic shift, but she probably could not afford it.

  “Far out,” Grace replied. “That’s just what I want. I’ll take it.”

  She then walked out of the showroom and straight to her bank, reappearing an hour later with $18,000 in cash. After handing it to the bewildered salesman, she got in the Aston Martin and drove away.

  “James Bond yeah,” said Grace, “that’s why I got it. I don’t have any of the spikes, the machine guns, or the ejector seat in the front or anything, but it’s a good car.”1

  Soon after Grace bought the DB5, she souped it up to make it even faster.

  “She had the engine taken out and put a Chevrolet engine in it,” said Jorma Kaukonen, who had just bought himself a Lotus Elan. “I mean that’s something you don’t see every day.”2

  In early July, Bill Graham stepped up his operation, opening the Fillmore West six nights a week for most of the summer. He also announced a “Fillmore Night at Tanglewood,” as part of the Berkshire Music Center’s prestigious summer music series. His program for August 12, designed to capture the atmosphere of the Fillmore East, starred The Who, Jefferson Airplane, and B.B. King. It would break all previous attendance records for the annual summer music series.