by John Glatt
The Fillmore East now closed down for a month as the staff moved up to Lenox, Massachusetts, to stage a special show at the Tanglewood Festival the weekend before the Woodstock festival. Presented by Bill Graham, the bill consisted of Jefferson Airplane, The Who, and B.B. King.
Joshua White videotaped all the performances for a potential television special, but unfortunately Graham had failed to secure clearances from the bands, and the project was eventually shelved.
After Tanglewood, many of the Fillmore East staff headed to Bethel, New York, for the Woodstock festival. After getting fired by Graham, John Morris had gone to work with Michael Lang to organize Woodstock, recruiting many of his old Fillmore staff to help.
“Bill started putting Woodstock down from the very first minute,” said Morris. “Bill thought Woodstock was taking a bunch of kids and putting them in a field [and] hated the idea. Bill looked at festivals and outdoor shows as uncontrollable and unsafe to the audience. You can’t hear as well. You can’t see the music.”16
Agent Frank Barsalona sold many of the Woodstock acts to John Morris for prices that would skyrocket after the festival and the resulting hit movie and best-selling double album.
Headliner Jimi Hendrix received $30,000; The Band, Janis Joplin, and Jefferson Airplane were paid $15,000; Sly and the Family Stone, The Who, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young all got $12,500; Joan Baez and Creedence Clearwater Revival each received $10,000; The Grateful Dead got $7,500; Ten Years After got $6,500; and Joe Cocker and Santana received only $2,500. By the purchasing power of the 2010s, the range is approximately $191,000 for Hendrix to $16,000 for Santana.
The only reason Bill Graham went to Woodstock was to see his protégés Santana perform. Bonnie had flown in to accompany him there, and they would be staying at Grossinger’s Resort, where he had once waited tables.
“We were able to stay in a nice hotel and went in on the helicopter,” said Bonnie. “He only really went because of Santana and that was it.”17
Several days before Woodstock, many of the musicians playing the festival met for a late dinner at El Quijote restaurant, next door to the Chelsea Hotel. Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane shared a table with Country Joe and the Fish, and Jimi Hendrix sat nearby with a ravishing blonde woman.
Patti Smith wandered in that night looking for friends before being amazed to see most of her musical heroes there eating dinner and discussing the upcoming festival.
“They were here for the Woodstock Festival,” said Smith. “Grace Slick got up and brushed past me. She was wearing a floor-length tie-dyed dress and had dark violet eyes like Liz Taylor.
“ ‘Hello,’ I said, noticing I was taller.
“ ‘Hello yourself,’ she said.”18
On the afternoon of Thursday, August 14, Jefferson Airplane arrived at the Holiday Inn in Liberty, New York, where most of the bands were staying. Various members of the Airplane and The Who had bonded during the previous weekend in Tanglewood.
“We partied with Keith Moon,” recalled Bill Thompson. “He was our good friend and we’d stay up the whole night with him.”19
When Janis Joplin turned up at the Holiday Inn with her girlfriend Peggy Caserta, she sought out her old boyfriend Country Joe McDonald.
“Janis and I talked and then she asked me to come to her room,” recalled McDonald. “When we got there she decided I needed to have sex. She gave me a blow job, much to my surprise.”
After they had sex, Janis got out her works to shoot up some heroin.
“It was all quite casual and natural for her,” said McDonald. “It wasn’t for me. I could not stand needles and watching someone shoot up was sure not my idea of fun.”
He told Janis he was leaving, but she begged him to stay and watch her shoot up.
“I told her . . . I was not going to watch her kill herself,” he said. “I left her room and did not see her for the rest of the festival.”20
On Friday morning—the first day of Woodstock—Bill Graham attempted to upstage the organizers. His office issued a press release proudly announcing that his recent “Fillmore Night at Tanglewood” had broken all attendance in the venue’s thirty-two-year history. To celebrate, read the release, Bill Graham would donate a thousand dollars to establish a Fillmore scholarship to send a young musician to the Berkshire Music Center.
On Saturday morning, the Jefferson Airplane helicoptered into the festival, flying in directly behind Janis Joplin and her Kozmic Blues Band. Backstage, Bill Thompson then organized a meeting of all the managers of the main bands. Thompson told everyone that the bands should be paid first to make sure they were not ripped off. A deputation of managers then met with Michael Lang and his partner, Artie Kornfeld, demanding their money by that night, or they would go home without performing.
“Now that kind of freaked him out,” said Thompson. “It was Saturday and the banks were not open. But we scared him enough that they talked to the banks about opening up.”21
Late morning, Lang and Kornfeld arrived with cashier’s checks and the bands were paid in full.
A few hours earlier at their hotel, Santana and Barry Imhoff, a staffer from Bill Graham’s management office, heard radio reports that all the roads to the festival were closed. So, they flew to the Bethel festival site.
“That’s why we had to take a helicopter in,” said Michael Shrieve. “There was no other way to access the site. Flying over the crowd was like a revelation. Nobody had ever seen that many people together, and this was for a rock concert.”
Carlos Santana, who had recently celebrated his twenty-second birthday, was thrilled when he saw the half-million people below.
“We weren’t afraid,” he said. “All I could see was an ocean of flesh and hair and teeth.”22
Backstage, Santana was greeted by Bill Graham, who had arrived earlier to see them play. He had helicoptered in with Bonnie and Kip Cohen, who took one look at the huge crowd and left.
“I wanted nothing to do with it,” said Cohen, “anymore than Bill did. But our whole stage staff had agreed to go up there and get it set up. I became actually disgusted by the sight of what was going on, as Bill was. I got back in the helicopter . . . and drove back to New York.”23
When Michael Lang ran into Graham backstage, he invited him to go onstage and announce some of the bands.
“He said, ‘No, no, no. It’s your party,’ ” recalled Lang.24
Most of the time he was there, Graham sat on a bench backstage, critiquing the organizers and picking faults. To the obsessive control freak, it was anathema to see the festival veer out of control and become a free one.
“And you’ve got to understand,” said Jack Casady, “if Bill was brought into something and he’s told he can’t run it—then why do it.”25
Backstage, Bill Graham caught Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kantner and road manager Bill Laudner trying to dose the main water supply with pink tablets of LSD.
“They were busted by Bill Graham,” said Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh. “[He] excoriated them mercilessly. However, it was agreed that the tablets would be given out by hand, individually.”26
Most of the bands dropped acid backstage while the bad weather caused big delays in the program.
“I remember sitting on the stage on acid in the afternoon,” said Paul Kantner. “And the stage apparently was a little rocky because of the rain.”
When Chip Monck, who would become known as the voice of Woodstock, tried to clear the stage when it became too dangerous, he encountered a spaced-out Paul Kantner.
“He wanted me to get off the stage,” said Kantner, “and I was sitting there on acid. My internal being was going deep into the heart of the earth and I could not move to save my life. I told him that. He thought I was just being a rock star . . . but it wasn’t that. I was the only one on the stage eventually, as everyone else had gone off worried that the stage w
as going to collapse. And I was just not in a position to really want to move, much less [being able to].”27
Santana had been told they would not be playing until Saturday night, and despite his confidence in the helicopter on the way to the festival, Carlos seemed nervous. So Jerry Garcia told him to relax and gave him some LSD, saying he had hours before he had to play. But at around two o’clock in the afternoon, just as the drug took hold, Santana were summoned to the stage, as Country Joe and the Fish finished playing.
“Everybody was getting high,” said Carlos. “At the peak of whatever I was getting high with, people are saying you’ve got to go on right now.”28
According to Chip Monck, Carlos initially refused to go on, and John Morris had to force him.
“He held Carlos by the neck with his feet against the trailer,” remembered Monck, “and said, ‘You’re going to go on now! It’s now or never!’ ”29
Carlos later remembered going onstage spinning and trying to clear his head enough to play.
“Damn! Why did I take LSD before I went on?” he later asked. “Like a drunk [I wanted to] find a telephone pole that I can hang onto. And so my telephone pole was saying, ‘God, please help me stay in time and in tune. That’s all I ask. I promise I’ll never touch this stuff again.’ ”30
From the very first notes of “Waiting,” Santana’s forty-five-minute set was a triumph, and the audience went wild. They got up and danced to the pulsating Latin rhythms and Carlos’s inimitable guitar solos, which many were hearing for the first time.
“The guitar neck . . . was literally like an electric snake,” said Carlos. “I’m making faces to try and keep it from slithering too much.”
The high point of the set came during Michael Shrieve’s drum solo in “Soul Sacrifice,” when Bill Graham crept onstage and sat behind an amplifier, playing his cowbell.
“It was one of the highlights of my life,” said Shrieve in 2013. “So many people just know me for that. . . . It was all improvised.”31
Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart watched his drum solo in awe.
“Michael Shrieve was playing like a god,” he said, “and the percussion section was snapping. Carlos was driven [and] I could see what he was doing to this crowd. They just had this incredible energy that was golden. It was like a heavenly clockwork.”32
Santana’s new timbales player, José “Chepito” Areas, had a religious experience playing Woodstock.
“I went all the way to the sky,” he said. “I was looking at Jesus’s face when I played in front of all those people. And I was the only one that was straight.”33
Jefferson Airplane watched the Santana set from backstage in total admiration.
“We’d never heard anything like it before,” said Jorma Kaukonen. “Knock out.”34
Also watching closely was Clive Davis, who was just weeks away from releasing the first Santana album.
“And Clive saw [500,000] people going crazy and what Santana could do live,” said record producer David Rubinson. “It rocked his world and he realized what he had in his hands. Then he turned the marketing and promotion forces of Columbia Records full on.”
As soon as Santana came offstage at 2:45 p.m., Bill Graham demanded a helicopter to take him and Bonnie back to Grossinger’s Resort. When they arrived at the helicopter pad, they found a long line of musicians and music executives waiting to leave. He went straight to the front of the line, ordering Frank Fava, who was in charge of security, to get him on the next helicopter.
“And he said, ‘Hi, I’m Bill Graham and I gotta get a helicopter out of here,’ ” Fava remembered. “I said, ‘I can’t get you a helicopter right now. I got all these people ahead of you.’ ”
Graham kept insisting he had to leave, threatening to have him fired.
“Right now, I’m the authority here,” Fava told him. “You want a helicopter? You get in the line. You keep it up, you don’t get out.”
Then a furious Graham vowed that Fava would never work in the music business again, as he took his place at the end of the line.35
Before he left, Bill Graham was interviewed for a documentary film of the festival. He was asked how he felt about the crowds climbing over the fences and turning Woodstock into a free event.
“So you have to find a control point at the beginning of the highways,” he replied, “and those with tickets are allowed in and those without tickets are not. And you have to have some control.
“You know, when you have the man-eating Marabunta ants coming over the hill in South America, if they want to cut ’em off and then stop ’em from coming, they make a ditch and they make a flame. Now I’m not saying they should put up flames to stop the people. There has to be some way to some to stop the influx of humanity.”36
As Bill Graham was leaving, Janis Joplin arrived with Peggy Caserta. They had never seen so many people and couldn’t stop laughing.
“We were hysterical,” recalled Caserta. “We were so happy because it was just seas and seas of people. We knew . . . the exposure was going to be tremendous.”37
Janis was desperate for a fix of heroin. So she and Caserta found a backstage porta-potty to shoot up in.
“We got in there and it was gut-wrenchingly awful,” said Caserta. “And she goes, ‘Shut up and fix!’ So we did.”
By the time she was due to take the stage with the Kozmic Blues Band, Janis was so out of it that her performance had to be postponed for eight hours while she sobered up. Later, she hung out backstage with Grace Slick, drinking expensive champagne from paper cups. The two Queens of Rock were photographed together by Time magazine.
“I remember Janis had a girlfriend with her that was a knockout,” said Mountain lead guitarist Leslie West, who played Saturday evening. “It took me a while to realize she was a lesbian. That was entertaining. My first lesbian duo and their stuff backstage.”38
When Janis eventually took the stage at two o’clock Sunday morning, she could barely stand up.
“How are you out there?” she drawled. “Are you okay?”
It was the first gig for Kozmic Blues Band’s new guitarist John Till, who had replaced Sam Andrew, and everybody was nervous. Then Janis struggled through the hourlong set, a performance that would go down as far from her best.
The Who were waiting to go on next when Janis finished her encore of “Ball and Chain.”
“She had been amazing at Monterey,” said Pete Townshend, “but tonight she wasn’t at her best, due probably to the long delay, and probably, too, to the amount of booze and heroin she’s consumed while she waited. But even Janis on an off-night was incredible.”39
The sun was coming up when Jefferson Airplane finally took the Woodstock stage after The Who. They should have gone on at midnight, but everything was so backed up that they spent more than six hours sitting behind the stage waiting.
“We didn’t go on until six o’clock in the morning,” said Bill Thompson. “Of course [Grace] had taken just about every drug known to man, but the show turned out pretty good.”40
Grace’s chief complaint was that there were no bathrooms. Her overall assessment was that Woodstock was badly organized.
“I was part of a congregation of musicians from the tribes of a temporary divided state,” she later wrote in her autobiography, Somebody to Love. “No bathrooms—my body, seemingly obeying a higher order, shut down and I had no need. We partook from each other’s stash of fruit, cheese, wine, marijuana, coke, acid, water and conversation.”
Glenn McKay’s Headlights, who had brought all their equipment from San Francisco, had all been set up and ready to go for hours. But by the time Jefferson Airplane came on it was bright sunshine, making a light show redundant.
Although she had been up partying all night, Grace looked beautiful in a plain white laced top and her long black hair in a perm.
“All right friends,�
�� she told the crowd squinting into the sun, “you have seen the heavy groups. Now you will see morning maniac music. Believe me, yeah, it’s a new dawn.”
Then the Airplane launched into “The Other Side of This Life” for a sensational ninety-minute set.
After playing, Jefferson Airplane flew to New York City for the Dick Cavett Show on Monday night. After being introduced as “San Francisco’s greatest export,” Grace shouted out cheekily, “Hi Jim,” to Cavett, who replied, “Good Morning, Grace.”
Then with a swirling light show behind them, Jefferson Airplane performed a blistering version of “We Can Be Together” from the new Volunteers album, complete with the refrain, “Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker!” It made history as being the first time the word “fuck” had been broadcast on American television.
“You were wonderful,” Cavett told Grace after they finished. “Boy, is the old lady upstairs going to be sore.”
Then the genial talk show host sat cross-legged on the floor in a circle with the Jefferson Airplane, Joni Mitchell, David Crosby, and Stephen Stills to chat.
Cavett asked Grace what she had done during her “off-hours” at the Woodstock festival?
“Listen Jim,” replied Grace, to howls of audience laughter, “I wish I could tell you.”
“You’ve got to learn my name Miss Joplin,” Cavett replied, to Grace’s applause. “Calling me Jim like that. Didn’t they teach you nothing at Finch?” 41
A few days after Woodstock, Columbia Records released the first eponymous Santana album. The record company took out half-page advertisements in all the music papers with the iconic cover, adapted from a Fillmore West poster.
“It makes you sweat,” read the ad. “Pulsating African Rhythms, Hot Latin Soul, Wild, Restless, Primitive. Santana. For your body as well as your mind.”
Santana was an instant hit, peaking at number 4 on the Billboard chart. Then Clive Davis released “Jingo” as a single, which failed to chart. But the next single, “Evil Ways,” made it straight into the Billboard Top Ten.
