by John Glatt
Surprisingly, the album was panned in Rolling Stone. Then, speculation surfaced that the band’s work was a victim of the ongoing feud between Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner and Bill Graham.
“Maybe its just a coincidence that Santana and speed became popular at the same time,” read the review. “Maybe not. At any rate their ‘long awaited’ album is definitely a speed freak’s delight—fast, pounding, frantic music with no real content.”
The reviewer also found fault with Carlos Santana’s lead guitar.
“Carlos has stumbled upon a tired and mechanical guitar lick which he likes so well that he plays it in virtually every song. It’s even possible that it was recorded only once and then overdubbed wherever the engineers thought it would fit. You’ll know it when you hear it.”
It forecast that although the album might sell, people would forget about it after a week and “file it away under ‘S.’ ”42
Thirty-four years later, Rolling Stone would rank it as one of the five hundred greatest albums of all time.
After Woodstock, and under the guidance of Bill Graham, Santana went into high gear. At the end of August, he got them on the bill of the Texas International Pop Festival with Janis Joplin, Led Zeppelin, and Sly and the Family Stone.
“Bill called me and asked me to put Santana on,” said festival organizer Alex Cooley. “He was very forceful. The lineup was full but he did a number on me and I put Santana on.”43
On Friday, September 19, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young debuted at the Fillmore East for the first of two nights. The new supergroup wanted to use their own sound system and play in a garden setting. None of it went down well with the Fillmore East staff, who took an instant dislike to CSN&Y.
“We were under the impression that we had the best there was,” said Allan Arkush, “and now they wanted to tear it all out and bring in their own. Also they demanded a lot of food which they never ate, which was good for us because we ended up with it.”44
Nonetheless, CSN&Y were a huge hit with the Fillmore East audiences. Neil Young and Stephen Stills trading guitar riffs on Young’s “Down by the River” was a highlight of the shows.
“Their sets at the Fillmore East last weekend,” wrote Joanna Schier in the Village Voice’s “Riffs” column, “created some of the most genuinely sympathetic rapport between performers and audience that I’ve ever seen. It all looked so easy.”
The following weekend, the Grateful Dead and Country Joe and the Fish played the Fillmore East. On Saturday, Country Joe and Jerry Garcia tossed a coin to decide who would close the second show that night.
“We won the toss,” said Fish lead guitarist, Barry Melton, “or at least we’d thought we’d won the toss.”
Closing the early show, the Grateful Dead had to be asked to stop playing by Bill Graham so the house could be turned over. Then the Dead opened the second show and played for five hours, finally coming off at around four o’clock in the morning.
“By the time we got on there was about ten people left in the audience,” recalled Melton, “and whoever was there was completely and totally exhausted. We never flipped that coin again.”45
CHAPTER TWENTY
Running on Ego
October to December, 1969
On October 2, 1969, Janis Joplin and Santana played four shows at the Fillmore West, with Santana receiving $7,500 ($48,000) for the run. One night after a show, Janis seduced Santana’s five-foot-tall timbales player, José “Chepito” Areas, back at her hotel.
“Oh yeah, she kind of raped me,” he recalled. “She grabbed me and threw me on the bed and then started attacking me. She was scratching my body and she destroyed me. She was wild.”1
Perhaps Janis’s temperament was a result of her long-awaited first solo album—Kozmic Blues—being released to mixed reviews just a few days prior. Rolling Stone hedged its bets by running two reviews side by side.
In the first review Ed Leimbacher called Kozmic Blues a “fine and solid” album that almost justified all the hype.
“But for all that,” he wrote, “I’ll play Kozmic Blues a few times, then file it away. But I no longer can hear what it was that turned me on at Monterey. The good’s gone.”
Underneath, reviewer John Burks found Janis’s new band to be the main problem with the album.
“She sounds great,” he wrote. “Just great. It’s simply a matter of reaching the point where you are able to shut out the band—entirely—and listen to this woman sing. An odd strategy, admittedly, but guaranteed worth it.”2
Always thin-skinned, Janis was deeply hurt by the reviews. She told a reporter for Time magazine that she was taking six months off “to clear my head.”3
The first week of October, John Cooke quit as road manager, fed up with seeing Janis destroy herself. Janis had also told him she was disbanding the Kozmic Blues Band at the end of the year to start a new band.
“It wasn’t any fun anymore,” Cooke explained, “and I didn’t want to see her go downhill. They made the decision that we’re no longer going to try and fix this.”4
Janis spent the next two months in New York, where it was easy to cop heroin. She started frequenting Nobody’s Bar on Bleecker Street in the West Village, where she met Dave Davies of The Kinks, who were playing the Fillmore East in mid-October.
“Janis Joplin was always there,” he recalled. “She’d talk ’till the cows come home and was like one of the guys. She could outtalk anyone.”5
In late October, The Who performed an entire week of Tommy shows at the Fillmore East. It was the first time the English band had performed the opera live in its entirety.
Tommy had now gone gold in America, selling a million copies, and Bill Graham was determined to do something really special for the six sold-out nights. So he appointed a special production staff with a $5,000 budget to work on it, headed by Joshua White and Chris Langhart.
“It was absolutely brilliant and Bill put it all together,” said White. “That was just an over-the-top thing. You could not get a ticket. From the get-go it was super-sold-out.”6
The Who and its management were totally behind the special week, and there would be one show a night with a fifteen-minute intermission.
It must have been music to Bill Graham’s ears when Pete Townshend told the New Yorker how The Who much preferred playing the Fillmore East to Madison Square Garden.
“We could have played Madison Square Garden instead of the Fillmore, and made more money in one night than we’ll get for the whole week,” explained Townshend. “But we’re willing to turn down huge offers for the chance to reach an audience. The problem with a place like the Garden is that the audience can’t see you wince. They can’t see you smile. And that’s important to us, because to us a rock concert is so much a theatrical performance as a musical one.”7
For the show, Joshua White commissioned a special twenty-foot-high wraparound cinemascope-sized screen. The middle of the screen would be closer to the audience and the edges farther away.
Chris Langhart then constructed it with his NYU theater students.
“We had to build a curved screen frame for it to be laced into,” said Langhart. “And that required a lot of the things that I taught at NYU. The kids rallied round it.”8
Photographer Amalie Rothschild, who was now also working for the Joshua Light Show, was given $500 to produce Tommy film sequences. These included filming special visuals for the “Acid Queen” number, featuring her light show colleague Cecily Hoyt walking naked back and forth across the Fillmore East stage. It was filmed multiple times, using different lenses, camera angles, and speeds, before being meshed together to produce “a wild psychedelic job.”
“It was fabulous,” said Rothschild. “That was what was so enlightened about Bill Graham. As much as he was a businessman he also cared about giving his audiences their money’s worth and doing a good sho
w.9
Even the Tommy playbills were collectables, with a stunning cover design by artist David Byrd. Inside was the story of Tommy with its complete lyrics. The cover read:
Bill Graham Presents In New York
THE WHO
PERFORMING THEIR ENTIRE ROCK-OPERA
TOMMY
PRESENTED BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT WITH HER MAJESTY
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
“Tommy was a real highlight,” recalled Allan Arkush. “Once again it was Bill striving to do more. He appreciated and really loved The Who.”
For the “Overture” and the first four numbers, it was decided to have The Who play without a light show. And the stage crew soon discovered that they could stand directly behind drummer Keith Moon’s shoulder without being seen by the audience. It was like being onstage with The Who, and crew members took turns onstage that week to experience the amazing rush.
“They’d count down and then kick off,” said Arkush, “and the stage would shake and you’d feel like you were on a rocket. And you’re looking at the faces of all these kids pinned to their seats from the scale of the music. It was unbelievable.”
It was at these Tommy shows that the Fillmore East staff invented its ten Klieg light salute, honoring a band that had delivered a transcendent set, by lighting up the audience.
“We would raise the screen and shine white light on the audience,” Arkush explained. “So The Who would be silhouetted in this incredible white light. And it became a tribute that if a band succeeded in being so good that they transcended, someone would call for raising the screen for their last number. And they’d shine all the lights on the audience. It was like breaking the fourth wall and the whole place became one celebratory moment. We only did it maybe five or six times. You had to earn it.”10
Among the select groups that the stage crew did this for would be Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers, and Leon Russell.
Jefferson Airplane’s new album Volunteers was finally released in late October. It had been delayed for months while the band battled with RCA over the words “motherfucker” and “shit to a tree.” The record company also objected to the use of the American flag on the cover and the original title, Volunteers of Amerika. The differences were finally sorted out with the title being abbreviated to just Volunteers, and although the two objectionable words stayed in the final sound mix, “motherfucker” was changed to “fred” in the enclosed lyrics sheet.
Inside the double cover—which opened up to become a peanut butter and jelly sandwich—was a spoof newspaper called the Paz Progress, dated August 1, 1939. It contained a cartoon ridiculing President Richard Nixon and the recent moon landing.
It was mostly the work of Grace Slick and Paul Kantner. Spencer Dryden, who had been responsible for all previous covers, had nothing to do with this one.
“I personally hated that cover,” said Marty Balin. “I had no idea why they would put a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on there. I guess they thought it was funny.”11
Many viewed Volunteers as the band’s public protest against the Vietnam War and the Nixon administration. Arguably, it was the band’s last great album, and it sold well, reaching number 13 on the Billboard chart. The title track, “Volunteers,” was released as a single but flopped.
“Volunteers is when [they] come to a peak,” said music critic Robert Christgau. “After that their music falls off a cliff.”12
Several weeks before the release of Volunteers, popular television host Art Linkletter’s twenty-year-old daughter Diane jumped out of a sixth-floor window in West Hollywood and died. The next day, Linkletter held a press conference, blaming Grace Slick and claiming his daughter had been on LSD when she had jumped. A subsequent autopsy found no drugs in her system at the time of her death, but Linkletter insisted it must have been a flashback.
Grace Slick was watching television in a New York hotel room when she saw Linkletter attack her.
“He said Grace Slick . . . is responsible for my daughter’s death,” said Grace. “And I rolled around to the TV and [said] ‘what the hell is he talking about?’ And I called the TV station [to complain] but I couldn’t get through.”13
In mid-November, Janis Joplin was arrested for screaming obscenities at police after a concert in Tampa, Florida. She had lost her temper with the cops, who were trying to stop her fans from dancing. Four months later, she would be fined $200 for the offense.
Around this time Janis had attempted to explain how she was now coping with success, and how it had changed her.
“The whole success thing has been weird,” she told Michael Lydon of the New York Times. “I look around after all the violent changes I’ve been through in the last year, and I see how surreal it’s gotten. Flying around in airplanes, kids screaming, a lot of money and people buying me drinks.”
She said she loved being Janis “the star,” and especially all the money and other trappings that came with it.
“That fur coat . . . know how I got that?” she asked Lydon. “Southern Comfort! Far out! I had the chick in my manager’s office Photostat every goddam clipping that ever had me mentioning Southern Comfort, and I sent them to the company, and they sent me a whole lotta money. How could anybody in their right mind want me for their image? Oh, man, that was the best hustle I ever pulled—can you imagine getting paid for passing out for two years?”14
That Halloween, Mountain played the Fillmore East for the first time. The three-piece hard-rock band, with Leslie West on lead guitar, Felix Pappalardi on bass, and Corky Laing on drums, would soon establish themselves as a firm Fillmore East favorite. But eighteen months earlier, West had had a serious run-in with Bill Graham at Winterland, when his previous band, the Vagrants, opened for The Who.
“We used to smash the guitars,” said West, “and use flash pods and smoke. Bill was sitting on the stage when we were doing our opening act, and I smashed my guitar right in front of him. He then wrote a letter to our agency, ‘I never want to see the Vagrants here again! Especially that three-hundred-pound psychedelic canary Lesley West.’ ”
When the guitar virtuoso first arrived at the Fillmore East for a soundcheck, he was worried about how Bill Graham would receive him.
“Bill walks over,” said West, “and I think, ‘Oh shit, he’s going to say something to me.’ And he sticks out his hand, and says, ‘I guess you’ve grown up since then.’ ”15
At the beginning of November, Bill Graham used his influence to have Santana booked on three of America’s most popular TV shows—the Ed Sullivan Show, the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, and the Dick Cavett Show.
And Carlos Santana’s sudden fame was now being felt in the San Francisco Mission District, where he still lived.
“Santana changed the whole attitude of people’s lives in the Mission,” said percussionist Richard Segovia, who lived a few block away from Carlos and knew him. “Everybody wanted to be a conga player. Everyone wanted to be a timbales player. Instead of the battle of the barrios it became the battle of the bands, and instead of fighting they did it musically.”16
On November 7 and 8, Santana headlined the Fillmore East for the first time, with the Butterfield Blues Band and Humble Pie opening.
“Santana had them standing on the seats,” wrote the Village Voice’s “Riffs” column. “I haven’t seen that kind of sheer physical response since the Chambers Brothers were last around Second Avenue.”
But critic Mike Jahn was far less enthusiastic about Santana.
“The group’s long drum passages become boring after a while,” he wrote, “particularly in a theater where the audience can’t move around. Latin music is created for dancing, and Santana’s super-charged Latin especially so.”
On Sunday, November 9, Bill Graham presented the Rolling Stones at the Oakland Coliseum as part of the group’s 1969 tour. There had been much tension between Gra
ham and the Stones after they had turned down his pitch to present the entire US tour. Graham had even asked Mick Jagger to intercede, but he refused.
“He’d done the Fillmores and now he wanted to do the ’69 Stones’ Tour,” said the Stones’ business manager Ronnie Schneider. “Mick [Jagger] called me and said, ‘We don’t want him doing the tour.’ I felt bad I had to tell him no, so I gave him a couple of shows.”17
During the first Oakland Coliseum show, thousands of people rushed the stage in the middle of “Satisfaction,” knocking over Graham’s closed-circuit cameras.
“Graham jumped onto the stage and began bouncing around like a man trying to stamp out a nest of snakes, pushing kids away and giving orders,” wrote Rolling Stone reviewer Jerry Hopkins. “Sam Cutler [the Stones’ tour manager] asked Graham to leave the stage. Graham told Cutler to get the hell off his stage. Then Graham grabbed Cutler—and Cutler, having a fuse only millimeters longer than Graham’s, grabbed back. They were going to kill each other. Five feet away the Stones were still playing ‘Satisfaction.’ ”18
Then a raging Graham went backstage to sulk. Soon afterward, when the Rolling Stones came offstage and went back to their dressing room, they found someone had put up several huge posters of Bill Graham flipping them the bird.
“There were all these posters up in our dressing room of [Graham],” recalled Bill Wyman. “And we just threw cakes at them and all that sort of stuff. He kind of underestimated us and he was a bit arrogant with us. We couldn’t give a damn who this guy was.”19
Outside the dressing room, Graham confronted Ronnie Schneider, accusing the Stones of disrespecting him by throwing food everywhere.
“And we started screwing with each other,” recalled Schneider. “Then he poked me in the chest with his finger, and I hit him in the nuts with my briefcase, as we say sweetly. He got ready to take a swing at me but these big security guys had heard us screaming and grabbed him. Then Keith [Richards] grabbed me and pulled me back into the dressing room and told me to calm down.”20
