Live at the Fillmore East and West

by John Glatt

  Jorma Kaukonen agreed that playing the Fillmore East was a far difference experience.

  “The Fillmore West was a ballroom,” he explained, “and it didn’t have the same theater ambience that the Fillmore East did. And the other thing was the audiences. There is a quality to the New York tri-state audiences that is theirs and theirs alone. . . . I mean there’s just nothing like them. And so to be able to get a positive response from the New York audience was a big deal. When they loved you, they loved you. If they didn’t, they didn’t.”23

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “Somewhere Near Salinas”

  August to October 11, 1970

  In August 1970, Grace Sick, now three months pregnant, toured the East Coast with Jefferson Airplane. Since the band’s return from England, Marty Balin had become more and more withdrawn, even growing a full Charles Manson–type beard.

  The band resembled a bloated corporation, employing a secretary, a gardener, an art director, and even a fan club president. And on tour they traveled with an entourage of at least fifteen people, with everyone going first class.1

  “Everybody was living the high hog,” said Marty Balin. “They all had their own entourages and fifty people hanging around each guy. Me. I’ve got nobody. Everybody thought I was a dork. I wasn’t into the drugs, I just drank in those days. Everybody was on coke so I just got bored by it.”2

  Jack Casady believes that the founder of the Jefferson Airplane now found himself completely overshadowed by Grace and Paul Kantner.

  “[Marty’s] personality isn’t pushy like that,” said Casady. “Paul has a very strong dynamic personality and so does Grace. Marty, I think, pulled back for a period of time with all of them.”3

  The Airplane were now one of the most bankable bands in America, earning at least $17,500 ($105,000) per concert. A year later, Paul Kantner would boast that he regularly wrote off all his drugs as a business expense.4

  At the end of the tour, the band found themselves stuck in Toronto because of an airline strike, so Paul Kantner chartered a Lear jet to fly them back to San Francisco. During the flight everybody got high and drank champagne, and Kantner asked the pilot to put the plane into barrel rolls, curious to see the effects of centrifugal force on the champagne glasses.

  “Yeah,” said Kantner. “Just buckle your seat and then flip over. The amusing thing is when they do these flips you’d have a glass of champagne on the table and it wouldn’t move.”5

  After a few barrel rolls, Kantner asked the pilot to go into freefall before firing up the engines and heading home.

  On Friday, July 31, Janis Joplin checked into the Chelsea Hotel for a couple of weeks while working around the New York area. Aware of the temptations that New York held for Janis, Albert Grossman enlisted Emmett Grogan, the founder of the anarchist group the Diggers, to make sure she stayed clean.

  “And you talk about a cat guarding the henhouse,” said Barry Melton. “Albert had hired Emmett as Janis’s bodyguard and to watch over her because he thought she had a drug problem. It was a total absurdity.”6 (Five years later Grogan would die of a heroin overdose on an F train in the New York Subway system.)

  On Saturday night, Janis and the Full Tilt Boogie Band were booked to play the Forest Hills Festival in Queens. All twelve thousand tickets for the open-air concert had been sold, and soon after she came onstage there was a heavy thunderstorm.

  The organizers then cleared the stage and canceled the show, declaring the conditions to be too dangerous.

  “The people, refusing to leave, began to boo,” recalled Patti Smith, who was standing at the side of the stage with Bobby Neuwirth. “Janis was distraught. ‘They’re booing me, man,’ she cried to Bobby. ‘They’re not booing you, darling,’ he said. ‘They’re booing the rain.’ ”7

  Later that night, Grossman invited Janis to dinner at a restaurant called Remington’s in the West Village. Among the others there were actress Tuesday Weld and Michael J. Pollard. Janis promptly got extremely drunk and propositioned Albert Grossman, who politely declined her offer.

  Then she told Tuesday Weld that she may be a big star but she couldn’t get laid. When no one paid her any attention, she stumbled over to the bartender and asked where she might find “all the pretty young boys.”8

  On Sunday, Janis played a rain date at the Forest Hill tennis stadium. It was a triumph.

  “Janis Joplin and Her New Group Give Rousing Forest Hills Show,” was the New York Times headline over Mike Jahn’s rave review.

  “Janis Joplin finally has a backup band worthy of her,” it began. “Miss Joplin is a tremendously exciting blues/rock shouter, one who has had trouble finding musicians able to weather her storm. Her first group, Big Brother and the Holding Company, was exciting but imprecise, sometimes embarrassingly so. Her second band, which went unnamed, was precise enough but lacking in the energy department.

  “Full Tilt Boogie, as the name implies, has the emotion and drive needed to back Miss Joplin, and is also composed of fine musicians.”

  The next night, Janis Joplin taped her third appearance on the Dick Cavett Show. After performing “Fill Me Like a Mountain,” she looked unsteady as she walked back to Dick Cavett, spilling coffee over her hand. Her eyes, never fully engaging with Cavett or his other guests, Gloria Swanson and Margot Kidder, were glazed.

  “She was a little off,” remembered Cavett, “and by that I of course mean a little drugged.”9

  During the break, Janis brought out a bottle of Southern Comfort and was swigging it in full view of the audience. When Gloria Swanson, the silent movie star who had just made a big comeback in Sunset Boulevard, came out things became a little uneasy. After she started flattering Cavett, handing him a series of humorous calling cards, Janis called out, “You silver-tongued devil, you.”

  “I beg your pardon,” snapped Swanson. “What did you say?”

  “I said you were a silver-tongued devil,” repeated Janis.

  Later on, Swanson discussed her 1922 silent movie Queen Kelly, which had been heavily censored after director Erich von Stroheim had added explicit brothel scenes.

  “I was in Germany when boys were dressing like girls,” said Swanson. “So I have seen everything, but a lot of what’s going on today [is] a bad imitation.”

  “But it shouldn’t be illegal,” Janis interjected, “just because somebody up there doesn’t like it. Well back then you couldn’t drink because they didn’t like it, right. Now you can’t smoke grass. Back then you couldn’t be a flapper, because they didn’t like it. Now you can’t play rock ’n’ roll. That seems to me you get the people that went through all that Prohibition and flappers . . . should realize that young people are always crazy, you know. And they’ll leave us alone.”10

  After the show, Dick Cavett took Janis out for dinner and asked her if she was using heroin.

  “And she said, ‘If I were, who would care?’ ” said Cavett. “And I was so stopped by that I couldn’t even do the obvious, which is to say, ‘I would.’ It just seemed to be such an admission of . . . it’s over.”11

  On Monday, August 10, as Abraxus neared release, Santana played three nights at the Fillmore East. It was their fifth appearance, and in the year since their Woodstock triumph the band had changed radically. With all the sudden fame and fortune, Carlos Santana and the rest of the band were now living the high life, indulging their every whim.

  “You’re going from a Mission District kid with nothing to having everything,” Carlos would explain later. “You’re Number One. Too much drugs, everything to excess.”12

  Although Carlos was heavily into such psychedelics as LSD, mescaline, ayahuasca, and peyote, other band members preferred cocaine and heroin. During this period, Carlos had a recurring nightmare that he would be at a show in no condition to play.

  “Bill Graham is screaming at me,” said Carlos. “ ‘You’re nothing, you
’re unprofessional, you’re a piece of shit.’ ”13

  Michael Shrieve says that the insanity began after the Woodstock movie became a worldwide blockbuster.

  “And it just blew up internationally,” he explained. “So from there it was gravy. We played all over the world. I mean the first album came out and the second album was even bigger. There were drugs, cocaine specifically, that entered the scene for us. We were young and misguided. We didn’t have the abilities or the maturity . . . to know how to deal with that kind of success and everything that goes with it at such a young age. In some ways it was the typical story.”14

  Organist Gregg Rolie believes that Santana was ill-equipped for all the sudden success.

  “It’s almost like too much, too soon,” he said. “You had the world at your feet, you could do anything you want. And during those days you really could do anything you want.”15

  Road manager Herbie Herbert went along on Santana’s roller-coaster ride.

  “I always say they went to cocaine heaven,” he said. “They were just a little too high and everyone was coming off nonexistent walls.”

  Janis Joplin came to one of the Santana shows at the Fillmore East after a very drunken dinner. On the way there, Myra Friedman asked her why she didn’t play the Fillmores anymore. Janis replied that there was just not enough money in them anymore, while conceding it would be nice to play for a “hip” audience again.

  When they arrived at the Fillmore East, a drunken Janis sat down by the stairs to compose herself.

  “That being against the fire laws,” said Friedman, “she got an usher frantic. ‘You’ve got to move,’ he pleaded. ‘Even if you are Janis Joplin, you’re not allowed to sit here!’

  “ ‘Honey,’ ” she said sweetly, ‘ “you’re doing a wonderful job and I want you to keep it up—but I ain’t movin’.’ ”

  Then Janis turned to Friedman and said that although she liked being treated like anybody else, she still wasn’t going to move.16

  A week later Bill Graham presented Santana, Miles Davis, and the Voices of East Harlem at a special Fillmore East night in the open-air amphitheater in Tanglewood, in the Berkshires. Miles was still feuding with Graham and once again deliberately arrived late.

  “The Voices of East Harlem had already performed,” recalled Herbie Herbert, “and Miles Davis’s greatest band were onstage opening for Santana, with no sign of Miles showing up. Bill Graham was pacing up and down, ‘That motherfucker, Miles; I’m gonna break his fucking neck.’ ”

  All of a sudden, there’s a screeching sound and a Maserati convertible careened to a halt by the stage, with Miles, wearing a patched leather vest, and his trumpet in the passenger seat.

  “[He] jumps out of the car, straight onstage and just hits it,” said Herbert. “Bill and I watched this go down with our mouths hanging open.”17

  After Miles’s set, Santana came out and played with Bill Graham sitting behind an amplifier banging his cowbell. It was recorded by Joshua White’s new television company for what Graham planned as the first made-for-television rock special.

  “We played at Tanglewood next to Miles Davis,” said José ‘Chepito’ Areas. “That was a beautiful concert.”18

  After the show, Graham threw a celebratory party for Santana in a trailer at the back of the stage.

  “We were just happy,” said Graham. “[They said] ‘Bill, you’re the greatest.’ ”

  That night Carlos Santana and Miles Davis bonded musically and soon became major influences on each other. After seeing Santana, Davis introduced a percussion section to his band. And the next time Santana played the Fillmore East, Davis would be there for every show.

  Two days after Tanglewood, Santana had a band meeting and decided to fire Bill Graham.

  “We didn’t like him,” said José Areas. “He wanted to manage Santana and he was after the money, because he knew we would make millions.”19

  Stan Marcum then telephoned Graham at his Fillmore East office and left the message that Santana had decided to “do its own thing” and no longer needed his services. When his secretary told him, Graham was furious, feeling deeply betrayed.

  A few hours later, when he landed at San Francisco airport, he headed straight to Santana’s Paisley Penguin rehearsal space to have it out with them.

  “Bill Graham smashed the door open and comes walking in,” said Herbie Herbert. “ ‘Where are they?’ he shouted. I go, ‘Bill, you can hear them. They’re in the back rehearsing.’ ”

  As soon as Graham walked into the rehearsal studio, the music stopped. Then he began yelling at Stan Marcum for daring to fire him after everything he had done for Santana.

  “It was ugly,” recalled Herbert, who was listening outside. “I’m a nonconfrontational hippie from Berkeley. I don’t do fighting, and I was about to go across the street and get a milk shake.”

  As Herbert was walking out, Gregg Rolie ordered him back to fire Bill Graham. Herbert explained he was only a roadie and that was not his job. But the organist insisted, saying his job with Santana was on the line if he didn’t.

  Then Herbert went in the rehearsal room and stood between Graham and the band. He told Graham that they just could not afford to pay commissions to two managers, and Stan Marcum, who had been there from the very beginning, would be manager. But he said Graham could continue to present and book Santana shows.

  “And here I am firing the guy that got me the job,” said Herbert. “He’s my mentor. My best friend. My second father, and now I’ve got to go in and fire him. But I did. And I did a very efficient and thorough job of it, and explained it to him. And when I was done Bill went, ‘Okay,’ and walked out and left.”20

  On Wednesday, August 12, Janis Joplin almost caused a riot when she played in front of forty thousand screaming fans at the Harvard Stadium in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Half of them had tickets and the rest had climbed over the walls to get in for free. Before taking the stage, Janis told Cambridge Phoenix music writer Jon Landau, “My music ain’t supposed to make you want to riot! My music’s supposed to make you want to fuck!”21

  Janis was on fire, delivering a great performance. It was the last one she would ever give.

  The next day she flew to Port Arthur for her tenth high school reunion, taking along John Cooke, Bob Neuwirth, and her New York limo driver, John Fischer, for moral support. Before leaving, she told a reporter that she was going to the reunion “just to jam it up their asses” and “see all those kids who are still working in gas stations and driving dry cleaning trucks while I’m making $50,000 a year.”22

  “She wanted to go home with all her finery,” said Cooke, “and her reputation and her well-earned fame and strut for Port Arthur.”23

  When they landed at the Golden Triangle Airport after a stopover in Houston, Janis and her entourage checked into a Port Arthur hotel. Her parents had skipped town for a couple of days to avoid any embarrassment their daughter might cause.

  The next day Janis arrived at the stately Goodhue Hotel on Proctor Street, where the Thomas Jefferson High School Reunion was being held. She swept into the Petroleum Room, wearing purple and pink feathers, silver slippers, and sunglasses, with an assortment of bracelets and necklaces.

  Then she gave a press conference for reporters and a local TV station, as many of her old high school classmates looked on.

  “What have you been doing since 1960?” asked a reporter.

  “Oooooh, hangin’ out,” Janis replied, sipping a cocktail. “You know just hangin’ out. Havin’ a good time. Tryin’ to get laid, stay stoned—no, don’t say that. That doesn’t work in Port Arthur.”

  Suddenly, Janis’s demeanor seemed to change and she went on the defensive, becoming the vulnerable high school girl again.

  “You can really see her retreat from that ‘I want to rub it in your face’ stuff,” said Cooke. “And she became really vulnerab
le like this wasn’t a great idea to come be a jerk.”24

  Janis spent the evening ensconced with her entourage and pointedly ignoring her old classmates.

  “Her peers spent the evening gawking at her,” noted a reporter from Texas Monthly, “or making catty comments out of her earshot. Several asked for autographs. At least one of them, who had never been close to the singer, assured Janis that she’d given the media the wrong impression about Port Arthur’s treatment of her. ‘Janis, we liked you!’ she insisted. Janis did not respond.”25

  After leaving the reunion, Janis had John Fischer drive across the river into Louisiana so she could show them the Texas Pelican, where she had her first drink.

  That night, Jerry Lee Lewis was playing and Janis went backstage during a break to introduce her younger sister Laura to him. When the Killer quipped that Laura might be good looking if she didn’t try to look like her sister, Janis hit him. Then Lewis punched her square in the face, saying that if she was going to act like a man, he was going to treat her like one. Janis burst into tears and had to be led away to the bar to regroup.

  After more drinking, she took her three friends back to her parents’ home to crash.

  A few hours later, Seth and Dorothy Joplin, who had watched Janis’s press conference on TV aghast, arrived home. They found Bob Neuwirth collapsed in a car outside with its engine running, John Fischer asleep on the living-room floor, and Janis upstairs in the bedroom.26

  A huge argument ensued, and Dorothy told Janis she wished she had never been born.27

  That fall, a grim-faced Bill Graham gathered his young Fillmore West staff together for a family meeting. He told them that the future of the Fillmore West was uncertain.

  “We are paying dearly for having provided the city of San Francisco with fine entertainment for the past five years,” he said. “The public is spoiled rotten.”