Live at the Fillmore East and West Read online

  Live at the Fillmore East and West

  Also by John Glatt

  Rage & Roll: Bill Graham and the Selling of Rock

  River Phoenix: The Biography

  The Chieftains: The Authorized Biography

  The Ruling House of Monaco: The Story of a Tragic Dynasty

  Live at the Fillmore East and West

  Getting Backstage and Personal with Rock’s Greatest Legends

  John Glatt

  LYONS PRESS

  Guilford, Connecticut

  Helena, Montana

  An imprint of Rowman & Littlefield

  Lyons Press is an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield

  Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

  Copyright © 2015 by John Glatt

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the publisher.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Information available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  eISBN 000-0-0000-0000-0

  Glatt, John.

  Live at the Fillmore East and West : getting backstage and personal with rock’s greatest legends / John Glatt.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-7627-8865-1

  1. Rock concerts—New York (State) —New York. 2. Rock concerts—California—San Francisco. 3. Fillmore East (New York, N.Y.) 4. Fillmore Auditorium (San Francisco, Calif.) 5. Graham, Bill, 1931-1991. 6. Rock musicians—United States. 7. Concert agents—United States. I. Title.

  ML3534.3.G63 2014

  781.66078’79461—dc23

  2014027226

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  For Gail

  My sweet little rock ’n’ roller

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Prologue

  PART ONE: THE ROAD TO THE FILLMORES

  Chapter One: The Refuge

  Chapter Two: Carlos

  Chapter Three: Finding Direction

  Chapter Four: Grace

  Chapter Five: The Right Time at the Right Place

  Chapter Six: The Saloon Keeper

  Chapter Seven: Janis

  Chapter Eight: The Pieces Come Together

  Chapter Nine: Moving Up

  Chapter Ten: 1967

  Chapter Eleven: Monterey

  Chapter Twelve: Hiring and Firing

  PART TWO: THE MUSIC NEVER STOPPED

  Chapter Thirteen: Birth of the Fillmore East

  Chapter Fourteen: Up and Running

  Chapter Fifteen: The Fillmore West

  Chapter Sixteen: Catching Fire

  Chapter Seventeen: The Sunshine Makers

  Chapter Eighteen: Go Ride the Music

  Chapter Nineteen: Three Days of Peace, Love, and Music

  Chapter Twenty: Running on Ego

  Chapter Twenty-One: A New Decade

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Dosing Richard Nixon

  Chapter Twenty-Three: The Festival Express

  Chapter Twenty-Four: “Somewhere Near Salinas”

  Chapter Twenty-Five: “The Show Must Go On”

  Chapter Twenty-Six: The Last Hurrah

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: “The Flowers Wilted”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: “Thank You and Farewell”

  Coda

  Acknowledgments

  Photographs

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  Foreword

  By the spring of 1967, word came to us in New York that amazing musical and visual ideas were happening in San Francisco. At the time I was designing lights for New York discotheques of the era—such as Salvation, Arthur, Trude Heller’s, and Bobb Goldstein’s Lightworks—but knew I wanted something more.

  That July, The Electric Circus opened on St. Marks Place in the heart of the Lower East Side. The entrepreneur behind the nightclub was Jerry Brandt. By fortunate coincidence, I’d gone to camp and was childhood friends with his wife, the late actress Janet Margolin, a relationship that gave me easy access to The Electric Circus. I went there often.

  In 1967 the Lower East Side was an ethnic melting pot. Basically, Jerry had taken a 1930s Polish ballroom, inexpensively altered its shape with stretch nylon, and imported the artist Anthony Martin from San Francisco to fill the surfaces with a light show. Fill them he did and brilliantly, with colors and projections of flowing liquids. What I didn’t know yet was that some artists in San Francisco, such as Bill Ham, Glenn McKay and Jerry Abrams, George Holden’s Abercrombe Lights, and Little Princess 109, were doing the same thing in several similar old ballrooms. They provided illumination and powerful visual imagery behind emerging bands, mostly from the Bay Area. It seemed prudent to make a trip out to northern California to check out the whole scene, including Haight-Ashbury.

  The Summer of Love (soon to be defined by major print media) was in progress.

  I contacted David Denby, an old friend and also a campmate, who lived there, and flew west. Hooking up with other old friends—Iris Ratner and Fred Cohen—we took a quick tour of the San Francisco scene. In addition to the Haight, the Avalon Ballroom, Golden Gate Park, and other iconic places, we went to the Fillmore Auditorium.

  My friends’ connections allowed us to skip the line and go directly to the box office.

  The tickets were two dollars, maybe three, all cash.

  I’ll always remember my first sight of the Fillmore Auditorium.

  There was a basket of apples at the bottom of the stairs where we entered.

  Most of the people there seemed to have a certain chill smile on their face. Perhaps it was a collective need to be part of a hip scene, a sense of expectation, a gathering of the tribes, but I still found it slightly eerie.

  At the top of the stairs, near the box office was a very unusual-looking person. He was intense but not mean. Unlike the patrons, his hair was relatively short. He was dressed in a simple shirt and pants. He was exotically handsome, with large features and a strong, lean body. He was articulate and spoke with a clear baritone voice. This was Bill Graham.

  Bill was clearly in charge, a sober center for a new and unfamiliar scene.

  The ballroom was already full—I suspect way over capacity. As people left, Bill personally admitted an equal number of people and took their money. There was a very clear sign over the door: “No Inny-Outey.”

  I honestly don’t remember the bands that played that night, but I do remember the ambience. In spite of the faux bliss, it was a real and powerful experience.

  The light show and band music filled the space and reached deep inside me. The Electric Circus in New York was interesting, but the overwhelming feeling at the Circus was of theater, with a fourth wall always existing between the artists and participants. The Fillmore was something different and dynamic, possibly more of a “be-in”—a participatory experience rather than a business. I couldn’t really define it then as much as feel it.

  I returned to New York energized by what
I’d seen.

  A few months later, my company was hired to provide support services for a theatrical event in Toronto of all places. Toronto had a hip scene and a very traditional modern theater, O’Keefe Centre, which usually offered ballet, opera, and musicals. The Centre, aware of the coming Summer of Love, had made a deal with an up-and-coming San Francisco producer to present a week with Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. The producer was Bill Graham.

  The original concept was to reproduce the ballroom scene. Bay Area light show artists Glenn McKay and Jerry Abrams of Headlights had flown in to survey the space and declared that they could do a great light show as long as the balcony was closed off to accommodate their equipment. Because we were now in a theater, the use of that space was a serious problem for box office ticket sales. Since I had been trained in the medium at Carnegie Tech drama school, it fell to me and my associates to solve the problem and find a way to stage the light show and do the concert without using any balcony space. We did this by providing an enormous rear projection screen behind the bands as opposed to the traditional way of throwing light from the balcony.

  It also fell to me to “call” the stage lighting in the theater itself. This task wasn’t hard, but I had to sit in the back of the house. For six performances, I was hypnotized by the combination of great music and the Headlights light show—a perfect blend of musical power and visual stimulation.

  In the end I was totally addicted.

  More importantly, I saw my future, at least to the degree that any twenty-four-year-old can see his future.

  By December we had our first engagement as the Joshua Light Show, projecting on the same giant rear projection screen we had made for Toronto.

  In January we got to play the Lower East Side at the Anderson Theater (formerly the Yiddish Anderson Theater). Our shows at the Anderson, presented by Crawdaddy magazine, featured the great artists of the time (Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Country Joe and the Fish) and were quickly selling out all four shows every weekend.

  We’d kept in contact with Bill Graham, but he was reluctant to expand to New York. I discovered later that his reservations stemmed from his stint as an unsuccessful actor in the Big Apple before striking gold as a San Francisco entrepreneur.

  But finally we got him to come to New York. Bill stood on the stage at the Anderson during a Janis Joplin concert, counted the house, and within two months opened at the Village Theater (another former Yiddish theater) across the street on Second Avenue near East Sixth Street. The Joshua Light Show now had a regular gig with Bill Graham. However, the theater’s previous promoter threatened to sue if the space was called the Village Theater.

  So at the last minute, Bill renamed it the Fillmore East.

  The rest is history.

  —Joshua White, founder of the Joshua Light Show

  September 19, 2014

  Prologue

  When Bill Graham summoned his Fillmore East staff to a Saturday afternoon meeting, nobody suspected anything out of the ordinary. They were busy preparing for two sold-out John Mayall shows that night, and business had never been better.

  “We just thought it was going to be another one of Bill’s talks,” recalled Allan Arkush of the psychedelicized liquid light show Joe’s Lights, who joined the rest of the 120 staff at the front of the big theater. “He would get the staff together and give these speeches about what made a great show. He’d say a show is like a beautiful woman, and then there’s Ava Gardner.”1

  Now sitting on the stage with his general manager, Kip Cohen, the tough-talking owner of rock music’s two most iconic venues—the Fillmore East in New York and the Fillmore West in San Francisco—struggled to find the right words.

  “As a result of my feelings as a producer,” he began, clearing his throat, “but mainly as a human being, I’ve decided to close the Fillmore East on June 26, which is the Allman Brothers/J. Geils show.”2

  An audible gasp went through the theater. The implications sunk in immediately.

  “The reason is that I’m tired personally with the artists [and] the public,” he continued. “And I can’t do it any more. For me the insanity is no longer endurable.”

  More than three years before, on March 8, 1968, Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company had opened the Fillmore East, the shabby former Jewish vaudeville theater in the heart of New York’s tough Lower East Side.

  Then, three months later, Graham had opened the Fillmore West in San Francisco. Since then, the two venues had hosted legendary shows by Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, the Allman Brothers, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Santana.

  Like a manic circus ringmaster, Graham ran his twin operations with military precision, constantly crisscrossing the country with a double-headed watch to keep track. Yet he still found time to orchestrate the venues’ transformation into a multimillion-dollar business empire, all the while giving music fans memories to treasure for the rest of their lives.

  But everything changed after Woodstock, when half a million people descended on Max Yasgur’s farm. The August 1969 festival—more so than previous events, like the Beatles’ 1965 concert at Shea Stadium—had revealed the huge financial potential of rock ’n’ roll. And Graham, well aware of the dangers Woodstock posed to him, had tried to stop it.

  After Woodstock the tectonic plates of the music business shifted as musicians and managers began squeezing the promoters for more and more money. Rock superstars Janis Joplin, The Doors, and Led Zeppelin would now play one show at Madison Square Garden instead of four at the more intimate Fillmore East, for the exact same money.

  Bill Graham warned that audiences would be the real losers, as these bigger venues had bad sound and distanced the audience from the concert experience. But he was secretly planning to move up to the next level of concert evolution to compete. He had no intention of laying bare such a strategy to the world or even his loyal staff.

  Instead he would portray himself as the aggrieved party—an unwitting victim of greedy musicians, managers, and agents. In his V-neck sweater and rolled-up sleeves, the failed actor, who had just turned forty, gave a masterful performance, recounting to his staff his last two frustrating weeks in New York.

  “It was the most aggravating, disappointing, unbearable two weeks of my professional career,” he declared.

  It had begun with a phone call, explained Graham, cancelling two upcoming Jethro Tull shows at the Fillmore East due to illness.

  “Which is okay,” he conceded, “but the hardships and the begging that you have to go through to get groups to replace them. . . .”

  Then there had been the “fucking around” he’d received from Tanglewood Music Festival organizers. After staging two well-received “Fillmore at Tanglewood” summer shows—showcasing such acts as The Who, Santana, and Miles Davis—this year the prestigious venue wanted him only as a consultant.

  “They decided they would throw us a bone,” he sneered.

  But the final straw came after legendary impresario Sol Hurok had invited him to present a month of shows at the Metropolitan Opera House. Hurok, Graham’s boyhood hero and his inspiration to become a promoter, had rented the prestigious Met for a month of performances by the Bolshoi Ballet. But a Russian sailor had defected to America, causing the Soviet authorities to cancel everything in retaliation and leaving Hurok owing $200,000 (the equivalent of about $1,156,000 in mid-2010s’ purchasing power) in rent. In desperation the octogenarian promoter had turned to Bill Graham to bail him out.

  The meetings “with the old man,” explained Graham, had begun “very amicably” but then rapidly deteriorated. After agreeing on which rock acts to present, Graham had explained that each would be paid $50,000 ($289,000) a week.

  “His reaction was that of an old Jewish vaudeville actor,” said Graham. “He couldn’t understand tha
t Isaac Stern can make $5,000 a night, which he thought was a fortune, and that an act like Grand Funk Railroad could earn $30,000 or $40,000.”

  Working full time to book the acts, Graham had based himself in New York, operating from his upstairs office at the Fillmore East.

  “Laura Nyro said yes,” said Graham. “Elton John said more than likely. Chicago said they’ll try and get out of something.”

  Then the sensitive question of marquee billing had come up.

  “And he was very blasé,” said Graham. “That of course it’ll be ‘S. Hurok’ very large and in very small letters below it would say, ‘in association with Bill Graham.’ I balked.”

  Graham explained he would be doing everything, while Hurok was only supplying the lease. After much wrangling, the old man reluctantly agreed the billing could be “S. Hurok and Bill Graham Present.”

  Marquee billing settled, Bill Graham pursued his dream act for the run—to book The Band for the final week of shows—feeling it would be his perfect “Ava Gardner.” So he had left a message with their manager, Jon Taplin, who had returned the call at 3:00 a.m. the previous Sunday morning.

  “I said, ‘Jesus, what a wonderful thing, The Band and [their] music—it belongs there.’ And he said, ‘What’s the deal?’ ”

  When Graham offered The Band $50,000 to play six evening shows and two matinees, Taplin started laughing, saying he couldn’t be serious about paying them only a “lousy fifty grand a week.”

  “That was the crowning blow,” Graham told his staff, becoming visibly emotional. “We all have our areas which we can go, and that was mine.”

  After putting down the phone with Taplin, Graham said he had started listing the negative and positive aspects of running the two Fillmores on a piece of paper. On the negative side were the rude, disruptive audiences, the greedy bands and their managers, the agents, and “the personal abuse that I take.”