by John Glatt
A fireball lit up the clear San Francisco night sky as Bill Graham arrived for his first show at the Fillmore Auditorium. Although he raised the admission price to $1.50, by nine-thirty that night there was a double line of people waiting outside the beige brick building on the corner of Geary and Fillmore Streets. More than 3,500 people came that night, 500 more than fire regulations allowed.
In his column on Monday, Ralph J. Gleason wrote: “Inside, a most remarkable assemblage of humanity was leaping, jumping, dancing, frigging, fragging, and fruggling on the dance floor to the music of the half-dozen rock bands.
“The costumes were free-form Goodwill-cum-Sherwood Forest. Slim young ladies with their faces painted à la Harper’s Bazaar in cats-and-dogs lines, granny dresses topped with huge feathers, white Levi’s with decals of mystic design; bell-bottoms spilt up the side! The combinations were seemingly endless.”
When Luria Castell ran into Bill Graham on the steps of the Fillmore, he pretended not to recognize her. The Family Dog leader then angrily accused him of stealing the venue from her.
“She says, ‘You stole my idea!’ ” Graham told his friend Ralph Gleason. “ ‘What was that?’ I said. ‘Throwing dances.’ I looked at her and I said, ‘That’s 4,000 years old. The Egyptians. You didn’t start that.’ ”6
Inside the auditorium, Graham’s sister Ester Chichinsky served her matzo ball soup and salad at a concession stand. Only soft drinks were available this time, as Graham, who did not have a liquor license, did not want to take any risks.
Jefferson Airplane lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen was fascinated and impressed as he watched Graham with his clipboard backstage, making sure everything went according to plan.
“I remember him as being outspoken and mercurial,” Kaukonen said. “He was ten years older than us [and] so different from most of the people we would have dealt with at the time. He certainly got things done.”7
As everybody filed out of the Fillmore early Sunday morning, the big question on their minds was when the next dance was going to be held. Graham, having made nearly $6,000 ($44,500) from his first Fillmore show, could hardly wait.
The very next day Graham quit the Mime Troupe and started a new company called Bill Graham Presents, although he agreed to hold one final Mime Troupe Benefit on January 14.
“Bill ran away with the cash box,” said Ronnie Davis. “I don’t think he was committed to anything but [his] ego and money in the bank.” 8
The third Mime Troupe Benefit featured The Great Society and Sam Thomas and The Gentlemen’s Band. Listed at the bottom of the bill were the Grateful Dead, who had only just changed their name from The Warlocks. It was the first time they had played under their new name.
The Grateful Dead dated from the early 1960s, when guitarist Jerry Garcia met drummer Bill Kreutzmann in a Palo Alto music store. They immediately bonded, and when Garcia started giving guitar lessons at the store, sixteen-year-old Bob Weir became one of his first pupils.
Garcia, Kreutzmann, and Weir began playing around the Bay Area as Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions. A fifteen-year-old blues singer and harmonica player named Ron McKernan (better known as Pigpen) then convinced them to go electric. They renamed themselves The Warlocks, adding Phil Lesh on bass.
In the fall of 1965, The Warlocks became the house band for Ken Kesey’s legendary LSD-fueled parties, which evolved into the Acid Tests. But after Lesh discovered there was another band called The Warlocks, they decided they needed a new name.
It was Jerry Garcia who stumbled upon the phrase “Grateful Dead” in an old Britannica World Language Dictionary.
“It hit me like a hammer,” Lesh later recalled. “It seemed to describe us perfectly.”
The newly minted Grateful Dead debuted at Bill Graham’s third and final Mime Troupe Benefit, which Garcia would fondly remember as the beginning of everything.
“It just sort of evolved into the rock ’n’ roll palace trip [when] Bill Graham took over the idea,” he remembered in 1975. “In those days our audience wasn’t an audience in the concert sense. Our audience was all dancing and they were all high too during this formative period. The fact that we were the band didn’t mean anything to anybody. We were just there to supply music at a party.” 9
Sitting on the edge of the stage that night was Grace Slick, who watched the Grateful Dead aghast. The Great Society were playing next and the model, always fastidious with cleanliness and makeup, was disgusted by the dirty, scruffy-looking musicians.
“We’ll have to wipe the mikes off after they play,” she reportedly told a friend.10
In early 1966, Bill Graham began to weave his name into the very fabric of San Francisco. His trademark “Bill Graham Presents” would soon be everywhere around the city on posters, on the radio, and in the newspapers. All his life he had been waiting for this opportunity, and he seized it with both hands.
“He never much talked to me about what he was doing,” said Bonnie MacLean. “He just did what he wanted to do and I went along for the ride, because it was an exciting time.” 11
While preparing to stage his first “Bill Graham Presents” show at the Fillmore Auditorium, he hired out his services to Ken Kesey to stage the three-day Trips Festival at the Longshoreman’s Hall for a percentage of the profits.
It was billed as a “Non-drug re-creation of the psychedelic experience,” and it would be San Francisco’s most ambitious multimedia event to date.
On Saturday night the newly formed Big Brother and the Holding Company, still five months away from discovering Janis Joplin, played their second public concert. Then the Grateful Dead performed as part of what was billed as “The Acid Test.”
The Dead’s psychedelic space music was accompanied by flashing strobes and ultraviolet lighting. The hall was awash in Day-Glo paint and pulsating with electric energy. At one point a young woman ran up on the stage and stripped to the waist to dance, before being led away.
Everyone was tripping from the LSD-dosed ice cream . . . everyone except Bill Graham, who was running around with his clipboard, barking orders and screaming at anyone who got in his way.
At one point, Big Brother and the Holding Companys guitarist Sam Andrew asked for a free pass for the band’s then-drummer, Chuck Jones.
“Bill started yelling and screaming and generally terrorizing us,” said Andrew. “I just thought, ‘What is he doing here? We’re supposed to be in the Aquarian Age and everything’s supposed to be beautiful and he’s terrorizing everybody.’ So I leaned into Bill’s ear and said, ‘You’re a motherfucker.’ And he just exploded. I thought he was going to kill me.”12
When Jerry Garcia came onstage after a break, he found his guitar bridge smashed, with the strings hanging limply.
“He was just staring at it and absorbing the news when [Bill Graham], wearing a cardigan sweater and carrying a clipboard, showed up,” recalled Charles Perry in his book The Haight Ashbury: A History.
“ ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.
“ ‘Well, my guitar . . . the bridge . . .’
“Without another word, Bill was down on the guitar with his customary furious energy, trying to fix the unfixable the same way he’d been trying to keep track of the incomprehensible all night.”
A young student named Jann Wenner, writing his very first piece for Berkeley’s Daily Cal under the nom de plume mr. jones [sic] later penned a piece on the Trips Festival, singling out Bill Graham for special mention.
“The Festival’s ‘producer,’ i.e., the man-who-was-in-charge-of-the-busy-work, was a total drag,” wrote the student who would go on to found Rolling Stone. “Mr. Bill Graham of the Mime Troupe, seemed opposed to having a good time, relaxation, and producing general ease. His extreme up-tightness put the rent-a-cops up-tight, and the rent-a-cops put quite a few other people up-tight.”
After the Trips Festival, Bill Graham recruited
Mime Troupe actor Jim Haynie to manage the Fillmore Auditorium.
“It was pretty obvious Bill had, as my daddy used to say, a bird’s nest on the ground,” said Haynie, “and it was going to make him a rich man. He had a hall that would hold 3,000 people and he only had to pay $45. What an opportunity.”13
At the end of January 1966, the Fillmore Auditorium’s leaseholder, Charles Sullivan, offered it to Graham permanently, but not efficiently. When Graham approached the owner about taking it over, he said he did not want to be bothered, as he was off on a fishing trip. Graham then hounded him with letters until he finally gave in and made him the Fillmore Auditorium’s sole leaseholder.
Things were also happening for Grace Slick and The Great Society. Influential San Francisco DJ and club owner Tom Donahue had heard them play at the Family Dog dance and liked them. He booked them for a two-week run at his club, Mother’s, as well as arranging studio time to record a demo album.
Ralph Gleason penned a glowing review of one of their performances in his San Francisco Chronicle music column, singling out Grace’s song “Father Bruce” for special mention.
“I have a strong feeling that they will make a reputation for themselves,” he wrote.
His review attracted the attention of several record company scouts, including Decca, who expressed interest in signing the band. While their new manager, John Carpenter, sifted through the offers, the band worked on their demo at the Golden State Records Studio. A local disk jockey named Sylvester Stewart, still a year away from founding Sly and the Family Stone, was hired to produce it, but he immediately clashed with Grace Slick.
“There was kind of an adversarial relationship right from the beginning,” said Darby Slick, “which was unfortunate.”14
While they were in the studio, Darby wrote “Somebody to Love” while coming down from an acid trip and depressed about his cheating girlfriend. The Great Society recorded it on November 30, 1965, with Sly Stone at the controls, and everybody knew it was something special.
A few days later, Grace composed “White Rabbit” late one night on her battered old four-string guitar, after listening to Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain.15
“[It took] about an hour,” she recalled. “There were two influences there. I loved the bolero used by Miles Davis and Gil Evans on their 1960 album. I also had a long-standing affair with Alice in Wonderland.”16
The song was aimed at parents who read their children Alice in Wonderland at an impressionably young age and later told them not to take drugs.
“It is a drug song,” Grace explained. “The things you learn between zero and five are supposed to be the most important and stick with you. They read us things like Alice in Wonderland, in which [Alice] has taken five or six different drugs [and] runs into a caterpillar sitting on top of a psychedelic mushroom. She takes things that say ‘drink me’ and literally gets high.”17
Grace was now also developing her unique stage persona, utilizing Betty Grable’s six-gun-toting character from The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend. But instead of bullets she used rhetoric.
“Grace really fired her performance at the audience,” said Darby. “She would get a little drunk, and use that part of her in-your-face personality to virtually attack the audience. She swore like a truck driver, unusual in 1965, and swaggered and posed onstage in ways that had been, hitherto, masculine.”18
She had a magnetic stage presence, standing as still as a statue as she sang into the microphone, using her voice like an instrument to improvise.
“Then she would run suddenly to the edge of the stage,” said Darby, “and bend forward to deliver the next phrase right at a particular person.”19
At one show, Grace and Jerry Slick met a wealthy chemist in his early twenties named Brian who introduced them to his self-manufactured high-grade LSD. He worked for the Shell Oil Company and had made a fortune from inventing an industrial glue used for roadways. He was also very eccentric, tooling around San Francisco in an antique Rolls Royce.
“He was a chemical genius,” said Grace, “and he looked sort of like a pansy, because he had real pink cheeks and white skin. And he was big around the middle. Very strange.” 20
But before he allowed them to drop his acid, Brian insisted they read books about hallucinogenic drugs and have a straight guide there to look after them.
Soon, Grace’s morning regimen included scraping a little acid off a pill with her fingernail, giving her a nice mellow high for a few hours.
“Just a little tiny bit,” she said. “It was very pleasant. Taking 600 mikes every day . . . doesn’t work. But with that powder form it was very nice. You can take care of business.”21
CHAPTER SIX
The Saloon Keeper
Although he had now tied up the Fillmore Auditorium, Bill Graham was still viewed as an outsider by the tight-knit San Francisco music community. Knowing little about the city’s bands or their music, he needed help. And his unwitting guide would be a tall, young, bearded Texan hippie named Chet Helms.
An aspiring promoter himself, Helms also managed Big Brother and the Holding Company, and he had formed an alliance with The Great Society manager John Carpenter to start booking shows. They had already signed up the Jefferson Airplane for their first show, but then they lost their venue at the last minute. Now in desperation they turned to Bill Graham, offering him free future shows by their bands in return for using the Fillmore for their first.
Graham readily accepted the partnership. Helms and Carpenter were two of the best-connected managers in the San Francisco music scene, after all, and the networking possibilities were promising. Cunningly, Graham also proposed they produce shows at the Fillmore on alternate weekends, while splitting the profits.
“Graham needed us to bring the bands and the audience to him,” said Chet Helms in 1992.1
The deal was sealed on a handshake over Coca-Colas, and it was agreed that Helms and Carpenter would hold their shows under the established Family Dog banner, although the original dance concert pioneers were now out of business.
At the beginning of February 1966, Bill Graham held his first weekend of shows at the Fillmore Auditorium with Jefferson Airplane as the headliners. Bonnie MacLean took the tickets and worked the concessions with Bill’s sister Ester. As patrons arrived and walked up the stairs, there was a large barrel of apples with the sign, “Take One or Two.”
Graham seemed to be everywhere in bursts of frenzied activity, clutching his clipboard and issuing orders to his new manager, Jim Haynie.
The first Family Dog show at the Fillmore, “A Tribal Stomp,” was held on February 19, 1966, again featuring Jefferson Airplane and a pre–Janis Joplin Big Brother and the Holding Company. The next Family Dog show, “King Kong Memorial Dance,” had Big Brother sharing the bill with The Great Society.
Flushed with success for their third show in late March, Helms and Carpenter booked the virtually unknown New York–based Paul Butterfield Blues Band for a weekend of shows, paying them a record $2,500 ($18,000).
“We were paying Jefferson Airplane only $500 ($3,600) for a weekend,” said Helms, “so it was very aggressive of us. Graham fought us a lot on that.”2
The Butterfield weekend was a triumph. More than 7,500 people paid $2.50 a ticket, grossing the trio $18,750 ($133,000), a huge sum in those days. After the final show on Sunday night, Graham divided the takings with Helms and Carpenter as they discussed a plan to rebook the Butterfield Blues Band for April.
Bill Graham had other ideas. And they did not include his two partners. At six o’clock on Monday morning, he called Paul Butterfield’s manager, Albert Grossman, in New York, buying out all the band’s San Francisco dates for the next two years.
Helms and Carpenter were livid when they learned of the deal, asking their partner to explain himself. But Graham was unapologetic, simply telling them that he had woken up early.
Soon afterward, Graham dissolved the partnership. Then Chet Helms secured the Avalon Ballroom, eight blocks east of the Fillmore on Sutter Street, and began staging his own shows in direct competition with Bill Graham.
By spring 1965, Bill Graham faced a community backlash accusing him of corrupting the city’s youth. There had been extensive media coverage of the wild dance concerts at the Fillmore, amidst rumors of drugs and sex orgies on the ballroom floor. Anxious parents now pressured the San Francisco Police Department to clamp down on this evil.
The Musicians Union also had their sights trained on the Fillmore. Though Graham deliberately billed his shows as dance concerts, the union insisted that he hire ten of their union members for a three-band show at full rate, otherwise there would be trouble. One night a deputation of cops and union leaders arrived at the Fillmore to confront Bill Graham.
“Bill held them off at the head of the stairs and really laid into them,” recalled Alton Kelley, who had been in the original Family Dog. “He told them that he’d come out of the Nazi concentration camps, and he wasn’t going to take any shit from them. He played hardball, and that was the last we ever heard from the union.”4
But the San Francisco Police Department was not so easily dealt with. At a City Hall permit hearing to review his application for a Dance Hall Keeper’s license, a police patrolman presented a petition against it being granted, signed by twenty-eight store owners.
Then Graham put on his best suit, accessorized with as much charm as he could muster, and visited each of the store owners, arguing persuasively that his concerts drew people to the area, which meant bigger profits for them.