by John Glatt
In fact, Grace had already decided to leave The Great Society, realizing the group’s musical limitations. She had long dreamed of joining the far superior Jefferson Airplane, which she had seen many times.
Her husband, Jerry Slick, gave her his blessing, but the other band members learned she had left only after playing the Fillmore Auditorium on September 11. It would be The Great Society’s final show. As they were packing up the equipment to go home, Jerry told his brother Darby and bassist Peter Vandergelder that Grace had quit.
“I felt completely betrayed,” said Darby. “How could she quit? She was just another showbiz asshole, me, me, me. Fame and riches, and fuck everybody else. We had done our last show.” 13
Most weekends that summer, you could find Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company either playing or hanging out at the Avalon Ballroom on Sutter Street and Van Ness. The San Francisco music scene was now exploding, and Janis loved checking out the bands; she was fascinated by their “bizarre names.” Although Bill Graham gave the members of Big Brother a free pass for the Fillmore, they far preferred the Avalon, where they felt more comfortable.
Janis often held court in the upstairs snack bar, usually dressed in an antique cape and sipping a Coke or standing near the stage, listening to the music.
“She would laugh and cackle and joke around with you,” said Peter Albin. “She was fun to be around and smiling. She wasn’t under a cloud.”14
Soon after Janis joined Big Brother, Chet Helms rented her a room on Pine Street. She was determined to stay clean and warned the other band members never to do drugs in front of her, or she was leaving.
One day she came home to find her roommates fixing mescaline.
“She was just screaming and she threw them out of the room,” said David Getz. “And just the idea of needles had such a fear-attraction thing for her that she couldn’t stand it.”
Country Joe McDonald first met Janis in a shared dressing room, when his band Country Joe and the Fish played a gig with Big Brother in Berkeley. He was tripping on acid and found an immediate rapport with her.
“Janis and I started talking,” he said, “and really seemed to enjoy each other’s company. We were laughing and carrying on. We were both Capricorns and kinda leaders of the bands we were in.”15
Soon afterward, Big Brother moved into a communal house in Lagunitas, Marin County, and Janis began falling off the drugs wagon. She was now having an intense affair with Big Brother’s lead guitarist James Gurley, and his wife, Nancy, had no problem with it. She even took Janis under her wing and gave her a gypsy look, dressing her in swirling brightly colored scarves, underslips worn as dresses, and dozens of bangles and rings.
But Nancy and several others at the new house were shooting speed, and Janis soon joined in.
“She started injecting drugs again,” said Sam Andrew. “Probably about the time we moved into Lagunitas.”
Before long Janis and the Grateful Dead’s singer Pigpen hooked up. The Grateful Dead lived in a commune just down the road, and Janis was a frequent visitor. Janis and Pigpen both eschewed pot and LSD in favor of hard liquor, and Janis often spent the night in Pigpen’s cabin, spending her time drinking, playing the blues, and making love.
“I turned her onto Southern Comfort, man,” Pigpen told Rolling Stone in 1970. “I told her one day, ‘Tex, try some of this.’ She said, ‘Oh man, that’s good.’ We used to get drunk and play pool together. She beat me 80 percent of the time.”16
In late summer 1966, Big Brother fired Chet Helms, as he could no longer devote enough time to them because of the Avalon. They replaced him with Julius Karpen, who had once measured the LSD doses for Ken Kesey’s acid tests. It was only then that they began playing the occasional show at the Fillmore Auditorium.
“Graham never hired us until we fired Chet,” explained bassist Peter Albin, “and then we started working slowly at the Fillmore.”
The first week of August, Paul Rothchild of Elektra Records saw Big Brother perform at the Avalon Ballroom. After the set, he came into the dressing room and invited Janis to lunch. On the menu were recording opportunities.
“She met with him the next day,” said Peter Albin, “and he wanted to start a supergroup with Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder.”
Rothchild, now on a roll after producing the Butterfield Blues Band’s breakout album East-West, promised to make Janis a star, complete with a home in the Hollywood Hills and a Cadillac.
When she told her bandmates about his offer, they were livid, as Big Brother was about to leave for their first out-of-town booking in Chicago. So they ordered her then and there to make up her mind to leave or stay in the band.
“She broke down in tears and was very emotional,” recalled Albin. “And she said, ‘This is everything I ever wanted.’ He had promised her lots of things and we really had to persuade her to continue with the band.”17
The Chicago trip was a disaster, as their new manager had made no hotel reservations. They band was reduced to pushing their amplifiers and instruments from hotel to hotel, as one after another said there were no rooms available for the long-haired musicians.
Peter Albin’s uncle, who lived in a Chicago suburb, finally came to their rescue, allowing the band to stay with him. The monthlong booking at Mother Blues Club, where Jefferson Airplane had played several weeks earlier, was a catastrophe. Although they had been promised a thousand dollars a week, the manager told them they could play for door money, and few people came.
At the end of the month, Big Brother and the Holding Company found themselves stranded in Chicago, without the fare back to San Francisco. Bob Shad of Mainstream Records then offered the musicians bus money home in return for signing a record deal and recording an album. Desperate for money, they reluctantly agreed and recorded some tracks before being told there would be no advance and that they were on their own.
Big Brother finally stuffed all their equipment in a drive-away Pontiac and started the long drive cross-country back to San Francisco.
In mid-May of 1966, a New York City band called the Velvet Underground had flown to San Francisco to play two nights at the Fillmore Auditorium. The experimental band, which was managed by Andy Warhol and featured a gorgeous German chanteuse named Nico—who had appeared in Fellini movies—was getting a lot of attention with its Exploding Plastic Inevitable Show. When Bill Graham had learned about the band, he immediately hired them on the same bill as the Mothers of Invention. He billed the show as “Pop-Op Rock.”
The Velvet Underground, led by Lou Reed and John Cale, were the antithesis of the California flower-power acid movement. Where the San Francisco scene was all about peace, love, and LSD, the New York scene was far more hard-core, with S&M, speed, and heroin.
“We had vast objections to the whole San Francisco scene,” explained Lou Reed. “It’s just tedious. They can’t play and they certainly can’t write.”18
Reed especially disliked San Francisco’s two most popular bands, Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead.
“Just look at them physically,” he sneered. “I mean how can you take Grace Slick seriously? It’s a joke! The kids are being hyped.”
Bill Graham took an instant dislike to the Velvet Underground, and vice versa. As the biggest promoter in San Francisco, he felt the Velvet Underground should show him more respect, but they went out of their way to avoid him.
Graham’s feelings were especially hurt when the Velvets ridiculed his light show during a rehearsal, saying it did not compare to theirs back in New York.
“That’s one of the reasons Graham really hates us,” said guitarist Sterling Morrison. “Right before we went on, he looked at us and said, ‘You motherfuckers! I hope you bomb.’ ”19
When their set finished to deafening applause, Reed started smashing up Moe Tucker’s drum kit, as a big “fuck you” to Bill Graham. During the violent commotion,
a cymbal hit Lou Reed in the forehead, covering him in blood.
After they came offstage, Graham rushed to their dressing room to give them a dressing down, but he left as soon as he saw Reed’s wound. Later, the Velvet Underground would speculate that he had not wanted to jeopardize his insurance.
In his book POPism, Andy Warhol recounts how filmmaker Paul Morrissey, who was traveling with the band, deliberately antagonized Bill Graham while they were watching a Jefferson Airplane show.
“ ‘Why don’t they take heroin?’ Paul asked. ‘That’s what all the really good musicians take.’ Graham didn’t say anything, he just fumed. Paul knew he was driving him good and crazy so he kept it up. ‘You know, I think I’m really all for heroin, because if you take care of yourself, it doesn’t affect you physically.’ He took a tangerine out of his pocket and peeled it in one motion, letting the peel fall on the floor. ‘With heroin you never catch cold—it started in the United States as a cure for the common cold.’ ”
But what really upset Graham was Morrissey’s dropping tangerine peel over the floor of his ballroom.
“Graham stared down at the peel,” wrote Warhol, “and he got livid. I don’t remember his exact words, but he started yelling—things like, ‘You disgusting germs from New York! You come out here with your disgusting minds and whips.’ ”20
That would be the first and last time the Velvet Underground would ever play for Bill Graham.
CHAPTER NINE
Moving Up
Grace Slick’s first show with Jefferson Airplane was at the Fillmore Auditorium on October 16, 1966. Several days earlier, Bill Thompson, the Airplane’s road manager, had fired Signe Anderson after buying out Grace’s recording contract for just $750. But Signe was still contracted to perform a three-night run at the Fillmore with the Airplane.
Exactly a year to the day after her first show with The Great Society, Grace was in the wings, still learning the Airplane’s set. But when Anderson failed to show up on the second night, Grace was ordered on instead. As the set started, Grace was petrified. Jefferson Airplane played far louder than The Great Society, and as stage monitors were a couple of years away from being invented, Grace could hardly hear herself. But her first performance was a triumph, followed by a performance she really nailed on the last night.
With Grace aboard, everything came together for Jefferson Airplane, setting the stage for their huge international success.
“Nobody sounded like her and it coalesced the band,” said Jorma Kaukonen. “It gave us a unified vision and a drive we didn’t have before.”1
Grace also brought her songs “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit” with her, which would soon give the Airplane their only two top-ten hits.
“They were performed differently,” explained Grace, “in the sense that the . . . Great Society were not as good as the Airplane.”2
And Grace brought a new edge to the music, much harder than the style of Signe Anderson, who had come out of the folk music scene.
“When Grace came into the band the harmonies changed,” explained Jack Casady. “And it was actually rougher because she sang in the same range as Marty and the harmony structure of the songs changed. It allowed us to move ahead . . . and explore different directions.”3
On October 30, Grace went on a short tour with Jefferson Airplane, and her effect on audiences was astonishing.
“She was stunning,” said David Crosby. “With Marty she was like a bullfighter with a bull. She would circle him and dart at him and pull from him and electrify him and touch him with bare wire. And Marty rose to the occasion.”4
During the brief tour, which included shows at the University of Santa Barbara and Grinnell College, Iowa, Grace easily found her place in the band.
“She was just like we were,” explained Balin, “drugged-out, drinking, free and ballsy and outrageous.”5
Grace was so delighted to be in Jefferson Airplane that she wanted to thank Jack Casady for bringing her in.
“So Grace was thinking about how can I reward Jack,” recalled Thompson. “He’s got the best pot in the world. Alcohol he didn’t drink. So what did she do? She fucked him. Just one time. It was a nice reward.”6
On October 5, 1966, Janis Joplin gave an interview to a small mimeographed newsletter called the Mojo Navigator. Asked to compare the Avalon and the Fillmore ballrooms, Janis said the Avalon was where the San Francisco in-crowd went for a good time, while the Fillmore was where drunken sailors went to get laid.
When Graham, who had already banned the Mojo Navigator from the Fillmore, read the article he went ballistic, swearing revenge. Several weeks later, Janis arrived at the Fillmore stoned on crystal meth for a B.B. King show.
“Bill met her at the top of the stairs and just pointed to the door and said, ‘You’re not coming in here,’ ” recalled Big Brother drummer David Getz. “Then he started screaming as he threw her [down the stairs].”7
“You’re no damn good,” he bellowed, as the people waiting on line for the show looked on in amazement. Janis burst into tears and ran out onto Geary Boulevard.
Realizing that he may have gone too far by publicly humiliating Janis, Graham sneaked into the backstage dressing room and hid in a closet to eavesdrop on what the other musicians would say about the incident.
“Bill Graham was the Sam Goldwyn of the rock ’n’ roll business,” said Nick Gravenites, who was playing the Fillmore that night with Electric Flag. “He would hide in places just to hear what was being said about him in his empire. I was in the backroom when I heard Janis had been thrown out and I exploded. Went right off the handle. So here Bill is hiding in the closet with all these irate, pissed-off musicians putting him down, using every conceivable epithet to describe his meanness.”
With the show about to start, the musicians’ attack on him showed no signs of abating. Due onstage to announce the first band, Graham was trapped in the closet with no means of escape.
“So I was ranting and raving about Bill Graham,” said Gravenites. “Then he finally came out and was standing behind me, where I couldn’t see him. Michael Bloomfield pointed at the back of the room and I turned round and there was Bill. I knew that he had heard everything that I had said about him, so I continued, ‘And, Bill, that’s not all, there’s more!’ I just cussed him up and down.”8
Graham barely responded, but his eyes went cold.
“I’ll get you for this,” he hissed and walked out of the dressing room.
In early November 1966, Jefferson Airplane went into the RCA studios in Los Angeles to begin recording their second album, Surrealistic Pillow. Grace Slick and the other band members stayed at the Tropicana Hotel on Santa Monica Boulevard in $12-a-night rooms, complete with a kitchenette. During the next four nights, the band laid down six tracks, including a new version of Grace Slick’s “White Rabbit,” which would soon become the anthem of the Sixties and turn Grace into a rock icon.
Jerry Garcia hung out in the studio, helping to arrange “Somebody to Love,” as well as playing guitar on several other tracks. He would be credited on the album as the band’s “musical and spiritual advisor.”
“We were pretty stoned all the time,” recalled Marty Balin. “We felt good about ourselves . . . and it was a real fun time.”9
After flying back to San Francisco to play the Fillmore Auditorium on November 6, the Airplane returned to Los Angeles to finish the album.
That Thanksgiving, Jefferson Airplane celebrated the completion of Surrealistic Pillow with another show at the Fillmore, the first of seven sold-out nights they would play there during the next month.
Bill Graham was now taking a special interest in Jefferson Airplane, indisputably the biggest band in San Francisco. With the Fillmore running smoothly, Graham wanted to expand into other areas of the San Francisco music scene. So he started courting Jefferson Airplane, with a view toward managing t
hem. First he offered them the Fillmore as a rehearsal space, and then he started socializing with Grace Slick and the other members of the band.
“We got to know the Airplane pretty well,” said Bonnie MacLean, “because they were the principal group that played the Fillmore. He schmoozed them so that he could get them at the price that he wanted, and behaved in a way that would make them want to do for him.”10
But although Bonnie liked the rest of the band, she did not approve of Grace or her morals.
“She had an all-right voice,” said Bonnie, “but beyond that I think she was a terrible person. She was an alcoholic. She was a slut [and] went with all the guys in the group. I’m not used to that crap.”11
That winter, Jefferson Airplane rehearsed every day at the Fillmore Auditorium, working on new songs for their third album, After Bathing at Baxters.
“I watched [Bill Graham] on a daily basis put the Fillmore shows together,” said Jack Casady. “We rehearsed at the Fillmore and we watched him in action in his office and how he would deal. And we got an appreciation for his ability, his knowledge and his work ethic. He oversaw the total experience.”12
During this time, Bill Graham edged closer and closer to the band, seeking their advice about whom they thought he should book for the Fillmore.
“He’d pick our brains,” said Casady, “about the kind of musicians that influenced us. And I would have long talks with him and show him my record collection.”
Jack Casady introduced Graham to Chicago blues and jazz. He played him records by Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters, James Cotton, and Little Walter, as well as jazz artists Eric Dolphy, John Coltrane, and Roland Kirk. Throughout the next few years, Bill Graham would book many of them for his legendary eclectic shows.
“One of his real geniuses was to put an important mix onstage,” said Casady, “so that the audience would see a great poet, hear a great jazz musician mixed with a great blues musician. Then he might mix a great rock ’n’ roll guy with a great R and B guy. That would all be presented onstage at the same time.”13