by John Glatt
Paul Kantner also recommended artists for the Fillmore Auditorium.
“We helped him along,” said Kantner, “and suggested all the people that he brought in like B.B. King and the jazz artists. And to his credit he would look into it . . . and have three complete disparate acts.”14
Years later Graham would acknowledge the enormous debt he owed the San Francisco musicians for his musical education.
“I relied so much on Paul and Marty from the Airplane and Garcia and Weir,” he told KSAN Radio in 1972, “who’d say, ‘Bill, you should listen to this group.’ ”
Bill Graham also befriended Jorma Kaukonen, recounting his war experiences to the Jewish musician.
“He was a Holocaust survivor,” said Kaukonen, “and as a Jew myself . . . there was that cultural sort of thing. He was so different from most of the people we’d know.”15
As Graham schmoozed the band, his only obstacle was that they already had a manager. Matthew Katz was a middle-aged businessman from old-school Tin Pan Alley. Under his direction, Jefferson Airplane had become the first San Francisco band to secure a major record contract with a $20,000 advance from RCA Victor. And some band members felt they owed Katz for this, but Graham was determined not to let that stand in his way.
He arranged a meeting with Katz to discuss Jefferson Airplane becoming Fillmore regulars. It took place in Katz‘s bedroom, as he was feeling unwell, with his insurance broker present.
For four hours, Graham listened patiently and silently as Matthew Katz lectured him on the music business. Finally, when Katz demanded an exorbitant price for Jefferson Airplane to play, Graham started walking out of the bedroom.
“I had a lot of chutzpah, already,” he explained later.
When Katz ordered him to come back, Graham realized that what Katz really wanted was someone to listen to him and any negotiation was just incidental. Ultimately, Katz agreed to Graham’s opening offer of $500 a night or $1,000 for a weekend, a real bargain for the most popular band in town.
Graham’s opportunity to get rid of Katz came soon afterward when he discovered that it was illegal for a manager to bypass an agent and book his own band. He then took Katz to court, accusing him of soliciting gigs for Jefferson Airplane and his other bands, It’s a Beautiful Day and Moby Grape, and won the case.
“We had a bad manager at the time,” said Paul Kantner. “[Bill] helped us shed him.”16
In retaliation, Katz sued Jefferson Airplane, enmeshing the group in a landmark case that would take twenty-two years to resolve, and that still impacts entertainment law to this day.17
On October 16, 1966, Carlos Santana and Stan Marcum were at the Fillmore Auditorium for the final night of a Jefferson Airplane/Butterfield Blues Band run of shows. A superjam was planned later for members of the two bands, as well as members of the Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service.
When Paul Butterfield failed to turn up after taking too much LSD, Marcum asked Bill Graham if his guitar-playing friend from Tijuana could join in the jam. Graham said it was okay with him as long as Butterfield lead guitarist Michael Bloomfield agreed. When Carlos asked his guitar hero for permission to play, Bloomfield graciously handed him his guitar and pointed to the stage.
“So I grab his guitar,” said Carlos, “and I waited my turn when he said to play. The next thing I know is that I got a reaction because Bill says, ‘Have you got a band?’ I said yeah, I got a band.’ ”
In the audience that night was a young rhythm guitarist named Tom Fraser, who was dazzled by Santana’s unique lead guitar style. As soon as he got back to his home in Palo Alto, he called his friend Gregg Rolie, who played keyboards in a band called William Penn and His Pals, saying he had just seen this amazing new guitarist he must play with.
Two days later, Fraser tracked Carlos down at the Tic-Toc Diner and offered to drive him straight to Mountain View to meet Rollie so they could jam together.
Carlos agreed, and after finishing his shift, he drove with Fraser across the bridge to a farmhouse in Mountain View, where Gregg Rolie was waiting. Then after smoking some strong weed in the garage, Carlos set up his equipment and started jamming with Rolie and Fraser.
“We were playing,” recalled Rolle, “making all kinds of racket and smoking. Pretty soon the cops came. I looked around and said, ‘We’ve got to get out of here.’ Because we heard the sirens. I looked over at Carlos and he was already about fifty yards down the road. He was way more hip than I was. We jumped and hid in a tomato patch, and that’s where I met him.”18
In November, Janis Joplin saw Big Mama Thornton play at a small club. After the show she went backstage to ask the blues legend for permission to use her song “Ball and Chain” in Big Brother’s act. Big Mama not only gave permission but also insisted on writing down the lyrics on a sheet of paper.
A month later Otis Redding played three nights at the Fillmore Auditorium. Bill Graham had flown to Macon, Georgia, to persuade him.19
Janis arrived early to all the shows, claiming a prime position front and center of the stage. Janis, who idolized Otis, watched each performance like a hawk, soaking up everything he did. With his hard-driving twelve-piece band behind him, Otis blew the musical roof off the Fillmore, which was only half-full, as the young white kids had not discovered soul music yet.
“Janis told me she invented the ‘buh-buh-buh-ba-by . . .’ after seeing him,” recalled Country Joe MacDonald. “She wanted to be Otis Redding.”20
Bill Graham was also knocked out, later saying it was one of the best shows he ever did.
“Otis is by far the greatest thing I’ve ever seen on any stage,” said Bill Graham. “I don’t know how much more can be said other than that. He was beautiful to look at, beautiful to listen to. He moved like no other man I’ve ever seen. I loved to watch him move.”21
CHAPTER TEN
1967
One year after taking over the Fillmore Auditorium, Bill Graham had become wealthy beyond his wildest dreams. To celebrate, he held a New Year’s Eve concert with the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. Graham, who loved theatrics, had Jim Haynie make a grand entrance at the stroke of midnight dressed as the New Year’s baby with a homemade diaper and a sparkly banner.
“I was completely whacko-stoned,” Haynie recalled. “I had taken my acid about an hour before.”
At five minutes to midnight, eight Fillmore security guards carried him into the Fillmore on a litter, to a trumpet fanfare.
“I looked around as if I was just waking up,” said Haynie, “and the crowd roared its appreciation. Then I got up on my knees and threw flowers to people. When we hit the stage Bill did his countdown to 1967, and the Grateful Dead started their set by playing ‘The Midnight Hour.’ ”1
From then on, Haynie would always be the Fillmore’s New Year baby. Several years later, Bill Graham began dressing up as Old Father Time, complete with a long white beard and robe, to ceremoniously hand over the New Year to Haynie.
As Jefferson Airplane’s new manager, Bill Graham became the most powerful player in the San Francisco music scene, a man with the city’s top ballroom and number-one band. He also briefly managed the Grateful Dead, but they soon got rid of him when he tried to lay down the law.
“Bill Graham was the straightest person that we knew,” said drummer Mickey Hart. “We fired him after twenty minutes. ‘You want to be macho? Okay cool.’ ”2
Bill Thompson, now appointed the Airplane’s assistant manager, remembers Jerry Garcia slugging Bill Graham one night backstage at the Fillmore.
“[Jerry] said, ‘You fucking asshole,’ ” said Thompson. “Punched him in the face after an argument about band stuff.”3
Bill Graham’s timing in the City by the Bay could not have been better. In December, Newsweek ran a major story about the San Francisco music scene that focused on Jefferson Airplane. During the next few months, a string of
major features would follow, as well as a national profile of the band on the Bell Television Hour. All this publicity would lure thousands of young people to San Francisco for the Summer of Love.
Graham’s management deal with Jefferson Airplane had been sealed on a handshake, with nothing in writing. It gave him an equal financial share with the band members, as well as a vote at band meetings. But their new manager had definite ideas about how the band should dress and behave, which were not popular.
“He talked about band uniforms,” recalled Jorma Kaukonen. “The fact that somebody wanted to control how we presented ourselves was anathema to us.”4
Graham also wanted to exploit the band’s success with a full-scale national tour. Band meetings often became acrimonious, as Grace and the other members preferred to stay in San Francisco, playing the odd show or party.
“It was very difficult,” Graham admitted, “and there was a great strain between us sometimes. I came from the business community and it was my job to act realistically.”
On January 8, 1967, Surrealistic Pillow was released, catapulting Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane to fame and fortune. It was a worldwide hit, going gold on the Billboard chart, peaking at number 3.
“It changes your life,” said Marty Balin. “You can’t walk down the street. We couldn’t leave our homes. They thought we were gods or something.”5
After an East Coast promotional tour, the band went on a three-week hiatus in March when Grace had surgery on her vocal chords. Then Bill Graham sent them off for another round of shows to promote the album.
To cope with all the extra work managing Jefferson Airplane, Bill Graham hired a young woman named Marushka Greene as his new secretary. Her husband had taken the cover photograph for Surrealistic Pillow.
Graham also brokered a deal with Levi Strauss & Co. for the band to create a series of radio advertisements. They recorded four in the studio, including one written by Grace, somehow linking Levi’s jeans to whiskey and cactus. But the band soon pulled out of the deal when radical activist Abbie Hoffman accused them of selling out.
That spring, as he prepared to take Jefferson Airplane on a short publicity tour, Graham asked Jim Haynie to look after his girlfriend, Bonnie, while he was away.
For the last several years, Bonnie and Jim had worked closely together in the cramped upstairs office at the Fillmore. They had long been attracted to each other, and after work one night they went back to Bill’s apartment in the Richmond District.
“We had a one nighter,” said Haynie, “and it was sweet and wonderful.”6
A couple of days later, they were both at the airport to meet Bill Graham off his New York flight.
“He sensed something right away,” said Haynie. “His antennae were up.”
Graham then called them into his office for a meeting.
“And he said just one thing,” recalled Haynie. “ ‘Don’t let this happen again, but the main thing is do you love her?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I do.’ He said, ‘That’s all I require. It’s between Bonnie and me now.’ ”
After the meeting, Jim Haynie asked Bonnie to leave Bill and move in with him, but she declined, as she wanted to stay in the relationship.
“It was an issue [with Bill] for a while and we discussed it,” said Bonnie. “He wasn’t happy about it, but after all he let it happen.”7
After he had cooled down, Bill Graham asked Bonnie to marry him, but she refused to commit herself.
“Well he begged and begged,” said Bonnie, “because I wasn’t sure I wanted to marry him. We’d been living together for quite a while, but he was always leaving me alone. So I took my time.”8
After their close call with the Mountain View police, Carlos Santana and Gregg Rolie started to put a band together with rhythm guitarist Tom Fraser and the bassist and drummer from Carlos’s old band The Dynamics. Carlos also recruited a young conga player he had met at a jam session, Michael Carabello. They called themselves The Santana Blues Band.
They began rehearsing in a garage on Potrero Hill, with Rolie hitching up to the city for rehearsals. They started playing weekend gigs at the Matrix Club in San Francisco and the Ark across the bridge in Sausalito.
A few weeks earlier, the Fillmore Auditorium had started holding weekly auditions for new talent every Sunday afternoon. And Stan Marcum, now acting as their manager, called Fillmore Auditorium manager Jim Haynie for an audition spot for the Santana Blues Band.
“Bill Graham had given me the job of finding new talent,” recalled Haynie. “I said, ‘Well you can be on the Sunday show.’ They were a high school band basically.”9
On a Sunday afternoon in late January, The Santana Blues Band set up their equipment on the Fillmore stage and played.
“We were playing songs like ‘Mary Ann’ by Ray Charles and ‘Misty’ and ‘Taste of Honey,’ ” said Santana, “only with Latin percussion.”10
Bill Graham, who was in the audience along with some mothers and their children, who had each paid a dollar to get in, was impressed by Carlos Santana’s distinctive guitar style and the band’s Latin sound. When they came offstage he congratulated them, saying he wanted to book them at the Fillmore. He then started using them as a fill-in band for acts that didn’t show.
“They sounded great,” said Haynie. “They were my first major find.”
One day while Carlos Santana was washing dishes at the Tic-Toc Diner, the Grateful Dead pulled up outside in two limousines.
“I had my apron on,” Carlos recalled, “full of hamburger pattie, peeling potatoes and shit. My shoes were funky from cleaning floors with hot water and bleach.”
Jerry Garcia walked in with the other members of the band, and they sat at the counter and ordered burgers and french fries.
“I never talked to the Dead that day,” Carlos said. “I just looked at them. But something in me just said, ‘Man, you can do . . . what they do.’ I walked up to the owner of the Tic-Toc and said, ‘Man, I quit. I’m outta here.’ ”
Grace Slick moved in with Jefferson Airplane drummer Spencer Dryden, although they were both married to other people. They’d first hooked up in a New York motel during a short East Coast promotional tour for Surrealistic Pillow. Both hard drinkers, they viewed themselves as “outsiders,” as the rest of the band preferred pot and acid.
The two massive hits Grace had given Jefferson Airplane had changed the whole dynamic of the group. Founder and leader Marty Balin now found himself overshadowed by Spencer Dryden, who used Grace’s growing influence to try to control the band.
“Whoever slept with Grace had the power in the band,” Balin later said.11
At the end of May, when Jefferson Airplane returned to Los Angeles to begin recording After Bathing at Baxter’s, Balin found himself virtually shut out. Although he’d written some of the most memorable songs on Surrealistic Pillow, “Come Up The Years” and “Today,” his sole composition on Baxter’s was “Young Girl Sunday Blues,” cowritten with Paul Kantner.
During the recording of their new album, the band moved into a $5,000-a-month luxury mansion in the Hollywood Hills, with their record company RCA Victor footing the bill. Meanwhile, sales of Surrealistic Pillow had now hit about one million, giving the band huge leverage. Bill Graham sent Jim Haynie to Los Angeles to keep an eye on things and report back.
“He was pretty busy with the Fillmore,” explained Haynie. “The guys in the band were staying in a big house in Hollywood up on the hill and they worked on the album at night.”
During the day the band and their entourage hung around the large pool and skinny-dipped, getting stoned and socializing with the band’s new Hollywood friends, Rip Torn and his wife, Geraldine Page.
“I was running around butt naked,” recalled Haynie, who joined in the fun. “Grace was a Scorpio. She was very into her position on things. And she was sassy.”12
Jorma K
aukonen’s marriage to his Swedish wife, Margaretta, was tempestuous, and the two were constantly fighting about his cheating on the road. He wrote “The Last Wall of the Castle” on the Baxter’s album about his marital problems.
“Jorma was fucking around on the road,” said Bill Thompson. “He used to stay with a woman and give her a guitar and the band paid for all [of them]. There’s probably five hundred women about now that have a guitar.”13
On one occasion when the lead guitarist saw strangers in the pool, he took out his pellet pistol and began shooting at the water. Things were no less crazy inside the studio, where Kaukonen liked to ride his powerful motorcycle. The band also installed a tank of nitrous oxide for their communal amusement. The cost of studio time went into the stratosphere, as some band members insisted on jetting in every day from San Francisco, causing many delays.14
In early 1967, Janis Joplin—who had been living in Lagunitas—moved back to San Francisco, renting an apartment in the Haight-Ashbury district. All the recent publicity about the new music scene and youth revolution in the city had drawn thousands of runaways to the Haight. LSD was everywhere, and the streets were a carnival of color as the idealistic young people swirled around the streets.
Janis soon became a familiar sight in Haight-Ashbury, walking her collie, George, down Haight Street or driving around in her Sunbeam convertible. Big Brother and the Holding Company now played regularly at the Avalon as well as performing free shows around San Francisco.15
Janis was now having a great time. Just six months after being voted the University of Texas’s “Ugliest Man on Campus,” she became a pinup girl after posing nude for photographer Bob Seidemann. The sexy shot, with just a string of beads hanging over Janis’s breasts, soon became a best-selling poster.
Janis and Grace now lived about a block away on Washington Street, and they saw much of each other. One day photographer Jim Marshall photographed them together for a Teen Set magazine feature called “Two Queen Bees of San Francisco.”