Live at the Fillmore East and West
Page 12
“That morning I went over to Grace’s house and then had to leave and pick up Janis,” Marshall wrote in his book Not Fade Away. “Janis wasn’t in the mood to do any pictures that day, but I begged her and she came along. Everyone always thought there was a huge rivalry between Janis and Grace, but they were dear friends. This is the only time they were ever photographed together. And, by the end of the session, we were all getting pretty silly and clowning around.”
“They were like fire and ice,” said Big Brother guitarist Sam Andrew. “Grace came from the upper middle class and was a model; Janis actually [did] too but she more or less disowned it. She went into the lower part of society, if you will. She sang their songs. Janis had this famous phrase about country club chicks coming in their pantie girdles, so they can barely move in their seat. And in a way that’s who Grace was. I never got a sincere feeling about her music-making.”16
Most days, Janis rehearsed in a dingy warehouse with Big Brother and the Holding Company, playing around the city at weekends. Their new manager, Julius Karpen, hired Barbra Streisand’s singing coach, Judy Davis, to work on Janis’s singing. At her first lesson, Davis told Janis she had the “worst voice she had ever heard,” reducing her to tears.
Soon after moving to Haight-Ashbury, Janis hooked up with Country Joe MacDonald after they shared a bill at the Avalon.
“We wound up dancing together,” wrote Country Joe in his blog. “We were just caught up in flirting and being attracted to each other. That night I went home with her to the flat she shared in the Haight.”
For the next three months, they carried on a passionate affair. They would stay up late drinking herbal tea and listening to the Larry Miller Show on KMPX Radio, calling in to request a song from Country Joe’s new EP.
When Janis got a new apartment in Lyon Street in the Haight, Country Joe moved in.
“We took those posters of her nude and put them up . . . all over one wall,” he recalled. “It was my idea.”
That spring, Dorothy Joplin came to visit and Janis couldn’t wait to show her mother her new life.
“She was so proud of that,” said Country Joe. “She wanted to make chow mein.”
One day while Janis and Country Joe were making love in a sauna, her hand suddenly became paralyzed.
“It started to freak me out,” he recalled. “She said not to worry about it.”
Janis explained that she’d had this paralysis since her days as a speed freak, but it was only temporary.
“A few minutes later she got back movement in the hand,” he said. “I did not share . . . her life with speed and heroin.” 17
Their brief affair was very tempestuous, as they were also sleeping with other people. One night they were sitting by their apartment window while screaming at each other.
“And people would walk by and tap at the window,” said Fish keyboard player David Bennett Cohen, asking, “ ‘Hey. How are you doing? Where are you playing?’ ”
When they broke up, Janis asked Joe to write a song about her.
“So Joe wrote this song called ‘Janis,’ which is on our second record,” said Cohen. “He actually wrote it for Big Brother and the Holding Company to do, but they didn’t know what to do with it and we did it really nicely.”18
Their affair finally ended after Country Joe failed to arrive for a meal Janis had cooked for him. According to Peggy Caserta, who would eventually become her lover, Janis burst into tears and ran down Haight Street, screaming, “Joe stood me up!”19
Fish bass player Bruce Barthol fondly remembers the time the band spent with Janis.
“She was very friendly and a very warm person,” he said, “but Janis was into hard drugs and Joe bailed on the relationship.”20
Jerry Garcia first saw Carlos Santana play in Golden Gate Park.
“They were called the Santana Blues Band,” Garcia recalled. “I watched them and listened to them play and [thought] this kid is really good. He’s got a great feel and I knew right away he was going to be happening.”21
True to his word, Bill Graham had booked the Santana Blues Band to open for the Steve Miller Band and Howlin’ Wolf. But in early April, everything was put on hold after Carlos was hospitalized with tuberculosis.
For the next three months he lay in a TB ward at Mission General Hospital, watching people die. Fortunately, the doctors soon had it under control by giving him massive amounts of streptomycin.
“They shot me so full of holes in my butt,” he said, “that I couldn’t sit for a week.”
While he was in the hospital, the authorities arranged for a private tutor, and Carlos graduated while hospitalized. Other friends would come in with various drugs to cheer him up.
“They’d bring me a couple of joints and LSD,” Santana told Rolling Stone. “And I’m taking LSD like a dummy.”
On one acid trip he started watching The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse on television and freaked out.
“I’m inside the bed with my sheets over my head, going, ‘Oh, shit.’ ”
Eventually Carlos became so fed up with the hospital he had a friend bring him in some clothes and discharged himself. 22
In spring of 1967 Jefferson Airplane went out on the road, earning up to $15,000 ($105,000) a night. Bill Graham had organized a booking agent for them so he wouldn’t run into the same legal problems as Matthew Katz had.
There was a huge demand for the band, who reveled in its new success. It soon turned into one long drug party, with Paul Kantner and Marty Balin throwing handfuls of Owsley’s Orange Sunshine acid into the audience at shows.
“I was almost always [tripping],” said Kantner, “as was the audience. So it sort of blended in and meshed it inside.”23
The band also delighted in spiking backstage drinks and food with LSD, and they had an ongoing competition with the Grateful Dead to be the first to dose Bill Graham.
“They were always trying to get Bill to do acid,” said Bonnie MacLean, “but I don’t know that they succeeded. He wasn’t taking drugs at all in those days. That came later.”24
Being the adult and trying to bring some order into Jefferson Airplane was a constant uphill battle for Graham. He now went behind their backs, secretly corresponding with their parents, hoping they would exert some influence on the unruly band.
On June 2, 1967, on the eve of “White Rabbit” being released as a single, Graham wrote to Jorma Kaukonen’s mother, Beatrice, care of the the American Embassy in Stockholm, where his father worked for the US State Department. The letter was written on the band’s official notepaper, which carried the header “Jefferson Airplane Loves You.”
Dear Mrs. Kaukonen:
Sorry to have taken so long in answering your note of May 20—as always things are frantic in a nice way. The group is on “American Bandstand” June 3 and will be on the “Smothers Brothers Show” again June 5. We are releasing White Rabbit as a single June 7. If all goes well, we should have an album ready in early August along with two or three singles—Things are going nicely.
If all goes as planned, I hope to get the group to Europe in mid-August for at least four to six weeks stay. My main concern now is to get some more records done so that when we are away we are still here record-wise.
Jorma is playing extremely well and in a sense has somewhat taken over the musical leadership of the group. I only wish he had done it months ago.
Hope all is well with you and Mr. Kaukonen; hope to see you while you are here.
Best
Bill Graham
The following day, a national television audience saw Jefferson Airplane lip-sync “White Rabbit” on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. On its release, “White Rabbit” would become the band’s second Billboard top-ten hit.
After Dick Clark had Grace introduce the band, he asked her about all this new music coming out of San Francisco.
“Let me skip along,” Clark continued. “Older people worry. They see the way you’re dressed and they hear your music. They don’t understand it. Do parents have anything to worry about?”
“I think so,” replied Paul Kantner. “Their children are doing things that they didn’t do and they don’t understand it.”
Then America’s oldest teenager asked Jorma Kaukonen what was going to happen in San Francisco this summer.
“I couldn’t even begin to tell you in about an hour,” he said, “but there’s going to be a lot of people there.”
On Sunday, June 11, 1967, Bill Graham married Bonnie MacLean at their home on Sacramento Street, San Francisco. Bonnie’s cigar-smoking mother flew in for the ceremony, which was officiated at by a Unitarian minister. A mambo band played at the wedding reception, performing Bill Graham’s favorite Latin music.
“Bill was dancing,” recalled Bill Thompson. “He liked Latin dancing and he was a good dancer, too.”
Graham was too busy for a honeymoon, so he took his new bride to the Monterey Pop Festival the following week, where Jefferson Airplane was headlining.25
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Monterey
On May 13, 1967, a catchy song called “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” was released. Written by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas and sung by his friend Scott McKenzie, it became a huge international hit and the unofficial anthem of The Summer of Love.
It was written to promote the Monterey Pop Festival, an event that Phillips and record producer Lou Adler were organizing to exploit the booming San Francisco music scene. The festival was to be held at the small coastal town of Monterey, 120 miles south of San Francisco. The film rights had already been sold to the ABC network for $600,000 when the organizers approached the leading San Francisco bands about playing. But the San Francisco musicians were wary, suspecting the slick LA music establishment of exploitation.
“There was a definite rivalry and antagonism between the L.A. and San Francisco camps,” wrote John Phillips in his autobiography, Papa John. “We had trouble even getting them to talk to us.”
Former Beatles PR man Derek Taylor was hired as festival publicist and goodwill ambassador, traveling to the Fillmore Auditorium for a meeting with the San Francisco musical community.
“The conscience of the movement was seen to be in San Francisco,” explained Taylor. “Bill Graham, Chet Helms, Ralph Gleason, and the Grateful Dead all had to be convinced that we were not charlatans. Bill was extremely hospitable when we met in his upstairs office at the Fillmore. He kept quite a salon and I was very impressed.”1
Bill Graham thought the festival was such a great idea that he secretly invested $10,000 in it, agreeing to act as a go-between for the LA organizers and the local music community. He wasn’t the only one with great expectations for Monterey. Representatives from every major record company, including Columbia Records president Clive Davis, flew to the West Coast with blank checks to sign up the new San Francisco bands. Bob Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, also came to Monterey, to see his band The Paupers play and to find new acts to sign.
“The real action of Monterey took place backstage, in the makeshift green rooms and private bar areas where record companies made their deals,” wrote Marc Eliot in his book Rockonomics.
The three-day festival, which drew ninety thousand fans, soon turned into a cattle auction for the major record companies desperate to sign up as many new San Francisco bands as they could. Monterey was officially a charity event, with the bands getting traveling expenses only. And there was immediate trouble when the San Francisco bands were handed a release to sign that gave the filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker worldwide rights to the festival concert special. It was only after much arguing that the bands signed, with the exception of the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company.
On Saturday afternoon, Janis Joplin and Big Brother played a historic show-stopping set that made her a star. Wearing a silver knit pantsuit, she mesmerized the audience for the five-song performance, climaxing with a devastating rendition of “Ball and Chain.”
“I was knocked out by Janis Joplin, who wasn’t known on the East Coast,” said music critic Robert Christgau, who was reporting for Esquire magazine. “A fantastic stage presence. Her left nipple erect under her knit pantsuit, looking hard enough to put out your eye, she rocked and stomped and threatened any moment to break the microphone or swallow it.” 2
As Janis left the stage to tumultuous applause, Clive Davis rushed over and offered Big Brother a major contract with Columbia.
“Her performance was incendiary,” wrote Davis in his 2013 autobiography, The Soundtrack of My Life. “I experienced a personal epiphany . . . I’ve got to sign this band.”3
But he was stunned when Janis told him that Big Brother had already signed with the indie label Mainstream Records for a meager $100 the previous year. When Davis told Albert Grossman about his dilemma soon afterward, he promised to help.
Grossman also wanted to sign Big Brother, moving in after discovering that their manager, Julius Karpen, had not allowed Big Brother’s set to be filmed. Grossman knew that if Janis’s astonishing performance ever made it to network television, it would be a sensation. So he took Janis aside and offered to make her and Big Brother into stars if they let him represent them. After Grossman found loopholes in the Mainstream record contract, the band agreed to overrule Karpen and perform again the following night, so they could be filmed.
“We needed [Albert’s] advice,” said Sam Andrew. “And he was a lot of help and matter-of-fact and not excitable. He really supported us, so we started talking to him about managing us.” 4
Albert Grossman was now on a roll, also signing up Steve Miller and Quicksilver Messenger Service. He then agreed to buy out Big Brother’s old Mainstream contract for $100,000, demanding Davis pay him a $100,000 advance for recording rights to Big Brother, Steve Miller, Quicksilver, and Electric Flag.
While Davis and Grossman were negotiating, Capitol Records slyly bought up record rights to Quicksilver and Steve Miller for six figures apiece, acing out Grossman.
After Janis Joplin’s second incendiary performance on Sunday night—which was filmed—Grossman doubled Big Brother’s price to $200,000, and Clive Davis accepted.
“We sat on the stage after Monterey and I remember our feet were hanging over the edge,” said filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker. “[Janis] seemed very excitable. She was still coming down and she poured out some Southern Comfort. And I thought . . . nothing better was ever going to happen to her.”
After Janis and Big Brother played, newlyweds Bill and Bonnie Graham watched from the side of the stage as Jerry Garcia introduced Jefferson Airplane as “a perfect example of what the world is coming to.”
“Monterey Pop was absolutely perfect,” recalled Grace Slick. “The weather, the way it was arranged. And you could actually get to a bathroom within about four minutes. Even the cops were good. So that was the best of any of the festivals I played.”5
Backstage that night, a Texan dealer introduced Paul Kantner to cocaine, which would become the new drug of choice for many of the band members.
On Sunday night the Airplane watched Jimi Hendrix play for the first time. Just before Hendrix took the stage, Jack Casady gave him two strong hits of Owsley acid.
“That’s when he started fucking his guitar,” said Bill Thompson.6
Grace Slick and Janis Joplin were backstage together watching in amazement, as Hendrix set his guitar alight during “Voodoo Chile.”
“We’d never seen anybody set fire to a guitar before,” said Grace. “And we were just appalled by this guy. He was just amazing.” 7
Back in San Francisco later that night, the Santana Blues Band was booked
to open for The Who at the Fillmore. It was the big break they had been looking for.
“And we were late,” said Carlos Santana. “Bill Graham was screaming at me and he asked me what kind of fuckin’ band we had, ’cause these other cats were late, just blowing it, putting cologne on themselves and all that shit.”
Carlos then fired everyone in the band except for Gregg Rolie, and Stan Marcum started recruiting new musicians. He found bassist David Brown, who had toured with the Four Tops, playing in a small club in North Beach and invited him to join. Then he discovered a conga player named Marcus Malone, who had been born in Memphis. To complete the group he found drummer Bob “Doc” Livingston.
“The band didn’t embrace the Latin thing until Gregg Rolie and I started hanging out with Marcus Malone,” said Carlos. “Marcus was a street mutt, just like Santana’s music.”8
The week after Monterey, Jefferson Airplane headlined a week of shows at the Fillmore Auditorium, with the Jimi Hendrix Experience opening. To capitalize on the Summer of Love, the Fillmore Auditorium would now be open six nights a week.
In July, Jim Haynie quit to become road manager for the Butterfield Blues Band. Bill Graham had never treated him the same after his brief affair with Bonnie, and he was relieved to go.
“I think Bill held a grudge,” explained Haynie. “I was never properly paid and when I asked for a raise he would say, ‘Not right now. Business is kind of tailing off.’ Bullshit.”9
In his place Graham hired a straight businessman named Paul Baratta, who knew little about the new rock music.
That summer, as Jefferson Airplane became stars, their relationship with Bill Graham was disintegrating. Although he disapproved of the band’s hedonistic lifestyle, he could do little about it. But when Time magazine profiled the band in June, Graham was furious when Grace and the other band members urged young Americans to take LSD and make love on it.