Live at the Fillmore East and West

by John Glatt

  “The stage is our bed,” Marty Balin was quoted as saying, “and the audience is our broad. We’re not entertaining, we’re making love.”

  Grace Slick, described as “a striking former model who gives the Airplane go-power with her big, belting blues voice,” explained how “White Rabbit” was “aimed at the twelve-year-old junkies.”

  “It doesn’t matter what the lyrics say, or who sings them,” she said. “They’re all the same. They say, ‘Be Free—free in love—free in sex.’ ”

  In mid-July, on the eve of the band’s first major US tour, their frustrated manager wrote another letter to Jorma Kaukonen’s mother, complaining about her son’s behavior.

  Dear Mrs. Kaukonen:

  Sorry to be so late in answering your note of July 1. As always, life with the Airplane is hectic.

  The album is doing well over here—it’s 4 or 5 on all the charts. We released White Rabbit four weeks ago and it is already #12. Presently working on next album—sorry to have to tell you problems are setting in. Don’t want you to mention this to your son, of course, but the “ego egg” is hatching. The group in general is getting just a bit too demanding in their general demands of society; but more on that when I see you.

  Also sending copies of recent publication and photo of your son that I thought you might like to have.

  Best to you and yours.

  Sincerely, Bill Graham.10

  In late July, Bill Graham took the Summer of Love on the road. He staged a week of shows at the O’Keefe Centre in Toronto, starring the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. It was designed to re-create the Fillmore experience in different cities across America, becoming the blueprint for the Fillmore East a few months later.

  To make it happen, Graham hired a small New York–based company called Sensefex, run by a group of ex–drama students. Their only previous concert experience had been staging disco dances with strobes and flashing lights (a few years in anticipation of the disco craze that took over America). As soon as Sensefex lighting director Joshua White and his partners, John Morris and Kip Cohen, arrived in Toronto to start work, they were briefed by Bill Graham.

  “Bill was the most insane human being I had ever met in my life,” remembered Morris. “The first thing I remember is his face, which is not the most beautiful thing in the world. But the strength and passion of that face.” 11

  For the next forty-eight hours, White and Graham discussed transforming the O’Keefe Centre, with its seats, balcony, and a stage, into a replica of the far smaller and more intimate Fillmore Auditorium.

  “Although we were total opposites,” said Joshua White, “we understood each other instantly. Our love of the theater was the basis of our relationship in the beginning.” 12

  To publicize the O’Keefe shows, Graham helped John Morris organize a free concert in Toronto for the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, drawing 52,000 people.

  The opening night at the O’Keefe Centre was a triumph, with 2,400 people dancing in the aisles.

  “The legend of Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, is part of the appeal of the Airplane,” wrote Barrie Hale in the Toronto Telegram. “The Airplane come onstage to the sound of a piston-driven plane in full snarl giving way to the high wail of a jet. There is Grace Slick, the lady Airplane, dark hair, fierce voice, beautiful smile. And from sticks burning on Grace’s piano, the smell of incense fills the air.”13

  After the week of Toronto shows, the Sensefex team decided to leave disco behind forever and move on to staging rock ’n’ roll shows.

  “I was just sucked in,” said White. “I was sucked into the music of the Airplane and the Dead. I was sucked into the light show. I looked at it and said, this is good but I could do this better. And all the people who were part of my disco company felt the same way.”14

  After the final show, Bill Graham asked John Morris to move to San Francisco and restructure the business side of the Fillmore Auditorium. Morris agreed and spent a few weeks living with Bill and Bonnie Graham in their new Washington Street house, unraveling the tangled Fillmore finances.

  “There was no organization,” said Morris. “He was running it with cash out of his desk. It was pass them in, pass them out. It wasn’t done that way to bury tons of cash. It was done because that was the way it was done.”

  Morris then helped Graham start a corporation to run the Fillmore Auditorium and his other business interests. He also became one of Graham’s closest friends and trusted associates.

  One night they were walking home after a show, with Graham carrying that night’s box office takings in a plain brown paper bag that he called his “Polish briefcase.” Suddenly a man leapt out of the shadows brandishing a gun and demanded the money.

  “Bill just told him, ‘Fuck you, get outta here,’ ” remembered Morris. “Wouldn’t even give the guy a quarter. The guy was stoned and he just turned tail and ran.”

  After eating breakfast at Zims diner, it was about three in the morning when they returned to Graham’s house and went to sleep. About an hour later, a naked Bill Graham burst into Morris’s bedroom, screaming that he’d left all the money back in the diner.

  “We got dressed at 900 mph, hopped in the car and drove to Zims,” said Morris. “The same waitress was there and she pulls the bag out from behind the counter. She had no clue that there was about $60,000 in that bag. Bill was so relieved he pulled out a $100 bill and gave it to her.”15

  After John Morris finished putting the Fillmore organization onto a business footing, Bill Graham asked him to become Jefferson Airplane’s tour manager. He was put in charge of the band’s first national tour, as a buffer between Graham and the band.

  “Jefferson Airplane’s whole thing was, ‘Yeah, let’s stay loose and stoned and high and have a great old time,’ ” said Morris. “But somebody’s got to watch out for the business. ‘Oh, Bill will do it.’ ” But when Bill started saying, ‘Oh you’re screwing up, you’re doing this,’ they didn’t want to listen. That would frustrate the hell out of Bill.”

  In Cincinnati, Grace Slick walked off stage at the end of the set, refusing to sing her current top-ten hit “White Rabbit” for an encore.

  “She said, ‘I’m not singing it,’ ” recalled John Morris. “ ‘I’ve done it five thousand times and I’m not doing it again.’ ”

  So Morris opened the dressing-room door to the stage and told Grace to listen to the audience screaming for “White Rabbit.”

  “And she said, ‘Okay, I’ll do it,’ ” said Morris. “I said, ‘Good, because it’s the only way we’re getting out of here alive.’ So she went out and sang it one more time.”16

  At another show, a drunken Grace suddenly turned on the audience, screaming obscenities.

  “[Grace] was one of the most interesting, attractive and wonderful people you could ever be around,” said Morris. “She was also as crazy as a hoot owl when she wanted to be.”17

  While John Morris was chaperoning Jefferson Airplane around America, Bill Graham flew to London to sign up new English bands for the Fillmore. He soon realized that there was a goldmine of talent across the Atlantic waiting to be discovered by American audiences.

  “That was the first time I went over to England,” he said. “I caught the Cream and then agents would start to send me tapes and records. And there were other people who were extremely helpful [like] Pete Townshend.”18

  While Graham was in London he visited the UFO Club, where he saw a new act called The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, and loved them.

  “Bill was doing a band-finding mission,” said Arthur Brown in 2013. “He saw us and he loved all the drama and theatrics. A few months later he brought us to America.”19

  At the end of August, Graham flew Cream to San Francisco for two weeks of shows at the Fillmore Auditorium. He paid the English supergroup—comprising Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, and Ginger Baker—just
$500 a night. And on the opening Saturday night he packed in more than 3,500 people–more than three times the Fillmore’s legal fire limit.

  Jefferson Airplane flew in for the Cream show by private plane after their own show in Bakersfield, California. And when the pilot ordered Paul Kantner to put out a joint during the flight, the guitarist opened the plane’s door and threw it out.

  The Cream’s run of six shows was a huge success, grossing Bill Graham more than $80,000 as well as another $60,000 from concessions—almost $1 million in current purchasing power.

  After the final show, Bill Graham benevolently presented each member of the group with an engraved Rolex pocket watch.

  “It meant so much to Eric, Ginger and Jack,” said Chris Brooks, who was the Fillmore publicist, “because nobody had ever done anything like that for them before.”20

  In fact, Graham brought the knockoff watches from Japan in bulk.

  “They were plentiful and they were given out,” said Chip Monck, who would later work closely with Graham. “He was very gracious.” 21

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Hiring and Firing

  After the Monterey Pop Festival, Janis Joplin’s relationship with Big Brother and the Holding Company would never be the same. Journalists were only interested in talking to Janis, as if the other band members didn’t exist. And they soon started resenting it.

  “Monterey was really the beginning that separated Janis from the band,” said drummer David Getz. “It made her a star. It made her a diva, an icon.”

  In November 1967, Big Brother finally fired Julius Karpen and looked for a new manager. They initially approached Bill Graham, who was now courting Janis to start playing the Fillmore as often as possible after her Monterey breakthrough.

  “Janis had actually asked Graham to manager them,” recalled John Morris. “[We] were together in the Pan Am building in New York, when he phoned her back and sent her to Albert Grossman.”1

  After Janis called Grossman in New York, he took the first plane out to San Francisco, meeting Big Brother in Peter Albin’s apartment. Grossman offered to manage the band in return for 20 percent of their profits, as well as his expenses. Then he asked how much money they wanted to make next year. Big Brother had earned around $25,000 that year, so David Getz said he would like to triple that to $75,000.

  Grossman guaranteed they would earn at least $75,000, if not more, promising to tear up the contract if they did not. After agreeing to terms, the portly, gray-haired manager said there was just one proviso to his managing them. He explained that his first wife had died of a heroin overdose, saying he refused to deal with anybody who took it.

  “He called it ‘schmack,’ ” recalled Albin. “He said, ‘You guys don’t do that?’ I can still see everybody crossing their fingers behind their backs, saying, ‘Oh, no.’ ”2

  While Jefferson Airplane toured America, Bill Graham kept adding extra dates to keep up with the high demand. Finally, there was a showdown in a hotel room when Graham wanted them to play new shows toward the end of the tour, and the band just wanted to go home. At the meeting Spencer Dryden lashed into him, saying his brain was made of money.

  “I’ll never forget what you just said, Mister,” came Graham’s angry reply as he stared the drummer straight in the eye.

  Grace Slick and Spencer Dryden both disliked Bill Graham, who was constantly on their case for drinking too much.

  “He was not [Grace’s] idea of a manager,” said Bill Thompson. “He was tough, a strict guy who wanted them to work, work, work. He wanted them to tour, which they really didn’t want to do.”3

  There were other issues, too. When Graham wanted to release Grace’s rousing new song “Two Heads” as the next single, she vetoed it, saying she didn’t want everyone to think she was band leader.4 Instead, they released “The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil,” which only reached number 42 on the charts.

  When Bill Graham demanded the band sign a formal management deal with him, they refused. He then arrived at a band meeting at the Landmark Hotel in Hollywood with a pile of contracts for them to sign. Jorma Kaukonen stormed out first, saying he was hungry, followed by the others.

  “Bill was a great businessman,” said Kaukonen, “but one of the strengths and weaknesses of the Jefferson Airplane was that we don’t like to be told what to do.”5

  On October 20, the band was in New York to play Hunter College. The afternoon of the show, Grace Slick asked John Morris to take her to the Upper East Side to see Finch College, where she had studied a decade earlier.

  “So we went,” said Morris, “and we wandered around and somebody finally recognized her. So she signed some autographs and we went on our way.”

  Then they went shopping and Grace bought a couple of expensive Pucci gowns.

  “She looked fabulous,” Morris recalled. “When she showed up to play that night in fatigues, I said, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ and threw her back in the limousine and made her go change.” 6

  That night, Jefferson Airplane was playing two shows, and the band held a press conference before the first.

  “Miss Slick calmly pulled what appeared to be a chrome-plated hand grenade from a lunch box and lit her cigarette from it,” reported John Kifner in next morning’s New York Times. “Elder, non-McLuhanesque reporters with hang-ups about linear thought appeared baffled.”7

  After playing the first show, the band returned to the dressing room and refused to play an encore.

  “Bill came [in] and said, ‘Do an encore! Do an encore!’ ” recalled Bill Thompson. “And Grace said, ‘We don’t do encores.’ And he started to go nuts at the band. ‘Who do you think you are?’ ”

  Then Thompson took Graham to one side, warning him to cool it, or they might refuse to play the second show that night.

  “I said, ‘Bill, they’re playing New York City,’ ” said Thompson. “ ‘I wouldn’t bum them out and make them feel bad.’ ”8

  Despite the absence of an encore, Kifner wrote an ecstatic review of the show, headlined: “Jefferson Airplane Electrifies Hunter Audience.”

  “Miss Slick,” he wrote, “a tiny former model who is reputed to have once been a student at Finch College for young ladies, can lean easily against a mike stand and belt out the lyrics of ‘Don’t You Need Somebody to Love’ over the assembled din like a cross between Dinah Washington and Mick Jagger.”

  Grace Slick and Spencer Dryden were furious when their manager refused to supply them with a bottle of Southern Comfort before each show, as they had demanded.

  “Grace didn’t like that the fact [Bill] wouldn’t give them money for booze,” said Bill Thompson. “She had brought in ‘Somebody to Love’ and ‘White Rabbit,’ which were two huge hits, so she called the shots.” 9

  Bill Graham also alienated other members of the band when he refused to buy Jack Casady an amplifier he needed to get a new sound.

  “Bill wouldn’t hand over the bread,” one anonymous band member told a reporter. “He didn’t believe we needed it. You always have to prove things to Bill, fight to convince him of everything. It’s a drag.”10

  On Sunday, December 3, Bill Graham and the Jefferson Airplane arrived an hour late for two shows at the Sheraton Park Ballroom after their equipment got lost in a snowstorm. Then Graham complained about the way a local disc jockey had been promoting the concert. After he refused to let the DJ announce the band, a “shouting match” ensued backstage.

  “I can’t stand the way disc jockeys come on,” he told Mary Ann Seawell of the Washington Post, “ ‘Hey there, kids, here’s that way-out psychedelic group you’ve all been hearing so much about.’ I just want a simple straightforward announcement.”

  Before the Airplane even took the stage, a small peace demonstration and an announcement of an upcoming protest against the Vietnam War were greeted by loud booing and hissing.

  “Then
Grace Slick,” wrote Seawell, “showed her feelings about being in Washington by playing a markedly off-key version of ‘The Star Spangled Banner.’ ”

  On November 27, After Bathing at Baxter’s was released. It had cost more than $80,000 ($560,000) to record, more than ten times as much as Surrealistic Pillow, and would sell a million fewer albums. After RCA Victor nixed the original album title Good Shit, the band settled on naming it after their code name for LSD—“Baxter.”

  When album sales failed to match those of Surrealistic Pillow, Bill Graham’s I-told-you-so appeals for more commercial material for the next album fell on deaf ears.

  Grace Slick was feeling anything but commercial. Her song “Rejoyce”—the last track on side one of Baxter’s—is a homage to James Joyce’s Ulysses.

  “I was paraphrasing some of the stuff in Ulysses,” she explained in 2012, “but it’s said with such sarcasm and darkness. So I didn’t write anything that you could say, ‘Oh, isn’t that beautiful.’ ”

  On December 31, 1967, San Francisco’s two biggest bands, Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Company, played the Winterland Ballroom. The New Year’s show, billed as “The Fillmore Scene at Winterland,” had tickets costing $6 for the far larger 5,400 capacity Winterland, which Graham now used for his bigger shows. That night, according to his official ledger, Graham sold 7,800 tickets to make $20,604 ($144,000), with an extra $165 ($1,500), from coat check.

  “That was certainly a memorable gig for me,” said John Cooke, who had just been appointed Big Brother’s road manager by Albert Grossman. “I thought this is it. This is amazing. This is rock ’n’ roll.”

  In the dressing room, Graham had laid out a long table filled with sandwiches, fresh fruit, and soft drinks.

  “I’d never seen anyone treat the artist like that,” said Cooke. “[Soon] bands began putting in their rider what kind of food and drink had to be provided backstage, but Bill, in my opinion, originated that.”11