by John Glatt
That night Janis Joplin became a star. Despite the lack of rehearsals she was in top form, thrilling the sold-out audience with the powerful songs Big Brother would soon release on their chart-topping Cheap Thrills album.
Janis strutted out onstage and up to the microphone for the first show.
“Well, New York,” she told the screaming audience, “we’re finally here you know.”
Then as David Getz counted her off, they launched into “Combination of the Two.”
“And the place levitated,” said Allan Arkush, a young New York University film student in the audience that night. “She was electrifying. It was every bit as exciting as we thought it would be.”14
Janis wore a slinky low-cut, dark sleeveless dress and fishnet stockings, with a dozen different colored necklaces of love beads twisted around her long neck. Her raw vocals filled every inch of the Anderson Theater, as the swirling colors of Joshua White’s light show pulsated behind her on a giant screen.
With her hair flying around wildly, Janis gripped the microphone hard for “Ball and Chain.” The song seemed to come from the very depths of her soul. Her unearthly voice soared and dived through “Down on Me,” and “Light Is Faster Than Sound.” But the highlight of her performance was her deeply moving version of George Gershwin’s “Summertime,” perfectly suited to her scratchy vocals.
Finally, after several encores and a five-minute standing ovation, a triumphant Janis left the stage drenched in sweat, having conquered New York.
Back in her dressing room, Janis held court for the journalists, wittily fielding questions while swigging Southern Comfort from the bottle.
“I’m a juicer,” she declared unapologetically.
Frustrated at the lack of attention they were receiving, the rest of the band left Janis with the reporters and went back to the Chelsea Hotel with various groupies to celebrate. There was supposed to be a rehearsal after the show for the new album, but when Janis showed up there was nobody there.
“We didn’t leave her on purpose,” explained Sam Andrew. “It was a misunderstanding.” 15
At around three Janis left the theater alone, walking out into the freezing cold on a deserted Second Avenue. She was angry at the band members for abandoning her, and so—feeling lonely and isolated—she walked into the nearby R.O.K. Bar and ordered a drink. A rowdy crowd of Ukrainians came over, with no idea who she was. They invited Janis to their table, and she started buying rounds of drinks and began to cheer up.
As Janis become drunker and drunker, she started berating the rest of the band, calling them “fuck-offs” for not bothering to come to rehearsal. It was almost daylight when she was finally rescued by one of Albert Grossman’s assistants, who took her back to the Chelsea Hotel in a taxi for a few hours of sleep.
A few blocks away to the west, Bill Graham was eating breakfast at the Tin Angel Cafe on Bleecker Street, which Joni Mitchell would immortalize the following year on her album Clouds. John Morris had arranged a meeting with Tony Lech and his associate Jerry Pompili to discuss a partnership in the Anderson Theater before Graham returned to San Francisco. But not everyone had been told the purpose of the get-together.
“Tony had no idea who Bill was or what he wanted,” said Pompili. “Bill came in. We all shook hands. Bill ordered some soup, and he started talking. Tony never looked up from his plate.”
Graham proposed a partnership to present shows at the Anderson.
“Tony . . . started screaming,” said Pompili, “like he was doing a bad Jimmy Cagney impression from a third-rate gangster flick. ‘Who da fuck do you think you are coming into town and telling me that we’re gonna do business together?’ Bill never batted an eye.”
After Lech finished his rant, Graham stood up from the table, put his legal pads and other papers into his leather case, and thanked Lech for his time.
“He shook my hand very politely and said, ‘Good-bye,’ and he left,” recalled Pompili. “I turned to Tony, who was still ranting and raving, and said, ‘Something tells me you just made a mistake dealing with this man the way you did.’ Tony said, ‘Fuck him. Who needs him?’ ”16
With the Anderson Theater now off the table, John Morris suggested going after the semivacant 2,645-seat Village Theater, right across from the Anderson. The building exuded the faded glamor of a 1920s movie palace, with a grand proscenium arch, red velvet walls, and painted murals with a gilt chandelier hanging above the double balcony.
“It was like the movie theater I had gone to every Saturday as a kid in the Bronx,” said Bill Graham.17
During the next several days, Graham visited the Village Theater numerous times, casting his expert promoter’s eye over its possibilities. He looked for ease of access for bands trucking heavy equipment in and out and checked out the stage and dressing-room spaces.
Finally, Graham decided to buy it and told his lawyer to start negotiations.
“I knew I was taking a risk,” said Graham. “But I never minded the risk factor. I still knew that if it all went down, I could go back to being a waiter.”
On the morning of Monday, February 19, 1968, the New York Times carried a rave review of the Big Brother show, headlined, “Janis Joplin Is Climbing Fast in the Heady Rock Firmament.”
“Miss Joplin made her New York debut Saturday night,” began the piece by music critic Robert Shelton. “The lines can start forming now, for Miss Joplin is as remarkable a new pop-music talent as has surfaced in years.”
If anyone was under illusions, Shelton wrote that the “excellent pop show” had featured Janis with her group.
“They used to call vocalists of such rare talent as Janis Joplin ‘a great jazz singer,’ ” he wrote. “Because the music has changed and the scene has shifted, the 25-year-old dynamo from Port Arthur, Tex., is what one would call nowadays a great rock singer . . . a white stylistic sister of Aretha and Erma Franklin.”
The influential Village Voice was equally ecstatic.
“A star rises quickly,” wrote “Scenes” columnist Howard Smith. “New York’s golden ears came out ringing from the Saturday evening performances of Janis Joplin. The two shows were the East Coast premiere of Big Brother and the Holding Company—long the favorite group of the San Francisco dance halls—but it was all Janis. Outside of soul, no girl has emerged with the sexual pizazz of male singers like Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix. Now with Janis, all this is over. Although not beautiful in the usual sense, she sure projects. Janis is a sex symbol in an unlikely package.”
A few hours after the New York Times review appeared, Big Brother and the Holding Company arrived at the Columbia Records headquarters on Sixth Avenue to sign a record deal. After the official signing ceremony, the band stunned CBS Records president Clive Davis by stripping naked in his office and changing clothes for a downtown press conference to publicize the Anderson show.
Janis then propositioned the suave thirty-five-year-old record boss for sex, a gesture she suggested would seal their new recording deal.
“For her, it was the event of a lifetime,” Davis later explained. “The culmination of her professional dream. For a mere signature to be taking place between the two of us seemed an inadequate expression of the event.”
Davis politely declined her offer, settling for a kiss instead.18
That night, Albert Grossman threw a press party at a Greek restaurant on 57th Street called Piraeus: My Love. After Robert Shelton’s ecstatic review, the space was packed with press who wanted to interview Janis.
Howard Smith of the Village Voice got there early and met Janis for the first time.
“It was mostly press and close friends,” he recalled in 2013. “And Grossman wasn’t there yet and [Janis] was nervous. And he showed up and said, ‘We did it. Isn’t that everything you’ve wanted?’ And she was so happy and jumped in his arms. That was one of the few times I ever saw Albert Grossman publicly
emotional, because he was Mr. Cool.”19
After Janis Joplin’s breakthrough at Monterey, Bill Graham had suddenly welcomed her to the Fillmore Auditorium, courting her with charm and flattery, his cruel public humiliation of the singer apparently forgotten. As soon as Graham committed himself to New York, he booked Janis to launch his new venue.
“Oh, [Bill] likes us now,” Janis later quipped. “He’s good to any group that’s made it.”
But Graham still needed financing to buy the Village Theater.
The asking price was $400,000, so with John Morris’s help and contacts, Graham set up a cartel of music business investors to raise the necessary cash. These moneymen included Albert Grossman, his partner Burt Block, promoter Ron Delsener, and the building’s broker, Mike Rogers.
At their first meeting, Graham demanded 75 percent of the shares for himself, with the remaining quarter being divided among the other partners.
“We had lots of meetings deciding how to do it,” said John Morris, who had already been appointed as general manager.
At one marathon investment meeting in Delsener’s Upper East Side office, Bill Graham became emotional as he set out exactly how his new theater would work.
“Delsener was listening carefully but kept very quiet,” recalled Morris. “Then in a very gentlemanly way he said, ‘I have just come to a decision. I was here before you guys came with this project, and I think I will probably be here afterwards. So if nobody minds, I think I’ll back out.’ I think Ron suddenly saw the egos involved that were going to make his life miserable and he stepped back from it.”20
The remaining partners agreed to put up $40,000 each, leaving Graham to raise the rest. Later, Graham would claim not to be able to remember where his share of the down payment had come from.
By the beginning of February 1968, after the contracts were signed, Jerry Pompili jumped the Anderson Theater ship to work for Bill Graham, taking along the rest of the competitor’s staff.
From then on it was a race against time to ready the theater for the March 8, 1968, opening night.
On the southwest corner of Second Avenue and Sixth Street, the Village Theater had begun life in 1925 as a Yiddish vaudeville playhouse called the Commodore. It was one of eleven lining Second Avenue from Houston to 14th Street. The “Jewish Rialto,” as the area was then known, was the center of Jewish cultural life in New York, with vibrant cafes and bookstores.
In the Thirties it was taken over by the Loews Corporation, who turned it into a movie theater, renaming it the Loews Commodore. In the Fifties it became the Village Theater, reverting back to live music and comedy, before being abandoned. By 1968 it was being used only for the occasional rock show.
When Bill Graham first set foot inside the venue, its condition could only be described as terrible. As he had now announced it would open on March 8, there were less than two weeks to have it up and running. Work needed to be done, and fast.
“The derelict building,” said future manager Kip Cohen, “was actually converted into the Fillmore East in twelve unbelievable days.”21
Bill Graham leased a cheap $90-a-month apartment on East Seventh Street to oversee the renovation. Then John Morris, Joshua White, and Kip Cohen got down to business, bringing in Chip Monck as lighting director. Everything came together.
“It was in a bad state,” Monck recalled. “I went up to measure the ceiling and the joists, and through a hole in the wall comes this wonderful lanky character called Chris Langhart. He said, ‘What the fuck are you doing in my ceiling?’ ”22
Langhart was professor of stagecraft, lighting, and sound at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts Theater Program, which shared a wall with the Village Theater. Within a couple of days Professor Langhart and most of his class of “college student theater buffs” had signed on with Bill Graham at $2.50 an hour.
“There was a bunch of us who were pretty tight,” said Bob See, who was in the NYU theater program, “so it flashed [around] pretty quick what was going on.”23
But their first task was clearing out all the rubbish and debris from the theater.
“There were just piles of dead seats and all manner of crap lying in the thing,” recalled Langhart. “And we would just go out to St. Marks Place and flag down kids and say, ‘Here, you’re going to come and move some junk.’ ”24
Enlisting Professor Langhart and his students was a masterstroke of luck by Bill Graham, as they were all trained in the theater.
“You had people with great theater skills and no theater to work in,” explained Joshua White. “So you ended up with a workforce that was well skilled beyond what they were doing. I mean playwrights and filmmakers were working as stagehands.”25
From the outset, Bill Graham wanted a state-of-the-art sound and lighting system, so bands would not have to bring in their own. With three acts playing two shows a night, it was vital to streamline the operation and prevent bands from parking forty-foot trucks outside and lugging heavy equipment in and out of the building.
“So Bill sensed correctly that in this venue,” said Kip Cohen, “he could say, ‘I don’t care what you do in Detroit or in St. Louis, but when you come here it’s our lights and our sound. And that’s the way it’s going to be.’ ”26
Graham then hired pioneering sound technician Bill Hanley to create a sound system for his new rock theater.
“I designed and engineered it and installed it,” said Hanley. “My job was to make his place sound good.”27
The “Hanley Sound System,” as it became known, cost $35,000, and Graham only leased it from Hanley, who retained ownership. It consisted of twenty-six speakers, including some manufactured for civil defense alerts, strategically placed around the theater with a total power source of 35,000 watts. There were professional-grade mixing consoles, as well as a two-ton center cluster speaker system, suspended over the center of the stage using a series of fly weights especially designed by Chip Monck and Chris Langhart.
The sound level could often break the 100 decibel level, and the cluster had to be perfectly positioned, aiming the sound into the audience so there would be no echoing.
“We were basically inventing stuff,” explained John Morris. “The lighting started out as being theatrical lighting off the shelf, and then became lighting that we built and designed and put up. We built a rigging system. We built big dollies so that we could have three bands, each on a dolly, and slide one in and let them play and then take them out and let someone else play, and then put someone else in. And it cut the equipment set-up time for the audience.”28
Chris Langhart and sound engineer John Chester even constructed an anechoic chamber above the theater dome to test out sound systems and microphones. The mathematically precise room was completely lined with absorbent material to screen out all outside noise and echoes to be acoustically pure. In it they would scientifically analyze the causes of distortion to design revolutionary multimixing boards, providing the Fillmore East with recording-studio sound quality.
Another innovation was using rear projection for the Joshua Light Show. All previous light shows had projected light from the back of the theater onto a large screen across the stage.
White and his light show colleagues operated the elaborate light show from projectors set up on two platforms that were suspended on the back wall of the theater. His equipment included three film projectors, ten slide machines, and four overhead projectors, as well as an array of color wheels, mirrors and spot lamps, and other devices White designed.
The improvised images would then be projected twenty feet onto the back of a huge screen across the stage. Audiences would see only the stunning psychedelic patterns coming through the screen, but none of the complex equipment that created them. As the light show artists were on the other side of the screen, separating them from the band and the audience, they could see only shadows.
Joshua White, th
en twenty-six, had signed a long-term contract with Bill Graham. It paid him $1,000 per show, plus an extra 10 percent if the weekend sold out, with a guarantee that all bands had to perform in front of the light show. The name “Joshua Light Show” would also permanently be on the marquee, giving it rock-star status.
Meanwhile, some of the problems faced by the Fillmore East renovators were more prosaic. For years the Village Theater had illegally been tapping into the electricity supply from Rattner’s Jewish Restaurant next door. So Chris Langhart had to rewire the whole theater, which was a huge undertaking.
“It was a really dangerous job,” said John Morris. “It was probably 880 volts for all the power in the building, so we could actually pay a bill to Con Edison.29
On February 29, 1968, during the height of the theater’s transformation, the first advertisement appeared in the Village Voice for the Big Brother and the Holding Company opening at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East. And the box office was now open for the reserved-section tickets, selling for $3, $4, and $5 dollars. Bill Graham had initially wanted to turn the Village Theater into a ballroom, but that proved too expensive. So he kept the 2,645 seats and introduced reserve seating, in the manner of a Broadway theater.
In the days leading up to the opening, Bill Graham shuttled between New York and San Francisco. His wife, Bonnie, was now pregnant, but he was far too busy to spend time with her.
“During the time that I was expecting,” said Bonnie, “I wasn’t paying much attention to what was going on in the business. I couldn’t care less at that point.”30