by John Glatt
The next day, the band attended a lunch at the Kennedys’ private compound in Hickory Hill, Virginia. Other guests included Lauren Bacall, Tommy Smothers, and Andy Williams. That afternoon, Grace Slick and several other band members had a private audience with Senator Kennedy, whom they admired.
Later, they took a stroll around the grounds, finding a cottage belonging to the young Kennedy children, complete with a jukebox.
“It had ‘White Rabbit’ on it,” recalled Thompson. “It was a great weekend.”
Soon afterward, to cash in on Grace Slick’s name, Columbia Records released an old 1966 live performance by The Great Society at the Matrix. Entitled Conspicuous Only in Its Absence, it featured the original versions of “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit.”
In March, the Jefferson Airplane bandmates were back in Los Angeles to work on their fourth album, Crown of Creation. This work would feature two new Grace Slick compositions—“Greasy Heart” and “Lava,” a tongue-in-cheek song about Spencer Dryden turning thirty. The album was released in April but only reached number 98 on the Billboard chart.
On Tuesday, April 30, Jefferson Airplane flew to New York to appear on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. While they were waiting in the green room, they skinned up and started smoking some strong dope.
“[It] smelled like Tijuana,” said Bill Thompson. “Carson was pissed off at the band and he shot us some dirty looks.”
During the show the band lip-synced “Somebody to Love,” standing on a stage set with a merry-go-round of carousel horses.
“Grace sat on the back of a carousel horse and sang the song to Johnny Carson,” said Thompson. “At the end of the song she took the microphone and shoved it up the horse’s ass. Carson almost fell off his chair.”
The next night, the band went to see Traffic, who was playing at The Scene. Jimi Hendrix was also there and invited Jack Casady and Steve Winwood back to a studio, where they recorded the legendary live version of “Voodoo Chile.”
On May 4, Jefferson Airplane played the first of two nights at the Fillmore East, where they would soon become the unofficial house band.
“New York was a big deal,” explained Jorma Kaukonen. “We worked a number of venues before the Fillmore East opened but when [it] did it was absolutely a home away from home.”15
The Fillmore East audience loved Jefferson Airplane, and the band would appear there more than any other musical act. They always played in front of Glenn McKay’s Light Show, who were considered part of the band and given special dispensation by the Joshua Light Show to perform there.
Opening for the Airplane on May 4 was The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, whom Bill Graham had discovered in London a year earlier. It was the band’s first stop on its first US tour, and Arthur Brown was suffering from jetlag and lack of sleep.
Before they went on, manager Chris Stamp handed Brown a powerful black bomber speed pill, saying it was what Keith Moon took to combat jetlag.
To allow the “God of Hellfire” to make a dramatic entrance, the Fillmore East technical staff had run a cable from the balcony to the stage. Brown was then attached to a winch and his helmet set alight as his band started to play “Prelude to a Nightmare.”
“He actually flew himself in from the balcony into the deck for his performance with his hair on fire,” said lighting director Chip Monck.16
But as Brown landed on the stage to thunderous applause, the speed started taking effect.
“The stage started to spin around,” he said. “I was still able to sing, so it didn’t interrupt the act, but I was concentrating on staying upright.”
The stage was bathed in half-light and somebody had left a trapdoor open by mistake. Brown fell right through it.
“I had the sensation of falling through space,” he remembered. “The next thing I knew the music was coming from a long way away.”
Realizing what had happened, he sobered up fast and managed to climb back onstage.
“The audience thought it was really good fun,” said Brown. “They saw me crawling out of a hole in the stage and thought, ‘Wow! Great Theatrics.’ I damaged my knee and it’s never fully recovered.”17
Reviewing the show for the New York Times, music critic Robert Shelton advised The Crazy World of Arthur Brown to pay “more attention to music and less to hokum.”
Then turning his attention to Jefferson Airplane’s performance later, Shelton applauded Grace Slick’s “striking” vocals.
“Grace Slick is the star here,” he wrote, “for her luminous and fluent alto voice is one of the ornaments of the group. She was soaring and poised on this occasion and the harmonization of Mr. Balin and others was especially effective.”18
On Sunday, May 5, Bill Graham organized a free concert in Central Park with Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. The bands all set up their equipment on a flatbed truck at the back of the bandshell, powered by portable generators. And an estimated ten thousand people turned up to see the afternoon show.
“Bill Graham’s Fillmore East has been . . . a revelation for New York audiences starved for quality rock,” observed the Village Voice, “but until Sunday something was missing. The bands knew it. Bill Graham knew it. So they got together and turned Central Park into the Panhandle. The coasts linked, and my head is still buzzing.”
After the concert, everybody went to the Sheep Meadow for an impromptu game of football. Bill Graham played quarterback, sporting a number 60 shirt to lead his Fillmore East Team to victory against a team fielded by the Grateful Dead. 19
That May, Jefferson Airplane purchased a massive three-story mansion at 2400 Fulton Street, across the street from Golden Gate Park. The seventeen-room Victorian mansion, which they renamed the Big House, would become an integral part of Jefferson Airplane folklore. Built in 1901, the structure reportedly offered refuge to opera legend Enrico Caruso during the night of fire after the 1906 earthquake.
Bill Thompson bought it from a ninety-three-year-old rancher, putting down a $20,000 deposit for the $73,000 mansion. At first the band members thought Thompson was crazy for buying such a large place, but they soon warmed to it.
“It was a beautiful old house,” said Grace Slick, “and we painted it black just to be kind of offensive.”20
It became the band’s headquarters, with the basement serving as a rehearsal space with a four-track recording studio. On the first floor was a games room with a Ping-Pong table and pool, leading into a dining room complete with a medieval torture rack used as a dining table.
Their resident martial arts instructor/cocaine dealer, who supplied the band with Merck Pharmaceutical cocaine, even had his own office in the basement. Inside were two huge nitrous oxide tanks with six spigots, so band members could get high together.
Grace had commissioned the wooden torture rack, complete with chains, winches, and screws, as well as an electric chair, which she placed alongside the Louis XIV couches and fancy furniture. On one occasion a stoned David Crosby was strapped onto the rack, and somebody turned the wheels until he screamed in pain.
“I had the macabre items specially made,” explained Grace, “because the juxtaposition of happy dining and instruments of death tickled my dark fancy.”21
Every couple of months, the Airplane would throw a lavishly catered banquet, complete with gourmet dishes, vintage wines, and acid-spiked punch.
“We had some of the great parties of all time there,” Bill Thompson fondly recalled. “Most of the members of the band lived there at one point.”22
Grace Slick and Spencer Dryden shared a room on the second floor, alternating between there and Grace’s house in Sausalito. Paul Kantner lived on the third floor, with its own private bathroom.
“That’s the best deal we ever made,” said Bill Thompson, who had found the house. “We used that 2400 Fulton Street for about twenty year
s.”23
On Friday, May 10, the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Sly and the Family Stone debuted at the Fillmore East with two sold-out shows. Despite sound problems, Hendrix played a long and blistering second set, including an amazing version of “Hey Joe.” The audience went crazy, bringing the Jimi Hendrix Experience back for an encore of “Wild Thing.”
“He was just staggering,” said John Morris, who was watching from the side of the stage. “And he was wearing a pair of velvet pants when he did his famous drop to his knees thing.”
Suddenly, Morris heard the distinctive sound of Hendrix’s skin-tight blue velvet pants ripping apart at the back seams.
“And he wasn’t wearing underwear,” he said. “The look on Jimi’s face—I mean he literally turned pink. And I thought, ‘Oh shit!’ ”
Thinking fast, Morris grabbed a towel and waved it at Hendrix, who was still playing his solo.
“And he sort of played his way into the wings,” said Morris, “and I wrapped it around him and tied it around his waist. And then he went back on and finished the set with a towel on. He was so cool. It was early Fillmore.” 24
Soon after the Fillmore East opened, one of the sound technicians secretly fed a wire from the mixing consul out of the Fillmore to an upstairs apartment to record all the shows in two-track stereo on ten-inch reel-to-reel tapes.
“It was all set up,” said Amalie Rothschild, who would become the Fillmore East house photographer, “and there was always somebody up there monitoring the tapes and changing the reels.”
Many years later, these priceless recordings of hundreds of Fillmore East shows would become part of the Bill Graham Archives, later to be bought by Wolfgang’s Vault and made available to the public.25
From the beginning, Village Voice music critic Robert Christgau knew that something special was happening at the Fillmore East. He lived just a few blocks away on Eighth Street and Avenue B with Ellen Willis, who was then art critic of the New Yorker.
“So we were like the big rock critic couple,” he explained in 2012. “We went [to the Fillmore East] every week. It was our ritual. We would go to the late show, have friends over and get stoned.”
Christgau viewed the new rock theater as a “ritual space,” where rock ’n’ roll, politics, and bohemia all collided, creating something far bigger than the sum of its parts.
“The confluence of hippies, rock ’n’ roll and bohemians achieving both commercial success and popular renown,” he said, “was to us an incredibly big fucking deal. And it was the place where you could see that happening.”26
And by mid-May, the Fillmore East was also making waves in the fashion world.
“In fashion terms a Fillmore East opening deserves as much coverage as the Philharmonic Galanosed Galas,” stated the Village Voice in its Outside Fashion column. “With some tribal differences it’s a scene-making pageant whether they’re seeing Lenny at Lincoln Center or Jimi at the Fillmore. Both audiences have their peacock strutting groupies, who could be classified ad infinitum.”
When Bill Graham, who favored baggy white shirts and jeans, was asked to comment, he was glib.
“I’m a functionalist,” he declared, “and I’m working constantly during every performance, so I can’t be hung up on beads and Nehru jackets. I’d probably choke to death on all those damn necklaces, just running up and down the aisles with the folding chairs. Besides I just don’t have the balls to wear them.”27
Janis Joplin also claimed to have little interest in fashion, although young girls all over America were starting to copy her new “got together” style.
“The Total Janis Look,” explained the Village Voice’s Stephanie Harrington, “is wearing everything and anything from her gypsy cape to her antique lace tablecloth bellbottoms to her rabbit fur Cossack hat which she made herself.”
Janis told the Voice that she “really don’t give a damn about clothes” and was “an absolute slob” as an art student.
“I groove on my clothes now because I have to,” she said. “I’m entertaining in front of an audience and I have to care how I look, regardless how I really feel.”
Janis said she collaborated with friends on her styles, and most of her outfits consisted of separates, bellbottom pants, and tops with low square necklines and long sleeves.
“[So] I can give my body the most freedom while I’m singing,” she explained. “Anything that interferes with my thing, baby, forget it.”
Janis also revealed that her stunning glass beaded necklaces and belts were her own creations.
“Bead stringing is a real thing with me,” she said. “It’s like therapy.” 28
After playing the West Coast, Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company returned to New York. It was early June, and the pressure to deliver an album was mounting. There were already huge advance orders for the new album, certifying it gold before it was anywhere near finished. And CBS chief Clive Davis wanted to release it immediately. So the band went back into the studio for more grueling sessions.
Producer John Simon discovered that Janis was anything but spontaneous while recording, working hard at perfecting her vocal phrases.
“Whereas a blues artist would sort of scream from the soul with whatever scream came to mind at the moment,” said Simon, “Janis would try out different screams and say, ‘How do you like this scream?’ ‘How about this scream in this place?’ So it was all very calculated. It wasn’t sincere.”
Sam Andrew believes it came down to Janis’s insecurity, and he would also see her practice outrageous lines in front of the mirror before delivering them word-for-word at interviews.
“She wasn’t really much of a star from day one,” said Andrew. “She would practice these things to say in interviews and riffs to sing onstage. She always did that. She was this powerful person who was really insecure.”29
While Big Brother were recording, top fashion photographer Richard Avedon shot Janis for a Vogue photo spread that came out in June, anointing her the “leading woman” in rock.
“Janis assaults a song with her eyes, her hips and her hair,” read the accompanying story. “She defies key, shrieking over one line, sputtering over the next, and clutching the knees of a final stanza, begging it not to leave.”
A feature on Janis in Time magazine soon followed, as well as numerous newspaper and magazine interviews. But none mentioned the other members of the band.
“And this eventually had an effect,” said John Cooke. “They would be resentful. I think the focus of the press on Janis was wearing over time. Some reviews in the press would basically suggest that Janis was good enough to do whatever she wanted to do.”30
During that short period, the marquee, posters, and billing changed drastically. It went from “Big Brother and the Holding Company” to “Big Brother and the Holding Company featuring Janis Joplin,” to “Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company.”
“I’m sure that made her heart beat faster,” said John Cooke. “How can it not?”
And all the time Albert Grossman was pressuring Janis to ditch the band and go it alone.
“Grossman started hitting on her really heavy,” said Peter Albin, “telling her the band was not up to her quality.”
Janis and several of her band members started using heroin at the time of their recording sessions in New York.
“[Heroin] was easier to get in New York than San Francisco,” said Peter Albin, who avoided hard drugs. “It was a problem for us . . . and also the downfall of the band.”31
Janis later told the New York Times that she thought New York made everyone uptight and aggressive.
“San Francisco’s different,” she said. “I don’t mean it’s perfect, but the rock bands there didn’t start because they wanted to make it. They dug getting stoned and playing for people dancing. What we have to do is learn to control success.”
In mid-June, the album was finally finished, after John Simon had quit and insisted he not be credited as producer. There were now more than two hundred reels of tape in the can, but none that Simon considered usable.
Columbia house producer Elliot Mazer was then brought in to edit and mix all the recorded tapes into an album. Janis insisted on being there with him to ensure quality.
Big Brother had wanted to call the album Sex, Dope and Cheap Thrills, but Clive Davis refused, warning it would be too controversial for many record stores to carry. Instead they compromised and called it, simply, Cheap Thrills.
In July, Clive Davis flew Big Brother and the Holding Company to Puerto Rico for the annual Columbia Records Company Convention. After playing a stunning showcase set for executives, Janis was disappointed when they displayed little reaction. But afterwards she enthusiastically networked on the convention floor, oozing “Texas Charm.”
“It’s the sort of thing that many artists, particularly the hipper ones, have a difficult time doing,” recalled Davis, “but Janis enjoyed it. ‘Oh you’re going to be selling my album? I hope you like it,’ she’d say to one salesman with a girlish sweetness. To another, she’d declare, ‘I hope you can sell the shit out of my album, man!’ ”32
Soon after the convention, Big Brother flew to San Francisco to play Bill Graham’s Winterland Ballroom. The opening band was The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, and they met backstage.
“Janis had a bottle of Southern Comfort in one hand,” said Arthur Brown, “and some other stuff in the other. She was quite rip-roaringly raucous and bossing the band about.”33
While in San Francisco, Big Brother also played several shows at the Carousel Ballroom, which was now losing money. The Jefferson Airplane/Grateful Dead joint venture was based on a community mind-set, and the musicians held regular meetings to discuss what was going wrong. Janis turned up at one, bearing a bottle of liquor, a loaf of bread, and a sausage.