by John Glatt
“Well what is it?” she cackled. “Music or money?”34
On June 16, Big Brother and the Holding Company had headlined the Fillmore Auditorium for a benefit for the Matrix, with a hot new opening act named the Santana Blues Band. During the last six months, Bill Graham had quietly nurtured Carlos Santana and guided his career. After Graham’s firing by Jefferson Airplane, Santana and Stan Marcum had invited Graham to manage their affairs. On a handshake deal he became their de facto manager, taking 10 percent instead of the usual 15 percent commission.
“I never asked for papers from anyone,” Graham later explained. “Because I felt, I’m good and you’re good. If we get along why have a marriage license. I’d rather live together.”35
That spring, Graham provided Santana with a rehearsal space and started booking the guitarist’s band around the Bay Area through his new company, Shady Management. He also had them open at the Fillmore Auditorium whenever there was a hole in the program. He wanted them to gain more experience and find their chops before they were ready to headline.
“Bill Graham just adopted us,” said Carlos Santana. “He loved to play salsa music, but he only called it Afro-Cuban music. And so we were the closest to that because we played blues with congas.”
One day Graham had a serious talk with Carlos and the other band members, telling them they had something really special.
“He said, ‘You guys got something different,’ ” said Carlos, “ ‘Something that makes the pelvis move in a different way. Your music is two things that should never be separated; spiritual and sensual. So stop fighting it.’ ”36
Santana Blues Band was paid $600 for the Matrix Benefit and were at the bottom of the bill, but their spirited set made a big impression. In the signed contract for the benefit, Carlos Santana is listed as the leader of the band, which now consisted of Carlos on guitar, Gregg Rolie on keyboards, Bob “Doc” Livingston on drums, Marcus Malone on congas, and David Brown on bass.
A couple of days after the benefit, the band decided to change its name simply to “Santana,” and everything started coming together.
“But the idea of calling it Santana,” said Herbie Herbert, whom Bill Graham had just installed as road manager, “was probably a big mistake.”37
Back in New York, the Fillmore East was taking off as audiences flocked to see the eclectic bills that Bill Graham now presented. In May, Country Joe and the Fish had played shows at the Fillmore Auditorium and Winterland in San Francisco before making their debut at the Fillmore East a week later. The two opening acts were Pigmeat Markham, who had just had a huge hit with the novelty song “Here Comes the Judge,” and Blue Cheer, probably the loudest band to ever play there.
“I remember how excited I was at the prospect of playing with Pigmeat Markham,” recalled lead guitarist Barry Melton. “He put on a wig like an English barrister with black robes and stuff. He was a showman. Blue Cheer were loud. You had to be in a certain mood to appreciate them.”38
The night before, Indian sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar had played the Fillmore East, and Bill Graham had wanted to make him feel at home.
“Bill was not a star fucker, he was a star honorer,” explained his assistant Lee Blumer. “And I remember before Ravi Shankar, we had gone out and bought three hundred carnations and put them on the stage. That was very beautiful and was like a welcoming gesture. It wasn’t in somebody’s rider.”39
Graham had also had an employee check out the neighborhood’s best Indian restaurants, and after soundcheck he offered to send out for an Indian meal. Shankar thanked him but declined, saying he’d much prefer a couple of cheese Danishes from Rattner’s.
The Jewish dairy restaurant next door had been about to close for lack of business before the Fillmore East arrived. But once the Fillmore opened, it thrived. Bill Graham used it as a suboffice, holding business meetings there and listing it on his cards as his business address. And it also became an aftershow ritual for Graham and many of his staff to eat an early-morning breakfast there.
“You’d see half the stage crew at Rattner’s getting breakfast or lunch,” said Allan Arkush, an NYU film student who moonlighted as a Fillmore East usher. “Then after the show we’d go there and sometimes the bands actually paid for food.”40
On the weekend of June 14, 1968, the Grateful Dead played the Fillmore East for the first time. Former Yardbirds’ guitarist Jeff Beck opened for them, with future Rolling Stone Ron Wood and his then-unknown singer Rod Stewart, making his American debut.
That weekend, as the Dead played his venue, Bill Graham secretly flew to Ireland to try to wrestle control of their Carousel Ballroom away from them. Due to the ineptitude of the Dead and the Airplane’s cronies in running the ballroom, it was now heavily in debt. Graham saw an opportunity to seize it.
In the wake of the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination, elements of San Francisco’s black community were harassing Graham’s predominantly white audience. Ticket sales were down, as many fans were too scared to go out. To survive, Graham knew he needed a new venue in a safer part of town.
“The Fillmore neighborhood became a battleground in the streets,” said Graham, “[with] black and white [and] racial issues. And I was ready to lose my business.”41
Situated on the busy corner of Van Ness and Market, the Carousel was owned by Bill Fuller, who was in Ireland on business.
Knowing his competitors would also be bidding for the Carousel, Graham flew across the Atlantic and tracked Fuller down to a construction site near Shannon. Over breakfast and a bottle of bourbon, the two men then hammered out a deal for the Carousel. An overjoyed Graham left with a five-year lease on the Carousel, just in time to catch an early plane back to the States.
On Saturday, June 22, after a Georgie Fame show, Bill Graham closed the Fillmore East for a month so that Chris Langhart could rebuild the ancient air conditioner from scratch. It was a brutally hot summer, and audiences had been sweltering. The old movie theater air conditioner was constantly breaking down.
“It was a serious business,” said Langhart. “We put a new cooling tower on the roof—just hired a crane and up it went.”42
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Fillmore West
July to September, 1968
The final show at the Fillmore Auditorium was on Thursday, July 4, 1968, two and a half years after Bill Graham had opened it, igniting the San Francisco music scene. The last marquee bore the words “Nothing Lasts,” and headlining the emotional closing was a new East Bay band called Creedence Clearwater Revival, currently riding the Top 40 with an eight-and-a-half-minute cover of the Fifties classic “Suzie Q.” At the end of the night, Bill Graham led a chanting conga line a mile downtown to his newly acquired Carousel Ballroom—now renamed Fillmore West.
“It was a historic gig,” recalled Graham. “It was very, very hectic and madness. We were being a little tearful about leaving that place, but being very happy because we were going into a better neighborhood.”1
The very next night, without missing a beat, Graham presented a sold-out weekend at the new Fillmore West, with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Ten Years After, and Fleetwood Mac.
A former ballroom turned car dealership, the Fillmore West building had a large parquet wooden dance floor. It was more than twice as big as the Fillmore Auditorium had been, holding 2,800 people. But soon Graham was defying the legal capacity and letting many more people in.
In deference to the fire marshals, Graham would stand at the top of the stairs, collecting tickets in a small basket. But he didn’t tear them. And as soon as the basket was full, he’d race back down to the booking office to resell the same tickets. If they were ever raided by fire marshals, he would swear he had only sold the legal number of tickets.
Even while he was across the country in New York, Graham obsessively worried that his Fillmore West staff were not packing enough people in. Jim Haynie, now back a
t the Fillmore West after a year on the road with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, was left in charge while Graham was away.
“Bill called me at least five times a night to see how many people had come to the show,” said Haynie. “I told him the fire marshals had been ’round to check on us and were still on the premises. Bill got angry and said, ‘Damn it! You’ve got to do better than that!’ ”2
Soon after opening the Fillmore West, Graham erected basketball hoops on either side of the large parquet wooden dance floor for his beloved Tuesday-night games. He named his team the Fillmore Fingers, with an aggressive logo of a clenched fist with a finger sticking up sewn on their purple uniforms. His star players were his six-foot, four-inch nephew Avi Chichinsky and Jim Haynie, who was just an inch shorter.
“And of course Bill was the nob and Avi and I were the underneath guys,” recalled Haynie. “We played the Grateful Dead and other teams from radio stations.”3
Barry Melton of Country Joe and the Fish often played basketball against the Fillmore Fingers.
“Bill was a vicious basketball player,” said Melton. “He was mean. He hit you. He kicked you. I mean he’d get in close and he would hurt you. It was more than a game to Bill, because he was so competitive.”4
On July 1, The Band released its landmark album Music from Big Pink. Up to then, Bob Dylan’s former backing group had never played their own live show. Bill Graham was determined to be the first to present them. To court The Band, he took his six-months-pregnant wife to spend the weekend at their manager Albert Grossman’s spread near Woodstock, in upstate New York.
While they were there, Graham was at his most charming while trying to persuade The Band to play some shows for him.
“He kept talking about how we owed it to ‘the people’ to play,” recalled guitarist Robbie Robertson. “So I just said, ‘Bill, how do I meet these people you speak of?’ And he said, ‘The best place would be in the Winterland, in San Francisco—that’s where there’s the most love—and then at the Fillmore East, in New York.’ ”5
Also discussed was Bob Dylan playing the Fillmore East, with The Band backing him up. At the end of the weekend, Albert Grossman refused to commit to anything concrete.
“They told me they weren’t thinking about performing live,” Graham later explained. “So I said, ‘But there are so many people who wanna hear you.’ What I hadn’t realized was that they weren’t entertainers, they were players.”
On July 16, Big Brother and the Holding Company played the first of three nights at the new Fillmore West that would gross a total of $33,843 ($226,000). With the release of Cheap Thrills less than a month away, Big Brother hit the road to promote it. And the tension in the band got thicker and thicker as the stakes got higher. It seemed all work and no play, leaving little opportunity for the band members to blow off steam.
“Life on the road [when] we released Cheap Thrills,” said Sam Andrew, “consisted of motels, the soundcheck and then playing the gig. It was too insane.”6
On July 27 they played the Newport Folk Festival, and the eighteen-thousand-strong audience adored them. Janis wore a sexy minidress with a neckline plunging down to her navel, and she was brought back for two encores, receiving a huge standing ovation for her stunning performance of “Ball and Chain.”
A triumphant Big Brother left the stage at one o’clock and found Albert Grossman and his wife, Sally, waiting in the wings. Grossman then “dragged” bassist Peter Albin and drummer David Getz into a tent behind the stage, complaining that their rhythm section just did not make it.
“I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ ” recalled Albin. “‘They just went nuts over the band. This is the way we play.’ ”7
The next Rolling Stone carried an eviscerating critique of Janis’s Newport performance by Jon Landau, who would go on to manage Bruce Springsteen. When Janis read it she was gutted.
“From my point of view Big Brother was not very good,” he wrote. “And then there is Janis. Talent, yes. A fantastic voice, yes. A great singer, no. To me her melodrama, overstatement and coarseness are not virtues. They are signs of a lack of sophistication and a lack of security with her material. Janis is a little too obvious for my tastes.”
Landau then castigated Big Brother for their weak musicianship and criticized Janis for overusing her “gimmicks” to the point of becoming a “bore.”
“Judging from their performance here,” he wrote, “the rhythm section never really happens. The whole band drags her at every turn.”8
Soon afterwards Time magazine profiled Janis and Big Brother under the headline, “Passionate and Sloppy.”
“When I go onstage to sing,” Janis explained to the Time writer, “it’s like the ‘rush’ that people experience when they take heavy dope. Sex is the closest I can come to explaining it, but it’s more than sex. I get stoned from happiness. I want to do it until it isn’t there anymore.”
Playing down her musical ambitions, Janis told Time she was not a “dispassionate professional.”
“We’re passionate and we’re sloppy,” she declared. “I’m untutored native folk talent—I like that phrase, it’s so pretentious.”
She also boasted of drinking so much Southern Comfort that “I may own that company some day,” saying her only regimen was not drinking cold beer before a performance.9
After having its air-conditioning system installed, the Fillmore East reopened on Friday, July 19, with a weekend of Jefferson Airplane shows. Kip Cohen had now been appointed managing director, as John Morris had taken a leave of absence to organize the upcoming European tour of the Airplane and The Doors.
Bill Graham, who wanted to repair his frayed relationship with Jefferson Airplane, ordered Chip Monck to come up with something really special to start the band’s set.
“It was really important to Bill to impress the Jefferson Airplane,” said Joshua White. “It was truly a love/hate relationship.”10
So the Fillmore East technical staff constructed a giant model airplane, which would take off from behind Spencer Dryden’s drum kit while accompanied by a recording of a Boeing jet engine. The airplane was actually two hollow ones inside each other. They were made out of paper and stretched wire, with five-foot wingspans, bright headlights, and red taillights.
As Jefferson Airplane prepared to go onstage, the Joshua Light Show projected stock footage of a runway on the screen while the sound crew played a tape of jet engines revving up.
The model airplane had been attached to a fishing line running out of the lobby, through the candy counter, and out onto Second Avenue. And for its takeoff, the Fillmore staff stopped the traffic outside so Chip Monck could reel in the fishing line from the other side of Second Avenue.
Then the model plane took off from behind the drum kit, flying just over the heads of the gasping audience and up to the balcony. Then it dramatically split in half, one side continuing on to the back of the balcony, while the other flew to the rear of the orchestra. To make it even more authentic, the smell of kerosene was pumped into the theater.
The stunt was a huge success, and Jefferson Airplane was impressed.
“Bill’s an absolute maven,” said Jorma Kaukonen. “This gigantic quarter-size airplane zoomed across the audience. What a guy.” 11
On July 31, Jefferson Airplane manager, Bill Thompson, wrote Bill Graham a thank-you letter.
Dear Bill,
On behalf of Jefferson Airplane, I would like to thank you very much for the nice way we were treated by the entire staff of the Fillmore East, and by yourself, during our visit to New York.
The group enjoyed playing Fillmore East, and thought that the wooden airplane was a real gas.
Be talking to you soon …
Peace, Bill Thompson.12
At the beginning of August, Big Brother was in New York for a weekend of shows at the Fillmore East. Soon after arriving,
Janis met her heroin dealer at the Chelsea Hotel and went on a binge. After all the bad reviews, Albert Grossman had finally persuaded her to dump Big Brother, and she was now trying to summon up the strength to tell them.
Ten Years After and The Staple Singers were opening for Big Brother at the Fillmore East, and Sam Andrew was late for the first show.
“Bill was so furious,” remembered Andrew. “He screamed, ‘You fucking amateur! God damn you!’ ”
At the first show, Janis watched Mavis Staples in awe from the wings.
“I’ll never be able to sing like that,” she whispered to her friend and publicist, Myra Friedman. A few minutes later she was brought onstage by Pops Staples to join them for a song.
Big Brother’s final shows at the Fillmore East were among their best. In the Village Voice’s “Riffs” column, Annie Fisher wrote that Big Brother “sounds better to me this time. And the selection of material has improved—more variety in texture and tempo.”
At the end of the second show on Saturday night, the packed house audience were on their feet, screaming for more.
“The band had come back onstage and I looked into the wings for [Janis],” wrote Fisher. “It was a moment frozen in time. She stood back there, pulling herself together for one more time, and her evident exhaustion was raw and frightening. I’d like to forget that look, but I won’t for a long time.”13
After the show, Bill Graham threw a champagne reception in the band’s dressing room, which he had painted purple, Janis’s favorite color. During a party, Friedman noticed a “tall, curly-headed” stranger hand-slip a small package of heroin to Janis, who was swigging Southern Comfort.
“Janis’s drinking served to distract the public from an awareness of her drug use,” said Friedman. “With the bottle as a talisman, she floated in and out of Holiday Inns and backstage at hundreds of concerts without arousing the slightest suspicion.”14