by John Glatt
After Traffic’s final encore, Graham was led out onstage to a round of applause as a photograph of his newborn son, David, just flown in from San Francisco, was projected onto the giant light show screen. It was his very first look at his son, and he shared the moment with his Fillmore East audience.
A few hours earlier, Life magazine hit the streets with another candid interview with Janis Joplin, headlined “Singer with the Bordello Voice.” Writer Al Aronowitz had interviewed Janis at the El Quijote Restaurant next to the Chelsea Hotel on a recent afternoon, where she was knocking back screwdrivers for breakfast.
“If [Janis] wasn’t so feminine, she might have become a lady wrestler,” wrote Aronowitz. “She’s pop music’s only broad, and whether she’s singing or talking it’s with all the sound of a Hells Angels exhaust pipe. Like Mae West, she could be the greatest lady who ever walked the streets.”
The article also observed that just a week after Cheap Thrills was released, Janis had sent the rest of Big Brother back to San Francisco, while she “shopped around” for a new band.
“I want a bigger band with higher highs,” she told Aronowitz, “a bigger ladder and I want more bottom—I want an incredible amount of bottom. I want more noise. When I do a rock tune I want it to be so HUGE.”41
Back in San Francisco after their European Tour, Jefferson Airplane threw a housewarming party at 2400 Fulton Street. Long banquet tables stretching the entire length of the first floor—from the billiards room to the great hall—were laden with stuffed birds, racks of lamb, and a suckling pig, prepared by GUSS (The Grand Ultimate Steward Service). At each place setting was a perfectly rolled joint of the best marijuana. Fine vintage wines were served by uniformed waiters, and the punch bowl was overflowing with Owsley’s latest batch of LSD.
On Sunday, September 29, the Airplane made its second appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, signaling their mainstream success in America.
“The number one rock group in the country,” went Sullivan’s introduction. “For the youngsters, let’s hear it, the Jefferson Airplane.”
Jefferson Airplane then lip-synced to the newly released “Crown of Creation,” with swirling psychedelic patterns projected behind them on a blue screen. As the band arrived in blue jeans and refused to change, they appeared to disappear from the waist down. Ed Sullivan was angry and they were never invited back.
The following day they played another free Bill Graham concert in Central Park, supported by Country Joe and the Fish, Ten Years After, and Buddy Guy.
“There were forty thousand people there,” recalled Barry Melton of Country Joe and the Fish. “It was huge and in the middle of our dates at the Fillmore East. And I remember climbing on top of the thirty-foot towers of speakers in the middle of some guitar break. I almost killed myself.”
The next day, Graham’s Fillmore East football team challenged the New York City Police Department to a game in Central Park. Graham invited Melton to play wide receiver for him.
“So I took a bunch of drugs that put you up for a football game and showed up,” he said. “I was good, man. The guys were throwing to me and I was getting hit. I mean this was a bruising exercise. Bill played.”
The New York cops easily beat the Fillmore East team.
“They smashed us to smithereens,” said Melton. “It was awfully hard contact [with] no padding or helmets. You just went out there and got hurt.”42
Graham’s passionate affair with Diane LaChambre was now an open secret among the staff at both Fillmores, but no one dared challenge him on it.
“And it wasn’t for me to comment as to what was proper and what wasn’t,” said Kip Cohen. “I understood . . . but it had its consequences—his marriage and his relationship with his son.”43
Diane now became a fixture backstage at the Fillmore West, and Graham proudly showed her off to his friends.
“I met her backstage a couple of times at the Fillmore West,” recalled Bill Thompson. “Bill used to always say, ‘She’s got the greatest butt.’ ”44
After a brief visit to San Francisco to see Bonnie and hold their baby David for the first time, Graham took Diane for a three-day vacation to John Morris’s luxury home in the Virgin Islands.
“He came down with her,” recalled Morris, “and it wasn’t done well. If Bill was going to have an affair, even if he was going to have it three thousand miles away from Bonnie, he didn’t have the instincts. He didn’t have the thoughtfulness. He didn’t have whatever it took to keep it a quiet, secret affair.”45
A couple of months later, Graham boasted to the New York Times about his recent dream vacation, staying in a big house with its own private beach.
“It was Holiday magazine but real,” he gushed. “I never knew that world existed. I never have time to discover those things. I work too hard making money to spend it.”46
Soon afterward, Graham told John Morris that Kip Cohen was now running the Fillmore East and Morris was out.
“I was fired,” said Morris. “Kip Cohen had wheedled his way into my position. Bill said to me, ‘I don’t think we’re a suit anymore. Kip can run the theater.’ And I thought, ‘I’ve just been fired.’ ”47
In late September, Janis Joplin bought an oyster-white 1965 Porsche 356C Cabriolet from a Beverly Hills dealer for $3,500 ($24,000). After the car was delivered to her San Francisco home, she had her friend Dave Richards paint it in a stunning psychedelic design, with an image of her and the members of Big Brother and the Holding Company on the left fender.
Janis and her psychedelic Porsche soon became a common sight driving through Haight-Ashbury. It became one of her most treasured possessions.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Catching Fire
October to December, 1968
With her two-year relationship with Spencer Dryden disintegrating, Grace Slick hit the bottle with a vengeance. On Thursday, October 3, the Jefferson Airplane played a fund-raising evening at the Whitney Museum in New York, for the same kind of WASPy society crowd she had grown up detesting in Palo Alto.
“They didn’t know what to make of us,” said Grace, “the women in minks and diamonds, and they’re really straight in their beehive hairdos. Each weekend they have a new performance group and I guess they were trying to be cool and have new stuff.”1
The evening got off to a bad start when the security guards barred Jack Casady from entering until one of the organizers came down to explain who he was. Grace had brought along a bottle of Southern Comfort, and she proceeded to down it before they went on. By the time classical pianist Raymond Lewenthal had finished playing his opener—pieces by Scriabin and Liszt—Grace was bombed.
The band had been waiting in an upstairs room in the Whitney, and Grace had been given a wireless microphone to use. It was the first time she had ever seen one.
In the elevator, going down to the great hall, Grace started mocking the audience, unaware that every word she was saying was coming through the PA system.
“I had this wireless mike and I’m talking,” she said. “And the band was going, ‘Oh Jesus, we haven’t even gone on yet, Grace.’ By the time we got to the stage the audience was completely nonplussed.”
As they began playing, Grace startled hurling insults at the rich audience wearing tuxedos and evening gowns.
“Hello, you fools,” she told them. “You got Rembrandts on the mantel and a Rolls in the garage, but your old man still wouldn’t know a clitoris from a junk bond, if you had the guts to show him your twat in the first place.”
During one song she slurred into an incoherent monologue, calling the Whitney patrons of the arts “filthy jewels,” which many of them misheard as “filthy Jews.”
Then she went on to insult the curator’s wife, demanding to know if she ever slept with her husband or only saw him at fund-raisers. The rest of the band carried on playing, well used to Grace’s unpredict
ability onstage.
The Village Voice was there to witness the “out of wack” show, and Annie Fisher’s negative review appeared in her next “Riffs” column.
“Grace was at her most abrasive,” it read, “stalking around with a wireless mike, spattering her own, in her anti-properness. Someone who shall remain nameless here said later that she should be told she’s a marshmallow and just come off it, baby. Grace Slick, stockbroker’s daughter and Finch dropout, is not, in the farthest stretches of anyone’s imagination except her own, funky. And funny and cheap are polarities. I would like to hear what she can do besides sing off-key. Off-color, she just don’t make it man.”
Manager Bill Thompson witnessed many crazy scenes going down over the years when Grace went on a three-day bender.
“[It] was always an adventure,” he said. “Given the combination of Grace and drink and a full moon and when Grace was having her period, it was a very dangerous time. She didn’t just drink a little—she’d drink everything she could lay her hands on.”2
At the end of October, Jefferson Airplane headlined the Fillmore West for three nights with the Ballet Afro-Haiti and a Milwaukee blues band called AB Skhy. The plan was to record all the shows for a live album, and the Lee Conklin poster for the show carried the enticing side banner, “recording Live” on it.
One of the Airplane’s main problems was that their records failed to deliver the band’s raw energy they had when playing live. They had been trying to capture their electrifying performances on tape for two years without success.
“The first time we recorded ourselves live it was so awful,” explained Spencer Dryden. “We’d play the tapes and it was a contest to see who could listen all the way through and not have to leave the room. It was just shit.”3
This time it would finally work. The subsequent Bless Its Little Pointed Head live album, which would be released the following February, would have six tracks from the October Fillmore West shows. The rest would be recorded at the upcoming Thanksgiving shows at the Fillmore East.
“The Fillmores were our home ground,” said Paul Kantner. “They were a large garden party and tribal gathering. They were our tribal stomping grounds.”4
On November 1, Grace Slick was on every front page in America after performing in blackface on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. At the end of her performance of “Crown of Creation,” she raised her fist in a black power salute, showing solidarity with the radical Black Panthers.
Bill Thompson says Grace got the idea a couple of weeks earlier after watching the Mexico City Olympic Games, where US sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave the salute during the medal ceremonies.
“That’s why Grace wore a blackface in sympathy with them,” said Thompson. “She’s forgotten why she did it, but I remember.”5
Paul Kantner said he never saw what all the fuss in the media was about.
“It was just Grace being Grace,” he said. “I mean it was another thing to do. We got away with stuff like that and we didn’t consider it daring. It was just something to do.”6
In mid-October, Bill Graham presented the Jimi Hendrix Experience for two shows at Winterland, while Country singer Buck Owens and his Buckeroos played across town at the Fillmore West.
“And it was a disaster,” Graham told journalist Howard Smith. “So I advertised it. One poster said ‘Jimi Hendrix at Winterland,’ and we did monstrous business. And then we had ‘Bill Graham Presents the Buck Owens Country and Western Show at Fillmore West.’ ”
Graham said his big mistake was mentioning the Fillmore West, as it put off Buck Owens’s straight country fans.
“The Fillmore for the straights has a certain dangerous air about it,” he explained. “You know that’s the place where they ‘smoke dope,’ do those strange things and wear those funny clothes . . . in that never, never land. I realized after that that if I had said, ‘Bill Graham Presents Buck Owens at the Hoochie Club,’ we would have filled up.”7
In the late Sixties it was standard for a headline act to take 60 percent of the gross and be responsible for all the promoter’s local expenses. Promoters paid a guarantee of $10,000 and split the gross sixty/forty, with the band paying its touring expenses. Once the deal was signed, the promoter assumed all risk for the show.
“All promoters are gamblers,” said Bob Grossweiner of Performance magazine. “The highest rollers at the poker table are the promoters and they don’t care if they win or lose. In the concert situation the promoters are the only ones at risk. Everyone else has a guaranteed salary.”8
In order to survive, promoters needed to know the sales potential of any given act to use as a starting point in their negotiations with the performers’ agent.
The profits to be made were enormous. A typical Fillmore East program ran for two evening performances on Friday and Saturday. Tickets were $3, $4, and $5, and a full house for all four shows would gross Graham $45,000 ($300,000). Set against the operating expenses of running the Fillmore East and paying the musicians, Graham could clear $17,000 ($115,000) profit on a good weekend. The Fillmore West made him $6,000 ($40,000). This gave him the potential to earn $832,000 ($5.6 million) a year from just staging concerts, without taking the larger Winterland or any of his other interests into account.
Bill Graham’s conspicuous success was unpopular with many counterculture activists, who accused him of exploiting the community. He now drove a green convertible Jaguar XKE that he had won in a crap game, and he and Bonnie had moved into a luxurious apartment in Pacific Heights. He also liked to boast about his new trappings of success in interviews.
His constant presence on Second Avenue standing outside the Fillmore East, taking tickets and yelling orders at people, made him many enemies.
“Once the Fillmore was established and very successful,” said New York journalist and broadcaster Howard Smith, “there was going to be some backlash in the community about if you’re giving enough back to the community. That was always the cry. And they started to target the Fillmore.”
The fuse was lit by the underground newspaper the East Village Other, whose staff had became his tenants when he bought the Fillmore East. In early October, the paper cruelly attacked Graham in an editorial, wishing he had followed his family into the Nazi concentration camps. When Graham read it he stormed into the editor’s office, turned over his desk, and threw him out into the street.
Soon afterward, a revolutionary street gang called the Motherfuckers (short for “Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker”), who were looking for a cause, fixed their sights on Bill Graham. And in the name of the people, they demanded that the Fillmore East be open to the community one night a week.
“[The Motherfuckers] were out of their fucking minds,” said Smith, who covered the story in the Village Voice. “And they loved disrupting things just for the sake of it.”
Motherfuckers’ spokesman Ben Morea told Rolling Stone, “The Fillmore’s interests are not our interests, and that’s the conflict. They’re into making money and we’re into living.”
In an attempt to avoid a possible community boycott, Graham agreed to their demands to “liberate” the Fillmore for one free night a week.
But there was trouble when the Living Theater staged their play Paradise Now at the Fillmore on one of the first free nights. When an actor suddenly announced that the people were going to liberate the Fillmore, Graham dashed onstage to defend his theater. Quickly overpowered, he was tied to a chair on the stage, where he remained for the next six hours, arguing and screaming at the rioters.
“It was their drama and Bill’s drama but in retrospect it was hysterical,” said Lee Blumer, who hid in the sound booth during the takeover.
“Bill battled the Motherfuckers,” said Joshua White. “They were demanding that the theater should be free and accused us of stealing money from the community. Bill told them, ‘It will be free when the musicia
ns play for free, and the airplanes fly them here for free, and the limousines are free.’ His argument was pretty tight.”9
The next day, an angry Graham told the Village Voice what he thought of the Fillmore takeover.
“Those rotten pieces of shit,” he said. “I’m so sick and fucking tired of listening to that ‘rip off the community’ shit. I told those pieces of shit, you get the musicians, and you get the equipment and you pay my stage people, and I’ll let you have this place on Wednesday. For all I care, this community can fucking shrivel up and die if they continue to let themselves be represented by that bunch of cheap-ass chicken-shit punks.”
Yet within a few days, Graham backed down and agreed to allow the Motherfuckers the use of the Fillmore every Wednesday night.
However the first free Wednesday after the Village Voice piece was a disaster, attracting Bowery bums, winos, and speed freaks from St. Marks Place, who vandalized the Fillmore. Then the police stepped in, ordering Graham to stop the open drug taking during the free nights or risk losing his operating license. Graham replied by circulating an open letter to the community, appealing for order. It cited, “Incidents of physical confrontation, and the blatant use, distribution, and sale of drugs on the premises—obviously illegal” and urged “intelligence, understanding and grace.”
The Motherfuckers replied with a letter of their own. In the radical black-and-white rhetoric of the times it read: “Situation: Pigs and Bill Graham stop free night. Why? They say we smoke, they say we take dope, but we know it’s because they are afraid of us. Afraid that we’ll get together there to destroy their world and create our own. The pigs threaten to close Graham down unless he stops our free night. He doesn’t have to worry about the pigs. We’ll close him down. No free night, no pay night.”
Then Bill Graham—to the anger of many—canceled the free nights and kept the Fillmore closed on Wednesdays.