by John Glatt
With the pressure now squarely on her shoulders, Janis was taking more and more drugs to escape into oblivion.
“She had to become a businesswoman and she was afraid of that,” said Sam Andrew, who often joined her on binges. “There was no brake on her as far as drugs go. She took a lot more drugs when she left Big Brother. It was just a natural progression . . . just becoming more of a superstar.”10
On January 19, Janis celebrated her twenty-sixth birthday with a crate of Southern Comfort and an orgy.
“Me and Linda and two guys for two days, man,” she later boasted. “The best party I ever had.”11
At the beginning of February, Albert Grossman booked her into a tiny off-the-beaten-track theater in Rindge, New Hampshire, for what was officially being called “a sound test,” to avoid any further humiliation. The next day she played “a preview” at the Boston Music Hall in preparation for her big Fillmore East debut as a solo act in early February.
“The pressure is on,” said John Cooke. “She’s decided to go off on her own and she doesn’t want to fail.”12
By the beginning of 1969, Bill Graham’s Fillmore East and West were running like clockwork and the money was pouring in. His marriage falling apart, Graham was now spending more and more time away from San Francisco, running his ever-expanding operation.
“The Fillmores are now what the Savoy, the Paramount and the Apollo used to be,” declared the New York Times, “great stages on which anyone who counts appears; to make it on them is to make it with the whole youth market.”13
Graham now split his time 70/30 between San Francisco and New York, leaving Kip Cohen in charge of running the Fillmore East. It was fast developing its own personality, one distinct from its West Coast sibling. The Fillmore West was more laid back, with a ballroom for dancing, while the Fillmore East was virtually a Broadway theater, with ushers to escort patrons to their assigned seats. It even had perfume dispensers in the ladies’ bathrooms and Candy Chicks running the concession stands.
At the end of 1968, ushers had started handing out programs to patrons at each concert. These pamphlets contained performers’ biographies, editorials, public service announcements, and even a guide to other music events around town.
Bill Graham was also branching out with eclectic bills, pairing artists from all over the musical spectrum and introducing them to his young rock audience. On January 17, veteran jazz drummer Buddy Rich and his orchestra headlined the Fillmore East, with the Los Angeles rock band Spirit opening.
“Buddy Rich played for me in New York,” said Graham proudly. “He broke the kids up, and now every Joe College promoter wants him. The Fillmore likes you, you’re a smash.”14
Bill Graham knew he could even risk booking lesser-known jazz greats like Woody Herman or Charles Lloyd, who wouldn’t be able to headline at either of the Fillmores, as long as he had a big draw like Led Zeppelin or the Jimi Hendrix Experience.
“Everything is based on draw,” he told Howard Smith. “I cannot have a bill with Archie Shepp, Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie—great music. One of them can fit in with a Creedence Clearwater. Isn’t it incredible that Miles Davis plays for X dollars a week and Creedence Clearwater plays for X dollars a night. Why is that? Not because one is better than the other. One sells eight million records and appears on the Ed Sullivan Show. That’s not knocking them. It’s just what life is about.”15
But when Graham launched a series of eight Sunday-night jazz concerts at the Fillmore East, it bombed. He canceled the program after only three shows when nobody came.
The Joshua Light Show was now an integral part of the Fillmore East experience. As well as providing an exciting visual accompaniment to the bands, it had also started screening cartoons and funny captions between changeovers.
“It was the Sixties so everyone has been smoking pot or whatever they did to go to those shows,” said Allan Arkush, who was now working on the stage crew. “They’re a captive audience and you’ve got them sitting in the dark. Even though it was a fast changeover—fifteen minutes—you want to keep them occupied, so we came up with the ideas of bringing cartoons.”16
The Light Show staff would also pair film clips with the bands; like Walt Disney’s Alice in Wonderland for Jefferson Airplane and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds for The Byrds.
A particular audience favorite was a trippy 1935 cartoon called The Sunshine Makers, featuring elves who bottled beams of sunlight. In the piece, the bottles would be given out to people, who then drank from them, which caused each imbiber to start singing and dancing.
“The Sunshine Makers was a huge success,” said Arkush. “We’d run it before the Grateful Dead.”
In the beginning, Bill Graham turned a blind eye to open drug taking at concerts. It was mainly marijuana and LSD in those days, and many of his staff were getting high along with the audience. When the Grateful Dead played the Fillmores, there was always plenty of LSD backstage, and often a jug of spiked apple juice would be passed into the crowd.
At the Fillmore East, a special room off the mezzanine had been set aside for people suffering bad trips. And manager Kip Cohen hired four young doctors and gave them permanent passes to be on call during concerts.
“It became known as the Bummer Palace,” said Cohen. “We furnished it very comfortably with soft couches and a select group of rather more sensitive ushers would babysit the people who were freaking out and having bad trips with drugs.”17
On Friday, January 24, The Doors played Madison Square Garden, becoming the first band to graduate from the Fillmore East to play the far larger venue. Instead of playing four shows for Bill Graham, they opted to play just one at the Garden for the same money. Graham felt insulted.
“I was the one who put The Doors into the Fillmore in San Francisco before they had a hit,” he raged to Doors’ manager Bill Siddons. “I gave them their first break.”18
Graham had always detested Madison Square Garden, referring to it as a “cement factory,” with none of the good vibes of the Fillmore East.
Annie Fisher of the Village Voice’s “Riffs” column, agreed.
“The sound system is abominable,” she wrote. “The Doors and the promoters got lots of money, and money is really all these monster events, indoor and out, are all about. The music? Who knows?”19
After playing the show, Jim Morrison arrived at the Fillmore East, gloating about how much money he had made that night. While walking around, he spotted the bosun’s chair that Chip Monck used to ride sixty feet up to the lighting bridge. Morrison boasted that his father was a Navy admiral, so he knew all about bosun’s chairs, asking if he could go up in it.
“So we put him in the bosun’s chair and took him up,” said John Morris, who was there that night. “We then tied him off in the chair and left him to go next door to Rattner’s for breakfast. We could hear him screaming through the walls because Rattner’s was on the other side. When we finally let him down we said, ‘So, play for us next time.’ ”20
Two weeks later, Led Zeppelin debuted at the Fillmore East, opening for Iron Butterfly, currently enjoying a huge hit with “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.” And all the Fillmore East ushers wanted to be stationed by the stage for a better look at the new Yardbirds.
“I certainly remember the first weekend of Led Zeppelin,” said Allan Arkush. “And the excitement. It was incredible.”
On Friday night, Led Zeppelin upstaged Iron Butterfly with an extended “Dazed and Confused.”
“At the late show on Saturday night Iron Butterfly decided they were going to take an earlier flight,” said Arkush, “so Led Zeppelin got to close. It was an epic concert. Epic.”21
Soon after the fire in the apartment he shared with Grace Slick, Spencer Dryden started an affair with a beautiful twenty-year-old groupie named Sally Mann, moving her into 2400 Fulton Street. The runaway daughter of the mayor of Houston, Mann recently had bee
n featured in a Rolling Stone special on groupies. A divorcée with a baby boy, she was collecting $150 a month on welfare.
“Sally is a good girl,” Dryden told Rolling Stone, “and the way you can tell is that the other girls here dig her.”
Mann explained that there was an unwritten rule among the girls at the Airplane Mansion, “about balling more than one guy in the band at a time.”22
By the time Grace Slick returned from Los Angeles, where she had been helping Paul Kantner mix the new Jefferson Airplane live album, Dryden had installed Sally Mann as the band’s new housekeeper. Grace then found an apartment in Sausalito, having her husband, Jerry Slick, move in as her roommate.
Grace got on well with Sally Mann, and for a time they shared Spencer Dryden in a love triangle.
“There were lots of bizarre evenings,” Mann explained. “The three of us would be up real late, drinking.”23
In late January, Grace went into the hospital for a second operation to have nodules removed from her throat. By coincidence Lydia Pense, the singer of the band Cold Blood, also managed by Bill Graham, was there for the same procedure.
“Gracie and me were in the same hospital,” recalled Pense. “We had our nodes in our throats scraped. Back then they scraped them.”24
In early February, Jefferson Airplane’s live album Bless Its Pointed Little Head was released to great reviews, with Rolling Stone calling it “an LP of astonishing power.”
A month later, the Fillmore East’s playbill’s “Your Mother Should Know” column applauded the LP, which had been recorded live at both Fillmores.
“All the energy that the Airplane’s giant wall of sound creates,” wrote editor Mark Spector, “becomes part of everyone’s living room. Furthermore, the group is at its best, giving us the finest Jefferson Airplane you can get in an onstage situation. This is an era of live, visual music and hopefully other groups will follow quickly in the Airplane’s footsteps.”25
With Grace and Spencer Dryden estranged, the other band members met to decide who was now going to look after the beautiful rock goddess.
“We had a meeting,” said Marty Balin,” to try and figure out who would go with Grace and take care of her, because she always needed a guy to talk for her. Jorma didn’t want the job and Casady had tried it and didn’t like it, and I didn’t want the job. Paul was actually elected, damned straight.”26
In mid-February, when Rolling Stone ran its special issue about the new breed of groupies, the backstage action at the Fillmore East and West was featured prominently. Along with Spencer Dryden’s new girlfriend, Sally Mann, Bill Graham’s twenty-nine-year-old Fillmore West publicist, Chris “Sunshine” Brooks, was profiled.
“Few groupies have been as active as long as Sunshine, who originally started with jazz players,” it read. “Now she is the senior partner in a group of five girls . . . who travel in a pack in quest of rock bands. Sunshine is both a groupie and more than a groupie.”27
Soon after the article appeared, Brooks, whom Bill Graham had recently appointed his national director of publicity, received calls from many of the bands she worked with at the Fillmore West.
“That article made me famous,” she said, “and I got phone calls from Ten Years After and all the bands that I worked for, ‘Chris, I didn’t know you were a groupie. Are you busy Friday night?’ ”
Brooks, the mother of twins, says that part of her job involved setting up girls for the visiting English bands who played the Fillmore West.
“I was a pimp for my English mates,” she explained, “by virtue of the fact I was a publicist. Because of my seniority at the Fillmore West, I surrounded myself with a bevvy of beautiful birds, who I knew were clean and fun and would show the guys a good time on the weekend and not bother them at home. That’s where the pimping came in. It was all part of the job.”
During her years working for Bill Graham, Brooks became good friends with many top bands, including The Who and Led Zeppelin, whom she supplied with beautiful willing girls.
“Most of the bands I worked for were proper Englishmen away from home,” she explained. “It would be a matter of Roger Daltrey saying, ‘Chris, you know that Chinese bird over there with the big Bristols?’ And I’d say, ‘Yes, I do.’ ‘Could we have an introduction please?’ And they were always properly introduced.”28
She would also set up Jimmy Page with nice clean women, as well as warning him about the more unsavory ones.
“There were two contingencies of San Francisco groupies,” she said. “One was very nice and then there was Miss Harlow. I remember Jimmy Page looking at her when she was coming onto him. And he said, ‘God, one night with her and it’d be two weeks in hospital.’ She was very grungy with all her Twenties get-up and Jimmy never went for that type anyway. He liked to do the hitting.”
On one tour, Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham caught the clap from a Fillmore West groupie and went home and gave it to his wife. The next time he played the Fillmore West, Bonham had Brooks “babysit” him, so he wouldn’t be tempted by any groupies.
Fillmore East general manager Kip Cohen was also interviewed for the Rolling Stone piece, saying his security men stopped groupies from going backstage unless they were with a band.
“We don’t have that many problems,” he said. “One of our security guards was once offered a free fuck on the fire escape, if he would let the groupie in afterward. But this sort of thing rarely happens.”
Cohen said that the English groups were “the worst,” because they attracted the most exotic-looking groupies.
“There’s definitely a run on black groupies this season for some reason,” he said.29
Howard Smith said dozens of groupies would congregate outside the Fillmore East before shows, offering sex for free tickets.
“And one night this particularly cute groupie,” he recalled, “was begging and begging because I had an extra ticket. I said, ‘Here, you can have it but we’ll have to sit next to each other.’ She said, ‘No, no, no. I’m going to blow you.’ I said I wasn’t interested in trading sex for a ticket.”
There was a great deal at stake when Janis Joplin and her Band, as they were now billed, played two sold-out nights at the Fillmore East on February 11 and 12. Opening for them were the Grateful Dead, who would record part of their landmark Live Dead album that weekend, with the rest being recorded a few weeks later at the Fillmore West.
A crew from CBS’s 60 Minutes came to film a segment on the Fillmore East. And along came reporters from Time, Life, Look, Newsweek, and the New York Times, who all wanted to profile Janis. Albert Grossman was snowbound in Woodstock, unable to come to the show. And Myra Friedman only discovered at the last minute that Mike Wallace and the 60 Minutes crew wanted to film Janis’s performance for an upcoming segment entitled “Carnegie Hall for the Kids.”
Earlier, while the band had been setting up, Janis was interviewed by Mike Wallace for 60 Minutes. She was stoned, telling the veteran newsman to just scream “fuck” if she said something he didn’t like, so it couldn’t be used on the air. She promised to do the same if he were to ask a “dumb” question.
When Wallace asked if a white woman can sing the blues, Janis looked straight at the camera and said “Fuck.”30
The four hotly anticipated shows had been sold out for weeks, and ticket scalpers outside on Second Avenue were charging exorbitant prices for seats. The Grateful Dead played first, launching into “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl” and not stopping for more than an hour.
One hard-core Janis Joplin fan named Ronnie Finkelstein sat through the Grateful Dead set while waiting patiently for Janis.
“I found them original and satisfying,” he explained to a reporter. “I wanted Janis, though. I rushed back when Bill Graham—the dirty capitalist!—introduced my girl.”31
Her new band came on first and played without her for a few minutes before Janis
strutted out wearing a black pantsuit and delivering a fine performance.
Later, as she held court to the press in her dressing room, Janis was insecure and sought reassurance.
“Don’t you think I’m singing better?” she asked one reporter. “Well, Jesus, fucking Christ, I’m really better believe me.”32
There was mixed critical reaction to Janis and her new band. Ellen Willis of the New Yorker was sympathetic to Janis for putting herself on the line with a new band and a new sound.
“I hoped she would do well,” she wrote, “but I knew I’d like her anyway. The show I saw wasn’t a flop. And though it wasn’t great, either, at this point the deficiencies can be attributed to growing pains. What was missing was a sense of authority; Janis did not know exactly where she was going, and she was not completely at home with her band.”33
Mike Jahn in the New York Times called it “an improvement.”
“Miss Joplin had been limited by Big Brother’s strict adherence to psychedelic music,” he wrote in his review. “Miss Joplin has never been better, even though her new group sounds as if it is just getting to work well together, it still is very good.”
After the Fillmore East shows, Janis Joplin and her band did a short East Coast tour before heading back to New York for the Ed Sullivan Show. While they were on the road, she hooked up with her new organist, Richard Kermode, for a few weeks, but he soon tired of her heroin use.
“The junk didn’t dampen her enthusiasm for sex,” he said later. “It was like she’d want to go on forever, but not feeling anything. I couldn’t get into it. It was weirdness.”34
On March 15, Rolling Stone published a devastating profile, headlined: “Janis: The Judy Garland of Rock?” Joplin was in New York when it came out, and she was so upset that she canceled an interview with Howard Smith for his show on WNEW-FM.