Live at the Fillmore East and West

by John Glatt

  A furious Graham then marched into Mick Jagger’s dressing room, where the frontman was putting on makeup. Graham was going to tell Jagger that he was canceling the late show.

  “Didn’t I speak to you on the phone once?” Jagger inquired. “You were rude to me. I can’t stand people who shout on the phone. It shows the most appalling manners.”21

  The singer then turned back to his mirror to finish making up, leaving Bill Graham lost for words.

  That Thanksgiving weekend, Jefferson Airplane were back at the Fillmore East for the sixth time. On the first night of the run of sold-out shows, Grace Slick dressed up as Adolf Hitler in full Nazi regalia, complete with a stick-on mustache and her hair slicked back. Later in their set, Rip Torn walked out disguised as Richard Nixon, to the boos of the audience.

  “Grace liked a bit of the theater,” said Jack Casady, “so we never quite knew what she was going to do.”22

  On Thanksgiving Day, Bill Graham again laid on a lavish feast in the theater lobby for the performers and the Fillmore East staff. Among the guests were Janis Joplin and Ike and Tina Turner, who were opening for the Rolling Stones that night at Madison Square Garden.

  Before the catered meal, Airplane manager Bill Thompson was sitting in the back of the theater talking to Graham when Ike and Tina Turner walked in.

  “Ike looked like a pimp,” remembered Thompson, “and Tina was wearing a miniskirt that was above the waist. They went past us and Bill and I are kind of mesmerized looking at Tina. And he looked to me and said, ‘That ain’t chopped liver.’ ”23

  At the Thanksgiving meal, Bill Graham sat at a table with Grace Slick, Janis Joplin, and Tina Turner.

  “Janis and Grace Slick were the two queens of rock ’n’ roll in the Sixties,” said Graham. “Dual royalty on the feminine side.”24

  During the meal, Janis sipped champagne but hardly ate, constantly leaving the table to go to a nearby stairway and talk to a friend. There was also some tension between Janis and Graham, as she was booked for a single show at Madison Square Garden in mid-December instead of her usual four at the Fillmore East. Graham spent most of the meal talking to Tina Turner.

  “And we had a long, long rap,” said Graham, “when Ike was off with the musicians somewhere. She was telling me about the old days of her one-nighters. Tina away from business is very ladylike and very calm. She saves her energy for the stage.”

  That night the Fillmore East was closed, so many of the staff headed to Madison Square Garden to see the Rolling Stones play.

  “We all had gotten tickets,” said Allan Arkush. “We went up to see them play the set that would eventually become the album Get Yer Ya Ya’s Out.”

  During Ike and Tina Turner’s opening performance, Tina noticed Janis Joplin watching and invited her onstage to sing a number. The two rock goddesses were then photographed singing together by Amalie Rothschild.

  “For me, time stopped,” said Amalie. “I think it was the only time these two extraordinary rock divas ever sang onstage together.”25

  Later backstage, Janis was the worse for wear after many hours of drinking and drugging. She was drinking Southern Comfort with Jimi Hendrix and a few others in the Stones’ dressing room when Sam Cutler ordered everybody to leave, as the Stones were going on in fifteen minutes.

  “Only Janis made a fuss,” said Cutler. “Janis wobbled unsteadily on her feet and breathed fumes of Southern Comfort into my face. ‘You know who I am, man?’ she mumbled.”

  When Cutler said he did, she took another swig and started at him blankly. The road manager then asked her not to be difficult. The Stones just needed some privacy, he explained.

  “Janis swiveled around to face Keith,” said Cutler, “who was sitting behind her. ‘Hey, man,’ she whined, ‘Your dude is trying to throw me out of your dressing room.’ ”

  Keith Richards merely smiled, saying the band needed to tune up and collect themselves before taking the stage. Janis sat down next to him, and it was obvious she was not going anywhere.

  Then Cutler asked her if she wanted a couple of thick lines of high-grade Peruvian cocaine.

  “Chop ’em up, big boy,” Janis drawled.

  Cutler explained they needed to go somewhere more private, as there were too many press around to snort up in the dressing room.

  “Well, I guess I’ll see you boys later,” Janis announced as she stood up. “I gotta see a man about a dog.”26

  The next day Janis Joplin flew to Florida to play the Miami Pop Festival with the Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, and Johnny Winter. The red-hot albino blues guitarist had grown up in Beaumont, Texas, where Janis had gone to college. It was their ever first meeting backstage in Miami, and they immediately hit it off.

  “I ended up jammin’ with her, and doin’ vocals and drinking Southern Comfort,” Winter later remembered.

  That first night, Winter drank so much Southern Comfort that he threw up on Janis in the helicopter on the way back to the hotel.

  “She was alright with it,” he said. “She called me up later on and asked me for another date.”27

  During the next few weeks, the two Texans would occasionally meet up in New York for one-night stands, but the relationship never became too serious.

  The first week of December, Bill Graham recruited Herbie Herbert to become Santana’s road manager. And on Saturday, December 6, the twenty-one-year-old found himself working his first show with Santana, who were playing the soon-to-be infamous free concert at the Altamont Speedway in California.

  “And that was my first day on the job,” said Herbert. “The stage was maybe eighteen inches high, and across the front was the wall of Hells Angels’ motorcycles.”

  As Michael Carabello was tightening up his congas, a six-foot five-inch Hells Angel with a big beard and long greasy hair came over with a stein of beer and a large mason’s jar of downers.

  “He offers the beer and big jar of pills to Carabello, who says no,” said Herbert. “He then turns around and faces the audience, rears his head back and pours the bottle of pills into his mouth. And then washes down an impossible mouthful of pills in one swallow. And I look at Carabello, who looks wide-eyed back at me, and say, ‘It’s going to be a long day.’ ”28

  As Santana opened the show, fights were starting to break out in the audience. At one point Santana stopped briefly when a Hells Angel ran across the stage to beat up someone.

  By the time Jefferson Airplane took the stage, things were getting really ugly. Spencer Dryden had been against playing Altamont and was only there under duress. All through the red-eye flight back to San Francisco from the Miami Pop Festival, the drummer had argued with the other members of the band, saying the Altamont vibes were wrong. Finally, Bill Thompson told him to shut up and just do it.

  It was late afternoon when a nervous-looking Grace Slick took the stage. As they began “We Can Be Together,” the drunken Hells Angels were beating people up indiscriminately. During the second number, “The Other Side of This Life,” Grace saw a fight break out below the stage and stopped the band.

  “Easy,” she said calmly. “Easy, easy, easy.”

  Then, there was a scream and Marty Balin jumped into the crowd to tackle a massive Hells Angel called Animal, who was beating up a young man with a pool cue.

  “Marty unfortunately said, ‘fuck you!’ to him, which is something you don’t do to a Hells Angel,” recalled Paul Kantner. “In life I generally don’t fuck with nuns, cops or Hells Angels with good reason. But Marty did and the guy just decked him.”

  Kantner stood on the side of the stage observing the goings-on.

  “I’m looking up at this eight-foot-tall Hells Angel,” he recalled, “with a big animal thing on his head. And I’m giving him a look like a principal in high school, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ And to his credit he’s going, ‘I’m sorry, man.’ So I got away with that
without dying.”29

  Grace Slick, who was short-sighted and didn’t have her contact lenses in, had to ask Dryden what was happening.

  “He said, ‘The Hells Angels are beating up Marty,’” Grace remembered. “Apparently the Hells Angels were beating up somebody else and Marty said, ‘Don’t do that, fuck you.’ ”

  Grace then tried to calm down the Hells Angels, preaching a “Make Love Not War” doctrine.

  “No! Stop it!” she yelled. “That’s really stupid. You’ve got to keep your bodies off each other unless you intend love.”

  Later, after the Airplane completed their set and left the stage, Balin was helped over to the band’s equipment truck to recover.

  “Marty was just waking up in the back of the truck,” said Kantner, “and a Hells Angel came to apologize. He said, ‘I’m sorry man. You shouldn’t say ‘fuck you.’ ” Marty looks up at him and says, ‘Fuck you!’ and so the guy gives it to him again. Maximum. I don’t know if he ever recovered, to be honest.”30

  After the rest of the band left, Grace and Paul Kantner watched the rest of the nightmare concert unfold from the side of the stage.

  Later Grace would claim that she had advised using the Hells Angels for security, as the Airplane were friendly with them and had used them before.

  “Paul and I went over to London to talk to Jagger about putting on Altamont,” explained Grace, “and it was our fault. You don’t mix speed and alcohol on people with chains and knives. It’s not a good move.”31

  The Grateful Dead, who were due on next, wisely decided not to play. Then after brief, uncomfortable sets by the Flying Burrito Brothers and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the Rolling Stones took the stage.

  In the middle of their set, as the Maysles Brothers’s cameras were rolling for a documentary on the Stones US tour, a young black man named Meredith Hunter was stabbed to death by a Hells Angel. At a later murder trial, witnesses testified Hunter had been waving a gun, and the Angel was acquitted.

  After the tragedy, Bill Graham accused Mick Jagger of being responsible and mocking Uncle Sam.

  He offered Jagger $50,000 to debate him on live television or radio.

  “He’s in his home country now,” said Graham. “What did he leave behind throughout this country? Every gig, he was late. Every fucking gig, he made the promoter and the people bleed. What right does this god have to descend on this country this way? It will give me great pleasure to tell the public that Mick Jagger is not God, Junior.”

  Calling Altamont a “Holocaust,” Graham blamed the police.

  “They should have taken Mister Jagger,” he railed, “twisted his fucking arms behind his back, put him in front of the radio and said, ‘Mister Jagger, if we have to break your arms, call it off.’ ”

  Bill Wyman believes Graham’s challenge was a publicity stunt.

  “I think he used people to promote himself,” said the former Rolling Stone. “We thought he was more interested in extending his ego to his best advantage, as opposed to doing his job and being a promoter.”32

  Two weeks later, Janis Joplin played Madison Square Garden, her final concert with the Kozmic Blues Band. After her wild behavior at Thanksgiving, a worried Albert Grossman had sent her to endocrinologist Dr. Ed Rothschild of Manhattan’s Sloan-Kettering Hospital for treatment. Janis denied having any problems with alcohol or drugs, saying she had no idea why her manager was getting so upset. She told the doctor that being stoned was the best thing in the world, although she did admit to six heroin overdoses.

  Dr. Rothschild later described Janis as “brilliant,” saying her problems arose from possessing an advanced intellect with “childlike and uncontrollable emotions.”

  He put her on a ten-day withdrawal treatment of the heroin substitute Dolophine.33

  Three days earlier, Janis had guested on the top-rated Tom Jones Show, singing a blistering duet of “Raise Your Hand” with the Welsh singer.

  “She was a wild person,” said Jones, “but she was very real and she didn’t take any bullshit. I did the duet with her and when we finished it she said, ‘Wow, you can really sing, you know.’ And to me it was a scream-up, but to her that was really singing.”34

  Janis spent the week before the Madison Square Garden show in New York with Bobby Neuwirth and Michael J. Pollard. One night they went to the Bachelors III nightclub on Lexington Avenue, which was owned by New York Jet Superbowl III MVP Joe Namath. As soon as she arrived, Janis introduced herself to Broadway Joe and immediately propositioned him. Later, she would proudly boast that she had seduced Namath with a bottle of Tequila in his apartment upstairs.

  The next morning she tipped off Rolling Stone magazine’s Random Notes column with the exclusive that she and Joe Namath had “gotten together.”

  “Joe, Joe, where are you?” Janis cooed into the microphone at Madison Square Garden on December 19 after dedicating the concert to Joe Willie and the Jets. That night Janis was electrifying and had everyone on their feet dancing.

  “What are you doing in your seats?” she screamed. “This is a rock ’n’ roll concert!”

  At the end of the show, she called Johnny Winter and Paul Butterfield to the stage to join her for a couple of songs.

  “It was her last night with the [Kozmic Blues Band],” said Winter. “I never was crazy about that band.”

  Winter says Janis was shooting heroin that night but warned him to stay away from the drug.35

  After the show, Clive Davis and his wife threw Janis a party at his apartment on Central Park West. Among the guests were Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, and Tony Bennett.

  “I wanted to make it a truly extraordinary night for her,” remembered Davis. “Janis arrived at 1:00, and though she was clearly high, she was in good cheer and made a vibrant entrance. By the end of the night, Janis had tears in her eyes as she thanked . . . me for creating this evening for her. All of us were deeply moved.”36

  Back in San Francisco, Janis moved into a new home in Larkspur, Marin County, a short walk away from Jerry Garcia’s house. She decorated it in Rococo Bordello style, buying two Samoyed puppies and a Siamese fighting fish, who lived in a wine bottle. To celebrate, Janis held a big housewarming/Christmas party and invited all her friends.

  “She bought the house because of Cheap Thrills,” said her friend David Cohen, who had now left Country Joe and the Fish. “I went to the party and she dragged me out. She looked up at the house and said, ‘One fucking record for the house and the car!’ ”37

  At the end of 1969, Bill Graham’s trusted right-hand man at the Fillmore West, Paul Baratta, staged a coup to unseat his mentor as the king of San Francisco rock. The former actor cut a deal with the owners of Winterland to jump ship and run concerts at the larger venue, which Graham had been using for years. On hearing the news, Graham acted fast and met with the owners of Winterland. He managed to wrestle Winterland away from Baratta by guaranteeing $60,000 in rentals for the rest of the year in return for exclusive use.

  Only three weeks after quitting the Fillmore, Baratta had been effectively neutralized and was safely back in the Graham fold, heading up its new Southern California operation, aptly named Shady Management. . . .

  The day after Christmas, a new Southern band arrived in New York in an old battered Winnebago camper to play their first gig at the Fillmore East. The Allman Brothers Band, whose first album, Idlewild South, would be released in January, were third on the bill behind Appaloosa and Blood, Sweat and Tears. In the lobby of the Fillmore, someone had pinned up a poster of the band bathing naked in a creek, looking like a bunch of rednecks.

  “All we knew about them was that album cover in the lobby,” said Allan Arkush, who now headed up the stage crew. “Now you’ve got these hipster New Yorkers looking at the Southern guys naked in the stream, and immediate opinions were formed as to what kind of inbred weirdoes they were.”

  It didn’t he
lp when the band arrived several hours late for the soundcheck. The stage crew then helped unload their old rundown equipment, and they were appalled.

  “It was all these Marshall amps held together with gaffer tape,” said Arkush. “This was not the equipment of a successful band.”38

  But as soon as Duane Allman launched into the opening bars of “Statesboro Blues” at the soundcheck, something magical happened at the Fillmore East.

  “Wow!” said Arkush. “And within about ten seconds you stopped what you were doing. Doors were opening throughout the theater and people were stepping out to see who was making this music.”39

  Dan Opatoshu of the stage crew called that soundcheck a revelation.

  “We had said, ‘Who the hell are these sheep-fuckers from who knows where?’ Until they started playing,’ ” said Opatoshu. “Then we were, ‘This is something amazing.’ ”40

  After the soundcheck, Allan Arkush headed straight to their dressing room to meet them.

  “I said, ‘What would you guys like to eat?’ ” he remembered. “And they were so astonished that they were being brought food for free.”

  Arkush sent out for pizza and wine, and it was the beginning of a close bond between the Allman Brothers Band and the Fillmore East stage crew. Over the three nights, the Allman Brothers made themselves at home at the Fillmore East, hanging out in the audience hunting for groupies.

  “Blood, Sweat and Tears were furious at them,” said Opatoshu, “because the Allman Brothers would not leave the audience after their set, trying to get girls’ names and phone numbers. There was this brouhaha going on with Blood, Sweat and Tears, who wanted to play.”41

  On the final night, Blood, Sweat and Tears’ guitarist Steve Katz’s mother arrived from Queens to see her son play, and she was horrified by the Allmans’ backstage antics.