by John Glatt
“She complained,” said Allan Arkush, “about all these guys running around half-naked.”42
That New Year’s Eve—as the Sixties morphed into the Seventies—Bill Graham’s Fillmore empire reigned supreme. In New York he presented Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys at the Fillmore East, while in San Francisco he had Santana playing the Fillmore West and Jefferson Airplane and the Quicksilver Messenger Service at Winterland.
“Hendrix was preparing for the Band of Gypsys’ shows,” said Allan Arkush, “and he would rehearse sometimes in the afternoons at the Fillmore. I’d come in and set up for a show and get to see Hendrix jamming with the Band of Gypsys, which is pretty impressive. You just put your feet up on the chairs watching him jam.”43
On New Year’s Eve, as the audience arrived at the Fillmore East, they were escorted to their seats by an eighteen-year-old usher named Ken Mednick, who had just been hired.
“The first day I showed up for work was the night Jimi Hendrix was playing,” he said. “And it was absolutely mind-boggling. I was a huge Hendrix fan and I was flabbergasted.”44
The final playbill for 1969 contained several New Year’s greetings from several musicians. “All the hangups of 1969—kiss my behind,” wrote Hendrix. “It’s a groovy thing to look forward to the future and hope that things’ll be better,” said Roger McGuinn of The Byrds. Bill Graham’s was, “And my hope for the new decade—may the dove rest.”
The Voices of East Harlem opened the Fillmore East New Year’s show with a short film by Amalie Rothschild, showing the young children’s choir preparing for it in Harlem.
“I went uptown,” said Amalie. “I filmed them getting ready, coming out of their homes and taking the subway.”
The film, projected onto the Joshua Light Show screen, then showed the children running out of the Astor Street subway and onto Second Avenue, where they turned left to the Fillmore East and went inside.
“Then they came down the aisle,” said Amalie, “climbed up onto the stage and launched into their first number.”
After playing the first show, Jimi Hendrix came into Graham’s office and asked what he had thought.
“So I ask Kip and the others to leave the office,” said Graham. “And I said, ‘Jimi, you’re the best guitar player I know, and tonight for an hour and a half you were a shuck. You were a disgrace to what you are.’ ”
Hendrix looked hurt and asked if Graham had heard the audience going crazy and demanding more.
“ ‘You know what you did?’ ” Graham remembered explaining. “ ‘You made the same mistake too many of the other great ones make. You subconsciously play what they want, you sock it to them. You did an hour and a half of shuck and grind and bullshit, that you can do with your eyes closed lying down somewhere. But you forgot one thing. You forgot to play. And it’s tragic for you because you can play better than anyone I know.’
“Well, the guy fell apart. ‘Why are you telling me that?’ ‘BECAUSE YOU ASKED ME!’ And we had a bad scene, pushing the furniture around, yelling. And Jimi’s a quiet guy.
“And I said to Jimi, ‘If I were you, and I’m dreaming, but if I could, one of the great ways to educate the public, to let them know that they’ve fallen into your shit, is to come out and say, ‘Did I sock it to you?’ ‘Yeah!’ ‘Boogie Woogie?’ ‘Did you dig it?’ ‘Yeah!’ ‘You’re all full of shit, I apologize. Don’t let me do that to you.’
“And Jimi said, ‘You’re right, you’re right. I’m sorry.’ And then we went down for egg creams, settled down. And what happened next is one of the warmest things that ever happened to me.”
For the second show, Hendrix took Graham’s advice to heart, delivering one of the greatest sets of his career, which was immortalized on his Band of Gypsys (Live) album.
Recalled Graham, “What followed, with respect to Carlos and Eric and all those others, was the most brilliant, emotional display of virtuoso electric guitar playing I have ever heard. I don’t expect ever to hear such sustained brilliance in an hour and fifteen minutes. He just stood there, did nothing, just played and played and played.
“He comes off the stage afterwards, a wet rag, and says to me . . . ‘Alright?’ I said, ‘Jimi, it was great.’ And I hugged him and got all wet, and I asked him if he would do an encore. ‘Yeah.’ He goes out and does every conceivable corny bullshit thing he can do.”45
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
A New Decade
January to March, 1970
On January 2, 1970, the Grateful Dead played the first of two nights at the Fillmore East, supporting their new album Live Dead. The Hells Angels, who had their New York City headquarters a couple of blocks away on Third Street, were there in force.
“By this time the Dead were very popular in New York,” said Allan Arkush, “and a lot of Hells Angels were coming to visit them. So you always had this incredible mix of people backstage at a Dead show.”
The Angels had also brought along a canister of nitrous oxide, which they carried into the Grateful Dead’s dressing room.
“So you were basically living a [Robert] Crumb cartoon,” said Arkush.
Bill Graham had instructed his sound screw to play the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” before he came onstage to introduce the Dead.
“This was a great idea,” said Arkush, “but no one had told the Grateful Dead. So they are all in the dressing room on nitrous oxide and laughing. We took them down and they were giggling, and Garcia practically fell down the steps getting on the stage.”
After plugging in their equipment and tuning up, the Grateful Dead waited onstage in the dark as the Zarathustra music began. Then Bill walked up to the microphone for his introduction—“Ladies and Gentlemen, the Seventh Samurai of Rock—the Grateful Dead.”
“Then the big chord came up and the light show started,” said Arkush. “And the Dead just stand there giggling. Then the giggling turned into Jerry noodling on ‘China Cat Sunflower’ with the chords. And it sounds like he’s laughing on the guitar, so to speak. Then the band kicks into ‘China Cat Sunflower’ and we’re off and running—a three-hour night.”1
After Woodstock, musicians suddenly realized their new clout and began to demand a bigger slice of the profits from promoters.
“Woodstock was when everybody realized it was real,” said Albert Grossman’s assistant, Vinnie Fusco. “It was both the beginning and the end. That’s when we asked, ‘Why did 400,000 people come?’ Woodstock just told everybody, ‘Maybe it’s not Bill Graham the promoter, it’s our acts.’ And then eventually the artists assumed, ‘It’s me.’ ”2
Bill Graham viewed Woodstock as nothing less than the destruction of the rock industry.
“It was a tragedy,” he said. “Groups recognized that they could go into larger cattle markets, play less time and make more dollars.” But although the top rock stars were now raking in millions while preaching hippie values, audiences still viewed Graham as the capitalist bogeymen of rock ’n’ roll. And as bands forced up ticket prices, he would always be blamed.
Jazz & Pop magazine columnist Patricia Kennealy observed that while “it may be quite fashionable in certain circles to damn Bill Graham as a capitalist,” he had given more to the music business than anyone.
“It is all too easy to take a gratuitous swipe at Graham,” she wrote.
Kennealy noted how some bands who played for “hamburger and beer money” a couple of years ago now demanded $50,000 for a forty-five-minute set, plus a percentage of the gross.
“When the promoter who has to pay the band and cover overhead costs,” she wrote, “gets blamed for all this, then I think change is due.”3
Joshua White also noticed the change in many musicians’ attitudes after Woodstock.
“We all knew the Fillmore was doomed,” said White. All the managers figured their bands could play arenas and stadiums and
eventually that’s where they went. It was very hard to get the Airplane and the Dead on a bill together after Woodstock because they wanted to play those giant venues.”4
Pete Townshend pointed out that it was impossible for The Who to play the Fillmores and make a profit.
“We’ve always been fond of Bill and have tried to be fair to him,” Townshend said. “So we used to go there for a third of what we can make on the road . . . and for a man who’s close to becoming a millionaire, it’s a bit of a hard-luck story.”5
As the musicians wielded their power, a new arrogance set in. In a September 1969 editorial, Variety condemned the increasing number of acts who failed to show for performances, noting their “shorter tempers and longer lists of demands.” Comparing it to industrial wildcat strikes, Variety pointed the finger at Diana Ross for canceling a show after her pet dog died and Jimi Hendrix for storming offstage after breaking a guitar string. It also singled out Jefferson Airplane as the group most feared by promoters for their bad attitude and frequent cancellations.6
Jefferson Airplane manager Bill Thompson said that came down to Grace Slick’s heavy drinking.
“Every time we went on a tour we missed about one out of every six or seven dates because she was getting drunk,” he said. “We would cancel the show [and] it cost us a lot of money.”7
On Monday, January 26, 1970, Grace Slick was the maid of honor at Spencer Dryden’s wedding to Sally Mann. Held at the Jefferson Airplane Mansion in front of three hundred guests, with Paul Kantner as the best man, the ceremony was performed by the Rev. Scott Beach, a director of the Committee Theater and a minister in the American Humanist Institute.
“Miss Grace Slick, the Airplane’s glacial contralto was radiant as maid of honor,” observed Rolling Stone in its next issue. “Some fifty friends and relatives attended, including many of the San Francisco rock and roll world’s most prominent swells, and they were radiant too. Refreshments were freely served, and in some quantity. The former Miss Mann, it will be recalled, was featured in the Rolling Stone special issue on The Groupies.”8
Grace graciously handed the newlyweds a thousand dollars in cash before Jerry Slick drove her back to the Sausalito house they now shared.
At the reception, Paul Kantner came downstairs with a silver tray that was loaded with lines of cocaine laced with Orange Sunshine acid next to a hundred-dollar bill. He snorted up the powerful drug mixture with the newly married couple, who then went upstairs to their room.
Some time later, a very stoned Paul Kantner was looking for Grace. After being told she had already left, he became upset. Finally, Sally Mann called Grace in Sausalito and asked her to return and take care of him. Grace drove straight back, and that night Paul Kantner fell in love with her.
Within weeks, Spencer Dryden was fired from Jefferson Airplane. Since his split from Grace, he no longer exerted any power in the band, and Paul Kantner, who had never liked him anyway, got rid of him.
“Basically I fired him after he broke up with Grace,” said Kantner. “He was out of the picture at that point.”9
Dryden, who then joined the New Riders of the Purple Sage, was immediately replaced by Joey Covington, who had recently moved into the Airplane mansion and had been waiting in the wings.
By the dawn of the new decade, Janis Joplin had become a fashion icon, with thousands of young girls across America imitating her gypsy style. In early January, the New York Times ran a feature about what the cutting-edge Manhattan fashionistas had been wearing at Janis’s recent Madison Square Garden show.
“I call [it] poverty fashion,” a young Australian rock writer named Lillian Roxon told the New York Times. “The idea is to try and get a rich look with very little money.”
Roxon said that fashions started with rock stars like Janis Joplin, who then passed it on to the fans. It was then picked up by the Seventh Avenue designers, who mass-produced it for the rest of the country.
“Janis gave us fringes and long, bushy hair,” explained Roxon. “Cher gave us bell-bottoms [and] Jim Morrison popularized leather.”
She cited tie-dye clothes as the latest fashion innovation, pointing out that Janis now slept in tie-dye satin sheets.
By February, Bonnie Graham had finally had enough of her husband’s philandering and filed for divorce. She moved into an apartment with their son, David, and sought full custody of the boy.
“[His] gallivanting was difficult,” explained Bonnie, “and what a rounder he was. He was going with every woman that came along. And for me that was the end. I didn’t hang around long after that.”10
Looking back, she believes Bill Graham’s traumatic childhood rendered him incapable of loving another human being.
“I think he got obsessed about something that didn’t last very long,” she said. “I don’t know what it was about me that he liked. He never really told me. I can only imagine that it had to do with that I’m just a pretty straight person [which is] maybe an antidote to his own being, his own personality. But it didn’t take too long to wear off.”11
In early February, Janis Joplin flew to Rio for the Carnival, and to clean up from drugs. A month earlier she had disbanded the Kozmic Blues Band, and Albert Grossman was now busy recruiting for her next group. Janis took her friend Linda Gravenites along, and they rented a luxury apartment on the beach and attended the various Carnival balls.
One morning, while walking on the beach in a white bikini, Janis met a young teacher named David Niehaus, who was traveling around the world. She fell in love.
“He’s just fantastic,” Janis breathlessly told Myra Friedman in a phone call from Rio, “and he’s gorgeous.”12
Janis moved Niehaus into her rented apartment, and she stayed clean. She even held a press conference, and for the rest of the trip she was trailed around the city by reporters and photographers.
“It’s vicious, man,” she told Rolling Stone, referring to the Brazilian police. “If you’ve got long hair they can drag you off and never let you out.”
She and Niehaus then headed up the coast to Salvador, looking for action.
“There was nothing there,” she said, “No entertainment.”
So Janis and her new boyfriend spent three nights drinking at a whorehouse, where she sang with the house band.13
At the beginning of March, Janis returned to San Francisco alone, with Niehaus planning to join her as soon as he got the necessary visas.
When he arrived at her Larkspur house a few weeks later, Janis was back on heroin and he hardly recognized her. After trying unsuccessfully to get her to quit drugs and finding her in bed naked with Peggy Caserta, he packed up his suitcase and left.14
Soon afterward, Janis’s friend Lyndall Erb, who was a clothes maker, moved into the house as Janis’s new roommate.
On January 15, the Allman Brothers Band debuted at the Fillmore West, third on the bill to Buddy Guy and B.B. King. They received just $1,500 for two shows a night during the four-night run.
“That was really something,” wrote Gregg Allman in his autobiography, My Cross to Bear. “My brother and I got to meet B.B. when we opened for him. Between the two of us, we had worn out three of his records—played those LPs until they turned white.”15
The Fillmore West audience gave the Allmans a good reception. But it wouldn’t compare to the one they received at the Fillmore East a month later when they opened for Love and the Grateful Dead.
That late show on the Friday of the Presidents’ Day weekend was memorable. The Grateful Dead’s hit squad dosed the backstage water cooler with Owsley acid, and almost everybody tripped out.
“That was a legendary show,” recalled Allan Arkush. “Someone had put acid in the water, so we were all under the influence.”16
His stage crew colleague Dan Opatoshu said that getting spiked with acid was an occupational hazard whenever the Dead played the Fillmore East.
/> “They would dose everybody,” he said. “And we would fall one by one like soldiers in the field of battle. You’d just say, ‘Ah, ah. They got me. I’m outta here. Goodbye.’ ”17
It was the first time the Allman Brothers had played on the same bill as the Grateful Dead, and Gregg Allman asked his brother Duane what he thought of the Dead’s music.
“He didn’t hesitate,” wrote Gregg. “ ‘This is shit. You see them jugs that they’re passing out?’ he said, referring to the cases of Gatorade that they would electrify backstage and then pass out to the crowd. And then I knew what he was talking about. One tiny sip of that shit and it would be raining fire, man, so no wonder everyone was grooving on that music—anything would sound good like that.”18
At the end of the Grateful Dead set, at around four o’clock in the morning, Jerry Garcia invited the Allman Brothers out onstage to join them in “Dark Star” and “Turn on Your Love Light.”
“It was a total cluster-fuck,” recalled Allman Brothers’ drummer Butch Trucks. “There was every member of the Grateful Dead, every member of the Allman Brothers, and Peter Green and Mick Fleetwood from Fleetwood Mac onstage jamming. I guarantee it was total cacophony.”19
Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh remembers the long jam being “a surprisingly coherent free-for-all, with five guitarists, four drummers, organ and Pigpen rolling over it all.”20
It was already daylight when they finally finished playing, and it was snowing.
“And when the doors opened,” said Arkush, “and you got all this smoke in the air and shafts of light, there was Sixth Street covered in virgin snow, as the audience wandered out.”21
Soon after Grace Slick and Paul Kantner became a couple, they started collaborating on songs together. Kantner, who was a science fiction buff, wrote a song called “Have You Seen the Saucers?” about space aliens. And in response to President Nixon’s newly initiated Operation Intercept, to stop the flow of Mexican marijuana into the United States by spraying it with paraquat, Grace wrote “Mexico.”