Live at the Fillmore East and West

by John Glatt

  By the time the Jefferson Airplane went into the studio to record the new tracks, which would be released as a double “A” single, the band was falling apart.

  “Jack came in and took five days to do a bass part,” said Stephen Barncard, who worked as an engineer on the sessions. “Then Jorma came in and did his part. Paul was pretty much running the show and Grace was hanging out and grossing everyone out.”22

  On Friday, March 6, the Miles Davis Quintet played the Fillmore East, opening for the Steve Miller Blues Band and Neil Young and Crazy Horse. His new album Bitches Brew had just been released on Columbia Records, and Clive Davis ordered him to play the Fillmore for exposure to white audiences.

  “He went nuts,” recalled Davis. “He told me he had no interest in playing for ‘those fucking long-haired white kids.’ [Bill] Graham would only rip him off.”23

  After Miles threatened to leave Columbia Records, Davis eventually calmed him down, and the jazz great reluctantly agreed to play the Fillmore East. He signed a contract for a single one-hour show for payment of $5,000, with $1,000 due on signing.

  The day after he signed the contract, Davis’s agent Jack Whittemore sent Graham a tersely worded telegram announcing that Miles Davis had pulled out of the gig.

  “Terribly sorry,” wrote Whittemore, “but I have no control over this situation.”

  Nonetheless, Miles Davis did relent and play the Fillmore East at the beginning of May, deliberately arriving late for the first show to spite Bill Graham.

  “You could see them bristling at each other,” wrote New York Post music columnist Al Aronowitz. “Miles walking in through the stage door in his long, white furry coat and Bill pacing back and forth in his shirtsleeves. They hardly spoke a word and yet they also hardly let a moment pass when they weren’t in each other’s sight. You kept finding them just off the wings backstage, Miles ignoring his dressing room, Bill ig­noring his office, each ignoring the other.”24

  Miles, whose formidable band included Chick Corea on electric piano and Wayne Shorter on saxophone, had no respect for the rock acts on the bill and tried to sabotage them.

  “I was opening for this sorry-ass cat named Steve Miller,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Steve Miller didn’t have shit going for him, so I’m pissed because I got to open for this non-playing motherfucker, just because he had two sorry-ass records out. So I would come late and he would have to go on first.”25

  On the last night, when Davis was late again, Bill Graham was waiting for him at the Sixth Street artist’s entrance.

  “Bill is madder than a motherfucker,” recalled Davis. “He’s standing outside the Fillmore. He starts to cut into me with this bullshit about ‘disrespecting Steve.’ So I just look at him, cool as a motherfucker, and say to him, ‘Hey, baby, just like the other nights and you know they worked out just fine, right?’ So he couldn’t say nothing to that because we had torn the place down.”

  Reviewing the final show of the run, Mike Jahn noted Davis’s “short, aggressive set” met with “restrained curiosity” from the Fillmore East audience.

  “To one raised on the Beatles,” wrote Jahn, “the name Miles Davis rings like a legend, to be revered if not understood.”26

  A month later, in April 1970, Miles Davis played four nights at the Fillmore West, opening for the Grateful Dead. During the run, Bill Graham introduced Miles to Jerry Garcia.

  “[We] hit it off great,” said Davis, “talking about music . . . and I think we all learned something, grew some. Jerry Garcia loved jazz, and I found out that he loved my music and had been listening to it for a long time.”27

  The Grateful Dead deeply respected Miles Davis, and they were intimidated by having to follow him onstage.

  “As I listened, leaning over the amps with my jaw hanging agape,” said Phil Lesh, “I was thinking, ‘What’s the use? How can we possibly play after this? We should just go home and try to digest this unbelievable shit.’ ”28

  On March 8, the Fillmore East celebrated its second anniversary with the Joshua Light Show “Movie Orgy.” The seven-hour show, created by future movie director Joe Dante and Jon Davison, who coordinated cartoons and movie snippets for the Fillmore East, included “singing cowboys, neurotic werewolves and maladjusted Indians.”

  Throughout the two years they had worked there, many of the Fillmore East staff saw themselves as a family, with Bill Graham as their often intimidating father figure.

  “He was the father that you loved and hated but listened to,” said his Fillmore East personal assistant, Lee Blumer. “He punished you.”29

  Jane Bernstein, who was the official Fillmore East Candy Chick, working the concessions, remembers Graham’s siege mentality.

  “He would gather us together to give us a talk about something,” she said. “A lot of his metaphors were kind of war metaphors [and] military allusions. He was a little scary.”30

  Graham also kept morale high at the Fillmore West by holding similar monthly “family meetings,” where employees could raise any problems.

  “We felt part of his family and he was like the father,” remembered Fillmore West publicist Chris Brooks.“We’d all sit there and Bill would talk and then ask for suggestions. [One day] I was feeling weepy and very upset. He put his arm round me and said, ‘Don’t worry, you’re in good hands with a Jew.’ ”31

  On March 26, the Woodstock movie was released. Without Bill Graham’s knowledge, the producers had included his interview comparing the Woodstock audience to “man-eating Marabunta ants,” and saying fire was the only way to control them.

  At the premiere, Graham’s original Fillmore East manager, John Morris, who had worked on the film’s production and knew exactly where the speech was, deliberately watched Graham’s reaction.

  “He was critiquing the Woodstock movie,” said Morris, “and taking notes on the whole film with a little pad and a pencil. When his speech about the ants came up he snapped the pencil in half. And it shot out and hit somebody in the audience.”32

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Dosing Richard Nixon

  April to May, 1970

  Since Janis Joplin had left the band, Big Brother and the Holding Company had been busy touring with their new singer, Nick Gravenites. In early April 1970, they played the Fillmore West, calling Janis onstage to sing a few songs. The delighted crowd rose to their feet when she came out and sang her song “Ego Rock” with Gravenites, as well as a couple of other numbers.

  “She jammed with us when we played the Fillmore West,” said Peter Albin. “It was fun and very cordial and warm.”1

  After Janis left the stage and Nick Gravenites ran through some new Big Brother songs, the crowd screamed for Janis. And she came back.

  “We’re really dredging up the past for ya, folks,” she told the audience.2

  Janis then sung “Piece of My Heart” and “Ball and Chain” to wild applause.

  A week later, Janis joined Big Brother onstage again at Winterland. Backstage, Sam Andrew spoke to her for the first time since she had fired him a year earlier.

  “She looked real puffy the way alcoholics do,” he said, “and she was repeating herself onstage. It was kind of embarrassing.”

  That night, Andrew had a premonition that something bad was going to happen to Janis, and he told her so.

  “I was real worried for her,” he said. “We were alone and she said, ‘I’m not going to die. My ancestors are pioneer stock and we’re real strong. And it’s in my genes and I’m going to survive.’

  “And I just thought, ‘I wish she wouldn’t have said that.’ I got a chill up my spine.”3

  Two weeks after the Woodstock movie was released, Santana played a three-night run at the Fillmore East for $20,000 ($120,000), with It’s a Beautiful Day opening. Before the first show on Friday, the band went to see the movie that would launch them into megastardom.<
br />
  “We waited in line with all the other folks for the early show,” said Michael Shrieve. “It was the first time we had ever seen it. When I saw the drum solo, and myself split on the screen like that, I didn’t know if I should stand up in the theater and yell, ‘That’s me!’ or sink down low in the seat.”4

  Billboard magazine reviewed one of Santana’s Fillmore East shows, calling it a mini-Woodstock.

  “There is very little that can be said about their set except that it was perfect,” it read. “Santana made every other rock group look as if it ought to go home and practice.”5

  Road manager Herbie Herbert said that the band played some of their best shows at the Fillmore East.

  “We loved the Fillmore West but the Fillmore East was in another league,” he said. “It was the most professional gig in the business and it was done in a full theatrical manner. And they had a serious theatrical crew of stagehands and would pretty much get everything right.”6

  That spring, Janis Joplin cleaned up her act and kicked heroin. She concentrated on finding a new band, getting back on the road, and recording an album. From the Kozmic Blues Band, she retained John Till on guitar and Brad Campbell on bass. Then she drafted pianist Richard Bell, organist Ken Pearson, and drummer Clark Pierson, whom she found playing at the Galaxy Topless Bar in San Francisco.

  John Cooke, who rejoined Janis as road manager, had never seen her so focused and motivated.

  “Janis’s level of professionalism had increased by a quantum leap,” said Cooke. “She had figured out how to be the band leader. She was just tickled pink.”7

  When Janis started rehearsing the new band at her Larkspur home in mid-April, everything came together.

  “I’m super-gassed,” she told a reporter. “They’re fuckin’ professionals. I’ve got my head back.”

  But she was soon diverted when her old friends Michael J. Pollard, Bobby Neuwirth, and country singer Kris Kristofferson suddenly turned up without warning at four o’clock one morning. It was the beginning of a mad three-week tequila bender around Marin County. They breakfasted on piña coladas, lunched on screwdrivers, and then headed off to the Trident Bar in Sausalito for cocktail hour.

  Jefferson Airplane manager Bill Thompson ran into Janis at the Trident late one afternoon. A few weeks earlier, Janis’s good friend Nancy Gurley had died from a heroin overdose, and her husband, James, Big Brother’s lead guitarist, had been charged with murder after injecting her with it. He would eventually be sentenced to probation.

  “I told her about it,” said Thompson. “I knew that she was probably still floating around with heroin, but I thought maybe that would scare her into quitting.”8

  During the marathon tequila binge, Janis had an intense affair with Kris Kristofferson, who would write the song “Me and Bobby McGee” for her.

  “Yeah, we made love a lot,” said Kristofferson. “She had a real sexy bed. She had silk sheets and it was pretty fancy stuff for a guy of my limited experience.”

  During their time together, Kristofferson got to see the real Janis, and her problems with stardom.

  “I never met anybody like Janis,” said Kristofferson. “Janis was a vulnerable character in a rock ’n’ roll situation where dreams come true—partially.”9

  One afternoon, Janis drove across the Golden Gate Bridge into downtown San Francisco, going to Lyle Tuttle’s tattoo shop on Seventh Street. She had him tattoo her wrist with a simple Florentine bracelet of hearts and flowers in green, red, and yellow. Her inspiration was a bracelet she had bought in South America. He also tattooed a small heart on her breast.

  “I wanted some decoration,” she explained. “See, the one on my wrist is for everybody. The one on my tit is for me and my friends—just a little treat for the boys, like icing on the cake.”10

  Janis was so pleased with her tattoos that three days later she threw a big party for Tuttle in her Larkspur home, where he tattooed eighteen guests. Michael J. Pollard had his wife’s name tattooed on his shoulder, and one of Janis’s girlfriends had the words “Property of Janis Joplin” tattooed over one of her breasts.

  At the party, Janis met a handsome young Berkeley student named Seth Morgan, who was paying his way through college selling cocaine, and took him to bed. Within weeks they would get engaged.

  On Friday, April 24, Grace Slick went to the White House to dose President Richard Nixon with Orange Sunshine LSD. She had been invited to a tea party by the president’s daughter Tricia, who had organized it for all her Finch College alumnae. The invitation had been sent to Grace Wing, and apparently no one at the White House realized she was now the notorious Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane.

  Grace then invited radical Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman along as her date and bought six hundred micrograms of powdered LSD. Hoffman, who had been a defendant in the Chicago Seven Trial two years earlier, duly shaved off his beard, slicked back his long curly hair, and put on a conservative suit. Grace opted for the preppy look: a camel hair coat over a miniskirt and boots.

  Her year at Finch College had taught Grace all about formal teas, so she devised a plan to surreptitiously slip acid into Richard Nixon’s cup and be long gone before it took effect.

  “You have two urns at either side of a long table,” she explained, “and you stand—you don’t sit—and since I’m an entertainer, I gesture a lot. And I was going to gesture across Nixon’s tea and in about a half an hour, he would have been out of his mind and nobody would’ve known why.”

  Grace then planned to thank Tricia Nixon for the tea, telling her she would really enjoy the rest of the afternoon.

  The day of the tea party, Paul Kantner drove Grace and Hoffman to the White House gates and dropped them off.

  “Grace took about seven thousand micrograms of Orange Sunshine into the White House,” said Kantner. “But they figured out who she was.”11

  After putting the powdered acid under a long fingernail she used to snort cocaine, Grace put her hands in her pockets and walked up to the White House gates with Abbie Hoffman.

  “And the security guard comes up to me and says, ‘I’m sorry you can’t go in. You’re a security risk,’ ” said Grace. “And I go, ‘What?’ And he says, ‘You’re on the FBI list.’ And I go ‘What?’ And I found out that the members of Jefferson Airplane were on a list because of ‘suspect lyrics.’ They didn’t know why I was a security risk, but they were right.”12

  The next morning’s New York Times reported that Abbie Hoffman had told White House security that he was “Miss Slick’s bodyguard and escort,” and they had been denied entry.

  “Mr. Hoffman brought out a black flag emblazoned with a multicolored marijuana leaf and hung it on the White House gate,” read the story. “It was quickly removed. The singer and Mr. Hoffman ran across the street and were driven away by a member of the Jefferson Airplane.”13

  “That would have been amusing if that had occurred,” said the getaway driver Paul Kantner. “She was a definite untouchable.”

  At the end of April, Joshua White disbanded his Joshua Light Show and quit the Fillmore East to start his own pioneering television company. He was also angry at the way hard drugs had now permeated into the Fillmore East and West managements.

  Most of the key executives in Bill Graham’s organization were often high at work. But the drugs of choice had changed from marijuana and LSD to cocaine and heroin.

  “The fish stinks from the head down,” said White. “Instead of getting stoned and getting mellow, they got stoned and mean. A lot of high-level management at the Fillmore were taking cocaine, which didn’t have evil connotations at that time. In the Joshua Light Show I was dealing with people I loved but they were making me crazy. When they smoked they would just get silly and mellow, but then when they started tak­ing cocaine they weren’t silly and mellow anymore. I had to get out of the Fillmore because I was just scared of those people. I
thought everybody was getting crazy here.”

  White says that cocaine was one of the main reasons he left the music business to move into television production.

  “The thing about coke is that you think you’re being terribly organized,” said White. “You have meetings and every­thing goes real fast and you just feel like you can rule the world. And for a time you can. But when you crash you lose it all.”14

  As hard drugs penetrated deeper into both Fillmores, the audi­ences also moved to cocaine, downers, and alcohol, and even worse. At one show, a smartly dressed, short-haired twenty-one-year-old man died at the Fillmore East after inhaling Freon gas and freezing his lungs.

  “I was giving him artificial respiration in the balcony of the Fillmore,” said Bill Graham’s personal assistant, Bonnie Garner. “And that kid dying just threw me. I thought, ‘I’m done. I’m done.’ ”15

  The next day, she handed in her notice.

  The first week of May, Jefferson Airplane were back in New York for a run at the Fillmore East. Two days before their first show, four Kent State University students were shot dead by National Guardsmen during a peaceful anti-Vietnam protest in Ohio.

  The shootings came in the wake of the United States invasion of Cambodia and President Nixon’s announcement that he was sending 150,000 more troops off to the war.

  Bill Graham had scheduled the Airplane to play a free concert on Sunday afternoon, after the Wednesday- and Thursday-night shows at the Fillmore East. But after the Kent State Massacre, some Yale students tried to convince the band to come to New Haven instead to take part in a student strike.

  “Reportedly, this request caused some consternation in the band,” recalled Robert Christgau, “with Grace and Marty tempted and the others reluctant.”