by John Glatt
He then accused the San Francisco musicians of disloyalty for snubbing the Fillmore to make more money in bigger venues.
“When they were unknown,” said Graham, “we hired them. When they were busted, we were there. We were always there. When the time came to stand up and be counted, I always thought we would be on the same team. I was wrong.”
Graham also reminded them that the Fillmore West was still under a death threat from Howard Johnson’s, and it would eventually be torn down.
“Running a ballroom,” he told his staff, “is like a weekly invasion of Normandy, and there are already too many casualties.”28
On Thursday, September 10, Santana started a three-night run at the Fillmore West—the first time they had played a Bill Graham venue since they had fired him. At Santana’s request, Graham had booked Dr. John as opening act. The morning of the first show, Graham messengered a letter to Stan Marcum, pleading with him for Santana to play two sets a night instead of the contracted one, because of the high demand.
Dear Stan:
Have not been able to reach you by phone. Request for tickets for this weekend is tremendous. Please, please ask the group if they could not possibly do two sets for me Thursday and Sunday evenings also. Have gone out of my way to get Dr. John for you and the light show you requested. I would consider it a personal favor if you would relay this request to the group and get back to me some time today. My sincere thanks for their consideration.
Best
Bill Graham.29
Soon after jettisoning Graham, Stan Marcum opened an office by the San Francisco waterfront. Santana’s manager now rarely arrived at work before dinner, and he used his safe to house the band’s cocaine stash. Drugs were rampant in the office, and Herbie Herbert had once found Marcum’s personal secretary crying because she had snorted too much coke.
Marcum hired a lawyer named Herb Resner, who renegotiated Santana’s contract with Columbia, obtaining a $1 million check in royalties. Bill Graham then had a stormy meeting with Resner, demanding $650,000 in fees. At the meeting, Graham produced an itemized list of everything he claimed to have accomplished for Santana, going through it point by point.
“We got very heated,” said Graham, “and he started calling me some names and I lunged at him.”
In mid-September, Santana’s second album, Abraxas, was released. To tie in with it, Time magazine ran a story about the group, which had been originally pitched by Bill Graham publicity chief Chris Brooks.
“It had taken months to get them a story in Time magazine,” she said, “with Bill pulling in some favors. They were all drugged out at the time, including their manager Stan Marcum. I had explained everything to him, like what time the band had to be there [for the interview]. And I knew something was wrong when after the discussion Stan looked at me and said, ‘Now, what time are they supposed to be there?’ ”30
Only a couple of band members even bothered to turn up for the interview, which made just three paragraphs.
“There is nothing simple about Santana’s music,” it read. “The group’s second recording, Abraxas, released this week by Columbia Records, shows less propulsive violence than the first, Santana. What it offers instead is a rare poetic delicacy.”
But the final line carried a real sting to Bill Graham.
“From the beginning, the group has been managed by a music-struck local barber named Stan Marcum.”
Rolling Stone also hailed the new album, which would later be ranked number 205 on its list of the greatest albums of all time.
“Carlos Santana is a Chicano,” read the review, “and he loves the guitar, which has always been used heavily in Mexican music. He has perfected a style associated with blues and cool jazz and crossed it with Latin music. It works well because the band is one of the tightest units ever to walk into a recording studio.”31
Soon after Abraxas was released, José “Chepito” Areas was flying back to Nicaragua, carrying a stack of new albums wrapped up in brown paper for his family. Just before takeoff, a stewardess told him that the large brown package would have to go in an overhead compartment.
The timbales player said he didn’t want to put it up there, as it was “dynamite.” Thinking it was a bomb, the stewardess told the pilot, who then abandoned the takeoff and alerted the FBI. Areas, who spoke little English, was then dragged off the plane while protesting his innocence.
Finally, Bill Graham had to call the FBI and explain that it was a mistake, and that Areas had been trying to say that it was a “dynamite recording.”32
On Sunday, September 27, Pink Floyd made their debut at the Fillmore East, playing their new concept album Atom Heart Mother. Bill Graham did not believe the psychedelic English band, who were on their first tour of America, could sell out the Fillmore East.
“So instead of promoting the show himself,” said Floyd drummer Nick Mason, “he rented the theater out to us for $3,000. We sold out.”
For their performance of Atom Heart Mother, Floyd brought in all their own sound and lighting equipment, as well as ten horn players, a conductor, and a twenty-piece choir onstage to augment them.
“They were doing quadrophonic sound,” said spotlight operator Ken Mednick. “It was totally revolutionary and quite mind-boggling.”33
It was also the first time that Pink Floyd met the Fillmore East lighting director Arthur Shafransky, who would soon take over all the band’s lighting, renaming himself Arthur Max.
During the intermission, a couple of scruffy-looking individuals came into the dressing room and made themselves at home.
“We had [them] ejected,” said Mason, “only to discover later they were members of The Band. This was particularly embarrassing for us, since Music from Big Pink was a favored album in all our record collections.”34
Bill Graham still could not bring himself to end his relationship with Diane LaChambre. Since Bonnie had moved out with his son, David, and filed for divorce, Graham underwent therapy to try to sort out his tangled personal life. The therapist had advised him to finish the relationship, but he just was unable to do so.
When Diane became pregnant again and wanted to marry him and settle down, Graham insisted she have an abortion, which she did reluctantly.35
Graham was also having problems on the business side, and his attempts to move into the Los Angeles and Southern California concert market had collapsed. Police harassment pulled the plug on many shows, and the Musicians Union began to investigate him after complaints from Little Richard, Country Joe and the Fish, and Roger McGuinn. Many music industry observers saw Bill Graham on the ropes, desperately fighting to keep his empire together.
Later Graham admitted that the two Fillmores alone had run him ragged, bringing him to the edge of a nervous breakdown.
“The economics got so it was madness,” he later explained. “They’d become a 52-week job and they were 3,000 miles apart and driving me mad because it was becoming more and more difficult to operate very small halls.”36
Now believing Graham to be vulnerable, Paul Baratta staged a second coup for Winterland. This time he was in a much stronger position than his first attempt nine months earlier, as Graham had failed to pay his $60,000 guarantee. The owners decided to back Baratta, giving him sole rights to stage all future Winterland concerts.
Baratta immediately signed Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead for his first show there. For the San Francisco bands, even though they owed part of their success to Graham, it would be an ideal opportunity to start a bidding war among the promoters, and thus drive their prices up.
“I think Bill’s in for a fight,” Baratta told Rolling Stone, vowing to become the number-one promoter in San Francisco. “Graham has never had any real competition. I know how to package a show as well as Bill. Winterland is the biggest hall in town and I know the market well enough to put the shows together so the people will come
to see them.”37
Baratta then attacked his former boss, calling him a heartless moneymaking machine.
“I broke with Bill because of a growing disenchantment,” he said. “At first what Bill did was good. He had heart. Then it began to seem like the bankbook was pumping blood through his veins. We just went our separate ways.” Watching from the sidelines, Rolling Stone reported the action with the gravity of a world championship boxing match, forecasting that the seasoned pro could be expected to “fight a hard battle” against the young challenger.
Siding with Baratta, Rolling Stone had this warning for the hard-nosed promoter: “You meet the same people on the way down as you did on the way up.
“Graham has made many enemies over the years. Now, at least some of them are happy to see him get some real competition and will do all they can, including playing the Winterland affairs, to reduce Graham’s overwhelming totalitarian position in the entertainment world.”
After her high school reunion, and as a tribute to one of her greatest influences, Janis Joplin had purchased a headstone to be placed above Bessie Smith’s grave. She also became engaged to Seth Morgan, whom she had met at her tattoo party. Independently wealthy, Morgan claimed to be the famous banker J. P. Morgan’s grandson, but was in fact the son of an obscure poet named Frederick Morgan.
Janis invited him to move in with her, and within days she told friends he was the love of her life and they were getting married. Many were suspicious of his true intentions.
The first week of September, Janis Joplin moved into Room 105 at the Landmark Hotel in West Hollywood to start recording her new album. During the next couple of days the rest of the Full Tilt Boogie Band also checked into the hotel. Seth Morgan remained in Larkspur, flying in on weekends to see Janis.
Soon after arriving in Los Angeles, Janis reconnected with her old girlfriend Peggy Caserta, who was staying at a nearby hotel. And it wasn’t long before Janis, who had been clean for six months, was back on heroin.
Throughout the last few months, Janis had started referring to herself as “Pearl,” personifying the tough, hard-drinking, seen-it-all good-time girl whose image she liked to project. This would be the name of her last, and arguably her best, album.
Ironically, it would be produced by Paul Rothchild, who three years earlier had tried to lure her away from Big Brother and the Holding Company to become a star. The early sessions were a strain, with Janis listening to hours of tapes looking for new songs.
She was now working eight to ten hours a day recording in the studio, while at night she partied hard.
“To the band she always presented [herself as] this very up, very happy, very ready-to-rock, ready-to-play and make the music,” said Full Tilt Boogie guitarist, John Till. “That was the side of her we saw [and] we didn’t really see the other side.”38
While she was in Los Angeles, Janis met her old lover Kris Kristofferson and writer J. Marks for a drink at a seedy little bar on Santa Monica Boulevard.
“Her personal life was very lonesome,” recalled Kristofferson, “and it was overwhelming to her.”39
After spending a couple of hours with Janis, Marks walked her back to the Landmark Hotel.
“She crashed almost as soon as she hit the bed,” said Marks. “I remember I was frightened by her massive fatigue. ‘Are you all right?’ I asked. She half opened her eyes and smiled bitterly. ‘Sure,’ she muttered, ‘I’m just working on this tune,’ she mumbled in her rusty voice. ‘I’m gonna call it something like this: ‘I just made love to 25,000 People, But I’m goin’ Home Alone.’ Then she went to sleep.”40
On Friday, September 18, Jimi Hendrix overdosed in London, choking to death at the age of twenty-seven. After hearing the sad news in the studio, Janis became obsessed with her own mortality. She asked bassist Brad Campbell if he thought she would get as much publicity as Hendrix if she died. She also told her fiancé, “I can’t go out the same year because he’s a bigger star.”
The following Thursday, producer Paul Rothchild called Nick Gravenites and asked him to write a couple of new songs to complete the album. Four days later Gravenities arrived in Los Angeles and headed straight to the Landmark Hotel, where he played Janis a new unfinished song called “Buried Alive in the Blues.”
In her hotel room, Janis told Gravenites that she was really happy and looking forward to marrying Seth Morgan.
“She was telling me everything about her new old man,” said Gravenites, “and how there were wedding bells in the air. She finally dug an old man she could relate to . . . and she was so happy with her band.”41
Janis loved the new song, and the next day Gravenites finished it and brought it into the studio for the band to learn. Other tracks that had already been recorded included Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee” and a quirky campfire song called “Mercedes Benz,” which Janis had written with Bobby Neuwirth and poet Michael McClure and sang a cappella.
By the end of September, after almost a month in the studio, the album was 80 percent finished, and everybody was excited at how well it was going.
On Wednesday, September 30, Janis Joplin did a short telephone interview with Howard Smith to air on his Sunday show on the New York rock station WPLJ. Smith would have interviewed Janis months earlier, but she had been so upset about a negative review in Rolling Stone that she had canceled.
“Are you still upset when you get put down in any articles?” he asked her.
“I should be able to get past that,” Janis replied, “but it’s like most people, especially girls . . . want to be reassured. I know that [they] are just assholes but in my insides it’s really hurtful if somebody doesn’t like me. That was a pretty heavy time for me. I was leaving Big Brother and it was really important whether the people were going to accept me or not.”
Then Smith asked how the recording of her new album was going.
“It’s really going good,” she told him. “We’ve got enough now for the record but we’re still putting down some more tunes.”
Smith then asked how she felt about the Women Libbers, who had recently complained that she was too sexually upfront for the movement.
“That’s their problem not mine,” she replied. “How can they attack me? I’m representing everything they said they want. I mean you’re only as much as you settle for, and if they settle for being somebody’s dishwasher, that’s their own fucking problem. How can they attack me? I’m just doing what I wanted to do and what feels right and not settling for bullshit and it worked. How can they be mad at that?”
Finally, Smith inquired how her voice was holding out after her demanding stage shows.
“I’m not losing my voice,” said Janis. “It’s in better shape than it ever has been. It’s stronger than ever . . . so long as I only have to work three nights a week I can last forever.”
“Okay, good luck,” said Smith, “and maybe when you’re in New York we’ll get together.”
Then, apparently concerned about her comments regarding the Women’s Liberation movement, Janis asked him to run it past Myra Friedman before it aired.
“Tell her what I said,” said Janis, “in case she thinks I said something wrong, so maybe she won’t let you use it.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Smith reassured her. “Really, don’t worry.”42
“Oh, I don’t want to offend people,” Janis explained. “It’s just like I have a certain set of things I try and live under. Like all this repressive upbringing and things. I have it too. You don’t think I have a repressive upbringing in Port Arthur, Texas, you know? It’s just that it drove me crazy and I kept fighting against it. You know, I don’t think you can talk anybody into fighting against it if they don’t have it in themselves to need more. You know what I mean?
“But hey, would you do that and talk to [Myra] in case I said anything wrong.”43
The next day, Jani
s made a new will, splitting her estate four ways between her parents and her brother and sister. She also approved a premarital agreement her attorney Robert Gordon had drafted for Seth Morgan to sign.
“She seemed very happy,” recalled Gordon. “She told me she was thinking of getting married. She was also very happy about her album. She said she ‘felt like a woman.’ ”44
After leaving his office, Janis stopped off at a beauty parlor and got her hair streaked. She had also been on a diet, telling friends she planned to wed Morgan on a Mexican cruise ship.
Later that day, during her last telephone conversation with Clive Davis, Janis seemed positive and upbeat about the new record, playing him a few of the new songs.
“She seemed so thrilled about the record she was making,” he said. “She couldn’t have seemed happier.”45
On Saturday, October 3, Janis didn’t have to be in the studio until late afternoon, so she hung out at the Landmark Hotel. She tried to call San Francisco City Hall to inquire about marriage licenses, but it was closed on weekends. By the afternoon, Janis felt bored and edgy. She called her dealer, reaching him on her third attempt. They arranged for a heroin delivery.
When she called Seth Morgan, who was at her house in Larkspur, they argued after he told her he couldn’t come to Los Angeles that day as planned. But he agreed to meet her at the Landmark early Sunday morning so they could have a three-way with Peggy Caserta.46
After her dealer arrived at the hotel, Janis shot up some old heroin she had in the room before driving her Porsche to the studio, arriving at around 5:30 p.m.
She walked in to find her band working on their arrangements for the new song “Buried Alive in the Blues,” for which Janis would record the vocals the next day.
“She was really liking the song,” said John Till. “She really felt good about what was going on and she told us many times, ‘I just love that.’ ”