by John Glatt
Although he was tempted to join Eric Clapton, when Santana made him a firm offer the very next day, he accepted.
“I didn’t feel I was ready to move all the way to England away from my family,” he explained. “I had also become very close to the Santana guys. Carlos had taken me under his wing like a little brother.”9
The young teenager soon found himself traveling the world with Santana and being treated like rock royalty. He was also exposed to the band’s hedonistic lifestyle of unlimited drugs and sex.
“When Neal came out on the road he’d room with me,” recalled Michael Carabello. “We hung out and I taught him some bad habits. Drugs were free-flow back then.”10
Schon held back for a while before he joined in the nonstop Santana party.
“Well it was an eye-opener,” he said. “These guys were all very wild and crazy. And it was that period in life in the music industry where everything went. I mean it didn’t matter what it was.”11
Carlos Santana would later say that the band started falling apart during the recording of the third album.
“Success was getting to be too much,” he explained. “We were trying to make Santana 3, but overindulgence in everything available to a successful rock ’n’ roller was becoming a problem. I started catching my friends shooting up in the bathroom. Nobody, apart from Bill Graham, kept a level head.”12
José Areas says that Carlos would dose the band’s drinks with acid before they went onstage.
“One time Gregg Rolie got mad and threw Carlos in the pool,” said Areas, “because he [dosed us] with acid before we were going to play this concert. Carlos was putting stuff in our drinks and he destroyed the group because of doing that shit. I cannot play with drugs, I play nutso, but Carlos had to have acid.”13
Carlos was now secretly battling his own demons, mentally going back to being molested as a young boy, which had him questioning his sexuality. He still felt guilty about what had happened, and it would be many years before he sought help.
“I was really at war with myself,” he said later. “When you fight yourself you start blaming that wall and this lamp, and then this amplifier. I wasn’t ready to forgive the person who molested me. I wasn’t ready to do the inner-work to be liberated from my own demons. I became really, really short-tempered and quick to anger.”14
Carlos would come to realize that all his unresolved issues combined with drugs was destroying the band.
“I’m sure I made hell for the original guys in the band,” he said, “because I didn’t have a way to express it and crystallize and heal it.”15
The same night that Bill Graham presented Eric Clapton at the Berkley Community Center, he also had Country Joe and the Fish at Winterland; Leon Russell and Captain Beefheart playing his new Marin County venue, Pepperland; and Black Sabbath, Love, and the James Gang at the Fillmore West.
Rolling Stone sent reporter Andrew Moss to the Fillmore West to see how the audiences had changed over the years. He found that about two-thirds of the audience were in high school, making them too young to remember the early days of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane.
“For most of the high school audience,” wrote Moss, “the 1966 San Francisco scene served as a kind of primeval origin myth. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be the Dead setting their musical style now. It’s Led Zeppelin and (of course) Grand Funk Railroad.”
Moss found that dope was rampant at the Fillmore West, with at least thirty dealers selling every kind of drug, including heroin.
“The waiting line is like a dope supermarket,” wrote Moss. “One of the dope dealers ran the market down to me: ‘What kind of a night am I having? Fair. About 50 bucks so far and I should do 75. You used to be able to do $300 to $500 a night, but there are too many dealers here now.’”
Moss calculated that the average Fillmore patron spent around $1.50 a night on dope, which would buy a hit of acid, six downers, or two joints.
“That’s how it is at the Fillmore West this year,” he wrote. “It’s a downer. It’s fucked.”
Fillmore West manager Gary L. Jackson claims to have had the situation well under control, with five security guards spread out around the ballroom.
“They’d bring the dealers into my office,” he said. “I busted them and took all their drugs and then I’d throw them out.”
Jackson would confiscate their drugs and any cash he found on them, which he later donated to a local Catholic church.
“The drugs,” he said. “We never resold them and put them in a pile and destroyed them. If you don’t police it yourself the police are going to come in and do it.”
But when it came to the bands and drugs, the Fillmore management took a different approach.
“Obviously we turned the other cheek,” Jackson explained. “Backstage you get treated another way. What would you do if you were managing the Fillmore and David Crosby says I’m not going on unless you get me some grass. The show must go on.”16
In mid-November, Grace Slick was the subject of a coveted Rolling Stone interview, joining the likes of John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, and Phil Spector. The lengthy interview by Ben Fong-Torres, which was recorded shortly before Janis Joplin’s death, was accompanied by photographs by Annie Leibovitz of Grace and Paul Kantner relaxing at their new home in Bolinas
“Would you like to be photographed with a very large stomach?” Leibovitz asked Grace. “No,” she replied. “For some reason I don’t . . . it’s not the large stomach, it’s the posing I don’t like. I hated modeling.”
At one point, Fong-Torres asked about their ex-manager Bill Graham, and if he was receptive to their idea of setting aside nights at the Fillmore for people to come and hang out.
“He’s got it too well down,” replied Kantner, “so it’s becoming like a TV show—the same thing every week.”
“How are you getting along with Bill?” asked Fong-Torres.
“Fine,” replied Kantner. “It’s always been cordial. He’s trying to help us go to South Vietnam and North Vietnam. But the government doesn’t like the idea . . . it’s the long hair and the dope. We’d probably tell people that anybody who didn’t want to fight could put down their guns and split.”17
That Thanksgiving, Jefferson Airplane once again played at the Fillmore East, with eight-months-pregnant Grace Slick wearing a white maternity dress. A few weeks earlier she had to pull out of a Fillmore East show with the Grateful Dead because of her pregnancy, but she had soldiered through the rest of their winter tour.
“I went on two tours when I had a big stomach out to here,” she said later. “Never threw up. Never got sick. It just went fine.”18
Once again Bill Graham laid on his traditional Thanksgiving Dinner, but this year things were different. The band members were hardly talking to one another, and Marty Balin was deeply depressed and drinking heavily.
“Everybody was dying in 1970,” he recalled, “and things were getting very dark. And then cocaine came in and cocaine ruined the music. I didn’t like the people in the band anymore. I didn’t like their attitude. I didn’t like the way they treated me. The Airplane was so important to me, but it wasn’t important to the other people in the Airplane.”19
On Thanksgiving night, Grace returned to her hotel room to find a stranger waiting for her, claiming to be the father of her baby.
“Grace is about eight months pregnant,” said Bill Thompson, “and she gets to her hotel room and there’s some hippie in her room. He goes, ‘I’ve been waiting for you to come home, dear.’ He thought he was the father of her child.”20
After the last show on November 28, the Airplane flew back to San Francisco for the holidays, with Grace and Paul preparing for their new baby. It would be the last time that Jefferson Airplane would ever play the Fillmore East.
By mid-December, Bill Graham had recaptured Winterland, leaving Paul Ba
ratta out in the cold. Using all his business cunning, the wily promoter now had exclusive use of Winterland for 1971, with options on the next two years.
Taking aim at his critics, Graham told England’s Melody Maker, “After a time I get sick of being called a capitalist pig, the big rip-off, being talked about as though I were some kind of leper. In San Francisco they say I have a monopoly. Man, there are four to five halls in that city waiting for someone to make it happen. Isn’t it just possible that someone is better than the rest at making it happen?” 21
On Thursday, December 31, Bill Graham presented the Grateful Dead at Winterland, Cold Blood at the Fillmore West, and Mountain at the Fillmore East. With their new album Nantucket Sleigh Ride just released, Mountain sold out all six of their shows that week, climaxing in the New Year’s Eve one.
“Mountain played there for a week at Christmas,” said Johnny Ramone. “I went about four times.”22
After Jimi Hendrix’s death, Rolling Stone observed that many of his fans had been won over by the hard-rock sound of Mountain. It was Mountain’s fourth appearance at the Fillmore East, and at one of the Christmas shows, guitarist Leslie West recognized an old schoolmate in the audience, someone who used to tease him about his weight.
“I recognized his voice,” recalled West. “It was George Pressman. He yelled out, ‘Hey fat boy!’ And so I couldn’t resist. I said, ‘How much did you pay for your ticket? Well fuck you. I’m up here and you’re not.’ I never forgot that.”
That night Bill Graham hired Nathan’s to come to the Fillmore East and serve hot dogs to everyone as a New Year’s Eve treat.
“And it was my idea to have the party,” said West, who weighed in at near three hundred pounds. “What kind of catering? We had Nathan’s pushcarts with frankfurters and knishes onstage afterwards. Everybody seemed to love it.”23
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The Last Hurrah
January to March, 1971
On New Year’s Day, 1971, Santana played the Diamond Head Crater festival in Hawaii, marking Neal Schon’s first appearance as a member of the band. During the trip, Santana partied hard with a full bowl of cocaine in their rented mansion. Carlos had even brought along his new personal astrologer, Dr. Stars, who joined in all the fun.
Abraxus had now reached number 1 on the Billboard charts. It would go on to sell more than four million copies, remaining in the charts for eighteen months.
“They beat the sophomore jinx,” said Herbie Herbert. “And so Santana was one of those rare artists that actually takes a leap forward.”1
On January 6—two days before he turned forty—Bill Graham reached out to Carlos Santana, writing him an eight-page letter expressing his deep feelings of betrayal by his protégé. He said he didn’t question Santana’s right to fire him, only the manner in which it was done. And he wrote how the breakdown in their relationship had hurt him personally.
“What am I trying to tell you, Carlos?” he wrote. “I’m trying to tell you that I felt very sad and depressed that our relationship had come to this point. That the relationship that once was has crumbled to this level of degradation. I ask you to please ask yourself whether you think that my work for you warrants this type of treatment; if all that I have tried to do for Santana over the years can be blurred out by the immediacy of your tremendous success. Can success block out truth, reality, ethics, wisdom—the right way?”
He then appealed to Carlos to search his conscience and fairly compensate him for all his work to make Santana so successful.
“There is no hope on my part for a reconciliation of our relationship in business,” he wrote. “I’m not asking for that. Your decision to go your own way was accepted by me immediately. However, it is the proper settlement of our previous business relationship that I’m concerned about. And that, Carlos, is what I’m asking you to look into at this time.”
Finally, he asked Carlos to imagine how demeaning it had been for him to read about his firing in the press.
“I ask you to think about how I might feel,” he wrote, “when I read of these accounts in a magazine like the Rolling Stone that isn’t good enough to be used by you as toilet paper. And yet, a magazine such as that tells the world that Santana has dropped Bill Graham as though he was some dried, decaying prune.”
Also two days before his fortieth birthday, Bill Graham predicted the death of rock ’n’ roll in a major interview in Variety.
“Right now there is a struggle going on between rock’s essence and its decadent alter ego,” warned Graham. “Five years ago when the current phase of rock began, the majority of promoters were young kids who dug rock. That was the beginning. It was a $100 business. Then it became a $1,000 business and some young people had to get knowledgeable about what they had to do to run dances. But then rock became a million-dollar business and then a multi-billion-dollar business.
“The entire monetary structure of rock has greatly changed, meaning that many groups can play a few large arenas and pocket enough money to live in luxury. It is not uncommon to find a 22-year-old earning up to $1 million a year. This emphasis on playing the big halls, taking your money and running has had a bad effect on rock. Many groups have priced themselves out of the medium-sized concert market and lost respect for the audience.”
Graham said that as a concert promoter he had certain responsibilities to the public, like providing a good sound system, good lighting, and security. He then drew his favorite analogy of himself as the maitre d’ of the Fillmores.
“We are in theater,” he wrote. “You put a steak on a paper plate and it tastes all right, but you take the same steak and put it on china and it tastes different.”
He then warned bands against underestimating audiences by playing in huge arenas with no personal contact.
“Three quarters of the groups around today are lousy,” he wrote. “They just get out there and bang away to make a quick killing. The groups today know they don’t have to be good, just gimmicky—give ’em what they want. I book the bad ones into the Fillmores because of economics—an overhead of $30,000 a week—not including talent. We bring in the best groups we can and then the best of the worst.”2
On January 15, 1971, Electric Hot Tuna headlined the Fillmore East for the first time, with Taj Mahal and Brethren opening. With Grace Slick due to give birth at any time back in California, Jefferson Airplane were now on an indefinite hiatus.
Ten days later, on Monday, January 25, Grace was with Paul Kantner and some friends at their Bolinas home when she suddenly went into labor.
“And I said, ‘Okay. That’s it. Into San Francisco,’ ” Grace recalled. “[Paul] took me into the hospital and then promptly went to sleep through the entire thing.”
Grace gave birth to a seven-pound baby girl at the French Hospital in San Francisco. It was a natural birth, but the anesthetist didn’t show up until two minutes before the baby was born.
“It hurt,” said Grace, “but that’s approximately what I thought it was going to be like. So it was all as smooth as silk.”3
A couple of weeks earlier, Rolling Stone had claimed that the “aristocratic couple,” who still did not know the sex of their unborn baby, would name their son “god” with a lower case g.4After the baby was born, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen ran an item suggesting that Grace had given a name to her daughter, and indeed the name was “god.” It was picked up by newspapers all over the world.
On January 30, the new mother and baby were photographed by the Associated Press while leaving the hospital.
“Grace Slick . . . took her newborn daughter home from the hospital,” wrote the San Francisco Examiner, “declaring that baby ‘god’ would be reared in the world of rock concerts and recording sessions.
“Its real name is god with a small ‘g,’ she said, cuddling the child at the French Hospital. ‘It’s a small ‘g’ because with a nam
e like that you have to show some humility.’ ”
After refuting any suggestion of being the “Queen of Rock,” Grace told the reporter she had abstained from dropping LSD during her pregnancy.5
Time magazine also duly commemorated the royal rock birth in its “Milestones” column, getting Grace’s age wrong.
Born. To Grace Slick, 31, acid-voiced rock singer, and Paul Kantner, 29, guitarist, both of Jefferson Airplane fame: a daughter; in San Francisco.
Name: “god” (a small g). No plans for marriage: god will have no surname.
Said Grace: “Art Linkletter and Al Capp will be disappointed to learn that she is very healthy, in spite of what they say about drug-crazed hippies.”6
Later, Grace would claim that she had only been joking about naming her daughter “god,” and one of the hospital nurses had tipped off Caen, who ran with it.
“I was just sort of dicking around with the nurse,” Grace maintained. “I had no intention of calling her god.”7
Soon afterward, she announced that her daughter would be known as China Wing Kantner.
In mid-January, Janis Joplin’s final album, Pearl, was released to rave reviews. It went straight to number 1 on the Billboard charts, staying there for nine weeks.
“Fortunately Pearl is a good record,” wrote Rolling Stone reviewer Jack Shadoian, “and Janis is often magnificent. The voice cut off was clearly in its prime. There is every indication that Janis was working toward a new maturity and confidence.”
On February 6, NBC’s First Tuesday news magazine broadcast a program entitled, “The Bitter Sweet Legacy of Janis Joplin.” It examined how Janis had already become a legend in the three months since she had overdosed.
“She was a product of a subculture that thrives on drugs,” said show producer Anthony Potter, “but her appeal extended beyond those boundaries.”
Janis’s parents were both interviewed, as well as Clive Davis.