by John Glatt
“Janis had had an enormous public while she was alive,” said Davis. “She will sell very, very well with this album.”
Also interviewed was a Philadelphia lady who did “big business” selling Janis posters, as well as Harry Essex, who claimed he owned the movie rights to her life story.
“The Joplin mystique left a lucrative market to exploit,” said Potter. “She may well make more money dead than alive.”8
In February, just days before Santana were due to leave for shows in Africa and Europe, José “Chepito” Areas had a brain hemorrhage and nearly died. Santana were rehearsing for the upcoming tour, and when Areas didn’t show up, Neal Schon and bassist David Brown went to his house. They arrived to find Areas lying unconscious in his bedroom in a pool of blood. He was then taken to Franklin Hospital, where a Catholic priest performed the last rites.
“I had a stroke,” said Areas. “I was five days in a coma and they pronounced me dead. And then I woke up. I don’t remember anything.”9
While Areas lay in a coma near death, Carlos Santana refused to cancel the tour, although many in the band thought they should do so out of loyalty to their fallen bandmate.
“We had a meeting,” said Michael Carabello, “because Carlos was getting restless, just sitting around and waiting. He wanted a gig. His head got about as big as Humpty Dumpty!”
Carabello told Carlos it was wrong to play without Chepito, as he was part of the band. He then threatened to quit if Carlos replaced him with another musician.
“And that just showed me a little greed on [Carlos’s] part,” said Carabello. “He should have been more concerned about his so-called brother.”10
Finally, Santana flew to Accra, Ghana, drafting Willie Bobo to replace Areas. But the veteran percussionist was also taken ill after they performed, and by the time they had reached London for the European leg of the tour, he had been replaced by Coke Escovedo.
In Europe, the newly hired percussionist befriended Carlos Santana, sharing hotel rooms with him. He soon cozied up to the insecure young guitarist, telling him he was really Santana and no one else was as important to the band.
“The wrong people were whispering in Carlos’s ear,” said Herbie Herbert. “ ‘This is you, buddy. It is your name. This is your band.’ As a matter of fact the idea of calling it Santana was Carabello’s.”11
The first week of March, Aretha Franklin played three consecutive nights at the Fillmore West, receiving $20,000 ($115,600). Bill Graham paid the Queen of Soul half on signing and the rest in cash before she even sang a note. As part of her four-page rider, Graham would provide her with a brand-new Cadillac limousine with chauffeur to transport her to and from San Francisco Airport.
These shows were a milestone in Aretha’s career, resulting in the classic album Aretha Live at Fillmore West. They also exposed her to a new white audience for the first time, turning her into a superstar. Aretha’s amazing band during the run included King Curtis on sax, Billy Preston on organ, and Cornell Dupree on guitar.
A beaming Bill Graham walked onstage to introduce her, saying: “For all of us here at the Fillmore West, it’s a long-awaited privilege and a great pleasure to bring out the number-one lady—Miss Aretha Franklin.”
On the final night, Ray Charles joined Aretha onstage, giving Bill Graham a career highlight.
“It was one of the magnificent moments of my life,” he later said. “For the first time, an egg cream, a fifty-fifty audience, black and white. And at the end of the night, Ray and Aretha are hand in hand, King Curtis is playing, all the house lights are turned up, and I’m looking out into that sweating, swaying, dancing audience . . . you can’t buy that. That’s why I’m in the business.”12
The next morning, San Francisco Chronicle columnist John L. Wasserman applauded Bill Graham for “hustling, haranguing, conning and cajoling” Aretha to record her live album at the Fillmore West.
“After five years of enjoying the best rock music available anywhere,” he wrote, “we tend to take Fillmore West for granted. On the basis of quality and quantity of acts, the unequalled production of Bill Graham, attendance and ticket prices, Fillmore West is simply the world’s greatest rock and roll music hall.”13
Four days later, the Allman Brothers played a three-night run at the Fillmore East, recording their legendary live double album Live at the Fillmore East. Incredibly, top billing for the shows went to Johnny Winter and the Elvin Bishop Group, with the Allman Brothers Band listed as a special added attraction.
On Thursday afternoon, as the Allman Brothers arrived, a large truck with a mobile recording studio was parked outside on Sixth Street to record the shows in quadrophonic sound. At the soundcheck, head roadie Red Dog gave the Fillmore’s assistant stage manager Dan Opatoshu the band’s orders for various drugs. He then passed the info on to lighting engineer Jene Youtt, who went out to score.
“I was selling drugs to the bands,” recalled Youtt. “I was into cocaine and I would sell that to the bands—user/dealer. It paid for my use. When they cut the album Live at the Fillmore East, I’d sell them cocaine for each show. And then Duane [Allman] needed heroin to come down afterward.”14
Drummer Butch Trucks said that Bill Graham had no problem with the band getting high, as long as they delivered a great show.
“Bill understood the nature of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll,” explained Trucks. “But at the Fillmore East, rock ’n’ roll came first. Then you could do the sex and drugs.”15
On a previous occasion there, Gregg Allman had gotten too wasted to play.
“Gregg was really kind of a mess,” said Trucks, “and Bill didn’t really go into him because he understood the nature of the sickness. But he just told him, ‘Gregg, if you continue to play at the Fillmore you can’t do that anymore. You just can’t. If that’s what you want to do, then you’re going to have to play somewhere else, because I’m not going to have that happening in my venue.’ ”
Whenever the Allman Brothers played the Fillmore East, there were so many available groupies that Red Dog had special T-shirts made up that read “No head. No backstage pass.”
“So if you were a female you had to suck some dick,” said Trucks, “and if you were a male you had to bring some cocaine. Oh man! I got my dick sucked in every corner of that building. It was a great place to do anything you wanted to do, as long as when it was your time to play you got on the stage and played the best show you could.”
On the first night, the Allman Brothers Band opened and Johnny Winter closed the show.
“When we finished our first set,” said Trucks, “half the audience got up and left. And so Johnny Winter’s manager went to Bill Graham and said, ‘I guess Johnny can’t go on after the Allman Brothers anymore.’ So we switched and we got to close the show. If that hadn’t have happened, we wouldn’t have had time to do all that stretching out and do a damn near fifteen minute ‘Whipping Post.’ ”16
That weekend, the Allman Brothers were transcendent, and every night after they came offstage they went back to Atlantic Studios with producer Tom Dowd to listen to the tapes.
“When we listened to them,” said Dowd, “we knew what we had nailed and what we might have to work on. And we started editing, ‘We don’t need to do this song tomorrow. Let’s change the set.’ ”17
The resulting Live at the Fillmore East album featured “Whipping Post,” “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” and “Statesboro Blues” from the last two nights. Other classic tracks, such as the thirty-four-minute “Mountain Jam,” would surface on the following year’s Eat a Peach double album.
Allman Brothers drummer Jai Johanny Johanson had first played there in Otis Redding’s band in 1966, when it was the Village Theater. He believes the building is haunted by generations of jazz musicians, whose spirits helped the Allman Brothers scale new musical heights.
“You know their spirits are hanging there,
” he said, “waiting for somebody to come in that’s got the ability, so they can play a little bit better. They’re what we call ‘wandering spirits,’ and they’re just lying there waiting to have a ball.”18
These classic shows were recorded just seven months before Duane Allman’s untimely death in a motorcycle accident. His brother Gregg says that in hindsight this made their performances far more poignant.
“Those concerts were so special,” he explained. “It was almost like somebody knew what was gonna happen; it was kind of eerie.”19
The iconic album cover, showing the band and roadies surrounded by all their equipment, was actually taken weeks later in Macon, Georgia, as the band were too busy to fly back and pose in front of the Fillmore East. Somebody suggested stenciling the words “The Allman Brothers Band at Fillmore East” on the equipment cases and stacked them up against a brick wall.
“It was a great idea,” said Gregg Allman, “so you would think we were in New York, but we were really in Macon, Georgia.”
Live at the Fillmore East was released in July 1971 and eventually went platinum, reaching number 13 on the Billboard album charts. It is listed at number 49 in Rolling Stone’s 500 greatest albums of all time, with many considering it the finest live rock album ever made.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“The Flowers Wilted”
April to June 6, 1971
When Santana headlined the Fillmore East the first weekend of April 1971, the band was falling apart. After their return from Europe, they had gone straight back into the studio to work on the third album, but it wasn’t coming together. Everybody had their own ideas about musical direction, and there were constant arguments.
“Things were coming unglued,” said Herbie Herbert. “They just kind of imploded on themselves and lost themselves really. Disparate egos and personalities.”1
Opening for Santana at the Fillmore East were Rahsaan Roland Kirk and the Tower of Power, whom Bill Graham had booked at Santana’s request. Since Graham’s January 6 aggrieved letter to Carlos, there was an uneasy truce between them, and Graham still booked the band for his venues. Santana’s two Fillmore East shows those April nights were among their best ever and the audience loved them.
But they were musical spikes in a downward trajectory for the band. Michael Shrieve believes that ultimately cocaine was responsible for the demise of Santana.
“I think [that when] cocaine entered into the scene for us,” he said, “it kind of closed [us] down. I can see it in the band on film. We were still playing well, but our hearts and minds had closed down to each other.”2
Dan Opatoshu said he was shocked to see the state of Santana in their dressing room before they went on to play. He believes heroin might have also ruined the band.
“You had to peel them off the floor to get them onstage,” he recalled. “I don’t know that Carlos was on smack, but some of those other guys certainly were. When people go into a nod it’s rather [easy] to see what they’re doing.”3
Then Santana hit the road, playing a string of dates in the United States. In Detroit, there was so much tension that the band took a communal acid trip to try to smooth things out.
“We tried to change the spiral by dosing them with liquid Owsley,” recalled Herbie Herbert. “It was Gregg’s first acid trip. We took the drops, too, to stay on the same page. It was the most electrifying show . . . and Carlos was wondering what was going on.”4
After the American tour, Santana flew back to Europe, where they played nine countries, culminating in their second appearance at the Montreux Jazz Festival. While they were in Europe, José Areas, now fully recovered from his stroke, rejoined the band, playing alongside his replacement, Coke Escovedo. But bassist David Brown, who had a severe heroin problem, was replaced by Doug Rauch from the Voices of East Harlem.
While they toured the world, Coke Escovedo once again pressured Carlos to make changes in the band.
“And a lot of political bullshit went on,” said David Rubinson, “with Carlos and Coke being bosom buddies against somebody else, and then this one against that one.”5
Finally, Escovedo encouraged Carlos to get rid of manager Stan Marcum, who had a serious heroin problem himself, and start asking him exactly where all the money was going. Later it would emerge that there had been financial irregularities, which even Marcum was not aware of.
“Marcum lost his controls when I came into the band,” said Escovedo. “We started finding out things he should have told us. It got to the point where no one knew what was happening.”6
That April, as Bill Graham jousted with Sol Hurok over booking the Metropolitan Opera House, he fell into a deep depression, questioning the price of his success.
“I wasn’t happy,” he said. “I was married in 1967. My work became my mistress. The marriage broke up simply because my love and adulation went to the work. I found myself in 1971, looking at the audience and looking at the stars and saying, ‘This year I made thirty-nine trips to New York and back.’ ”7
Although the Fillmore East could make him a healthy $15,000 ($90,000) profit during a good weekend, the Fillmore West was losing money because of the high overheads. Graham had also tied himself up in knots by becoming involved in many conflicting areas of the music business. Not only was he a promoter, he was now a theater owner, manager, agent, and recording company executive.
“Graham almost single-handedly ran a music industry within the music industry,” claimed Rolling Stone during an investigation into his business operations. “Because the various positions he assumed were by tradition adversary in relation to one another—an agent negotiates with a promoter; a manager deals with a record executive—he was in constant conflict with himself. And everyone else, or so it seemed.”8
Graham now realized that to survive into the Seventies, he must eat his words and promote the mega rock ’n’ roll concerts he claimed to detest so much. But his true reasons for closing the Fillmores were not for public consumption. He would always maintain that the straw that broke his camel’s back was The Band’s refusal to accept “a lousy fifty grand” for six shows.
In April, Marty Balin quit Jefferson Airplane, walking away with a $30,000 compensation package from the band he had founded. He also surrendered any rights to the name Jefferson Airplane.
He finally made the break as the band started rehearsing for their new album. It was the first under the band’s lucrative new contract with RCA, which gave them their own record label they christened “Grunt.”
Manager Bill Thompson said no one wanted Marty Balin to leave, but he stopped attending band rehearsals and meetings.
“A lot of times we would knock on his door to get Marty to come to our meeting,” said Thompson, “and he would go, ‘Oh gee. I had to disappear,’ and the door closed.”
After he missed a whole week of rehearsals, Thompson asked him why. Balin replied that he had come to the rehearsal and then somebody had told him to drive his car to Stinson Beach, where Janis Joplin’s ashes had been scattered.
“And it happened for the whole week,” said Thompson. “Fine, we didn’t go back. So we used to tell people that Marty didn’t quit the band, his car did.”9
According to Balin, it was the other way around, and it was his bandmates who refused to work with him.
“I got disgusted with all the ego trips,” he would later explain, “and the band were so stoned out I couldn’t even talk to them. Everybody was in their little shell and had private rooms in the mansion. It was like, ‘Hey, I got a song. Does anybody want to help me with it?’ In the studio [I was told], ‘Oh, man do it yourself, I can’t be bothered to help you out. I can’t play the bass for you. I can’t play the guitar for you.’ ”10
Bill Graham went public with his decision to close the Fillmores during a sold-out five-night run by the Grateful Dead at the Fillmore East. The Dead’s breakthrough s
tudio album American Beauty had just been released, and all the shows were being recorded.
On Monday night, during the late show, Duane Allman walked onstage to jam with the band, trading licks with Jerry Garcia. The next night, Bob Dylan was smuggled into the light booth to see the Grateful Dead, with whom he would tour sixteen years later.
Bill Graham, who was there that night, had decided to try to persuade Dylan to join the Dead onstage for a couple of songs. Halfway through the late show, the Beach Boys came onstage to the audience’s delight. They harmonized with Pigpen on “Searchin” before playing “Riot in Cell Block No. Nine” with the Dead.
Allan Arkush, now working with Joe’s Light Show, was putting up slides of the various guests as they were announced. In the event that Bob Dylan did decide to play that night, a special slide with his name was there waiting.
“And then word went out through the headsets that Dylan was there,” said Arkush, “and Dylan was thinking of going onstage. Of course we had a Bob Dylan slide that we never used, but was there just in case it ever happened. And I put it in the projector and when the [Beach Boys] finished, by mistake I hit the wrong slide and Bob Dylan’s name went up. And the audience went crazy because they though Bob Dylan was coming down to play.”
As soon as Dylan saw his name flash up on the screen, he left through the back door.
“I did something really, really stupid,” said Arkush, “and Bill [Graham] got really, really mad at me. Obviously his biggest get at the Fillmore was to have Bob Dylan play. I imagine Dylan was deciding when he saw that and left. Bill was pretty pissed off.”11
A few hours after Bob Dylan stormed out of the Fillmore East, Bill Graham held a press conference and announced he was closing both Fillmores and retiring from the music business. Perched on the edge of the Fillmore East stage clad in a V-neck sweater and rolled up sleeves and wearing his trademark two-faced watch, he sent shock waves through the music industry with the news that the Fillmore East would close on June 27. The Fillmore West would close later that summer, to make room for “a four-hundred-room Howard Johnson’s.”