by John Glatt
During the ninety-minute press conference, which was catered by Rattner’s, Graham held court, rambling on about greedy bands, unscrupulous promoters, and Madison Square Garden. He sadly declared that the “flowers had wilted and the scene had changed.”
“What’s going to happen to the Fillmore East?” asked one reporter, “this structure that’s housed so many livelihoods.”
“The frightening aspect is, I don’t know,” Graham replied.
Another reporter then asked how he saw the future of rock music.
“What is happening to rock is that it’s joining America,” he replied. “It is General Motors, it is Pacific Gas and Electric. I’ll play for forty thousand people, OK. Sure. Make sure it’s against 60 percent [of the gross].”
Bill Graham told reporters about one Fillmore East show when he had pulled a practical joke on the audience. He had announced from the stage that on New Year’s Eve he was staging the Azores Pop Festival, which would be the biggest rock event in history.
“By the end of the night,” said Graham, “the kids were going out of this theater and saying, ‘Dig it! I hear the Beatles and the Stones and Dylan are making it, man. I gotta go. How much?’ ”
The next afternoon, Graham walked into his office to find Sha Na Na’s manager, Ed Goodgold, waiting for him.
“Kip [Cohen] was sitting behind his desk and I just winked at him,” said Graham. “And I said to Kip, ‘Wouldn’t you know it, Bob and the Beatles both want to go on at midnight. Now, how the hell are we going to do that?’ ”
Goodgold then demanded that Sha Na Na must be booked for the Azores Pop Festival at any cost. Graham replied that would be “a million-to-one shot,” advising him to get his agent on it immediately.
Several days later, back in San Francisco, Graham got a call from Sha Na Na’s agent, who sounded nervous. He said the group was definitely in for the festival and wanted to know all about it.
“And I said, ‘Well I can’t,’ ” said Graham. “And he says, ‘Well the biggest problem we have is the Azores is out in the middle of nowhere, and we don’t know whose territory it is.’ This one manager became a mental case until we finally told him that it wasn’t happening.”
Graham said that he and Kip Cohen had then worked out two possible scenarios for the imaginary festival in the middle of the Atlantic. One had the public on the island, with the bands playing forty-five-minute sets from a tugboat circling it. The other reversed things, with the bands playing on the island, while the audience sailed around in tugs.
“That was our idea of the ultimate festival,” Graham told reporters. “And then we were going to blow up the island, let it sink, cover it up and start all over again.”
After the press conference, Bill Graham handed reporters a seven-point indictment of the music business, which he and Kip Cohen had been working on for several weeks. It would be printed verbatim in the next Fillmore East program and the next issue of the Village Voice.
“Two years ago I warned that the Woodstock Festival syndrome would be the beginning of the end,” he wrote. “I am sorry to say that I was right.”
He accused many rock bands of hypocrisy and selling out, saying that although they had “long hair and play guitars” they had become “large corporations.” He also attacked the audiences for their lack of musical sophistication.
“Now,” he wrote, “there are too may screams for ‘More’ with total disregard for whether or no there was any musical quality.”
Throughout, he portrayed himself as the aggrieved party, a victim of greedy bands, unscrupulous managers and agents. The timbre and nuances of the charges and the embittered reprimands of each and every part of the music business were pure Bill Graham.
“For six years, I have endured the abuse of many members of the public, and press,” he wrote, “The role of ‘anti-christ of the underground’ has obviously never appealed to me.”12
Following his announcement, Bill Graham was interviewed by almost every major magazine and newspaper. He appeared on many late-night talk shows, explaining his decision and discussing the future of rock ’n’ roll. He loved the spotlight, coming across well as an articulate and witty elder statesman of rock.
Life magazine also ran a large spread about the imminent closings under the headline, “Goodbye to Rock.” It compared the closing of the Fillmores to the recent breakup of the Beatles.
“His decision was another violent blow to the rock era,” it read. “Graham’s two concert halls, the Fillmore East and West, in New York and San Francisco, were the showcases from which the entire rock music scene had sprung. They had meant as much to the rock explosion as the Birdlands, the Palladiums and the Peppermint Lounges had meant to other music in other times.”13
Kip Cohen told Rolling Stone he was glad they were was closing.
“Let’s put it this way,” he said, “amputation while it’s still possible can save the rest of the body from picking up the disease.”14
That spring, Grace Slick and Paul Kantner began work on the next Jefferson Airplane album, Bark. They each wrote three songs for it, with Jorma Kaukonen and Joey Covington penning the rest. Grace’s contributions were as idiosyncratic as ever. “Never Argue with a German if You’re Tired, or European Song,” was written in her invented phonetic German. “Sticken in mine haken, sticken in mine haut,” it began.
Her second song, “Law Man,” warns officers that her old man has a gun and she’d hate to shoot them with it. Her third, “Crazy Miranda,” was an all-out attack on young women who buy into what the fashion media tells them to be.
Jorma Kaukonen’s contribution, “Third Week in The Chelsea,” recounted the breakup of Jefferson Airplane as its members began to believe what Rolling Stone wrote about them.
“That’s pretty much how I felt at the time,” he said in 2013, “for whatever reason. I mean here I am in New York City for three weeks and I’m complaining about it. What a baby. But it made sense at the time.”15
Grace Slick viewed Jorma’s revealing song as a clear message to the band that he had had enough of Jefferson Airplane.
“[He’s] letting us know he wants to be free,” she said, “the feeling of being trapped by that group.”16
At around four in the morning on Thursday, May 13, after an all-night recording session with much drinking, Grace and Jorma went drag racing at full speed toward the Golden Gate Bridge. Three months after giving birth to China, Grace had reportedly started occasionally sleeping with Jorma.
“Grace did certainly sleep with me a couple of times,” said Kaukonen. “The first time involved Jack Daniel’s and Tuinol [downers], which is not exactly a heightening of perceptions.”17
As they raced through the empty streets of San Francisco at more than one hundred mph, Grace lost control of her Mercedes sports car and hit a wall, wrecking her new car and nearly killing herself. The force of the crash threw her across the car into the passenger side.
“I was there,” said Kaukonen, “and I was able to pull her out of the car until the ambulance came. And thank goodness she wasn’t seriously injured. Now when I called my ex-wife [Margaretta] at six in the morning to tell her what was going on, her first comment wasn’t, ‘Oh, I’m so glad you’re all right.’ The comment was, ‘What were you doing with Grace at six in the morning.’ ”18
In June, Santana flew to Lima, Peru, to play their first concert in South America. They were already big stars there after the Woodstock movie, and “Black Magic Woman” was constantly on the radio. Soon after arriving, Santana were told that the concert had been banned by the ruling military regime and they had to leave immediately.
“Peru opened my eyes toward reality,” Carlos later told Ben Fong-Torres of Rolling Stone. “That was really a slap. I used to get a lot of slaps from acid and mescaline and drugs. But when reality itself is slapping your face.”
When the band flew bac
k to San Francisco to resume recording the third album, things became even crazier.
“Well, we show up at CBS Studios,” recalled Herbie Herbert, “and I’m all set up with the gear and the band shows up in all their fancy cars and motorcycles, and just terrorize that place. Chepito has stolen all the lightbulbs, all the toilet paper, all the soap. Everything. They rode their motorcycles—Harleys—all the way through the building. They sat in this brand-new studio on the couch and put their feet up on the walls and left black marks. The studio manager wants to kill me.”19
Carlos Santana compared getting the band into the studio together to pulling wisdom teeth.
“And when [we] do get in the studio,” he said, “we have an attitude. You either show up late or you’re too over-the-top with drugs to play. But nevertheless, I think that when we put our egos and illusions aside, there’s incredible beauty.”20
Gregg Rolie believes that it was exactly this raging fire in Santana that made their music so great.
“The band was built with passion and it fell apart with passion,” he said. “And if that kind of animal attack on music hadn’t been there, it would never have happened.”21
That Memorial Day weekend, the Grateful Dead played at Bill Graham’s Winterland to sold-out audiences. On Saturday night, at the first intermission, there was a stage announcement: “Those of you who are going to get some liquid refreshment, pass it on so your neighbor can have some.” Then several containers of apple juice, heavily dosed with Owsley acid, were passed into the audience.
By midnight, more than fifty young fans were in the crisis unit of Mount Zion Hospital suffering from bad trips. Seven others were arrested by police outside Winterland, including a naked young man covered in blood, screaming, “There’s LSD in the water!”
“You had to be really careful with the Dead,” said Fillmore West manager Gary L. Jackson, “because you never know what’s going to happen, especially when Owsley’s there.”22
On Monday morning, it made the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle, along with the headline, “Bad Trips at Rock Hall—Report of Spiked Drinks.”
The story said the mass-dosing recalled the early days of the “acid tests.”
“About 1,000 persons,” read the article, “most of them between 12 and 18, got unexpectedly stoned after drinking ‘liquid refreshment’ passed around at a Grateful Dead concert, according to police.”
A young fan named Alison McDonald told a Chronicle reporter that she’d drank some of the apple juice after the stage announcement.
“It seemed like a friendly thing,” she said. “I took a sip because I was very thirsty.”
About forty-five minutes later, when she started coming up on the acid, she took another sip.
“It was okay acid,” she said, “but I feel sorry for anyone who took more than two sips. Pretty soon everybody got going. It was like a revival meeting—a religious experience almost.”
Bill Graham, who had been at the concert, said he was unaware of any stage announcement about “liquid refreshments.”
“I’m very sorry about this, if it did happen,” he told the Chronicle. “The overuse of heavy drugs and the need to escape by young people is one of the reasons I’m backing away from this business.”23
Within hours of the San Francisco Chronicle story, a furious Graham told his Fillmore West manager he was moving up the date of the closing.
“That’s what triggered it,” said Jackson. “After we hit the front page of the Chronicle, Bill Graham just said, ‘That’s it. We’re closing.’ And then for the next month we were planning the closings of the East and West.”24
The next morning, San Francisco’s Police Chief Alfred J. Nelder demanded that Bill Graham’s license to run Winterland be revoked, saying he was lucky nobody had died. Chief Nelder said he had received numerous calls from worried parents whose children had accidentally taken the LSD at the Grateful Dead show, and his narcotics detail was now investigating.
Two days later, Graham called a press conference to defend himself. He attacked the Chronicle’s coverage of the story, disputing that a thousand people had taken the LSD. He claimed it was closer to fifty.
“In the last six years we’ve given something like twelve hundred concerts,” Graham told reporters. “We’ve had four million customers, not counting Fillmore East. In all that time, we’ve had less than ten arrests for drugs.”
He then lashed out at the police for daring to insult him.
“What am I?” he railed. “Some fly-by-night operator trying to rip off the kids . . . being blasted for something I didn’t do.”
Graham said that as a parent himself, he was concerned about drugs.
“What can you do?” he asked. “LSD is a chemical that’s impossible to detect. It can be carried on the pinkle [sic] of your hand or a hip pocket and put in a tub of water. But you don’t close down the whole railroad because there’s one wreck.”25
On Thursday, June 10, Bill Graham called a Fillmore West staff meeting in the ballroom’s dining room, announcing it would close at the end of the month. The thirty-some staff were shocked, as they thought the meeting was to discuss a July 4 employee party.
“The executioner is here,” he told them. “The end of the month we’re gonna close this place.”26
Then he mournfully spoke of his years of “voluntary slavery” that had cost him “a lot of personal happiness.”
“I started to become robotized,” he said. “I tried to do too much and I failed. I never really wanted it to end this way.”27
But within days, Graham had abandoned his original plan to close with a single concert. Realizing the potential gold mine, he announced that the Fillmore West would now close with a week of shows, which would be recorded for an album and filmed for a major motion picture.
The first weekend in June, the Fillmore East had one of its greatest nights when John Lennon took the stage to jam with Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. Lennon’s impromptu appearance was engineered by Howard Smith, who had spent Sunday interviewing him and Yoko Ono for his WPLJ-FM show.
At the end of their conversation, Smith said he was leaving to interview Frank Zappa, who was playing the Fillmore East that night. Lennon suddenly lit up, saying he was a big fan of Zappa and would love to meet him.
“And that’s when the idea hit me,” said Smith. “I asked John and Yoko to come along to the interview in Frank’s hotel room and meet him. But I had also decided to get John and Yoko onstage with Zappa that night.”28
Lennon and Zappa found an immediate rapport during the interview, and when Smith suggested they play together that night they agreed.
“So Zappa said, ‘Oh, that’ll be great, are you up for it?’ ” recalled Smith. “John looked at Yoko and they were both quite scared. At that point John hadn’t played live in a while. So I kind of talked everybody into it.”
The plan was for John and Yoko to take the stage during the first encore of the last show. So after finishing his live radio show an hour early, Smith took them to the Fillmore East. An employee was there at the side door to meet them and brought them up to the lighting booth.
“And on the way down there,” said Smith, “John and Yoko said, ‘We can’t do this without coke. Can you get us some really good cocaine?’ ”
At the Fillmore, they were soon hooked up with assistant stage manager Dan Opatoshu, who would later describe dealing coke to John Lennon as one of the great thrills of his time at the Fillmore East.29
“They did their coke,” said Smith. “It wasn’t so much they needed to wake up, it’s more they needed that kind of confidence that coke gives you.”
Then about two in the morning, just before the end of Frank Zappa’s set, a Fillmore staffer arrived to bring John and Yoko backstage. But first they swapped shirts for good luck, leaving Howard Smith in the light booth.
“The audience were screaming and yelling for Frank Zappa to come back,” said Smith. “Then the lights came on and there was John and Yoko standing there.”
The audience went crazy as Lennon and the Mothers of Invention, who had not been told what was going to happen, tuned up.
“I’d just like to say, ‘Hello,’ ” John Lennon told the Fillmore audience, “It’s wonderful to be here. This is a song that I used to sing when I was in the Cavern at Liverpool. I haven’t done it since so . . .”30
For the next twenty-five minutes, John, Yoko, and Zappa played wild, improvised versions of, “I Love You Baby, Please Don’t Go” and “Scumbag.” At one point two of the Mothers of Invention covered Yoko in a huge burlap bag, as she wailed away inside on a microphone.31
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“Thank You and Farewell”
June 7 to July 4, 1971
In mid-June of 1971, the yellow invitations to the final Fillmore East show went out to the crème de la crème of the music industry. The shows would be headlined by the Allman Brothers Band, with the J. Geils Band and Albert King playing second and third on the bill. Tickets to the Friday and Saturday shows were on sale to the public, but the final night on Sunday, June 27, was by invitation only and would be simulcast live on New York City radio stations WNEW and WPLJ.
Jefferson Airplane, who had become the Fillmore East’s unofficial house band over the last three years, were also breaking up at this time. While they no longer jibed as a band, they felt an affinity with the Fillmores.
“It was the end of an era, the end of a time,” said Paul Kantner. “I was just disappointed. I could understand what [Bill] was doing.”
Jorma Kaukonen said he had been surprised by Graham’s decision.