by John Glatt
“I couldn’t believe the spectacle,” said Herbert. “And I just said to Tom Donahue, ‘Who the fuck is that? It looks like Elvis.’ He said, ‘You won’t believe it. That is John Fogerty.’ I went ‘bullshit!’ The guy was the squarest motherfucker on the face of the earth by hippie standards.
“They went out that night as a trio and played the best I ever heard Creedence Clearwater Revival. Wow. And they set the stage for Santana to deliver one of their most classic landmark performances.”21
By now the album Santana III was finished, but still months away from being released. Just before they went on to close the show, Carlos Santana told Herbert they were going to play the new album for the first time that night. When Herbert pleaded with them not to do so, since the show was being broadcast live and would certainly be bootlegged, the band ordered him to make sure it didn’t hit the airwaves.
“They were nothing but a fucking street gang,” said Herbert, “and I knew because I was part of that gang I would have to go and do something.”
So Herbert took out a Cub Scout hatchet from the band’s toolbox. He then went over to the side of the stage where a small radio mixing device was attached to the dedicated phone lines taped to the floor and going out to the radio stations.
“And just before Bill Graham came out to introduce them, I hatcheted and the lines went dead. Dusty Street from KSAN jumped on my back, and tried to claw both of my eyeballs out. So I had to knock her out. And we performed the show with the new material but it didn’t go out on the radio.”22
That night would be the last time the original Santana lineup that had played Woodstock would ever perform together. They started with “Incident at Neshabur,” off the new album, finishing with Carlos Santana’s moving arrangement of Miles Davis’s “In a Silent Way.” The set signaled Santana’s change in musical direction.
“We wanted to come off as a little more progressive,” said Michael Shrieve, “as we felt that it would represent us at the given time when the Fillmore closed. We were sort of transformed as a band and that’s why we chose to do the Miles Davis tune . . . and have our kind of groove to it. That was really important to us.”23
At the end of their set, Bill Graham came onstage and brought out Van Morrison, Mike Bloomfield, Lydia Pense, Sam Andrew, Jack Casady, and many others for a final jam session.
“The music was terrible,” wrote David Felton in Rolling Stone. “At one point, Van Morrison insisted they all stop and try something else. But the show was great.”24
Then Bill Graham brought his staff onstage to throw gifts at the audience, including champagne, beer, and ice cubes.
The final show ended at around 5:00 a.m., when “Greensleeves” was played through the P.A. system. Fans lined up to shake Bill Graham’s hand and personally thank him.
Before the show, Rolling Stone writer David Felton had been puzzled by a glass-encased bulletin board for coming attractions, in which Graham had constructed an eerie shrine, apparently for the Fillmores.
“At the top he pinned his May press release,” wrote Felton, “underneath that, a small, upside down American flag and two flowers; at the bottom, a drawing of a thick, wooden cross. On each arm of the cross was nailed a hand—nailed right through the palm—one hand pointing downward, hands pointed to each side, and a hand pointing upward, giving the finger—to what? God? The flag? The Fillmore? Who knows?”25
CODA
After closing the two Fillmores, Bill Graham hardly retired from the music business. By December 1971, he had made his peace with Madison Square Garden, where he presented the Grateful Dead—his first New York show after closing the Fillmore East.
In January 1972, his divorce became final, but it was followed by an acrimonious child custody battle with Bonnie, who eventually won control of their young son, David. In June, the documentary on the last days of the Fillmore West was released and flopped. Time magazine called Graham the undisputed star of the movie.
“He gives quite a performance,” wrote Time reviewer Richard Heffron, “by turns nasty, cajoling and funny.”1
During the next few years, Graham concentrated on producing mega-arena rock tours, working with Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and George Harrison. In July 1973, he surpassed the attendance at Woodstock with the Watkins Glen Festival in upstate New York. Featuring the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers Band, and The Band, it drew an estimated 600,000 people and is still listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the biggest festival crowd in history.
On Thanksgiving 1978, he brilliantly staged The Band’s farewell show at Winterland, which Martin Scorsese filmed as The Last Waltz.
In January 1980, Bill Graham turned fifty. He was now grossing $100 million a year, and was showing no signs of slowing down. He had become an icon of rock, and in September 1984, San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein issued a proclamation declaring it “Bill Graham Day.”
A year later, he staged the American half of Live Aid, although he hated the new MTV generation.
“There was no television until I was seventeen,” he complained. “Today with twenty-four channels and cable and video stores, people have become much more isolated. There’s much less communal entertainment and communal joy.”2
But Graham’s personal life failed to match up to his astonishing business success. He tore through relationship after relationship, without ever finding a lasting one. He would call these his “hate-fucks.”
He proposed and then ended a relationship with Marcia Sult, who bore him his second son, Alex. Then he had a turbulent on-off four-year relationship with his beautiful receptionist, Regina Cartright. In December 1988, she gave birth to a baby girl she named Caitlin, claiming Bill Graham was the father. DNA tests would later prove he was not.
After leaving the Fillmores, Bill Graham started using drugs, getting heavily into cocaine, ecstasy, and marijuana cookies. At one point he became addicted to Halcyon and sought treatment.
On October 25, 1991, Bill Graham died while coming back to his Mill Valley home from a Huey Lewis concert, when his helicopter hit a high voltage electrical tower just west of Vallejo, California, and exploded. Also killed were his fiancée, Melissa Gold, and friend and pilot Steve “Killer” Kahn.
A week later, more than 300,000 fans flocked to a free memorial concert in Golden Gate Park to celebrate him. The Grateful Dead, Santana, and Crosby, Stills & Nash played, and a tearful Carlos Santana delivered a moving eulogy to his “best friend and brother.”
He told the audience how Graham had called him the night before he died, saying, “Stay well, my friend.”
“Just the way he said it,” Santana told the audience. “Maybe his mind didn’t know, but something inside him did.”
In 1992, Bill Graham was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the nonperformer category by Carlos Santana and John Fogerty.
In October 1971, Santana III was released and became another huge hit, staying at number 1 for five weeks. In early 1972, Santana started recording their follow-up, Caravanserai, which would be a turning point for the group, taking their music into jazz fusion. Clive Davis was furious, warning Carlos he was committing “career suicide.”3
Gregg Rolie and Neal Schon also felt the band was veering in the wrong direction, but Carlos stood his ground. Eventually the band split up with Carlos and Michael Shrieve carrying on with Santana, while Gregg Rolie and Neal Schon started the immensely successful rock band Journey, under Herbie Herbert’s management.
In 1972, Carlos Santana met his first wife, Deborah, at a Tower of Power concert. He also gave up drugs and found religion, becoming a disciple of Sri Chimnoy, who gave him the name “Devadip.” He then recorded an acclaimed album with another Sri Chimnoy devotee, John McLaughlin.
Santana soldiered on with changing personnel but never found the huge success and album sales of the original band.
In 1998, Carlos Santana, now fifty-five, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by John Popper, whose band Blues Traveler was discovered by Bill Graham’s son, David.
Then a year later, Clive Davis, now running Arista Records, suggested Carlos record a collaborative album with some of the recording industry’s biggest stars. The result was Supernatural, which put Carlos back on top, selling twenty-five million albums and winning nine Grammys, the first he had ever won. The single “Smooth” with Rob Thomas spent twelve weeks at number 1 on the Billboard chart.
It was around this time, while in psychiatric counseling, that Carlos finally confronted being molested more than forty years earlier. He also went public with it, bravely telling 60 Minutes’ Charlie Rose how it had torn him apart.
“It made me realize I was thinking wrong, like a victim,” said Carlos. “It’s a very, as children say, icky part of your life. By the grace of the holiest of holiest, I am free from feeling guilt, shame, fear.”4
In December 2013, Carlos Santana received the nation’s highest honor when he was awarded a Kennedy Center Award for influencing American culture through the arts. President Barack Obama welcomed the new honoree, saying: “Before Carlos Santana took the stage at Woodstock, few people outside his hometown of San Francisco knew who he was and the feeling was mutual: Carlos was in such a, shall we say, ‘altered state of mind,’ that he remembers almost nothing about the performance.”
After Grace Slick’s drag-racing accident, which almost killed her, her behavior became even more bizarre. In late August 1972, while at the Rubber Bowl in Akron, Ohio, a drunken Grace and Paul Kantner were both arrested and landed in jail after she grabbed a cop by his police whistle and took a swing at him.
After Bill Thompson bailed them out, they took a private plane to a show in Chicago.
“So the show is starting and Grace is drunk,” said Thompson, “and what does she do? Somebody says ‘Take it off!’ And Grace pulled up her dress and she had no underwear on. A good shot. It was kind of like the end of the Airplane.”5
A month later, on September 22, Jefferson Airplane played their final concert at Winterland.
In January 1974, Grace released her first solo album, Manhole, which was conceived as a soundtrack for a movie that never materialized. Soon afterward, she and Paul Kantner formed a new band called Jefferson Starship, which would achieve even bigger success than Jefferson Airplane.
During the first Jefferson Starship tour, Grace, now thirty-five, fell in love with Skip Johnson, the band’s twenty-year-old lighting engineer. When Paul Kantner found out, he was furious. Eventually Grace split up with Paul and married Johnson in Hawaii. She and Paul would continue to share custody of China, who spent most of her time being brought up by a nanny.
Ironically, it was only after Marty Balin joined Jefferson Starship that they broke big, with their album Red Octopus hitting number 1.
In early 1978, Grace outdid herself as a celebrity judge in a charity takeoff of The Gong Show. After getting drunk, she began abusing contestants, fellow judges, and audience members and had to be dragged offstage. The audience cheered.
A few hours later she was arrested for DWI by the California Highway Patrol, but the charges were later dropped on the condition that she join Alcoholics Anonymous.
“I’m a periodic alcoholic,” she explained in 2012. “I don’t drink every day. Never did. I was sober all during the Eighties. I’ll go for ten years without drinking and it’s all self-will. And a lot of that comes out of the ethos of the Sixties. We just did pretty much what we wanted to do.”6
In 1985 Grace finally hit number 1 on the Billboard singles chart with “We Built This City,” in which she dueted with Mickey Thomas.
A year later, Starship, as the band was now called, hit the number 1 spot again with “Sara,” although Grace only sang backup vocals.
During her years touring, her daughter, China, rarely saw her parents, and she resented them for it.
“China felt abandoned,” said Grace, “because both her mother and her father would take off at the same time for months. So I can understand that.”
Grace quit Starship in 1988. A month later she reunited with the original members of Jefferson Airplane, with the exception of Spencer Dryden, for a twenty-five-date tour and album. It flopped. She also divorced Skip Johnson after discovering he was having an affair with a woman half her age.
On September 30, 1989, at the age of fifty, Grace retired from singing after the final Jefferson Airplane show in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco.
“There is something painful, something sad, about seeing people of my age performing with a rock band,” she told Charles Laurence of the Daily Telegraph. “I watch Mick Jagger singing ‘Satisfaction,’ and think: ‘Boy, if you still can’t find satisfaction, with all your money and at your age, there really is something wrong!’ ”7
Grace did give one other public performance, however, at Hollywood’s House of Blues in 1995, making a guest appearance with Jefferson Starship during a tribute to Papa John Creach, who had died two years before.
A year later, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with Jefferson Airplane, but she didn’t bother to attend the ceremony. During their acceptance speeches, Marty Balin and Paul Kantner both thanked Bill Graham.
“Very few if any people ever came to the Fillmore to see a band, if you know what I mean,” said Kantner, as the audience laughed. “As Grace said, she liked being in the band because it was the least crowded place of the party. She sends you her love and wishes and says, ‘What are these old fuckers all doing over here? A bunch of doddering, goddamn old people.’ ”
In retirement, Grace let her hair turn snow white and started a new career as a commercial artist, specializing in painting white rabbits and other characters from Alice in Wonderland. As of this writing, she is seventy-five and lives with her daughter, China, and her husband, Seth, in Malibu, California.
“I can draw a white rabbit blindfolded by now,” she told Vanity Fair in 2012. “The whole thing about rabbits has just continued all through my life. It’s not exclusive; it’s just part of my deal. I’ve done pictures of rock-and-roll people, obviously. Woodstock, Monterey Pop . . . a lot of stuff that is known to me.”8
In the forty-four years since Janis Joplin’s untimely death, her star now burns brighter than ever. New generations have discovered her music, and she remains a fashion icon.
In 1995, Melissa Etheridge inducted Janis into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, hailing her as an inspiration for men and women everywhere.
“I feel like what she did in her life at that time,” said Etheridge, “enabled me when I was a young girl in 1976 growing up, not to feel so strange about wanting to do the things I wanted to do. She gave me power in my life, we didn’t have to be secretaries or housewives, we could be rock stars.”
On January 19, 2008, on what would have been her sixty-fifth birthday, the town of Port Arthur placed a historical marker outside her childhood home.
“She was a very popular figure in the Sixties,” said Yvonne Sutherlin of the Jefferson County Historical Commission. “We just want people to know she’s from here.”
Eighteen months later, Janis’s life and music were celebrated during the Fourteenth Annual American Music Masters series.
“I am touched, as is the rest of the family,” said her younger sister, Laura, “that Janis’s musical and social power continue to inspire and remain important in the lives of so many.”
A Broadway musical entitled A Night with Janis Joplin, starring Mary Bridget Davies, who toured with Big Brother and the Holding Company in late 1990s, opened in 2013, receiving positive reviews.
On November 4, 2013, Janis received her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at a moving ceremony attended by Kris Kristofferson and Clive Davis.
“There has never been an artist like Janis,” said Da
vis. “This contradictory chick from Texas was on top of the rock world. She was unapologetically herself. She helped change what we perceive star quality to be. I’m so glad she’s here on the Walk of Fame. She’d be drinking Southern Comfort and having a good time.”9
After Bill Graham closed the Fillmore East, it lay empty for three and a half years until it was reopened by a promoter named Barry Stein as the NFE Theater, standing for New Fillmore East. In 1975, it changed its name to the Village East after Bill Graham objected to the Fillmore name being used.
In September 1980, after a $4 million renovation, it became The Saint, one of the most popular gay nightclubs in New York. It lasted until 1988, when it closed at the start of the AIDS epidemic.
In the early 1990s, the stretch of street outside the onetime Fillmore East was officially renamed “Bill Graham’s Way” by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. But the sign was soon stolen.
Today, the building houses the Emigrant Bank, which has some pictures of the original Fillmore East in its entrance, the only trace remaining of the legendary rock theater.
After the Fillmore West closed its doors, Howard Johnson’s abandoned plans to raze it to the ground and build a hotel. Instead, the 50,000-square-foot building reverted back to being a Honda car dealership, which it remains as of this writing. Recently, the San Francisco planning authorities approved plans to demolish it and build a tower of luxury high-rise apartments.
Acknowledgments
This book has been a true labor of love and the result of more than twenty years of research. My first book, Rage & Roll: Bill Graham and the Selling of Rock, was published in 1993 and chronicled how Bill Graham almost single-handedly invented the music business.