Oct 5, 2017

February 11-12, 1969: Fillmore East

JANIS JOPLIN / GRATEFUL DEAD

FILLMORE EAST, N.Y. - The last show of a two day, four show stand is the moment of truth a performer must face when playing the Fillmore. It's usually the show attended by the most important and influential musical trade and press personages, who recognize that a performer needs a few shows to warm-up. For Janis Joplin and her new band, the moment of truth was a moment that should have been postponed.
What was missing from the new Janis Joplin was the total excitement that characterized her performance with Big Brother. Perhaps Janis felt that the new band was superior enough to let her relax a little, perhaps she was no longer excited. Janis will be given a second chance and probably a third and fourth, for she is too good a talent to be lost.
Paradoxically, we got the feeling that this new band will be a much stronger recording entity than the old. For awhile, we were thinking of it as Blood, Sweat and Janis, what with the horns and all, and then decided it was closer to the Electric Janis, what with the Nick Gravenite tunes. But somehow, Nick's songs don't sound right on Janis. We liked her rendition of "Maybe," the old Chantells' hit, the Bee Gees' "To Love Somebody." And nobody does "Summertime" better than Janis. Her two encore numbers, "Piece Of My Heart" and "Ball and Chain," were the Janis of old. But the new songs, the new sound of Janis Joplin was a letdown, and since they formed the bulk of the act, it too suffered.
Those who have never seen Janis, or have seen her on an off-night, would have been more than happy with the new show. In fact, if we had never heard, or heard of, Janis before, we would have been raving about the new discovery. Unfortunately, we know the feeling of warmth, ecstasy, of many other pleasurable things, that Janis was capable of in the past, and we can only hope she will soon be providing them again.
The Gratefull Dead were a surprise. For more than an hour, they kept us entranced by exploring every facet of rock. Though we doubt we would want to listen to the same thing on disk, we would welcome a chance to catch the whole thing again on a night when our minds were in better shape.

(from Cashbox, 22 February 1969)

Thanks to Dave Davis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ys66oXW9g28  (Janis - possibly the early show) 
https://archive.org/details/gd69-02-12.late.sbd.kaplan.9072.sbeok.shnf

* * *

JANIS JOPLIN'S SONG STYLE LEAVES CRITICS IN DOUBT

NEW YORK - Janis Joplin sings the blues like she means it. Her new six-man band may not even understand it.
Miss Joplin, a hard-rock-blues singer more in the tradition of Bessie Smith and Big Mamma Willie Mae Thornton than of San Francisco rock, brought the group into Fillmore East, the Lower East Side new-music emporium, last week for a New York debut.
[line missing] -ful and funky blues band. A group, say, like the Butterfield Blues Band at its peak would be ideal. There are no strong bluesmen in her present group. The band's strongest soloist is rock-oriented guitarist Sam Andrew, a holdover from Big Brother and the Holding Company, the group for which Miss Joplin once sang lead vocals.
The present group is only three weeks old. It is not the same one she had at her much criticized performance at the Stax-Volt Revue in Memphis last December. But, as the two shows last Wednesday night showed, newness has nothing to do with growth potential. The material is not there for the developing.
The band's brief experience reduced Miss Joplin to performing a limited program. Her repertoire was already circumscribed, but for her to repeat virtually the same program in the second show as she sang in the first was a sign of artistic debilitation.
In her sometimes harsh, sometimes whispering but always raw voice, she sang many of her familiar tunes, including a vigorous "Turtle Blues."
Miss Joplin continued to sing "Summertime," a winner for her. The new band has the same arrangement on the tune as the old group except for a new, charming, baroque-like introduction by two English horns.
Her interpretation of the song changes little from performance to performance. She has routine phrase patterns for each section of the song, even down to repeating, "baby, baaby, baaaby, baaaaby," always in the same way.
But repetition is characteristic of Miss Joplin's style. Her performance of "Piece of My Heart" and "Ball and Chain," which she sang last week, were done in similar patterned fashion. It is no artistic crime for her to sing like this, but it is a strike against her creative imagination if she is to be compared with the great blues singers.
Miss Joplin also sang several songs new for her, including "Maybe," a tune the Chantels popularized in the 1950s; "Work Me, Lord," a gospel-like piece, and "You're The Only One Who Knows," a recent Nick Graventies composition.
Also on the show was the Grateful Dead, a San Francisco band that played its raucous sound unrelentingly.

Not everyone who came to see Janis Joplin at Fillmore East was of the now generation. Amid the sea of faces was Benny Goodman, the legendary "King of Swing."
Clarinetist Goodman, who is in semi-retirement, came with his daughter, Rachel, to "see the atmosphere of the Fillmore."
It was his first rock concert, and after hearing several songs, he said, "I think it's quite vital. It's awful hard to put in any category, as good or bad. You have to listen to all the groups.
"The thing that shatters me is the volume. It's so loud, it's almost deafening. It's hard to see where a clarinet would fit in there."

(by Hollie West [L.A. Times-Washington Post Service], from the Portland Oregonian, 20 February 1969) 

* * * 

MAYBE

Before-show crowd sounds at the Fillmore East on Tuesday night changed from Saturday movie matinee to concert hall historic as Bill Graham made his nostalgic introduction of the Grateful Dead, calling them something like the granddaddies of them all. And they were beginning to look as if they were out of a music book history. Was that bespectacled and bearded little man a cartoon figure of the Jerry Garcia whose guitar danced me to the "midnight hour" and beyond in San Francisco just two years ago?
Musically they were sounding old too. Starting with a long blues number, they wandered all around the melody and the stage like '50s jazz musicians. Then they played a sort-of western number, coming on very country and funky. Also very long. People were saying they wanted to dance; it had been a long time since I'd heard that. Dancing would have been good, if only to keep from being bored and to see if whirling about was the sorcery the Dead used to hypnotize me two years ago.

But the historic event we had really come to see/hear was the New York debut of Janis Joplin and her new band. And with Joshua Light Show sunbursts on she comes. The band was more like Janis and the Pick-ups. [ . . . ]
Impossible not to watch Janis Joplin, but closing my eyes, trying to imagine how the brass would come across with her voice in recordings...Bessie Smith with strings? No, that's not it. Brought up around the vibrating double-pitched resonating noises of amplifiers and guitars, she is more a Big Mamma Thornton with electronically scratched vocal cords. I have never heard anyone say that they didn't like Janis after having seen her sing. Somehow it takes seeing her to know that the heart-busting sounds are quivering up from her insides instead of trickling down from her head. Her records hide it and sound forced unless you've seen it happen to her through her. But wouldn't it be great to have Janis both ways?
"Maybe," a song from the '50s originally recorded by the Chantels, may be the one that will put Janis across. Coming out like an oldie done her own way, it shows what her own way is. Blues-rock, not fake blues or tricky rock. Three more new blues songs by Nick Gravenites, "As Good As You've Been," "You're the Only One Who Really Knows," and "Work Me Lord," were done with a mysteriously personal meaning. "Work Me Lord," like a sexy revival meeting, gets the whole audience involved and could be a sympathetic flip side on a hit single with "Maybe." All of her new songs need more rehearsal and performance to cement them into solid memory mashers. The whole new band approach is definitely a fermenting thing and not a finished masterpiece.

(by Susanna, from the "Riffs" column, the Village Voice, 20 February 1969) 

* * * 

JANIS: THE JUDY GARLAND OF ROCK?  [excerpt] 

NEW YORK - When Janis Joplin danced on stage in front of her new, as-yet-unnamed, six-piece band at the Fillmore East February 11 and 12, she seemed to have victory within her grasp. How could she miss? There had been a "sound test" for the band (as road manager John Cooke put it) in Rindge, New Hampshire, a "preview" in Boston - but this was Opening Night, the Big Debut, and the city’s rockers have been working themselves into a lather for days. All four performances were sold out, and ticket scalpers roamed along Second Avenue offering paradise at prices that would have been out of line for a kilo of hash.
Tuesday’s opening night crowd had more than a hint of uptown prosperity to it. Affluent reporters from Time, Like, Look, Newsweek, and other bastions of slick-paper supremacy laid claim to most of the complimentary tickets, while those hardy souls from the lower echelon rock press either stood outside in the slush, their faces pressed against the glass, or somehow got past the door only to huddle together in the lobby and standing-room areas to look in vain for an empty seat. Mike Wallace and the CBS television crew were on hand documenting the building’s events for a March 4th segment of 60 Minutes to be called, with true media irony, "Carnegie Hall For Kids."

Through the balloon-filled air, the Grateful Dead, the "other half" of an all-San Francisco program, started to play "Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl."
And play they did - one of those wonderful, comfortable, one-long-song sets that went uninterrupted for close to an hour and actually managed to neutralize much of the inherent tension by turning the concert into something not unlike a freebie in the park or a pleasant party at somebody’s home.
The band played well - but, more important, gave New York audiences something of the idea of rock as a relaxed and relaxing way of life, not as a sporadic series of super-hypes for super-groups. There were no artificially induced high points or low points, no cream-in-your-jeans climax - instead, a steady stream of satisfying music which simply went on until it stopped.

Nonprofessional response to the buildup was interesting. One long-term Joplin fanatic, a young man named Ronnie Finkelstein, approached the Fillmore with ecstasy and hurried to his seat just as the Grateful Dead began their set. "I found them original and satisfying," he said. "I wanted Janis, though."
"I rushed back when Bill Graham - the dirty capitalist! - introduced my girl. The band futzed around for about five minutes, and then, with a short brass intro, Janis appeared out of nowhere. In a cape-gown sort of thing, she danced for a minute, then threw off the cape to reveal her famous shoulder-strap pants outfit. I was excited!"
Another admirer put it even more succinctly. "I’ve had a hard-on since four o’clock this afternoon waiting for this."
This consisted of an incredibly nervous Janis Joplin - hair flying, long fingers showing white clenching a hand mike - in front of her new group: Sam Andrew from Big Brother and the Holding Company, lead guitar; terry Clements, sax; Richard Kermode, organ; Roy Markowitz, drums; Terry Hensley, trumpet; and a temporary bass player, Keith Cherry (ex-Pauper Brad Campbell is expected to come down from Canada to join the band as a permanent member as soon as he can get a work permit.)
The first song made a number of things both painfully and delightfully clear. The potential to become a genuinely great rock singer is still there, but so are the infamous and disheartening Joplin tendencies toward vocal overkill. Indeed, Janis doesn’t so much sing a song as to strangle it to death right in front of you. It’s an exciting, albeit, grisly, event to behold. But it would seem to belong more to the realm of carnival exhibition than musical performance.
[ . . . ]
On the first number, the band made all the local stops, while Janis was an express. The singing and playing simply failed to mesh, Joplin constantly projecting and the group continually receding. Between verses, the vocalist as dancer seemed more a constrained Radio City Rockette than a free-form blues singer. Every moment was stiff and preordained.
The applause was respectful. People seemed to be biding their time, waiting for the big explosion. Janis and the band plowed into the second song, a Nick Gravenities composition, and made it sound a smudged carbon copy of the first. Any sense of pace was forgotten. The audience began to pall. Joplin reached for her bottle of booze, a trademark which had been placed proudly on top of an amplifier with all of the deliberate care inherent in the planting of a religious symbol.
Things started to go better. "Maybe," an old Chantells signature tune from the late Fifties, was good and hard, and "Summertime," born of Cheap Thrills but now instrumentally processed through Ars Nova and Blood, Sweat and Tears, brought with it flowers, affection, a watermelon rasp, some sneaky CBS cameramen, and a more appreciative response from admirers. Janis swayed a bit, rubbed her head fetchingly, and hitched up her pants with a jump.
Robin and Barry Gibb’s "To Love Somebody" was rendered needlessly grotesque as Joplin ran through her rapidly depleting bagful of mannerisms in a desperate attempt to inject even more meaningless into the song by almost literally wiping up the floor with it. Then, a fast one, written by the group, which Janis said she wanted to call "Jazz for the Jack-offs." Again, the local-express syndrome, with a real credibility gap developing between star and support.
Came the highlight of the new act: Joplin’s moving and only slightly overripe singing of the beautiful new Nick Gravenites song, "Work Me, Lord." Empathy and art formed a strong partnership at this point, and passion, throughout the evening so misused and purposeless, finally found a home in spiritual rock.

It is difficult to imagine a Bob Dylan or a John Lennon peppering an interview with constant nervous interjections of "Hey, I‘ve never sung so great. Don’t you think I’m singing better? Well, Jesus fucking Christ, I’m really better, believe me." But Janis seems that rare type of personality who lacks the essential self-protective distancing that a singer of her fame and stature would appear to need.
One gets the alarming feeling that Joplin’s whole world is precariously balanced on what happens to her musically - that the necessary degree of honest cynicism needed to survive an all-media assault may be buried too far under an immensely likeable but tremendously under confident naivete.
She knows the band isn’t together yet. Haven’t worked together long enough - "Hey, it takes longer than a couple of weeks to get loose, to be really tight, to push. But conceptually I like it, and I think I’m singing better than I ever, ever did." This is what Janis Joplin wants, this band, these songs, all of it. "I mean, I really dig what I’m doing, but I just wish the band would push as hard as I am. Hey, I’m the lead, you know-but they’re hanging back way too far for me."
It all takes time, she knows. Janis wants to sing and she wants other people in the band to sing, too. You get a bunch of musicians together so everybody can contribute to the final product, make it something larger than the sum. "Trouble is, we haven’t really had a chance to get into each other yet."
It’s going to get better. She’s sure it’s going to get better. Like maybe she’ll add a new cat next week - "great big ugly spade cat." He blows baritone and drums like Buddy Miles. "He’s really heavy. I really need somebody to push, you know. There’s really not enough push in the band yet."
The band’s got an even dozen songs together now. Not enough repertoire yet. But Nick Gravenites has been a big help. "Isn’t his "Work Me, Lord" beautiful? Oh, man - whew! Man, I love that guy. His songs really say something."
Clive (Davis, president of Columbia records) isn’t hassling her to record right away, and it’s just as well, Janis says. She doesn’t understand people recording before they have a chance to work at it. "Hey, I want to play a little more, I want to gig a little bit so that the tunes get together before I make a record."
Janis exudes several things at once: that the act is going fine right now; that’s it’s not so fine; that it’s going to get better; that, despite herself, there’s the terror that it might not, unless something happens.
She’s looking for a cat to be musical director, knows she doesn’t know enough to do it herself. Somebody to pull it together. Like Michael Bloomfield. Everybody’s doing arrangements now and...it isn’t working. Maybe that will have to come first before a new name for the group can be chosen. "I want a name that implies a band but has the person’s name in it, right? Like the Buddy Miles Express. That has an identity in it. We were thinking," she laughs, "of Janis and the Joplinaires - ha!" Except that isn’t what a band is. What is the band? Too soon to say.
"Well, people say that I’m singing great, man. The whole San Francisco scene, which I was afraid might be a little pissed at me for officially disclaiming the familial San Francisco rock thing, has been fine. Jerry Garcia told me that I made him cry. The Dead have been so good to me, man. They’re so warm and everything. I really needed that because of the pressure - I’ve been really scared because this is important to me.
"The kids - well, they’re missing the familiar tunes. You know how audiences are. And I really want to do the new songs. I don’t want to have to get up there and sing "Down On Me" when I’m eighty years old. The reason I did this was so that I could keep on moving. Once I get the new tunes on a record, then the kids won’t mind."
It will all be better then.
Doing the 60 Minutes segment had been really funny, Janis said she just laughed all the time at the media and the Big Build-Up she had gotten. It was too much to take seriously. "It’s surreal. It’s got nothing to do with me, really. I’m beginning to be able to cope with it. I don’t believe it, you know - I mean, you can’t." One thing you’ve got to be sure about, she thinks, is that you don’t start believing you are worth all that attention, Janis laughed.
[ . . . ]
Janis had thought the Fillmore East "opening" had gone well - "I’m really doing good," she thought - but the audience reaction had been decidedly mixed.
The kid who’d kept that hard-on all that while thought Janis was the greatest thing he’d ever seen, and didn’t want to say any more than that. But Ronnie Finkelstein liked her better with Big Brother. Ronnie thought she was flaunting her sexuality and that altogether it was a vulgar display. "Her thing now is showboating. Her dancing is a drag. Everything is a big put-on." An ex-worshiper, art director Gene Mallard, felt that success most definitely had spoiled Janis Joplin. This new thing was a brassy burlesque show - the old hypnoticism was gone - there was an air of boredom. "Miss Superstar and her group," said Mallard, "are just another put-together plasticized show."

The full article here:
http://www.janisjoplin.net/news/8/48/Janis-The-Judy-Garland-of-Rock/ 

(by Paul Nelson, from Rolling Stone, 15 March 1969)

The Dead's show was released on the Fillmore East 2-11-69 CD.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBEiwABOBp0&t=05m23s (10 seconds of film from the early show)

8 comments:

  1. Not much Dead in the Cashbox review - only a couple sentences - but the reviewer liked them more than Janis's band. They were a "surprise" who "entranced" him "for more than an hour" with their various styles (and with a largely instrumental show, nothing he'd recognize).
    But since they were the lesser-known opening act and Janis was the star, they just got a paragraph. It's curious that while he's eager to see the Dead again, he doesn't think he'd want to listen to the same show on record!

    The longer Rolling Stone piece gives more space to the Dead (the 2/11 early show) - not going into musical specifics, but calling their show "wonderful, comfortable," like a "pleasant party" that relaxed the audience, "a steady stream of satisfying music."
    Oddly, their set is said to be "one long song," which might've characterized the late show more, but the early show had a bunch of distinct, recognizable songs - Schoolgirl, King Bee, Lovelight, even Hey Jude to please the crowd. (The Pigpen-heavy opening show couldn't have been accidental. The Dead must've been aware of the nervous Janis and heavy press presence.)

    Janis was glad to be playing with old friends: "Jerry Garcia told me that I made him cry. The Dead have been so good to me, man. They’re so warm and everything. I really needed that because of the pressure."

    As for Janis's show, this was one of the first Kozmic Blues Band performances. They had a mixed reception - many people preferred Janis with Big Brother. Cashbox missed the old excitement, and Rolling Stone was very negative; when Ralph Gleason saw them, he wrote, "Her new band is a drag" and suggested she go back to Big Brother. (On the other hand, the New York Times wrote, "Joplin has never been better. Even though her new group sounds as if it were just getting to work together, it still is very good.")

    It's odd the Cashbox reviewer said the press usually attended the last show of a run - actually, they attended the first, on the 11th, which I think was more customary. (That's when the 60 Minutes crew was there to film and interview Janis, and they also filmed the small glimpse of the Dead.)
    Other reviewers there to see Janis may have said a few brief words about the Dead as well. Variety (in a 2/19/69 review) wrote that they "deliver a strikingly unique musical compound." I'll add others if I find them.

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    1. McNally mentions that "after the show, when she performed only adequately, she became too drunk to descend the steep spiral staircase from her dressing room, and [Dead manager Jon] Riester carried her out to the truck, so both bands could return to the hotel." (McNally p.289)

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  2. Ed Ochs covered the show in the 2/22/69 Billboard, "Janis Joplin Jolts, Jars, Jells" - barely mentioning the Dead, but it's worth quoting:

    "Janis Joplin, that bawdy bundle of blues power, touched off a highly combustible brew of Southern Comfort and soul Tuesday (11) at Fillmore East when she featured her brand-new band - and plenty of her old, beautiful corruption - during her two-day return to the stage. The Grateful Dead, Warner Brothers group and pop patriarchs of the San Francisco sound, were sacrificed as bait for the evening's main attraction.
    Screaming like a crosscut saw biting into mahogany, Miss Joplin fattened her legend every time she hitched her drooping tights, choked the microphone or shimmied a hallelujah to her guitarist Sam Andrew...
    Her dark, raw oaths, burning up lyrics like dry leaves in flash-fires of depression, love and love's agony, turned [the songs] into intense, bleeding invocations to pagans, demons, bad luck and hard-loving losers. Still, her mighty voice, raised in stormy defiance of almost every social convention, seemed to turn anguish into triumph by the sheer size of her lust and laughter. Ironically, only her uniqueness - her existential aloneness as one woman singing hard about the survival of the blues - keeps her odes to pain's pleasure from becoming a mod manifesto.
    An iconoclast with a voice big enough and a manner bold enough to illustrate her message ("You know you got it - if it makes you feel good") - Janis Joplin's return to the stage, and on records with Columbia, should swell her legend until she can either no longer live what she sings about, or until her vocal chords drop out of her body like charred remains from a memorable old blaze."

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  3. I added the review by Hollie West, found in (of all places) the Oregonian, though they got it from a news service.
    West was a jazz & culture critic at the Washington Post, and a black journalist - I'm not sure how pertinent that is to this review; but he notes that Joplin is in the tradition of the great blues singers, but not their equal.
    His main criticism is that she sings the same songs the same way each time, which to him is a sign of her limited artistic range. (He primarily covered jazz music, so it surprises me that he even sat through two of Joplin's sets!)
    All he says of the Dead is that the group "played its raucous sound unrelentingly." Not a fan!

    But most interestingly, Benny Goodman (the renowned King of Swing from the '30s) attended one of these shows - apparently dragged there by his daughter. It's kind of remarkable that the first (and only?) rock show Benny Goodman ever saw had the Grateful Dead. If anyone had asked his opinion of them, he probably would have had the same complaint: "It's so loud, it's almost deafening!"
    John Cooke's book On the Road with Janis Joplin has more of this story - Goodman and his daughter were brought backstage to meet Janis. It's said that "Janis, in her inimitable obscenity, shocked the pants off Benny Goodman. Because Benny was kind of a straightlaced guy, and his daughter was a young girl, and for Benny to hear this in front of his daughter, or for his daughter to hear this - it was...a moment to be treasured." (p.181)
    If the Dead were present, I can only imagine their reaction to seeing Benny Goodman backstage.

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  4. I added another review from the Village Voice, which gives more attention to the Dead.
    This writer had seen them in San Francisco two years earlier, and had been "hypnotized" by their "sorcery" and Garcia's dancing guitar. She seems less impressed now - they sound "old," they're now playing long blues & country numbers that bore her. (And apparently the audience was confined from dancing by the Fillmore East seats, which stifles her.)
    Evidently she saw the 2/11/69 early show, which started with Schoolgirl, but I'm puzzled what "sort-of western number" she could be referring to in that set. It's even more intriguing that in early 1969, she already sees the Dead as a kind of nostalgic anachronism, granddaddies belonging in a "music book history"!

    The Village Voice ran two reviews of the Joplin show in the same issue - the other one by Jennifer Gale doesn't mention the Dead's set, but she had also been to San Francisco years earlier, and compares it to the current show:
    "The first time I saw Big Brother and the Holding Company was three years ago at the Avalon Ballroom. It was my second or third dance in San Francisco, and I was becoming acclimatized. At the first I had been shocked, pleasantly, but still it was so different from anything that I had known that I panicked. I walked around, very nervously, until I became strangely soothed by the strobe lights and slowly my New York skin melted away. The music was new, the atmosphere was new, the whole scene was new, and everything part of everything else. A typical weekend at the Avalon, at that time the better of the two dance halls, consisted of Big Brother, the Grateful Dead, and the Quicksilver Messenger Service. After their sets the performers would get out on the dance floor and do what everyone else was doing. Nobody held back. That's what it was all about. Big Brother epitomized that. Janis was free and wild and very talented, the four cats in the group were also free and wild, but not quite so talented. That didn't matter. What did matter was that they felt it and everyone else felt it.
    How different that atmosphere was from today's... When you are herded to your seat, not allowed to move, or dance, or do anything but sit perfectly still, how the hell can you dig what's going on. It's contrary to the music, especially if it is good music. I suppose that is partially why I didn't dig Janis Joplin and her new group, because I didn't dig being in the Fillmore. But it does go much deeper than that. Janis Held Back.
    If this had been the first time I'd seen or heard her I would have loved it. The musicians were great, Janis was great, but it wasn't the same Janis Joplin, and the musicians were not the funky people who cradled Janis as Big Brother... Those so-called mediocre musicians were not bringing Janis down. They were building her up, supporting her, grooving behind her and with her, not drowning her out, not making her weaker.
    That whole night at the Fillmore was like going back to San Francisco two years after I had left - finding a tightness and a structure where there had been only freedom, finding locked doors and people hiding away with their bank books where it had once been completely open, where you knew everybody, and even if you didn't you dug them because you took it for granted that they were good instead of taking for granted that they were bad. And you took care of people and they took care of you...
    The death of the beauty that was Big Brother and the Holding Company, that was Country Joe and the Fish, that was the Buffalo Springfield, that was so many thousands of others, is our own fault. We have allowed ourselves to be hyped and used. We have progressed...[but] we have left behind what took so long to develop - Purity."

    Now that's nostalgia!

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  5. Another short review:
    "Janis Joplin and The Grateful Dead shared billing at the Fillmore East midweek to sellout performances. The Dead recaptured the excitement of San Francisco in New York receiving cheering encores, while Janis received a lukewarm reception. Janis seemed to have lost much of her spontaneity with a stilted performance bogged by a blaring, brassy horn section and contrived arrangements."
    (from the East Village Other, 2/21/69, p.27)

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  6. The article, possibly dated 2/17/69...GD Sock It to 2000 Rock Lovers, Minneapolis Tribune, date unknown...anyone have it?

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  7. Sorry, that's incorrect, it's Cook, Bruce, Janis Joplin Is Still The Queen, On A New throne, National Observer, possibly 2/17/69. That's what I'm lookin for.

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