THE DEAD LIVE IN PASADENA
It was a nice night for chucking out to the Pasadena Civic Auditorium. The evening air was nice and warm, and the headliners at the concert were none other than the Grateful Dead. I had heard all sorts of fascinating stories about the Dead, so it was with awe and wonderment that I approached the auditorium.
I have never attended a concert at the Pasadena Civic before, and I must say that the promoters of the show have found themselves a nice little place. The seating is comfortable; the stage is easily visible; and its acoustics are pretty good. There seemed to be a slight inconvenience for mutual ticket holders in that they had to wait in rather lengthy lines in order to exchange said slips of paper for the real thing. However, once inside everything was smooth, quiet and controlled.
This was the case as the first group of the evening performed. They were the New Riders of the Purple Sage, who are a group of lads who hang around and jam with the Dead. Performing with them was Jerry Garcia on pedal steel guitar. The set, which lasted for about an hour, was slow and unimpressive. And the band members were all so listless that I half expected them to crash right on stage any minute.
Musically, the Sages travel deep into Country and Western territory with an occasional stopover in Monotony. The only times that they managed to excite the audience to any appreciable extent was during their last two numbers, which were "The Wait" and "Honky Tonk Women." Instrumentally, they were loose and lazy with Garcia's slide work being the only sound that was comfortable to listen to.
Following their performance, there was a brief intermission wherein the audience milled about, met their neighbors, got stoned and above all, anxiously awaited the arrival of the Dead. After a few moments, the lights dimmed and the M.C. (a bearded pipe smoking freak) appropriately introduced the Dead as rockdom's most outrageous group.
The spotlights came on to reveal the Dead in all their grace and splendor. Jerry Garcia, the figurehead of the group, stepped forward and spoke to the audience. He was warm and friendly, which is surprising when one considers that his appearance closely resembles that of a grizzly bear wearing work clothes. This, of course, is due to the mass of black frizzy hair which covers his head and face except for his eyes and nose. As spokesman and lead guitarist for the group he is perfect.
After the opening remarks, they started off their set [with] "Casey Jones" which let the audience know right off that the Dead were in good shape tonight.
Following their first song, there was a slight delay during which time Garcia got the houselights turned up and the spotlights turned down so that the group and the audience could see one another. From then on, the show was out in the audience as well as on stage, because most of the crowd was up and dancing in the aisles as soon as the second number started.
It nearly goes without saying that the efforts of the crowds did not go unrewarded, for the Dead went on to play some of the finest San Francisco type music to be heard in a long time. As usual, almost all of the faster material broke into those long instrumental jams for which the Dead are famous. It was during these jams that Garcia displayed his talents on the guitar which have made him one of the most popular figures in the music scene. He plays with such apparent ease that he makes those long, high pitched leads of his look like child's play.
That evening, the Dead went on to play cuts that were representative of their past album efforts. The set also included a large dose of the Dead's new country material. The crowd loved all, although [--line missing--] slower material as they were with the faster stuff. This is due to the fact that when people come to a Grateful Dead concert, they are coming to move to the music, to dance to the music and not just listen to it. That is why everyone really went berserk during "Good Love" and "Mona," even though they aren't typical Dead material.
One can't really blame an audience for getting so excited during the Dead's performance because the mood and the tempo and the feeling of the music is just begging you to "get your hands out of your pockets" and freak, especially during a tune like the fast-paced "Good Love," which - besides being a rocker - was a vehicle for [a] double drum solo between Hart and Kreutzman. Other tunes that were performed that evening to the delight and enjoyment of all present were "Dark Star," "Easy Wind," and a slowed down rendition of "Candy Man."
But the highlight of the evening came when "Mona" trailed off and then turned into "Turn on Your Lovelight" which has got to be the most requested and favored Dead song of all time. Even the most stoned out downer freaks were up and dancing to this one. And why not? Garcia's riffs were high, flawless and clear, the drumming was tight, and the rest of the group's backing efforts were smooth and well integrated.
After "Lovelight," the Dead left the stage to the sound of an insatiable horde that could have listened to the Dead play all night. As it turned out, they only played for a measly hour and forty minutes.
(by Jacob Wiesel, from the Los Angeles Free Press, 2 October 1970)
Alas, no tape!
Jul 24, 2020
June 14, 1968: Fillmore East
JEFF BECK GROUP CHEERED IN DEBUT
British Pop Singers Delight Fillmore East Audience
They were standing and cheering for a new British pop group last night at the Fillmore East. The American debut of the Jeff Beck Group promises much heated enthusiasm for the quartet in its six-week American tour.
Mr. Beck is a young Londoner who distinguished himself for a year and a half as the lead guitarist of the Yardbirds. He was seen, if not really heard, in a sequence of the film "Blow-Up" and has generally earned a reputation as a highly polished and adroit blues guitarist. He and his band deal in the blues mainly, but with an urgency and sweep that is quite hard to resist.
The group's principal format is the interaction of Mr. Beck's wild and visionary guitar against the hoarse and insistent shouting of Rod Stewart, with gutsy backing on drums and bass.
Their dialogues were lean and laconic, the verbal Ping-Pong of a musical Pinter play.
The climaxes were primal, bringing the "big beat" of the English rock school forward.
But there were whimsy and invention and modernist games thrown in, in "Beck's Boogie" and variations on "Bolero." All told, an auspicious beginning for an exciting group.
The British group upstaged, for one listener, at least, the featured performers, the Grateful Dead of San Francisco. This two-drummer sextet was settling into its elaborate and discursive arrangements in a musically psychedelic vein when the deadline came. The band sounded more cohesive and disciplined than past outings here and was warmly received.
A rather aimless performance by a trio called The Seventh Sons opened the evening wanly. Perhaps it was an off-night for the group or perhaps they were totally overwhelmed by the rest of the bill.
(by Robert Shelton, from the New York Times, 15 June 1968)
See also:
http://deadessays.blogspot.com/2018/02/buzz-saw-music-fillmore-east-june-14.html
http://rockprosopography101.blogspot.com/2009/12/june-14-15-1968-fillmore-east-grateful.html
British Pop Singers Delight Fillmore East Audience
They were standing and cheering for a new British pop group last night at the Fillmore East. The American debut of the Jeff Beck Group promises much heated enthusiasm for the quartet in its six-week American tour.
Mr. Beck is a young Londoner who distinguished himself for a year and a half as the lead guitarist of the Yardbirds. He was seen, if not really heard, in a sequence of the film "Blow-Up" and has generally earned a reputation as a highly polished and adroit blues guitarist. He and his band deal in the blues mainly, but with an urgency and sweep that is quite hard to resist.
The group's principal format is the interaction of Mr. Beck's wild and visionary guitar against the hoarse and insistent shouting of Rod Stewart, with gutsy backing on drums and bass.
Their dialogues were lean and laconic, the verbal Ping-Pong of a musical Pinter play.
The climaxes were primal, bringing the "big beat" of the English rock school forward.
But there were whimsy and invention and modernist games thrown in, in "Beck's Boogie" and variations on "Bolero." All told, an auspicious beginning for an exciting group.
The British group upstaged, for one listener, at least, the featured performers, the Grateful Dead of San Francisco. This two-drummer sextet was settling into its elaborate and discursive arrangements in a musically psychedelic vein when the deadline came. The band sounded more cohesive and disciplined than past outings here and was warmly received.
A rather aimless performance by a trio called The Seventh Sons opened the evening wanly. Perhaps it was an off-night for the group or perhaps they were totally overwhelmed by the rest of the bill.
(by Robert Shelton, from the New York Times, 15 June 1968)
See also:
http://deadessays.blogspot.com/2018/02/buzz-saw-music-fillmore-east-june-14.html
http://rockprosopography101.blogspot.com/2009/12/june-14-15-1968-fillmore-east-grateful.html
Jul 22, 2020
1967: San Francisco Ballrooms
Hippies 'Super Children'
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN PSYCHEDELIC BALL ENDS?
San Francisco electric rock is not so much soul music as it is stomach.
There's something about 300 watts of amplified guitars, drums, harmonicas, and organ that grabs your lower intestinal region and turns it into a private, pulsating baffle. How much you enjoy the concert may depend on how much you enjoyed your last meal.
Actually, it doesn't really matter whether you enjoy the music or not; it will have accomplished its purpose - to suck you in, to make you totally involved with what's happening.
This basically is what the hippie creative renaissance is all about, a sort of sensual extremism that runs through their music, their light shows, their costumes and psychedelic posters.
Renaissance headquarters is San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, the West Coast's music center for the bombarding arts. But the Haight-Ashbury influence - and this is important - can be observed at every teen-age gathering and on every teen-age radio station around the country.
"What we're trying to create is a total environment kind of thing. We're getting the kids aged 16 to 25," explained Bob Cohen, 29-year-old co-manager of the Family Dog, a hippie production agency at 639 Gough St.
He said the Family Dog's main job is sponsoring the wild, weekly weekend teen-age dances in San Francisco's Avalon Ballroom, fluorescent balls that regularly draw thousands of costumed youngsters from the bay area per night.
With his long, receding hair, Cohen is one of the few hippies in Ben Franklin glasses who actually looks something like Ben Franklin. He quit his electronic engineering job and joined show business after discovering the electricity of rock and roll.
"The groups we book all have the 'San Francisco sound,'" he said. "It has to be experienced in person. I've taped every group that has appeared at the Avalon; they're strange tapes, they can only be played at full volume."
After joining the Family Dog, Cohen's first job was to build the entire Avalon sound system. "It's one of the best systems in the country. It cost $4,000. It'll put out 126 decibels at 100 feet, and that's only for the voice."
Most groups use their own sound systems for the instruments, he explained, and if it weren't for the Avalon system, beautiful rock lyrics would be drowned out.
"We match the groups by energy levels," said Cohen. "We try to book two high energy groups and one low energy per show. Certain blues groups, say, are low energy groups. Then you get groups like the Grateful Dead or the Quicksilver Messenger Service - they're high energy. When they're on, you can't talk anywhere in the building."
Not that the youths do much talking anyway at the Avalon. Mostly it's a lot of dancing, a lot of staring, some rolling on the floor, some flaking out, and occasionally a freak-out or two.
"We only have a few rules," Cohen said. "You can't wander in and out of the building. You can't take your clothes off - it would be nice if you could, but the police are against it. There is no physical violence and no narcotics."
"It doesn't matter," Cohen added. "Everybody's high when they come in, some have trouble getting up the stairs.
"We've had a few acid freak-outs. See, there's these pillows and rugs in front of the bandstand where the kids can lie down if they don't want to dance. Well, when the dance is over at 2 a.m., some of the kids won't leave. We have to go around and wake 'em up.
"A few are so turned on we have to bring them down with tranquilizers. We have a doctor on hand at all times, and we always see that the kids get home or to a hospital."
One's first visit to the Avalon Ballroom can be an exhilarating or shattering experience, depending on how long one stays and his threshold of pain. The following description of what happened there two Saturdays ago may or may not be fully accurate; it was written without the benefit of drugs.
They start lining up an hour before the doors open. They are two kinds: the hippies, the freaks and flower children of the entire Bay Area, dressed in every fabric of their expanded imagination and decorated by all the beaded symbols of the world; and the frat boys, the conservatively coat-and-tied and clean-faced youngsters who have come mainly to dance and see what's happening.
The dance floor itself is bathed in ultraviolet light which makes even the frat boys, in their bright white shirts and teeth, glow like zombie visions.
A giant projection screen hides three of the four walls. It is covered with blood; no wait, honey; no wait, oil and ink and alcohol, all the vibrating ingredients of a liquid light show, operated from an upstairs booth by six men with rotating glass dishes.
Everything keeps time to the music, the lights, the slides, the abstract films, the dancers, even a mad black-light puppet show near the snack bar upstairs.
In one corner of the dance floor a stroboscopic flood light turns giggling hippies into spastic silent actors. They toss a balloon into the air and watch it jerk and act funny. The strobe attacks their peripheral vision, and soon the whole room darts from left to right to left. Nothing is fastened anymore.
In another area, kids play with fluorescent toys, a fluorescent ball and boat and rubber elephant. An electric orange go-cart whizzes by. Surrounded by dancers playing ring-around-a-rosy, someone in a sailor suit is drawing with fluorescent chalk. He applies chalk to the floor, then his hands, then his face and hair, and finally over all his shoes and clothes.
This is not the Avalon; it is a fantastic, turned-on nursery of super children. In its own way it is the Haight-Ashbury and the entire hippie world.
Which raises two question: When is the dance going to end? And when and if it ends, who is going to wake up the kids and send them to their homes and to their hospitals?
Perhaps that is the wrong attitude. At the Avalon a dancer is dancing by himself. He is jumping and laughing and waving a fluorescent tambourine. When asked why he is dancing alone, the tambourine man shouts:
"I'm not. I'm dancing with everybody, I'm dancing with everybody. Think positive, man."
End of a series.
(by Dave Felton, from the Los Angeles Times, 13 April 1967)
* * *
'Haight - It's Love'
'GRATEFUL DEAD' STOLE SHOW
Haight-Ashbury -- Last in a Series.
Editor's Note: Stater reporter Jim Toms, on a recent trip to San Francisco, spent considerable time in Haight-Ashbury, new "hippie hub of the world."
SAN FRANCISCO -- Three walls of the huge auditorium are smothered with psychedelic colors and patterns - and the ultraviolet lights in the ceiling blink in perfect time with the deafening band on stage.
Except for the flashing patterns and moving globs of color, the scene could be any modern rock 'n roll dance - but the difference is that no one dances.
The band playing calls themselves the Jefferson Airplane, and although they're not in concert this night, the audience sits on the floor and just watches - enthralled.
Fillmore Auditorium, located in the heart of the Negro section of San Francisco, fills to capacity every time the Jefferson Airplane makes an appearance. The group began its career here, and now that it has "made it" with a national hit single, kids from all over the Frisco area come to identify.
The big auditorium seats about 1,000, and at three bucks a head you have to figure the proprietors are making out pretty well.
The cop at the door told us, "Sure, three bucks is a lot of moolah to most of these kids, but they come up with it night after night. We're keeping 'em off the streets aren't we? That's got to be considered a service."
There are no alcoholic beverages served in Fillmore Auditorium - only soft drinks. The kids all sit politely in rows, their legs crossed and heads bowed. No one makes trouble - they're all having too good a time.
Jefferson Airplane is the alltime winning band at Fillmore, which means they can return whenever they want. Three bands compete each night, and the winner comes back for another try. The audience rates the band by applause, the night we visited a group called "The Grateful Dead" stole the show. Others competing were the "Paupers" and "Collage."
The Fillmore district is where some racial rioting took place last summer, and city officials were skeptical as to what will happen this year with an influx of 30,000 hippies to nearby Haight-Ashbury. They're hoping things stay as they have been - nice and peaceful.
Shop owners in Haight are facing the expected invasion of hippies this summer with equanimity.
"These will be the amateur hippies on vacation from school," one owner told us. "They'll pretend they don't have any money, but many of them will have a nice packet of travelers checks provided by mommy and daddy." The owner was probably right.
Any way you look at it, a stay in Haight-Ashbury is an experience never to be forgotten. But as one editor so aptly put it: "Haight's a wonderful place to visit, but I'll be damned if I'd want my kid living there."
(by Jim Toms, from the Daily Kent Stater, OH, 19 May 1967)
* * *
San Francisco Scene
WINTERLAND TRIP
Although Billy Graham and Emmett Grogan do not have much in common, they both play vital roles in keeping the perpetual San Francisco hippy carnival rolling. Graham (not the evangelist) provides the circuses and Grogan (of the Diggers) the free food.
Each weekend, Graham, who runs the famous psychedelic Fillmore Auditorium, coordinates a concert, complete with noise (rock and roll bands) at a painful decibel level, strobe lights, light shows, and day-glo paint. San Francisco has more than one modern coliseum, and if the Fillmore becomes a drag, the Avalon isn't far away. But it is just as far out as the Fillmore.
San Francisco is nurturing a sound-oriented culture and the developments there in rock and roll are months ahead of the rest of the country. The Jefferson Airplane, for example, which piloted the San Francisco sound at the beginning of the hippy boom last fall, is suffering a popularity nosedive now that they have started doing commercials for white Levis.
They are being replaced by new groups like the Grateful Dead, the Quicksilver Messenger Service, Moby Grape, the Chocolate Watchband, and the Sopwith Camel, all of whose multiamplified music in the San Francisco auditoriums has not yet reverberated to the east coast.
On April Fool's night, the Byrds were at Winterland. Billy Graham also runs Winterland, a converted ice skating rink, but saves it for the big concerts. Knowledgeable sources claim that the acoustics and light shows at Winterland are real "bummers" (not as good as at the Fillmore or Avalon).
Nevertheless, what may have been just another normal, or even worse than normal concert to a Bay Area veteran, was an earful awakening to a New Yorker brought up on the printed word and the movie screen.
Apparently Billy Graham is attempting to shatter the sense barrier. The sights and sounds at Winterland merge into a new artform based on transforming the environment into an unbearable medium. Yet the few thousand hippies who packed the Winterland until 2 a.m. seem to thrive on the pain. Only the few tourists who strayed from the Greyhound bus could not make the Winterland trip.
But the uniqueness of the experience and the realization that everyone else was in a euphoric state nullified the pain. By obliterating the outside world of sense perceptions, the synthetic environment of Winterland became a whole new "reality" to be experienced and possibly enjoyed:
Six hippies sit cross-legged lettering "love" and "peace" in luminescent day-glo paint on the floor, on themselves, on others. Strobe lights blink on and off 120 times a minute fracturing all motion into a rapid series of dissociated actions.
Each person exists and ceases to exist 120 times a minute. Reality is dead. Time and space collapse into a slow progression of people spectrally floating by. Dizziness, but no nausea.
Just another concert to sate the hippy masses. And it goes on every week. But these masses are not satisfied by rock and roll alone. Music is just their outlet of expression. The common denominator and creative food for all hippies is dope and acid. Not only do drugs give them a passive personal self-experience, but they provide them with a new type of communication and community spirit. This spirit is perhaps the most striking aspect of the hippy community in Haight-Ashbury (better known as Hashbury). A crude type of communism underlies the community, and possessions, whether a place to stay for a night, or food, are freely shared.
The San Francisco Bay Area hippy community lives together, eats together, and trips together. The pulse of the synthetic Winterland environment is the pulse of a community vibrating between reality and what is to them a more meaningful psychedelic world - of a community that has dropped out and is looking for a place to land.
(by Robert Friedman, from the Columbia Daily Spectator, NY, 12 April 1967)
* * *
SAN FRANCISCO IS THE PLACE WHERE THINGS ARE HAPPENING
SAN FRANCISCO (UPI) - Sixty years ago this city was rocked by an earthquake. It wasn't the place to be.
Today San Francisco is quaking with vibrations of a different sort - the music of the 1960s called rock. And this is where it's at.
The vibrations come from amplifiers blaring sounds of electric guitars, rim shots on a snare drum, and wailing from a long-haired and wildly dressed singer.
The San Francisco sound, synonymous with the "turned-on" world of psychedelic happenings, is being felt in popular music quarters across the country.
Some local writers prefer to call San Francisco "The Liverpool of the United States." Liverpool is, of course, where the sound of the Beatles was born.
There are a number of reasons why San Francisco is, as young sound maker put it, "the holy city of music." It has hippies, a strong tradition of jazz, freedom of social expression, and large halls for dancing. Then, there's the aesthetic beauty, too.
The so-called "tribes" seem to blend easily. Those of the barefoot-and-bells set can "groove out" in the same dance hall with the Establishment in its costume of suit and tie, skirt and heels.
"People found out here that music is fun," said Jim Murray, 25, from Philadelphia. "Everybody wants to be themselves in this city and the music is part of it."
Murray plays guitar with a quintet called the Quicksilver Messenger Service. Quicksilver and a number of other groups such as the Jefferson Airplane, Steve Miller Blues Band, and the Grateful Dead have taken the local sound to other places by recordings and concerts.
The San Francisco sound - many musicians testify that there is such a thing - is a combination of electronics, visual effects, freedom, and the chance to play original pieces.
The widespread usage of LSD, marijuana, and other drugs is part of the scene, influencing the titles of songs, musicians' jargon, and the sounds themselves.
One band manager said he felt that "95% of the musicians in town have taken LSD." But musicians from the Dixieland, swing, and bop eras also used drugs.
It has been estimated that 2,000 groups are in the San Francisco Bay area, but not all of them can work regularly, or record.
Basically the sounds are the same, except for some soloists or electronic gimmicks. The musicians dress similarly, in outfits the "straight" world calls costumes.
New groups are born every week. You can hear rock bands playing in garages and apartments in the Haight-Ashbury district - the center of the hippie movement of the United States. [ . . . ]
Musicians emphasized that playing San Francisco happenings offers a chance to play original music. [ . . .]
Two of the "big rooms" for the new sounds, former dance halls of a near-forgotten music era, are the Avalon Ballroom and Fillmore Auditorium. On weekends, hundreds of persons wait in line to get in - and many never make it.
Avalon manager Chet Helms, 24, labels his dance-light show "Environmental Participatory Theater" and feels a responsibility toward the groups which play there.
Helms is more identified with the Hippies than Bill Graham, 35, who runs the Fillmore, in a predominantly Negro area skirting the Haight-Ashbury.
Graham has stated he is not a Hippie but a salesman of "talent and environment."
An evening in these halls means total assault of the senses. The music is loud. Abstract light patterns and psychedelic images with art films superimposed on them are projected on the walls. It is like looking at a moving colored slide under a microscope in a biology class.
There is often the smell of incense. Many dancers paint designs on their bodies and clothes in glowing paint, giving an eerie effect in strobe lights.
San Francisco has a solid history of contemporary music. The Barbary Coast of pre-earthquake days was a Dixieland center. Downtown, King Oliver played on Market Street before Chicago heard his Creole Jazz Band.
The Barbary Coast is now North Beach, where the mode is topless dancers. There isn't much work here for rock bands which want to experiment and express themselves to appreciative audiences.
There's a line from a popular song that Hippies and their followers like to quote. It applies to the music scene, too.
"Something's happening here."
(by Mitchell Hider, United Press International, from the Nashville Tennessean, 19 June 1967)
* * *
Here's one account of an outdoor show from an English reporter visiting Haight-Ashbury...
THE HIPPIES [excerpt]
. . . That day there was a love-in, at least that is what the newspapers called it, although it did not seem to me to live up to quite so exotic a name.
At two o-clock on Saturday afternoon, the hippies set up a platform in one of San Francisco's parks, a narrow strip about 200 yards wide called the Panhandle. For eight hours through blaring loudspeakers a succession of bands beat out the loudest music I have ever heard.
Long-haired and bearded the hippies danced. As I went into the crowd the first thing which struck me was the overpowering reek of marijuana smoke.
And yet it was fun. This was the hippies not on their mystical beat but what they called the joyful thing. Mothers danced with babies strapped to their backs. Children danced. Lovers lay on the grass kissing.
One group after another played the wild-sounding music of the hippies. Music forms an important part of their lives.
The more famous groups have exotic names like Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, and the most famous of all - The Grateful Dead. This last group, led by an enormous wild figure known only as Pigpen, produces music which Paul McCartney regards as a threat to British groups. These were not the best groups, but their beat and electronic Indian whine stirred the crowd.
Two girls, as hippy girls are prone to do, took off all their clothes. No one among the crowd looked worried, but the police did.
Sirens, shrieks. The traffic was cut off from either side of the park. The girls were taken away. But it never occurred even to the police to disband the rest of the crowd.
I went away and came back at dusk. A new note had crept into affairs. Mingled with the hippies were people drinking from beer cans. The hippies were stoned but some others were drunk.
As the last band was finishing and packing up their instruments, Michael Bowen, the organiser of the love-in, appealed to the crowd to clean up the park before they left. Obediently the hippies set out to pick up the paper, the bottles, the detritus of the day.
Then a drunk threw a bottle at the stand. Michael Bowen came down to talk to me.
"You see it is going to be spoiled. Alcohol. That is the trouble in the world. What harm do we do? But drunks, they kill."
As I left the park I saw a girl lying writhing on the ground. From her mouth trickled yellow saliva. She was having what I had come to recognise as a bad LSD trip.
The next morning was the last that I spent in Haight-Ashbury.
For a time I had been beguiled by the hippies' gentleness, their generosity, their openness. Now I was depressed by their lethargy, their woolliness, their totally ineffectual way of life. [ . . . ]
In three months nearly a quarter of a million kids from all over the country...would come down to San Francisco, bed down where they might, and lose themselves in a mish-mash of aimless, pseudo-mystical drifting.
They would be kids disenchanted with the war, with the path which the American dream has taken. Lost, lonely, afraid.
California would seem a haven! LSD an alluring illusion. The music would entrance them. [ . . . ] And they would follow the new leaders. Leaders who might be almost as perverting of their minds as LSD.
(by Quentin Crewe, from the Sunday Mirror, UK, 4 June 1967)
Thanks to Dave Davis.
* * *
And from later in the year, an interview with Bill Graham...
IN SAN FRANCISCO, IT'S AT THE FILLMORE
The small neon sign on the dilapidated corner building reads simply "Fillmore Auditorium," and aside from the sight of a few couples walking up the wide stairs to the second-floor hall, there is little on the outside to suggest that this is where the action is in San Francisco.
Once inside, however, there is plenty of action - incredibly loud music, crazily flashing lights and slides, and a mass of people watching, listening, and absorbing the floor's vibrations.
Here, in a Negro slum district far from San Francisco's tourist attractions, is the original psychedelic dance hall, where the attraction of rock groups and bizarre light shows first achieved fame nearly two years ago.
Now, imitations of the Fillmore Auditorium are springing up all over the country. New York has the Electric Circus, Los Angeles the Kaleidoscope, Washington the Ambassador Theater. Even Chicago has its version of the Cheetah.
In the midst of this, The Fillmore, the father of them all, is doing its best to maintain its own identity. Its manager, 35-year-old Bill Graham, rejects the others as mere money-making ventures, describing his own Fillmore in such terms as "free art form" and "mixing of the media."
The Fillmore rocks, blinks, and shakes every weekend to the sounds of a variety of Bay Area groups, including the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Big Brother, Mother Earth, the Flaming Groovies, and a host of others. It attracts an average crowd of 1,000, sometimes as many as its capacity of 1,500. In addition to the best of San Francisco's rock groups, it presents well-known out-of-town performers, a skillfully composed light show, art shows, poetry readings, and free apples.
The apples, placed in baskets outside the dance hall, represent to Graham as much of the atmosphere of the Fillmore as does the music and light show. He gave them out free at first because he thought it would be a nice gesture. He keeps giving them out, partly as a tradition, but also because he feels they serve a practical purpose.
He compares the offering of free apples to offering house guests a drink. "It breaks down the subconscious tightness of some people," he says. "When they start to munch on something, it lessens inhibitions. It loosens them up."
For 12 years before it came under Graham's direction, in January, 1966, the Fillmore shook to the sounds of Negro bands playing for Negro audiences.
Since taking over, Graham has spent a considerable amount of time and energy molding the Fillmore to his liking. He has installed overhead projectors, liquid projectors, 16-mm cameras, strobe lights, fluorescent lights, and others - all of which are operated by four experts working together during performances.
The result is a light show that, through the skillful use of all the equipment, is tailored to the mood and rhythm of the music being played. Slides of ancient and modern art, famous personalities, motorcycles, and psychedelic cars are flashed on the side walls along with silent film shorts. All the while, enormous, colored, liquidy blobs grow and shrink on the wall in back of the performers in rhythm to their music.
On the third floor is a balcony where those with headaches and eyestrain can retreat for soft drinks and a snack (no liquor is served) and to watch the activity below. Throughout the building are the personality and pop art posters that have become a fad.
Graham, a long-haired, mod-dressed man, also manages the Jefferson Airplane, currently the most popular rock group to come out of San Francisco. He came to the United States in 1942, fleeing from Nazi Germany, where both his parents died in concentration camps. He says he has done everything. "From truck-driving to huckstering." He has a degree in business administration from City College in New York, and before coming to the Fillmore, he was producer for the satirical San Francisco Mime Troupe.
As the first place of its kind, the Fillmore had some difficulties winning community acceptance, most notably from the San Francisco Police Department.
In the early days, there were problems in obtaining a dance permit, and the police raided the hall. Graham fought back, insisting that there had never been a fight on the premises since he had taken charge.
At the time of the troubles, San Francisco Chronicle critic John L. Wasserman described Graham as "...ambitious, aggressive, imaginative, responsible, hard-working, opinionated, impatient, and the best entrepreneur of public entertainment in San Francisco."
In the interests of "free art form" and "mixing of the media," Graham has had at the Fillmore such people as poet Allen Ginsberg, folksinger Joan Baez, Muddy Waters, Stokely Carmichael, and jazzman Charles Lloyd.
Graham estimates he has given the Fillmore over to benefit performances more than 50 times since he opened. "That's what differentiates San Francisco rock and roll from others," observes Graham. "They'll play for nothing."
In fact, the success of the Fillmore stems in large part from its location in San Francisco, according to Graham. "The great thing we have going here is the people. They're sensitive, warm, and passionate. They're here to have a good time and that's about all.
"San Francisco, as far as the arts are concerned, is made up of a lot of rejects. They're from the theater, they're musicians, and they're writers. You add to that the up-and-comers and professionals. It's also a very romantic city. You get an emotional breed that comes here. You've got kinetics, action-reaction."
Graham becomes incensed when the Fillmore is referred to as a "hippie haven." "I want the shirt-and-tie to come here as well as the hippie. It's for everybody," he insists.
Nevertheless, he estimates that probably 60 per cent of each audience is of "the hippie movement." Most of those at the Fillmore who consider themselves hippies might probably more accurately be termed "establishment hippies" or "respectable hippies," mostly because they can afford the price of admission ($3 per single ticket) to the Fillmore.
With the "hippie haven" reputation naturally goes the marijuana-LSD reputation, Graham answers the implication by pointing out that he has had neither legal trouble not unpleasant personal experiences with drug users. He feels that these people have too much respect for the Fillmore and the service it performs to put its existence in danger by bringing drugs along when they come.
"If I were to tell you that nobody comes here glassy-eyed, I'd probably be lying," he concedes. "But if they do, they don't cause any trouble."
A quick, incisive man, Graham sees the Fillmore as the most uninhibited place of its kind. "Above all," he says, "the Fillmore doesn't stop being what it was. Success doesn't keep us from changing the way it does a lot of places. We're always trying to improve."
As for the future of the Fillmore, Graham believes it will still lead the way in setting rock music trends. "We're going through cycles," he observes. "We've had a blues cycle, a jazz cycle, and now we're going through an English cycle. I hope we'll grow instead of shrink. Above all, I hope that the dollar will remain secondary, and if it doesn't, then I hope they run over me."
David Gumpert is a University of Chicago student who is making his second appearance in Panorama.
(by David Gumpert, from the Chicago Daily News, 25 November 1967)
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN PSYCHEDELIC BALL ENDS?
San Francisco electric rock is not so much soul music as it is stomach.
There's something about 300 watts of amplified guitars, drums, harmonicas, and organ that grabs your lower intestinal region and turns it into a private, pulsating baffle. How much you enjoy the concert may depend on how much you enjoyed your last meal.
Actually, it doesn't really matter whether you enjoy the music or not; it will have accomplished its purpose - to suck you in, to make you totally involved with what's happening.
This basically is what the hippie creative renaissance is all about, a sort of sensual extremism that runs through their music, their light shows, their costumes and psychedelic posters.
Renaissance headquarters is San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, the West Coast's music center for the bombarding arts. But the Haight-Ashbury influence - and this is important - can be observed at every teen-age gathering and on every teen-age radio station around the country.
"What we're trying to create is a total environment kind of thing. We're getting the kids aged 16 to 25," explained Bob Cohen, 29-year-old co-manager of the Family Dog, a hippie production agency at 639 Gough St.
He said the Family Dog's main job is sponsoring the wild, weekly weekend teen-age dances in San Francisco's Avalon Ballroom, fluorescent balls that regularly draw thousands of costumed youngsters from the bay area per night.
With his long, receding hair, Cohen is one of the few hippies in Ben Franklin glasses who actually looks something like Ben Franklin. He quit his electronic engineering job and joined show business after discovering the electricity of rock and roll.
"The groups we book all have the 'San Francisco sound,'" he said. "It has to be experienced in person. I've taped every group that has appeared at the Avalon; they're strange tapes, they can only be played at full volume."
After joining the Family Dog, Cohen's first job was to build the entire Avalon sound system. "It's one of the best systems in the country. It cost $4,000. It'll put out 126 decibels at 100 feet, and that's only for the voice."
Most groups use their own sound systems for the instruments, he explained, and if it weren't for the Avalon system, beautiful rock lyrics would be drowned out.
"We match the groups by energy levels," said Cohen. "We try to book two high energy groups and one low energy per show. Certain blues groups, say, are low energy groups. Then you get groups like the Grateful Dead or the Quicksilver Messenger Service - they're high energy. When they're on, you can't talk anywhere in the building."
Not that the youths do much talking anyway at the Avalon. Mostly it's a lot of dancing, a lot of staring, some rolling on the floor, some flaking out, and occasionally a freak-out or two.
"We only have a few rules," Cohen said. "You can't wander in and out of the building. You can't take your clothes off - it would be nice if you could, but the police are against it. There is no physical violence and no narcotics."
"It doesn't matter," Cohen added. "Everybody's high when they come in, some have trouble getting up the stairs.
"We've had a few acid freak-outs. See, there's these pillows and rugs in front of the bandstand where the kids can lie down if they don't want to dance. Well, when the dance is over at 2 a.m., some of the kids won't leave. We have to go around and wake 'em up.
"A few are so turned on we have to bring them down with tranquilizers. We have a doctor on hand at all times, and we always see that the kids get home or to a hospital."
One's first visit to the Avalon Ballroom can be an exhilarating or shattering experience, depending on how long one stays and his threshold of pain. The following description of what happened there two Saturdays ago may or may not be fully accurate; it was written without the benefit of drugs.
They start lining up an hour before the doors open. They are two kinds: the hippies, the freaks and flower children of the entire Bay Area, dressed in every fabric of their expanded imagination and decorated by all the beaded symbols of the world; and the frat boys, the conservatively coat-and-tied and clean-faced youngsters who have come mainly to dance and see what's happening.
The dance floor itself is bathed in ultraviolet light which makes even the frat boys, in their bright white shirts and teeth, glow like zombie visions.
A giant projection screen hides three of the four walls. It is covered with blood; no wait, honey; no wait, oil and ink and alcohol, all the vibrating ingredients of a liquid light show, operated from an upstairs booth by six men with rotating glass dishes.
Everything keeps time to the music, the lights, the slides, the abstract films, the dancers, even a mad black-light puppet show near the snack bar upstairs.
In one corner of the dance floor a stroboscopic flood light turns giggling hippies into spastic silent actors. They toss a balloon into the air and watch it jerk and act funny. The strobe attacks their peripheral vision, and soon the whole room darts from left to right to left. Nothing is fastened anymore.
In another area, kids play with fluorescent toys, a fluorescent ball and boat and rubber elephant. An electric orange go-cart whizzes by. Surrounded by dancers playing ring-around-a-rosy, someone in a sailor suit is drawing with fluorescent chalk. He applies chalk to the floor, then his hands, then his face and hair, and finally over all his shoes and clothes.
This is not the Avalon; it is a fantastic, turned-on nursery of super children. In its own way it is the Haight-Ashbury and the entire hippie world.
Which raises two question: When is the dance going to end? And when and if it ends, who is going to wake up the kids and send them to their homes and to their hospitals?
Perhaps that is the wrong attitude. At the Avalon a dancer is dancing by himself. He is jumping and laughing and waving a fluorescent tambourine. When asked why he is dancing alone, the tambourine man shouts:
"I'm not. I'm dancing with everybody, I'm dancing with everybody. Think positive, man."
End of a series.
(by Dave Felton, from the Los Angeles Times, 13 April 1967)
* * *
'Haight - It's Love'
'GRATEFUL DEAD' STOLE SHOW
Haight-Ashbury -- Last in a Series.
Editor's Note: Stater reporter Jim Toms, on a recent trip to San Francisco, spent considerable time in Haight-Ashbury, new "hippie hub of the world."
SAN FRANCISCO -- Three walls of the huge auditorium are smothered with psychedelic colors and patterns - and the ultraviolet lights in the ceiling blink in perfect time with the deafening band on stage.
Except for the flashing patterns and moving globs of color, the scene could be any modern rock 'n roll dance - but the difference is that no one dances.
The band playing calls themselves the Jefferson Airplane, and although they're not in concert this night, the audience sits on the floor and just watches - enthralled.
Fillmore Auditorium, located in the heart of the Negro section of San Francisco, fills to capacity every time the Jefferson Airplane makes an appearance. The group began its career here, and now that it has "made it" with a national hit single, kids from all over the Frisco area come to identify.
The big auditorium seats about 1,000, and at three bucks a head you have to figure the proprietors are making out pretty well.
The cop at the door told us, "Sure, three bucks is a lot of moolah to most of these kids, but they come up with it night after night. We're keeping 'em off the streets aren't we? That's got to be considered a service."
There are no alcoholic beverages served in Fillmore Auditorium - only soft drinks. The kids all sit politely in rows, their legs crossed and heads bowed. No one makes trouble - they're all having too good a time.
Jefferson Airplane is the alltime winning band at Fillmore, which means they can return whenever they want. Three bands compete each night, and the winner comes back for another try. The audience rates the band by applause, the night we visited a group called "The Grateful Dead" stole the show. Others competing were the "Paupers" and "Collage."
The Fillmore district is where some racial rioting took place last summer, and city officials were skeptical as to what will happen this year with an influx of 30,000 hippies to nearby Haight-Ashbury. They're hoping things stay as they have been - nice and peaceful.
Shop owners in Haight are facing the expected invasion of hippies this summer with equanimity.
"These will be the amateur hippies on vacation from school," one owner told us. "They'll pretend they don't have any money, but many of them will have a nice packet of travelers checks provided by mommy and daddy." The owner was probably right.
Any way you look at it, a stay in Haight-Ashbury is an experience never to be forgotten. But as one editor so aptly put it: "Haight's a wonderful place to visit, but I'll be damned if I'd want my kid living there."
(by Jim Toms, from the Daily Kent Stater, OH, 19 May 1967)
* * *
San Francisco Scene
WINTERLAND TRIP
Although Billy Graham and Emmett Grogan do not have much in common, they both play vital roles in keeping the perpetual San Francisco hippy carnival rolling. Graham (not the evangelist) provides the circuses and Grogan (of the Diggers) the free food.
Each weekend, Graham, who runs the famous psychedelic Fillmore Auditorium, coordinates a concert, complete with noise (rock and roll bands) at a painful decibel level, strobe lights, light shows, and day-glo paint. San Francisco has more than one modern coliseum, and if the Fillmore becomes a drag, the Avalon isn't far away. But it is just as far out as the Fillmore.
San Francisco is nurturing a sound-oriented culture and the developments there in rock and roll are months ahead of the rest of the country. The Jefferson Airplane, for example, which piloted the San Francisco sound at the beginning of the hippy boom last fall, is suffering a popularity nosedive now that they have started doing commercials for white Levis.
They are being replaced by new groups like the Grateful Dead, the Quicksilver Messenger Service, Moby Grape, the Chocolate Watchband, and the Sopwith Camel, all of whose multiamplified music in the San Francisco auditoriums has not yet reverberated to the east coast.
On April Fool's night, the Byrds were at Winterland. Billy Graham also runs Winterland, a converted ice skating rink, but saves it for the big concerts. Knowledgeable sources claim that the acoustics and light shows at Winterland are real "bummers" (not as good as at the Fillmore or Avalon).
Nevertheless, what may have been just another normal, or even worse than normal concert to a Bay Area veteran, was an earful awakening to a New Yorker brought up on the printed word and the movie screen.
Apparently Billy Graham is attempting to shatter the sense barrier. The sights and sounds at Winterland merge into a new artform based on transforming the environment into an unbearable medium. Yet the few thousand hippies who packed the Winterland until 2 a.m. seem to thrive on the pain. Only the few tourists who strayed from the Greyhound bus could not make the Winterland trip.
But the uniqueness of the experience and the realization that everyone else was in a euphoric state nullified the pain. By obliterating the outside world of sense perceptions, the synthetic environment of Winterland became a whole new "reality" to be experienced and possibly enjoyed:
Six hippies sit cross-legged lettering "love" and "peace" in luminescent day-glo paint on the floor, on themselves, on others. Strobe lights blink on and off 120 times a minute fracturing all motion into a rapid series of dissociated actions.
Each person exists and ceases to exist 120 times a minute. Reality is dead. Time and space collapse into a slow progression of people spectrally floating by. Dizziness, but no nausea.
Just another concert to sate the hippy masses. And it goes on every week. But these masses are not satisfied by rock and roll alone. Music is just their outlet of expression. The common denominator and creative food for all hippies is dope and acid. Not only do drugs give them a passive personal self-experience, but they provide them with a new type of communication and community spirit. This spirit is perhaps the most striking aspect of the hippy community in Haight-Ashbury (better known as Hashbury). A crude type of communism underlies the community, and possessions, whether a place to stay for a night, or food, are freely shared.
The San Francisco Bay Area hippy community lives together, eats together, and trips together. The pulse of the synthetic Winterland environment is the pulse of a community vibrating between reality and what is to them a more meaningful psychedelic world - of a community that has dropped out and is looking for a place to land.
(by Robert Friedman, from the Columbia Daily Spectator, NY, 12 April 1967)
* * *
SAN FRANCISCO IS THE PLACE WHERE THINGS ARE HAPPENING
SAN FRANCISCO (UPI) - Sixty years ago this city was rocked by an earthquake. It wasn't the place to be.
Today San Francisco is quaking with vibrations of a different sort - the music of the 1960s called rock. And this is where it's at.
The vibrations come from amplifiers blaring sounds of electric guitars, rim shots on a snare drum, and wailing from a long-haired and wildly dressed singer.
The San Francisco sound, synonymous with the "turned-on" world of psychedelic happenings, is being felt in popular music quarters across the country.
Some local writers prefer to call San Francisco "The Liverpool of the United States." Liverpool is, of course, where the sound of the Beatles was born.
There are a number of reasons why San Francisco is, as young sound maker put it, "the holy city of music." It has hippies, a strong tradition of jazz, freedom of social expression, and large halls for dancing. Then, there's the aesthetic beauty, too.
The so-called "tribes" seem to blend easily. Those of the barefoot-and-bells set can "groove out" in the same dance hall with the Establishment in its costume of suit and tie, skirt and heels.
"People found out here that music is fun," said Jim Murray, 25, from Philadelphia. "Everybody wants to be themselves in this city and the music is part of it."
Murray plays guitar with a quintet called the Quicksilver Messenger Service. Quicksilver and a number of other groups such as the Jefferson Airplane, Steve Miller Blues Band, and the Grateful Dead have taken the local sound to other places by recordings and concerts.
The San Francisco sound - many musicians testify that there is such a thing - is a combination of electronics, visual effects, freedom, and the chance to play original pieces.
The widespread usage of LSD, marijuana, and other drugs is part of the scene, influencing the titles of songs, musicians' jargon, and the sounds themselves.
One band manager said he felt that "95% of the musicians in town have taken LSD." But musicians from the Dixieland, swing, and bop eras also used drugs.
It has been estimated that 2,000 groups are in the San Francisco Bay area, but not all of them can work regularly, or record.
Basically the sounds are the same, except for some soloists or electronic gimmicks. The musicians dress similarly, in outfits the "straight" world calls costumes.
New groups are born every week. You can hear rock bands playing in garages and apartments in the Haight-Ashbury district - the center of the hippie movement of the United States. [ . . . ]
Musicians emphasized that playing San Francisco happenings offers a chance to play original music. [ . . .]
Two of the "big rooms" for the new sounds, former dance halls of a near-forgotten music era, are the Avalon Ballroom and Fillmore Auditorium. On weekends, hundreds of persons wait in line to get in - and many never make it.
Avalon manager Chet Helms, 24, labels his dance-light show "Environmental Participatory Theater" and feels a responsibility toward the groups which play there.
Helms is more identified with the Hippies than Bill Graham, 35, who runs the Fillmore, in a predominantly Negro area skirting the Haight-Ashbury.
Graham has stated he is not a Hippie but a salesman of "talent and environment."
An evening in these halls means total assault of the senses. The music is loud. Abstract light patterns and psychedelic images with art films superimposed on them are projected on the walls. It is like looking at a moving colored slide under a microscope in a biology class.
There is often the smell of incense. Many dancers paint designs on their bodies and clothes in glowing paint, giving an eerie effect in strobe lights.
San Francisco has a solid history of contemporary music. The Barbary Coast of pre-earthquake days was a Dixieland center. Downtown, King Oliver played on Market Street before Chicago heard his Creole Jazz Band.
The Barbary Coast is now North Beach, where the mode is topless dancers. There isn't much work here for rock bands which want to experiment and express themselves to appreciative audiences.
There's a line from a popular song that Hippies and their followers like to quote. It applies to the music scene, too.
"Something's happening here."
(by Mitchell Hider, United Press International, from the Nashville Tennessean, 19 June 1967)
* * *
Here's one account of an outdoor show from an English reporter visiting Haight-Ashbury...
THE HIPPIES [excerpt]
. . . That day there was a love-in, at least that is what the newspapers called it, although it did not seem to me to live up to quite so exotic a name.
At two o-clock on Saturday afternoon, the hippies set up a platform in one of San Francisco's parks, a narrow strip about 200 yards wide called the Panhandle. For eight hours through blaring loudspeakers a succession of bands beat out the loudest music I have ever heard.
Long-haired and bearded the hippies danced. As I went into the crowd the first thing which struck me was the overpowering reek of marijuana smoke.
And yet it was fun. This was the hippies not on their mystical beat but what they called the joyful thing. Mothers danced with babies strapped to their backs. Children danced. Lovers lay on the grass kissing.
One group after another played the wild-sounding music of the hippies. Music forms an important part of their lives.
The more famous groups have exotic names like Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, and the most famous of all - The Grateful Dead. This last group, led by an enormous wild figure known only as Pigpen, produces music which Paul McCartney regards as a threat to British groups. These were not the best groups, but their beat and electronic Indian whine stirred the crowd.
Two girls, as hippy girls are prone to do, took off all their clothes. No one among the crowd looked worried, but the police did.
Sirens, shrieks. The traffic was cut off from either side of the park. The girls were taken away. But it never occurred even to the police to disband the rest of the crowd.
I went away and came back at dusk. A new note had crept into affairs. Mingled with the hippies were people drinking from beer cans. The hippies were stoned but some others were drunk.
As the last band was finishing and packing up their instruments, Michael Bowen, the organiser of the love-in, appealed to the crowd to clean up the park before they left. Obediently the hippies set out to pick up the paper, the bottles, the detritus of the day.
Then a drunk threw a bottle at the stand. Michael Bowen came down to talk to me.
"You see it is going to be spoiled. Alcohol. That is the trouble in the world. What harm do we do? But drunks, they kill."
As I left the park I saw a girl lying writhing on the ground. From her mouth trickled yellow saliva. She was having what I had come to recognise as a bad LSD trip.
The next morning was the last that I spent in Haight-Ashbury.
For a time I had been beguiled by the hippies' gentleness, their generosity, their openness. Now I was depressed by their lethargy, their woolliness, their totally ineffectual way of life. [ . . . ]
In three months nearly a quarter of a million kids from all over the country...would come down to San Francisco, bed down where they might, and lose themselves in a mish-mash of aimless, pseudo-mystical drifting.
They would be kids disenchanted with the war, with the path which the American dream has taken. Lost, lonely, afraid.
California would seem a haven! LSD an alluring illusion. The music would entrance them. [ . . . ] And they would follow the new leaders. Leaders who might be almost as perverting of their minds as LSD.
(by Quentin Crewe, from the Sunday Mirror, UK, 4 June 1967)
Thanks to Dave Davis.
* * *
And from later in the year, an interview with Bill Graham...
IN SAN FRANCISCO, IT'S AT THE FILLMORE
The small neon sign on the dilapidated corner building reads simply "Fillmore Auditorium," and aside from the sight of a few couples walking up the wide stairs to the second-floor hall, there is little on the outside to suggest that this is where the action is in San Francisco.
Once inside, however, there is plenty of action - incredibly loud music, crazily flashing lights and slides, and a mass of people watching, listening, and absorbing the floor's vibrations.
Here, in a Negro slum district far from San Francisco's tourist attractions, is the original psychedelic dance hall, where the attraction of rock groups and bizarre light shows first achieved fame nearly two years ago.
Now, imitations of the Fillmore Auditorium are springing up all over the country. New York has the Electric Circus, Los Angeles the Kaleidoscope, Washington the Ambassador Theater. Even Chicago has its version of the Cheetah.
In the midst of this, The Fillmore, the father of them all, is doing its best to maintain its own identity. Its manager, 35-year-old Bill Graham, rejects the others as mere money-making ventures, describing his own Fillmore in such terms as "free art form" and "mixing of the media."
The Fillmore rocks, blinks, and shakes every weekend to the sounds of a variety of Bay Area groups, including the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Big Brother, Mother Earth, the Flaming Groovies, and a host of others. It attracts an average crowd of 1,000, sometimes as many as its capacity of 1,500. In addition to the best of San Francisco's rock groups, it presents well-known out-of-town performers, a skillfully composed light show, art shows, poetry readings, and free apples.
The apples, placed in baskets outside the dance hall, represent to Graham as much of the atmosphere of the Fillmore as does the music and light show. He gave them out free at first because he thought it would be a nice gesture. He keeps giving them out, partly as a tradition, but also because he feels they serve a practical purpose.
He compares the offering of free apples to offering house guests a drink. "It breaks down the subconscious tightness of some people," he says. "When they start to munch on something, it lessens inhibitions. It loosens them up."
For 12 years before it came under Graham's direction, in January, 1966, the Fillmore shook to the sounds of Negro bands playing for Negro audiences.
Since taking over, Graham has spent a considerable amount of time and energy molding the Fillmore to his liking. He has installed overhead projectors, liquid projectors, 16-mm cameras, strobe lights, fluorescent lights, and others - all of which are operated by four experts working together during performances.
The result is a light show that, through the skillful use of all the equipment, is tailored to the mood and rhythm of the music being played. Slides of ancient and modern art, famous personalities, motorcycles, and psychedelic cars are flashed on the side walls along with silent film shorts. All the while, enormous, colored, liquidy blobs grow and shrink on the wall in back of the performers in rhythm to their music.
On the third floor is a balcony where those with headaches and eyestrain can retreat for soft drinks and a snack (no liquor is served) and to watch the activity below. Throughout the building are the personality and pop art posters that have become a fad.
Graham, a long-haired, mod-dressed man, also manages the Jefferson Airplane, currently the most popular rock group to come out of San Francisco. He came to the United States in 1942, fleeing from Nazi Germany, where both his parents died in concentration camps. He says he has done everything. "From truck-driving to huckstering." He has a degree in business administration from City College in New York, and before coming to the Fillmore, he was producer for the satirical San Francisco Mime Troupe.
As the first place of its kind, the Fillmore had some difficulties winning community acceptance, most notably from the San Francisco Police Department.
In the early days, there were problems in obtaining a dance permit, and the police raided the hall. Graham fought back, insisting that there had never been a fight on the premises since he had taken charge.
At the time of the troubles, San Francisco Chronicle critic John L. Wasserman described Graham as "...ambitious, aggressive, imaginative, responsible, hard-working, opinionated, impatient, and the best entrepreneur of public entertainment in San Francisco."
In the interests of "free art form" and "mixing of the media," Graham has had at the Fillmore such people as poet Allen Ginsberg, folksinger Joan Baez, Muddy Waters, Stokely Carmichael, and jazzman Charles Lloyd.
Graham estimates he has given the Fillmore over to benefit performances more than 50 times since he opened. "That's what differentiates San Francisco rock and roll from others," observes Graham. "They'll play for nothing."
In fact, the success of the Fillmore stems in large part from its location in San Francisco, according to Graham. "The great thing we have going here is the people. They're sensitive, warm, and passionate. They're here to have a good time and that's about all.
"San Francisco, as far as the arts are concerned, is made up of a lot of rejects. They're from the theater, they're musicians, and they're writers. You add to that the up-and-comers and professionals. It's also a very romantic city. You get an emotional breed that comes here. You've got kinetics, action-reaction."
Graham becomes incensed when the Fillmore is referred to as a "hippie haven." "I want the shirt-and-tie to come here as well as the hippie. It's for everybody," he insists.
Nevertheless, he estimates that probably 60 per cent of each audience is of "the hippie movement." Most of those at the Fillmore who consider themselves hippies might probably more accurately be termed "establishment hippies" or "respectable hippies," mostly because they can afford the price of admission ($3 per single ticket) to the Fillmore.
With the "hippie haven" reputation naturally goes the marijuana-LSD reputation, Graham answers the implication by pointing out that he has had neither legal trouble not unpleasant personal experiences with drug users. He feels that these people have too much respect for the Fillmore and the service it performs to put its existence in danger by bringing drugs along when they come.
"If I were to tell you that nobody comes here glassy-eyed, I'd probably be lying," he concedes. "But if they do, they don't cause any trouble."
A quick, incisive man, Graham sees the Fillmore as the most uninhibited place of its kind. "Above all," he says, "the Fillmore doesn't stop being what it was. Success doesn't keep us from changing the way it does a lot of places. We're always trying to improve."
As for the future of the Fillmore, Graham believes it will still lead the way in setting rock music trends. "We're going through cycles," he observes. "We've had a blues cycle, a jazz cycle, and now we're going through an English cycle. I hope we'll grow instead of shrink. Above all, I hope that the dollar will remain secondary, and if it doesn't, then I hope they run over me."
David Gumpert is a University of Chicago student who is making his second appearance in Panorama.
(by David Gumpert, from the Chicago Daily News, 25 November 1967)
November 1965: Bending Your Mind
FRETS AND FRAILS [excerpt]
... Pete Rowan, guitarist from Boston, has joined the Bill Monroe group ... Scotty Stoneman is playing with the Kentucky Colonels ... Dave Grisman found the Warlocks to be the best rock-and-roll group he heard in California. He especially liked a song written by their lead guitarist, Jerry Garcia, titled "Bending Your Mind." ... Eric Andersen is writing a 35-minute song for the opening sequence of Andy Warhol's eight- or ten-hour movie to be called Poor Little Rich Girl ...
(by Israel Young, from Sing Out! magazine, November 1965)
... Pete Rowan, guitarist from Boston, has joined the Bill Monroe group ... Scotty Stoneman is playing with the Kentucky Colonels ... Dave Grisman found the Warlocks to be the best rock-and-roll group he heard in California. He especially liked a song written by their lead guitarist, Jerry Garcia, titled "Bending Your Mind." ... Eric Andersen is writing a 35-minute song for the opening sequence of Andy Warhol's eight- or ten-hour movie to be called Poor Little Rich Girl ...
(by Israel Young, from Sing Out! magazine, November 1965)
Jul 5, 2020
May 17-18, 1968: Shrine Exposition Hall, Los Angeles
THE 'GRAPE' APPEARS IN ROCK CLUB
The Moby Grape, the real Moby Grape, as the ads said, since the San Francisco quintet had recently been impersonated at another club, attracted a sizable audience for a weekend appearance at the Kaleidoscope.
Although their albums and single record releases have met with relatively little commercial success, the group has a devout following because of the quality of the material and their live performances.
They are fun to watch, fun to listen to, and danceable. Some of their songs - "Sitting By the Window," "8:05," and "Omaha" - are among the best products of San Francisco combos.
The Moby Grape projects a vigorous sound through four synchronized guitars and a vocal flexibility matched by few groups.
Despite their abilities with blues, ballads, and straight rock, however, the quintet has just enough humdrum material to prevent them from being great.
Meanwhile, over at the Shrine Exposition Hall, the Grateful Dead pummelled several thousand persons with their long improvisational rock music in a show sponsored by the Pinnacle.
The sound of the San Francisco sextet is heavily dependent on lead guitarist Jerry Garcia, whose brilliant playing makes it hard to realize that he is surrounded by routine musicians.
They have two average drummers instead of one good one. Pigpen's organ is generally barely audible and his voice, the best in the group, is mediocre.
Garcia, however, led the group through some exciting blues-based music which roused the Shrine crowd into fervid demonstrations of appreciation.
(by Pete Johnson, from the Los Angeles Times, 20 May 1968)
Alas, no tape!
Pete Johnson also reviewed these Dead shows:
http://deadsources.blogspot.com/2012/02/september-15-1967-hollywood-bowl.html
http://deadsources.blogspot.com/2012/02/november-10-1967-la-shrine-hall.html
http://deadsources.blogspot.com/2017/06/august-23-1968-shrine-exposition-hall.html
http://deadsources.blogspot.com/2020/07/march-22-1969-rose-palace-pasadena-ca.html
The Moby Grape, the real Moby Grape, as the ads said, since the San Francisco quintet had recently been impersonated at another club, attracted a sizable audience for a weekend appearance at the Kaleidoscope.
Although their albums and single record releases have met with relatively little commercial success, the group has a devout following because of the quality of the material and their live performances.
They are fun to watch, fun to listen to, and danceable. Some of their songs - "Sitting By the Window," "8:05," and "Omaha" - are among the best products of San Francisco combos.
The Moby Grape projects a vigorous sound through four synchronized guitars and a vocal flexibility matched by few groups.
Despite their abilities with blues, ballads, and straight rock, however, the quintet has just enough humdrum material to prevent them from being great.
Meanwhile, over at the Shrine Exposition Hall, the Grateful Dead pummelled several thousand persons with their long improvisational rock music in a show sponsored by the Pinnacle.
The sound of the San Francisco sextet is heavily dependent on lead guitarist Jerry Garcia, whose brilliant playing makes it hard to realize that he is surrounded by routine musicians.
They have two average drummers instead of one good one. Pigpen's organ is generally barely audible and his voice, the best in the group, is mediocre.
Garcia, however, led the group through some exciting blues-based music which roused the Shrine crowd into fervid demonstrations of appreciation.
(by Pete Johnson, from the Los Angeles Times, 20 May 1968)
Alas, no tape!
Pete Johnson also reviewed these Dead shows:
http://deadsources.blogspot.com/2012/02/september-15-1967-hollywood-bowl.html
http://deadsources.blogspot.com/2012/02/november-10-1967-la-shrine-hall.html
http://deadsources.blogspot.com/2017/06/august-23-1968-shrine-exposition-hall.html
http://deadsources.blogspot.com/2020/07/march-22-1969-rose-palace-pasadena-ca.html
Jul 3, 2020
March 21-22, 1969: Rose Palace, Pasadena, CA
ROSE PALACE ROCKS WEEKEND SCENE
It looks like the Los Angeles area finally has a permanent home for rock concerts, akin to the good vibes of San Francisco's Fillmore and Avalon ballrooms.
The name of the place is the Rose Palace.
After only two weeks in operation, it's assimilated the best features of Los Angeles' historic (and no more) hallowed halls of rock: Shrine Hall, Cheetah, and Kaleidoscope, and taken some care to avoid making the mistakes that sent the aforementioned establishments into ruin.
For instance, the capacity is equal to the Shrine (about 8,000), yet there are no posts, pillars or balconies obstructing the view of the stage. The floor, though concrete, is covered with a one-inch layer of artificial grass (very apropos). And gone are the days of hot, sticky-sweltering concert hall. This place gets actually cold as the night rolls on. In other words, the place is set up for audience enjoyment.
But these features are only subordinate to the big issue: talent. Booking good shows, ultimately, is what makes or breaks a rock ballroom. Happily, the Rose Palace (run by Scenic Sounds) makes it quite well. Take last weekend for example.
The show started off with the local debut of Jethro Tull, an English quintet whose music predominantly falls into the jazz-rock genre. Riding the crest of the second wave of English pop groups, Jethro Tull (named after the inventor of the plow in England) is unique enough in its approach [and dedication] to make a dent in the American market. The group is led by the [elf-like] antics of flutist Ian Anderson, whose on-stage stance is highly derivative of a giant flamingo bird [at] rest...only Anderson doesn't rest, he's constantly moving, conveying the [same] kind of visual excitement that the Who's Peter Townscend specializes in.
The group's material runs [from] Roland Kirk "Serenade to a Cuckoo" to their own rocking "Dharma for One," to a nonsense song called "[Don't] Wanna Be a Fatman," the [latter] finding Anderson playing oud [and his] drummer beating tablas. Anderson keeps up a constant dialogue with the audience and is repaid with a [great] deal of rapport.
At one point, he emptied a [pot] of cigarettes into the audience...the crowd threw them back. Later, Anderson made a public apology for the length of his hair: "I'm sorry about it being so long and all, but it does hide me pimples."
The Grateful Dead were probably responsible for attracting most of the sellout crowd. And they were up to the task of entertaining them, particularly Saturday night. The first thing you notice about the Dead, even while they're tuning up, is the smell of cannabis in the air. It might have been there before, but somehow it's more apparent with the Dead's sets.
Musically the Dead also fall into the rock-jazz category, but for different reasons than Jethro Tull. The Dead specialize in long, long musical improvisations...the hallmark of jazz.
Led by the fluid guitar of Jerry Garcia, they buildup constantly-moving crescendos of sound that are interspersed with brief (and usually inaudible) vocal bridges. The seven-man group, which includes two drummers and a conga bopper, kept most of the audience on their feet.
The Butterfield Blues Band closed the show in style. Paul Butterfield's vocals are moving deeper and deeper into the better category, as exemplified by his rendition of the Blood, Sweat and Tears song, "More and More" (although Butterfield's version could be subtitled, "More and More, Baby"). The current personnel are a tight unit, featuring a potent horn section and an excellent new young guitarist.
Picture caption:
"Free-form musical improvisation was order of day last weekend in pop music concert at Pasadena's Rose Palace. Providing music were The Grateful Dead (left), who specialize in tunes lasting at least an hour apiece; and new English group called Jethro Tull (right), who are led by clowning antics of flutist Ian Anderson. Daily Sundial photos by Pete Senoff."
(by Pete Senoff, from the Valley State Daily Sundial, 28 March 1969)
Thanks to Ron Fritts.
https://archive.org/details/gd69-03-22.sbd.cotsman.8994.sbeok.shnf
* * *
The LA Times also had a few words on the March 21 show....
BRIEF, BRIGHT LIFE OF ROCK 'N' ROLL [excerpt]
(Most of the article is about putting together a radio program on the history of rock music.)
. . . The structure of the program forced me to define the major contributors and contributions to rock music, and the list turned out to be quite finite, despite the enormity of 20 years of heritage. There are many more Fabians and Impalas than there are Little Richards or Drifters, and a lot of what is significant today is not going to sound good in 10 years. Will the Supremes be remembered then as hazily as the Chantels are now? I suspect so. How will Jimi Hendrix's music compare with Clarence Frogman Henry's?
It is harder to do reviews now, hard to go to the Pasadena Rose Palace, as I did Friday night, and find anything relevant to say about the Grateful Dead and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band (I missed Jethro Tull - the shows start earlier than they did at the Shrine).
The Dead were not as good as they have been. Lead guitarist Jerry Garcia lacked both enthusiasm and polish. Butterfield, though, turned in an exciting set, highlighted by his wailing vocals and the band's driving horn arrangements. But Butterfield is only a hard-working technician. His harmonica playing does not compare with that of Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter, or Sonny Terry; his singing is beneath any of those three or a score of other bluesmen, and his band is less exciting than Bobby Blue Bland's, Ike and Tina Turner's, or Ray Charles'.
Butterfield is restating tradition rather than adding to it, and restating it not quite as well as the originals. My perspective is unfair since this is Butterfield's time, but it is harder to do reviews now. Little Richard has reminded me of too much.
(by Pete Johnson, from the Los Angeles Times, 24 March 1969)
It looks like the Los Angeles area finally has a permanent home for rock concerts, akin to the good vibes of San Francisco's Fillmore and Avalon ballrooms.
The name of the place is the Rose Palace.
After only two weeks in operation, it's assimilated the best features of Los Angeles' historic (and no more) hallowed halls of rock: Shrine Hall, Cheetah, and Kaleidoscope, and taken some care to avoid making the mistakes that sent the aforementioned establishments into ruin.
For instance, the capacity is equal to the Shrine (about 8,000), yet there are no posts, pillars or balconies obstructing the view of the stage. The floor, though concrete, is covered with a one-inch layer of artificial grass (very apropos). And gone are the days of hot, sticky-sweltering concert hall. This place gets actually cold as the night rolls on. In other words, the place is set up for audience enjoyment.
But these features are only subordinate to the big issue: talent. Booking good shows, ultimately, is what makes or breaks a rock ballroom. Happily, the Rose Palace (run by Scenic Sounds) makes it quite well. Take last weekend for example.
The show started off with the local debut of Jethro Tull, an English quintet whose music predominantly falls into the jazz-rock genre. Riding the crest of the second wave of English pop groups, Jethro Tull (named after the inventor of the plow in England) is unique enough in its approach [and dedication] to make a dent in the American market. The group is led by the [elf-like] antics of flutist Ian Anderson, whose on-stage stance is highly derivative of a giant flamingo bird [at] rest...only Anderson doesn't rest, he's constantly moving, conveying the [same] kind of visual excitement that the Who's Peter Townscend specializes in.
The group's material runs [from] Roland Kirk "Serenade to a Cuckoo" to their own rocking "Dharma for One," to a nonsense song called "[Don't] Wanna Be a Fatman," the [latter] finding Anderson playing oud [and his] drummer beating tablas. Anderson keeps up a constant dialogue with the audience and is repaid with a [great] deal of rapport.
At one point, he emptied a [pot] of cigarettes into the audience...the crowd threw them back. Later, Anderson made a public apology for the length of his hair: "I'm sorry about it being so long and all, but it does hide me pimples."
The Grateful Dead were probably responsible for attracting most of the sellout crowd. And they were up to the task of entertaining them, particularly Saturday night. The first thing you notice about the Dead, even while they're tuning up, is the smell of cannabis in the air. It might have been there before, but somehow it's more apparent with the Dead's sets.
Musically the Dead also fall into the rock-jazz category, but for different reasons than Jethro Tull. The Dead specialize in long, long musical improvisations...the hallmark of jazz.
Led by the fluid guitar of Jerry Garcia, they buildup constantly-moving crescendos of sound that are interspersed with brief (and usually inaudible) vocal bridges. The seven-man group, which includes two drummers and a conga bopper, kept most of the audience on their feet.
The Butterfield Blues Band closed the show in style. Paul Butterfield's vocals are moving deeper and deeper into the better category, as exemplified by his rendition of the Blood, Sweat and Tears song, "More and More" (although Butterfield's version could be subtitled, "More and More, Baby"). The current personnel are a tight unit, featuring a potent horn section and an excellent new young guitarist.
Picture caption:
"Free-form musical improvisation was order of day last weekend in pop music concert at Pasadena's Rose Palace. Providing music were The Grateful Dead (left), who specialize in tunes lasting at least an hour apiece; and new English group called Jethro Tull (right), who are led by clowning antics of flutist Ian Anderson. Daily Sundial photos by Pete Senoff."
(by Pete Senoff, from the Valley State Daily Sundial, 28 March 1969)
Thanks to Ron Fritts.
https://archive.org/details/gd69-03-22.sbd.cotsman.8994.sbeok.shnf
* * *
The LA Times also had a few words on the March 21 show....
BRIEF, BRIGHT LIFE OF ROCK 'N' ROLL [excerpt]
(Most of the article is about putting together a radio program on the history of rock music.)
. . . The structure of the program forced me to define the major contributors and contributions to rock music, and the list turned out to be quite finite, despite the enormity of 20 years of heritage. There are many more Fabians and Impalas than there are Little Richards or Drifters, and a lot of what is significant today is not going to sound good in 10 years. Will the Supremes be remembered then as hazily as the Chantels are now? I suspect so. How will Jimi Hendrix's music compare with Clarence Frogman Henry's?
It is harder to do reviews now, hard to go to the Pasadena Rose Palace, as I did Friday night, and find anything relevant to say about the Grateful Dead and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band (I missed Jethro Tull - the shows start earlier than they did at the Shrine).
The Dead were not as good as they have been. Lead guitarist Jerry Garcia lacked both enthusiasm and polish. Butterfield, though, turned in an exciting set, highlighted by his wailing vocals and the band's driving horn arrangements. But Butterfield is only a hard-working technician. His harmonica playing does not compare with that of Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter, or Sonny Terry; his singing is beneath any of those three or a score of other bluesmen, and his band is less exciting than Bobby Blue Bland's, Ike and Tina Turner's, or Ray Charles'.
Butterfield is restating tradition rather than adding to it, and restating it not quite as well as the originals. My perspective is unfair since this is Butterfield's time, but it is harder to do reviews now. Little Richard has reminded me of too much.
(by Pete Johnson, from the Los Angeles Times, 24 March 1969)
Jul 2, 2020
October 23, 1970: McDonough Gym, Georgetown U, Washington DC
TWO HEAVY ROCK GROUPS [excerpt]
Derek and the Dominos; Plus the Grateful Dead
Things should really rock this week as Eric Clapton and Jerry Garcia roll into town just two days apart.
Clapton's new group, Derek and the Dominos, will move into Lisner Auditorium at George Washington University on Wednesday evening, while Garcia's old, reliable Grateful Dead make their Washington debut Friday night at Georgetown University's McDonough Gymnasium.
Clapton and Garcia have never appeared in Washington before (either alone or with any group), and these two concerts should not only provide good music for many of their old fans but may also introduce a lot of old people to the joys of good old rock 'n' roll.
If someone asked me to name a band that would typify the real essence of rock, I'd immediately suggest the Dead. But to think that Derek and the Dominos will also be in easy earshot - well, that's almost too good to believe. [ . . . ]
It's probably fair to say that people in rock audiences, for the most part, have rather limited musical backgrounds and will, quite regularly, cheer for whatever they are manipulated into cheering for. Audiences often approve ecstatically anything an artist does (and that's not true only of rock), regardless of how bad it may be. The result is that real musicians often may not enjoy playing.
Imagine yourself performing what you consider an evening of music that never quite got together. You're not satisfied with your playing, you finish your set and walk off stage convinced that you really didn't have it that evening. But the 10,000 people in the audience are wildly screaming, "More!" It would be rather unnerving. [ . . . ]
The Grateful Dead music consists basically of two guitars (one of which is played by Jerry Garcia), a bass player who switched over from classical violin, two drummers, and a fellow named Pig-Pen who also plays organ and harmonica and sings. A lot of their music takes off from basic blues patterns, but where it goes is impossible to say.
The Dead were heavily involved in the depths of the San Francisco love-rock-drug scene. They played at the great and now historical dances at the Family Dog and the Avalon Ballroom. Although their roots are somewhat precarious, they now make mellow, mellow music. They'll start off with a basically acoustical set, work into country-western material, and finally build into some very loud yet amazingly soothing rock music.
Perhaps two warnings might be a fitting way to close. The Dead concert is part of Georgetown's homecoming weekend. To those who go expecting a homecoming dance, it just ain't gonna be that way. And to those who expect the usual 90-minute concert, please be informed that I have never seen the Dead play for less than five hours.
(by Tom Zito, from the Washington Post, 18 October 1970)
*
GRATEFUL DEAD'S WASHINGTON DEBUT
More than 7,000 people crowded into McDonough Gymnasium at Georgetown University last night as the Grateful Dead, a rock band from San Francisco, made their Washington debut.
The crowd was the largest ever assembled in the gymnasium for any event.
The audience trickled slowly through the two single-door entrances and by 8:15 p.m., 15 minutes before the concert was scheduled to begin, almost 3,000 persons were still queued up at the gate.
As the concert began, a few ticket holders complained that they had been refused entry. But within 20 minutes all entrances to the gym were thrown open and people were admitted whether or not they had tickets.
The evening's performance was part of Georgetown's homecoming weekend, but the scene around the campus was quite different from that of previous homecomings.
Long-haired, blue-jeaned, maxi-dressed rock fans trecked across the campus and less than 30 per cent of the audience consisted of Georgetown students.
Because of the heat level generated within the gym by the immense crowd, people doffed shirts and wandered in and out. Speakers were set up outside the building and about 2,000 listeners took advantage of them.
The concert began at 8:45 p.m. with the New Riders of the Purple Sage, an offshoot group of The Dead. Perhaps because of crowded conditions in the gym and also because of amplification difficulties, the crowd remained largely lethargic and the band never quite got together.
It was only with their last number, a countrified version of the Rolling Stones' "Honky Tonk Woman," that the crowd rose to its feet.
After a delay of about one hour the Grateful Dead finally emerged from the wings of the stage. As Jerry Garcia's guitar wailed out the opening notes of "Casey Jones," the entire gymnasium began to sway in rhythm to the music.
(by Tom Zito, from the Washington Post, 24 October 1970)
* * *
'GRATEFUL DEAD' GIVES A MARVELOUS CONCERT
The long-awaited Grateful Dead concert took place Friday night at Georgetown University. It took years to get the Dead to Washington, but it was well worth it.
The promoters promised a long concert, and that it was. However, considering the fact that after the first set the group supposedly went back to their hotel for a spell, the time wasn't all that music-filled.
There are a few more things to quibble about, but before that it should be said that the group was marvelous - from their set of country songs to their superb electric songs (not so much the songs as what the band does with undiscovered melodic paths once they're into a tune).
I'd only heard their remarkable, jazzlike improvisation really get off on their recent in-person album, "Live Dead," although I'd heard about it for a long time. It also reminded by of something Chuck Berry once told an audience here that was wowed by his guitar playing: "It's only mathematics, children."
Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir for example: Weir's guitar style is much more linear in conception, and when he trades off a solo to Garcia, something different happens. Garcia looks over a musical phrase, appraises it for variations involving the basic ingredients of a phrase, rather than using the prase as a road-like base to run on.
One of Garcia's favorite approaches to this is to simply accent different parts of a phrase; permutations, if you will. The results are always intriguing, and often approach the magic quality of what music can tell the soul.
The Grateful Dead group has never been "successful" in a commercial way. As their manager, Rock Scully, once said, "We won't do what the system says, make single hits, take big gigs, do the success number." That was last year, and the Dead was $50,000 in debt. A good band, a legendary one, in debt.
But in the past year, the public finally caught up with the music, and the Dead finally had albums that hit the LP charts. Especially their recent "Workingman's Dead," which demonstrated they could also play in a traditional way - tight vocal harmonies and precise country-western instrumental backgrounds. They even have songs that East coast people can recognize within the first few bars. "Uncle John's Band" made it to AM radio.
Now, for the first time since the mid-sixties, the Grateful Dead have become popular outside their own turf on the West Coast.
About the small gripes I mentioned earlier. Well, the big one was the temperature inside the auditorium. With nearly five thousand persons crammed in the place (there was no, repeat, no room anywhere) the temperature went up to around 100 degrees. It was so hot there was a cloud in the gym. Really. But it was worth perspiring a bit, believe me.
(by William Holland, from the Sunday Star, Washington DC, 25 October 1970)
Thanks to Ron Fritts.
https://archive.org/details/gd70-10-23.aud.wolfson.15080.sbefail.shnf
See also:
http://deadsources.blogspot.com/2014/08/october-23-1970-mcdonough-gym.html
http://deadsources.blogspot.com/2019/02/october-23-1970-mcdonough-gym.html
http://deadsources.blogspot.com/2019/08/october-23-1970-mcdonough-gym.html