A political cartoon from 1880.
Note the skeleton's hat.
Latin phrase from A Dictionary of Quotations, 1822
Another example, from the 1813 Pantologia:
Aug 15, 2017
Aug 1, 2017
August 1, 1969: Family Dog, Playland
STRIKE FLASHES ON HIP SCENE
What is touted as the world's first psychedelic strike will flash upon the hip scene tomorrow night.
Something called the Lightshow Guild will hit the bricks at the Family Dog Dance Hall on the Great Highway.
The Guild, a loose but lively collection of artists who accompany rock music with far-out flashing light patterns, is demanding higher wages from two of the nation's top producers of contemporary concerts - Chet Helms of the Family Dog and Bill Graham of Fillmore West.
Lightshow men said a team of light artists now gets only about $150 a night for performance, while rock musician bands may get several thousand dollars. They are asking for a minimum of $300 a night, or $800 for four nights running.
The strike is scheduled to begin tomorrow night at the Family Dog, then move on to Fillmore West Tuesday night.
The Guild promised that the strike will be "wild," with light projections flashed on the outside instead of the inside of the dance hall.
(from the San Francisco Examiner, 31 July 1969)
* * *
LIGHTS OUT
The Light Artists Guild, organized two months ago and representing more than sixty Bay Area light shows, will picket the Family Dog this weekend and the Fillmore West starting Tuesday. From 7 p.m. till closing, strikers will carry flowers, candles, flashlights, strobes, and electric yoyos. A generator and flat-bed truck will supply power for outside projections.
The strike was called at a tumultuous Guild meeting last Tuesday night by an overwhelming majority (all but one). The strikers' first and most important demand is recognition of the Guild as a bargaining agent by the ballrooms. At present neither Chet Helms nor Bill Graham will extend recognition or discuss terms with the Guild's elected negotiating committee. The committee . . . is ready to meet with Chet or Bill at any time, but the picket lines will stay until a settlement is reached.
The other demands are for minimum billing requirements in all forms of advertising, and for minimum wages. At present a good light show might get $150 for a one-night performance (actually less than that per night when pro-rated for two or three nights). The Guild wants a one-night minimum of $200 from the Dog and $300 from the Fillmore.
A light show is one of the most expensive of art forms, requiring an investment of anywhere from five to fifteen thousand dollars. Materials alone - bulbs, dyes, gels, film stock - are used up at a rate of $25 an hour. By contrast many shows manage to earn only $1 an hour per man at present wage rates.
The Guild has requested performers and audiences to boycott the halls until the strike is settled. On Wednesday the strikers sought - but failed to get - sanction from the San Francisco Labor Council. Sanction would have required members of the musicians' union to honor the Guild's picket lines.
Nevertheless Jerry Abrams reported at a Guild meeting Wednesday that Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead would refuse to cross the picket line, and that other members of the Dead were being contacted on an individual basis. (The Dead had been scheduled to play the Family Dog this weekend.) Support for the strikers has also been voiced by Tom Donahue, Roland Young and other djs at KSAN and KSJO, the Berkeley Tribe and Good Times, and the hip rank-and-file of Local 261.
At present the strike seems likely to hit the Family Dog hardest. The Dog is in serious financial difficulties to begin with, and had counted on this weekend's appearance by the Grateful Dead to help recoup losses. Chet Helms, reached at his home, expressed no outrage and only mild regret over the strike. Chet explained his reluctance to recognize the Guild as a wish not "to deal with organizations but with individuals or families." Chet's books are always open, and he is "willing and prepared to publish figures to show what goes into the Dog." The light show, he feels, is a part - but not an irreplaceable part - of the total construct, and that the Family Dog has been moving into a more theatrical direction in any event.
Bill Graham could not be reached for comment by press time.
(by Verne & Bill, from the San Francisco Good Times, 31 July 1969)
* * *
STRIKE AT FAMILY DOG SPORTS A LIGHT TOUCH
There’s a song on the air these days called “Both Sides Now,” which would be a fitting theme for a scheduled light show strike tonight at the Family Dog Dance Hall, 660 Great Highway.
Members of the striking Light Artists Guild plan to do their light thing on the outside of the building, while inside the Grateful Dead will throb their beat to the psychedelic lighting of the non-striking Glare light group from Palo Alto.
Customers will be faced with the decision of which show to dig and undoubtedly some will try to pick up on them from both sides now.
Although the Berkeley Barb hassle set some precedent for hip labor disputes, the wrangling at the Family Dog – which is expected to carry over to the Fillmore West on Tuesday – seems to be filled with more love than acrimony.
Mrs. Jerrie Cummings, secretary to Family Dog manager Chet Helms, is actually looking forward to tonight’s picket line:
“I think it will be kind of fun.”
And as to the members of the Light Artists Guild, Mrs. Cummings said:
“We don’t want to fight with the light artists. They’re our friends. We love them. If they need some electricity, we might run some out to them.”
(by John Hurst, from the San Francisco Examiner, 1 August 1969)
* * *
LIGHTS OUT AT S.F. BALLROOMS
It will be lights out tonight for the Family Dog Ballroom on the Great Highway.
The Light Artists Guild, representing more than 60 bay area light shows, will strike the Family Dog on Friday with picket lines around the ballroom.
What the sounds will be like (if any) is at this moment anybody's guess. Gerry Garcia, lead guitarist for the Grateful Dead - which is scheduled to play the Dog this weekend - has stated that he will not cross the Guild picketline.
If other rock groups follow Gerry's lead, both the Dog and Fillmore West will be shutdown by next weekend.
The Guild will strike the Fillmore West next Tuesday, after a Guild member finishes this weekend's previously-contracted performance.
Reaction to the strike from Fillmore proprietor Bill Graham was quick and caustic. "These scumbags have the audacity to threaten me with a picketline," he said.
Graham told the Tribe that the light show was not a draw factor and that he would fill up his ballroom just as easily without the light artists.
He said that the Guild had threatened both rock groups and other light shows before they asked to negotiate with him.
"We are not here to put them in business," Graham said, "but to support their craft. And we will determine on what level we support their endeavor."
The Guild states that both Graham and Dog head Chet Helm have refused to talk to the Guild as an organization - that they will only talk to the individual light shows.
The Light Artists Guild began to get themselves together about two months ago in an attempt to "further the light show as an art form," as one member put it. While the members emphasize that they are not strictly a union, they can function in traditional union ways.
Last Monday night, the Guild voted overwhelmingly to use one union tactic, the strike, if the ballrooms refused to recognize the Guild as spokesmen for the bay area artists.
They will announce the strike at a press conference Friday morning and ask rock groups and ballroom patrons to respect their picket line.
In general, the Guild is seeking "greater recognition of the light art." They claim that with the minimal wages that are now being paid, the light art, the most expensive of all the art forms in the cultural revolution, is being crippled in its development.
Light shows are being paid the same wages they were paid three years ago, which is only about a third as much as an unknown rock group gets for gigging the same ballroom.
"Like rock groups, we want our art to be self-supporting," one Guild member said. "The light show is an integral part of the rock environment; we are writing art history, but we want to expand and embellish the art."
With each group averaging about five members, the present rate of $100 per night barely covers the cost of projectors, film, oils, cameras, and bulbs.
The Guild is seeking $600 for 3 nights work at the Family Dog and $650 for the same time at the Fillmore. (The difference is based on the difference in the two ballrooms' capacities.)
The Guild's third demand is that light artists be given at least 35% of the billing in all advertisements for a concert.
So far, the Guild is only beginning to receive response from local rock groups. Both Country Joe and the Fish and Gerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead have promised to honor the picket line.
The Tribe asked Garcia if he could be in trouble for violating his contract at the Dog this weekend by refusing to cross the picket line.
"It doesn't have anything to do with unions or picket lines," he said. "I know where the Guild is at and I know how much they need to do their thing. I would prefer to play, but I won't cross their picket line."
Those who are of the subculture and who are fed up with the Establishment's exploitation of its arts, feel the same as Gerry.
As one Guild member stated, "For the first time artists have sat together in the same room and have forgotten their petty competition."
The Berkeley Tribe is one example of people getting together and refusing to let the Man make them competitors. The Light Guild is another example of the same thing. The rock groups are next.
As one Guild spokesman stated, "Man, this is going to spread."
(by Tari, from the Berkeley Tribe, 1 August 1969)
* * *
PICKET LINE SPLITS GRATEFUL DEAD
The Grateful Dead, a group legendary in the San Francisco rock world, last night ignored pickets sent to the Family Dog at Ocean Beach by striking members of the Light Artists Guild.
Known by fans simply as "The Dead," the group played without its leader, Jerry Garcia, who refused to cross the picket line circling on the sidewalk in front of the dance hall at 660 Great Highway near Playland at the Beach.
Spokesman for the light show artists, Jerry Abrams, operator of Head lights, outlined the three demands put forward by the newly formed guild:
- A minimum salary of $600 per weekend.
- Recognition of the new guild.
- Better billing for light artists.
For squares who have never attended a rock concert, the artists provide the swirling psychedelic colored lights that accompany the music.
The strikers also staged a light show outside the Dog dance hall, bouncing the beams off the awning over the front door. Coffee and doughnuts were served, flowers and leaflets handed out to passersby, and generally a feeling of amicability prevailed.
In fact the general manager of the Family Dog, Chet Helms, provided the electricity for the strikers' light show.
Helms said it was an unhappy day when he could no longer "talk to individuals" but had to bargain with "third parties and groups."
"There are only so many potatoes," Helms said. "What we need to do is get together the whole community who draw sustenance from the Dog and draw up a new wage scale."
The Grateful Dead took a step in that direction by offering to take a wage cut in order to sweeten the salaries of the light technicians.
But so far, no meeting has been arranged.
Helms said that he is $20,000 in the hole on his seven week old enterprise.
(from the San Francisco Examiner, 2 August 1969)
* * *
LIGHT STRIKE
Chet Helms spent Friday night in dialogue with the people.
In fact, Chet Helms has spent most Friday nights for the past three years talking for hours with the people, but usually not on the street. This Friday was different from all other nights because, for most of it, there were more people outside his Playland dance hall than inside.
The big attraction (and obstacle) was 50 pickets from the Light Artist's Guild who sometimes blocked the doorway. They handed out a leaflet which Helms claimed, bitterly, was full of lies; chanted; and harassed those who were undecided about spending $3 to see whether the Grateful Dead would or wouldn't appear.
The Dead (minus Jerry Garcia) and Albert Collins did appear, along with the Ballet Afro-Haiti, but fewer than 700 paid to see them.
Outside, Helms rapped with everyone who wanted to talk to him. "I spent five years on the streets, came out of a meth thing, and went into music with the Family Dog because I wanted to change America. What I'm seeing here on the street tonight is the worst thing that I've seen since I began..."
Helms grabbed a sign from a picket, which read, "The name of the game is Glare." "Look at this, it makes me sick, demeaning another man's work. Glare did the lights tonight because they wanted to, no one forced them..."
The dialogue went on and on.
"You talk like a 1930's businessman, anything to keep the store open, as long as it's the workers who pay."
"It's you who put the thing in 1930's terms, talking about exploitation and bread when the name of the game here is to draw. My books are open. We're $20,000 into operating this hall, I still owe $50,000 from the Avalon, and our current debt here is $7,000. I was counting on the Dead to pull us out - we'd have 1500 inside and 2000 waiting to get in on a normal Friday. I haven't been paid in four weeks myself."
"Why aren't we getting enough to live on - where's the money going?" light show members repeatedly asked Helms.
"The name of the game is draw, man, and as soon as you can show me in any way how that can be changed..."
"The name of the game should be share!"
"Sure it should, but it isn't, and how are you helping to share anything by economically destroying this dance hall? I don't want light shows, I want friends. I want an example of behavior for a million kids all over America. I have enough theater in me to do any kind of environment I want without your light shows, but what we really pay for outside ourselves is the music. What's starving us is Big Jefferson Airplane, Big Grateful Dead, they draw and they get the bread they ask for..."
"But light shows are art, man, just because people don't scream for more that doesn't mean they don't dig it. You make every light show here project on a big screen and then you pay $110 to rent the screen and only $50 to the light show!"
"That's the same lie you guys tell on your leaflet. The group tonight, Glare, dropped out of the Light Artist's Guild and then offered to work for nothing, but they're getting $300 for the weekend. $50 is all I have to pay for an auditioning group, but I'm paying $300, and I usually pay more on a weekend, a lot of bread for something we could do without, particularly when we're hurting financially. And then you say you made repeated efforts to negotiate or something like that, but no one even called me after our first meeting except a few people who said they didn't speak for the negotiators - that's better than Graham got, anyway, no one called him at all, he just got a letter announcing the demands and a strike for next Tuesday!"
There are, obviously, two very different issues at stake in the light artist's strike, both of which have important roots in the growth of San Francisco hip culture.
First, who needs light shows - are they any good, and can they develop as an art form alongside the runaway commercialism of the rock industry?
And second, are the economics of running rock concerts insane merely because a lot of weak people (and some manipulative, strong ones) have gotten on the merry-go-round of sales capitalism? Or do public concert performances no longer represent anything relevant to the hip community and therefore those who still attend them are paying for a Broadway-type operation?
Tom Wolfe, writing about the infant era of head culture, described what light shows once were, and what they want to be now:
"For months Kesey had been trying to work out...the fantasy...of the Dome. This was going to be a great geodesic dome on top of a cylindrical shaft. It would look like a great mushroom. Many levels. People would climb a stairway up the cylinder...and the dome would have a great foam rubber floor they could lie down on. Sunk down in the foam rubber, below floor level, would be movie projectors, video-tape projectors, light projectors. All over the place, up in the dome, everywhere, would be speakers, microphones, tape machines, live, replay, variable lag. People could take LSD or speed or smoke grass and lie back and experience what they would, enclosed and submerged in a planet of lights and sounds such as the universe never knew. Lights, movies, video tapes of themselves, flashing and swirling over them come from the beams of searchlights from the floor from between their bodies. The sounds rolling around in the globe like a typhoon. Movies and tapes of the past, tapes and video tapes, broadcasts and pictures of the present, tapes and humanoid sounds of the future - but all brought together now - here and now - Kairos - into the dilated cerebral cortex..."
Such a trip can end several ways.
It can become the plasticized nightmare of a New York psychoanalytic chamber where too many fucked up people with too much money take off their clothes, pay and leave.
Or it can really work, with the cooperation of people who have environmental vision, a genius for what creates unity and what is human rather than humanoid, "submerged in a planet of lights and sounds such as the universe never knew" but related to the universe, protected and expanded in a drug culture neither selfish nor ignorant.
Or it can become a symbolic appendage of the strongest force within the impetus for that new environment - in this case, the music, which has become portable, cheap, and expert.
What has happened to light shows in San Francisco artistically is what has happened to concerts in San Francisco. People once had a choice of three or four or five ballrooms, at less than half the price of records. There was grass and acid, smiles from strangers, communal streets nearby where one could live, dancing at the dances, and the newness, high or straight, of light and form - whirls, strobes, black light, strange movies.
Check out the Fillmore West one of these nights for nice highs, smiles, a walk home, a place to dance - and see if the light, still pretty and sometimes even inspired, makes up for what's not there.
Bill Graham, despite his repulsive image of Hollywood hucksterism - "concern" for "artists" born of an inability to relate to their art; impatience with public behavior; paternalism; inaccessibility; irascibility - is not the villain of the scene. He's in the grinder with the rest. Although more obviously capable of supporting a $600 per weekend light show than Helms, still not out of the financial woods. He can't really turn a profit at the Carousel most of the time, because of the same big, evil bands.
But the big, evil bands aren't so evil, either. The Dead are reportedly at least $50,000 in debt; other name groups show reliable figures of great financial losses. Equipment, lawyers, friends, travel, houses, toys...it all goes, even for bands pulling $10,000 a weekend.
"The name of the game is draw," as Helms said over and over last Friday. Until a hundred thousand people make a habit of visiting Playland Family Dog, Helms can't risk leaving the star band system for competent, lesser-known groups. Nothing is structured that way: rents, insurance, payroll, investment returns, everything is geared to make the money make money, and the people, unless they hang on to money's ride, scramble forever.
This, then, is really why the light shows are up against it. Unfortunately, their demands seem too money-oriented and their tactics were poor - not contacting Graham except too late and by letter, and fucking up Helms when he's in bad trouble. With these things and their sloppy Guild structure, the light people seem to be combining the worst traits of bread-and-butter unionism and rebel culture indignation.
If there were positive aspects to the demands, some sense of what light show art might become, some relevance to the community, the light show strike might be supported as the first opening in the cancerous culture boil which the rock music scene has become. Instead, it looks like it will be just another brief gleam on the hip horizon, suitable for cute pictures in the Chronicle.
(by Lawrence Bensky, from Dock of the Bay, 5 August 1969)
* * *
OUT ON THE EDGE [excerpt]
"We're out on the edge...hangin on, tryin to live, but tryin to live just a little bit better."
- Chet Helms
It was like, you know, the whole wild, free feelin that was the spirit of America drifting ever west, to the farthest edge of the frontier, till the frontier was no more and we were just hangin on to the edge of the Pacific Ocean.
And there we were, in a coney island dance hall, all these hairy freaks who had come together in a community crisis, to see if we, and our common vision, could hold together: Chet Helms and the Family Dog, Jerry Abrams and the Light Artists Guild, Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, the Messiah and his World Crusade, Teddy Bear and his Thirteenth Tribe, Ron Poulte of the Wild West Show, Mike Bloomfield, the Good Times, the Berkeley Tribe, and Bill Graham even.
[ . . . ] The curtain of ocean mist rises on - The Family Dog on the Great Highway.
It's Friday night down in Playland, but there's only 300 people inside the Family Dog, hoping to hear the Grateful Dead, who are late as usual. On the street outside the Light Artists Guild has set up a psychedelic picket line, with light show, conga drums, coffee and food.
"If the Dead crosses the line," declares Jerry Abrams at the stage door, "as far as I'm concerned the rock trip in this city is down the drain. We would never cross a musician's line."
The San Francisco light shows, 67 of them, all the major shows except the Brotherhood of Lights (which has a corner on the Fillmore - and intends to keep it) have come together to work for the development of their art form, and their economic survival.
The Guild voted to strike the two San Francisco ballrooms in order to gain recognition for the Guild, equal billing with the bands, and a minimum pay scale.
Chet is out on the street too, maintaining that "I want to deal only with individuals. I don't think I could ever reach an agreement with an organization. I would give my right teeth, man, never to have to deal with another agent or middleman." And here, the lanky, gently-bopping Helms, who looks like he stole his long silky blond hair from the head of the baby jesus, straightens his shoulders and flips into a crisp baritone, mimicking a businessman: "Now please look here, Mr. Helms, it's like this..."
If Jerry Abrams is anything, he ain't a businessman. He ain't the world's greatest organizer either. By throwing a picket line around the Family Dog, the Guild made a serious mistake. The Dog has been losing $4000 a week since it opened on the Great Highway June 13. The Guild's asking for a minimum of $300 a week. Chet has been paying $400 a week on the average.
"I could use some money too," Helms relates. "I haven't been paid in 4 weeks. I still have a $50,000 personal liability from the Avalon. Very simply, we put the place together with 6 grand, and we've been given another 12 grand by our investors. I was counting on this weekend with the Grateful Dead to get a paycheck." If the Dead ever turns a profit, Helms will get 30% to feed his Family.
Inside the ballroom Friday night, Glare light show from Palo Alto is shedding light on the situation for 300 bills, but was turning the money back to Helms.
Why didn't Glare join the Guild, or at least honor the picket line?"It's kind of insane," Richard of Glare says. "Chet Helms doesn't have any money. We want to help save the Family Dog. The Guild is a good idea, but if the Family Dog falls down, so does everybody else."
On the dance floor below, the feeling was summed up by one chick who comments: "We got to stand together, brother, it's as simple as that. I came to hear the Grateful Dead - if they didn't play then I wouldn't cross the line."
When the Dead finally arrived, we all trucked out to their Metro van, 50 yards from the pounding surf, lit the peace pipe, and began to rap. It became clear that all of us are "out on the edge, hangin on, trying to live."
Even the Dead are $50,000 in debt. "The way I experienced this strike," Helms explained a few days later, "was like a run on the bank. It feels like a precursor, you know, of what's going to happen around the country. They're looking at us to see not only what we can do about us, but what they can learn from us.
"We started out with the forms that were given, business forms, union forms, but for 3 years the whole fuckin world has been looking at us for new solutions."
"If we work together collectively," Jerry Garcia of the Dead offered, "we can all extend our forms. Right now the bands get more money than anybody else, and that's not righteous."
"At one time," said Helms, "people would come to the Fillmore just because it was happening. They didn't know exactly what it was, but knew it was exciting. Then the record companies came in, put $50,000 on it, sealed it, packaged it, and said here is what it is.
"I think essentially people don't come to see this band or this light show - people come to have a good time. Billing is the linear structure we have to leave behind. I mean the draw game, man, where this group is best, this group next best, and so on, you dig?
"I think, though, that light shows, you know, in their relative importance to the whole thing have come down over the past few years, you dig? It isn't necessary to say any more, lights by - "
The Dead did not play Friday. But a temporary settlement was reached Saturday afternoon, so that the Family Dog could be open that night.
Saturday night on the Great Highway [August 2] was one of the best gigs since opening night [June 13], when the Airplane played. With the strike over, the Dead, Albert Collins and the far-out Afro-Haitian Ballet played to a full house. The scene there gave off comfortable vibes.
Bill Graham, at the meeting the following Tuesday, would rail on about his "rights" as a businessman, and his right to run the Fillmore exactly according to his whims, as the individual with the bread. "Why do we have light shows?" Graham would ask. "Why do we have apples in the cafeteria? Because I like them. The man with the dollars, and not the man with the art form, has the negotiating point."
All well and legal. Yes, Bill Graham, the Fillmore is your personal trip, and [the] fact that it may be our trip too don't bother you. Maybe that's why I never go there, because I always feel the heavy presence of somebody's personal money trip.
But at the Family Dog Saturday night, I felt as free and comfortable as I would in a friend's home. "We're all locked into games - the Family Dog, the Grateful Dead," as Chet Helms said. "When are we something happening [sic], but it doesn't have to be called the Family Dog - it can be The Common or whatever."
[ . . . ]
[The rest of the article narrates in detail the Tues, Aug. 4 meeting between Helms, Graham, and the Light Artists Guild.]
(by Art Johnson, from the Berkeley Tribe, 8 August 1969)
Thanks to jgmf.blogspot.com
* * *
'LIGHT' STRIKE SUSPENDED
Rock Concert Talks Continue
The strike by the newly-formed Light Artists Guild against the Family Dog ballroom took a turn toward conciliation with meetings set for this afternoon.
Jerry Abrams, spokesman for the guild, said an interim agreement has been reached with ballroom manager Chet Helms to end the strike while talks take place.
The light artists, who provide the swirling psychedelic lights for rock band-concerts, picketed the Family Dog ballroom on the Great Highway near Playland Friday night, but reached [an] interim accord the following day.
Under the terms of the agreement, the strike at the Family Dog will be suspended until Thursday noon, and in return the guild is recognized as the official bargaining agent for the light artists.
According to Abrams, negotiations will center on the possibility of a "percentage deal" whereby the proceeds from the concerts would be "more equitably divided."
As it is, the bands get a guaranteed wage, while the light shows and other staff members split up whatever is left.
Representatives of the leading bands are scheduled to attend the 1 p.m. meeting at the ballroom.
Meanwhile, Abrams said, the guild plans to go ahead with plans to picket Bill Graham's Fillmore West tomorrow night.
The Fillmore is featuring a non-guild light show, The Brotherhood of Light. Robert Pullum, manager for the group, said he "would be glad to walk across the picket line."
"I don't think they're going about this the right way," Pullum said. "The market is too small. All of those who signed with the guild are going to find themselves without jobs."
(from the San Francisco Examiner, 4 August 1969)
* * *
PERSONALITY POWER
(by Verne/Bill, from
Good Times, 7 August 1969)
Thanks to jgmf.blogspot.com
* * *
BILL GRAHAM EXPLODES: "QUITTING SAN FRANCISCO"
As has been his manner for more than three years, Bill Graham was a lonely and angry figure August 4th when he announced that he was finished with San Francisco as a dance/concert operator, effective December 31st, when new owners take over the Fillmore West building. Graham made his surprise announcement — he'd been reported looking for a new location for his operation — in front of more than 100 artists, musicians, and other persons gathered at the Family Dog to discuss the then-still-flickering light-show strike.
The announcement, made haltingly through a voiced choked and shaken by emotion, followed a lengthy, acrimonious lecture in which the pugilistic ballroom master hammered out a theme of "the reality of being a businessman," the rights of an individual. Time and time again he insisted: "I will never have anyone tell me to what level I support an art, what I must pay a light show." But Graham, long-ago ostracized from the hip community as a profiteer and the target of as much abuse as respect, had much more wrath to vent.
"This town has never stopped rapping an honest businessman for four fucking years," he said, brooding. "I leave here very sad ... I may be copping out, but your attitudes have driven me to my decision."
But Graham really blew his gnarled top only after Steve Gaskin, a resident communications lecturer at the Family Dog, stood up and told him: "When you started, you had to make a choice between love and money. You've got our money, so you can't have our love ... You've used dramatics today to fuck over a lot of heads with your emotional trips."
Graham's reply (as tape-recorded by the Good Times newspaper): "I APOLOGIZE, MOTHER FUCKER, THAT I'M A HUMAN BEING. I fucking apologize. Emotional — you're fucking right. Fuck you, you stupid prick! Do you know what emotions are? Stand up and have emotions. Get up and work. Get up and sing. Get up and act. You think I'm an actor? You're full of shit, man, I have more fucking balls than you'll ever see. You want to challenge me in any way about emotions? You slimy little man ... YOU SLIMY ... LITTLE ... MAN. (To the crowd): Fuck you. FUCK YOU! (To a musician trying to calm him) Don't get peaceful with me. Don't you TOUCH me!"
With those words, Graham barreled out of the room, followed by a paled Time magazine writer working on a profile of the man.
Contacted last week, a still-petulant Graham at first refused to talk with Rolling Stone, citing the publication as "one of the other reasons I'm getting out." But he went on to confirm his abandonment of ballroom operations here. He is expected to maintain Fillmore East in New York, his Millard agency, the still-fledging Fillmore record label, and his residence in San Francisco.
"We're not good, we're not bad," he said, "but I think this city will know what it's lost by the first week of 1970."
Before his violent walkout at the Family Dog the focus of discussion (that word used loosely) had been the light show strike, called by the 500-member Light Artists Guild to force Graham and Chet Helms to raise wages. A picket line had been set up Friday, August 1st, at the beachsite Dog house, and another was planned for the uptown Fillmore West the following Tuesday — the day of Graham's explosion.
Chet Helms had reacted to the strike line with predictably open gestures of brotherhood — provision of electricity for a coffee percolator and for a Guild light show projected on the Dog's outside wall; flowers for the pickets, and an invitation to negotiate. The lines were down by late Friday night, and light heads agreed to meet with Chet, on his terms: a "common" gathering including not only light artists, but the community as well. That's why Graham, along with Jerry Garcia of Grateful Dead, David and Linda LaFlamme of It's a Beautiful Day, and numerous other scene-makers were at the convocation.
Helms, the mystic/Texan who has tried, in the past two months, to move his operation away from the big–name band and dance/concert hall concept towards a free-form environmental theater, opened the meeting by casting the I Ching. The hexagrams spelled out the need for unity. The judgment: "Holding together brings good fortune. What is required is that we all unite ... around a central figure." Graham, seated with head hunched over, looked bored.
Then Helms, always considered the altruistic figurehead of the San Francisco music scene where Graham was the I-came, I-saw, I-conquered figure, laid the basic question across: "How is the community going to relate to (1) Mr. Bill Graham and to (2) Chet Helms?" For himself, he proposed recognition of the fact that the Dog had been losing money since its Avalon Ballroom days. "Money is tight in America, and we get the feeling we're disconnected from that scene," he said. "We're not. We're at the bottom of the totem pole and we're feeling the run on the bank first."
Helms proposed the need for "some new models" for "distributing the few potatoes available" — perhaps a percentage-rate for all artists — musicians as well as light shows — at the Family Dog. But he wasn't speaking for Bill Graham. Graham made that obvious.
First, he smilingly brushed off Helms as "not a realistic person in terms of business." That set his theme. "You cannot tell the world, 'Look at what we're doing, it's right, you must come here.' You can only suggest. Chet runs this place on a dream, a nice one, but he's having financial problems because although he understands the problems of the business, he has refused to meet them."
Then he turned to challenge the rest of the meeting. "You do not tell me what to do. If you don't like the way I conduct my business, why the fuck don't you get off your asses and do it? Where the fuck does the artist come to say 'you the businessman must support us' when I personally think the light shows are not producing an income for me? The only way you can do this is to kill me and step over me."
Graham indirectly explained his choleric tone when he dove into a self-defensive spiel about his honesty and about the dues he paid before hitting onto the ballroom idea in late fall of 1965.
Finally nearing the nitty-gritty of his expostulation, he faced long-time archenemy and Light Artists Guild member Jerry Abrams, stating: "I'll challenge the Light Guild to tell me if their approach to the strike was the ethical approach." The Guild, before contacting either Helms or Graham personally, sent a blunt notice of new light show rates, signed "Ma." Then Graham got wind of a picket line being planned for the Fillmore — still before any personal contact with the Guild — and from that point on, Graham "lost respect" and any communications with the Guild – all of this aside from his insistence on the right to negotiate prices for acts on an individual basis.
His "I'm through with this town" statement came after a bitter, heated exchange with Abrams — Abrams defending the Guild's approaching of various bands to gauge potential strike support and apologizing for the "tactless" letter; Abrams slamming Graham for "refusing negotiations over the last three years;" Graham insisting on the "reality" of the Guild's obvious disrespect for him and his operation. Graham made it painfully clear that now he would never hire a Guild show at any rate. And Helms hardly had enough money to buy a bag of potatoes each week.
Helms pushed in the final pin. "Friday night finished the Family Dog as a business," he said. (On Friday, standing outside his building looking glumly at the pickets, he had stated his theory about the few potatoes around to be distributed. "And if we can't get together and decide who eats, I don't see where we've arrived at in three years." Now, he said, Family Dog would give up the struggle to cover its $50,000 of debts. The new commitment, he says, is "to extend the form artistically," with a new mode of business and finances.)
"The dream burst Friday," he continued to the assembly. "I have a proposal to make at our next meeting Thursday. But if there's a picket line at the Fillmore West tonight, I won't bother to come up with a proposal, and Family Dog won't operate this weekend."
Within minutes, one Guild member, from the Garden of Delights, withdrew his support for the strike. Finally a beleaguered Abrams, trying to hide defeat behind various voices hailing "a new community" rising out of the shambles, then unofficially drew a curtain over strike plans. The reasons: Helms' statement and Bill's stubbornness. "We are we and he is he," Abrams understated.
The actual strike lasted only about four hours, and all three booked acts — Albert Collins, Afro-Haiti Dancers, and Grateful Dead — honored their contracts with Helms. Only Jerry Garcia and Mickey Hart of the Dead — reportedly physically detained at the door by Abrams — didn't cross the line. Inside, a small crowd saw lights worked by a Peninsula group called Glare, a strike–supporting Guild member until "we were turned off by the attitude at a strike meeting — we were falling back into the Establishment trip." Glare offered to do the work this weekend for free, after seeing Helms' profitless loss statements, and spokesman John Darcy further stated: "This is the only new art form left in this City. Graham has prostituted it, but Chet's doing all he can for it."
It was a matter of relating with (1) Bill Graham and (2) Chet Helms.
(by Ben Fong-Torres, from Rolling Stone, 6 September 1969)
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/bill-graham-explodes-quitting-san-francisco-19690906
What is touted as the world's first psychedelic strike will flash upon the hip scene tomorrow night.
Something called the Lightshow Guild will hit the bricks at the Family Dog Dance Hall on the Great Highway.
The Guild, a loose but lively collection of artists who accompany rock music with far-out flashing light patterns, is demanding higher wages from two of the nation's top producers of contemporary concerts - Chet Helms of the Family Dog and Bill Graham of Fillmore West.
Lightshow men said a team of light artists now gets only about $150 a night for performance, while rock musician bands may get several thousand dollars. They are asking for a minimum of $300 a night, or $800 for four nights running.
The strike is scheduled to begin tomorrow night at the Family Dog, then move on to Fillmore West Tuesday night.
The Guild promised that the strike will be "wild," with light projections flashed on the outside instead of the inside of the dance hall.
(from the San Francisco Examiner, 31 July 1969)
* * *
LIGHTS OUT
The Light Artists Guild, organized two months ago and representing more than sixty Bay Area light shows, will picket the Family Dog this weekend and the Fillmore West starting Tuesday. From 7 p.m. till closing, strikers will carry flowers, candles, flashlights, strobes, and electric yoyos. A generator and flat-bed truck will supply power for outside projections.
The strike was called at a tumultuous Guild meeting last Tuesday night by an overwhelming majority (all but one). The strikers' first and most important demand is recognition of the Guild as a bargaining agent by the ballrooms. At present neither Chet Helms nor Bill Graham will extend recognition or discuss terms with the Guild's elected negotiating committee. The committee . . . is ready to meet with Chet or Bill at any time, but the picket lines will stay until a settlement is reached.
The other demands are for minimum billing requirements in all forms of advertising, and for minimum wages. At present a good light show might get $150 for a one-night performance (actually less than that per night when pro-rated for two or three nights). The Guild wants a one-night minimum of $200 from the Dog and $300 from the Fillmore.
A light show is one of the most expensive of art forms, requiring an investment of anywhere from five to fifteen thousand dollars. Materials alone - bulbs, dyes, gels, film stock - are used up at a rate of $25 an hour. By contrast many shows manage to earn only $1 an hour per man at present wage rates.
The Guild has requested performers and audiences to boycott the halls until the strike is settled. On Wednesday the strikers sought - but failed to get - sanction from the San Francisco Labor Council. Sanction would have required members of the musicians' union to honor the Guild's picket lines.
Nevertheless Jerry Abrams reported at a Guild meeting Wednesday that Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead would refuse to cross the picket line, and that other members of the Dead were being contacted on an individual basis. (The Dead had been scheduled to play the Family Dog this weekend.) Support for the strikers has also been voiced by Tom Donahue, Roland Young and other djs at KSAN and KSJO, the Berkeley Tribe and Good Times, and the hip rank-and-file of Local 261.
At present the strike seems likely to hit the Family Dog hardest. The Dog is in serious financial difficulties to begin with, and had counted on this weekend's appearance by the Grateful Dead to help recoup losses. Chet Helms, reached at his home, expressed no outrage and only mild regret over the strike. Chet explained his reluctance to recognize the Guild as a wish not "to deal with organizations but with individuals or families." Chet's books are always open, and he is "willing and prepared to publish figures to show what goes into the Dog." The light show, he feels, is a part - but not an irreplaceable part - of the total construct, and that the Family Dog has been moving into a more theatrical direction in any event.
Bill Graham could not be reached for comment by press time.
(by Verne & Bill, from the San Francisco Good Times, 31 July 1969)
* * *
STRIKE AT FAMILY DOG SPORTS A LIGHT TOUCH
There’s a song on the air these days called “Both Sides Now,” which would be a fitting theme for a scheduled light show strike tonight at the Family Dog Dance Hall, 660 Great Highway.
Members of the striking Light Artists Guild plan to do their light thing on the outside of the building, while inside the Grateful Dead will throb their beat to the psychedelic lighting of the non-striking Glare light group from Palo Alto.
Customers will be faced with the decision of which show to dig and undoubtedly some will try to pick up on them from both sides now.
Although the Berkeley Barb hassle set some precedent for hip labor disputes, the wrangling at the Family Dog – which is expected to carry over to the Fillmore West on Tuesday – seems to be filled with more love than acrimony.
Mrs. Jerrie Cummings, secretary to Family Dog manager Chet Helms, is actually looking forward to tonight’s picket line:
“I think it will be kind of fun.”
And as to the members of the Light Artists Guild, Mrs. Cummings said:
“We don’t want to fight with the light artists. They’re our friends. We love them. If they need some electricity, we might run some out to them.”
(by John Hurst, from the San Francisco Examiner, 1 August 1969)
* * *
LIGHTS OUT AT S.F. BALLROOMS
It will be lights out tonight for the Family Dog Ballroom on the Great Highway.
The Light Artists Guild, representing more than 60 bay area light shows, will strike the Family Dog on Friday with picket lines around the ballroom.
What the sounds will be like (if any) is at this moment anybody's guess. Gerry Garcia, lead guitarist for the Grateful Dead - which is scheduled to play the Dog this weekend - has stated that he will not cross the Guild picketline.
If other rock groups follow Gerry's lead, both the Dog and Fillmore West will be shutdown by next weekend.
The Guild will strike the Fillmore West next Tuesday, after a Guild member finishes this weekend's previously-contracted performance.
Reaction to the strike from Fillmore proprietor Bill Graham was quick and caustic. "These scumbags have the audacity to threaten me with a picketline," he said.
Graham told the Tribe that the light show was not a draw factor and that he would fill up his ballroom just as easily without the light artists.
He said that the Guild had threatened both rock groups and other light shows before they asked to negotiate with him.
"We are not here to put them in business," Graham said, "but to support their craft. And we will determine on what level we support their endeavor."
The Guild states that both Graham and Dog head Chet Helm have refused to talk to the Guild as an organization - that they will only talk to the individual light shows.
The Light Artists Guild began to get themselves together about two months ago in an attempt to "further the light show as an art form," as one member put it. While the members emphasize that they are not strictly a union, they can function in traditional union ways.
Last Monday night, the Guild voted overwhelmingly to use one union tactic, the strike, if the ballrooms refused to recognize the Guild as spokesmen for the bay area artists.
They will announce the strike at a press conference Friday morning and ask rock groups and ballroom patrons to respect their picket line.
In general, the Guild is seeking "greater recognition of the light art." They claim that with the minimal wages that are now being paid, the light art, the most expensive of all the art forms in the cultural revolution, is being crippled in its development.
Light shows are being paid the same wages they were paid three years ago, which is only about a third as much as an unknown rock group gets for gigging the same ballroom.
"Like rock groups, we want our art to be self-supporting," one Guild member said. "The light show is an integral part of the rock environment; we are writing art history, but we want to expand and embellish the art."
With each group averaging about five members, the present rate of $100 per night barely covers the cost of projectors, film, oils, cameras, and bulbs.
The Guild is seeking $600 for 3 nights work at the Family Dog and $650 for the same time at the Fillmore. (The difference is based on the difference in the two ballrooms' capacities.)
The Guild's third demand is that light artists be given at least 35% of the billing in all advertisements for a concert.
So far, the Guild is only beginning to receive response from local rock groups. Both Country Joe and the Fish and Gerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead have promised to honor the picket line.
The Tribe asked Garcia if he could be in trouble for violating his contract at the Dog this weekend by refusing to cross the picket line.
"It doesn't have anything to do with unions or picket lines," he said. "I know where the Guild is at and I know how much they need to do their thing. I would prefer to play, but I won't cross their picket line."
Those who are of the subculture and who are fed up with the Establishment's exploitation of its arts, feel the same as Gerry.
As one Guild member stated, "For the first time artists have sat together in the same room and have forgotten their petty competition."
The Berkeley Tribe is one example of people getting together and refusing to let the Man make them competitors. The Light Guild is another example of the same thing. The rock groups are next.
As one Guild spokesman stated, "Man, this is going to spread."
(by Tari, from the Berkeley Tribe, 1 August 1969)
* * *
PICKET LINE SPLITS GRATEFUL DEAD
The Grateful Dead, a group legendary in the San Francisco rock world, last night ignored pickets sent to the Family Dog at Ocean Beach by striking members of the Light Artists Guild.
Known by fans simply as "The Dead," the group played without its leader, Jerry Garcia, who refused to cross the picket line circling on the sidewalk in front of the dance hall at 660 Great Highway near Playland at the Beach.
Spokesman for the light show artists, Jerry Abrams, operator of Head lights, outlined the three demands put forward by the newly formed guild:
- A minimum salary of $600 per weekend.
- Recognition of the new guild.
- Better billing for light artists.
For squares who have never attended a rock concert, the artists provide the swirling psychedelic colored lights that accompany the music.
The strikers also staged a light show outside the Dog dance hall, bouncing the beams off the awning over the front door. Coffee and doughnuts were served, flowers and leaflets handed out to passersby, and generally a feeling of amicability prevailed.
In fact the general manager of the Family Dog, Chet Helms, provided the electricity for the strikers' light show.
Helms said it was an unhappy day when he could no longer "talk to individuals" but had to bargain with "third parties and groups."
"There are only so many potatoes," Helms said. "What we need to do is get together the whole community who draw sustenance from the Dog and draw up a new wage scale."
The Grateful Dead took a step in that direction by offering to take a wage cut in order to sweeten the salaries of the light technicians.
But so far, no meeting has been arranged.
Helms said that he is $20,000 in the hole on his seven week old enterprise.
(from the San Francisco Examiner, 2 August 1969)
* * *
LIGHT STRIKE
Chet Helms spent Friday night in dialogue with the people.
In fact, Chet Helms has spent most Friday nights for the past three years talking for hours with the people, but usually not on the street. This Friday was different from all other nights because, for most of it, there were more people outside his Playland dance hall than inside.
The big attraction (and obstacle) was 50 pickets from the Light Artist's Guild who sometimes blocked the doorway. They handed out a leaflet which Helms claimed, bitterly, was full of lies; chanted; and harassed those who were undecided about spending $3 to see whether the Grateful Dead would or wouldn't appear.
The Dead (minus Jerry Garcia) and Albert Collins did appear, along with the Ballet Afro-Haiti, but fewer than 700 paid to see them.
Outside, Helms rapped with everyone who wanted to talk to him. "I spent five years on the streets, came out of a meth thing, and went into music with the Family Dog because I wanted to change America. What I'm seeing here on the street tonight is the worst thing that I've seen since I began..."
Helms grabbed a sign from a picket, which read, "The name of the game is Glare." "Look at this, it makes me sick, demeaning another man's work. Glare did the lights tonight because they wanted to, no one forced them..."
The dialogue went on and on.
"You talk like a 1930's businessman, anything to keep the store open, as long as it's the workers who pay."
"It's you who put the thing in 1930's terms, talking about exploitation and bread when the name of the game here is to draw. My books are open. We're $20,000 into operating this hall, I still owe $50,000 from the Avalon, and our current debt here is $7,000. I was counting on the Dead to pull us out - we'd have 1500 inside and 2000 waiting to get in on a normal Friday. I haven't been paid in four weeks myself."
"Why aren't we getting enough to live on - where's the money going?" light show members repeatedly asked Helms.
"The name of the game is draw, man, and as soon as you can show me in any way how that can be changed..."
"The name of the game should be share!"
"Sure it should, but it isn't, and how are you helping to share anything by economically destroying this dance hall? I don't want light shows, I want friends. I want an example of behavior for a million kids all over America. I have enough theater in me to do any kind of environment I want without your light shows, but what we really pay for outside ourselves is the music. What's starving us is Big Jefferson Airplane, Big Grateful Dead, they draw and they get the bread they ask for..."
"But light shows are art, man, just because people don't scream for more that doesn't mean they don't dig it. You make every light show here project on a big screen and then you pay $110 to rent the screen and only $50 to the light show!"
"That's the same lie you guys tell on your leaflet. The group tonight, Glare, dropped out of the Light Artist's Guild and then offered to work for nothing, but they're getting $300 for the weekend. $50 is all I have to pay for an auditioning group, but I'm paying $300, and I usually pay more on a weekend, a lot of bread for something we could do without, particularly when we're hurting financially. And then you say you made repeated efforts to negotiate or something like that, but no one even called me after our first meeting except a few people who said they didn't speak for the negotiators - that's better than Graham got, anyway, no one called him at all, he just got a letter announcing the demands and a strike for next Tuesday!"
There are, obviously, two very different issues at stake in the light artist's strike, both of which have important roots in the growth of San Francisco hip culture.
First, who needs light shows - are they any good, and can they develop as an art form alongside the runaway commercialism of the rock industry?
And second, are the economics of running rock concerts insane merely because a lot of weak people (and some manipulative, strong ones) have gotten on the merry-go-round of sales capitalism? Or do public concert performances no longer represent anything relevant to the hip community and therefore those who still attend them are paying for a Broadway-type operation?
Tom Wolfe, writing about the infant era of head culture, described what light shows once were, and what they want to be now:
"For months Kesey had been trying to work out...the fantasy...of the Dome. This was going to be a great geodesic dome on top of a cylindrical shaft. It would look like a great mushroom. Many levels. People would climb a stairway up the cylinder...and the dome would have a great foam rubber floor they could lie down on. Sunk down in the foam rubber, below floor level, would be movie projectors, video-tape projectors, light projectors. All over the place, up in the dome, everywhere, would be speakers, microphones, tape machines, live, replay, variable lag. People could take LSD or speed or smoke grass and lie back and experience what they would, enclosed and submerged in a planet of lights and sounds such as the universe never knew. Lights, movies, video tapes of themselves, flashing and swirling over them come from the beams of searchlights from the floor from between their bodies. The sounds rolling around in the globe like a typhoon. Movies and tapes of the past, tapes and video tapes, broadcasts and pictures of the present, tapes and humanoid sounds of the future - but all brought together now - here and now - Kairos - into the dilated cerebral cortex..."
Such a trip can end several ways.
It can become the plasticized nightmare of a New York psychoanalytic chamber where too many fucked up people with too much money take off their clothes, pay and leave.
Or it can really work, with the cooperation of people who have environmental vision, a genius for what creates unity and what is human rather than humanoid, "submerged in a planet of lights and sounds such as the universe never knew" but related to the universe, protected and expanded in a drug culture neither selfish nor ignorant.
Or it can become a symbolic appendage of the strongest force within the impetus for that new environment - in this case, the music, which has become portable, cheap, and expert.
What has happened to light shows in San Francisco artistically is what has happened to concerts in San Francisco. People once had a choice of three or four or five ballrooms, at less than half the price of records. There was grass and acid, smiles from strangers, communal streets nearby where one could live, dancing at the dances, and the newness, high or straight, of light and form - whirls, strobes, black light, strange movies.
Check out the Fillmore West one of these nights for nice highs, smiles, a walk home, a place to dance - and see if the light, still pretty and sometimes even inspired, makes up for what's not there.
Bill Graham, despite his repulsive image of Hollywood hucksterism - "concern" for "artists" born of an inability to relate to their art; impatience with public behavior; paternalism; inaccessibility; irascibility - is not the villain of the scene. He's in the grinder with the rest. Although more obviously capable of supporting a $600 per weekend light show than Helms, still not out of the financial woods. He can't really turn a profit at the Carousel most of the time, because of the same big, evil bands.
But the big, evil bands aren't so evil, either. The Dead are reportedly at least $50,000 in debt; other name groups show reliable figures of great financial losses. Equipment, lawyers, friends, travel, houses, toys...it all goes, even for bands pulling $10,000 a weekend.
"The name of the game is draw," as Helms said over and over last Friday. Until a hundred thousand people make a habit of visiting Playland Family Dog, Helms can't risk leaving the star band system for competent, lesser-known groups. Nothing is structured that way: rents, insurance, payroll, investment returns, everything is geared to make the money make money, and the people, unless they hang on to money's ride, scramble forever.
This, then, is really why the light shows are up against it. Unfortunately, their demands seem too money-oriented and their tactics were poor - not contacting Graham except too late and by letter, and fucking up Helms when he's in bad trouble. With these things and their sloppy Guild structure, the light people seem to be combining the worst traits of bread-and-butter unionism and rebel culture indignation.
If there were positive aspects to the demands, some sense of what light show art might become, some relevance to the community, the light show strike might be supported as the first opening in the cancerous culture boil which the rock music scene has become. Instead, it looks like it will be just another brief gleam on the hip horizon, suitable for cute pictures in the Chronicle.
(by Lawrence Bensky, from Dock of the Bay, 5 August 1969)
* * *
OUT ON THE EDGE [excerpt]
"We're out on the edge...hangin on, tryin to live, but tryin to live just a little bit better."
- Chet Helms
It was like, you know, the whole wild, free feelin that was the spirit of America drifting ever west, to the farthest edge of the frontier, till the frontier was no more and we were just hangin on to the edge of the Pacific Ocean.
And there we were, in a coney island dance hall, all these hairy freaks who had come together in a community crisis, to see if we, and our common vision, could hold together: Chet Helms and the Family Dog, Jerry Abrams and the Light Artists Guild, Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, the Messiah and his World Crusade, Teddy Bear and his Thirteenth Tribe, Ron Poulte of the Wild West Show, Mike Bloomfield, the Good Times, the Berkeley Tribe, and Bill Graham even.
[ . . . ] The curtain of ocean mist rises on - The Family Dog on the Great Highway.
It's Friday night down in Playland, but there's only 300 people inside the Family Dog, hoping to hear the Grateful Dead, who are late as usual. On the street outside the Light Artists Guild has set up a psychedelic picket line, with light show, conga drums, coffee and food.
"If the Dead crosses the line," declares Jerry Abrams at the stage door, "as far as I'm concerned the rock trip in this city is down the drain. We would never cross a musician's line."
The San Francisco light shows, 67 of them, all the major shows except the Brotherhood of Lights (which has a corner on the Fillmore - and intends to keep it) have come together to work for the development of their art form, and their economic survival.
The Guild voted to strike the two San Francisco ballrooms in order to gain recognition for the Guild, equal billing with the bands, and a minimum pay scale.
Chet is out on the street too, maintaining that "I want to deal only with individuals. I don't think I could ever reach an agreement with an organization. I would give my right teeth, man, never to have to deal with another agent or middleman." And here, the lanky, gently-bopping Helms, who looks like he stole his long silky blond hair from the head of the baby jesus, straightens his shoulders and flips into a crisp baritone, mimicking a businessman: "Now please look here, Mr. Helms, it's like this..."
If Jerry Abrams is anything, he ain't a businessman. He ain't the world's greatest organizer either. By throwing a picket line around the Family Dog, the Guild made a serious mistake. The Dog has been losing $4000 a week since it opened on the Great Highway June 13. The Guild's asking for a minimum of $300 a week. Chet has been paying $400 a week on the average.
"I could use some money too," Helms relates. "I haven't been paid in 4 weeks. I still have a $50,000 personal liability from the Avalon. Very simply, we put the place together with 6 grand, and we've been given another 12 grand by our investors. I was counting on this weekend with the Grateful Dead to get a paycheck." If the Dead ever turns a profit, Helms will get 30% to feed his Family.
Inside the ballroom Friday night, Glare light show from Palo Alto is shedding light on the situation for 300 bills, but was turning the money back to Helms.
Why didn't Glare join the Guild, or at least honor the picket line?"It's kind of insane," Richard of Glare says. "Chet Helms doesn't have any money. We want to help save the Family Dog. The Guild is a good idea, but if the Family Dog falls down, so does everybody else."
On the dance floor below, the feeling was summed up by one chick who comments: "We got to stand together, brother, it's as simple as that. I came to hear the Grateful Dead - if they didn't play then I wouldn't cross the line."
When the Dead finally arrived, we all trucked out to their Metro van, 50 yards from the pounding surf, lit the peace pipe, and began to rap. It became clear that all of us are "out on the edge, hangin on, trying to live."
Even the Dead are $50,000 in debt. "The way I experienced this strike," Helms explained a few days later, "was like a run on the bank. It feels like a precursor, you know, of what's going to happen around the country. They're looking at us to see not only what we can do about us, but what they can learn from us.
"We started out with the forms that were given, business forms, union forms, but for 3 years the whole fuckin world has been looking at us for new solutions."
"If we work together collectively," Jerry Garcia of the Dead offered, "we can all extend our forms. Right now the bands get more money than anybody else, and that's not righteous."
"At one time," said Helms, "people would come to the Fillmore just because it was happening. They didn't know exactly what it was, but knew it was exciting. Then the record companies came in, put $50,000 on it, sealed it, packaged it, and said here is what it is.
"I think essentially people don't come to see this band or this light show - people come to have a good time. Billing is the linear structure we have to leave behind. I mean the draw game, man, where this group is best, this group next best, and so on, you dig?
"I think, though, that light shows, you know, in their relative importance to the whole thing have come down over the past few years, you dig? It isn't necessary to say any more, lights by - "
The Dead did not play Friday. But a temporary settlement was reached Saturday afternoon, so that the Family Dog could be open that night.
Saturday night on the Great Highway [August 2] was one of the best gigs since opening night [June 13], when the Airplane played. With the strike over, the Dead, Albert Collins and the far-out Afro-Haitian Ballet played to a full house. The scene there gave off comfortable vibes.
Bill Graham, at the meeting the following Tuesday, would rail on about his "rights" as a businessman, and his right to run the Fillmore exactly according to his whims, as the individual with the bread. "Why do we have light shows?" Graham would ask. "Why do we have apples in the cafeteria? Because I like them. The man with the dollars, and not the man with the art form, has the negotiating point."
All well and legal. Yes, Bill Graham, the Fillmore is your personal trip, and [the] fact that it may be our trip too don't bother you. Maybe that's why I never go there, because I always feel the heavy presence of somebody's personal money trip.
But at the Family Dog Saturday night, I felt as free and comfortable as I would in a friend's home. "We're all locked into games - the Family Dog, the Grateful Dead," as Chet Helms said. "When are we something happening [sic], but it doesn't have to be called the Family Dog - it can be The Common or whatever."
[ . . . ]
[The rest of the article narrates in detail the Tues, Aug. 4 meeting between Helms, Graham, and the Light Artists Guild.]
(by Art Johnson, from the Berkeley Tribe, 8 August 1969)
Thanks to jgmf.blogspot.com
* * *
'LIGHT' STRIKE SUSPENDED
Rock Concert Talks Continue
The strike by the newly-formed Light Artists Guild against the Family Dog ballroom took a turn toward conciliation with meetings set for this afternoon.
Jerry Abrams, spokesman for the guild, said an interim agreement has been reached with ballroom manager Chet Helms to end the strike while talks take place.
The light artists, who provide the swirling psychedelic lights for rock band-concerts, picketed the Family Dog ballroom on the Great Highway near Playland Friday night, but reached [an] interim accord the following day.
Under the terms of the agreement, the strike at the Family Dog will be suspended until Thursday noon, and in return the guild is recognized as the official bargaining agent for the light artists.
According to Abrams, negotiations will center on the possibility of a "percentage deal" whereby the proceeds from the concerts would be "more equitably divided."
As it is, the bands get a guaranteed wage, while the light shows and other staff members split up whatever is left.
Representatives of the leading bands are scheduled to attend the 1 p.m. meeting at the ballroom.
Meanwhile, Abrams said, the guild plans to go ahead with plans to picket Bill Graham's Fillmore West tomorrow night.
The Fillmore is featuring a non-guild light show, The Brotherhood of Light. Robert Pullum, manager for the group, said he "would be glad to walk across the picket line."
"I don't think they're going about this the right way," Pullum said. "The market is too small. All of those who signed with the guild are going to find themselves without jobs."
(from the San Francisco Examiner, 4 August 1969)
* * *
PERSONALITY POWER
The great rip-off is now in the open. Heavy vibes, heavy
actions, set the tone for this past week.
Last Tuesday Jerry Abrams of the Light Artists’ Guild
announced a strike against the Family Dog and the Fillmore West. On Friday
night the pickets appeared in front of the Dog with conga drums, signs,
projectors, strobes, people, and much excitement.
The scene was absurdly festive to begin with. Dog staffers
passed out carnations; Michael Christopher served a tray of macrobiotic bread
to projectionists working from the roof of a van. Power for the light show was
supplied partly by a generator, partly by an extension cord from the Dog.
Earlier that day, Chet Helms had cast the I Ching to learn
the outcome of the strike. The answer was Peace moving into Taming Power of the
Great, two very favorable hexagrams. The moving line, however, was critical: “The
wall falls back into the moat. Use no army now. Make your commands known within
your own town. Perseverance brings humiliation.” The judgement turned out to be
sound advice for both sides.
The reading of the I Ching convinced Chet not to resist.
They would just have to wait out the evening. The hour of doom was at hand, in
the words of the I Ching. Or, “It’s fate,” as Michael Christopher put it.
The strike (boycott, really) was successful from the start.
By 9:30 there were still only 200 people in the Dog…14 people and 2 cops on the
patio. Top attendance at any time never exceeded 500, on a night that should
have drawn 1500 or more. Finally Chet appeared outside to plead with the
picketers. If the Guild was trying to close the Dog, they had nearly succeeded.
The present ballroom concept – Bill Graham’s game called
draw – has ruined the San Francisco scene. Chet’s version of the situation is
called Concentration Camp. We’re all inside: people who run the Dog, light
artists, musicians, audiences, all dependent on one bag of potatoes that comes
in once a week. Somehow we must distribute a few potatoes to as many people as
possible without letting anyone starve.
Rumors and declarations abounded. The Grateful Dead would
not show up…their equipment was set up and they were on their way…everyone
would play except Jerry Garcia…Jerry Garcia and Mickey Hart were gigging at the
Bear’s Lair in Berkeley and would arrive late.
At 11:20 Rock Scully arrived and offered to mediate the
dispute. Rock began a heavy rap with Chet and some Guild members. Ideas for
restructuring the concept of the game were batted around. How do you beat a
scene predicated on the idea that the bigger the name of the band, the bigger
the draw? How do you cope with what has become a sardine-can environment? How
can you bring back the fun?
By 11:30 the crowd inside was still under 500. The Dead were
scheduled to go on at midnight. Chet: “What are we going to do?” Rock: “Let’s
have a fucking good time!”
Jerry Abrams to Bill Kreutzmann, outside: “I talked to Jerry
Garcia, and he told me he wouldn’t cross our picket line. And you told me that if
Jerry doesn’t play, you won’t either.” Bill Kreutzmann: “I’d rather play music
than argue with out. [sic] I like to
play music.”
The Dead – minus Jerry Garcia and Mickey Hart – went on at
midnight. Jerry Abrams complained bitterly, “That’s bullshit. Those are our
brothers. They should have played outside, we have a generator out here. We
offered them the use of our generator and electricity and they refused to do
it. We feel that our brothers have betrayed us.”
At 12:30 Jerry and Mickey arrived from Berkeley, and a heavy
confrontation shaped up in front of the stage entrance. There currently is a
rumor going around that Jerry Abrams physically prevented Garcia from entering,
that’s not true. According to Bluto (that’s the name lettered on the T-shirt
Garcia wore Saturday), Abrams only stood in front of him. Bluto: “You guys are
saying we can’t play.” Abrams: “We’re saying we wish you wouldn’t play.” Bluto:
“Why are you doing this, man? Chester don’t have no fuckin’ money.”
The Dead stopped their set and joined the scene outside. A
heated argument erupted between Jerry Abrams, John McIntyre, and Phil Lesh.
Some pickets and members of the negotiating committee tried to move Abrams away
from the door so that Bluto could make an end run any time.
Dog staffers showed up and the argument went on for nearly
half an hour. Garcia: “Let’s talk inside. Let’s get Chet and talk.” Abrams: “We
vowed not to go inside. Let’s talk right here.” Mickey Hart: “Let’s go up on
stage and say what we have to say.”
Around 1 the crisis session moved into the Dead’s silver
metro truck, where Bluto passed around some superweed as a peace token. Twenty
representatives of the Dog, the Dead, and the Guild got totally ripped. In the dope-rap
that followed, people got into a group mind-thing and discovered they all
shared the same problems. Chet owes $50,000 in personal debts left over from
the Avalon, and the relocated Dog is already seven grand in the hole. The Dead
owe $60,000, probably from recording and equipment expenses. There are over
sixty light shows and only two major outlets…and one of them is sewed up. Where
do we go from here?
Jerry Garcia: “I’m speaking first and last as a contracted
union musician. Also we’ve got a big family and we’re broke. Next, Chet is a
good friend who is also broke, and I know the artists in the Guild are also
broke. What I’m thinking about, just for tonight, is that there are a bunch of
people inside whom I feel responsible for too. We’ve got to decide something
here and let them know about it.”
Chet: “We’re not unresponsive to light shows, and in fact we’re
responsible for putting them where they are.” Chet rapped some more about
concentration camps and potatoes, and finally proposed a settlement: a sliding
pay-scale, some kind of recognition of the Guild as a family, and equal billing
for everybody.
IN THE TRUCK
The Guild hassled over Chet’s proposal for a while. As
closing time approached, the pressure increased. At 1:23 AM one of the
equipment men let loose a cherry bomb under the truck. BLAM! “Jackson wants his
truck back!” “Let’s go INSIDE.” “But we haven’t got down to the issues yet.”
Bluto and Mickey never did make it inside that night. The
light show people caucused near the beach. Inside the Dog, a few of the Dead
jammed with two flutists from the audience and a conga drummer off the beach.
Fewer than 100 people heard them. It just wasn’t the Dead.
Finally a negotiating session was called for Saturday at 1
PM for bands, light shows, all interested members of the community.
SATURDAY’S MEETING
The common, as Chet suggested calling [it], convened
Saturday, after a Guild meeting that morning to discuss Chet’s offer. It got
off the ground around 2:30 with Chet and Rock laying down the rap. The Dog is
dying. Because of the strike there’s not enough bread to pay the Dead their
$5,000 guarantee for the weekend. Chet had invited his investors to what he’d
hoped would be a packed house, but the strike blew all that.
Chander Locklin [Laughlin]
(formerly Travis T. Hip) spoke in favor of the Guild as a national entity
because of the need to get one up on promoters elsewhere in the country, not on
Bill Graham and Chet Helms. Messiah Allan deplored the commercial interests
displayed by the strikers, and preached his vision of a world commune. Nick
Gravenites suggested that if the light shows wanted a percentage, they should be
willing to accept a percentage of Chet’s debts.
Jerry Abrams: We’ve come to realize that we’re all in the
same bag and we’re all broke. Chet: The light shows have gotten the short end
of the stick as far as pay and billing goes, but the blame belongs to everyone
in the community. The issue is still that slogan of Graham’s; The Name of the
Game is Draw. Mike Bloomfield: Does the Guild feel that musicians are getting
too much bread? Because they’re not, the industry cops it all.
An interim agreement was finally reached shortly after 5 PM.
Abrams: “Let’s work on a settlement. I promise you we won’t strike tonight.”
Rock Scully: “Hare Krishna!” The final handshake came at 6:30, and Chet and
Jerry embraced.
The main point of contention still to be settled was whether
the Guild had the right to set minimums for any light shows, even for shows not
in the Guild. Chet absolutely refused to concede that point, and the
negotiations were continued to next week.
TUESDAY’S MEETING
The entire community was invited back to the Dog Tuesday for
what was hoped would be the last negotiating session. Chet opened the meeting
by casting (Union) moving into Work On What Has Been Spoiled (Decay). The book
laid it right down; it was all there. “…Water flows to unite with water… So too
should human society hold together through a community of interests that allows
each individual to feel himself a member of the whole.” Also, “Decisiveness and
energy must take the place of inertia and indifference…in order that the ending
may be followed by a new beginning.”
There were several moving lines, one perhaps a reference to
Bill Graham, who was present. “We are often among people who do not belong to
our own sphere…”
Chet finished reading from the I Ching and started his rap
once more on potatoes. He was not the only one to repeat himself that
afternoon. Bill interrupted: Chet is not being realistic. Chet runs a groovy
trip, but it’s not businesslike. The only way that Chet can survive is with a
state or government subsidy.
Chet: Why not a community subsidy?
Bill: I will never share my profit with anyone in the community.
Go out and pay your own dues. If you want to support your art, get a gig on the
side. As long as I control the show, no one will ever tell me how to run it or
what to do with my money. I have a house in Pacific Heights and an $8,000
Mercedes-Benz, and it’s mine, I Earned it.
Graham was intransigent on the subject of pay and billing
for the Guild, because he feels that light shows are not a draw (i.e.
money-making) factor. “When I choose to support you on the basis of artistic
merit alone, it is my choice alone. I decide whether I want apples or flowers
or posters or light shows each week. I sign the checks.”
As for recognition of the Guild, Graham insisted that he
could not recognize an organization for which he had no respect whatsoever. And
he had no respect for the Guild because the Guild had no respect for him. As
evidence of their disrespect, Graham mentioned received a tactless letter
stating what the Guild minimums would be at the Fillmore, before he had even
been contacted by anyone from the negotiating committee. Abrams admitted that
some of the Guild tactics had been impolitic, but that the shows had been
trying to talk to Bill for two and a half years and had gotten nowhere.
Graham and some members of the community got into a personal
trip and started a mutual exchange of anger and frustration. Each side
displayed a fundamental inability to accept the other’s trip. “You will never
step on me, you will never disrespect me, because you haven’t got the balls.”
Graham invited anyone to do as well as he had, simply by opening across the
street and out-drawing him. But then, “You have neither the guts nor the
ability to change the world.”
Graham – obviously tired and overwrought – suddenly announced
in an emotion-charged voice that he would not relocate the Fillmore West in San
Francisco when the Carousel Ballroom closes on December 31. “I’ve taken this
shit from you for four years, and I’m not going to take any more. I’m through
with this town.”
From the moment of this statement on, it was obvious that
the strike was dead. As long as the Fillmore remained open, Graham would never
give in to any of the strikers’ demands. One thing about Bill Graham is that he
is always up front about what is on his mind. Perhaps some who heard his “retirement
speech” refused to take it at face value. Perhaps they considered it only a
gesture for sympathy. For whatever reason, people refused to stop sniping at
Graham long after it became clear that he and the rest of the Common had
nothing in common.
Steve Gasking, who conducts his mystic/religious
lecture/classes Monday nights at the Dog, hammered home the final attack. “You
can’t ask for both our money and our love. You’ve got our money, so you can’t
have our love. You are a good manager, a good promoter, but still you’ve fucked
over many heads with your emotional trips.”
Graham’s response was, “I
APOLOGIZE, MOTHERFUCKER, THAT I’M A HUMAN BEING. I fucking apologize.
Emotional, you’re fucking right. FUCK YOU. You stupid prick. Do you know what emotions
are? Stand up and have emotions! Get up and work, get up and sing, get up and
act. You think I’m an actor? You’re full of shit, man, I have more fucking
emotions and balls than you’ll ever see. You want to challenge me in any way
about emotions? You slimy little man…YOU SLIMY…LITTLE…MAN. FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU.
Don’t get peaceful with me. Don’t you TOUCH me.”
It was all over after Graham split. Jerry Abrams got up and
delivered the consensus opinion: “I think the strike is off.” Yet despite (or
because of) Bill Graham’s walkout, those who remained felt a tentative stirring
of optimism, a sense of regeneration of communal spirit.
A new community settlement of Guild’s strike against the Dog
will be worked out on Thursday. The Dog may die, but the Family lives. We’re
all in it together. Nobody won the strike, because we’re all losers. Our
victory becomes real only if we can prove that Bill Graham was wrong, that we
can survive together as a community. Let’s get it on.
Thanks to jgmf.blogspot.com
* * *
BILL GRAHAM EXPLODES: "QUITTING SAN FRANCISCO"
As has been his manner for more than three years, Bill Graham was a lonely and angry figure August 4th when he announced that he was finished with San Francisco as a dance/concert operator, effective December 31st, when new owners take over the Fillmore West building. Graham made his surprise announcement — he'd been reported looking for a new location for his operation — in front of more than 100 artists, musicians, and other persons gathered at the Family Dog to discuss the then-still-flickering light-show strike.
The announcement, made haltingly through a voiced choked and shaken by emotion, followed a lengthy, acrimonious lecture in which the pugilistic ballroom master hammered out a theme of "the reality of being a businessman," the rights of an individual. Time and time again he insisted: "I will never have anyone tell me to what level I support an art, what I must pay a light show." But Graham, long-ago ostracized from the hip community as a profiteer and the target of as much abuse as respect, had much more wrath to vent.
"This town has never stopped rapping an honest businessman for four fucking years," he said, brooding. "I leave here very sad ... I may be copping out, but your attitudes have driven me to my decision."
But Graham really blew his gnarled top only after Steve Gaskin, a resident communications lecturer at the Family Dog, stood up and told him: "When you started, you had to make a choice between love and money. You've got our money, so you can't have our love ... You've used dramatics today to fuck over a lot of heads with your emotional trips."
Graham's reply (as tape-recorded by the Good Times newspaper): "I APOLOGIZE, MOTHER FUCKER, THAT I'M A HUMAN BEING. I fucking apologize. Emotional — you're fucking right. Fuck you, you stupid prick! Do you know what emotions are? Stand up and have emotions. Get up and work. Get up and sing. Get up and act. You think I'm an actor? You're full of shit, man, I have more fucking balls than you'll ever see. You want to challenge me in any way about emotions? You slimy little man ... YOU SLIMY ... LITTLE ... MAN. (To the crowd): Fuck you. FUCK YOU! (To a musician trying to calm him) Don't get peaceful with me. Don't you TOUCH me!"
With those words, Graham barreled out of the room, followed by a paled Time magazine writer working on a profile of the man.
Contacted last week, a still-petulant Graham at first refused to talk with Rolling Stone, citing the publication as "one of the other reasons I'm getting out." But he went on to confirm his abandonment of ballroom operations here. He is expected to maintain Fillmore East in New York, his Millard agency, the still-fledging Fillmore record label, and his residence in San Francisco.
"We're not good, we're not bad," he said, "but I think this city will know what it's lost by the first week of 1970."
Before his violent walkout at the Family Dog the focus of discussion (that word used loosely) had been the light show strike, called by the 500-member Light Artists Guild to force Graham and Chet Helms to raise wages. A picket line had been set up Friday, August 1st, at the beachsite Dog house, and another was planned for the uptown Fillmore West the following Tuesday — the day of Graham's explosion.
Chet Helms had reacted to the strike line with predictably open gestures of brotherhood — provision of electricity for a coffee percolator and for a Guild light show projected on the Dog's outside wall; flowers for the pickets, and an invitation to negotiate. The lines were down by late Friday night, and light heads agreed to meet with Chet, on his terms: a "common" gathering including not only light artists, but the community as well. That's why Graham, along with Jerry Garcia of Grateful Dead, David and Linda LaFlamme of It's a Beautiful Day, and numerous other scene-makers were at the convocation.
Helms, the mystic/Texan who has tried, in the past two months, to move his operation away from the big–name band and dance/concert hall concept towards a free-form environmental theater, opened the meeting by casting the I Ching. The hexagrams spelled out the need for unity. The judgment: "Holding together brings good fortune. What is required is that we all unite ... around a central figure." Graham, seated with head hunched over, looked bored.
Then Helms, always considered the altruistic figurehead of the San Francisco music scene where Graham was the I-came, I-saw, I-conquered figure, laid the basic question across: "How is the community going to relate to (1) Mr. Bill Graham and to (2) Chet Helms?" For himself, he proposed recognition of the fact that the Dog had been losing money since its Avalon Ballroom days. "Money is tight in America, and we get the feeling we're disconnected from that scene," he said. "We're not. We're at the bottom of the totem pole and we're feeling the run on the bank first."
Helms proposed the need for "some new models" for "distributing the few potatoes available" — perhaps a percentage-rate for all artists — musicians as well as light shows — at the Family Dog. But he wasn't speaking for Bill Graham. Graham made that obvious.
First, he smilingly brushed off Helms as "not a realistic person in terms of business." That set his theme. "You cannot tell the world, 'Look at what we're doing, it's right, you must come here.' You can only suggest. Chet runs this place on a dream, a nice one, but he's having financial problems because although he understands the problems of the business, he has refused to meet them."
Then he turned to challenge the rest of the meeting. "You do not tell me what to do. If you don't like the way I conduct my business, why the fuck don't you get off your asses and do it? Where the fuck does the artist come to say 'you the businessman must support us' when I personally think the light shows are not producing an income for me? The only way you can do this is to kill me and step over me."
Graham indirectly explained his choleric tone when he dove into a self-defensive spiel about his honesty and about the dues he paid before hitting onto the ballroom idea in late fall of 1965.
Finally nearing the nitty-gritty of his expostulation, he faced long-time archenemy and Light Artists Guild member Jerry Abrams, stating: "I'll challenge the Light Guild to tell me if their approach to the strike was the ethical approach." The Guild, before contacting either Helms or Graham personally, sent a blunt notice of new light show rates, signed "Ma." Then Graham got wind of a picket line being planned for the Fillmore — still before any personal contact with the Guild — and from that point on, Graham "lost respect" and any communications with the Guild – all of this aside from his insistence on the right to negotiate prices for acts on an individual basis.
His "I'm through with this town" statement came after a bitter, heated exchange with Abrams — Abrams defending the Guild's approaching of various bands to gauge potential strike support and apologizing for the "tactless" letter; Abrams slamming Graham for "refusing negotiations over the last three years;" Graham insisting on the "reality" of the Guild's obvious disrespect for him and his operation. Graham made it painfully clear that now he would never hire a Guild show at any rate. And Helms hardly had enough money to buy a bag of potatoes each week.
Helms pushed in the final pin. "Friday night finished the Family Dog as a business," he said. (On Friday, standing outside his building looking glumly at the pickets, he had stated his theory about the few potatoes around to be distributed. "And if we can't get together and decide who eats, I don't see where we've arrived at in three years." Now, he said, Family Dog would give up the struggle to cover its $50,000 of debts. The new commitment, he says, is "to extend the form artistically," with a new mode of business and finances.)
"The dream burst Friday," he continued to the assembly. "I have a proposal to make at our next meeting Thursday. But if there's a picket line at the Fillmore West tonight, I won't bother to come up with a proposal, and Family Dog won't operate this weekend."
Within minutes, one Guild member, from the Garden of Delights, withdrew his support for the strike. Finally a beleaguered Abrams, trying to hide defeat behind various voices hailing "a new community" rising out of the shambles, then unofficially drew a curtain over strike plans. The reasons: Helms' statement and Bill's stubbornness. "We are we and he is he," Abrams understated.
The actual strike lasted only about four hours, and all three booked acts — Albert Collins, Afro-Haiti Dancers, and Grateful Dead — honored their contracts with Helms. Only Jerry Garcia and Mickey Hart of the Dead — reportedly physically detained at the door by Abrams — didn't cross the line. Inside, a small crowd saw lights worked by a Peninsula group called Glare, a strike–supporting Guild member until "we were turned off by the attitude at a strike meeting — we were falling back into the Establishment trip." Glare offered to do the work this weekend for free, after seeing Helms' profitless loss statements, and spokesman John Darcy further stated: "This is the only new art form left in this City. Graham has prostituted it, but Chet's doing all he can for it."
It was a matter of relating with (1) Bill Graham and (2) Chet Helms.
(by Ben Fong-Torres, from Rolling Stone, 6 September 1969)
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/bill-graham-explodes-quitting-san-francisco-19690906
Jul 10, 2017
1967: Album Review
ROCK: SAN FRANCISCO, PART II
During the past year the San Francisco renaissance in rock music has been widely publicized and popularized (especially its more sensational aspects) in the national press. The rise of San Francisco rock shifted rock's creative center of influence from England back to America, for good reasons. The San Francisco musicians are really the first self-consciously creative rock musicians.
In this article and the last we've selected three albums by groups which rank with the best San Francisco has produced. Our selections are completely arbitrary. We didn't consider the two Jefferson Airplane albums because while they are good albums, they are not indicative of how the group sounds in live performance. Moby Grape's album is also good but most San Francisco groups have gone beyond them at least instrumentally. Big Brother's album is poor but was released because of avarice. The groups we are considering reflect the current trends in all rock.
The Grateful Dead are technically the only San Francisco rock group discussed in these two articles. Country Joe is from Berkley. If you haven't bought the Dead's album (Warner Brothers W 1689) don't bother wasting your money. The album as a whole is disappointing especially considering that everyone who had heard them before the album was released raved about them.
Jerry Garcia (lead) and Phil Lesh (bass) have both admitted that the album wasn't quite up to their expectations either. It's not really a total loss. There is one excellent cut ("Morning Dew") and two good cuts ("Cream Puff War" and "New, New Minglewood Blues") but it is so far from what the Grateful Dead sound like live that they deserve better treatment.
First the album. "Morning Dew" is deceptively simple. The song is based on only four chords and is arranged around a simple, pretty guitar figure. Garcia's guitar solo is a beautifully original solo for rock and points out the lyrical quality of much of the Dead's music. The other two songs mentioned are more illustrative of the Dead's usual style — hard rock.
"Viola Lee Blues," the last track on the second side, is a good starting point for discussing the Dead's live performances. It illustrates the weakness of their worst performances — dullness. The Dead's music centers around Jerry Garcia's guitar. The other members of the group contribute fantastically, of course, but mostly in terms of interplay with the lead guitar.
Obviously when Garcia is bad, the music is bad. This isn't usually the case, however, in person, since Garcia is one of the top three or four guitar players in rook music. When he is very good, the music is incredible.
Jazz critic Philip Elwod has said that the Grateful Dead are very close to an experimental jazz group and he is right. In person, the Dead feature very improvised instrumentals framed by average vocals and lyrics.
The vocals and lyrics though, become almost superfluous as the instrumental section of each song weaves moods, changing tone, tempo, and style often for thirty minutes or longer.
Garcia's main deficit as a soloist is demonstrated on "Viola Lee Blues." He occasionally gets hung up on a single rhythmic figure which he repeats up and down the fingerboard.
"Viola Lee" never seems to get off the ground because of this. Lesh is an amazingly inventive bassman (he studied under Darius Milhaud) and though he tries his damnedest on "Viola Lee," nothing happens.
The Grateful Dead are one of the most powerful and inventive groups in rock (or any music for that matter); if you've heard their album and disagree then we suggest that you listen to them when they come East again.
A number of people writing about rock in the past year have pointed out rock's eclecticism; one of the most appealing features of rock is its ability to encompass styles as diverse as the Lovin' Spoonful and the Cream's.
A case in point is the recently released album Ara-Be-In (Arhoolie—Changes Records 7001) by the Jerry Hahn Quintet. Jerry Hahn is a guitar player who is best known for his work with jazz musician John Handy. The other members of his group are Mike White, a violinist who was with Hahn in Handy's group of a year and a half ago, Ron McClure and Jack De Johnette, bassman and drummer respectively for Charles Lloyd, and Noel Jewkes, a San Francisco jazz musician (tenor and flute) who sounds very much like Charles Lloyd. In other words, Hahn's group is basically a West Coast jazz group.
Their album, however, contains two tracks ("Ara-Be-In" and "Ragahantar") which are as much like the highly inventive rock of the Grateful Dead and the Cream, for example, as they are like jazz.
"Ragahantar" is Hahn solo. It is formally based on the raga but it is as close to Indian classical music as most Indian derived rock is; i.e., not very close. It is its own thing, just like Country Joe's instrumentals and the Doors' "The End" are unique though influenced by Eastern tonalities.
Hahn's guitar is in an open tuning (reminiscent of Sandy Bull) and several strings act as sympathetic strings, setting up a drone or root note over which Hahn solos.
"Ara-Be-In" is more interesting if only for the fact that the rest of the quintet is included on this track. The same guitar figure opens "Ara-Be-In" and the structure of the piece is the same for each soloist — a rhythm-free improvisation in which the rest of the band establishes and augments the drone followed by a quick tempoed rhythmic improvisation once more over the drone.
White's violin solo is the most effective because his instrument (like the guitar) is most readily adaptable to this style of music. The piece ends with a unison improvisation and finally a return to the theme.
"Ara-Be-In" is impressive from any musical point of view, but it is especially interesting in that Hahn's group is clearly thinking along the same lines as, for example, Jerry Garcia's group.
As the instrumental quality of rock keeps improving, we feel that the music will end up in the area that Jerry Hahn's music encompasses — a musical area that defies labels because it is eclectic and is unashamed of its roots. Some rock groups — the Grateful Dead, Country Joe and the Fish — are already there. Whether or not they will be listened to is another question.
THIS IS THE END.
(by Bill Dalton and Tom Law, from The Heights, 17 November 1967)
https://newspapers.bc.edu/cgi-bin/bostonsh?a=d&d=bcheights19671117.2.80&srpos=9&e=-------en-20-bcheights-1-byDA-txt-txIN-grateful+dead------
This piece continued a previous article, "Rock: San Francisco, Part I," reviewing the first Country Joe & the Fish LP, Electric Music for the Mind and Body:
https://newspapers.bc.edu/cgi-bin/bostonsh?a=d&d=bcheights19671103.2.84&srpos=8&e=-------en-20-bcheights-1-byDA-txt-txIN-grateful+dead------
During the past year the San Francisco renaissance in rock music has been widely publicized and popularized (especially its more sensational aspects) in the national press. The rise of San Francisco rock shifted rock's creative center of influence from England back to America, for good reasons. The San Francisco musicians are really the first self-consciously creative rock musicians.
In this article and the last we've selected three albums by groups which rank with the best San Francisco has produced. Our selections are completely arbitrary. We didn't consider the two Jefferson Airplane albums because while they are good albums, they are not indicative of how the group sounds in live performance. Moby Grape's album is also good but most San Francisco groups have gone beyond them at least instrumentally. Big Brother's album is poor but was released because of avarice. The groups we are considering reflect the current trends in all rock.
The Grateful Dead are technically the only San Francisco rock group discussed in these two articles. Country Joe is from Berkley. If you haven't bought the Dead's album (Warner Brothers W 1689) don't bother wasting your money. The album as a whole is disappointing especially considering that everyone who had heard them before the album was released raved about them.
Jerry Garcia (lead) and Phil Lesh (bass) have both admitted that the album wasn't quite up to their expectations either. It's not really a total loss. There is one excellent cut ("Morning Dew") and two good cuts ("Cream Puff War" and "New, New Minglewood Blues") but it is so far from what the Grateful Dead sound like live that they deserve better treatment.
First the album. "Morning Dew" is deceptively simple. The song is based on only four chords and is arranged around a simple, pretty guitar figure. Garcia's guitar solo is a beautifully original solo for rock and points out the lyrical quality of much of the Dead's music. The other two songs mentioned are more illustrative of the Dead's usual style — hard rock.
"Viola Lee Blues," the last track on the second side, is a good starting point for discussing the Dead's live performances. It illustrates the weakness of their worst performances — dullness. The Dead's music centers around Jerry Garcia's guitar. The other members of the group contribute fantastically, of course, but mostly in terms of interplay with the lead guitar.
Obviously when Garcia is bad, the music is bad. This isn't usually the case, however, in person, since Garcia is one of the top three or four guitar players in rook music. When he is very good, the music is incredible.
Jazz critic Philip Elwod has said that the Grateful Dead are very close to an experimental jazz group and he is right. In person, the Dead feature very improvised instrumentals framed by average vocals and lyrics.
The vocals and lyrics though, become almost superfluous as the instrumental section of each song weaves moods, changing tone, tempo, and style often for thirty minutes or longer.
Garcia's main deficit as a soloist is demonstrated on "Viola Lee Blues." He occasionally gets hung up on a single rhythmic figure which he repeats up and down the fingerboard.
"Viola Lee" never seems to get off the ground because of this. Lesh is an amazingly inventive bassman (he studied under Darius Milhaud) and though he tries his damnedest on "Viola Lee," nothing happens.
The Grateful Dead are one of the most powerful and inventive groups in rock (or any music for that matter); if you've heard their album and disagree then we suggest that you listen to them when they come East again.
A number of people writing about rock in the past year have pointed out rock's eclecticism; one of the most appealing features of rock is its ability to encompass styles as diverse as the Lovin' Spoonful and the Cream's.
A case in point is the recently released album Ara-Be-In (Arhoolie—Changes Records 7001) by the Jerry Hahn Quintet. Jerry Hahn is a guitar player who is best known for his work with jazz musician John Handy. The other members of his group are Mike White, a violinist who was with Hahn in Handy's group of a year and a half ago, Ron McClure and Jack De Johnette, bassman and drummer respectively for Charles Lloyd, and Noel Jewkes, a San Francisco jazz musician (tenor and flute) who sounds very much like Charles Lloyd. In other words, Hahn's group is basically a West Coast jazz group.
Their album, however, contains two tracks ("Ara-Be-In" and "Ragahantar") which are as much like the highly inventive rock of the Grateful Dead and the Cream, for example, as they are like jazz.
"Ragahantar" is Hahn solo. It is formally based on the raga but it is as close to Indian classical music as most Indian derived rock is; i.e., not very close. It is its own thing, just like Country Joe's instrumentals and the Doors' "The End" are unique though influenced by Eastern tonalities.
Hahn's guitar is in an open tuning (reminiscent of Sandy Bull) and several strings act as sympathetic strings, setting up a drone or root note over which Hahn solos.
"Ara-Be-In" is more interesting if only for the fact that the rest of the quintet is included on this track. The same guitar figure opens "Ara-Be-In" and the structure of the piece is the same for each soloist — a rhythm-free improvisation in which the rest of the band establishes and augments the drone followed by a quick tempoed rhythmic improvisation once more over the drone.
White's violin solo is the most effective because his instrument (like the guitar) is most readily adaptable to this style of music. The piece ends with a unison improvisation and finally a return to the theme.
"Ara-Be-In" is impressive from any musical point of view, but it is especially interesting in that Hahn's group is clearly thinking along the same lines as, for example, Jerry Garcia's group.
As the instrumental quality of rock keeps improving, we feel that the music will end up in the area that Jerry Hahn's music encompasses — a musical area that defies labels because it is eclectic and is unashamed of its roots. Some rock groups — the Grateful Dead, Country Joe and the Fish — are already there. Whether or not they will be listened to is another question.
THIS IS THE END.
(by Bill Dalton and Tom Law, from The Heights, 17 November 1967)
https://newspapers.bc.edu/cgi-bin/bostonsh?a=d&d=bcheights19671117.2.80&srpos=9&e=-------en-20-bcheights-1-byDA-txt-txIN-grateful+dead------
This piece continued a previous article, "Rock: San Francisco, Part I," reviewing the first Country Joe & the Fish LP, Electric Music for the Mind and Body:
https://newspapers.bc.edu/cgi-bin/bostonsh?a=d&d=bcheights19671103.2.84&srpos=8&e=-------en-20-bcheights-1-byDA-txt-txIN-grateful+dead------
Jul 9, 2017
July 11, 1969: The Pavilion, Flushing Meadow Park, Queens NY
ROCK, ETC.
Rock fans have certain stock complaints, and one is that there is no decent live rock scene in New York. The Fillmore is a cross between Philharmonic Hall and the subway at rush hour. The clubs offer prohibitive prices and the vibrations of a dentist's drill. Once in a while, something nice happens in Central Park or Tompkins Square, and people will talk about it for months afterward. But mostly rock talk in New York is wistful, punctuated by many mentions of Woodstock and (last year) San Francisco and (this year) Mill Valley.
One place nobody muses about is Queens. Queens -- yech! A lot of rockheads, including me, have tended to define both their generational revolt and their spiritual progress in terms of their migration from Queens to Manhattan. But a favorite pastime of Americans is rediscovering their origins -- that's what the whole rock renaissance is about, after all -- and this may be the year we find out that Queens has a soul. Didn't Jimmy Breslin promise, "If elected, I shall go to Queens?" Aren't the Mets contenders? Queens is where the working class calls itself the middle class. It's the scene of the epic teenage rivalry of the fifties, between the "rocks" and the "collegiates." It's the home of the original sawdust pizza. Rock belongs to Northern Boulevard as much as, if not more than, to Second Avenue. And Queens has something Manhattan doesn't have -- lots of open space.
This fact has not escaped rock promoters. Last summer, two producers brought a number of major groups to the Singer Bowl, in Flushing Meadows. The concerts were an artistic flop; the stadium was too large, the sound was terrible, and the problem of musical theater-in-the-round was solved -- or, rather, parried -- by means of a revolving stage, which allowed each spectator to get a good look at the performers every three minutes or so, a system that does not facilitate rapport.
This year, the Singer Bowl concerts have been taken over by Music Fair Enterprises, the company that runs the Westbury Music Fair. Howard Stein, a young producer who was hired to organize the shows, has screened off a section of the arena and made improvements in the sound system, and prospects look good. At the same time, however, Music Fair Enterprises has outflanked itself by delegating Stein to take on a much more inspiring project -- a series of rock dances in the open-air (but roofed) New York State World's Fair Pavilion, also in Flushing Meadows. The first of these was held on Friday, July 11th. It featured the Grateful Dead and Joe Cocker, and it was quite simply fantastic. If the management continues to do the right things, rock at the Pavilion could become an institution. For the sake of the music and the culture -- and for the sake of Queens -- I hope it will.
I rode to Flushing on a chartered bus that MFE had hired to lure the skeptical press to the outlands. The bus driver got lost, and we took a little tour of Corona (coming withing eight blocks of my old junior high school). Then, to make up for his lapse, he began to speed. It was no use -- we were late anyway. But by this time the bus had become part of the adventure. It was the Who's Magic Bus, the Magical Mystery Tour bus. We jounced along eating brownies and shouting instructions to the driver.
At the Pavilion, it soon became evident that the rest of the crowd shared our expansive mood. They kept coming in, thousands of happy kids -- almost five thousand by the end of the evening. The Pavilion was large enough to accommodate everyone without strain. The ground level served as a huge round dance floor; on the balcony there were tables and chairs, the food concession (the main culinary attraction was tacos, a beautiful idea, though the reality was mediocre), and a nice view of the park. The atmosphere was totally relaxed. As in the San Francisco ballrooms, people were free to dance, crowd in front of the stage, sit in a corner, wander around, eat, or do whatever else impulse dictated. There were no intrusive guards or cops.
The music was great. Joe Cocker and his band did an excellent hard-rock set that included a spectacular rendition of "Let's Go Get Stoned" -- redundant advice for most of the audience, which sang along enthusiastically. During the break between sets, someone backstage had the good sense to put on Beggar's Banquet, and a large group of spectators got up to dance to the Stones. Nothing like that had happened at a rock concert -- in San Francisco or anywhere else -- for a long, long time.
Later, when the Dead were about to come on, there was some squabbling between a solid bloc of dancers who stood in the middle of the floor -- and insisted moralistically that everyone else do the same -- and the people sitting behind them, who complained that they were cutting off the view. After a few minutes of edgy exchange, Bob Weir came onstage and announced, as the Dead do whenever they can, "The management of this place told us you can get up and dance if you want to, so why don't you get up and dance?" That did it. The dancers won; the sitters got up. They were probably glad they did.
The Dead proceeded to perform for more than two hours. They played a lot of new material (notably "Don't Murder Me," a witty country-western song), some standards (including Otis Redding's "Hard to Handle," with Pigpen doing a pretty fair vocal), and several cuts from their new album, Aoxomoxoa; my favorite was "Mountains of the Moon." Through it all, Jerry Garcia, in his red polo shirt, beamed at us. It was the season of love all over again.
The Dead were the perfect group to launch this latest and best exercise in the nostalgia that has been hitting the rock community lately. Dancing. The summer of love. Queens. We still need that ambience, those memories. It's not enough to stare reverently at Eric Clapton's nimble fingers. I only wish the admission price could be lower. Three dollars is reasonable compared to what city places charge, and you get more for your money; still, it's not exactly proletarian.
I didn't appreciate just how good the Pavilion concert was until the following night, when I attended the Madison Square Garden debut of Blind Faith, the new Eric Clapton-Ginger Baker-Steve Winwood combine. (The group is rounded out by a relative unknown -- bassist and electric violinist Rick Grech.) The best part of the evening was that it was short, though this irritated me, theoretically, as one more example of the promoters' indifferent greed. For the prices the kids paid (the cheapest seats were four dollars), they deserved at least a half hour more of music. They also deserved, and didn't get, adequate sound, an alternative to the atrocity of the revolving stage, and an environment that was not conspicuously hostile and policed. Clapton played well, as usual, but Winwood's voice did not come through, and, as for Baker, his show-offy drumming just makes me nervous. In spite of the shoddy production, the audience was ecstatic. Hundreds of teenagers rushed the stage, screaming like Beatlemaniacs. I don't understand it. I'm sure the Emperor has no clothes, but there must be an aesthetic of nakedness I'm not getting.
(by Ellen Willis, untitled article in the "Rock, Etc." column, from the New Yorker, 26 July 1969)
https://archive.org/details/gd1969-07-11.127258.sbd.kaplan.flac16
See also:
http://deadsources.blogspot.com/2015/04/july-11-1969-new-york-state-pavilion.html
http://deadsources.blogspot.com/2017/10/july-11-1969-new-york-state-pavilion.html
*
Ellen Willis had visited San Francisco in fall 1968 and seen the Dead; unfortunately she did not write about them, but she wrote a piece on the other bands she saw:
THE SCENE, 1968
I had been in San Francisco a week, was preparing to visit the new Fillmore West for the third time, and asked a friend from East Bay to come along. He wasn't really in the mood, but he had a hard time saying no. "I feel as if I ought to go," he said. "As if it's culture." I'd been experiencing a similar sense of obligation, but dismissing it as a rather banal occupational disease. Yet, after all, it's just a matter of degree: I'm not an art critic, but if I went to Florence I'd feel duty-bound to see a lot of paintings. Rock and roll was the lazy man's music. Who worked at liking Little Richard? You dug him or you didn't.
I hadn't quite realized how much things had changed until I found myself going to concerts here and in Berkeley (a) to pay my respects to the cultural capital of white pop music, (b) to gain insight into what the new groups were doing, and (c) to see Steve Miller live, because I was afraid I had misjudged his first album (he turned out to be as bad as I thought -- third-rate honky-tonk with a fuzztone -- but then the night I was there he had to cope with a bum sound system and was without his rhythm guitarist). The only group I went to see for its own beautiful sake was the Grateful Dead.
Even now there is more and better music going on here than anywhere else in the country. The Bay Area has long been an amazing reservoir of musicians. In 1964, they were sitting around the Berkeley campus playing for fun. Now, apparently, they've all joined rock groups. In the past week or so, at least fifteen local bands, most of them completely unknown elsewhere, have performed at the Fillmore West, the Avalon, the Oakland Coliseum, the Berkeley Community Theater, and various clubs; of those I've seen, the worst are well above the level of the average third-billed act at the Fillmore East, and the best need only practice, good advice, and luck to be really great.
But, for all this talent, the cultural capital is not what it was when the earliest groups were defining a new consciousness. Such intensity is always difficult to sustain, and the circumstances have not been favorable. Haight-Ashbury has passed to the hoodlums and the meth addicts, the growing political urgency has made music seem less important, and the media, after publicizing the scene to death, have lost interest in it, which is even worse. It may be that the mystique of community that characterized San Francisco rock was based at least partly on wishful thinking; Grace Slick was never exactly the hippie next door.
Yet for me and a great many other people, in and out of San Francisco, it was very exciting, and I am not happy to see it replaced by what amounts to a mystique of musicianship -- a reverence of the sort that makes entertainment "culture." This attitude has its roots in the increasing conversion of white rock from a vocal into a primarily instrumental music -- a trend that originated in San Francisco, though it is by no means confined here. (Eric Clapton has said that Cream uses a voice as just another instrument; Ten Years After, the best of the English blues bands, appears to have the same philosophy.)
The most striking casualty of this development has been the eclectic sensory experience that dance floors and light shows were set up to provide. At the Fillmore West, almost everyone sits on the floor and watches -- one scarcely visible corner is reserved for dancing, as if on principle, just as so many of the groups offer token vocals on principle -- and the light show has become an unobtrusive backdrop. The audience wants to concentrate on what the performers are doing with their instruments.
The best and most polished group I've seen here, It's a Beautiful Day, is totally involved with instrumentation. Not one of its six members -- four men and two girls -- can sing rock. They lack the basic prerequisites of volume and enthusiasm -- especially the lead singer, who also plays the violin. But they are excellent musicians (except for one of the girls, whose function is obscure; she shakes a tambourine now and then, but that's about it). Their sound is built on intricate, shifting rhythmic patterns that reminded me of the Kaleidoscope (a band that isn't very well known but should be), and it is so varied and unfailingly interesting that the vocal vacuum doesn't matter.
At the other extreme is a group of five girls called the Ace of Cups. Everyone sings, and each singer is better than the last, ending with the bass player, Mary Gannon, who has a perfect rock voice, strong, mellow, and idiosyncratic. She and three of the others are essentially belters, but the fifth voice (the piano player's) is soft and torchy -- an effective contrast. Their melodies and arrangements are excellent. But they can't play at all. (This is not surprising. There are plenty of female rock singers but, for some reason, virtually no girls who play instruments seriously.) They pick at their instruments as if at unwanted food on a plate -- especially the drummer, who provides almost no beat. The lack of virtuosity is no problem in itself -- in fact, given my prejudices, it is refreshing -- but the lack of drive is. Their singing is so good that I hope they can overcome this handicap; that they've been performing for a year without learning more is disturbing.
Other groups I've enjoyed are Creedence Clearwater Revival, a workmanlike hard-rock band that is a bit more established -- it has an LP out and a hit single, "Susie Q" -- and the Cleveland Wrecking Company, which is in the wall-of-sound tradition, with a lot of well-integrated electronic noise a la Byrds. . .
[ omitted negative review of "one group I hated, Black Pearl" ]
Except for the Dead, the big groups have been out of town. The Airplane has been in Europe with a twenty-seven-man entourage, and Big Brother recently gave its last local concert to feature Janis Joplin, who is going out on her own. The Airplane doesn't belong to San Francisco anymore; it belongs to the world, like the Beatles and white Levis. As for Janis, she has always belonged to herself. I hope she'll be well and not lose her incredible voice too soon. Incidentally, both groups' latest albums -- the Airplane's Crown of Creation and Big Brother's Cheap Thrills -- are classics. Not only that, they are pure, immediate pleasure. The Grateful Dead's new album, Anthem of the Sun, does take some getting used to, but I find myself enjoying it more and more. Sometimes I think the Dead are the only really happy people left.
(by Ellen Willis, from the "Rock, Etc." column, the New Yorker, 2 November 1968)
Reprinted in the collection Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music.
Rock fans have certain stock complaints, and one is that there is no decent live rock scene in New York. The Fillmore is a cross between Philharmonic Hall and the subway at rush hour. The clubs offer prohibitive prices and the vibrations of a dentist's drill. Once in a while, something nice happens in Central Park or Tompkins Square, and people will talk about it for months afterward. But mostly rock talk in New York is wistful, punctuated by many mentions of Woodstock and (last year) San Francisco and (this year) Mill Valley.
One place nobody muses about is Queens. Queens -- yech! A lot of rockheads, including me, have tended to define both their generational revolt and their spiritual progress in terms of their migration from Queens to Manhattan. But a favorite pastime of Americans is rediscovering their origins -- that's what the whole rock renaissance is about, after all -- and this may be the year we find out that Queens has a soul. Didn't Jimmy Breslin promise, "If elected, I shall go to Queens?" Aren't the Mets contenders? Queens is where the working class calls itself the middle class. It's the scene of the epic teenage rivalry of the fifties, between the "rocks" and the "collegiates." It's the home of the original sawdust pizza. Rock belongs to Northern Boulevard as much as, if not more than, to Second Avenue. And Queens has something Manhattan doesn't have -- lots of open space.
This fact has not escaped rock promoters. Last summer, two producers brought a number of major groups to the Singer Bowl, in Flushing Meadows. The concerts were an artistic flop; the stadium was too large, the sound was terrible, and the problem of musical theater-in-the-round was solved -- or, rather, parried -- by means of a revolving stage, which allowed each spectator to get a good look at the performers every three minutes or so, a system that does not facilitate rapport.
This year, the Singer Bowl concerts have been taken over by Music Fair Enterprises, the company that runs the Westbury Music Fair. Howard Stein, a young producer who was hired to organize the shows, has screened off a section of the arena and made improvements in the sound system, and prospects look good. At the same time, however, Music Fair Enterprises has outflanked itself by delegating Stein to take on a much more inspiring project -- a series of rock dances in the open-air (but roofed) New York State World's Fair Pavilion, also in Flushing Meadows. The first of these was held on Friday, July 11th. It featured the Grateful Dead and Joe Cocker, and it was quite simply fantastic. If the management continues to do the right things, rock at the Pavilion could become an institution. For the sake of the music and the culture -- and for the sake of Queens -- I hope it will.
I rode to Flushing on a chartered bus that MFE had hired to lure the skeptical press to the outlands. The bus driver got lost, and we took a little tour of Corona (coming withing eight blocks of my old junior high school). Then, to make up for his lapse, he began to speed. It was no use -- we were late anyway. But by this time the bus had become part of the adventure. It was the Who's Magic Bus, the Magical Mystery Tour bus. We jounced along eating brownies and shouting instructions to the driver.
At the Pavilion, it soon became evident that the rest of the crowd shared our expansive mood. They kept coming in, thousands of happy kids -- almost five thousand by the end of the evening. The Pavilion was large enough to accommodate everyone without strain. The ground level served as a huge round dance floor; on the balcony there were tables and chairs, the food concession (the main culinary attraction was tacos, a beautiful idea, though the reality was mediocre), and a nice view of the park. The atmosphere was totally relaxed. As in the San Francisco ballrooms, people were free to dance, crowd in front of the stage, sit in a corner, wander around, eat, or do whatever else impulse dictated. There were no intrusive guards or cops.
The music was great. Joe Cocker and his band did an excellent hard-rock set that included a spectacular rendition of "Let's Go Get Stoned" -- redundant advice for most of the audience, which sang along enthusiastically. During the break between sets, someone backstage had the good sense to put on Beggar's Banquet, and a large group of spectators got up to dance to the Stones. Nothing like that had happened at a rock concert -- in San Francisco or anywhere else -- for a long, long time.
Later, when the Dead were about to come on, there was some squabbling between a solid bloc of dancers who stood in the middle of the floor -- and insisted moralistically that everyone else do the same -- and the people sitting behind them, who complained that they were cutting off the view. After a few minutes of edgy exchange, Bob Weir came onstage and announced, as the Dead do whenever they can, "The management of this place told us you can get up and dance if you want to, so why don't you get up and dance?" That did it. The dancers won; the sitters got up. They were probably glad they did.
The Dead proceeded to perform for more than two hours. They played a lot of new material (notably "Don't Murder Me," a witty country-western song), some standards (including Otis Redding's "Hard to Handle," with Pigpen doing a pretty fair vocal), and several cuts from their new album, Aoxomoxoa; my favorite was "Mountains of the Moon." Through it all, Jerry Garcia, in his red polo shirt, beamed at us. It was the season of love all over again.
The Dead were the perfect group to launch this latest and best exercise in the nostalgia that has been hitting the rock community lately. Dancing. The summer of love. Queens. We still need that ambience, those memories. It's not enough to stare reverently at Eric Clapton's nimble fingers. I only wish the admission price could be lower. Three dollars is reasonable compared to what city places charge, and you get more for your money; still, it's not exactly proletarian.
I didn't appreciate just how good the Pavilion concert was until the following night, when I attended the Madison Square Garden debut of Blind Faith, the new Eric Clapton-Ginger Baker-Steve Winwood combine. (The group is rounded out by a relative unknown -- bassist and electric violinist Rick Grech.) The best part of the evening was that it was short, though this irritated me, theoretically, as one more example of the promoters' indifferent greed. For the prices the kids paid (the cheapest seats were four dollars), they deserved at least a half hour more of music. They also deserved, and didn't get, adequate sound, an alternative to the atrocity of the revolving stage, and an environment that was not conspicuously hostile and policed. Clapton played well, as usual, but Winwood's voice did not come through, and, as for Baker, his show-offy drumming just makes me nervous. In spite of the shoddy production, the audience was ecstatic. Hundreds of teenagers rushed the stage, screaming like Beatlemaniacs. I don't understand it. I'm sure the Emperor has no clothes, but there must be an aesthetic of nakedness I'm not getting.
(by Ellen Willis, untitled article in the "Rock, Etc." column, from the New Yorker, 26 July 1969)
https://archive.org/details/gd1969-07-11.127258.sbd.kaplan.flac16
See also:
http://deadsources.blogspot.com/2015/04/july-11-1969-new-york-state-pavilion.html
http://deadsources.blogspot.com/2017/10/july-11-1969-new-york-state-pavilion.html
*
Ellen Willis had visited San Francisco in fall 1968 and seen the Dead; unfortunately she did not write about them, but she wrote a piece on the other bands she saw:
THE SCENE, 1968
I had been in San Francisco a week, was preparing to visit the new Fillmore West for the third time, and asked a friend from East Bay to come along. He wasn't really in the mood, but he had a hard time saying no. "I feel as if I ought to go," he said. "As if it's culture." I'd been experiencing a similar sense of obligation, but dismissing it as a rather banal occupational disease. Yet, after all, it's just a matter of degree: I'm not an art critic, but if I went to Florence I'd feel duty-bound to see a lot of paintings. Rock and roll was the lazy man's music. Who worked at liking Little Richard? You dug him or you didn't.
I hadn't quite realized how much things had changed until I found myself going to concerts here and in Berkeley (a) to pay my respects to the cultural capital of white pop music, (b) to gain insight into what the new groups were doing, and (c) to see Steve Miller live, because I was afraid I had misjudged his first album (he turned out to be as bad as I thought -- third-rate honky-tonk with a fuzztone -- but then the night I was there he had to cope with a bum sound system and was without his rhythm guitarist). The only group I went to see for its own beautiful sake was the Grateful Dead.
Even now there is more and better music going on here than anywhere else in the country. The Bay Area has long been an amazing reservoir of musicians. In 1964, they were sitting around the Berkeley campus playing for fun. Now, apparently, they've all joined rock groups. In the past week or so, at least fifteen local bands, most of them completely unknown elsewhere, have performed at the Fillmore West, the Avalon, the Oakland Coliseum, the Berkeley Community Theater, and various clubs; of those I've seen, the worst are well above the level of the average third-billed act at the Fillmore East, and the best need only practice, good advice, and luck to be really great.
But, for all this talent, the cultural capital is not what it was when the earliest groups were defining a new consciousness. Such intensity is always difficult to sustain, and the circumstances have not been favorable. Haight-Ashbury has passed to the hoodlums and the meth addicts, the growing political urgency has made music seem less important, and the media, after publicizing the scene to death, have lost interest in it, which is even worse. It may be that the mystique of community that characterized San Francisco rock was based at least partly on wishful thinking; Grace Slick was never exactly the hippie next door.
Yet for me and a great many other people, in and out of San Francisco, it was very exciting, and I am not happy to see it replaced by what amounts to a mystique of musicianship -- a reverence of the sort that makes entertainment "culture." This attitude has its roots in the increasing conversion of white rock from a vocal into a primarily instrumental music -- a trend that originated in San Francisco, though it is by no means confined here. (Eric Clapton has said that Cream uses a voice as just another instrument; Ten Years After, the best of the English blues bands, appears to have the same philosophy.)
The most striking casualty of this development has been the eclectic sensory experience that dance floors and light shows were set up to provide. At the Fillmore West, almost everyone sits on the floor and watches -- one scarcely visible corner is reserved for dancing, as if on principle, just as so many of the groups offer token vocals on principle -- and the light show has become an unobtrusive backdrop. The audience wants to concentrate on what the performers are doing with their instruments.
The best and most polished group I've seen here, It's a Beautiful Day, is totally involved with instrumentation. Not one of its six members -- four men and two girls -- can sing rock. They lack the basic prerequisites of volume and enthusiasm -- especially the lead singer, who also plays the violin. But they are excellent musicians (except for one of the girls, whose function is obscure; she shakes a tambourine now and then, but that's about it). Their sound is built on intricate, shifting rhythmic patterns that reminded me of the Kaleidoscope (a band that isn't very well known but should be), and it is so varied and unfailingly interesting that the vocal vacuum doesn't matter.
At the other extreme is a group of five girls called the Ace of Cups. Everyone sings, and each singer is better than the last, ending with the bass player, Mary Gannon, who has a perfect rock voice, strong, mellow, and idiosyncratic. She and three of the others are essentially belters, but the fifth voice (the piano player's) is soft and torchy -- an effective contrast. Their melodies and arrangements are excellent. But they can't play at all. (This is not surprising. There are plenty of female rock singers but, for some reason, virtually no girls who play instruments seriously.) They pick at their instruments as if at unwanted food on a plate -- especially the drummer, who provides almost no beat. The lack of virtuosity is no problem in itself -- in fact, given my prejudices, it is refreshing -- but the lack of drive is. Their singing is so good that I hope they can overcome this handicap; that they've been performing for a year without learning more is disturbing.
Other groups I've enjoyed are Creedence Clearwater Revival, a workmanlike hard-rock band that is a bit more established -- it has an LP out and a hit single, "Susie Q" -- and the Cleveland Wrecking Company, which is in the wall-of-sound tradition, with a lot of well-integrated electronic noise a la Byrds. . .
[ omitted negative review of "one group I hated, Black Pearl" ]
Except for the Dead, the big groups have been out of town. The Airplane has been in Europe with a twenty-seven-man entourage, and Big Brother recently gave its last local concert to feature Janis Joplin, who is going out on her own. The Airplane doesn't belong to San Francisco anymore; it belongs to the world, like the Beatles and white Levis. As for Janis, she has always belonged to herself. I hope she'll be well and not lose her incredible voice too soon. Incidentally, both groups' latest albums -- the Airplane's Crown of Creation and Big Brother's Cheap Thrills -- are classics. Not only that, they are pure, immediate pleasure. The Grateful Dead's new album, Anthem of the Sun, does take some getting used to, but I find myself enjoying it more and more. Sometimes I think the Dead are the only really happy people left.
(by Ellen Willis, from the "Rock, Etc." column, the New Yorker, 2 November 1968)
Reprinted in the collection Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music.
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