JANIS JOPLIN / GRATEFUL DEAD
FILLMORE EAST, N.Y. - The last show of a two day, four show stand is the moment of truth a performer must face when playing the Fillmore. It's usually the show attended by the most important and influential musical trade and press personages, who recognize that a performer needs a few shows to warm-up. For Janis Joplin and her new band, the moment of truth was a moment that should have been postponed.
What was missing from the new Janis Joplin was the total excitement that characterized her performance with Big Brother. Perhaps Janis felt that the new band was superior enough to let her relax a little, perhaps she was no longer excited. Janis will be given a second chance and probably a third and fourth, for she is too good a talent to be lost.
Paradoxically, we got the feeling that this new band will be a much stronger recording entity than the old. For awhile, we were thinking of it as Blood, Sweat and Janis, what with the horns and all, and then decided it was closer to the Electric Janis, what with the Nick Gravenite tunes. But somehow, Nick's songs don't sound right on Janis. We liked her rendition of "Maybe," the old Chantells' hit, the Bee Gees' "To Love Somebody." And nobody does "Summertime" better than Janis. Her two encore numbers, "Piece Of My Heart" and "Ball and Chain," were the Janis of old. But the new songs, the new sound of Janis Joplin was a letdown, and since they formed the bulk of the act, it too suffered.
Those who have never seen Janis, or have seen her on an off-night, would have been more than happy with the new show. In fact, if we had never heard, or heard of, Janis before, we would have been raving about the new discovery. Unfortunately, we know the feeling of warmth, ecstasy, of many other pleasurable things, that Janis was capable of in the past, and we can only hope she will soon be providing them again.
The Gratefull Dead were a surprise. For more than an hour, they kept us entranced by exploring every facet of rock. Though we doubt we would want to listen to the same thing on disk, we would welcome a chance to catch the whole thing again on a night when our minds were in better shape.
(from Cashbox, 22 February 1969)
Thanks to Dave Davis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ys66oXW9g28 (Janis - possibly the early show)
https://archive.org/details/gd69-02-12.late.sbd.kaplan.9072.sbeok.shnf
* * *
JANIS JOPLIN'S SONG STYLE LEAVES CRITICS IN DOUBT
NEW YORK - Janis Joplin sings the blues like she means it. Her new six-man band may not even understand it.
Miss Joplin, a hard-rock-blues singer more in the tradition of Bessie Smith and Big Mamma Willie Mae Thornton than of San Francisco rock, brought the group into Fillmore East, the Lower East Side new-music emporium, last week for a New York debut.
[line missing] -ful and funky blues band. A group, say, like the Butterfield Blues Band at its peak would be ideal. There are no strong bluesmen in her present group. The band's strongest soloist is rock-oriented guitarist Sam Andrew, a holdover from Big Brother and the Holding Company, the group for which Miss Joplin once sang lead vocals.
The present group is only three weeks old. It is not the same one she had at her much criticized performance at the Stax-Volt Revue in Memphis last December. But, as the two shows last Wednesday night showed, newness has nothing to do with growth potential. The material is not there for the developing.
The band's brief experience reduced Miss Joplin to performing a limited program. Her repertoire was already circumscribed, but for her to repeat virtually the same program in the second show as she sang in the first was a sign of artistic debilitation.
In her sometimes harsh, sometimes whispering but always raw voice, she sang many of her familiar tunes, including a vigorous "Turtle Blues."
Miss Joplin continued to sing "Summertime," a winner for her. The new band has the same arrangement on the tune as the old group except for a new, charming, baroque-like introduction by two English horns.
Her interpretation of the song changes little from performance to performance. She has routine phrase patterns for each section of the song, even down to repeating, "baby, baaby, baaaby, baaaaby," always in the same way.
But repetition is characteristic of Miss Joplin's style. Her performance of "Piece of My Heart" and "Ball and Chain," which she sang last week, were done in similar patterned fashion. It is no artistic crime for her to sing like this, but it is a strike against her creative imagination if she is to be compared with the great blues singers.
Miss Joplin also sang several songs new for her, including "Maybe," a tune the Chantels popularized in the 1950s; "Work Me, Lord," a gospel-like piece, and "You're The Only One Who Knows," a recent Nick Graventies composition.
Also on the show was the Grateful Dead, a San Francisco band that played its raucous sound unrelentingly.
Not everyone who came to see Janis Joplin at Fillmore East was of the now generation. Amid the sea of faces was Benny Goodman, the legendary "King of Swing."
Clarinetist Goodman, who is in semi-retirement, came with his daughter, Rachel, to "see the atmosphere of the Fillmore."
It was his first rock concert, and after hearing several songs, he said, "I think it's quite vital. It's awful hard to put in any category, as good or bad. You have to listen to all the groups.
"The thing that shatters me is the volume. It's so loud, it's almost deafening. It's hard to see where a clarinet would fit in there."
(by Hollie West [L.A. Times-Washington Post Service], from the Portland Oregonian, 20 February 1969)
* * *
MAYBE
Before-show crowd sounds at the Fillmore East on Tuesday night changed from Saturday movie matinee to concert hall historic as Bill Graham made his nostalgic introduction of the Grateful Dead, calling them something like the granddaddies of them all. And they were beginning to look as if they were out of a music book history. Was that bespectacled and bearded little man a cartoon figure of the Jerry Garcia whose guitar danced me to the "midnight hour" and beyond in San Francisco just two years ago?
Musically they were sounding old too. Starting with a long blues number, they wandered all around the melody and the stage like '50s jazz musicians. Then they played a sort-of western number, coming on very country and funky. Also very long. People were saying they wanted to dance; it had been a long time since I'd heard that. Dancing would have been good, if only to keep from being bored and to see if whirling about was the sorcery the Dead used to hypnotize me two years ago.
But the historic event we had really come to see/hear was the New York debut of Janis Joplin and her new band. And with Joshua Light Show sunbursts on she comes. The band was more like Janis and the Pick-ups. [ . . . ]
Impossible not to watch Janis Joplin, but closing my eyes, trying to imagine how the brass would come across with her voice in recordings...Bessie Smith with strings? No, that's not it. Brought up around the vibrating double-pitched resonating noises of amplifiers and guitars, she is more a Big Mamma Thornton with electronically scratched vocal cords. I have never heard anyone say that they didn't like Janis after having seen her sing. Somehow it takes seeing her to know that the heart-busting sounds are quivering up from her insides instead of trickling down from her head. Her records hide it and sound forced unless you've seen it happen to her through her. But wouldn't it be great to have Janis both ways?
"Maybe," a song from the '50s originally recorded by the Chantels, may be the one that will put Janis across. Coming out like an oldie done her own way, it shows what her own way is. Blues-rock, not fake blues or tricky rock. Three more new blues songs by Nick Gravenites, "As Good As You've Been," "You're the Only One Who Really Knows," and "Work Me Lord," were done with a mysteriously personal meaning. "Work Me Lord," like a sexy revival meeting, gets the whole audience involved and could be a sympathetic flip side on a hit single with "Maybe." All of her new songs need more rehearsal and performance to cement them into solid memory mashers. The whole new band approach is definitely a fermenting thing and not a finished masterpiece.
(by Susanna, from the "Riffs" column, the Village Voice, 20 February 1969)
* * *
JANIS: THE JUDY GARLAND OF ROCK? [excerpt]
NEW YORK - When Janis Joplin danced on stage in front of her new,
as-yet-unnamed, six-piece band at the Fillmore East February 11 and 12,
she seemed to have victory within her grasp. How could she miss? There
had been a "sound test" for the band (as road manager John Cooke put it)
in Rindge, New Hampshire, a "preview" in Boston - but this was Opening
Night, the Big Debut, and the city’s rockers have been working
themselves into a lather for days. All four performances were sold out,
and ticket scalpers roamed along Second Avenue offering paradise at
prices that would have been out of line for a kilo of hash.
Tuesday’s opening night crowd had more than a hint of uptown prosperity
to it. Affluent reporters from Time, Like, Look, Newsweek, and other
bastions of slick-paper supremacy laid claim to most of the
complimentary tickets, while those hardy souls from the lower echelon
rock press either stood outside in the slush, their faces pressed
against the glass, or somehow got past the door only to huddle together
in the lobby and standing-room areas to look in vain for an empty seat.
Mike Wallace and the CBS television crew were on hand documenting the
building’s events for a March 4th segment of 60 Minutes to be called,
with true media irony, "Carnegie Hall For Kids."
Through the
balloon-filled air, the Grateful Dead, the "other half" of an all-San
Francisco program, started to play "Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl."
And play they did - one of those wonderful, comfortable, one-long-song
sets that went uninterrupted for close to an hour and actually managed
to neutralize much of the inherent tension by turning the concert into
something not unlike a freebie in the park or a pleasant party at
somebody’s home.
The band played well - but, more important, gave
New York audiences something of the idea of rock as a relaxed and
relaxing way of life, not as a sporadic series of super-hypes for
super-groups. There were no artificially induced high points or low
points, no cream-in-your-jeans climax - instead, a steady stream of
satisfying music which simply went on until it stopped.
Nonprofessional response to the buildup was interesting. One long-term
Joplin fanatic, a young man named Ronnie Finkelstein, approached the
Fillmore with ecstasy and hurried to his seat just as the Grateful Dead
began their set. "I found them original and satisfying," he said. "I
wanted Janis, though."
"I rushed back when Bill Graham - the dirty
capitalist! - introduced my girl. The band futzed around for about five
minutes, and then, with a short brass intro, Janis appeared out of
nowhere. In a cape-gown sort of thing, she danced for a minute, then
threw off the cape to reveal her famous shoulder-strap pants outfit. I
was excited!"
Another admirer put it even more succinctly. "I’ve had a hard-on since four o’clock this afternoon waiting for this."
This consisted of an incredibly nervous Janis Joplin - hair flying,
long fingers showing white clenching a hand mike - in front of her new
group: Sam Andrew from Big Brother and the Holding Company, lead guitar;
terry Clements, sax; Richard Kermode, organ; Roy Markowitz, drums;
Terry Hensley, trumpet; and a temporary bass player, Keith Cherry
(ex-Pauper Brad Campbell is expected to come down from Canada to join
the band as a permanent member as soon as he can get a work permit.)
The first song made a number of things both painfully and delightfully
clear. The potential to become a genuinely great rock singer is still
there, but so are the infamous and disheartening Joplin tendencies
toward vocal overkill. Indeed, Janis doesn’t so much sing a song as to
strangle it to death right in front of you. It’s an exciting, albeit,
grisly, event to behold. But it would seem to belong more to the realm
of carnival exhibition than musical performance.
[ . . . ]
On the
first number, the band made all the local stops, while Janis was an
express. The singing and playing simply failed to mesh, Joplin
constantly projecting and the group continually receding. Between
verses, the vocalist as dancer seemed more a constrained Radio City
Rockette than a free-form blues singer. Every moment was stiff and
preordained.
The applause was respectful. People seemed to be
biding their time, waiting for the big explosion. Janis and the band
plowed into the second song, a Nick Gravenities composition, and made it
sound a smudged carbon copy of the first. Any sense of pace was
forgotten. The audience began to pall. Joplin reached for her bottle of
booze, a trademark which had been placed proudly on top of an amplifier
with all of the deliberate care inherent in the planting of a religious
symbol.
Things started to go better. "Maybe," an old Chantells
signature tune from the late Fifties, was good and hard, and
"Summertime," born of Cheap Thrills but now instrumentally processed
through Ars Nova and Blood, Sweat and Tears, brought with it flowers,
affection, a watermelon rasp, some sneaky CBS cameramen, and a more
appreciative response from admirers. Janis swayed a bit, rubbed her head
fetchingly, and hitched up her pants with a jump.
Robin and
Barry Gibb’s "To Love Somebody" was rendered needlessly grotesque as
Joplin ran through her rapidly depleting bagful of mannerisms in a
desperate attempt to inject even more meaningless into the song by
almost literally wiping up the floor with it. Then, a fast one, written
by the group, which Janis said she wanted to call "Jazz for the
Jack-offs." Again, the local-express syndrome, with a real credibility
gap developing between star and support.
Came the highlight of
the new act: Joplin’s moving and only slightly overripe singing of the
beautiful new Nick Gravenites song, "Work Me, Lord." Empathy and art
formed a strong partnership at this point, and passion, throughout the
evening so misused and purposeless, finally found a home in spiritual
rock.
It is difficult to imagine a Bob Dylan or a John Lennon
peppering an interview with constant nervous interjections of "Hey, I‘ve
never sung so great. Don’t you think I’m singing better? Well, Jesus
fucking Christ, I’m really better, believe me." But Janis seems that
rare type of personality who lacks the essential self-protective
distancing that a singer of her fame and stature would appear to need.
One gets the alarming feeling that Joplin’s whole world is precariously
balanced on what happens to her musically - that the necessary degree of
honest cynicism needed to survive an all-media assault may be buried too
far under an immensely likeable but tremendously under confident
naivete.
She knows the band isn’t together yet. Haven’t worked
together long enough - "Hey, it takes longer than a couple of weeks to get
loose, to be really tight, to push. But conceptually I like it, and I
think I’m singing better than I ever, ever did." This is what Janis
Joplin wants, this band, these songs, all of it. "I mean, I really dig
what I’m doing, but I just wish the band would push as hard as I am.
Hey, I’m the lead, you know-but they’re hanging back way too far for
me."
It all takes time, she knows. Janis wants to sing and she
wants other people in the band to sing, too. You get a bunch of
musicians together so everybody can contribute to the final product,
make it something larger than the sum. "Trouble is, we haven’t really
had a chance to get into each other yet."
It’s going to get
better. She’s sure it’s going to get better. Like maybe she’ll add a new
cat next week - "great big ugly spade cat." He blows baritone and drums
like Buddy Miles. "He’s really heavy. I really need somebody to push,
you know. There’s really not enough push in the band yet."
The
band’s got an even dozen songs together now. Not enough repertoire yet.
But Nick Gravenites has been a big help. "Isn’t his "Work Me, Lord"
beautiful? Oh, man - whew! Man, I love that guy. His songs really say
something."
Clive (Davis, president of Columbia records) isn’t
hassling her to record right away, and it’s just as well, Janis says.
She doesn’t understand people recording before they have a chance to
work at it. "Hey, I want to play a little more, I want to gig a little
bit so that the tunes get together before I make a record."
Janis
exudes several things at once: that the act is going fine right now;
that’s it’s not so fine; that it’s going to get better; that, despite
herself, there’s the terror that it might not, unless something happens.
She’s looking for a cat to be musical director, knows she doesn’t know
enough to do it herself. Somebody to pull it together. Like Michael
Bloomfield. Everybody’s doing arrangements now and...it isn’t working.
Maybe that will have to come first before a new name for the group can
be chosen. "I want a name that implies a band but has the person’s name
in it, right? Like the Buddy Miles Express. That has an identity in it.
We were thinking," she laughs, "of Janis and the Joplinaires - ha!" Except
that isn’t what a band is. What is the band? Too soon to say.
"Well, people say that I’m singing great, man. The whole San Francisco
scene, which I was afraid might be a little pissed at me for officially
disclaiming the familial San Francisco rock thing, has been fine. Jerry
Garcia told me that I made him cry. The Dead have
been so good to me, man. They’re so warm and everything. I really
needed that because of the pressure - I’ve been really scared because this
is important to me.
"The kids - well, they’re missing the familiar
tunes. You know how audiences are. And I really want to do the new
songs. I don’t want to have to get up there and sing "Down On Me" when
I’m eighty years old. The reason I did this was so that I could keep on
moving. Once I get the new tunes on a record, then the kids won’t mind."
It will all be better then.
Doing the 60 Minutes segment had been really funny, Janis said she just
laughed all the time at the media and the Big Build-Up she had gotten.
It was too much to take seriously. "It’s surreal. It’s got nothing to do
with me, really. I’m beginning to be able to cope with it. I don’t
believe it, you know - I mean, you can’t." One thing you’ve got to be sure
about, she thinks, is that you don’t start believing you are worth all
that attention, Janis laughed.
[ . . . ]
Janis had thought the Fillmore East "opening" had gone
well - "I’m really doing good," she thought - but the audience reaction
had been decidedly mixed.
The kid who’d kept that hard-on all
that while thought Janis was the greatest thing he’d ever seen, and
didn’t want to say any more than that. But Ronnie Finkelstein liked her
better with Big Brother. Ronnie thought she was flaunting her sexuality
and that altogether it was a vulgar display. "Her thing now is
showboating. Her dancing is a drag. Everything is a big put-on." An
ex-worshiper, art director Gene Mallard, felt that success most
definitely had spoiled Janis Joplin. This new thing was a brassy
burlesque show - the old hypnoticism was gone - there was an air of boredom.
"Miss Superstar and her group," said Mallard, "are just another
put-together plasticized show."
The full article here:
http://www.janisjoplin.net/news/8/48/Janis-The-Judy-Garland-of-Rock/
(by Paul Nelson, from Rolling Stone, 15 March 1969)
The Dead's show was released on the Fillmore East 2-11-69 CD.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBEiwABOBp0&t=05m23s (10 seconds of film from the early show)
Oct 5, 2017
Oct 3, 2017
August 5, 1967: O'Keefe Center, Toronto, Ontario
TORONTO AUDIENCE APATHETIC
Something unfortunate happened at the O'Keefe Center in Toronto last Saturday afternoon. The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane were met by an unresponsive audience, and gave the audience what perhaps it deserved - an almost wholly uninspired performance.
Rock is an active art, demanding an active response. Active in this sense is subjective and broadly defined - it might be dancing, might be sitting while moving with the music, or even sitting motionless. None of these is inherently active or passive; what is essential is an effort to reach out and meet the music. Physical manifestations can easily be deceptive - they were last Saturday. The people dancing on stage were, for the most part, contemporary counterparts of those who were doing it on American Bandstand ten years ago. A few seemed to have really felt the music, but the majority were up there either because it was the thing to do or because they had a better view from onstage than from their seats.
Returning to the program itself, the planning was disastrous. It catered to the wishes of the audience, shying away from any attempt to change those wishes for the better. Thus, the Dead found themselves degradingly sandwiched between Luke and the Apostles (Toronto's most famous and most offensive white blues group) and a 20-minute intermission. Faced with poor programming, a hum in their sound system which forced them to eliminate everything soft and slow in their repertoire, and finally with an audience who came only to see the Airplane (just as they flock to hear Paul Revere and the Raiders), the Dead failed to bring across their beautiful and unified sound. The beautifully ugly Jerry Garcia smile was conspicuous in its absence.
As far as the musical quality of the performance is concerned, the Airplane clearly outclassed the Dead. The honor was a somewhat dubious one, however - it proved that the Airplane sound can survive even when they don't feel it, while the Dead sound loses its impact under such circumstances. In any case, it would be senseless to generalize from this performance, for it was the exception rather than the rule. But it points up a problem that these groups, and many others, will have to confront in the near future. It is this: that in order to succeed financially, they will have to perform in many cities to audiences even less receptive than in Toronto. Most likely they will fail there, as they did in Toronto, to turn people on to their music in the way they would like to. They will probably learn (and from some of Garcia's comments it seems they already have) that their music, powerful though it is, cannot break down the barriers which people have conditioned themselves to live behind. If their goal is to spread the love message throughout the continent, they will fail. It is for this reason that last Saturday afternoon was a sad one.
The Grateful Dead are at their best, it seems, performing to their own audience on their own terms, and this was obviously an impossibility at O'Keefe, since neither was the case. Due to the structure of the program, they were unable to let Pigpen go off into a 30-minute blues like Midnight Hour. He is the best white blues singer anywhere, but the crowd wanted none of it. Good Morning Little Schoolgirl was beautiful, but got neither response nor applause. The song that went over best was the folk song Rider (of Kensington Trio [sic] and Serendipity Singer stock), and I'm afraid it was accepted not on its own merits but rather because it sounded more like the Airplane than anything else they did.
The Airplane flew most smoothly when Gracie Slick sat down at the organ to let Marty Balin take over the lead singing. He is far better in person than on record, while the opposite is true of his female counterpart. Today (which is either cliche-ridden or brilliant, depending on the circumstances under which it is heard), was the best song of the afternoon, because Marty felt the music, as even this audience was able to discern.
Somebody to Love and White Rabbit, with Gracie singing lead, came across with too much strength. It seemed that this beautiful yet sinister evangelist was standing on stage imploring the audience to love, while as they had seen a moment before, she really didn't seem to practice what she preached. This overbearing evangelism (Feed your head! Feed your head!) grates on the consciousness of the listener rather than soothing it.
The difference between the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead is one of approach rather than message. The message for both is love (in case Time and Newsweek haven't reached you yet) and freedom. The Airplane screams the message loudest and least subtly, and thus seems to have reached more people (in terms of popularity). The Dead attempt to bring it across through their love for the music and for their audience (when it is theirs), and through a complete lack of pretension. Their subtlety is their greatest asset, and will prevent them from becoming commercially successful in the sense that the Airplane is. The Dead should not waste their sound on people who don't want to hear it.
Next week the Spectrum will publish a review of this concert by Eric Steese, in "The Grump."
(by Danny Rotholz, from the Spectrum, Buffalo, 11 August 1967)
* * *
THE GRUMP
When I sort of talked myself into attempting a review of the Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, and Luke and the Apostles as they appeared in Toronto, it appears that I considerably underestimated the task. Those who try to dabble in words forget that there are things subjective left in the world, or I at least committed such a transgression.
I find myself confronted with the problem of trying to conceive of a program of music and color in very cold and inadequate words of black print. I do not readily see a solution that I can approach in less than a few thousand carefully chosen words, but bear with me and we will try.
Chronological order of program - Luke and Apostles, the Dead, an intermission and the Airplane. The first is a Toronto group added to the program after appearing with the other two groups in a free concert in front of the Toronto City Hall - and how would that turn Frank Sedita on? [The mayor of Buffalo - ed.] Two light groups involved - Headlights from San Francisco providing a rear projection operation directly back of the performing group, and Sensefex from New York attempting to befuddle the rest of the theater.
And whence from here? - into a sort of never never land where the main object seems to be to overwhelm the defenses of the individual and pull him into a world where color, patterns, and music relate in a fashion which invalidates cause and effect, action and reaction, and simply exists.
Into a wall of sound, color, movement and activity where it is impossible to notice everything at once even though the mind desperately tries in order to have something concrete to fix on, a tie to a normality it can understand and remember.
It turned out to be a mixed success. It drove a number of people out of the theater, but it also pulled a crowd of devotees to sit and dance on those portions of the stage not occupied by the performing group. It appeared to my rather unknowing eye that some of the devotees may have had a little something extra in the way of pharmaceuticals of one kind of another going for them, but that is purely subjective. Suffice it to say that the groups accomplished their desired effect - if I am right about what it was - in at least as many people as they drove out.
I would guess again, that the largest portion of the audience, including myself, were torn in a variety of directions. Ego dominated, and raised on the Protestant Ethic, we knew that this was bad, way down in our heart of hearts. But because of embarrassment, stubbornness, or fascination, we had no real desire to leave.
One hears much talk of hippies these days, and these three groups seemed somehow to speak of that movement. I have watched and listened to a fair number of jazz groups but I do not ever recall seeing an as impromptu, instantaneous, spontaneous and unconcerned performance in my life.
In trying to analyze my own feelings about the seven hours or so I spent in the O'Keefe Centre I am not even sure I enjoyed it. I suspect that you can write a review of an evening like that only if you can remain completely apart from it. This I could not do, yet neither could I allow myself to become a part of it and try and describe it from the inside. I was only a befuddled observer, which I expect is obvious from this word hash.
Let me say that I was not prepared for the musical talent I found. I am lyric oriented usually, having at best a very poor ear, but both the Grateful Dead and the Airplane managed to convey something to me through music alone - even if I am unable to express what it is they transmitted. And I have come to the conclusion that it really is not that important to understand the words to the songs, especially of the Airplane. The voice is simply another instrument to be blended into a collage of color, sound, and moving bodies. With one exception, Miss Grace Slick.
Miss Slick, to crib a line, makes the Airplane fly. She is the only difference in their first and second albums, and the difference is large. Good they were, now - they may very well be something unique and impossible to classify. She should have no voice left by the end of one song - much less a performance, but it never seems to crack, squeal, or even waver. It simply skewers you into a seat and holds you, especially if you are male.
I quit, I have tried, and I suspect failed, to communicate the happening - and I finally think I have an inkling of what that word means now - at the O'Keefe.
And if you ever, ever, ever have a chance, see the Jefferson Airplane, and the Grateful Dead - then sit down and write me a letter describing it.
The imagery must exist, but it is beyond me.
(by Eric Steese, from the Spectrum, Buffalo, 18 August 1967)
* * *
JEFFERSON AIRPLANE BUZZES CANADIANS
TORONTO - The Jefferson Airplane landed in Canada recently with the Grateful Dead aboard and proved a big success for their hippie and pseudo-hippie fans, at free "we love you" concerts in Toronto and Montreal, and a slightly better than 50 per cent draw at the O'Keefe Centre in Toronto at a $4.50 to $2 ticket scale.
The July 30-Aug. 5 engagement of the Jefferson Airplane, RCA Victor artists, and Grateful Dead, Warner Bros. artists, at the O'Keefe Centre was heralded by SW Magazine, a national publication with a circulation well over half a million, as "the coming of age of rock 'n' roll," as much because of the setting as because of the sound.
Certainly the two San Francisco groups, plus the local Luke and the Apostles, and the light show by Headlights supplemented by Sensefox Inc. [sic] of New York, made up the furthest-out attraction yet to play the O'Keefe, which brings to Toronto top Broadway musicals, ballet, opera, drama, and such concert stars as Harry Belafonte, Liberace, Judy Garland, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass.
For the first time in the eight-year history of the prestigious, 3,200-seat showplace, patrons climbed on stage to dance or listen, danced in the aisles, and stayed after the concert to dance on stage again to improvisations by all three groups playing together.
Audience reaction to the O'Keefe Centre performances again reflected the power of records, as The Airplane's biggest disk hits, "White Rabbit" and "Somebody to Love," drew the strongest response.
The Airplane and the Dead reaped maximum exposure in the press and on radio and TV during their Canadian visit. Their free performance in Toronto's City Hall Square a week prior to their O'Keefe opening drew crowds estimated at from 10,000 to 40,000, only exceeded by the wordage covering the event in the three daily papers. They co-operated fully with TV and radio interviews.
Another free performance at Place Ville Marie in Montreal drew 20,000 to 25,000 and again, full media coverage. They returned to Toronto Aug. 7 and 8 to tape an appearance on an upcoming CBS-TV "O'Keefe Centre Presents" show and drew a capacity audience for the taping sessions.
(by Kit Morgan, from Billboard, 26 August 1967)
Thanks to Dave Davis.
See also:
http://deadsources.blogspot.com/2012/02/july-31-1967-okeefe-centre-toronto.html
Something unfortunate happened at the O'Keefe Center in Toronto last Saturday afternoon. The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane were met by an unresponsive audience, and gave the audience what perhaps it deserved - an almost wholly uninspired performance.
Rock is an active art, demanding an active response. Active in this sense is subjective and broadly defined - it might be dancing, might be sitting while moving with the music, or even sitting motionless. None of these is inherently active or passive; what is essential is an effort to reach out and meet the music. Physical manifestations can easily be deceptive - they were last Saturday. The people dancing on stage were, for the most part, contemporary counterparts of those who were doing it on American Bandstand ten years ago. A few seemed to have really felt the music, but the majority were up there either because it was the thing to do or because they had a better view from onstage than from their seats.
Returning to the program itself, the planning was disastrous. It catered to the wishes of the audience, shying away from any attempt to change those wishes for the better. Thus, the Dead found themselves degradingly sandwiched between Luke and the Apostles (Toronto's most famous and most offensive white blues group) and a 20-minute intermission. Faced with poor programming, a hum in their sound system which forced them to eliminate everything soft and slow in their repertoire, and finally with an audience who came only to see the Airplane (just as they flock to hear Paul Revere and the Raiders), the Dead failed to bring across their beautiful and unified sound. The beautifully ugly Jerry Garcia smile was conspicuous in its absence.
As far as the musical quality of the performance is concerned, the Airplane clearly outclassed the Dead. The honor was a somewhat dubious one, however - it proved that the Airplane sound can survive even when they don't feel it, while the Dead sound loses its impact under such circumstances. In any case, it would be senseless to generalize from this performance, for it was the exception rather than the rule. But it points up a problem that these groups, and many others, will have to confront in the near future. It is this: that in order to succeed financially, they will have to perform in many cities to audiences even less receptive than in Toronto. Most likely they will fail there, as they did in Toronto, to turn people on to their music in the way they would like to. They will probably learn (and from some of Garcia's comments it seems they already have) that their music, powerful though it is, cannot break down the barriers which people have conditioned themselves to live behind. If their goal is to spread the love message throughout the continent, they will fail. It is for this reason that last Saturday afternoon was a sad one.
The Grateful Dead are at their best, it seems, performing to their own audience on their own terms, and this was obviously an impossibility at O'Keefe, since neither was the case. Due to the structure of the program, they were unable to let Pigpen go off into a 30-minute blues like Midnight Hour. He is the best white blues singer anywhere, but the crowd wanted none of it. Good Morning Little Schoolgirl was beautiful, but got neither response nor applause. The song that went over best was the folk song Rider (of Kensington Trio [sic] and Serendipity Singer stock), and I'm afraid it was accepted not on its own merits but rather because it sounded more like the Airplane than anything else they did.
The Airplane flew most smoothly when Gracie Slick sat down at the organ to let Marty Balin take over the lead singing. He is far better in person than on record, while the opposite is true of his female counterpart. Today (which is either cliche-ridden or brilliant, depending on the circumstances under which it is heard), was the best song of the afternoon, because Marty felt the music, as even this audience was able to discern.
Somebody to Love and White Rabbit, with Gracie singing lead, came across with too much strength. It seemed that this beautiful yet sinister evangelist was standing on stage imploring the audience to love, while as they had seen a moment before, she really didn't seem to practice what she preached. This overbearing evangelism (Feed your head! Feed your head!) grates on the consciousness of the listener rather than soothing it.
The difference between the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead is one of approach rather than message. The message for both is love (in case Time and Newsweek haven't reached you yet) and freedom. The Airplane screams the message loudest and least subtly, and thus seems to have reached more people (in terms of popularity). The Dead attempt to bring it across through their love for the music and for their audience (when it is theirs), and through a complete lack of pretension. Their subtlety is their greatest asset, and will prevent them from becoming commercially successful in the sense that the Airplane is. The Dead should not waste their sound on people who don't want to hear it.
Next week the Spectrum will publish a review of this concert by Eric Steese, in "The Grump."
(by Danny Rotholz, from the Spectrum, Buffalo, 11 August 1967)
* * *
THE GRUMP
When I sort of talked myself into attempting a review of the Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, and Luke and the Apostles as they appeared in Toronto, it appears that I considerably underestimated the task. Those who try to dabble in words forget that there are things subjective left in the world, or I at least committed such a transgression.
I find myself confronted with the problem of trying to conceive of a program of music and color in very cold and inadequate words of black print. I do not readily see a solution that I can approach in less than a few thousand carefully chosen words, but bear with me and we will try.
Chronological order of program - Luke and Apostles, the Dead, an intermission and the Airplane. The first is a Toronto group added to the program after appearing with the other two groups in a free concert in front of the Toronto City Hall - and how would that turn Frank Sedita on? [The mayor of Buffalo - ed.] Two light groups involved - Headlights from San Francisco providing a rear projection operation directly back of the performing group, and Sensefex from New York attempting to befuddle the rest of the theater.
And whence from here? - into a sort of never never land where the main object seems to be to overwhelm the defenses of the individual and pull him into a world where color, patterns, and music relate in a fashion which invalidates cause and effect, action and reaction, and simply exists.
Into a wall of sound, color, movement and activity where it is impossible to notice everything at once even though the mind desperately tries in order to have something concrete to fix on, a tie to a normality it can understand and remember.
It turned out to be a mixed success. It drove a number of people out of the theater, but it also pulled a crowd of devotees to sit and dance on those portions of the stage not occupied by the performing group. It appeared to my rather unknowing eye that some of the devotees may have had a little something extra in the way of pharmaceuticals of one kind of another going for them, but that is purely subjective. Suffice it to say that the groups accomplished their desired effect - if I am right about what it was - in at least as many people as they drove out.
I would guess again, that the largest portion of the audience, including myself, were torn in a variety of directions. Ego dominated, and raised on the Protestant Ethic, we knew that this was bad, way down in our heart of hearts. But because of embarrassment, stubbornness, or fascination, we had no real desire to leave.
One hears much talk of hippies these days, and these three groups seemed somehow to speak of that movement. I have watched and listened to a fair number of jazz groups but I do not ever recall seeing an as impromptu, instantaneous, spontaneous and unconcerned performance in my life.
In trying to analyze my own feelings about the seven hours or so I spent in the O'Keefe Centre I am not even sure I enjoyed it. I suspect that you can write a review of an evening like that only if you can remain completely apart from it. This I could not do, yet neither could I allow myself to become a part of it and try and describe it from the inside. I was only a befuddled observer, which I expect is obvious from this word hash.
Let me say that I was not prepared for the musical talent I found. I am lyric oriented usually, having at best a very poor ear, but both the Grateful Dead and the Airplane managed to convey something to me through music alone - even if I am unable to express what it is they transmitted. And I have come to the conclusion that it really is not that important to understand the words to the songs, especially of the Airplane. The voice is simply another instrument to be blended into a collage of color, sound, and moving bodies. With one exception, Miss Grace Slick.
Miss Slick, to crib a line, makes the Airplane fly. She is the only difference in their first and second albums, and the difference is large. Good they were, now - they may very well be something unique and impossible to classify. She should have no voice left by the end of one song - much less a performance, but it never seems to crack, squeal, or even waver. It simply skewers you into a seat and holds you, especially if you are male.
I quit, I have tried, and I suspect failed, to communicate the happening - and I finally think I have an inkling of what that word means now - at the O'Keefe.
And if you ever, ever, ever have a chance, see the Jefferson Airplane, and the Grateful Dead - then sit down and write me a letter describing it.
The imagery must exist, but it is beyond me.
(by Eric Steese, from the Spectrum, Buffalo, 18 August 1967)
* * *
JEFFERSON AIRPLANE BUZZES CANADIANS
TORONTO - The Jefferson Airplane landed in Canada recently with the Grateful Dead aboard and proved a big success for their hippie and pseudo-hippie fans, at free "we love you" concerts in Toronto and Montreal, and a slightly better than 50 per cent draw at the O'Keefe Centre in Toronto at a $4.50 to $2 ticket scale.
The July 30-Aug. 5 engagement of the Jefferson Airplane, RCA Victor artists, and Grateful Dead, Warner Bros. artists, at the O'Keefe Centre was heralded by SW Magazine, a national publication with a circulation well over half a million, as "the coming of age of rock 'n' roll," as much because of the setting as because of the sound.
Certainly the two San Francisco groups, plus the local Luke and the Apostles, and the light show by Headlights supplemented by Sensefox Inc. [sic] of New York, made up the furthest-out attraction yet to play the O'Keefe, which brings to Toronto top Broadway musicals, ballet, opera, drama, and such concert stars as Harry Belafonte, Liberace, Judy Garland, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass.
For the first time in the eight-year history of the prestigious, 3,200-seat showplace, patrons climbed on stage to dance or listen, danced in the aisles, and stayed after the concert to dance on stage again to improvisations by all three groups playing together.
Audience reaction to the O'Keefe Centre performances again reflected the power of records, as The Airplane's biggest disk hits, "White Rabbit" and "Somebody to Love," drew the strongest response.
The Airplane and the Dead reaped maximum exposure in the press and on radio and TV during their Canadian visit. Their free performance in Toronto's City Hall Square a week prior to their O'Keefe opening drew crowds estimated at from 10,000 to 40,000, only exceeded by the wordage covering the event in the three daily papers. They co-operated fully with TV and radio interviews.
Another free performance at Place Ville Marie in Montreal drew 20,000 to 25,000 and again, full media coverage. They returned to Toronto Aug. 7 and 8 to tape an appearance on an upcoming CBS-TV "O'Keefe Centre Presents" show and drew a capacity audience for the taping sessions.
(by Kit Morgan, from Billboard, 26 August 1967)
Thanks to Dave Davis.
See also:
http://deadsources.blogspot.com/2012/02/july-31-1967-okeefe-centre-toronto.html
Aug 15, 2017
1880: The Perils of Deadheadism
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 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
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