Travel Back In Time To Bill Graham's Fillmore East

From outside 105 Second Avenue, it’s virtually impossible to tell where the Fillmore East once stood. A small plaque by the entrance to the bank that's now there marks the spot of the legendary rock venue, which occupied the former movie theater from 1968 through 1971. Standing further back, the upper part of the facade looks the same, but that’s about it. The street sign on the corner denotes the block as Bill Graham’s Way, an appropriate recognition of the venue’s assertive proprietor.

Born Wulf Grajonca in Berlin in 1931, and known as Wulfgang in his youth, Graham is the subject of a traveling exhibit that opened this week at the New-York Historical Society. Open through August, the exhibit offers a moving and detailed overview of Graham’s life and career, including ephemera from his early life in the Bronx (where he appropriated his new name in the phone book), lots of psychedelic poster art, and documentation of Graham’s quarter-century as rock’s preeminent live promoter. An audio tour component, unfortunately, makes the exhibit both anti-social and bottlenecked, as many of the visitors follow the same slow path from display to display.

There are only a few remnants of the Fillmore East, including one of the green-and-gold usher jerseys (after Graham’s old Bronx football team, the Pirates), a handful of posters, and many excellent photographs by house documentarian and Joshua Light Show member Amalie Rothschild. A video showing under a faux-Fillmore East marquee, however, is actually Fillmore, shot entirely in San Francisco. In one case is Graham’s cowbell, possibly the one presented to him by Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart before a Fillmore East show in January 1970, which would make it the same cowbell Graham played after the band dosed him with LSD the previous year and he’d jammed with them for the night.

With the Fillmore brand now owned by LiveNation, there are currently eight (soon to be nine) venues bearing the name around the country, including San Francisco’s original Fillmore Auditorium in the Fillmore District, where Graham began promoting shows in late 1965. But the Fillmore East was the first besides the original, and Graham’s first show in New York—headlined by Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company—was on March 8th, 1968. For the next three years and change, Graham booked an astonishing array of shows into the venue.

But Big Brother were hardly the first hippies to appear on the stage. Opened in 1926 as the Commodore Theatre, for films and Yiddish vaudeville, it became a Loews during Second Avenue’s movie palace heyday. But from 1965 to 1968, when it known as the Village Theatre, it hosted a slew of concerts and events every bit as legendary as what Graham himself would book, and perhaps even more eclectic — even if the venue itself was what Village Voice columnist Richard Goldstein referred to in late 1967 as “New York’s sad-eyed answer to the Fillmore-Avalon [ballroom] scene.”

Starting with a 1965 Donovan performance promoted by folk impresario Harold Leventhal, the Village Theatre became perhaps New York’s most “lost” legendary venue. In the fall of 1966, barely two weeks before LSD became illegal, Timothy Leary took up residence for two months of weekly psychedelic lectures with Ralph Metzner, accompanied by light artists Rudi Stern and Jackie Cassen.

That same fall, Andy Warhol idly mused about taking over the space when Leary departed, starting his own religion, and presumably installing his new house band, the Velvet Underground — all of which would’ve presented a drastically alternate history.

Throughout 1966 and 1967, before Bill Graham’s arrival, numerous promoters stepped into the run-down Village Theatre to host shows that included John Coltrane (with Ornette Coleman, Alice Coltrane, Rashied Ali, Jimmy Garrison, and others), the Yardbirds (featuring Jimmy Page), The Who, Cream, Canned Heat, The Byrds, Nina Simone, The Doors, Frank Zappa, Allen Ginsberg, The Fugs, Tim Buckley, Paul Anka, Sarah Vaughan with Miriam Makeeba, Buck Owens, and a pair of infamous post-Christmas Grateful Dead gigs during which it snowed through a hole in the ceiling. There were heady soirees including a fashion show (with live performances by mysterious acts Third Eye Band and Quintet Revolutionary), a visit from Sri Swami Satchidananda (with yoga demonstration), and numerous anti-war rallies, including an October gathering hosted by Paul Krassner and the Fugs’ Ed Sanders a few days before they tried to levitate the Pentagon during a massive protest. An afternoon/evening “October Breakout” headlined by Phil Ochs also featured Charles Mingus, Archie Shepp, old-guard folk-singer Barbara Dane, and outsider street musician Moondog performing with strings.

🎵While researching this story, I attempted to create a complete chronology of performances at the Village Theatre, 1965-1968 🎵

Initially reluctant to expand his business to New York, Bill Graham finally committed in the spring of 1968. In a partnership that initially included folk music mogul Albert Grossman, Graham bought the building, soon renovated by a team led by Chip Monck, later the circumlocutory MC at Woodstock. Joshua White, who’d been developing a light show for the previous year at the Anderson Theater, built a set-up in the rigging behind the stage, so he and his crew could run shadow-free rear projections while artists performed. The Joshua Light Show would remain one of the venue’s most iconic fixtures during its three-year lifespan, turning performances by some of the era’s most vital acts even more transcendent.

Up until just before the venue opened, though, Graham had no intention of turning “Fillmore” into a brand. Originally planning to bill performances as “Bill Graham Presents at the Village Theatre,” the former owners objected, and the Fillmore East was born. When the refurbished venue opened in the spring, it became New York’s first major rock palace since promoter Alan Freed put on shows at the Paramount in Downtown Brooklyn a decade earlier.

“I wanted it to look classy,” Graham would say in his posthumous memoir, Bill Graham Presents. “So that when people came in off the street, they would rise up to a higher level. Like when someone walks into a spiffy restaurant.” With a capacity of nearly 2,700, the Fillmore East was the first real theater in New York to take live rock music seriously, and featured one of the first great, loud sound systems in Manhattan, custom designed by Bill Hanley — so serious that even the notoriously picky (and trailblazing) Grateful Dead trusted it.

Even in 1968, though, it was hard to see how the entrance at 105 Second Avenue could possibly lead into a theater. But, in classic New York style, it spread into every available space. Past the old ticket booth, the long, narrow lobby was a passageway into a wide-open two-balconied auditorium that wrapped around the corner so that the side doors opened out onto East 6th Street. The downstairs concession stand at the back of the orchestra provided sodas, hot dogs, and the usual movie theater-style provisions, but upstairs was a different story.

“Up on the balcony level was the perfect stoned-hippie-food concession,” Gary Lambert remembered in Steve Silberman’s vivid reconstruction Primal Dead at the Fillmore East. “[It] offered up fresh fruit and juices, donuts, bagels with cream cheese, and best of all, Dannon Yogurt, in a wide selection of flavors. Yogurt never tasted so good! Even today... Dannon sets loose a Proustian torrent of Fillmore memories.”

Graham would fly frequently between coasts and took an apartment around the corner, at 71 East 7th Street. The streetwise promoter recruited neighborhood kids to help load equipment and make sure none of it got stolen. When he was in New York, Graham could often be found operating from a makeshift office at a rear table of Ratner’s Delicatessen, next door to the venue. It took a few months for the venue to get up to speed, with Graham spending time on his relocation from the Fillmore District downtown to what the marquee formally called the Fillmore West at the Carousel Ballroom.

In the building upstairs from the venue’s lobby, leftover from the Village Theatre days, one of Graham’s tenants was the local underground newspaper, the East Village Other, who (in some accounts) also weren’t paying any rent. They quickly became one of Graham’s antagonists, egging on the promoter’s stand-off with the neighborhood street radical group, Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, who all but demanded that the capitalist pig Graham turn over the venue to “the community” for free shows every Wednesday. After the attempt at anarchy degenerated into chaos and Graham was chain-whipped, the free Wednesday shows were discontinued. (Things were eventually smoothed over by Wavy Gravy, then Hugh Romney.)

As was Graham’s practice at the original Fillmore, the venue booked two shows a night, usually three bands playing early and late sets, starting at 8 and 11:30, and often running extra-late, especially if the Grateful Dead were headlining. In the case of the three shows the Dead played with the Allman Brothers and Love 50 years ago past week, all three gigs ended after dawn.

Unlike Graham’s unseated general admission shows in San Francisco, the Fillmore East cleared the house between shows, did a clean-up, and started over again. With a translucent rear-stage curtain used by the Joshua Light Show, the stage crew rotated custom wheeled drum risers and amplifiers for extra-quick set-changes. Above them, the Joshua Light Show kept fans entertained with cartoons and other visual amusements, in large part to keep the audience from overcrowding the tiny lobby areas. Of course, smoking was permitted everywhere.

The classic shows happened frequently in front of the tough New York crowds. The first year of the Fillmore East saw Sly Stone’s east coast breakout, Rod Stewart’s American debut (opening for the Dead with the Jeff Beck Group), and a pair of shows that began with Led Zeppelin as the opening act for Iron Butterfly and ended the other way around. There wasn’t music every night, and Graham shut the venue down almost entirely during the summers of 1968 and 1969. It was during that latter summer that the venue’s core staff became the basic team that staged Woodstock. The Fillmore East soon became the focal point in New York’s media eye. “After Woodstock, all the famous things happened, and then it went downhill,” Joshua White would observe.

The “famous things” were high points as the countercultural musical narrative condensed itself into a stream of classic albums. But Fillmore East shows were often statements by themselves, and it was no coincidence that it was where the Who debuted the full version of Tommy in the fall of 1969 (when Pete Townshend accidentally assaulted a plain-clothes police officer onstage). Fillmore East performances often became contemporary live albums on their own, including Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsies, Frank Zappa’s Fillmore East - June 1971, the Grateful Dead’s Bear’s Choice, and the Allman Brothers Band’s At Fillmore East (and part of Eat A Peach).

Even part of Woodstock itself was recorded at the Fillmore East, with a version of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Sea of Madness” taped a month after the festival making it onto the movie soundtrack. Thanks to Bill Hanley’s sound system, it’s also generated another baker’s dozen worth of archival releases, from jazz songwriter Laura Nyro to box sets by Derek and the Dominoes. A March 1970 triple-bill of Neil Young (with Crazy Horse), Miles Davis (with Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Dave Holland, and Jack DeJohnette), and the Steve Miller Band has yielded live albums from Davis and Young.

By the time 1970 turned to 1971, Bill Graham was ready to be out. The scene of bands he’d nurtured had graduated to bigger venues. The new heavy sounds of acts like Alice Cooper and Black Sabbath were not doing it for Graham. The crowds, too, had changed, Graham complained. He had no interest in booking shows at Madison Square Garden. He shut the Fillmore East down in June 1971 with a three-night run headlined by the Allman Brothers Band, joined on the closing evening by an all-star cast that included Country Joe, Mountain, and the Beach Boys. The Fillmore West closed a week later. It was a rough year on St. Marks Place. The Electric Circus closed that summer, and even Gem Spa shut down for a spell.

The Fillmore East had an extended afterlife, though. The Allman Brothers were very far from the room’s last boogie. Promoter Barry Stuart reopened the room in late 1974 as the N.F.E., the New Fillmore East, with a bill that matched Bob Seger with Bachman-Turner Overdrive. Shortened to the N.F.E. Theatre and the Village East, it had a murky mid-‘70s life, including acting as practice space for KISS (who staged a press event there), Blue Oyster Cult, and the Dictators.

🎵 I’ve attempted to put together a chronology of live music at the New Fillmore East/N.F.E. Theatre/Village East, 1974-1975 🎵

And in 1980, the venue was mostly gutted and transformed into its longest lasting incarnation as a space for music, with visual entertainment just as far out as the Joshua Light Show. The Saint opened in September 1980, a semi-private superclub and one of the last of the pre-AIDS mega-discos. It featured a 76-foot-wide planetarium dome, a special Spitz Space System hemisphere star projector, a hydraulic light rig, and 26,000 watts of surround sound. The club’s heyday was brief, though the venue lasted until 1988, more than twice the life of Bill Graham’s Fillmore East. There was at least one performance there in a way that the old neighborhood freaks might recognize in 1986, when the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir headlined a ‘60s Ball with Abbie Hoffman, Country Joe, Jefferson Airplane’s Jorma Kaukonen, Peter Paul and Mary’s Peter Yarrow, and others.

Though Bill Graham’s posthumous memoir claims that the space again became a movie theater in the ‘90s, longtime neighborhood residents say this is not the case. The former shell of the Fillmore East (and the Village Theatre and the Commodore) lasted until 1997, when the building was finally gutted once and for all and turned into apartments. (Ratner’s Delicatessen lasted until 2004.)

“I harbored some fond, if not entirely serious, fantasies of scoring a unit somewhere in the airspace above the former stage area,” says Fillmore East regular Gary Lambert.

The Fillmore East can be playing in your headphones right now via the Grateful Dead’s Dick’s Picks 4, the Allman Brothers’ Live at Fillmore East, or any number of other excellent releases. Bill Graham and the Rock & Roll Revolution is open through August at the New-York Historical Society.