September 10, 1991 with Branford: Best Show of the 1990s?

Yes it was. In my opinion, this was the best show of the 1990s for the Grateful Dead.  No doubt it was the best show from 1991-1995, and I know there were some Dozin shows in Spring 1990 including another Branford classic, but this is the one for me. I have a nice audience paying here, but take the effort to get the DSBD or better yet the 30 Trips.

The only show I saw after 1987 was the lowest rated Branford show in December 1994 in LA.  Was still a wonder for me, that late in the game.

In the amazing September 1991, this one has it all, song selection, playing and Dark Star. Help on the Way, great CC Rider>Train to Cry medley, just about everything you could ever want. Enjoy

A little known fact is that six days later on Sept 17, 1991 played the National Anthem at the Mets game in Shea in front of a tiny 4,355 crowd. Brandon was also playing a couple of gigs at the Joyce Theater Sept 12 and 13.

Blair's thoughts

Dupree Diamond Review

From Deadbase 1991

NY TIMES Sept 9, 1991

In a recessionary pop music environment in which tours keel over and die and radio and MTV stars hit the road only to cancel their tours, the Grateful Dead, 26 years old and counting, are doing better than ever. So far this year, their gross for live shows has been higher than any other band's. For the first six months of the year, the Dead earned $20 million. Playing stadium-size venues -- something no other tour has dared do this summer -- the band has sold out virtually every show it has played, and the prediction is that for the rest of the year, it will sell out everything that's left.

Yesterday the Grateful Dead arrived in New York to play nine sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden.

"If I knew what made us popular, I'd bottle it," one of the group's leaders, the guitarist Jerry Garcia, said in a telephone interview. "Whatever it is, it invented us, we didn't invent it. The audience thinks we're providing more than music, but we don't let on what we're providing, intentionally. We're elliptical. Someone once wrote that we're a real cheap vacation to Bermuda, which is kind of right. But insofar as we're providing a safe context to be together with a lot of people who aren't afraid of each other, which is real valuable in New York, I'd guess, we're important."

Part of the Grateful Dead experience is its audience. However the baby-boom generation has ended up making a living, it still likes to go to concerts, perhaps dreaming of California freedom and San Francisco bohemia. People sliding in from a hard day on Wall Street sit next to people two generations younger in tie-dye whose glazed eyes don't come from staring at a computer all day and who have been following the tour, showing up at every concert. Standard parts of the scene are the Grateful Dead A.A. chapter, out in force, and the officially sanctioned bootleggers, who sit beneath a forest of microphones taping each precious drop of music. And unreconstructed older hippies, role models and mentors to the teen-agers in the audience, also show up in tie-dye but with streaks of gray in their hair.

Each show is an event, a spectacle that draws meaning from itself as much as it does from the music.

"With all the kinds of people that come, old-timers and kids, it's a little hard to tell what makes them all have a valuable experience," Mr. Garcia said. "I used to wonder about it and worry. Suppose we're misleading all these people? But it's not really like that, I realized, because we're not selling a point of view. We stay away from advocating much at all, so people are left on their own to imagine who we are."

Though the core of the band -- Mr. Garcia and Bob Weir on guitars, Phil Lesh on bass, and Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann on percussion -- has been together since 1968, the loss of its pianist, Brent Mydland, to a drug overdose last year and the subsequent inclusion of Vince Welnick and Bruce Hornsby on keyboards have meant that the band has been changing its sound. Though it still does its standard two-set shows, with a long drum interlude, and though it still performs many of its classic songs -- playing without a set list, the band can do six nights without repeating itself -- it is developing a thicker and harder sound. Not that this has changed the audience's experience too much; the shows still feature people dancing in the aisles, performing a particularly arrhythmic dance that's specific to Grateful Dead shows.

"The band is basically a new band with the two new guys," Mr. Garcia said. "Those guys have to catch up with 25 years of stuff, and we have to learn to hear what their unique capabilities are. In the short run, it's a setback, but in the long run it's an advantage. The band is more solid now; it's lost some of its lightness but there's a little more rhythmic precision, which we could always use." Going Out Separately

Mr. Garcia has been busy recently, putting out two albums, including one, "The Jerry Garcia Band," (Arista) culled from a tour he did with his own band, featuring songs like "The Way You Do the Things You Do," "Dear Prudence" and "Tangled Up in Blue." Typically, the songs are completely remade, as much a comment on the tunes' potential as about the original version of the songs. The other album, "Jerry Garcia/David Grisman" (Acoustic Disc), is a series of acoustic pieces by Mr. Garcia and his old mandolinist friend, David Grisman.

"I can afford to be more selective now, and I have the luxury to pick and choose that I haven't always had," Mr. Garcia said. "I worked as a studio musician in the late 1960's and early 70's, without that much concern for who I was recording with. Everything I've done recently is something that I wanted to do."

Mr. Garcia mentioned possible projects with Paul Kantner, the former Jefferson Airplane and Starship guitarist, and with Mr. Hornsby. And he has just appeared in some ads for Levi's jeans: "Me, Hornsby and Branford Marsalis," Mr. Garcia said. "Spike Lee directed, and I figure if Spike can sell out, so can I."

Of all the major rock guitarists to arrive in the 1960's, Mr. Garcia is arguably the most musically literate. He's just as at home talking about Indian improvisation as he is about John Coltrane or about Brazilian mandolin players. Taking bluegrass and jazz as a conceptual framework, his solos, shifting easily from harmonic color to harmonic color, always sidestep cliches. And his improvisations swing and crest the same way a jazz musician's might, with an intensity that isn't predicated on volume. He's one of the few rockers, in fact, who can sustain a lengthy improvisation.

"I'm still learning," he said. "As long as I'm still learning I can keep playing, and it's going to be fun. There's a certain problem-solving aspect to improvisation that I like, it's thinking on your feet. There's an intellectual and emotional side to it, and the emotional side I can't quite articulate. It's one of those things you feel or you don't. The intellectual is easer to grasp, it's the bead game, with infinite ways a solo can go. Freezing the choices in time and choosing, that's the satisfaction. As I get older I'm starting to perceive a greater sense of composition, a sense of contour and development that is missing in my early stuff. The earlier stuff, truthfully, is embarrassing."

It is the improvisational aspect of the Grateful Dead's music that keeps it fresh, even as the band's members reach an age that at one time would have been thought impossible for a functioning rock group. (Mr. Garcia is 49 years old; Mr. Lesh is the oldest at 51.)

"If Benny Goodman and Pablo Casals could do it, so can we," said Mr. Garcia. "I keep playing and touring because I enjoy it. But it can be labor intensive. Rehearsing the Grateful Dead is major work. It's one of the reasons we don't come up with new material every tour. The band is evolutionary, and where everybody learns a new tune right away, deciding what to play goes on for years. Everybody in the band is so amazingly idiosyncratic, nobody plays a formula. From a writer's point of view, there's two years' worth of discomfort performing a new tune. About the second year it starts turning into something.

"But, you know, everything is always subject to change."

Photo: The Grateful Dead, which earns more in live shows than any other band, last night began nine sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden. (Angel Franco/The New York Times)

An Interview with Jerry Garcia

Richard Gehr, Newsday, 9 September 1991

IT WAS THE first thing that happened to the Grateful Dead when they arrived in New York City on June 1, 1967, and Jerry Garcia remembers it as though it were, well, the Summer of Love.

"Somebody picked us up at the airport in VW buses," recalled the guitarist by telephone recently. "We hit town and there was a little parade. The hippies from the East Village came, and we took our gear to Tompkins Square Park and played with the Fugs. It was fun." It was also free.

The Tompkins Square Bandshell was demolished a couple of weeks ago, but the jollies continue at Madison Square Garden, where the Dead conclude a sold-out nine-performance run this Wednesday. Back then, the Dead (whose longtime core includes guitarist Bob Weir, bassist Phil Lesh, and drummers Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart) were intensely playful alchemists who took audiences along on bluesy psychedelic star flights that played fast and loose with musical parameters.

Today it's a somewhat different entity, a heavily mythified and economically prosperous beast with nearly 30 years collective experience behind it. As other groups gang up to offer cost-efficient concert packages, the Dead easily sell out scores of arena shows each year on their own with minimal hype. Sometimes quality and consistency become their own reward.

For Garcia, the Dead are in a transitional period, having replaced Brent Mydland (who died of a drug overdose last year) with keyboardists Bruce Hornsby and Vince Welnick. "I would say that within the next couple of years the band will go through some interesting changes," he says. "I think we're going to end up with something more powerful than what we've had in the past. When you add more guys, you've got to have a greater agreement about precisely what the tempos are and how the time is divided. Especially since one of the guys is Hornsby, who has great chops and is into dividing up the time into little teeny pieces."

Despite its inherent looseness, and occasional jams with the Neville Brothers and Branford Marsalis, the Grateful Dead event-experience has become more codified over the years - much like its eternally tie-dyed, mainly college-aged audience. Does Garcia ever get a notion to shake the whole thing up?

"Absolutely. As a matter of fact, I'm doing that right now in a mild sort of way. Because it suddenly occurred to me this last year that, hey, I'm starting to get a little tired." Is there anything specific Garcia would like to see the Dead do more of? "I'd like to see us take more vacations!" he says with a laugh. "But if we're going to keep on doing this, we have to focus on making it more fun for us. If that means making it more challenging, or whatever it takes, that's what we've got to do."

Don't fret about Garcia retiring anytime soon; he won't hit 50 until next year. Meanwhile, the excellent Jerry Garcia Band (Arista), a recently released double-CD, documents the live adventures of his primary sideline, a rhythmically taut groove machine specializing in Bob Dylan and r&b cover versions. The versatile band's namesake characterizes the group as "relaxed," "comfortable," and "low-maintenance," in contrast to the Dead, which is "kind of a big deal." Why so much Dylan? "His songs have real intelligent lyrics. They're very resonant for me."

Another facet of Garcia's versatile musical persona, which ranges from old-timey styles to free jazz, receives exposure on Jerry Garcia/David Grisman (Acoustic Disc), a deceptively casual-sounding non-electric project pairing the former Captain Trips with modern bluegrass music's most formidable mandolin player.

"We complement each other," the guitarist says. "He's kind of a tightly organized, well-rehearsed player and I'm a loose, undisciplined kind of player." Working a similar vein, Garcia has also been recording with Red Allen, "one of the fine old voices of bluegrass."

Garcia and the Dead have always operated as an alternative to the music industry. Many of their recordings are available only on the band's own label, while approximately half their concert tickets are sold through Grateful Dead Ticket Service, which Ticketmaster and Ticketron have pressured the group to discontinue. Although the band records for a major label, Arista, its records often seem like afterthoughts to the concert experience. By giving old songs fresh twists, like a repertory jazz group, the roadwork fuels their legend while paradoxically making them less appealing to an industry that relies on the appearance of constant novelty to generate profit.

According to Garcia, the main problem with the music industry is that it isn't doing anything to support its future. "Where are musicians going come from? The music business makes enough money so there could be a music college or something, but it doesn't give anything back. It's not very conscientious."

While drugs still tend to play a certain part in much of the audience's enjoyment of the band (every religion needs its sacrament), Garcia himself shies away from the sort of chemical stimulation that inspired the band's improvisatory adventures. Garcia claims not to remember the last time he intentionally played live on LSD.

"Acid today comes in such small doses that if they dosed me, I don't think I'd notice it, to tell you the truth. Sometimes I feel like I've been hit with something, so I'm sure it occasionally happens. But I get a serious buzz just playing. My responsibility is to deliver a competent show and I have enough trouble going out there normal. The days you could get high and the audience wouldn't mind are over."

© Richard Gehr, 1991

The Warlocks at the Spaceship October 8-9, 1989

I expect in a straw poll of Deadheads, the Warlocks shows would be considered the top-shows of the 1980s (although it's hard to beat Lewiston 9-6-80 and Oakland 12-31-81 for me) 

My only Hampton show was the first one 10 years earlier on May 4, 1979 so I was along time and fart away from going to these unbelievable shows.  

Here are some tales from this golden road.  

Bird Sing, Help>Slip>Franklins, Gimme Dew, Bid You Goodnight

Playin UJB Playin Dark Star Death Dont Attics

Yes, I would love to have been there

Duprees Diamond Reviews

And Unbroken Chain

There's a Riot in Richmond, November 1-2, 1985

Bring out the horses and the hoses, the whiskey and the wine, the Dead are back in town. While the Grateful Dead, played Virginia a total of 37 times, only 5 were in Richmond (2nd to Hampton's 21 shows), the Mosque in 1977, and the Coliseum in 1983, 1984 and these last two.  The local police did not appreciate the Comes A Time, China Doll and Morning Dew played over these two nights.

The first night was the show of 1985 according to the Deadbase XI polling, while the second night hardly received a vote.  Have fun these were groovy nights, complete with video footage, audio, and a nice contemporary Bill Graham Rolling Stone Interview at the bottom.

The Rolling Stone Interview: Bill Graham

Michael Goldberg, Rolling Stone, 19 December 1985

The P.T. Barnum of rock & roll celebrates his twentieth anniversary

TWENTY YEARS ago, on November 6th, 1965, Bill Graham produced his first concert. It was a benefit for the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and it featured an eclectic group of artists: poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, the Jefferson Airplane and improvisational comedians the Committee. The show was held at the troupe's Howard Street loft, and thousands of people showed up. In the ensuing months, Graham held two more Mime Troupe benefits. By then, he had discovered an auditorium in San Francisco's Fillmore District – and his calling. "I came to realize what I could do with my life," he said. "I am not an artist. But I had found a means of expression."

Graham was born Wolfgang Grajonca in Berlin on January 8th, 1931. His father died in a construction accident two days later; his mother placed him and his youngest sister in a Berlin orphanage so she could work. His earliest memory is of being taken to an orphanage in France, which is where he was in 1939 when war broke out between France and Germany. Two years later, a Red Cross representative helped Graham and sixty-three other children flee the Nazis. It was a nightmarish journey that eventually landed him in New York. Graham's mother died in a Nazi concentration camp.

Today, the fifty-four-year-old Graham is a multimillionaire who rules over a music-business empire that grosses more than $100 million a year. Though still best known for the hundreds of concerts his company, Bill Graham Presents, stages each year, he also has a management division (Santana and Eddie Money are two of his clients); a technical division; a merchandising company; record-production, music-publishing and film-production wings; and even a food and beverage company, Fillmore Fingers. In addition to presenting nearly every major rock and pop act that comes to the San Francisco Bay Area, Graham has promoted national tours by Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones, and he was the producer of the Band's farewell concert, the Last Waltz, and of the American portion of Live Aid.

Graham, who has two sons (David, 17, and Alex, 8) and a stepson (Thomas, 18), has been married once, and is now divorced. He currently owns a home in Marin County, an office-apartment in Manhattan and shares a vacation property in Lake Geneva, Switzerland. His spacious, million-dollar Marin County home, which is where these interviews were conducted, sits on nearly nine acres in the hills thirty minutes north of San Francisco. A quarter-mile driveway, lined with eucalyptus trees, leads up to the house, past an immense, slowly spinning lighted globe and a gigantic skull – both props from some Grateful Dead show – set on the hillside. There's a swimming pool, basketball court and volleyball court. A silver Mercedes 280SE and a brown Jaguar convertible sit in his garage.

Inside the house, Graham is surrounded by his past Framed Fillmore posters. A painting of the stage from the Rolling Stones' 1981 world tour. Photos of Keith Richards, the Grateful Dead, Marlon Brando, Bob Dylan. A shredded black vest that once belonged to Richards hangs in his study. And, in a frame, a tambourine and microphone used by Janis Joplin.

Graham has mellowed considerably since the late Sixties and early Seventies, when he could often be found outside the Fillmore East or the Fillmore West, shouting down some hippie who wanted free admission. Yet he remains extremely sensitive to the accusations that he was, as Graham himself puts it, "a capitalist pig ripoff."

"The minute somebody starts attacking me in that area, something happens to me," said Graham. "I'm like a cobra whose head is rising and sss...." Late in the second session, he talked about what makes him happy these days. At one point, in his deep, gruff voice, he said, "Not to be accused."


You've been involved with rock & roll for twenty years now. How have things changed since you started out?

Rock & roll is now the music of the land. Broadway. Movies. TV commercials. Miami Vice. It's the music of America. It's certainly not the music of the alternative society. Somebody, a guy who used to go to the Fillmore East all the time, had a comment about Live Aid. He said, "Isn't it amazing, Bill. In twenty years, the outlaws became the heroes." Hall and Oates at the Statue of Liberty. Live Aid. Farm Aid. Royalty at Wembley. Rock & roll is in the White House!

Did you ever think, back when you first opened the Fillmore in 1965, that twenty years later you'd still be in the music business, and on such a grand scale?

The scene at that time was in its embryonic stage. Did I know that it was going to be that lucrative? Impossible. I went into it not so much as a way to earn a living – although I had to earn a living – but as a way of life. It was a means of expression. There was no conception of what the whole thing would be like twenty years later. How did you learn how to put on a rock concert?

We have to leapfrog back in time to the mid-Sixties, when there were no rules, no blueprints. The rock & roll business – the weekly concerts, the Fillmore, the Avalon – that all started in 1965. All of a sudden, there was the Fillmore, and there was the Avalon. And oh, those are agents? Is that who you talk to? And the posters and the light shows. There was no rock & roll college. And yet, the promoters that followed... I know a major promoter back East, for example, who stood in the lobby of the Fillmore East and made notes and notes and notes. Well, we didn't take notes.

So you didn't know much about the concert business when you put on the benefit for the Mime Troupe?

I want to show you something. [Graham leafs through a scrapbook from 1965 and stops at a small handbill advertising the Mime Troupe benefit.] A few weeks before the benefit, a man called me, and it turned out to be Chet Helms, who told me he was with the Family Dog [a communal group that later became Graham's chief competition]. He said, "We'd like to donate our services."

Well, when he arrived the night of the show, I asked him where the dogs were. I didn't mean it as a joke. I actually thought that they were a dog act. And the proof is that they're listed right here among the other entertainers: Jefferson Airplane, the Committee, the Family Dog! At the time, that was the extent of my knowledge of the scene.

When you first started presenting concerts at the Fillmore, you coproduced one show – featuring the Paul Butterfield Blues Band – with the Family Dog. But it seems they rubbed you the wrong way.

They ran their business differently than I did, and in a way that in the long run couldn't make it You can't invite so many people in as friends and then be able to conduct your business... If an artist travels thousands of miles, he's owed something. He's owed your awareness that he needs to eat and needs shelter. I'm not relating it to Chet. I'm relating it to anybody. Chet meant well. His image was the exact counterpoint to mine.

On one hand, this hippie – flowery, long-haired Chet Helms. And on the other, Bill Graham – the guy with the clipboard who knew how to deal with city hall.

Chet was a product of that era; I was a product of an earlier era. At our company, at that time and today, you can't do drugs on the job. Why? Somebody has to be clearheaded. And that's us. What I'm trying to do, indirectly, is tell you the difference between Chet and me. I wish the Utopian theory of life could work. But to cross a bridge, you gotta have a coin for the toll. And I think sometimes that was forgotten.

For a long time, the Grateful Dead were trying to dose you with LSD. Eventually, they succeeded. What exactly happened?

That was at the Fillmore West, during my 7 Up era. We'd put plastic barrels full of sodas and ice in the dressing rooms. And they took the 7 Up cans on top in these barrels and used a hypodermic needle to put in their goodies. They figured that sooner or later I'd pick one up. And on one of my trips, just as I habitually would do, I picked up a can of 7 Up. Just about the time they were going onstage, it hit. Rather heavily.

One of the guys, [drummer] Mickey Hart, asked if I would like to come onstage with them. He gave me a drumstick and said, "Feel free to play anything you like, and hit the gong whenever you like." Now, I've always felt as the producer that the stage belongs to the artist. But that night I felt no inhibitions about staying up there. I spent the next four and a half hours onstage with the Dead. I didn't think I'd made an ass of myself. I just had one of the great evenings of my life.

How do you feel about drugs in general?

I have never been a heavy drug user, ever, except there was a week, maybe ten years ago. I was in New York, and it was very late, and I had to get up early the next morning. A friend was with me, and I said, "I don't know how I'll get up." He said, "I've got some coke. Take a little hit." I have never enjoyed coke the way other people have or seem to have. It's just like a bamboo pole up my ass. It will wake me up, but it doesn't take me away. But he gave me a small vial of it. That first morning, I took some, and I felt good. I had a very tough day. The next day, I had another tough day, and I thought, "Thank God I have got a little bit of this stuff." I did that four mornings in a row. The fifth morning, I found myself getting up and automatically going for it I stood in front of a mirror with a nail file, and I put the nail file into the little vial. I saw myself in the mirror, and I knew that I had done it automatically. That woke me up forever, I think. I hope.

You've presented almost every major rock act except the Beatles. Did you ever try to get them to do a show?

In the first year and a half that I was in business, on three different occasions, I wrote letters to Brian Epstein, saying: This is who I am, you visited the Fillmore, ta-da-da-da... I said, If you are ever going to come back to America, I now have so much money saved, and I offer you this amount of money.... Just to have the Beatles play here would be an honor. And when I had saved $10,000, I wrote to them again. I remember the highest amount I offered them was $28,000. But I never got a response.

How much money did bands usually make when they played the Fillmore?

Well, the most significant early-day figure that I remember is for a week of shows with the Jefferson Airplane, Gabor Szabo and Jimi Hendrix, who was the opening act. Jimi made $750 for the week.

How much did the Airplane make?

The headliner would make $2500, perhaps, or $3000, something like that. For a weekend – three nights.

For years you felt you were forced to assume, as you put it when you announced the closing of the Fillmores, "the role of Antichrist of the underground." People hated you because they thought you were ripping them off, charging too much for tickets and so on. They called you names. Swore at you. How did that make you feel?

When people shit on you, it stinks. Who wouldn't be affected by that? To be verbally attacked, psychologically attacked. In the early days of this business, I retaliated very strongly against accusations by challenging people verbally rather than trying to make them really understand. I'd get into a screaming match with the person. There were hundreds of situations where I didn't feel good about what happened. The anger came on so strong. I was engrossed in "you have no right to do this" – whatever you were doing. If you would show me an instant replay of some of those incidents, I could look at myself and say, "What an asshole."

How do you deal with your anger now?

It's almost nonexistent. There are still times when I'll snap, but I'm not as possessed, obsessed. And something happened: The audience changed. The promoter no longer was "the capitalist." In the early years, I would walk through the crowd, waiting for some negative things. Somebody would say, "Money." Or just, "Fuck the pigs! Why do you charge so much? Capitalist ripoff!"

If I had this conversation once, I've had it a thousand times – where somebody says, "Well, why is the ticket price so high? I know if it was up to the artists, they'd play for nothing." And then I would say, "How much do you think the artist makes a night? Their take was twelve times mine." Still, they weren't satisfied, because they weren't concerned with how much the artist made. The artist was a member of their family. I wasn't. I was a businessman. I don't experience that anymore. Now, more often than not, it's "Hey, Bill, great show!"

What's the most memorable show you've produced?

The Mime Troupe benefit was, is and always will be the most exciting night of my life in theater. Here were these filmmakers who met these poets for the first time. And jazz musicians and rock & roll musicians. It was a totally different thing than I'd ever seen. People dancing with people they had never met before. Men and women and kids were just dancing. And all of a sudden, it was six o'clock in the morning – it started getting light – and Allen Ginsberg was doing his mantra chants.

When I think about the past twenty years, I think about the Stones tour, the Dylan tour or Live Aid. I think about the Last Waltz or the closing of the Fillmore or the opening of the Fillmore East. And, of course, the early days. There was a gig with the Butterfield Blues Band and B.B. King, and both Albert King and Freddie King showed up and played.

When the power structure was different, we were able to put on Howlin' Wolf with Janis Joplin, or two one-act plays by Leroi Jones at a Byrds concert at the Fillmore. To see the faces of Grateful Dead fans listening to Miles Davis; to watch a roomful of really hyper Who fans being blown away by Woody Herman. Turning the house-lights on with Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles and the King Curtis band, and the band went into twenty minutes of laying down this incredible beat, and Aretha and Ray both stopped playing and singing, and Aretha just held Ray's arm, and the two of them just rocked back and forth on the stage. [Laughs] That was pretty much nirvana.

Those kinds of shows – where you present a soul or blues or jazz act to the rock audience – rarely happen these days. Rock & roll is much more segregated now. Does that bother you?

More than any single aspect of this business, it bothers me the most, and I miss it the most. In the first six or seven years, I was able to do that. It gave me pleasure, it gave the public pleasure, and it also educated the public and me at the same time. I'd never seen these people perform. I couldn't believe Howlin' Wolf the first time I saw him. The effect of Mavis Staples keeping time by snapping her fingers. Rahsaan Roland Kirk walking through the audience like a Pied Piper, playing two saxes.

But gradually, the struggle was with the power system of our industry.

I can sit here as a producer and say, "Wouldn't it be nice to see Talking Heads and King Sunny Ade on the same bill," but that also takes the artists' doing. If two artists really want to get together, they could. Nothing stops them.

How would you compare the big stars of today – say, Madonna or Prince or Michael Jackson – to the stars of the Sixties? Are there more prima donnas today?

The obvious problem we have with that type of question is that as a producer who's dealing with these people, if I start tearing anybody down by name, I'll lose that relationship.

The days of insisting on a white limousine are gone. Because the stars found out that people pound on limousines. So let's not take limousines; let's take station wagons. They learned through the years. In between, it was difficult. There was an artist we lost because I would not get him a white limousine; the only white limousine was in L.A., and I wasn't about to schlep to L.A. for a white limousine.

There was a certain English group some years ago that asked us for bottles of a highly expensive vintage wine. But I found out after a few visits that they never opened them. So one time I went into the dressing room and said, "Hello, how are you? God, that's a nice wine." And I picked up a bottle as if I were going to open it. And someone said, "Don't touch that bottle!" And I realized one of the leaders of this organization was a wine collector. And he was just gradually amassing this amazing wine collection. From then on I said, "Why should I be feeding your wine collection?"

Let's talk about some of the rock stars you've known. What's your favorite memory of Janis Joplin?

Janis and Grace Slick were the two queens of rock & roll in the Sixties. Dual royalty on the feminine side, both living in San Francisco. Once in the late Sixties, Janis came off her second set and said, "Bill, you wanna hang out, get something to eat?" She had never said that to me in her life. We weren't friends, and therefore it was very unexpected.

We got into her car, which was a psychedelically colored Porsche, and went to an all-night place where you could get food. She had some booze; we got some cheese and salami and crackers and Oreos – just garbage food. Then we went driving across the bridge to an area where you can look at the Golden Gate Bridge from the Marin side. We sat down and talked about how insane life was, how tough it was to pull down the blinds and just be off on your own.

Janis had just become really huge. She'd done a few tours, and she talked about the horrors of the road. The key sentence was "You know, you're in Des Moines, in the middle of a tour and at the end of a gig, the guys go back to the Holiday Inn, and they can go down to the bar and see what's happening. What does a woman do in this society?"

Janis made me realize that in spite of "making it," you could still have great difficulty balancing work and play and joy. In the end, a truck driver can be luckier than Janis Joplin.

What about Jimi Hendrix?

There was a night in New York that is among my favorite incidents of all time. He played New Year's Eve and New Year's Day at the Fillmore East – two shows a night – and they were recording it for an album. It was the Band of Gypsys, with Billy Cox on bass and Buddy Miles on drums. During the first show, he was really having fun, humping, grinding, putting the guitar behind his back. Usually, he would do that later on in the set. First, he would really play. But that night, that stuff started very early on, and it bothered me.

While we were clearing the house before the second show, Jimi came down to my office and said, "How are you doing, man? What did you think?" He never did that. Jimi Hendrix was a very quiet, private person.

There were other people in the office, and I asked them to leave. Then I said, "I'll tell you something. I saw you humping and laying down, playing behind your back. You did all that shit, but you forgot one thing. You forgot to play." And he looked at me like he couldn't believe what I said. He didn't really say anything; he just sat a minute or more. Then he turned to me and very seriously and gently just pointed to me and said, "Bill, you are here for the second show, right?" I said, "Yeah." And he said, "Okay, man. Thanks."

At the second show, he proceeded to play eighty minutes of the most brilliant music, emotionally and technically, that I have ever seen. He moved very little. The audience sat there as if they were watching a ballet. He came off, and the people were applauding, and he saw me standing there. He came up to me and looked very serious and very drenched in perspiration after giving energy that was awesome. He looked straight at me, maybe three inches from my face, and said, "All right?" And just stared at me. "All right?"

And then he went out and did a fifteen-minute encore of nothing but shit, nothing but circus. All the bumps, the grinds, the fire, the humping, guitar behind the neck, somersaults – all of it – as if to say, "Okay, you got yours, now I'm gonna just have fun."

What do you remember about Jim Morrison?

A funny incident happened when he was at the Fillmore. He took the microphone and started swinging it like a lariat, letting more and more of it go. It started swinging over the audience, and I immediately went through the crowd and tried to stand in front of the stage, because I could see that sooner or later he was going to lose it, and I didn't want it to hit anybody. I was standing maybe ten people back, waving my arms, trying to catch his attention, and then he loses it And out of 2000 people in the hall, it hits me right in the head. There's this lump on my head. Afterward, I went downstairs, and we joked about how ironic it was.

The next time he came to the Fillmore, he gave me a gift. It was a psychedelically painted pith helmet – a protective pith helmet that I should wear during the show.

The Who?

In 1970, the Who were playing a week at the Fillmore East There was a grocery store on the corner of the theater, and during the latter part of the performance one night, someone threw a Molotov cocktail into the store. It started to go up in flames. Some of the flames started coming in through the side door of the Fillmore, and all of a sudden, with maybe three or four minutes of the performance left, the fire department started coming in through the front doors. The audience was totally convinced that this was part of the show, and they cheered. Nobody left the building. And then they saw the smoke coming in and thought it was special effects.

The first fireman went down the aisle and jumped up on the stage. Roger [Daltrey] didn't know who they were, and he goes and kicks the guy off the stage. Pete [Townshend] comes over and wants to hit the guy with his guitar. The audience was going crazy and applauding; thought it was the greatest thing they'd ever seen.

Well, everyone was finally evacuated from the building. But the fire department was pissed: Who were these guys kicking us off the stage? And the police were looking for the members of the Who. So I took them to my apartment, which was around the corner. The next afternoon, their lawyer surrendered them to the police. They held them at the station for a number of hours, took some statements. The end result was that they were released about a half-hour before it was time for them to go back onstage at the Fillmore the next night.

How about the Stones? There's a beat-up pair of Keith Richards' boots sitting in a cabinet in your dining room. How'd they get there?

Every time Keith walked onstage during the Stones' 1981 tour, he wore a different outfit, but he always wanted to wear these handmade Spanish boots. After a while, after playing many cities, a little piece of suede came loose, and they had to glue it down. In another city, the stitching or the sole might come loose, and they'd put some tape on it or nail it together. There was tape here, gauze there, glue there, nails... But it got to a point where the boots became a major concern of mine, because he loved them and wanted to wear them all the time. Finally, at Candlestick Park [in San Francisco], the Stones were just about to go on, and the heel snapped off and broke.

I said, "Aw, jeez, do you really want to wear those? Do you have something else?" He said, "Yeah, but I just feel like..." He didn't go crazy. And I said, "Well, I'll try." So I leave the trailer and go out and ask everybody who works for me, "What are you wearing? Let me see your heel." "What do you want?" "Let me see your heel!" I couldn't find anything.

But then there was a guy at a table in the other backstage area who had a pair of boots on, and the heel was just about the same size – a little higher, but the same shape. And I said to him, "Do me a favor. I can't explain it to you now. Let me have your shoes for fifty bucks." He didn't know what I was doing. I got them and took them back to the tech area. Two of the guys got a nail and hammer, shaped the heel down a little and put it on Keith's boot. Up and away it went. He used it. After that date, there was more paper, more glue, more spit, more rubber bands. He always wanted to wear those boots.

On the plane back to New York after the last date, he said, "Hey, Bill, I want to see you for a minute." And we stepped into the toilet area. "Man, I just want to tell you, I really drove you up the wall. Sometimes it was insane. But..." And he had this package wrapped in newspaper with a rubber band around it and a rose attached, and he just said, "Thank you." And I knew what it was. It was the boots.

What was it like working with Dylan in 1974?

At the beginning of the tour, I said to my staff, "I'm not assuming that you don't know who Bob Dylan is, but he's going back out, and he's going to be looked at in every town with adulation and respect and love and affection. It's really going to come at him. He's going to get that all the time. We should just be loose. Some of you may say, 'Hey, Bob, good morning.' But don't make him answer, because he's going to get that in every city. He's going to get, 'Hey Bob, hey Bob, hey Bob.' So just know who he is, and let him have his space."

On the third date, in Cleveland, late one night, Bob called and asked if I could come to his room. Everything seemed quite nice the first few days – getting the kinks out of the lighting and so on. He was blown away by the public acceptance. The encores. So it was the middle of the night I went up to his room, knocked on the door, walked inside, and he said, "Why isn't anybody talking to me?"

Around that time, you also produced national tours for George Harrison and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. In doing that, you essentially took on the roles of both agent and promoter. Agents, as well as other promoters, didn't like that. They felt you were stepping on their turf.

After a few tours, some agents and managers and promoters invited me to a luncheon up in Long Island to discuss the industry. Knowing what this meeting was going to be about, I wanted to make it a little more merry. So I hired some people from Central Casting. And as we're getting into it, these black limousines drive up, and this group of gentlemen – about twelve of them – gets out. They were all dressed in Untoucbables-style clothes – Prohibition-era suits, Stetson hats, spats – and they all had musical-instrument cases.

The door to the room we were in opened, and the first guy, a very large man, stepped in and said, "Everybody sit down. Nobody moves!" The guys spread themselves out around the room, and within fifteen seconds, the first guy leans across the table – and just before they came in, I lit a cigar – and says, "Excuse me, Mr. Graham, is everything satisfactory?" And I just nodded my head. And they all got their musical-instrument cases and opened them, took their jackets off, stuck them in the cases and started to leave. And on the back of each of their shirts was written Bill Graham Presents. I wanted to take the edge off. As if to say, "If you had my shot, wouldn't you take it if you were smart enough?"

In 1971, you were famous. The Fillmore West and Fillmore East were both great successes. Yet you closed them both. Why?

Running the Fillmores had begun to take its toll. I was flying back and forth across the country. I was beginning to lose some acts to bigger places. The business of rock & roll got so big, and the managers said, "You can make as much in one night at the Garden as you can in three nights at the Fillmore."

But one day I got a phone call from Sol Hurok, the great Russian impresario. He was the only person that I really looked up to, so I went to see him in New York. I went in, and there was Mr. Hurok, sitting behind this large marble table with a lot of press clippings on his desk. He looked at them for another few minutes. Then he looked at me and said, "Yes? Oh, you've come." He shook my hand. He looked at me, he looked down at the papers and said, "It says here you've got lots of guts and balls. Is true?" First thing he ever said to me.

His reason for asking me to come was that he had a contract to do a month with the Stuttgart Ballet at the Metropolitan Opera House, and they had canceled. He had a free month, and he didn't know what to do with it. He had paid the rent So the idea was that we would present a month of the best rock & roll we could get into the Metropolitan Opera House. Well, I was flabbergasted – this was the citadel of the arts and music world, the most popular facility in the world.

In the ensuing months, some groups said yes, some said maybe, some said no. But I wanted the great artists, and I was having difficulty with a lot of the managers. One night, I was in my office at the Fillmore East, and the manager of [an up-and-coming] group returned my call. I tried to explain to the manager: "The band has to do five nights, and this is all you are going to make. But this is the Metropolitan!" I went through the whole thing, and he finally said, "Bill, you expect my boys to play all week for a lousy fifty grand?"

That was the trigger. This was the Metropolitan Opera House! Look at the opportunity you've got to break through to that fucking yo-yo world out there that doesn't trust you. And you have the balls to say to me that I have no right to ask you to play for a lousy fifty grand a week? You piece of shit I just said to myself, it's not worth it. If I was totally healthy at the time, totally free of problems, it might not have affected me that hard. But it blew my mind. I just said, Fillmore East, Fillmore West – that's it.

Michael Jackson initially wanted you as tour consultant to help run the Jacksons' 1984 tour. One of the Jacksons' advisers told me they decided not to use you because you were "too egoed out." Were you?

For me, that criticism has no foundation. You can always use somebody's personality against them: Well, Bill isn't soft-spoken; Bill may speak his piece if you ask him a question. Your ego, as best as I know what ego means, is a feeling that you have a particular gift for something. I think we are good producers; I think we are ethical people.

Many people's names came into the picture. Mine fell out somewhere early on. The end result was that, as we know, Mr. Sullivan, Mr. King and some other people were involved in that project. Everybody lost. The show lost, the public lost, and Michael Jackson lost... You want to talk about ego? I really don't know the fight game, Mr. King, or the business you're in, Mr. Sullivan. But I know you spat on the public and you spat on the artists. He wanted to make a killing. For the last time, do you want to talk about ego?

How would you have produced the Jacksons' tour?

One thing I would have done was made the ticket price more commensurate with the going price for any major superstar. Maybe twenty dollars, but not double the going rate. I would have used local promoters, and I would have had community involvement because of who the Jacksons are and who Michael Jackson is. At the time, I mentioned x amount of dollars to go toward sickle-cell anemia.

As the tour progressed, the word got out that it wasn't such a hot show. Dates weren't selling out. There was a bad feeling about the tour.

It started at the beginning, with the handling of the tickets. You couldn't buy two tickets. You couldn't buy two tickets. And you had to send your money in way in advance to some place back East, and they sat on your money for months. Sooner or later, an aura surrounds everything.

Woodstock was heralded as a major countercultural event. You were there, but you didn't see it that way.

It was great for some people, but it was a horrific experience for others. I met many people ten, fifteen miles away who pitched their tents or sat in the back of a truck and didn't get any closer 'cause the roads were jammed. And some had driven from Iowa.

I felt badly for those who didn't get what they came for. But it was the forerunner of them all. I always imagined that as Woodstock took place... I had this image of sleeping corporate giants waking up and waxing their mustaches and saying, "Aha! Rock & roll. Very interesting." If hundreds of thousands of people would get together on a farm in upstate New York, that's big business. And Woodstock, more than any single event, heralded the era of big-business music.

Do you think that Band Aid and USA for Africa and Live Aid have brought back some of the Sixties spirit?

Yes, I do. Bob Geldof should be remembered in history for suggesting that a lot can be done if we tap this power source. And the power source is music and the people who make it Give me another element of our society that could have drawn as many people as Live Aid. A sporting event? An international soccer match? I don't know. I'm trying to show what a rare position these artists are in – that a group of people can say: You want to raise $10 million?

When I first saw that film [about the famine in Ethiopia], I thought of doing something, but I never really thought I could do what Bob did. And I realize why. He's an artist, asking another artist. To follow that mania and do what was seemingly undoable – I take my hat off to him.

You were born in Germany around the time of the Second World War. What was your childhood there like?

Other than what my sisters have told me, I have absolutely no direct memory of the first nine years of my life. When my father died, my youngest sister – there were five girls and one boy – and I were put into an orphanage. My mother made and sold hats in a hat shop in Berlin because she had to go to work after my father died. And she would take care of the other four girls. And on the weekends, we would come home or they would visit the orphanage.

In the summer of 1939, a group of French-Jewish orphans went on a two-week exchange with the children that were living in the Berlin orphanage. And this orphanage was southeast of Paris, in Chaumont. During the two weeks that we were in France, war broke out between France and Germany, and the French children perished in Berlin.

Eventually we were moved onto the grounds of a chateau. When the raids really started in Paris and the surrounding areas, we dug shelters beneath the grounds of the chateau. And I remember when the air raids came, we went into these shelters. In the rainy season, they became almost flooded full of water, and we stood in water up to our waists. The biggest fear of my life – I feared them forever and ever – was a little snake and a toad that jumped up at me. This little short snake. I've had a fear of snakes, and anything in the reptile family, all my life.

The raids were pretty constant. And then, as the Germans broke through the lines and it was inevitable that France was going to fall, the International Red Cross sent a man to our community to take all of us south. The whole nation was moving south. The roads were full of cars and carts and people, just walking with their belongings. It was just like in the movies. Everybody fleeing. I remember, outside Lyons, the Germans had these suicide parachuters to demoralize the public. And I saw this happen. These fanatics would parachute into an area of the country that wasn't yet occupied, and they would be throwing hand grenades as they came closer to the ground. I saw the French Resistance forces capture one of these men and put him against a wall two streets away and riddle him with bullets.

And as we were moving, some children ran away. And the group became smaller and smaller. And very little food. We got to Madrid and then went to Lisbon, and in Lisbon they put us on a freighter to Casablanca and eventually across the Atlantic to Bermuda. And on the crossing, we were stopped by a German U-boat. We were on [the freighter] for nineteen days. All we had to eat were cookies and oranges. When we got to New York, they put us in a bunch of barracks run and funded by the Foster Home Bureau. What they did was ask people, preferably Jewish homes, to take young people in.

On weekends, the families would come up to these cottages, looking at us as though they were picking out a pet in a pet shop. And all of us wanted to be taken by somebody. Nine weeks passed. Finally, on the last weekend in November, a family came, a couple with a boy who was two years older than I was. I've always felt that the primary reason that they took me into their home was that the two languages their son was studying were French and German. I was taken by them and began my life in New York City.

Growing up in the Bronx, you spent a lot of time in the streets.

When I first got to the Bronx, I didn't speak English. But to the kids in school, it didn't mean anything that I was a refugee. To them, I wasn't a Russian Jew. To them, I was a German. All they knew was that I spoke German, and Germany was the enemy. And I used to get my head kicked in all the time at school. They would goose-step in front of my house and say, "Nazi go home." My foster brother, who was two years older, said, "Not only are you going to have to learn how to speak English very quickly, you also have to lose that accent". So on a daily basis, he and I sat down and read the newspaper headlines, and I practiced every day with a mirror. Getting rd of za accent ven you go down ze street to ze store. Within six months, I learned English, and I lost my accent

Later, you were in the army, fought in Korea and were awarded a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. You also had started to fine-tune your business skills.

I was on board a ship, headed overseas. I was working in the kitchen. The crossing was, I think, eleven days. Well, I started running a little crap game. And the first night, people had cookies from home to eat. By the second night, nobody had anything. So I made a couple of sandwiches, took them down – people got hungry in the middle of the night – and sold them for a dollar each. I figured out roughly that from apples and oranges and sandwiches and whatnot, I took in about $1400. And from the crap game, I was up about $1300. I was twenty-two years old, and I had $2700 in my pocket. When we pulled into base, they started a game on deck. Well, I lost all the money. I got off in Tokyo without a dime on me.

You also worked as a waiter at resort hotels in the Catskills.

What I learned as a busboy and a dishwasher and a cabdriver, and then eventually as a waiter, is how to be a qualitative surface conversationalist. You get an instinct: Does this person want to talk? Or not talk? You learn to say: How are the greens today? I can't spell golf. I know nothing about golf. But you learn certain words. How many laps did you do? Did you ride the horses today? Whatever it is.

Every morning, I would buy three copies of The New York Times and three of the Daily News. And my guests would come in, and I'd say, "See the paper today?" "Oh, thanks." What did it cost me? Twenty cents or thirty cents. I know nothing about real estate, but I can have a conversation with real-estate people. They leave the table feeling, you know, Bill is really interested in my business. That must have come in handy later on.

You meet them [performers] for a night, and it's not that you're conning them, it's not that you're playing games with them. If there are 60,000 people out front, 99 times out of 100 the act will do an encore. And if they don't, I will find the one way to get them to do that encore. I'll tell stories until the cows come home to get them to do an encore. Or if there are 10,000 people outside making noise, I'll say, "Let me tell you the last time this happened..."

It's like an honest con game. I've always thought of myself as an honest con. Meaning, if it's not going to be bad for you and bad for anybody else – it looks like a con to you, but it's okay.

Your son David, who is seventeen, is a big rock fan. Would you want him to become a musician?

Probably not, because I've seen very few musicians who truly live a balanced life. Most famous artists have difficulty on the private side. And I gave up something that I shouldn't have – the breakup of my family. If my son said, "Dad, I think I'd really be happy running a restaurant, but I also know I'm a very good musician and I can paint. I think I could become a millionaire as a musician and be known by the world. Or I could make a very good living running a restaurant and painting." You might not believe this, but I would choose the smaller financial return, because there are involuntary prices with fame on a level that you might not be able to deal with. If you make it.

Somebody sees Van Halen onstage or Neil Young and says, "I'd like to do that" Look at the odds. How many garages are there with instruments in them? You want to be a musician, understand the odds. Don't give up your dream and your goals, but try to also deal with the most difficult thing for us to deal with – reality. I'm not just saying, be prepared for failure. Even if you are one of those who beats the odds, what do you have? It's a very different life.

For twenty years, you have been totally consumed by your work. One wonders, though, if there's more to life for Bill Graham than putting on the next concert?

Yes, there is. If there is something – not to conquer but to experience – it's the man-woman experience. The ultimate other expression in life. What do you do with your life, and who do you share it with? It's tough for me to believe that any person would say that their choice would be not to share most of their private life with another person. And yet, because of the lives we all live, for one reason or another, it doesn't occur. Some are luckier than others, and they may be laborers, but the loved one is there to share with, through tough times, through good times. I don't think I am any different than anyone else in that capacity.

For me, the missing link is only one. There is nothing else I really need. I'm fifty-four years old, and I'd like to share what I and one other person could have. That stuff, it's been difficult because of the life. It's just obviously not nine to five, and obviously it's time consuming, and obviously, for many years, it's taken the form of the consummate mistress.

© Michael Goldberg, 1985

Do You Know The Way to Santa Fe, October 17, 1982

There seems to be alot of interest in 1982 latelt, it being 35 years ago and the release of a throve of never before heard audience tapes.  This one from 10-17-82 is not from that batch but deserves to be heard nevertheless. Here's a rare New Mexico show with  lots of your favorites and a nice rare Goin Down the Road>The Wheel as the late second set downshifter.  Please read some local comments about the show and bobs your uncle.   Anne Van Arsdal Poore great photos of this show

Mississippi Half-Step

Franklin's Tower

New Minglewood Blues

Candyman

Me and My Uncle

Mexicali Blues

Althea

Man Smart/Woman Smarter

Ramble on Rose

Let it Grow

Deal

Shakedown Street

Samson and Delilah

Good Time Blues

Estimated Prophet

He's Gone

drums

Throwin' Stones

Goin' Down the Road Feelin' Bad

The Wheel

The Other One

Wharf Rat

Good Lovin'

Don't Ease Me In

Summertime Jams 1968; Betty Organic and Newport Pop

^{Here's a groovy little tale from nine years and a day before Englishtown September 2, 1968 from Betty's Organic Farm. Enjoy}

^{Articles from} 

9/2/68

Sky River Rock Groove

Berry farm hosts Dead, Santana and others 

Mud man

"The best freaking scene ever," said one musician. The Sky River Rock Festival and Lighter Than Air Show was not dampened by the rain that fell over Labor Day weekend, but made creative use of it. And the proceeds went to an assortment of American Indian and Black organizations.

The Friends of American Indian Rights, the principal Indian beneficiary, the Central Area Committee for Peace and Improvement, and the Black Student Unions of the Pacific Northwest were the principal organizations for which the musicians gave their benefit performances. Some of the proceeds are also going to local institutions for alienated youth, such as the Open Door Clinic and the Seattle Free University.

The music started at 9:30 on Saturday morning and ran till after midnight. Sunday's show ran from nine in the morning till five on Monday and Monday's show was of necessity a little disorganized, but after giving everybody four hours to sleep, the festival wound up with one more eighteen-hour slug of music.

Some forty acts, rock, blues and folk, with a few theater acts such as the Congress of Wonders and the S. F. Mime Troupe, were on stage for the marathon event before an audience of around 15,000. Spectators had trooped in from all over to Betty Nelson's Organic Raspberry Farm in Sultan, Washington (pop. 960), fifty miles outside of Seattle, not to be disappointed.

On Saturday it started to rain. All the less reason to forbid the audience to set up their tents in the field of the natural amphitheater. Soon there was a vast modern-day replica of a Civil War encampment, and the clouds of smoke were immense. The police kept their distance, like decent, law-abiding, privacy-respecting public servants, and everybody was happy.

While the audience was gathered like a great camp meeting in the field, the musicans -- all 175 of them -- were quartered in the three floors of the Camlin Hotel. Musicians, it is well known, are musicians because they like to play music, and the concentration of musical trips was incredible.

And who was there? Santana, Dino Valenti, It's a Beautiful Day, James Cotton, the New Lost City Ramblers, Kaleidoscope, the Youngbloods, Country Joe and the Fish, Phoenix, John Fahey, Mark Spoelstra, H. P. Lovecraft, Big Mama Mae Thornton. The Grateful Dead played a magnificent set for their last appearance with the personnel of their recordings.

By Monday the field was soggy with rain, but spirits were high. A Mud Cult arose in the principal puddle, improvising Mud Rituals and Mud Dances. The baptism consisted of taking long run and belly-flopping (with your clothes on) in the mud, alter which you would be covered with mud and embraced by other cultists.

The Mud People also made half a dozen Charges of the Mud Brigade through the Civil War Encampment. Their Mud Chant went something like, "mud (stomp) mud (stomp) we like mud." Mud was, like they say in ads, Happening, so a couple of dozen fans were swinging with it.

Continuity and saccharine rap between acts were provided by Buddha (not the B., you understand, but a San Francisco underground bartender and former KMPX strikebreaker who goes by the name). His longwindedness was one factor in the concerts' running overtime. Musicians got into the habit of telling each other when they were due on stage in terms such as, "We're on at 4:30-plus-Buddha-rap." "The only crummy ointment on the fly," said one.

The kind of festival it was, when a young man wearing nothing but beads got up on stage during Big Mama's set and started dancing in the lightshow, it was not thought strange. Except perhaps by Big Mama, who had registered dismay when she first saw the Encampment that was to be her audience.

As Big Mama turned to leave the stage, the young man found himself facing the microphone, and impulsively said, "Hey, you know what? I just had a real flash. We're all Jesus Christ," and everybody applauded. Then Big Mama came back to the mike and said, "Wow! Wasn't that weird! I'd heard about it, but I never thought I'd see it!"

There was also a great scheduled balloon ascent, and the balloon was lots of fun, everybody played with it the first day. Then on the second day, the balloon went ahead and ascended, but paying no heed to human schedules. And there was a pig, some sort of personage in the festival. He was already a Mud Cultist from in front.

Many a festival would have been ruined by rain, but not a perfect festival, a festival with lots of festival in it. That's what Sky River was, and Lighter Than Air, too. Many thanks to John Chambless, director, and his assistant Stan Maginnis. And especially to Betty Nelson and her organic berries.

(RS 19, October 12, 1968)

s Orgamic
8/4/68

Newport Pop Festival Drags on in Dust and Heat

Dead, Country Joe, Crosby, pie fight weekend's highlights


Mud man

An estimated 140,000 attended the first and probably the last Newport Pop Festival in California's Orange County Aug. 3-4, viewing, among others, Tiny Tim, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish, Grateful Dead, Chambers Brothers, Charles Lloyd, James Cotton Blues Band, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and the Byrds.
The festival was regarded musically successful but on other fronts rather less than pleasing. The performers appeared on a raised stage under a striped canopy, but the young crowds were left sitting or standing in a huge, flat, dusty-dry open field under a broiling sun. Refreshment and rest room facilities were less than adequate and the sound system was not powerful enough to carry the sound to eveyone present.
The highlight of the pop fest on the first day (Saturday) seemed to come when Country Joe closed the bill. The hour was late and Orange County officials were threatening to shut off the electricity when the band went on, finally relenting to give the band time for two songs. As they began their first, "1, 2, 3, 4, What Are We Fighting For," the approximately 40,000 young people still on hand rose as if one, cheering, hands held aloft in the "peace sign." During the second number, a long blues, even the cops on stage were grinning and adlibbing a moderate version of the boogaloo.
The second day's climax came when David Crosby started a planned pie fight with the Jefferson Airplane. In all, 250 cream pies flew back and forth . . . and the thousands of people present stormed the stage to join in.
The musical line-up was an impressive one. Besides those already mentioned, bands appearing were Alice Cooper, Steppenwolf, Sonny and Cher, Canned Heat, Electric Flag, Butterfield Blues Band, Eric Burdon and the Animals, Blue Cheer, Iron Butterfly, Illinois Speed Press and Things To Come.
But admission to the festival was $5.50 per day -- to sit in heat and dust. Most considered it another in the series of pop music shucks.
The Newport Pop Festival -- which wasn't even held in Newport, but in Costa Mesa -- was produced by Humble Harvey Miller, one of L.A.'s Top-40 deejays, and Wesco Associates, basically the same coalition that staged a similarly uncomfortable weekend festival last summer in another Los Angeles dust bin.
(RS 16, September 14, 1968)