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Live at the FILLMORE EAST
A photographic memoir
1999 © Thunder's Mouth Press
by Amalie R. Rothschild with Ruth Ellen Gruber
Amalie R. Rothschild bio:
Amalie R. Rothschild is a photographer and an award-winning film-maker.
Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Life,
The Village Voice, and many other publications. As a director,
her
films include Nana, Mom, and Me (1974) and Painting the Town (1990).
She divides her time between New York and Rome.
Foreword by Mickey Hart:
The Fillmore East was a unique venue, one of the few places the
Grateful Dead would play in New York.
Amalie R. Rothschild's pictures bring back the entire F.E. experience
in vivid detail. |
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There's no way to talk about the Fillmore East, though, without
talking about Bill Graham. Bill put tremendous effort into
everything he did. He wanted to be the best - the best basketball
player one-on-one, the best promoter, the best judge of what people
in the audiences would love to see. It was this "best thing" that
was his strength. This was the root of the passion that be brought
to everything he did, and this is what made his Fillmores so special.
Even arranging the tables and chairs, putting flowers in the dressing
rooms, making everything ready before the people were let in to
a concert, all this was done with a super, almost obsessive concentration.
Musicians felt this energy when they played for Bill Graham. That's
why the bands would deliver once-in-a-lifetime performances.
Bill believed in magic, and magic was the key component at the
Fillmore East. Indeed, by the day the F.E. looked like an innocuous,
plain building sitting on the corner of a typical street in the
East Village. But at night it came alive. The building became
a living organism - breathing, pulsating, vibrating, swaying with
emotional outpouring from within. It became a sacred space: a
cathedral of sound consecrated by the testimony of the extraordinary
performances that took place there. Bill called it a Palace of
Sound. People came with great expectations, and trance and ecstasy,
ritual and rapture were courted. The Fillmore East was the church
of rock and roll, and Bill was the shepherd tending the flock.
Bill shuttled back and forth cross-country between the Fillmore
West and the Fillmore East, sometimes twice in one week. He brought
the West Coast experience to New York, but the East Coast energy
was quite different from that in San Francisco, more frenzied.
There was a greater hunger for the music in New York: The music
had broken out on the West Coast and the East was trying to catch
up.
The Fillmore East had lights, sounds, and a smell - musty, like
a gymnasium - that all added to the particular chemistry. It was
small enough that you could hear the room. You could hear the
walls, you could hear the music coming back to you. The F.E. had
a unique sound - I could recognize it. It was a good sounding
space, not too big, not too small, kind of intimate. And the audiences
were over-the-top.
My favorite memories of the Fillmore East are playing all night.
There was no curfew - the second shows were the best and we could
go on and on until dawn. And every night the part we loved most
was when Bill Graham begged us for an encore. He would beg us.
He would give us money, blow us kisses, stand on his head. He
would do handstands. "They're tearing my place apart, listen to
them, they're ripping up the seats. Play one more song."
"Sorry, Bill," we'd say, "we've given it all we've got."
"Come on, they're ripping my seats!"
We'd egg him on until he'd do something crazy to get the encore
out of us: "Okay, Bill, recite 'Mary had a Little Lamb." And he'd
recite it!
Rock and Roll was a baby back then and Bill Graham was its midwife
- he birthed the modern version of a rock and roll concert. He
used to say to me, "If you give somebody a diamond and you put
it in a plain brown wrapper, they won't know its worth. But if
you take something good and package it well, people will know
that it is of great value." He had the vision that a rock concert
should be more than just listening to music. So he dressed it
up -- he put a dress on rock and roll. He thought of rock as grand
opera.
Bill also knew how to harness the energy of rock and make it a
business. The Grateful Dead and the other bands couldn't do that;
Grateful Dead energy was made in chaos - we'd laugh at Bill trying
to organize us. We'd watch him kick and scream - we never took
him seriously. He'd come about an inch from your eyeball as if
he was going to eat your head and scream at you. When it was over
we'd laugh about it. We'd say "Okay Bill, you've got five minutes
to go crazy. Okay Bill, your five minutes are up." Yet, it was
Bill who stepped in and made it work; he was the only person with
a clipboard. He saw us musicians as deviants, wayward children
irresponsible in the ways of business. We were transients, and
he felt it was his responsibility to create a home for us. He
was the wiser older brother whose mission was to make a safe haven
for the reckless, carefree spirit of rock and roll.
For a few short, memorable years, the Fillmore East was where
we played it best.
Mickey Hart
CSNY excerpts from the book:
"CSNY, on the other hand, presented other exciting, but totally
different, visual possibilities. The group was one of the few
acts whose F.E. performances were not accompanied by a light show.
They felt a light show background would be distracting. Instead,
the group sang elegantly spotlit in front of a deep black background,
perches on stools atop a plush Persian carpet laid across the
stage."
"The crowd for Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young tickets, May 1970.
I had my studio in one of the loft spaces upstairs in the theatre
building, so I was usually around during the day, as well. It
was a revelation when so many people showed up on a warm May day
to wait for the box office to open to sell CSNY tickets. It was
the first time a crowd that big had gathered - a moment worth
documenting. It took me some time, but I eventually found someone
who let me into the building catty-corner across the street and
allowed me to go up to the roof to get the picture."
In the Fillmore slide show, check out the photo of the outside
of the Fillmore East, May 1970. Amalie captured the throng of
people spilling out on the streets to purchase CSNY tickets. -Lorraine-
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