Michael Reel
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the closing of Fillmore East, promoter Bill Graham’s rock mecca in New York’s East Village. An all-star show on June 27, 1971 headlined by the Allman Brothers Band, the J. Geils Band and blues legend Albert King marked the end of the venue’s brief three-year run. Graham, who also ran Fillmore West in San Francisco, presented the cream of rock royalty. Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, Carlos Santana, The Who, Eric Clapton, Elton John and many other stars performed.
And it was not just rock. Graham revolutionized the rock concert industry with shows that featured the giants of jazz, blues, soul, R&B, and folk music. Graham introduced young white audiences to Black artists that included Tina Turner, Sam & Dave, the Staple Singers, Voices of East Harlem, and blues legends Albert and B.B. King, Buddy Guy, James Cotton and Taj Mahal.
Journalist and photographer Frank Mastropolo interviewed more than 90 musicians and crewmembers—including 19 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees—to write Fillmore East: The Venue That Changed Rock History. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1737764547. The coffee-table-size oral history is packed with more than 200 performance photos, posters, letters, buttons, contracts, and memorabilia, many never before published.
Fillmore East is the simply the best book on rock and R&B of 2021. There are never-before told stories about Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, B.B. King, Sly Stone, Albert King, Taj Mahal, Ike & Turner Turner, Claudia Lennear and more. Fillmore East is a must-read for any fan of the music of the ’60s, ’70s and beyond.
“The kids were leading it,” Taj Mahal explains in the book. “They were like, ‘Wow, who’s this B.B. King guy? Eric Clapton says he’s somebody. I guess we should go and hear him.’ They’d go and hear him and go, ‘Wow, yeah, I can see what you can learn from that.'”
“You’d come to see Tim Buckley and you’d go, ‘Who’s Albert King? Holy shit, that’s Albert King!'” said Rock Hall inductee Steve Miller. “‘Inever heard anything like that in my life!I wanna hear that again!’ It exposed people, that was the really great thing about it. And it exposed a different audience. It was a middle-class, white audience. Kids from the suburbs coming in to see this stuff, you know?
“You talk to people and when they were little kids, they say, that was a big deal to go to the Fillmore and see a show. You might just be a punk fourteen-year-old kid wanting to go into town to get away from your parents and go do that groovy thing and that might have been the night Clifton Chenier was there. And all of a sudden you know about Louisiana swamp rock.
“You’d go, ‘Oh my God! Who knew?’ And that happened all the time. And I think the most important thing about the whole deal was the exposure it gave to so many different kinds of artists and the careers that it created. Anda lot of those careers are still around, a lot of those musicians are still playing.”
Claudia Lennear is a renowned vocalist who performed at Fillmore East with Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs & Englishmen and as an Ikette with the Ike & Tina Turner Revue. “When I was with Ike and Tina, we played the Chitlin’ Circuit. The Chitlin’ Circuit was a group of black-owned nightclubs, based mostly in the South,” Lennear recalls. “That was the bread and butter of the Ike & Tina Turner Revue. And the way we dressed and behaved on stage was sort of formal.
“The Ikettes wore their same dresses and the band wore suits and Tina wore her special dresses. And her diamond rings and all this. That was what we were used to. But when we got to the Fillmore and we were dressed like that, everybody else was in blue jeans. And tie-dyed shirts. Big hair and Afros and all that. We were wearing that straight hair with miniskirts and all.
“So we really just kind of seemed out of place. I didn’t see one hippie with a diamond ring on. But most of the Ikettes had their bling, as they would call it nowadays.
“I always thought that was so strange andI would always mention to Ike and Tina, you know, maybe we need to relax if we’re going to cross over. Relax in the way we dressed and the jewelry we wear and that kind of thing. But they didn’t want to hear that. I could very well have just turned around and talked to the wall and got a better response.”
Taj Mahal played a three-night engagement in 1971 at Fillmore East with a tuba band organized by multi-instrumentalist Howard Johnson. One night was simulcast live on WPLJ-FM. “They made us sign something that said that we could be prosecuted for using any juvenile bad language on the air,” Johnson recalled.
“You know, one of the things that band could do and did was play dynamic. We knew when to get louder and when to get softer. The sound techs at the Fillmore don’t understand softer. So if we played softer, they’d jack up the machines.
“Well, there’s a couple of places where the sound system just squalled. And Taj, who was making up his blues lines, went over to that booth and cursed the guys out. He said, ‘Why you motherfuckers always messin’ with my shit? You come into my house, I’ll put the dog on you.'”
“The whole country was like one great big laboratory,” says Taj Mahal. “There was a lot going on when Graham was doing the music here in this country. It was pretty damn serious if you ask me. Who does it now? Nobody. No-body. It’s a shame too because there’s still plenty of great music and musicians out here.”
Fillmore East: The Venue That Changed Rock Music Forever is published by Edgar Street Books and is available now on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1737764547 For more information, visit www.fillmoreeast.nyc
