At the center of it all of course is Sly, who keeps the energy high and the groove moving. The highlight comes smack dab in the middle of the set with an ecstatic rendition of their single “Dance to the Music” featuring a hurricane of guitar solos amid a series of seismic horn blasts. Opening with “M’Lady,” Sly and his group of musicians treated the crowd to a full-on soul explosion that never let up from start to finish. The energy throughout all four shows is incredibly intense, reaching a near-boiling point during the final performance. Nevertheless, when their time came, they played that like they were already the biggest stars in the world. The band had yet to really break through in the way they would following their turn at Woodstock the following year, and the release of their platinum-selling greatest-hits collection in 1971. The Fillmore East was widely regarded as a palace of blues and rock, but every once in a while the place could get downright funky, like when Sly and the Family Stone rolled through in October 1968. “I felt, watching Jim Morrison, that I could do that,” Smith wrote. It was a galvanizing experience, as she explained in her autobiography Just Kids. Her boyfriend, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, was working as an usher at the venue and managed to get her a free pass to the show. It was an incredible showing, and left a tremendous impression on one audience member in particular: future punk poetess Patti Smith. That night, the Doors played their regular collection of material but apparently enjoyed themselves so much that they came back after most of the crowd had thinned out and played again for nearly an hour. The final set on the second evening was the one to catch. Just two weeks after the Fillmore East opened, Graham booked the Southern California psych rockers to play four sets of music spread across two nights. You simply didn’t know what they were going to do or how long they were going to do it for. In the late 1960s, the Doors, and particularly their frontman Jim Morrison, were one of the most unpredictable live acts on the planet. No detail was too small for Graham’s notice. To him, everything was about the fan experience, and he went out of his way to provide the best kind of atmosphere to take in a live performance, from the ornate, hand-rendered posters he printed up to announce the gigs the lavish psychedelic visuals he commissioned the Joshua Light Show to provide behind the stage the 35,000-watt, 26-speaker sound system custom designed by Bill Hanley and even the barrel of free apples he left out for people departing at the end of the night. Graham operated a tight ship, demanding nothing less than excellence from his staff and the artists who inhabited his stage. But it wasn’t just the names emblazoned on the marquee that made the Fillmore East a special place to catch a show it was the man who ran it.īill Graham, a German transplant born Wulf Wolodia Grajonca, opened the venue on March 8th, 1968, to stand as an East Coast outpost for his burgeoning live-concert empire. King, Eric Clapton, and Sly and the Family Stone to name just a few. The ornate theater located on Second Avenue near East 6th Street in New York City only operated for three years, but in that time, it hosted some of the greatest legends the music industry has ever known, including Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, the Allman Brothers Band, B.B. Few venues in rock history can match the hallowed legacy of the Fillmore East.
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