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Fillmore East

Fillmore East

105 2nd Ave, New York, NY 10003


Two blocks south of St. Mark’s Place, on Second Avenue and Sixth Street, was the Fillmore East—which for a brief period between 1968 and 1971 hosted the downtown sounds of the Fugs and Silver Apples, along with touring acts like the Who, Jefferson Airplane, and Jimi Hendrix.

Stories

Bill Graham Clashes with His East Village Neighbors

People

The Fillmore East was an instant commercial success, which led to a clash between Bill Graham and the East Village neighborhood radicals who demanded he “give back to the community.” The Motherfuckers insisted that the theater should be turned over to them one night a week, so the first “Free Wednesday” featured the Living Theatre performing Paradise Now. When one of the actors announced that they were going to “liberate” the theater, Graham ran onstage to stop the madness, but the crowd overwhelmed him and forcibly tied him to a chair. The psychodrama continued for hours, with Graham and the crowd yelling back and forth at each other well into the early morning. “The free nights at the theater were just drunken homeless people screaming and hitting drums. It didn’t last very long,” said Joshua White, recalling the combustible mix of people in the Lower East Side. Bill Graham closed the Fillmore East’s doors in the summer of 1971, citing the changing economics of the concert industry and an inhospitable atmosphere in the surrounding neighborhood. By the time it shut down, Joshua White had witnessed how drug consumption was shifting from psychedelics to cocaine and heroin, which created even more tension inside and outside the theater. “One of the things that I noticed right away,” he recalled, “was that even though people went around smiling and grinning at each other, there was a lot of anger and hostility there. It was not a good time, and it was going to get worse before it got better.”

From Chapter 19 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore


The Joshua Light Show at the Fillmore East

People

Curious about the light shows at the Fillmore Auditorium, Joshua White made his way out to San Francisco in 1967. “I was really struck with how sloppy it was, in the sense that the light show wasn’t particularly great,” he recalled. “The people in the audience all together, that was the exciting part, but there was something wrong about the light show—because it wasn’t that dynamic.” White and his partners still picked up some ideas from the venue’s oil and liquid projections, and when one of the Fillmore’s lighting designers moved to New York, they all began collaborating. “He showed us the artistic things which were hard,” White said, “and we showed him how to do mechanical things which were hard—like attaching a color wheel to a motor in front of the projector.” Everyone who worked at the Fillmore East came out of theater school—including White—and they also had the good luck of sharing a building wall with NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. “Their students came over because rock ’n’ roll was exciting,” White said, “and many of them got involved in the Fillmore. So we began with this very high level of well-trained people.” The psychedelic Joshua Light Show became part of the Fillmore East experience as soon as it opened on March 8, 1968. Bands usually performed two separate shows an evening, often for multiple-night runs, which allowed the Joshua Light Show to experiment and refine their techniques. “It was a perfect way to grow a light show,” White said. “You just keep doing it, and we kept doing it for two years. We developed a palette, and that palette just got bigger and bigger.”

From Chapter 19 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore