Thank You and Farewell - The Closing of the Fillmore East, Fillmore East, New York City, 6-27-1971, Part 7: The Allman Brothers Band

Here's the seventh and last part of the closing of the Fillmore East in New York City in 1971, featuring the Allman Brothers Band. I was a bit reluctant to post this, because it's the only portion of the concert that has been officially released. But I ultimately decided to post it for completeness's sake. 

The version of "One Way Out" here is actually the version that appeared on the band's "Eat a Peach" album in 1972. (Other live songs on that come from earlier concerts.) Then, when the deluxe version of "Eat a Peach" was released in 2008, the entire show was included as a bonus disc. The whole show was also included on the 2014 box set "The 1971 Fillmore East Recordings."

The farewell concerts to the Fillmore East actually took place over three days, but only the final night was broadcast live on the radio, so that's the only night where we have excellent recordings. Promoter Bill Graham, who controlled the Fillmore East, considered the Allman Brothers Band his favorite musical act. So he had them as the final act for all three nights.

Unfortunately, while this set by the band was certainly excellent, it sounds like the band's set from the night before was even better, and much longer. It's considered a kind of lost holy grail for fans of the band, but no recording of it has ever emerged. According to different accounts, the band played for anything between four to seven hours!

Band member Dickey Betts later said of the concert on June 26th (the night before this one), "That was a special show. We played until daylight that morning. I remember it was dark in there, and when they opened the door, the sun about knocked us down. We didn't realize we had played until seven, eight o'clock in the morning. Bill Graham just let us rattle, and nobody said, 'We gotta cut the time.' It was just a really free kind of thing."

Band member Butch Trucks added, "We played for roughly seven straight hours with everything we had. We played a three-hour set and then came back out. The feeling from the audience, not necessarily the volume, but the feeling was just so overwhelming that I just started crying. Then we got into a jam … that lasted for four straight hours. Non-stop. And when we finished, there was no applause whatsoever. The place was deathly quiet. Someone got up and opened the doors, the sun came pouring in, and you could see this whole audience with a big shit-eating grin on their face, nobody moving until finally they got up and started quietly leaving the place. I remember Duane [Allman] walking in front of me, dragging his guitar while I was just sitting there completely burned, and he said, ‘Damn, it’s just like leaving church.'"

Trucks added, "The next night, Bill [Graham] came running over, grabbed me around the neck so hard it hurt, and said, 'Thank you, thank you, thank you, for that show. It made all the years of crap I had to put up with worth it.' And I'll never forget what he said next: 'If I had my way, when you finished this morning, I would be sealed up in my bubble and gone off to wherever I’m going.'" 

So yeah, too bad we don't have THAT recording. But this one certainly is nothing to be ashamed of. Consider that the band liked it enough to include the whole thing on the deluxe version of "Eat a Peach," when there were other 1971 soundboard recordings they could have put there instead (with some of them eventually being released later). But I read the band was tired from the night before, and they felt the audience was tired too, so they chose to keep their set short and sweet, by their relative standards.

It's also worth noting that Graham gave the band an unusually prolonged and heartfelt introduction. That included the comment, "In all my life, I've never heard the kind of music that this group plays. The finest contemporary music. We're going to round it off with the best of them all – the Allman Brothers." 

Band member Gregg Allman later commented, "That was special. I'd heard a rumor before that Bill had said of all the bands he'd ever worked with, we were his favorites, but I hadn't believed it. So when I heard him say that with my own two ears, I was elated."

This album is an hour and 16 minutes long.

63 talk by Bill Graham (Allman Brothers Band)
64 Statesboro Blues (Allman Brothers Band)
65 talk (Allman Brothers Band)
66 Don't Keep Me Wonderin' (Allman Brothers Band)
67 talk (Allman Brothers Band)
68 Done Somebody Wrong (Allman Brothers Band)
69 One Way Out (Allman Brothers Band)
70 In Memory of Elizabeth Reed [Instrumental] (Allman Brothers Band)
71 Midnight Rider (Allman Brothers Band)
72 talk (Allman Brothers Band)
73 Hot 'Lanta [Instrumental] (Allman Brothers Band)
74 Whipping Post (Allman Brothers Band)
75 talk (Allman Brothers Band)
76 You Don't Love Me (Allman Brothers Band) 

https://www.upload.ee/files/16376045/VA-ThnkYounFrwll197107AllmnBrthrsBnd.zip.html

The cover photo of the band's slide guitarist Duane Allman comes from this exact concert. This one, along with the photo I used for the Albert King set, were the only two good ones I could find that were actually in color. So that's why I used a photo that only shows Duane, because this was what was available.

Thank You and Farewell - The Closing of the Fillmore East, Fillmore East, New York City, 6-27-1971, Part 6: Country Joe McDonald

This sixth album of the closing of the Fillmore East in New York City in 1971 is a very short one. But I figure since all the other sets are their own albums, this one should be its own album too. This features singer-songwriter Country Joe McDonald.

McDonald had been the leader of the rock band Country Joe and the Fish from 1965 until the band's break-up in 1970. He then pursued a solo career in more of a singer-songwriter mode.

He performed this concert solo, just vocals and guitar. He'd just released his most recent album, "Hold On It's Coming" a couple of months prior to this concert. But the only song he played from it was the title song.

This album is 16 minutes long. This just might be the shortest album I've posted at this blog so far.

As short as this album is, it was even shorter before I started editing it. I cut out a couple of minutes of guitar tuning. It seems he took a extra long time because he broke a string.

56 talk by Bill Graham (Country Joe McDonald)
57 Kiss My Ass (Country Joe McDonald)
58 Entertainment Is My Business (Country Joe McDonald)
59 I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag (Country Joe McDonald)
60 talk (Country Joe McDonald)
61 Rockin' All Around the World (Country Joe McDonald)
62 Hold On It's Coming (Country Joe McDonald)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16376038/VA-ThnkYounFrwll197106CntryJoMcDnld.zip.html

The cover photo comes from this exact concert. However, the photo was black and white. I colorized with the help of the Palette program.

Thank You and Farewell - The Closing of the Fillmore East, Fillmore East, New York City, 6-27-1971, Part 5: The Beach Boys

This, the fifth album from the closing of the Fillmore East in New York City in 1971, is an extra special one. That's because although this has existed as a bootleg ever since the live broadcast on the radio, the recording has had serious flaws. But I believe I have mostly fixed them through the magic of audio editing. So one can hear how they really sounded for the very first time.

Before I describe the sound edits I made, I want to tell a story about some backstage intrigue relating to this concert.

First off, note that Chip Rachlin and Michael Klenfner were employees of Graham helping to run the Fillmore East. They also happened to be huge Beach Boys fans. Jack Rieley was the Beach Boys' manager. Also, note that the Beach Boys were considered very uncool at the time, since their earlier hits about cars and surfing were out of sync with rock music culture by 1971. Rachlin and Klenfner managed to convince Graham to let the Beach Boys play at Carnegie Hall in February 1971. That went very well, and helped restore the band's reputation a bit. They also had a guest spot during a Grateful Dead concert at the Fillmore East in April 1971. That helped their reputation some more. Bob Dylan watched that show from backstage, and was heard to exclaim, "They're fuckin' good, man!"

So, with all that in mind, when it came to this concert, according to Rachlin, "Jack Rieley nearly got [the Beach Boys] thrown off by insisting that they close the show, even though you had J. Geils there and you had the Allman Brothers there. The Beach Boys were lucky to be on the show and we had to work very hard to convince Bill (Graham) to put them on the show and then for Jack to take the idiotic position that they had to close the show. Klenfner showed his disgust with Jack in the lobby of the Fillmore, with the glittering lights and all the beautifully lit Fillmore posters. Klenfner threw Jack into a glass case and said he would kill him if he didn't change his mind… He told him 'If we go to Bill with this request he'll throw you out of the theater, so don't hurt the band by being such a jerk!' We won that one."

Butch Trucks of the Allman Brothers Band, who closed the show, has a somewhat different account, where their demand did reach Graham. "Everyone wanted in on that gig. The Beach Boys showed up and unloaded all their stuff and said they'd have to play last, and Bill Graham said, 'Well, just pack up your shit. I have my closing band.' So the Beach Boys had to swallow their pride."

I'm guessing Rieley's demand did make it to Graham, but then Klenfner confronted Rieley and got him to back off. That makes sense and reconciles the two accounts.

Anyway, I think it's possible that someone sabotaged the recording of the Beach Boys for this conflict due to that behind the scenes dispute. This is just a guess, based on the fact that all the other acts sounded great on the live broadcast of the show, but the levels were seriously off for the vocals in the Beach Boys set. It seemed one microphone was fine, but other microphones were turned way, way down, to the point that the other vocals from the other microphones were almost inaudible at times. And of course multiple part harmonies were essential to the Beach Boys sound. This problem wasn't fixed for the entire duration of their set. So the bootleg of their set has been almost unlistenable, in my opinion. What was on there sounded perfectly fine, like a pristine soundboard, but large portions of the vocals were completely missing, including the lead vocals on some songs. At times, it almost sounded like a karaoke version of the band.

Luckily, nowadays, audio editing technology has progressed to the point that much of this problem could be fixed. I spent a lot of time and effort repairing this recording. The first thing I did was split all the songs into vocals and instruments. Then I boosted the vocals where that could help. In many cases, the vocals were there, just buried way down in the mix. Sometimes, I had to carefully fix the volume levels line by line, because they were highly variable. 

But in other cases, the vocals were so low that they were essentially gone. So I had to take more drastic measures. I isolated vocals from other Beach Boys concerts around this time, and I patched those in to replace the missing vocals. It was tricky because I had to match the pitch and speed, but I believe it worked nearly all the time. You be the judge. The songs where I did a lot of this are marked with "[Edit]" in their titles. For the others, just boosting up the existing vocals managed to fix things.

I could have done even more, there are still some missing vocals here and there, but I think that overall, the recording has been drastically changed for the better.

In my opinion, the band was still in a very creative mode. and they sounded very good here. Their next album, "Surf's Up," released in August 1971, would be one of their very best, in my opinion. However, they mostly stuck to their older hits, with only one song, "It's about Time," from their most recent album, and another one, "Student Demonstration Time," from their upcoming album "Surf's Up." (By the way, note that "Student Demonstration Time" is really just the 1950s classic "Riot in Cell Block No. 9" with different lyrics. The band messed up in this performance, singing the chorus to the original version, for almost every chorus.) One nice surprise was that the band also did an excellent cover of "Your Song" by Elton John, which had only been released a year earlier. The Beach Boys have never officially released any version of this song.

This album is 41 minutes long.

38 talk by Bill Graham (Beach Boys)
39 Heroes and Villains (Beach Boys)
40 Do It Again (Beach Boys)
41 Cotton Fields (Beach Boys)
42 Help Me, Rhonda (Beach Boys)
43 talk (Beach Boys)
44 Wouldn't It Be Nice [Edit] (Beach Boys)
45 talk (Beach Boys)
46 Your Song (Beach Boys)
47 talk (Beach Boys)
48 Student Demonstration Time [Riot in Cell Block No. 9] (Beach Boys)
49 talk (Beach Boys)
50 Good Vibrations [Edit] (Beach Boys)
51 talk (Beach Boys)
52 California Girls [Edit] (Beach Boys)
53 talk (Beach Boys)
54 I Get Around [Edit] (Beach Boys)
55 It's about Time [Edit] (Beach Boys)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16376040/VA-ThnkYounFrwll197105BchBys.zip.html

The cover photo comes from this exact concert. However, the original was in black and white. I used the Palette program to convert it to color, then I used Photoshop to fix it up some more. Also, I added the blobs in the background, taken from a different photo of a light show. That roughly matches with images of the light show I saw in other photos from this concert. 

Finally, I'm pretty sure that, from right to left, that's Al Jardine, Carl Wilson, and Mike Love. The other band members weren't included in the photo. Also, drummer Dennis Wilson wasn't at the concert since he had badly injured his hand in an accident a couple of weeks earlier. He was temporarily replaced by a drummer named Mike Kowalski.

Thank You and Farewell - The Closing of the Fillmore East, Fillmore East, New York City, 6-27-1971, Part 4: Mountain

The final night of the Fillmore East in New York City in 1971 continues with the fourth act, Mountain.

Mountain was a hard rock group that lasted from 1969 to 1972. (There would be later reunions.) Its main star was singer and lead guitarist Leslie West. But the band was heavily inspired by Eric Clapton's band Cream. The two bands were linked by Felix Papparaldi, who produced most of Cream's albums and co-wrote some of their songs, including "Strange Brew." He played bass in Mountain, as well as producing and doing some songwriting and singing. The band had their biggest hit in 1969 with "Mississippi Queen."

You can read more about the band at their Wikipedia page, here:

Mountain (band) - Wikipedia

Mountain would release a live album in 1972, "The Road Goes Ever On," which drew from concerts between 1969 and 1972. But surprisingly, there were only four songs on that album, and none of them are the same as any of the songs here. This is arguably a better live document of the band in their prime, especially due to the presence of "Mississippi Queen."

As with most of the other sets from this concert, everything here is unreleased. But the sound quality is great due to the fact that it was professionally recorded and broadcast live. The lead vocals were low in the mix, but I fixed that with the UVR5 audio editing program.

This album is 51 minutes long.

29 talk by Bill Graham (Mountain)
30 Never in My Life (Mountain)
31 talk (Mountain)
32 Theme from an Imaginary Western (Mountain)
33 Roll Over Beethoven (Mountain)
34 Dreams of Milk and Honey - Swan Theme (Mountain)
35 Silver Paper (Mountain)
36 talk (Mountain)
37 Mississippi Queen (Mountain)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16376042/VA-ThnkYounFrwll197104Mntin.zip.html

The cover photo is from this exact concert. That is Felix Pappalardi on bass on the left and Leslie West on guitar on the right. This photo was originally in black and white, but I used the Palette program to colorize it.

Thank You and Farewell - The Closing of the Fillmore East, Fillmore East, New York City, 6-27-1971, Part 3: Edgar Winter's White Trash

The final concert at the Fillmore East in New York City in 1971 continues. The third act to appear was Edgar Winter's White Trash.

Edgar Winter is the younger brother of Johnny Winter. Both were born with albinism. Johnny Winter became famous in the late 1960s for his blues guitar playing. Edgar, who sings and plays keyboards and saxophone, started out in his brother's band, and the two of them often appeared on the others' albums. In 1970, Edgar released his first solo album, "Entrance." Then he formed the group "Edgar Winter's White Trash." They released a studio album in 1971, also called "Edgar Winter's White Trash," then a live album in 1972, "Roadwork." 

Then the band name changed again, to the Edgar Winter Group. Under this name, the band found huge success with the singles "Frankenstein" (which hit Number One in the U.S.) and "Free Ride." Also, the lead guitarist for all these projects was Rick Derringer. He put out a solo album in 1973 while staying in Winter's band, and had a big hit with the song "Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo."

Most of that success was still to come, however. At the time of this concert, Winter had yet to have a single or album reach the Top 100 in the U.S. charts. But his band was increasingly well regarded for their live performances.

This concert has a lot in common with the live "Roadwork" album from a year later. In particular, both feature long versions of "Tobacco Road" and "Turn On Your Love Light." But "Roadwork" is a double album, so it's almost twice as long as this. However, the other two songs here are not on that album.

Like most of the other sets from this concert, the lead vocals were rather low in the mix. So I used the UVR5 audio editing program to boost them relative to the instruments. By the way, the lead vocals are shared between Edgar Winter and a member of his band, Jerry LaCroix.

This album is 38 minutes long.

24 talk by Bill Graham (Edgar Winter's White Trash)
25 Where Would I Be (Edgar Winter's White Trash)
26 Let’s Get It On (Edgar Winter's White Trash)
27 Tobacco Road (Edgar Winter's White Trash)
28 Turn On Your Love Light (Edgar Winter's White Trash)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16376039/VA-ThnkYounFrwll197103EdgrWntrWhtTrsh.zip.html

 The cover photo is from this exact concert. That's Edgar Winter on the left and Rick Derringer on the right with the guitar.

Thank You and Farewell - The Closing of the Fillmore East, Fillmore East, New York City, 6-27-1971, Part 2: The J. Geils Band

I just posted Part 1 of this album series of sets from the final concert at the Fillmore East in 1971. Please read my write-up there for an explanation about what this concert was all about. There were seven music acts in this concert, and I'm presenting them in their order of appearance. The second act is the J. Geils Band.

Nowadays, the J. Geils Band are best known for their huge 1982 pop rock hits "Centerfold" and "Freeze-Frame." But at the time of this concert, their music was more heavily influenced by blues and R&B. They had a reputation for being hard-working, lively concert performers, generally better on stage than on their albums.

The band did release one live album from around this time period. "Full House" is a live album that was both recorded and released in 1972. So there's a lot of similarity between the song selections on that album and in this concert. But there are some differences, and this concert is longer. 

Like most of this overall concert, this performance is unreleased. But the sound quality is excellent because it was professionally recorded and broadcast live on the radio.

This album is 42 minutes long.

Note that the track numbering starts at 8 instead of 1 because the numbering continues where it left off with the previous act. That way you can easily play all the songs from the whole concert if you so desire.

08 talk by Bill Graham (J. Geils Band)
09 Sno-Cone [Instrumental] (J. Geils Band)
10 Wait (J. Geils Band)
11 talk (J. Geils Band)
12 First I Look at the Purse (J. Geils Band)
13 talk (J. Geils Band)
14 Whammer Jammer [Instrumental] (J. Geils Band)
15 talk (J. Geils Band)
16 Homework (J. Geils Band)
17 talk (J. Geils Band)
18 Pack Fair and Square (J. Geils Band)
19 talk (J. Geils Band)
20 Cruisin' for a Love (J. Geils Band)
21 talk (J. Geils Band)
22 Serves You Right to Suffer (J. Geils Band)
23 Hard Drivin' Man (J. Geils Band)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17205340/VA-THNKYOUNFRWLL197102JGilsBnd.zip.html

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/QAhPshgr

The cover photo is from this exact concert. However, the only photo I could find was a rather blurry  and black and white one. I used the Palette program to convert it to color. I then added the colorful blobs in the background from another picture, because the photos I found of this concert had a light show with that kind of imagery. (You can see it on the Part 1 Albert King set, for instance.) I couldn't do anything about the blur, but at least you hopefully get the general idea. 

UPDATE: On October 5, 2024, I upgraded the photo with the use of the Krea AI program. The image is still blurry in places, but not as much as before.

Thank You and Farewell - The Closing of the Fillmore East, Fillmore East, New York City, 6-27-1971, Part 1: Albert King

I've made it a point to try to post entire rock festivals, as these often seem to be overlooked and neglected. Here's another one. This is the concert from the final night of the legendary Fillmore East venue in New York City. I'll explain more in a bit about what it was and why it closed when it did. But suffice to say the venue went out with a bang. This final concert featured seven big name acts performing for a total of about five hours. So I've made seven albums, one for each act. This first one is blues guitarist Albert King.

All but one of the sets currently remain officially unreleased. However, the entire last night was broadcast live on the radio, so bootlegs exist with excellent sound.

The Fillmore East is closely tied to its owner, promoter Bill Graham, who was arguably the most important promoter in rock history. He was particularly instrumental in the development of the San Francisco psychedelic sound in the late 1960s. Bands like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane didn't have many good places to play at first. But Graham opened the Fillmore Auditorium in late 1965, and that became a haven for many new and upcoming bands. At first, this venue was just known as the Fillmore (named after the street it was on), but its name changed to the Fillmore West in 1968 when Graham moved it to a larger building about a mile away, around the same time he opened a similar venue in New York City, which he called the Fillmore East.

Both the Fillmore West and Fillmore East were among the most important and prestigious concert venues in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They held between 2,500 and 3,000 people, which was big enough for most of the famous rock acts of the time, but not so big to become a stadium type show, with inevitably poorer sound quality and less of a connection between the musicians and the fans. The Fillmore East in particular was well known for good acoustics, so dozens of live albums were recorded there. You can see a list at the Wikipedia article on the venue, here:

Fillmore East - Wikipedia

Unfortunately, these two venues didn't last that long. In 1971, Graham decided to close both of them. Part of it seems to be that Graham seemed to be personally burned out after hosting concerts on both the East and West coasts nearly every night for three years. But also, the economics were changing. As rock music got increasingly popular and mainstream, the acts that had found success playing at both Fillmores were increasing graduating to playing in arenas and stadiums that could hold 10,000 or more spectators. Graham couldn't pay the acts nearly the same amount when his venues were much smaller. He could have continued with lesser known acts, but he decided to quit the business instead.

Dickey Betts of the Allman Brothers Band later had this to say about the closing of the venue. "The Fillmore East was everybody’s favorite gig to play. It was the Carnegie Hall of rock and roll. Bill Graham made a very great presentation of rock and roll, with the light shows and the curtains and the presentation of the bands and the set changes. But the Fillmore East wasn't big enough to pay any of the bands what they made other places. I think the general feeling among anyone who played there was even though we could be playing somewhere else for three times the money, we'd rather come to the Fillmore East and play because it’s such a great place to play."

As it so happens, Graham didn't stay retired for long. Within a year, he was back to promoting rock concerts, although he wasn't as closely tied to particular venues as he'd been with the Fillmores. He arguably remained the most important concert promoter until he died in a helicopter crash in 1991. The original Fillmore in San Francisco reopened in 1994, and remains a popular venue until today.

Anyway, the closing of the Fillmore West on July 4, 1971, is well documented. There were five nights of closing concerts. This resulted in a documentary film called "Fillmore" and a triple album called "Fillmore: The Last Days," released in 1972. But there was no such similar film or album for the closing of the Fillmore East, which took place just a week earlier. 

Luckily though, we have the bootleg recordings. I'm calling this album series "Thank You and Farewell," because the marquee sign in front of the Fillmore East had "thank you and farewell" written on it after the venue closed. You can see that included in the artwork at the top of the cover art for each album.

After all that, there's not a lot to say about the actual music here. In my opinion, Albert King was at his peak in the late 1960s and early 1970s. There's one classic live album from this time, "Live Wire/ Blues Power," released in 1968. But other than that, there isn't much live music from this time period, although he did release many live albums later in his career. So this is a very welcome addition, in my opinion, although it is a rather short set.

Oh, by the way, apparently, King was the very first artist to play the venue when it opened up. So that could be why he was involved in the last show.

This album is 29 minutes long.

01 talk by Bill Graham (Albert King)
02 Knock on Wood [Instrumental] (Albert King)
03 Got to Be Some Changes (Albert King)
04 Nothing but the Blues (Albert King)
05 Crosscut Saw (Albert King)
06 Personal Manager (Albert King)
07 Bye Bye Blues (Albert King)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16376043/VA-ThnkYounFrwll197101AlbrtKng.zip.html

The cover art consists of two parts. The top part is taken from a photo of the marquee sign for the venue. The "thank you and farewell" message was written on three different lines, but I used Photoshop to combine them to one line in order to save space. I also colorized the black and white photo I found, basing the colors off a color photo I found of the same sign. 

The photo of Albert King is from this exact concert, I'm happy to say.