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.