Fillmore East
Based on Wikipedia: Fillmore East
The Church of Rock and Roll
For three years and four months, a converted Yiddish theater on Manhattan's Lower East Side became the most important venue in rock music. The Fillmore East wasn't just a concert hall. Musicians called it "The Church of Rock and Roll," and they meant it as something close to literal truth.
The building at 105 Second Avenue had a deceptively modest entrance. Walk past the small marquee and through the doors, and you'd find yourself in a cavernous space that could hold nearly 2,700 people. The theater had been built in 1925 and 1926, designed by architect Harrison Wiseman in the Medieval Revival style, during an era when this stretch of Second Avenue was known as the "Yiddish Theater District" and the "Jewish Rialto." Yiddish-speaking audiences packed houses up and down the avenue, watching plays and musicals in their native language. By the time rock promoter Bill Graham took over in 1968, the building had cycled through several lives—the Commodore Theater, then the Loews Commodore movie house, then the Village Theatre—and had fallen into disrepair. Graham saw something else entirely.
Bill Graham's Vision
Graham was already running the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, which he would soon relocate and rename the Fillmore West. He wanted an East Coast counterpart, a venue where he could book the same acts on alternating coasts and create a true national circuit for rock music. This was 1968. Rock was barely a decade old as a distinct form, and the infrastructure for touring bands was still being invented. Graham was one of the people inventing it.
The Fillmore East opened on March 8, 1968, and immediately distinguished itself from other venues. Graham ran two shows per night, at eight and eleven, on both Friday and Saturday. Each show featured three acts—a format that seems almost quaint now but was innovative then. You didn't just see one band; you saw an entire evening of music, with the headliner following two opening acts. The triple bill meant that audiences might discover new favorites, and younger bands got exposure to crowds that had come to see someone else.
What made the Fillmore East special wasn't just the booking or the schedule. It was the atmosphere Graham created. He paid attention to details that other promoters ignored: the sound quality, the comfort of the audience, the treatment of the musicians. The hall had excellent acoustics—not a given in converted theaters—and Graham invested in maintaining them. Audiences at the Fillmore East were famously attentive and enthusiastic. They came to listen, not to talk or be seen.
The Sound of Light
One element that set Fillmore East apart was something you couldn't hear at all: the Joshua Light Show. Headed by an artist named Joshua White, this was a team of visual artists who projected swirling, psychedelic imagery onto a backdrop behind the performing bands. The effect was hypnotic—colors bleeding into colors, shapes morphing and dissolving in time with the music. This wasn't a simple light show with colored bulbs. The Joshua Light Show used overhead projectors, liquid dyes, clock crystals, and handmade slides to create what amounted to visual improvisation alongside the musical improvisation happening onstage.
After White left in 1970, the Pig Light Show took over under Marc Rubinstein's direction, continuing the tradition. When Joshua White's crew worked elsewhere, they went by "Joe's Lights." The psychedelic light show became so associated with the Fillmore East experience that it's hard to imagine those performances without it.
The House Band
The Allman Brothers Band played the Fillmore East so often that people started calling them "Bill Graham's house band." This wasn't an insult. The Allmans understood something fundamental about the venue and what it offered.
Gregg Allman and guitarist Dickey Betts explained it simply: they were a live band, and they knew it. The audience was part of what they did. And there was no question about where to record a live album. "New York crowds have always been great," they said, "but what made the Fillmore special was Bill Graham. He was the best promoter rock has ever had and you could feel his influence in every little single thing at the Fillmore. It was just special. The bands felt it and the crowd felt it and it lit all of us up."
The result was At Fillmore East, recorded over two nights in March 1971 and released that July. It became the band's breakthrough, a double album that showcased their instrumental interplay in a way studio recordings never could. Producer Tom Dowd edited some of the performances, but the raw energy came through. The follow-up, Eat a Peach, included more Fillmore East recordings and was dedicated to lead guitarist Duane Allman, who died in a motorcycle crash shortly after the first live album's release.
The Allman Brothers weren't finished with the Fillmore East even after the venue closed. In 1996, recordings from February 1970 surfaced—shows where the Allmans had opened for the Grateful Dead and the band Love. The Dead's legendary sound engineer, Owsley "Bear" Stanley, had captured those performances on the soundboard. More than two decades later, they finally saw official release.
The Dead's Second Home
If the Allman Brothers were the house band, the Grateful Dead were the extended family that kept coming back. The Dead played forty-three concerts at the Fillmore East between June 1968 and April 1971. That's an extraordinary number for a single venue over three years.
The Dead's relationship with the Fillmore East produced some of their most celebrated performances. A run in February 1970 is consistently ranked by Deadheads—the band's devoted following—as among the five best live tapes in existence. The thirty-minute version of "Dark Star" from those shows is considered one of the finest performances of that legendary improvisational piece, a song that could stretch or compress depending on where the band's collective consciousness wandered.
Multiple live albums emerged from these performances. The album commonly called Skull and Roses drew seven of its eleven tracks from a March 1971 run. Bear's Choice collected performances from February 1970. The Dick's Picks archival series returned to the Fillmore East well multiple times. Dave's Picks did the same. The Dead recorded so much usable material at this one venue that releases continue into the present day.
Hendrix at Midnight
Jimi Hendrix recorded some of his most important live work at the Fillmore East, but the circumstances were unusual. On New Year's Eve 1969, Hendrix debuted a new band called Band of Gypsys, a power trio featuring bassist Billy Cox and drummer Buddy Miles. This was a departure from the Jimi Hendrix Experience, his previous group, and the music was different too—funkier, rawer, with extended improvisations that pushed into new territory.
Hendrix played four shows over two nights: early and late shows on December 31, 1969, and again on January 1, 1970. The album Band of Gypsys, released later in 1970, drew from these performances and remains one of the essential documents of Hendrix's artistry. Additional material from those four shows continued to surface for decades, including a comprehensive box set released in 2019 called Songs for Groovy Children.
Jazz Meets Rock
Bill Graham didn't limit his bookings to rock bands. He brought in jazz, blues, and acts that defied easy categorization. Miles Davis played the Fillmore East multiple times, which was remarkable for several reasons.
In March 1970, Davis and his sextet opened for Neil Young and Crazy Horse and the Steve Miller Blues Band. Think about that billing for a moment: one of the most important figures in jazz history, a man who had already revolutionized the genre multiple times, playing as an opening act for rock bands. Davis was in the midst of his electric period, when he was deliberately blurring the boundaries between jazz and rock, and Graham's willingness to book him alongside rock acts helped expose him to new audiences.
The March 7, 1970, show had additional significance: it was saxophonist Wayne Shorter's last live performance with Davis after nearly six years in the band. Columbia Records recorded the performances, and they eventually saw release as a two-disc set more than thirty years later.
Three months later, Davis returned to open for Laura Nyro over four nights. Columbia recorded all four shows, and producer Teo Macero edited the results into the double album Miles Davis at Fillmore. The full, unedited performances finally emerged in 2014 as part of Davis's Bootleg Series.
A Brief Catalog of Magic
The list of notable performances at the Fillmore East could fill a book. Here are a few that deserve mention.
Cream, the British blues-rock trio of Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, and Ginger Baker, played the venue when it was still called the Village Theatre in September 1967, before Graham's renovation. Led Zeppelin appeared four times in early 1969, opening for Iron Butterfly—a booking that seems absurd in retrospect, given what Zeppelin would become. Amateur film footage of their January 31 performance survives.
Chuck Berry headlined on February 15, 1969, with Johnny Winter, Savoy Brown, and Aorta as support. A four-act bill was rare; seeing the man who arguably invented rock and roll guitar at the Fillmore East was rarer still. The Mothers of Invention played regularly, and on June 6, 1971, John Lennon and Yoko Ono sat in with Frank Zappa's band. That collaboration ended up on a live album included with Lennon and Ono's Some Time in New York City.
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young played ten shows total: four in September 1969 and six in June 1970. The June run contributed to their double live album 4 Way Street. Derek and the Dominos, Eric Clapton's post-Cream band featuring Duane Allman on guitar, recorded In Concert there in October 1970.
The venue even hosted classical music. Organist Virgil Fox performed Bach on what was marketed as the "Heavy Organ" concert in December 1970. Pianist Lorin Hollander played in February 1969. These weren't gimmicks; Graham believed in exposing rock audiences to other traditions, and the Fillmore East's acoustics rewarded the effort.
Television Comes Calling
On September 23, 1970, National Educational Television—the precursor to today's Public Broadcasting Service—taped a show called Welcome to Fillmore East. The broadcast featured the Byrds, the Elvin Bishop Group, Albert King, Sha Na Na, and Van Morrison, complete with a psychedelic light show by Joe's Lights.
The Allman Brothers were also filmed that night, but technical difficulties prevented their segment from airing. A thirty-minute clip eventually surfaced on YouTube decades later, a reminder of how much documentation of the era has been lost, recovered, or never properly archived in the first place.
The show aired on WNET Channel 13 in New York on October 10, 1970, with a simulcast on WNEW-FM radio—an early experiment in multimedia broadcasting that presaged the concert films and streaming broadcasts of later decades.
Why It Ended
The Fillmore East closed on June 27, 1971. Bill Graham announced he was shutting down both Fillmores, East and West, and stepping back from the concert promotion business. He was exhausted and disillusioned.
The music industry was changing rapidly. The big outdoor festivals—Woodstock in 1969, Altamont later that year—had shown that rock could draw hundreds of thousands of people. The intimacy of a 2,700-seat theater began to seem quaint when bands could fill stadiums. Economics were shifting too. Acts that had been happy to play multiple nights at the Fillmore could now command fees that made such extended runs impractical.
Graham also felt that the counterculture he'd helped nurture was losing its way. The idealism of the late sixties was curdling into something darker. Altamont, where a fan was killed by Hell's Angels acting as security during a Rolling Stones performance, had shattered certain illusions about peace and love.
The final shows at the Fillmore East featured the Allman Brothers Band—who else?—along with the Beach Boys, Albert King, Mountain, the J. Geils Band, and Country Joe McDonald. Edgar Winter's White Trash closed the venue. The Allman Brothers' performance that night was eventually released as part of a comprehensive box set in 2014.
The Building Lives On
The theater at 105 Second Avenue didn't disappear when the Fillmore East closed. It became the Saint, a famous gay nightclub, in the 1980s. Later it was converted to a multiplex movie theater, and the facade was incorporated into an apartment building. The neighborhood itself transformed around it, gentrifying from the gritty Lower East Side of 1968 into what's now called the East Village, with rents that would have been unimaginable to the hippies who once lined up for shows.
But the recordings survive. That's the Fillmore East's truest legacy. Because Graham ran such a professional operation, because he welcomed recording equipment, because the acoustics were excellent and the audiences attentive, an extraordinary number of live albums were captured there during its brief existence. The Grateful Dead alone left behind enough Fillmore East recordings to fill dozens of hours. The Allman Brothers' breakthrough came from those stages. Hendrix's Band of Gypsys exists because of those New Year's shows.
Most concert venues leave behind memories and ticket stubs. The Fillmore East left behind a library.
The Sound of a Room
Recording engineers talk about the "sound" of a room, by which they mean the way sound waves interact with the physical space—the reflections, the absorption, the subtle coloring that makes one venue sound different from another. The Fillmore East had a particular sound, warm and present, that suited live rock recording unusually well.
But there was another kind of sound to the Fillmore East, something harder to capture on tape: the sound of an audience that had come to pay attention. Graham cultivated this. He expected people to listen, and they did. The musicians noticed. When Dickey Betts talked about the crowd "lighting all of us up," he was describing something that happened in the room, in real time, a feedback loop between performers and audience that elevated both.
This is what gets lost when music moves to stadiums and arenas, to streaming and headphones. The Fillmore East was a place where music happened as a communal act, where the energy in the room shaped what came out of the amplifiers. For three years and four months, it was the best room in rock and roll.
Then the doors closed, and that particular magic became available only on record—which, if you think about it, is still a kind of miracle. You can hear what the Fillmore East sounded like anytime you want. You just can't feel what it felt like to be there, surrounded by 2,700 people, watching the lights swirl behind the stage, knowing you were somewhere that mattered.