JEFFERSON AIRPLANE
FILLMORE EAST, NYC
1970-05-07
Edited (Upgraded?) Source

SBD? > ?? > CDR > EAC > Audacity > CDWave > FLAC

HOT TUNA SET:(Removed due to HT ruling)
001. Intro
002. New Song (For The Morning)
003. Mann's Fate

SET 2

1. Intro
2. Have you Seen The Saucers?
3. 3/5 Of A Mile In 10 Seconds
4. We Can Be Together
5. Volunteers
6. Somebody To Love
7. Wooden Ships
8. Mexico
9. Uncle Sam Blues
10. Emergency
11. Crown Of Creation

Transfer Notes:

Got this one in a trade from someone on the JFT. It came as one
big audio file, which I EAC-ed (secure, offset-corrected). There
seemed to have been TAO in the lineage at some time in the past,
which was only partially repaired, so I removed the gaps, tracked
using CDWave and then converted to Flac (with alignment on sector boundaries). Tracking was made difficult by the way Grace
chats/rants over the beginning of many song intros, but IMHO it's
not a bad job.

I am presuming this to be the upgraded 1 disc version of the show
mentioned on a few people's trade lists. Vocals are very upfront
in the mix, particularly Grace and Marty. There is a full version
of the show in circulation, but I have not heard it. Other songs
played and listed at etree are: Won't You Try Saturday Afternoon,
The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil, Rock Me Baby, Star Track,
Up Or Down. Uncle Sam Blues was also played twice.

This excellent-sounding show contains the infamous Shrimp Rap
during Somebody To Love, which makes it an essential listen for
any fans of Grace at her most controversial. I have also included
a review of the show, giving some of the background.

Enjoy

boombox, feb 2005
---
May 7 1970 - Fillmore East, New York NY

This was a few days after the Kent State massacre, and the Airplane were
finishing a two day run, two shows per, at the Fillmore East. We saw the
late show - i.e. the fourth show of the run.

To say that things were tense at the time would be a megahyperbolic
understatement. After Kent State happened, it seemed as though the
revolution was no longer just a verbal exercise, but was reality. THEY
were killing us now. What was to come next was anybody's guess.

With this as the background to the show, my friends and I trucked off to
New York. The show was weird from the get-go. As I recall, tickets had
gone on sale a few days earlier for a week run by Crosby, Stills, Nash
and Young, and there had been no ticket limit policy and a very few
scalpers had bought up all the tickets, and the New York concert going
crowd were just super P.O'd at Bill Graham. I remember some major argument
Bill had with some folks before the show even began. There was definitely
hostility in the air. I think Manfred Mann opened and were not given much
attention. In those days, the Airplane would open the show with some
appropriate video - there was the scene from Disney's "Alice in
Wonderland" - ending with the cheshire cat telling Alice that "We're all
mad around here" as he fades away to just tail; there was the scene from
"North by Northwest" where Cary Grant is chased by the airplane in the
field; I think the show that night was the end of King Kong where after
Kong falls from the Empire State Bldg. someone says "Well the airplane's
done it", and then the movie dude says, "No, it wasn't the airplane, it
was beauty killed the beast". Well, these were always big-fun openings,
but that night it was different. People were booing the movie. I knew it
was going to be a strange night.

The Airplane started playing, and I recall they sounded pretty bad - which
was not all that unusual in those days because they played so loud, and
without tuning devices that are available today, they would often be very
loud very out of tune. I just remember they sounded bad, and with all
those weird vibes, the show couldn't get on track.

And Grace was in rare form. She was pretty wasted (projection? - I know
I was totally wasted), and she got into some discussions with some
members of the audience. Now there were invariably a few New York Aholes
at Fillmore shows, but this night there were a few extra. Anyway, I seem
to recall the discussion starting with Grace kind of innocently suggesting
that since it was such a groove out in California, that we all pack-up New
York and move out West. The response of some was f**k California, and
that turned into a pretty mean f**k you Grace conversation between Grace
and several aholes in the audience. Well, by now the audience is getting
pretty hostile among themselves, with the many berating the few. This went
on for a while. The band in the meantime had left the stage and Grace was
just having this tremendously horrendous verbal exhange with the idiots.
This went on for a time-distorted 'long' time, I'd say at least twenty
minutes to a half-hour with just Grace on the stage arguing with whomever
wanted to argue with her. Then she stopped cold on the stage, looked
around, and seeing she was alone, wondered where everybody else was. Marty
and I think Paul came out and led her off-stage. The audience was
restless. Things were pretty bleak in my mind. The Airplane were Love
and Revolution to me, and now there was just the Revolution. What the hell
was going on?

Jack and Jorma came out, Jorma with acoustic guitar in hand, and I was
stunned. This was something I had been dreaming about for years, to hear
Jorma play acoustic guitar. The first Tuna album had not yet been
released, and this was amazing. Thay started playing and the aholes were
booing and yelling to get off the stage. Jack started to walk off and
Jorma grabs him and says that they have to do this, and they did a nice
Hot Tuna set in the midst of audience bedlam.

Then the band came back on stage. Grace apologised, saying she had done
too much drugs and, besides, she was "on the rag", and all she was trying
to do was tell people how nice the scene was out west, and well, it kind
of started all over again. And Paul said something about the folks being
killed at Kent State, and that was maybe why things were so weird. And,
boy, were things weird. By the end of the show - it like seven in the
morning, the doors are all open, the sun's streaming into the theatre and
everyone's standing on their seats, cheering the band, not allowing them
to stop playing, screaming to put some meaning into the night's
happenings. I remember thinking that us "good" guys were victorious over
the ahole "bad" guys that had added so much negativity to an already
downer of a week. "Such a night".

Now some of this is straight memory, and some is from a copy of the tape
from the second set that I amazingly ran into a few years back. Some of
you may know this tape as the 'shrimp-shit' tape. During Grace's rap in
"Somebody to Love" she tells how she can just call up room service at the
hotel anytime, even ther middle of the night and get whatever she wants,
even some 'shrimp-shit' (I think she was referring to shrimp salad).
Anyway, what she says is not an ego boast that she's so special, but that
we're all special, that we all deserve the finer things, and it's up to
each one of us to make it happen in our own lives. It's a message that
I've always been grateful to Grace and Paul and the Airplane for.
-- contributed by David Kreitzer (kreitze1@JEFLIN.TJU.EDU)
from: http://www.mv.com/ipusers/owsley/airplane/jarev.txt