Live at the Fillmore East & West: Getting Backstage and Personal with Rock’s Greatest Legends

Glatt expands his first book, Rage and Roll: Bill Graham and the Selling of Rock, with this grand history of the Fillmore concert halls of San Francisco and New York City. Using to great effect his original interviews and a wide-ranging selection of previously published material, Glatt presents a definitive analysis of the rock music industry from Fillmore founder Bill Graham’s birth in 1931 to the theaters’ closing 40 years later. As a reference tool, music buffs and casual fans alike will find this volume indispensable. Glatt has spent the better part of 20 years assembling a truly staggering amount of information on a period of music that is often oversimplified as a haze of drugs and sex. Influential though those elements may have been, Glatt focuses instead on a triumphantly thorough chronicle of the business decisions and industry trends that affected the music of a generation, like Janis Joplin’s decision to split with Big Brother and the Holding Company. Though Glatt can’t always manage to organize his prose dramatically, he has nevertheless compiled an exhaustive compendium of fascinating data. Photos. (Dec.)