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

Glatt presents a fascinating but disjointed history of the two rock music venues that legendary promoter Bill Graham (the subject of the author's last book, Rage & Roll) founded in 1968—New York City's Fillmore East and San Francisco's Fillmore West. The Fillmore story is told through a series of short biographies of some of the major rock acts who graced a Fillmore stage during the theaters' three-year existence. Glatt jumps between profiles of Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, the Velvet Underground, the Grateful Dead, and other legendary performers as well as some lesser acts, with each brief chapter covering a different artist and detailing their association with Graham and Fillmore. Glatt also touches briefly on the famously abrasive but passionate rock promoter's debatably questionable business decisions in the face of tremendous changes in music trends and his various rock industry innovations, but the focus is squarely on the musicians and their Fillmore gigs. Narrator Peter Berkrot delivers a knockout performance himself, capably voicing a wide variety of characters.