The Motherfuckers
The contretemps between Bill Graham and the New York Motherfuckers contingent has been simmering and broiling toward bloody violence for weeks. A full report on the background, the foreground and all the attendant emotions that, brought the rock people and the revolution people into confrontation, as prepared by Rolling Stones’s New York bureau chief, follows.
New York — In retrospect, the stormy and sometimes violent ten-week battle between Bill Graham’s Fillmore East and the “revolutionary” Motherfuckers-led segment of New York’s East Village hip community was a clash between two styles of life — two philosophies, if you will — which would have had a difficult time adjusting to each other under the most favorable of conditions — and conditions were far from favorable during the entire entanglement.
On one hand, Graham delights in taking responsibility for his actions and is deeply concerned with operating his business at maximum efficiency. He clearly regards the Fillmore East as “my property, since I pay the rent.” On the other hand, the amorphous “community,” a coalition of various factions without any duly appointed leadership, seems to reject any collective responsibility, preferring instead the protection of segmental camouflage.
The dispute goes to the heart of capitalism: who owns what. Graham is into “property”; Ben Morea, Motherfuckers spokesman, feels that “property” is the least consideration. The most important thing is people’s lives and living. One of the basic things in our culture is the absence of property or the lack of respect for property.”
Morea continues: “The Fillmore’s interests are not our interests, and that’s the conflict. They’re a business. We’re not a business — we’re a people who feel we have a culture which we want access to, that’s been taken from us, and that’s being used to make money for other people. We don’t want just a show, we want to go back to those original attempts at having a community culture, not a money-making thing. By nature of the conflict, they’re into making money, and we’re into living. They’re somewhere else, which don’t dig and which is bullshit.”
Here is what Kip Cohen, manager of Fillmore East, thinks of the Motherfuckers: “Oddly enough, the Motherfuckers, as an organization, while they may not be the most passive of the community factions, have become the spokesmen for the community — and the community has allowed them to become the spokesmen. When all the trouble was occurring, we were extremely disappointed in some of the saner members of the community who allowed this to go on without speaking up, the basic point being that it seemed that no one was willing to lose his cool by standing up and making a statement.”
It is plain to see why the twain never really met.
Play Rashomon with us now as we examine various viewpoints about several key incidents. •
The WBAI-FM Caper. Cohen claims that, in late October, the Motherfuckers, as representatives of the community, made their initial demands to “liberate” the Fillmore East for one free night a week over radio station WBAI-FM. According to Bob Rudnick and Dennis Frawley, rock columnists for The East Village Other, the community planned to use the hall for “free food, music, dancing, smoke, tumbling, nude dancing, and a flock of meetings … a free exchange of goods and energy.”
Graham was eventually approached on the matter, but only after subsequent demands were made in the form of pamphlets distributed in the East Village. He said that he would have to approve the community’s plans first. According to Cohen, their answer was: “Man, we ain’t got time. Next Wednesday is our first show.” Graham lost his temper and ordered them out of the building.
Morea denies a good deal of this. He claims that Graham, in early October, agreed to let the community use the hall one night a week but later changed his mind “for no reason. None of the Motherfuckers were ever on WBAI, there’s no question about that. But there were other groups involved.”
Ah, semantics. •
The Living Theater Benefit. Both sides are in basic agreement on what happened in the early part of the evening. Morea: “We spoke to the Living Theater. They agreed that we should have the free night. So, on the night of their benefit for Columbia University strikers [held at the Fillmore], we decided to appeal to the audience to try to make it clear to Graham that a lot of people felt that the demand for one night a week was not out of the question.
“That night, the Living Theater did Paradise Now, but the performance was interrupted when somebody announced from the stage that the people were here and uptight about not having the theater. Graham came on stage and went through his whole riff with us about how ‘You’ll never get this theater’ and all that shit. So nobody left the theater for a couple of hours. We negotiated with Graham, and he agreed to give us a night in the next week for a town meeting.”
According to Cohen, the argument raged well into the early hours of the morning and the “town meeting” was to be at least partially a debate between Graham and the community.
Morea: “No, it was not to be a debate. They gave it to us as a community assembly night to discuss what we would do with the Fillmore. They weren’t supposed to debate with us whether we’d get it or not.” •
The Town Meeting or the Debate. Cohen claims that, on arrival, the Motherfuckers told Graham (who had flown in from San Francisco especially for the meeting): “Fuck you. Fuck your goddamn town meetings. We don’t need to talk. We don’t need to rap. This is a fuck-in, man. We’re here to have a good time. This is our crash pad for the winter. Can you dig it?” At midnight, they finally agreed to talk. An angry Graham told them that he did not recognize the Motherfuckers as true representatives of the community and once again ordered them out of the hall. Retaliations were threatened and the “debate” ended with “minor skirmishes and minor damage to property. Once again, we had to wait it out until they all left.”
Morea: “When we got there, Graham had the stage set up with two tables and a lot of microphones. He told us that it was a debate between us and him. We said that we weren’t there to debate, we were there to talk to ourselves, to eat together, to hear some music together, and to have a community night — and not to debate him. But he wasn’t excluded.” •
The Free Nights and the Law. Cohen: “After the debate, some responsible members of the community asked to see us and told us that they didn’t dig what went down that night either. They asked permission to come to us with a proper and responsible program. Our answer was an obvious yes. They came back a couple of days later with creative, constructive measures, and we agreed to give them the free use of the Fillmore East each Wednesday night.
“The first free night, in late November, was organized with music and workshops, but the theater was also full of Bowery bums, winos, people just dropping by, and speed freaks from St. Mark’s Place who were not about to partake in anything creative. It was plain there would be obvious problems with the law.” (Graham later specified them in an “open letter” to the community as “smoking on the premises, incidents of physical confrontation, and the blatant use, distribution, and sale of drugs on the premises — obviously illegal.”)
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