Live at the Fillmore East and West

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.

Live at the Fillmore East & West is an entertaining overview of the rock scene in the late ’60s and early ’70s. . .The most fascinating part of Live is the detailed explanation of how the Fillmore East came to be born.