Best Jann Wenner Memory Under Glass

Everybody knows what you do if you wind up at the Fillmore and get bored with the opening band -- you head upstairs and take in the great concert posters that grace the walls of the upper balcony and dining area. From Jefferson Airplane to Wire, Bob Marley to Counting Crows, there's ample, colorfully represented proof that a whole lot of history has made its way onto the Fillmore stage. But if you're a regular concertgoer, perhaps the folks at BGP or SFX or ClearChannelFXGP or whoever's running the joint now don't rotate new posters in as often as you might like. The best thing to do in that case is to explore the tables upstairs, which feature tickets, memorabilia, and news clippings from Bay Area rock history. It's hard to pick a favorite -- there are a lot of great Ralph J. Gleason columns -- but the most emblematic is a clipping from the Nov. 30, 1966, edition of the Daily Cal. In a column amusingly named Doin' the Thing! a young UC Berkeley student named Jann Wenner wrote an assessment of a Thanksgiving Day show at the Fillmore that featured the Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service. The man who would later create Rolling Stone wrote: "It's every few months you read here about the 'best rock and roll concert ever,' pardon my enthusiasm. Either I'm without critical discrimination, or else the shows keep getting better. We'll all hope it's the latter." Thirty-four years later, all we've got is ample proof of the former.