Before the Beatles: Searching for the Site of Jefferson Airplane’s Rooftop Concert
What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.
-Pericles
Every location has its historic sites. Whether the citizens identify through ties to a geographic location or just share a common set of tastes, these people can point to a location and wax on the significance of that place in the community’s history and development.
Often, a city will house multiple sites for more than one community. Thus, a city like New York, say, would have a set of historic sites that are important to a general audience, a set for those whose main passion is cinema, and a surprisingly large number of sites of interest to fans of rock music.
Sometimes, though, there is a moment in space and time that all the tribes get to share when they look together, amazed that something like this could ever happen to all of them at once.
On the morning of November 19th, 1968, midtown Manhattan got a very rude awakening when Jefferson Airplane, one of the most potent rock acts that emerged from the San Francisco scene of the 1960s, started a free concert atop the roof of one of the older hotels in the neighborhood. The performance was done as a surprise and without any prior clearances having been secured; according to band member Grace Slick, “We did it, deciding that the cost of getting out of jail would be less than hiring a publicist.”
It was also in the spirit of a revolution that was being sought by the man who filmed the appearance, Jean-Luc Goddard. A giant in the French “New Wave” movement, Goddard had come to the United States in the hope of capturing what he thought was an eminent revolution that was about to sweep the country. As described in Everything is Cinema by Richard Brody, Goddard was invited by WNET-TV (the initial flagship station of what would become PBS) to provide a film about America at that moment that captured the zeitgeist of the times. Working here with Richard Leacock and D. A. Pennebaker, who before the project had caught on film performances by Bob Dylan and acts that appeared at Monterey, Goddard’s shooting had before this moment taken him to Brooklyn with Rip Torn attempting to rile a classroom of kids over the legacy of the Civil War, as well as getting an interview with Eldridge Cleaver just days before he started his self-imposed exile in Algeria.
According to Craig Fenton’s Take Me to a Circus Tent, the concert consisted of “Someone to Love,” followed by “The House at Pooneil Corner,” the only song Goddard and Pennebaker filmed. The explosion of “Pooneil” with its end-of-world imagery, played loud on an early Tuesday morning to an unsuspecting audience, was probably intended to spark a reaction from the crowd and authorities, just what Goddard hoped to catch on film.
And in fact, before a third song could be performed, the NYPD arrived to break up the concert. While the Airplane wasn’t booked for disturbing the peace, there were summons issued to Torn for harassment, and to the producer for creating a disturbance and filming without a license.
There were rumors and suppositions that this act may have inspired the Beatles to take to their own roof at 3 Savile Row a few months later. There’s no hard evidence that anyone in the group or Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who was in the midst of filming what became Let It Be, was aware of the Airplane’s New York stand, so it’s possible it was less a coordinated stand in solidarity than a random act of performance on their part.
It soon became apparent to everyone tied to the New York incident, however, that the revolution would not be televised this time either. Goddard soon gave up on the project, no longer feeling involved with the spirit he tried to capture, and leaving his American producers in the lurch for an unfinished film. The footage from the performance and other shots ended up in Pennebaker’s effort to do the best he could with the remains, which became 1971’s 1 P.M. The film was considered a curiosity by critics on its release, and is still thought of as one by modern critics today. The remains of Goddard’s film were just a momentary bump in the road for Pennebaker, who would go on from there to capture performances by John Lennon, David Bowie, and Carville and Stephanopoulos.
As for Jefferson Airplane, they would be together for only 19 more months before disbanding. Their act of dissolution, however, as far less final than what happened to the site of the stand.
Both Brody and Fenton’s account of the event place it at the Hotel Schuyler, which the postcard from the hotel above (found through the online collection of the Boston Public Library) states the address as being 57 West 45th Street. While other sources also confirm that this building was the site of the concert/stillborn revolution, the postcard’s depiction of the building matches the images we see of the rooftop.
We also get a good shot during Goddard’s plying with the lens of the nearby 30 Rockefeller Center a few blocks north, then known as the RCA Building, which helps determine the local geography around it.
This becomes important when one gets to 57 West 45th Street today, where the address has…
…a small park. No plaque or marker, which was expected, but no sign that there ever was a hotel here, either. The fact that the building where Goddard set up his camera in Leacock and Pennebaker’s old office is still there…
…and that 30 Rock is visible from the site, now that the hotel is gone, helps establish the location seen in the performance.
The building, the site of the first rooftop session, was torn down shortly after the Airplane’s early morning raid. The building that oversees the small park where the hotel stood, 1166 Avenue of the Americas, was erected by 1974; sometime within five years of the performance, the building was bought out for both the land it stood on and its “air rights,” the amount of vertical space a building has in New York under its building codes. Said rights, which if connected together over combined properties, can enable the developer to build a higher building, though possibly requiring such give backs for that as land for public access in return, such as the park that’s there now.
It’s a constant in our culture, the urge for development to overtake sites that make up our past. While the Hotel Schuyler’s demolition is not quite the same level of loss as Penn Station’s demolition or housing swallowing up the Battle of Princeton site, the effort to obliterate the past, more through neglect than malice, is appropriately emblematic in how all signs of this revolution were wiped by the hands of commerce. If anything, the demolition of the building gives a much better sense of where we were as a culture then than Jefferson Airplane’s performance for Jean-Luc Goddard.
And yet we can’t forget the free performance of “The House at Pooneil Corner,” especially as its profile rises whenever we lose a member of the group. There may not have been a revolution to depict then, but for a few minutes, there were moments of abandon that were worth looking skyward towards.
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Richard Singer