John Morris, who brought rock legends to the stage, dies at the age of 84
John Morris, who added an element of spectacle to the rock explosion of the 1960s as coordinator and MC for the era-defining Woodstock festival, and who also helped run the legendary rock venues Fillmore East in New York City and the Rainbow Theater in London , died Friday at his home in Santa Fe, NM. He was 84.
The cause was complications of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease after treatment for lung cancer, said his longtime partner, Luzann Fernandez.
Born in New York, Morris started out as a lighting designer – first for theater productions in his hometown and on London’s West End, and later for rock concerts – before starting to produce concerts himself. He rose to prominence in 1967 when he organized a free Jefferson Airplane concert in Toronto that drew some 50,000 people, and he toured with that band, as well as the Grateful Dead and others.
In 1968, Mr. Morris cemented his place in rock history when he helped Bill Graham, the powerful and feared West Coast rock impresario, open an East Coast answer to his hallowed Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco. Fillmore East became a magnet for top acts like Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and the Allman Brothers, who made a searing recording live album there, and was often called “the church of rock ‘n’ roll.”
Yet no Fillmore East concert could come close to the impact of Woodstock, where legions of rock disciples turned a mass migration to a dairy farm in upstate Bethel, New York, into a pilgrimage that marked the apotheosis of the hippie era.
Mr. Morris served as production coordinator for the three-day event, formally known as the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, which featured more than 30 acts. Organizers originally sold tickets for $18 (the equivalent of about $150 today), in anticipation of a crowd of about 50,000 people.
Before the festival began, Mr. Morris helped the festival’s creators attract cutting-edge talent, using all available resources given budgetary constraints. “We famously got the Who for $11,000 because that was all we had left in the budget,” he said in 2019. interview with the music site Pollstar, “and we provided Pete Townshend with wine to get him to agree.” (Other sources give the amount as $12,500.)
The festival, of course, became a signature event of the 1960s, a rain-soaked counterculture convention where an estimated 400,000 people or more got high, listened to wailing guitars and lived communally in muddy fields, as commemorated in the Academy Award-winning documentary “Woodstock ” (1970), directed by Michael Wadleigh.
Mr. Morris, who usually worked behind the scenes, found his own taste of fame after Michael Lang, one of the festival’s organizers, alternated between him and Chip Monck, the lighting director, as master of ceremonies without warning.
It was Mr Morris’s voice that echoed over the hills, in his famous announcement, as unexpected crowds converged on the festival, that Woodstock was ‘from now on a free concert’, adding: ‘That doesn’t mean there something is going on. go. This means that we will place the music here for free.”
But as he later clarified, it was Mr. Monck, not he, who made the equally famous announcement warning festival-goers to avoid the dodgy batch of LSD known as “brown acid.” “I didn’t do drugs,” he said, “because I did usually in charge and I didn’t feel like I could. So if I were to say that the brown acid is not particularly good, that would be very strange, because I would have no idea.”
As transcendent as Woodstock proved to be for the hordes of partygoers, Mr. Morris faced constant crises. “You can see me in that movie announcing and getting as close to one as possible nervous breakdown is as human as possible,” he said in a 2017 interview with The Malibu Times. “On Sunday we had what was later called a tornado that ripped through the festival, pouring rain and wind – the stage started sliding and felt dangerous.”
However chaotic things became, Mr. Morris later expressed pride in having accomplished the seemingly impossible.
“We were dealing with what at that time became one of the largest cities in New York State,” he said, and “managed to put on one of the best pieces of music. concerts of all time.”
John Hanna Morris Jr. was born on May 16, 1939 in Manhattan, the eldest of two sons. His father was a deputy police commissioner in New York City and later an advertising executive. His mother, Louise (Edwards) Morris, had led national youth programs under the New Deal during the Great Depression.
The family eventually settled in Pleasantville, a village in Westchester County. After graduating from high school in Somers, NY, Mr. Morris studied theater production for two years at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh.
Following his tenure at Fillmore East, Mr. Morris led the reopening of London’s Rainbow Theater in Finsbury Park as a rock temple in its own right, starting with a fiery opening show by The Who in November 1971.
In addition to Mrs. Fernandez, Mr. Morris is also survived by his brother Mark.
Mr. Morris continued to produce concerts for major acts including David Bowie, Pink Floyd and Stevie Ray Vaughan into the 1980s. He later produced antique shows and was a dealer in Native American art and artifacts.
Despite all his later achievements, he remained proud that he helped make Woodstock, a festival created by young people and for young people (the main organizers were in their twenties), an unlikely success.
“I was the adult in the room, charged with keeping the place running,” he told Pollstar. “I was older than most of the others, all thirty at the time.”