Once again, live at the Fillmore

The past and future collide tonight in Fishtown with the grand opening of the Fillmore Philadelphia, which kicks into high gear with a sold-out show by local legends Hall & Oates.

The hall, a repurposed 19th-century munitions factory at the intersection of Frankford and Richmond Avenues, is good news for music fans. It has a calendar full of progressive acts like Tove Lo, MisterWives, Disclosure, and Mac Miller.

The name of the venue is a nostalgic nod to the dingy dowager rock palaces that feisty impresario Bill Graham opened in the '60s in San Francisco (the Fillmore West) and New York City (the Fillmore East).

The latter was the mecca of my misspent youth, the libertine lodestar of my teens. For three solid years, I, along with a coterie of my rowdiest classmates, would go to virtually every Friday night late show.

We'd buy the cheapest seats available in the Himalayan reaches of the upper balcony. But we'd never climb the stairs. Instead, we'd gather in the inner lobby - where the acoustics were surprisingly good - to dance all night as if possessed.

I'm not sure how the ritual started. We probably spotted some long-haired dervish letting his freak flag fly on the carpeted area between the entrance and where the main seating started and judged it to be cool. And that was a status we desperately aspired to.

The space definitely attracted the freer spirits in the crowd - and believe me, during the Age of Aquarius, that was really saying something. It was a stoner circus back there, and we wanted to dance among its pink elephants.

The price we paid for those remote seats never rose far above $3, for which you often got a triple bill, topped by two impressive headliners. I saw Led Zeppelin opening for Iron Butterfly, Sly and the Family Stone followed by Jimi Hendrix, and Pentangle preceding Canned Heat. (I never said the pairings were homogenous.)

Things have changed radically for concertgoers in the interim. General admission to the Hall & Oates show is $95. (The price point for lesser acts will range around $30.) And that doesn't get you a seat. At the Fillmore Philadelphia, as the pride of Overbrook High, the Dovells, sang back in 1963, "You can't sit down." Unless of course you spring for VIP tickets (upward of $2,000), for which you get a cocktail lounge, restricted bathrooms, and other luxe amenities.

We are the seventh city to get Live Nation's Fillmore franchise, all of them with pricey premium offerings. Back in the '60s, if a promoter tried to sell pampered elitist seating, it would have sparked a riot. Power to the people, right on!

Those were volatile times, all right. You might see a musician performing and then, two months later, see him again with a different band. Alliances changed rapidly. And so Jethro Tull begot Blodwyn Pig, the Jefferson Airplane begot Hot Tuna, the Butterfield Blues Band gave us the Elvin Bishop Group, and the Nice evolved into Emerson, Lake & Palmer.

I saw the British guitar gods at the Fillmore: Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page. And great keyboardists like Lee Michaels and Brian Auger. I also had my musical horizons broadened by exposure to artists like Miles Davis, Gary Burton, and Mongo Santamaria.

Even relatively obscure groups could put on memorable shows. I remember in particular a pyrotechnic display by the aptly named Crazy World of Arthur Brown. Mott the Hoople once brought the house down. My personal favorite, a frequent visitor to the Fillmore, was the Savoy Brown Blues Band, which could boogie like no one's business.

The one disadvantage of our lobby vantage was that we never got the full effect of the de rigueur psychedelic light shows rolling and tumbling on a big screen behind the performers. I didn't consider it a significant loss. If you've seen one paisley amoeba you've seen them all.

It occurs to me that to call our mad gyrations in the lobby "dancing" is a little misleading. Our kinetic style suggested a curious and wildly abandoned admixture of St. Vitus and air guitar. God bless the hippie ushers who let us spaz out, endangering any ticket holders forced to take a bathroom break. They had to thread their way through my gang's minefield, a sort of proto-mosh pit, at once violent and unpredictable.

I gamboled through epic shows from bands as disparate as Santana, the Youngbloods, Procol Harem, John Mayall, Grand Funk, and Delaney & Bonnie.

I was even at the historic New Year's Eve concert by Band of Gypsys with Hendrix and Buddy Miles. It was their show the following night that was recorded for a live album. I'm not sure why I missed the night in 1971 that the Allman Brothers recorded their own live album, At Fillmore East, but I must have been tied to the whipping post.

Never saw the Beatles, except on TV. But I was at the Fillmore the night John Lennon joined Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention on stage for a ragged set curdled by Yoko Ono screeching throughout like a cat entangled in barbed wire.

The weirdest experience of my Fillmore years was the time when I was personally ejected from the building by Graham himself. It was an altogether unusual night in that I was at an early show for once with an actual seat - in the sixth row no less. (One of the perks of having a mother who worked at Life magazine was that she occasionally got tickets to rock concerts. That's how I got to see the first "supergroup," Blind Faith, from the front row at Madison Square Garden.)

I don't remember what band was playing the night of my run-out by Graham, perhaps because I wasn't around for the performance. He came out to introduce some group, and I was directly in his sight line, smoking. I don't know if it was a cigarette or the herbal variety. In those days, it could have been either. In any case, fire regulations forbade lighting up in the building, a rule that was universally flouted.

Not this time. Graham interrupted what he was saying. With the veins on his neck swelling visibly, he pointed at me and yelled, "Put that out!" I ignored him, reasoning that he couldn't very well jump off the stage to accost me. Which was when Graham vaulted off the stage and yanked me out of my seat, dragging me all the way up the aisle by my arm, and throwing me out the entrance onto Second Avenue like a barkeep tossing a drunk out of a saloon.

Good times. And most of them really were. Even wifty one-hit wonders like Spooky Tooth and Pacific Gas & Electric were enjoyable. The fact is, we really didn't care about a band's popularity. The only qualities we prized out in the lobby were volume and endurance.

There were times after marathon late shows by bands like the Grateful Dead and even Mungo Jerry (!?!) when the ushers would throw open the fire doors onto East Sixth Street and everyone in the crowd would blink defensively at the dawning day.

We'd stumble out of the theater, once a Yiddish burlesque house, onto the streets of the Lower East Side. Back then, before the Trumpification of Manhattan, it was one of the slummiest neighborhoods in New York. At that hour, there were far more rats on the streets than people.

It was an otherworldly walk to get to the subway back to Brooklyn, our heads palpably ringing from the amplifiers, our spirits blissfully drunk on music.

I'm told the Fillmore Philadelphia has a lobby space like the one we used to frequent back in the day. They've even dubbed it the Ajax Hall Foyer. But it's not for dancing. It's designated for selling merch and cocktails.

For various reasons, including sentimentality, I'll probably check it out anyway. After all, I can't possibly do any more damage to my hearing.

David Hiltbrand is a former Inquirer columnist. dahilt@msn.com