SAN FRANCISCO _ It's 10 minutes to showtime. Step up to the three-story Italianate brick box at Fillmore Street and Geary Boulevard. Avert your eyes from the payday-loan operation that takes up much of the ground floor. Submit to a brief search by security.
Then climb the stairs, grab an apple from the giveaway bin and check out the hundreds of vintage posters. The 10 twinkling chandeliers. The four balcony arches. The dance floor crowded with about 1,200 lively bodies. The stage.
This is the Fillmore, where American pop music and youth culture took a sudden psychedelic turn in the mid-'60s.
Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Carlos Santana, Steve Miller and the Grateful Dead played some of their most important early shows here. Otis Redding and B.B. King won over some of their first white audiences here.
And the music plays on, in a building more than a century old. That alone, for me, made the auditorium a more compelling destination than the T-shirt shops and hippie haunts of Haight-Ashbury. But the auditorium is also part of a larger, long-running drama _ complete with an unsolved killing _ that few out-of-towners know.
When I saw my first Fillmore show last year (the Wood Brothers, a bluesy folk band), I learned that the auditorium had been built as a dance hall in 1912, converted into a skating rink in the 1930s, then reconverted to hold dances and concerts.
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