Concert promoter and artist manager Bill Graham forever changed the way rock and roll is presented. He provided the business and organizational acumen that allowed the anarchic San Francisco scene of the mid-to-late Sixties to flower in venues such as the Fillmore, a dilapidated auditorium that Graham transformed into a tightly run concert hall beginning in late 1966. There, Graham booked such mainstays of the psychedelic era as Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Big Brother & the Holding Company and Quicksilver Messenger Service. In 1968, Graham moved the Fillmore into another old dance hall (the Carousel Ballroom, rechristened Fillmore West) and opened Fillmore East in New York. Subsequently, he took over Winterland, another San Francisco concert venue, and branched into band management and tour promotion. A high percentage of the most significant pop-music events of the last thirty years have been produced under the banner ??Bill Graham Presents.? Among other things, Graham brought a new standard of professionalism to the business.
Graham was born Wolfgang Grajonca on January 8, 1931, in Berlin and literally walked across Europe to escape the Nazis. He was raised in New York by foster parents and moved to San Francisco in the mid-Fifties to pursue an acting career. Instead, events conspired to thrust him into his calling as a concert impresario and business manager. Several fundraisers for the San Francisco Mime Troupe, a political comedy group he managed, were wildly successful due in large part to the Jefferson Airplane. Graham grasped the potential: something electrifying was beginning to happen in San Francisco, and the scene lacked only a focused, business-oriented mind to harness its power.
A tireless worker known for his gruff exterior and unsullied idealism, Graham challenged the rock audience by booking bills that mingled jazz, blues and folk artists in with all of the psychedelic rock bands of the day. One might walk into the Fillmore and find Miles Davis sharing a bill with Neil Young or the Staple Singers opening for Steppenwolf. His broad, generous view of music and the public??s ability to appreciate it stands in marked contrast to the narrowcasting that would subdivide the rock and roll audience, to its lasting detriment, in the Eighties and beyond. After closing the Fillmores in 1971, Graham continued to run Winterland (site of the Band??s farewell concert, ??The Last Waltz,? in 1978), while managing acts like Santana and the Neville Brothers, promoting national tours for Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones and others, and helping to organize the Live Aid benefit concert of 1985.
Graham was killed in a helicopter crash near Vallejo, California in 1991, while returning home from a Huey Lewis and The News concert at the Concord Pavilion. Graham had attended the event to discuss promoting a benefit concert for the victims of the 1991 Oakland firestorm, after a large portion of the Oakland/Berkeley Hills burned.
Once he had obtained the commitment from the News to perform, he returned to his helicopter, but was stopped by the bass player from the band, Mario Cippolina, who, in a moment of foresight, pressed Graham to take his limousine. The helicopter crashed shortly after take-off, just 20 miles from the concert site.
Flying in weather reported as low overcast, rain and gusty winds, the aircraft flew directly into a 223-foot high-voltage tower along Hwy 37, which runs between Vallejo and Marin County.
Also killed in the crash was Graham's girlfriend, Melissa Gold, ex-wife of author Herbert Gold, and pilot Steve Kahn.
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Originally Posted by crimson and clover
