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BILL GRAHAM/ 2012
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Prints on paper: Portraits 3 | | Medium: | Giclée on Japanese matte paper | | Size (inches): | 16.5 x 11.7 (paper size) | | Size (mm): | 420 x 297 (paper size) | | Edition size: | 25 | | Catalog #: | PP_0262 | | Description: | From an edition of 25. Signed, titled, date, copyright, edition in pencil on the reverse / Aside from the numbered edition of 5 artist's proofs and 2 printer's proofs.
"A couple of years ago, a couple of geniuses put on something called Woodstock Festival. It was a tragedy. Groups recognised that they could go into larger cattle markets, play less time and make more dollars. What they've done is to destroy the rock industry."
- Bill Graham, NME, April 1971
Bill Graham -
Bill Graham (January 8, 1931 – October 25, 1991) was an American impresario and rock concert promoter from the 1960s until his death.
Career:
Graham moved from New York to San Francisco in the early 1960s to be closer to his sister, Rita. He was invited to attend a free concert in Golden Gate Park, where he made contact with the San Francisco Mime Troupe, a radical theater group. He gave up a promising business career to manage the troupe in 1965. After Mime Troupe leader Ronny Davis was arrested on obscenity charges during an outdoor performance, Graham organized a benefit concert to cover the troupe's legal fees. The concert was a success, and Graham saw a business opportunity.[11][12]
Graham began promoting more concerts to raise funds for the Mime Troupe and eventually left the troupe to promote concerts full time. Charles Sullivan was a mid-20th century black entrepreneur and businessman in San Francisco who owned the master lease on the Fillmore Auditorium. Bill approached Charles to put on the Second Mime Troupe appeals concert at the Fillmore Auditorium on December 10, 1965 using Sullivan's dance hall permit for the show. Graham later secured a contract from Sullivan for the open dates at the Fillmore Auditorium in 1966. Graham credits Sullivan with giving him his break in the music promotion business. Charles Sullivan was found murdered on August 2, 1966, south of Market Street in San Francisco. To this day the murder remains unsolved.[13]
One of the first concerts Graham promoted was in partnership with Chet Helms of the Family Dog organization and featured the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. The concert was an overwhelming success and Graham saw an opportunity with the band.[14] Early the next morning, Graham called the band's manager, Albert Grossman, and obtained exclusive rights to promote them. Shortly thereafter, Chet Helms arrived at Graham's office, asking how Graham could have cut him out of the deal. Graham pointed out that Helms would not have known about it unless he had tried to do the same thing to Graham and advised him to "get up early" in the future.[citation needed]
A charismatic but often difficult personality, Graham produced shows attracting elements of America's now legendary counterculture of the time such as Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Country Joe and The Fish, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, The Committee, The Fugs, Allen Ginsberg, and, a particular favorite of Graham's, The Grateful Dead. He was the manager of Jefferson Airplane during 1967 and 1968. His successes and popularity allowed him to become the top concert promoter in rock music. He operated the famous venues the Fillmore West and Winterland (both in San Francisco) and the Fillmore East (in New York City), where the best up-and-coming acts would come to play. Graham also owned a record label, Fillmore Records, which was in operation from 1969 to circa 1976. Some of the artists who signed with Graham were Rod Stewart, Elvin Bishop and Cold Blood.[15]
In New York City, he formed a booking agency called The Millard Agency which organized the booking of bands into various venues across the US. Because his music venue was the Fillmore, it seemed obvious to call the booking agency Millard. (Millard Fillmore was the thirteenth president of the United States.) In his music venues, he also opened certain weekday nights for unknown bands, like Santana, to get exposure. Graham promoted the West-Coast leg of the legendary The Rolling Stones American Tour 1972, also known as S.T.P. Tour (for Stones Touring Party), as well as parts of the Rolling Stones 1975 and 1978 tours. He would then promote the entire Rolling Stones American Tour 1981 and Rolling Stones European Tour 1982. When the Stones returned to touring in 1989 with the Steel Wheels tour, Mick Jagger accepted the offer of Michael Cohl's The BCL Group (Ballard Cohl Labatt).[16] to buy the concert, sponsorship, merchandising, radio, television, and film rights. Steel Wheels became the most financially successful in history. Graham later discovered that Cohl had offered only slightly more money. Graham took Jagger's repudiation as a personal defeat, writing "Losing the Stones was like watching my favorite lover become a whore."[17]
In 1971, he closed the Fillmores on both coasts, citing a need to "find [himself]". The movie Fillmore: The Last Days documents the closing of the Fillmore West. Graham retreated to a Greek island, but found the quietude disconcerting and later admitted being disappointed that no one there knew of him. He returned to promoting, first organizing concerts at smaller venues, like the Berkeley Community Theatre on the campus of Berkeley High School. He then leased out the Winterland Arena in San Francisco and promoted shows at the Cow Palace Auditorium in Daly City.[citation needed] His first large-scale outdoor arena concert was a benefit for the San Francisco after-school programs, called the SNACK concert and starred Bob Dylan, with Neil Young,various members of the Grateful Dead and members of The Band.[11]
In the mid-1980s, in conjunction with the city of Mountain View, California, and Apple Inc. cofounder Steve Wozniak, he masterminded the creation of the Shoreline Amphitheatre, which became the premier venue for outdoor concerts in the Silicon Valley. Throughout his career, Graham promoted benefit concerts.
He would go on to set the standard for well-produced large-scale rock concerts, such as the American portion of Live Aid in JFK Stadium, Philadelphia on July 13, 1985, as well as the 1986 A Conspiracy of Hope and 1988 Human Rights Now! tours for Amnesty International. In addition, he presented regular bay area outdoor concerts at the Oakland Coliseum, referred to as "Days on the Green," and was known to aggressively challenge potential competition.
Graham's monopoly business practices went as far as strong-arm contracts with the University of California Regents to control on-campus entertainment venues, thus preventing ASUC and other student organizations from promoting their own rock concerts in the 1980s. In the 1980s, he teamed up with BASS Tickets to drive small ticket-distribution companies out of business in the Bay Area, creating a de facto monopoly.[citation needed] After the smaller operations failed, the remaining one, Ticketmaster (formerly BASS), raised prices to unprecedented levels. Its only opposition came from a few bands, notably Pearl Jam, who protested that the company's high ticketing fees were unfair to music fans. Such practices were targeted by the California Senate in S.B. 815.[18]
Graham was recognized as an expert promoter who genuinely cared about both the artists and the attendees at his concerts. He was the first to ensure that medical personnel were on site for large shows and was both a contributor and supporter of the St. Mark's Free Clinic in New York and the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic,[19] which he often used as medical support at events.[20] He enjoyed putting together groups onstage from different ethnic backgrounds—many of whom were ignored by other promoters—and he had an eye for pleasing his audience, while making an effort to educate them in styles of music they would otherwise not have been exposed to. Graham was credited with assisting the early careers of artists like Santana, Eddie Money and Paul Collins' Beat.[11][21]
Graham's status as a Holocaust survivor came into play in the mid-1980s, during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. When Graham learned that Reagan intended to lay a wreath at the Bitburg Cemetery in Germany, where SS soldiers were buried, he organized protests against the act. During the same month that Reagan visited the cemetery, Graham's office was firebombed by Neo-Nazis. Graham, in France at the time, meeting with Bob Geldof to organize the first Live Aid concert, was informed of the fire via telephone. He responded as follows: "Was anybody hurt?" It was only after he was told that everyone was okay, he asked, "Is anything left?"[citation needed]
Graham had a lifelong dream to become a character actor, professing a great admiration for Edward G. Robinson. He appeared in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, as a promoter. In 1990, director Barry Levinson and actor Warren Beatty provided an opportunity for Graham to take a more substantive role by casting him as Charles "Lucky" Luciano in the film Bugsy.[22] During one scene, Graham is shown in a Latin dance number, a style of dancing Graham had embraced as a teenager in New York. He also appears as a promoter in the 1991 Oliver Stone film, The Doors.[23] He also had a small part in Coppola's 1987 Gardens of Stone playing the part of Don Brubaker as a hippie war protester at a garden party during the Vietnam War who gets into an argument with James Caan's character and is beaten up.[24]
Graham was instrumental in commissioning and marketing psychedelic concert posters by designers including Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelley, Wes Wilson, Victor Moscoso, and Rick Griffin. Bill Sagan (Former CEO of EBP) of Minnetonka, Minnesota bought the Bill Graham Presents archives and has organized hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of merchandise and video/audio recordings of concerts collected by Graham. Sagan is now selling some of the collection at Wolfgang's Vault referring to Graham's childhood nickname.[25]
References:
11. ^ a b c Randie Paige Lewis; Luckydog Arts and Design; www.luckydogarts.com; randie@luckydogarts.com, 831-423-4239. "Bill Graham Bio". Billgrahamfoundation.org. Retrieved June 27, 2011.
12. ^ "History San Francisco Mime Troupe". Sfmt.org. Retrieved June 27, 2011.
13. ^ "The Fillmore: Timeline". Pbs.org. Retrieved June 27, 2011.
14. ^ "The Paul Butterfield Blues Band Concert". Wolfgangsvault.com. Retrieved June 27, 2011.
15. ^ "Fillmore Records". Rock and Roll Map. Retrieved 2 October 2011.
16. ^ "Satisfaction: The Life and Times of Michael Cohl". Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Retrieved June 27, 2011.
17. ^ in book Bill Graham Presents
18. ^ "California Senate Bill, S.B. 815". Retrieved June 27, 2011.
19. ^ Randie Paige Lewis; Luckydog Arts and Design; www.luckydogarts.com; randie@luckydogarts.com, 831-423-4239. "About Bill Graham Memorial Foundation". Billgrahamfoundation.org. Retrieved June 27, 2011.
20. ^ "Haight Ashbury Free Clinics: RockMed". Hafci.org. Retrieved June 27, 2011.
21. ^ Bill Graham postcards and handbills
22. ^ Bugsy IMDB
23 ^ The Doors IMDB
24. ^ Gardens of Stone IMDB
25. ^ "About Wolfgang's Vault". Wolfgangsvault.com. July 3, 1973. Retrieved June 27, 2011.
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Graham_(promoter)
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