Bill Graham
Bill Graham was born Wolfgang Grajonca on January 8, 1931, in Berlin, Germany.
In order to escape the Nazis, Graham left Germany as a child. The young Wolfgang
eventually came to New York, where he Americanized his name to Bill Graham.
In the 1950s Graham headed west to San Francisco. America’s first rock
and rollers were hard at work, and Graham would eventually become a legendary
promoter on the national rock scene in the 1960s and 70s.
In the mid 1960s Graham managed a political comedy assemblage known as the
San Francisco Mime Troup. Several fundraisers, featuring headlining rock bands
like Jefferson Airplane, were successful enough to help Graham see his future
in organized management and promotion on the business end of rock and roll.
In 1966, Graham bought the Fillmore, a run down auditorium in San Francisco,
fixed it up, and booked Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Big Brother &
the Holding Company, and other bands leading San Francisco’s psychedelic
trip through the 60s. By 1968, Graham had opened his Fillmore East in New York.
In the 1970s Graham operated his Winterland venue in San Francisco, site of
The Band’s famous final show, “The Last Waltz,” in 1978, while
at the same time, moving more and more into managing and promoting band’s
tours. He managed Santana, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and the Dead. In 1985,
Graham organized Live Aid, an all-star musical benefit for world hunger. In
August, 1987, Graham’s company, Bill Graham Presents, organized a two-day
Grateful Dead concert in Telluride, Colorado. In order to promote and celebrate
the event, Graham used a poster that integrated Telluride’s history with
the iconic Grateful Dead skeleton.
Bob Weir and Jerry Garcia in Telluride, August 15, 1987
Ninety-eight years before Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Mickey Hart, Phil Lesh, Bill
Kreutzmann, and Brent Mydland rolled into Telluride’s Town Park to jam
Grateful Dead classics, another band of men, known as the Wild Bunch, rolled
into town on a similarly beautiful summer afternoon in 1889. But Robert Leroy
Parker, who would become better known later as Butch Cassidy, and Harry Longbaugh,
“The Sundance Kid,” and three other members of their gang, had not
come to Telluride to entertain the town’s hard-rock miners. This was made
evident when the Wild Bunch robbed the San Miguel County Bank, making off with
$24,000 of the miners’ monthly payroll.
The Telluride job (the money was never recovered) was one of the first in a
long history of heists and scams carried out by Parker and Longbaugh, who were
immortalized in a 1969 film, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, starring Paul
Newman and Robert Redford. Due largely to the film, which characterized Butch
and Sundance as lovable, Robin Hood-like characters, the Wild Bunch gained Western-legend
status with an entire generation of young, long-haired American youths in the
late 1960s. Many of the young people who saw Butch and Sundance as rebels fighting
large corporations, including mines, railroads, and banks, saw parallels to
their own world, where college students were protesting corporate America, Vietnam,
and environmental destruction. Butch and Sundance fans were the very same people
listening enthusiastically to the Grateful Dead and other bands produced by
Bill Graham. Therefore, a poster that superimposed, with an added sixth member,
the Grateful Dead’s ubiquitous skeletal face onto the famous pose struck
by the Wild Bunch nearly a century earlier, was sure to send a clear message:
a new Wild Bunch was in town, and they were going to keep Telluride dancing
for days.
Bill Graham died in an helicopter crash in October, 1991. When he was inducted
into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, it was said that “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 …Among other things, Graham brought a new standard of professionalism
to the business.”
1. Listen to the Grateful Dead’s “Me and My Uncle,” and think about the similarities between the narrator, or nephew, in the song, and the popular versions of Butch and Sundance. When the narrator sings of leaving his dead uncle on the side of the road and absconding with the gold, the listener is, at once, presented with a somehow likeable, yet roguish outlaw-murderer. Using Gene Autry’s Cowboy Code from the first lesson as a model, how does this West Texas cowboy stack up against the 1950s model?
2. When Bill Graham escaped Germany, he was, like Butch and Sundance, or the Dead’s West Texas cowboy, on the run. But Graham was a child, not an outlaw, and a victim of violence and politics gone terribly awry under Adolf Hitler. Look in your paper for stories about political refugees, people pushed from their homes as victims of political struggle. Place push pins on a map to mark the earth’s troubled political spots. Monitor your newspaper and the maps each week to stay updated.
3. When Bill Graham Presents used a poster playing on Western folklore and Telluride history to promote the Grateful Dead, they were following a long line of clever, creative schemes in rock and roll promotion. Look in the newspaper for promotions of music. What ads draw your attention? Why does the Western image in Graham’s poster carry such a lasting appeal?
Graham died in an helicopter crash in October, 1991.
As the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame put it, “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 …Among other things, Graham brought a new standard of professionalism
to the business.”