The following photographs tell a pictorial story of Bill Graham and the Fillmore East. Bill Graham, whose original name was Wulf Wolodia Grajonca, was a Jew born on January 8, 1931 in Germany. When America was celebrating its Independence Day with fireworks, young Bill Graham was fleeing to France from Germany to be saved from the Holocaust on July 4, 1939. He eventually made it to America and was placed in a foster home in the Bronx at age 10, graduating from DeWitt-Clinton High School and City College, majoring in Business.
He moved in the early 60s to San Francisco. In 1965 he managed a radical mime troupe based in the Bay Area. Ronnie Davis, the leader of the mime troupe, was arrested for obscenity at a performance that took place outdoors. Bill Graham put together a series of three benefit concerts in order to cover the cost of the mime troupe’s legal fees. Among the performers at these shows were the Grateful Dead. These benefit concerts played a significant role in both launching the careers of Bill Graham as a legendary concert promoter the Grateful Dead as one of the most prolific rock-n-roll bands of all time. It also began an important relationship between the Grateful Dead and Bill Graham.
Although, in many ways, he got his early training for his future position as a concert promoter, when he worked as a waiter and a maître d’ in the Borscht Belt, the mountain resorts of the Catskills, located in upstate New York. Bill Graham worked in such hotels as The Concord and Grossinger’s. He would often say that literally serving people as a waiter and on a greater level learning how to service people taught him some of the core skills of being a concert promoter. Additionally, both playing in and hosting poker games taught him gamesmanship, customer service, and managerial and promotional skills. He would later use what he learned in the Catskills to become one of the greatest concert promoters of all times. Lastly, his experience in the Catskills gave him an opportunity to witness all the great comedy and music shows that the Catskills had to offer and to learn how they operate from a technical and administrative perspective behind the scenes.
Later on, Bill Graham would create the Fillmore West, an extraordinary rock-n-roll theater in San Francisco, hosting some of the greatest bands in the 1960s and 70s, and its amazing east coast sister venue, the Fillmore East.
Fillmore East Today and Apple Bank
Fillmore East Sometime Between 1960-1971
Commemorative Plaque on the Wall of Apple Bank – Former Site of Fillmore East
Bill Graham Onstage at Fillmore East
Grateful Dead Onstage at Fillmore East
Fillmore Pole
Bill Grahams Way: Street Sign for 2nd Avenue & 6th Street named after Bill Graham