Twitter: How did one man become a rock impresario?
I photographed this building because it played an important role in the history of American music.
It is the Longshoreman's Hall on Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. What happened here is pretty stunning and the story has never been told.
It
was early in 1966 and Ken Kesey and Stewart Brand had organized a
series of Acid Tests that are well described in Tom Wolfe's Electric
Kool Aid Acid Test. I went to the first one in Longshoreman's Hall
with the original Grateful Dead playing. It was not called an Acid
Test it was the first Trips Festival.
I was early and Stewart asked me, whom he knew as a banker, to take tickets at the door. I did it for a short while then couldn't ignore the lusty excitement of everything going on around me.
I picked one guy, whom I knew to be a greedy asshole, but not a thief, and told him to handle the door. He loved it, did a good job and made it his lifetime carrier. It was Bill Graham who became America's impresario of rock music..then every kind of music.
This is a good time to tell what a scoundrel Bill was. Bill was widely hated. Cecil Williams, a prominent black minister in San Francisco believed he was a friend of Grahams. In the mid 1970's Williams got Quincy Jones to agree to put on fund raising festival for William's church (Glide Memorial) at the giant Cow Palace. Graham promised Williams he would not put on a conflicting show the same night. About a month before the Jones show, Graham scheduled some really big act on the same night. That is what kind of friend Graham was.
Years later when one of Graham's warehouses was robbed, he, a man widely hated by many for many reasons, publicly blamed the robbery on anti-Semitism.
Graham was killed along with a girl friend, Melissa Gold (whom I had met) and his helicopter pilot, when he forced his pilot to fly him home from a concert in Contra Costa to Marin in a dense fog. The pilot refused, but Graham said he would be fired if he didn't fly. The pilot wasn't fired. He was fried... along with Graham and Melissa when the helicopter hit power-lines near Napa, flying as much below the fog as was possible.