The CJM

about bill graham

Bill Graham (1931–1991) was born Wolodia “Wolfgang” Grajonca in Berlin, the son of Russian Jews who emigrated to Germany in search of a better life. In 1938, after Kristallnacht, Graham’s mother decided to send him with his sister Tolla onward to France. In 1941, as part of a Red Cross effort to help Jewish children fleeing the Nazis, Graham arrived in New York, malnourished and suffering from rickets, at the age of eleven. After the war, he would learn that his mother and one of his five sisters had perished in Europe.

Graham went to live with a foster family in the Bronx and spent his teenage years in New York City before being drafted into the US Army to fight in the Korean War. Because no one could pronounce Grajonca correctly, he changed his name to Graham, selecting it from the phone book. Returning from the Korean War, he worked for a time in the Catskills and in New York City, where he decided to become an actor.

Graham relocated to San Francisco just as the hippie movement was gathering steam, and became the business manager for the San Francisco Mime Troupe. He was thirty-four years old when he organized the fundraiser to support the group founder’s legal defense on November 6, 1965, a transformative moment for Graham, who had finally found his calling.

Soon afterwards he took over the lease on the famed Fillmore Auditorium, where he produced groundbreaking shows, including sold-out concerts by the Grateful Dead, Cream, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the Doors, among many others.

Graham was distinguished for his booking mix, bringing the bands creating the psychedelic sound together on the same stage with jazz, blues, and folk artists. He also began booking English bands that had never before performed on the west coast like The Who.

In 1968, Graham moved the Fillmore into the Carousel Ballroom, calling it Fillmore West, and opened the Fillmore East in New York. After closing the two Fillmore locations in 1971, he took over Winterland, another San Francisco concert venue, and branched into band management and tour promotion under the banner “Bill Graham Presents.” Graham also began organizing large stadium concerts locally, like Day on the Green at the Oakland Coliseum, and nationally, such as the Watkins Glen Festival in New York that drew 600,000 people.

Graham presented many landmark benefit concerts, including Live Aid in 1985 and two Amnesty International tours, “Conspiracy of Hope” and “Human Rights Now!” He was the driving force behind the 1987 Soviet-American Peace Concert in Moscow, organized a twelve-hour rock telethon that raised two million dollars for the victims of the massive earthquake that hit the Bay Area in October 1989, and more.

Graham died on October 25, 1991, when the helicopter he left in from a Huey Lewis and the News show in the East Bay crashed into an electrical tower. A week later, nearly half a million people filled the Polo Field in Golden Gate Park for a free concert held in his memory. Three months after his death, Graham was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Bill Graham and the Rock & Roll Revolution

Let Bill tell you his story . . .