"Bill never let the truth get in the way of a good story."
- Chet Helms
There's a great story here, along with hundreds of great anecdotes. The book is presented as a series of personal recollections based, I guess, on taped interviews with the book's co-author. About 100 of Graham's family, friends, co-workers, and competitors speak, including many luminaries in the music business. Bill Graham does most of the talking, but it's not a whitewash - there are interviews with Graham's detractors as well. Published soon after Graham's death, it's not clear how much input Graham had in regards to the tone and content of the book.
The recollections are presented in chronological order. The first part of the book, detailing the fate of Graham and his family during the Holocaust, is the most gripping. The surviving members of the Grajonza family escaped only by taking desperate chances, often.
After coming to the US as a refuge during World Was II, Graham served in the army during the Korean conflict, hoping to gain citizenship faster in order to bring surviving family members to the US. He had a very dangerous assignment as an artillery spotter, which required him to go out, lightly armed, in front of the line. He avoided death, but it was a close thing. After refusing what he considered a suicide mission, he was saved from a court martial when he was awarded a bronze star for an earlier, disastrous mission when he had carried a wounded comrade back after being overrun by the enemy.
After the war, working as a waiter in the Catskills, Graham acted out his interpretation of the Robin Hood archetype - stealing from the rich, offering the purloined goods to the poor at a discount, while reaping a substantial profit for himself. Although, at the time, he wasn't much of a businessman. The profits he cleared from all of his schemes were always "a lot of money in those days", but he was invariably soon broke. After some time living the Kerouac east coast - west coast highway life, he settled down in San Francisco.
After a brief stint as business manager for the Mime Troupe, Graham found his ultimate occupation as concert promoter. Perhaps remembering the joy of many nights spent at New York's Palladium Ballroom in the 1950's, Graham tried to create a similar space in his venues. Reflecting Graham's trailblazing efforts in the field of promotion, the book presents a great account of the development of the music scene in mid-1960's San Francisco, and, to a lesser extent, to the growth of artist-produced (as opposed to commercially produced) Rock and Roll from a small regional niche market to a major entertainment behemoth. The Fillmores were tiny venues by today's standards, yet they are where the headliners of the day performed. Graham played a crucial role in this head-on collision of Art and Commerce; by his own account, he was not pleased with the result. With the post-Woodstock transmogrification of rock and roll musicians to rock superstars, Art was almost fatally battered by Commerce, and Graham began to sour on the music business. It's reflected in the tone of the book as well; after the engrossing section on the sixties scene in San Francisco and elsewhere, the tone of the book (as well as Graham's personal life) becomes gloomier.
By these memoirs, Graham appears to be the only promoter who gave thought to anything besides counting the money. The productions at his venues, as he describes them, are superior to anything I've ever experienced (OK, were his restrooms always clean?). Why is there so much negative vibe floating around on Graham? There's no denying the man had a huge ego, and did business carrying a chip on his shoulder. He never backed down when he felt someone was stepping on him; no doubt this aggressiveness was often interpreted as belligerence by those WASP types who feel the more swarthy among us should defer to their Noblesse Oblige. For the most part, those who worked with Graham, and those who went to his concerts have nothing bad to say. The main complaints about him seem to arise from denial of something that was not his fault - the scene changed. The kids got older, were saddled with more responsibilities, couldn't stay out all night; and perhaps more importantly, the bands got bigger, and wanted more money. In Graham's words : "What they didn't realize was that their heroes were capitalists...The artist on stage always dictated the price of the ticket by his financial demands."
There's just a bit here on Jefferson Airplane; Graham was their de facto manager in 1967. He claims he didn't make a dime on them, beyond what he made when they played in his house. One interesting tidbit - he pushed for releasing "Today" as the next single after White Rabbit'; the band insisted upon "The Ballad of You, Me, and Pooneil." "Pooneil" tanked, but I'll bet that "Today" had a chance of being a monster. Can you imagine the "alternate quantum"? Marty has a hit, he's got a bigger voice in the band, maybe he wouldn't have withdraw from the writing process. Any doubt that the future history in this universe would have been significantly different?