"Bill Graham and the Rock & Roll Revolution" Celebrates the Life and Work of the Legendary Concert Promoter

Bill Graham at Fillmore East, all photos courtesy of the Skirball Museum

Bill Graham didn’t invent concerts, but live music was never the same after Graham took over the Fillmore West and East. In running the Fillmore venues in the late 60s and early 70s, he worked with the Doors, Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin, Santana, the Who… everyone.

After he shut down both Fillmore venues, he went on to produce Bob Dylan’s comeback tour in 1974, the Band’s famed Last Waltz show, the U.S. version of Live Aid in 1985 and both Amnesty International tours in 1986 and 1988, featuring the likes of U2, the Police, Bruce Springsteen and Peter Gabriel. Chances are if there was a major event in live music prior to his death in 1991 Graham was behind it. So how do you tell the story of a man whose iconic career lasted more than 25 years and reinvented the live music experience?

The Skirball Museum in Los Angeles has a major new exhibit on Graham’s life from fleeing Nazi Europe as a young boy to his eventual role in helping “develop the mass rock concert format that drew audiences totaling in the millions,” according to his 1991 New York Times obituary. The exhibit does a pretty stellar job of telling that story, says his ex-wife Bonnie MacLean. “That’s the part that impressed me so much about it, they did a beautiful job of presenting him as a human being from the beginning of his life to the end and they did it with a great deal of sensitivity and understanding and it had a nice emotional mood about it,” she tells Noisey.

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A central part of the Graham exhibit and a great place to start in telling an epic tale almost too strange for fiction--from Nazi refugee in a foster home to work alongside Dylan, the Dead, Stones, Frank Zappa and countless legends--is the Fillmore posters. Those classic posters of Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Cream and everyone else were the brainchild of Graham, who brought in the artists to create the works.

“They were significant to him because he wanted to keep these treasures for his later years when he was looking back on his achievements and these would be representative of his achievements,” MacLean says of the posters. “The more interesting part to him is he saw them as a chronicle of the shows more than he saw them as works of art. That’s why he wanted to preserve them for himself. He had his own personal collection he had for that reason. Then if you go all the way back to the beginning, like the handbills, they represent an evolution of what he wanted to present. Such a variety of types of things he was interested in presenting to the public.”

In addition to being his wife for a period, MacLean was also one of the main artists behind the series of posters, having created works for Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Bo Diddley, Yardbirds, Donovan and Pink Floyd among many others.

Though the posters were Graham’s initial idea, he left the actual design and creation to the commissioned artists. “Bill wasn’t involved too much with the poster making, so we were free to do whatever we wanted, which was great,” MacLean says.

Bonnie MacLean's poster for the Graham exhibit

David Byrd, who lived in New York and was the main artist for the Fillmore East, concurs. “Bill was not involved with the artists that much,” he says. “Unlike my subsequent work for Broadway you didn’t have any guidelines at all. And I looked at the West Coast posters, not a lot had been done yet, but I realized that you just could make it up.”

Through working on the posters, though, the artists did get to know Graham well. Byrd says, “I did see Bill often because I went to the Fillmore a lot.” Graham has a reputation for being a hard ass, which Byrd got to see firsthand at a show with an early incarnation of Fleetwood Mac.

“A lot of people didn’t like him because we was very tough, and he could be very mean in not a bad way. He had certain things he required, and that was being on time, particularly the bands,” Byrd recalls. “I was there one night when Fleetwood Mac was late. They were like ten minutes late, and he went out on the stage and he said, ‘Okay, there’s no show tonight, you’ll get your money back at the box office.’ Then Fleetwood Mac showed up and said, ‘What the fuck happened?’ He said, ‘You were fucking late, and I don’t take that. This is a professional place, everybody goes home, I don’t make any money, you don’t make any money.’”

There was another side to Graham, of course, and Byrd saw that as well after delivering a poster for the Who at the Metropolitan Opera House. “He paid me 500 dollars, which then was, for me, a lot of money,” he recalls. “And he would always pay me in cash, so I put it in my pocket and I went out the door and I went down 8th Street, and these two guys pushed me in a doorway and put a knife in my stomach and took the money. So I was exceedingly upset, I ran back to the Fillmore into Bill’s office. So Bill called the police and made a report and I described the guys, then Bill paid me again, all 500 dollars, without any qualms, which meant a lot.”

Graham checking time with the Beach Boys' management

Neither Byrd or MacLean had any idea the works they were creating to promote concerts would one day hang in museums like the Met in New York around the world and become collectors’ items worth tens of thousands of dollars, if not more. So they didn’t personally maintain their collections for posterity. “I gave posters away like a drunken sailor,” Byrd says. “I wasn’t thinking ahead. I didn’t expect to be alive today. Everything was in the moment and moving and all that. You lose a lot of stuff. I’m sorry I didn’t hold on to everything.”

Nor did MacLean, but she did get an emotional present from Graham years after she created the posters. “The most beautiful thing he ever did in reference to the posters, for me, was in 1990,” she recalls. “My then-husband and I went to California with Bill and my son David because David was spending every Christmas there. So we decided we’d just barge in on the party, we went out there, and while we were there, Bill called me into another room, brought out a big carrying case for art pieces. He handed it to me, and it was a whole bunch of my original poster art pieces. It was a gift for me, and it just blew me away. It was the sweetest thing.”

Looking at the progression of the posters, from ’66 to ’73, is a fascinating trip through the changes in rock and roll from the hippie era of the late 60s to the rock star decadence that defined the 70s. For instance, there’s an October 30, 1969 It’s a Beautiful Day poster with a young act at the bottom of the triple bill named Alice Cooper. Cooper and the changes that came with the 70s are what led Graham to close the Fillmore doors in 1971, according to Byrd.

Archival radio broadcast of the Fillmore East's closing night concert

“He said to me, ‘I don’t want to have to clean up vomit one more time,’” Byrd recalls. “He told me that the drugs had changed. From ’68, the drugs were psychedelic, and by ’70, ’71: red wine and reds. The drug scenario changed, it made for a different audience and he was tired of it.”

Byrd did the farewell poster: the Grateful Dead at Nassau Coliseum in March of 1973. Graham would go on to continue to change the world of live music with the massive benefit show. They were always done his way, though, which was how Graham did everything. MacLean remembers Graham getting a chance to be involved with the original Woodstock but having no interest.

“He was asked to participate in the planning of the Woodstock show, but he didn’t want to because he thought it was ridiculous to try and attract such a large crowd, and then when it actually took place, not to have any way of handling the fact people could just get in willy nilly,” she says. “That’s exactly what happened: They went into debt, and it took them years to get out of debt afterward. And things like that didn’t happen to Bill. He just knew better.”

The posters, numbered in a series of 289, from Jefferson Airplane at the Fillmore West to the Rolling Stones at Winterland, cover both an incredible amount of rock history and the period that made Graham a music industry legend. They tell the tale of his long relationships with acts that also became his friends: Santana, the Dead and Jefferson Airplane. And tragically, so many great acts from the early run – the Doors, Hendrix and Janis Joplin – all disappear in the last two years of posters, following the deaths of Jim Morrison, Hendrix and Joplin. But they can only tell so much of who Graham was: There were no artistic drawings of his early days as a foster child waiting to be taken into home after coming to America on his own, and no posters celebrating Live Aid or after his death in a helicopter accident in 1991 on his way home from a Huey Lewis & the News show he had promoted.

Graham and his son David

The comprehension of the Skirball exhibit, which goes from his early days to the massive tributes that poured in from around the world and the huge memorial concert at Golden Gate Park in November of ’91 that brought in 300,000 fans and featured performances from the Dead, Santana, Joan Baez, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Jackson Browne, Robin Williams and more, does tell the complete tale.

The one thing that comes through from the people who knew him is how much his childhood influenced him. “I never liked the color scheme for the Fillmore, which was green and yellow. Not the best green and the best yellow, and I asked him why he chose those colors,” Byrd recalls. “And then he went to his closet and he took out this satin jacket, green and yellow, it was from DeMolay, the catholic youth organization. They were involved in bringing him over as a refugee, so he was very beholden to DeMolay, and that’s why the Fillmore colors were yellow and green.”

MacLean believes that was a big part in shaping his career. “I think the early years are significant. I always felt that about Bill and knowing those things about Bill that made him seem remarkable to me as an adult human being, having survived all of that and being able to do what he did on his own initiative,” she says. “He got into this business and made such a success of it and did it so well. I think that’s the most important thing, because he made all that happen himself.”

“Bill Graham and the Rock & Roll Revolution” remains at the Skirball Museum until October 11th, after which it is expected to travel to New York.

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