Bill Graham (promoter)

Bill Graham (born Wulf Wolodia Grajonca; January 8, 1931 – October 25, 1991) was a German-American impresario and rock concert promoter.

Graham was born on January 8, 1931, in Berlin.

He was the youngest child and only son of Jewish lower middle-class parents, Frieda (née Sass) and Jacob "Yankel" Grajonca, who had emigrated from Russia before the rise of Nazism.

There were six children in the Grajonca family.

His father died accidentally two days Graham was born.

Graham's family nicknamed him "Wolfgang" early in life.

Due to the increasing peril to Jews in Germany and the death of Jacob, Graham's mother placed her son and her youngest daughter, Tanya "Tolla", in a Berlin orphanage, which sent them to France in a pre-Holocaust exchange of Jewish children for Christian orphans.

Graham's older sisters Sonja and Ester stayed behind with their mother.

On July 4, 1939, he was sent from Germany to France due to political uncertainty in his home country.

After the fall of France, Graham was among a group of Jewish orphans spirited out of France, some of whom finally reached the United States.

Tolla Grajonca came down with pneumonia and did not survive the difficult journey.

Graham was one of the One Thousand Children (OTC), mainly Jewish children who managed to flee Hitler and Europe and come directly to North America, but whose parents were forced to stay behind.

Graham's mother was murdered in Auschwitz.

At age 10, he settled into a foster home in the Bronx, New York.

After being taunted as an immigrant and being called a Nazi because of his German-accented English, Graham worked on his accent, eventually being able to speak in a perfect New York accent.

He changed his name to sound more "American".

(He found "Graham" in the phone book—it was the closest he could find to his birth surname, "Grajonca". According to Graham, both "Bill" and "Graham" were meaningless to him.) Graham graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School and then obtained a business degree from the City College of New York.

He was later quoted as describing his training as that of an "efficiency expert".

Graham was drafted into the United States Army in 1951, and served in the Korean War, where he was awarded both the Bronze Star and Purple Heart.

Upon his return to the States he worked as a waiter/maître d' in Catskill Mountain resorts in upstate New York during their heyday.

He was quoted saying that his experience as a maître d' and with the poker games he hosted behind the scenes was good training for his eventual career as a promoter.

Tito Puente, who played some of these resorts, went on record saying that Graham was avid to learn Spanish from him, but only cared about the curse words.

He also mentions in his bio-pic Last Days At The Fillmore working for Minnesota Mining.

In the early 1960s, Graham moved to San Francisco, and in 1965, began to manage the San Francisco Mime Troupe.

He had teamed up with local Haight Ashbury promoter Chet Helms to organize a benefit concert, then promoted several free concerts.

This eventually turned into a profitable full-time career and he assembled a talented staff.

Graham had a profound influence around the world, sponsoring the musical renaissance of the 1960s from its epicenter in San Francisco.

Chet Helms and then Graham made famous the Fillmore and Winterland Ballroom; these turned out to be a proving grounds for rock bands and acts of the San Francisco Bay area including the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin, who were first managed, and in some cases developed, by Helms.

Graham moved from New York to San Francisco in the early 1960s to be closer to his sister Rita.

He was invited to attend a free concert in Golden Gate Park, produced by Chet Helms and the Diggers, where he made contact with the San Francisco Mime Troupe, a radical theater group.

After Mime Troupe leader R. G. Davis was arrested on obscenity charges during an outdoor performance, Graham organized a benefit concert to cover the troupe's legal fees.

The concert was a success and Graham saw a business opportunity.

Graham began promoting more concerts with Chet Helms and Family Dog projects, which provided a vital function of the 1960s, promoting concerts that provided a social meeting place to network, where many ideologies were given a forum, sometimes even on stage, such as peace movements, civil rights, farm workers and others.

Most of his shows were performed at rented venues, and Graham saw a need for more permanent locations of his own.

Charles Sullivan was a mid-20th-century entrepreneur and businessman in San Francisco who owned the master lease on the Fillmore Auditorium.

Graham approached Sullivan to put on the Second Mime Troupe appeals concert at the Fillmore Auditorium on December 10, 1965, using Sullivan's dance hall permit for the show.

Graham later secured a contract from Sullivan for the open dates at the Fillmore Auditorium in 1966.

Graham credits Sullivan with giving him his break in the music concert hall business.

The Fillmore trademark and franchise has defined music promotion in the United States for the last 50 years.

From 2003 to 2013 auxiliary writers of the times surrounding the 1960s, and Graham family lawsuits, tell the narrative of the Fillmore phenomena and how the Black community there was disenfranchised.