The Capitalist of Rock

Bill Graham is a solid, no-nonsense name for a dynamic businessman who in the past four years has made himself a millionaire, acquired a Mercedes, a 29-year-old wife, a baby boy, and offices in both San Francisco and Manhattan. Wolfgang Grajonca, on the other hand, seems a more appropriate title for a temperamental typhoon of promotional creativity, whose obscenity-flavored conversation often builds to a scream, whose business conferences are likely to explode into happenings, and whose office costume usually consists of dirty corduroys and a short-sleeved sweatshirt. That both Bill and Wolfgang inhabit the same skin is one of the more important facts of life on the popular-music scene today. For Graham, ne Grajonca, is, at age 38, the No. 1 producer and promoter of the Now Sound -- which emanates from his two culture centers, the Fillmore West on San Francisco's Market Street and the Fillmore East on Manhattan's Second Avenue. He also runs a record company (called Fillmore) and a booking agency (called Millard, naturally).

In a world where indolence, inefficiency and fiscal fecklessness are the rule, Graham is a nonpareil. He has grown rich by knowing what is good, and hiring the best talent he can get. He provides his performers with the best equipment and facilities, and expects them to be good. If they are not -- even though most of the audience may not know the difference -- Graham simply stops booking them, regardless of how well they draw. The result is that Graham's two Fillmores are the places where the top talent wants to be heard -- and the rock world grudgingly knows that it needs him.

I'm Not Yelling! The telephone is his fortress, his launching pad, his shepherd's crook. TIME Correspondent Stanley Cloud sat in Graham's San Francisco office one recent morning while Impresario Graham stabbed at the multiple buttons that were perpetually lighting up with incoming calls. "WHAT DID YOU SAY?" he yells, his craggy face contorted, his back hunched. "They want to borrow another $12,000 for musical equipment! Did we supply them with one set already? Yes! Did they insure like I told them to? No! Did they get it stolen? Yes! They've gotta be crazy. You've gotta be crazy! Absolutely not! I'm not yelling, goddammit. I want nothing to do with those psychedelic parasites."

Without hanging up, he punches an other button and listens: an associate wants instructions on whether to bid on an auditorium to replace the Fillmore West, which will be torn down next year to make way for a new Howard Johnson motel. "Yeah -- put in a bid. Go low at first and see what they come back with. I want that place if we can get it."

Well he might. Each of his Fillmores is worth $3,000-$5,000 net profit to him on a good weekend--a fact that stirs articulate contempt from the unworldly dreamers of the rock scene. "Moneygrubber" is one of the milder epithets they lay on Bill Graham.

Critics, though, tend to forget the many benefits he has staged for various causes, ranging from the People's Park Bail Fund to the Episcopal Church. He has also made numerous interest-free loans to musicians and he gives intense loyalty to those who work for him. "If I have an act I think is good but that hasn't made it yet," he says, "I put it on a bill with the Who or the Jefferson Airplane. This approach to my business has gotten me a good reputation nationwide, but here in San Francisco the kids say: 'We love the music and we love the Fillmore, but we hate Graham because he's a f--ing capitalist.' "

Beautiful Evening. Capitalist Bill Graham was born in 1931 to Russian parents who had moved to Berlin only a few years before. Two days after his birth, his father was killed in an accident. In order to be free to work, his mother eventually placed Wolfgang and his younger sister in an orphanage. The two were transferred to France on a student-exchange program and then stranded there when World War II broke out. After the Germans invaded, the Grajonca children were rounded up by a Red Cross worker for a march to Marseilles; the girl died of malnutrition on the way, but Wolfgang survived the ordeal and subsequently made it to New York. Raised in a Jewish foster home in The Bronx, Wolfgang Grajonca officially became Bill Graham in 1949. "I wish I'd never changed it," he now says. "Bill Graham is a nothing name."

He was drafted into the Army during the Korean War, court-martialed twice for minor offenses (once for refusing to put on his field pack). He spent eight months at the front and won the Bronze Star. In 1955, after a stint as a New York cab driver, and now with a degree in business administration from the College of the City of New York, he went to work in Southern California as a statistician for the Southern Pacific Company.

This was the first of a series of jobs in industry that he periodically quit to study acting or travel in Europe or try to break into show business. In November 1965, just before he resigned as producer and business manager of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, he staged a benefit party that brought together poets, actors, and some of the pioneers of the big new sound called rock. It was a huge success and showed him what he could do. "It was the first time all those people met," says Graham. "Ferlinghetti, the Fugs, the Jefferson Airplane, Peter Orlovsky. It was the most beautiful evening of theater, the most beautiful party, the most joyful evening ever. Everyone was stoned --some on grass, yeah, but others on nothing at all but the scene, man. The musicians played, and the people kissed and hugged, and it was unforgettable."

It was so unforgettable, in fact, that Graham organized two more benefits like it. He chose an old auditorium in the heart of San Francisco's black ghetto. It was called the Fillmore. Then he switched to another site, the present Fillmore West, set up the Fillmore East as the second axis of the rock world, and proved that rock was a business worth administering well.

Graham's success seems remarkably secure. He has even branched out into the world where the word hip is often synonymous with middle-age spread. At Tanglewood's well-groomed Berkshire Festival this summer, Graham staged a rock program that broke all cash and attendance records. Yet the base of his enterprises is precarious and emotional. That fact was recently demonstrated in a raging confrontation that called into question the whole future of the Fillmore West, displayed Graham's pyrotechnical style, and sent shockwaves through the realm of rock.

The occasion was a threatened strike. A meeting had been called at San Francisco's other rock palace, Chet Helms' Family Dog Ballroom, by a group of psychedelic-light-show operators who were demanding more money and saying they would throw picket lines around the Fillmore that night. About 150 people were ready and waiting for Graham when he entered. First to speak was Helms, a gentle, aesthetic-looking man in his late 20s. He delivered a long speech calling for "brotherhood," accusing Graham of having a monopoly in town, and suggesting that those involved in the San Francisco rock business divide all income equally for the greater good of the "community."

Bill's Bombshell. When Graham spoke at last, he began calmly, listing his reasons for refusing the light-show people's demands, but as he turned to the real subject of the meeting--himself --the decibel level began to rise. "For four years I've been attacked and accused of being a moneygrubbing capitalist by the people in this so-called community," he said. "I'm an American businessman, mister, and I've made a lot of money. And, man, I've earned it. But I think we've also given something to this city in return. You people talk about community. Where is this community you're always talking about'7 Where are the pottery shops in the Haight? Where are the music groups that are giving lessons to kids?" Graham ranted on and on, to a screaming climax. Then quietly he announced that he would close up the Fillmore West for good in December, when his lease on the present site expires. The announcement tore the meeting to shreds. There would be no pickets then or later at the Fillmore West. Last week it was announced that Graham's lease-on the Fillmore West had been extended to August 1970, and anyone who thinks Bill Graham will fold it then doesn't know Wolfgang Grajonca.

Graham works 16 to 18 hours a day at mind-blowing intensity, sometimes not getting his first meal of the day until the wee hours after a concert. He has been known to refer to the business he's in as "Ugly! Ugly! Ugly!" Yet one day recently he slammed down his phone, rubbed his eyes and shook his head at TIME Correspondent Cloud. "You know," said Bill Graham. "You hate these groups one minute. They have no sense of reality. But then they play their music and you love 'em again."

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