Bill Graham Explodes: ‘Quitting San Francisco’
San Francisco– — As has been his manner for more than three years, Bill Graham was a lonely and angry figure August 4th when he announced that he was finished with San Francisco as a dance/concert operator, effective Decem-31st, when new owners take over the Fillmore West building.
Graham made his surprise announcement — –he’d been reported looking for a new location for his operation– — in front of more than 100 artists, musicians, and other persons gathered at the Family Dog to discuss the then-still-flickering light, show strike.
The announcement, made haltingly through a voiced choked and shaken by emotion, followed a lengthy, acrimonious lecture in which the pugilistic ballroom master hammered out a theme of “the reality of being a businessman,” the rights of an individual. Time and time again he insisted: “I will never have anyone tell me to what level I support an art, what I must pay a light show.” But Graham, long-ago ostracized from the hip community as a profiteer and the target of as much abuse as respect, had much more wrath to vent.
“This town has never stopped rapping an honest businessman for four fucking years,” he said, brooding. “I leave here very sad … I may be copping out, but your attitudes have driven me to my decision.”
But Graham really blew his gnarled top only after Steve Gaskin, a resident communications lecturer at the Family Dog, stood up and told him: “When you started, you had to make a choice between love and money. You’ve got our money, so you can’t have our love … You’ve used dramatics today to fuck over a lot of heads with your emotional trips.”
Graham’s reply (as tape-recorded by the Good Times newspaper): “I APOLOGIZE, MOTHER FUCKER, THAT I’M A HUMAN BEING. I fucking apologize. Emotional – — you’re fucking right. Fuck you, you stupid prick! Do you know what emotions are? Stand up and have emotions. Get up and work. Get up and sing. Get up and act. You think I’m an actor? You’re full of shit, man, I have more fucking balls than you’ll ever see. You want to challenge me in any way about emotions? You slimy little man … YOU SLIMY … LITTLE … MAN. (To the crowd): Fuck you. FUCK YOU! (To a musician trying to calm him) Don’t get peaceful with me. Don’t you TOUCH me!”
With those words, Graham barreled out of the room, followed by a paled Time magazine writer working on a profile of the man.
Contacted last week, a still-petulant Graham at first refused to talk with Rolling Stone, citing the publication as “one of the other reasons I’m getting out.” But he went on to confirm his abandonment of ballroom operations here. He is expected to maintain Fill-more East in New York, his Millard agency, the still-fledging Fillmore record label, and his residence in San Francisco.
“We’re not good, we’re not bad,” he said, “but I think this city will know what it’s lost by the first week of 1970.”
Before his violent walkout at the Family Dog the focus of discussion (that word used loosely) had been the light show strike, called by the 500-member Light Artists Guild to force Graham and Chet Helms to raise wages. A picket line had been set up Friday, August 1st, at the beachsite Dog house, and another was planned for the uptown Fillmore West the following Tuesday — –the day of Graham’s explosion.
Chet Helms had reacted to the strike line with predictably open gestures of brotherhood — –provision of electricity for a coffee percolator and for a Guild light show projected on the Dog’s outside wall; flowers for the pickets, and an invitation to negotiate. The lines were down by late Friday night, and light heads agreed to meet with Chet, on his terms: a “common” gathering including not only light artists, but the community as well. That’s why Graham, along with Jerry Garcia of Grateful Dead, David and Linda LaFlamme of It’s a Beautiful Day, and numerous other scene-makers were at the convocation.
Helms, the mystic/Texan who has tried, in the past two months, to move his operation away from the big – name band and dance/concert hall concept towards a free-form environmental theater, opened the meeting by casting the I Ching. The hexagrams spelled out the need for unity. The judgment: “Holding together brings good fortune. What is required is that we all unite … around a –central figure.” Graham, seated with head hunched over, looked bored.
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