Bill Graham (concert promoter)

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Bill Graham (around 1990)

Bill Graham (born Wolodja Grajonca , called Wolfgang Grajonca ; born January 8, 1931 in Berlin , † October 25, 1991 near Vallejo , California ) was a German-American concert promoter. Graham had been an influential impresario since the 1960s . During the Summer of Love he ran the legendary Fillmore and the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco . Graham took over the concept of acid tests from Ken Kesey and developed financially lucrative rock shows from them.

During the Holocaust , Bill Graham was orphaned and adopted by a New York family at the age of ten.

Life

Berlin (1931-1939)

Wolfgang Grajonca was the only son of a Jewish family who emigrated from Russia in the 1920s. After his sisters Rita Rosen (* 1920), Evelyn Udry (* 1924), Sonja Szobel (* 1925), Ester Chichinsky (* 1926) and Tanja "Tolla" (* 1928, † 1940), he was Frieda Sass's youngest child and Jacob "Yankel" Grajonca. The father died of blood poisoning two days after Wolfgang was born . The family lived on Lindenstrasse in Kreuzberg and visited the synagogue there . After the “ Kristallnacht ” of 1938, Ester Grajonca had to switch from the state school to the Jewish girls' school on Auguststrasse. The 18-year-old sister Rita emigrated to Shanghai with her then partner Freddie , the second oldest sister Evelyn fled with her Jewish-Hungarian partner Juri Teichner hidden in a pig transport to Budapest and worked there as a dancer under the stage name Evelyn Barnett.

The mother was able to accommodate little "Volodja" and his youngest sister "Tolla" in a Berlin orphanage, which he and other Jewish children sent to France in 1939 in exchange for Christian orphans, to the Chateau de Chaumont, southwest of Paris. The sisters Sonja and Ester initially stayed with their mother, who was soon arrested and perished on the way to Auschwitz . Ester survived the Holocaust in hiding in Berlin and Spandau .

Childhood on the run

After the occupation of France by the Wehrmacht, Wolfgang was brought out of the country and to safety together with his sister "Tolla" and other Jewish youths. The escape, which most did not survive, including "Tolla", who suffered from pneumonia and had to be left behind in Lyon , took the children via Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Barcelona, ​​Madrid, Lisbon and with the MS Serpa Pinto to Casablanca , Dakar (Senegal), Bermuda and finally New York , where Wolfgang arrived on September 24, 1941. In New York, he was placed in the Pleasantville Orphanage by the Hebrew Shelter and Guardian Society of the New York Association for Jewish Children . On November 12, 1941, Wolfgang was adopted by his great uncle Alfred Ehrenreich and his wife Pearl. From then on he lived at 1635 Montgomery Avenue in the Bronx .

Act as a promoter

Late 60s Bill Graham was the most influential rock concert promoter of the USA - "the one," said Woodstock organizer Michael Lang , "has the concert event business ever been invented."

From 1966 he ran the Fillmore Auditorium , the Winterland Ballroom and later the Fillmore West in San Francisco and the Fillmore East in New York . The elite of the American rock scene performed there for years - from the Allmann Brothers ( At Fillmore East , 1971) to Frank Zappa . The Fillmore East was known as "The Church of Rock and Roll" because of the top-class program.

Bill Graham's most famous events included The Last Waltz , The Band's farewell concert held in Winterland on November 25, 1976, and the American branch of the 1985 Live Aid charity concert .

He also marketed psychedelic posters by artists such as Wes Wilson and Rick Griffin . Occasionally Graham appeared as an actor, for example in the film Apocalypse Now by Francis Ford Coppola .

death

Bill Graham died in a helicopter crash in 1991 with his partner Mellis Gold and the pilot after returning from a " Huey Lewis & the News " concert at Graham's Shoreline Amphitheater in Concord, California . During a storm, the helicopter collided with a power line pylon on Highway 37 near Vallejo , California and crashed.

The rebuilt high-voltage pylon near Vallejo

Bill Graham left behind his divorced wife Bonnie McLean, two sons David and Alex Graham and his three sisters Rita Rosen, Esther Chichinsky and Sonja Szobl.

honors and awards

While still alive, he was honored by MTV with the Special Recognition Award at the MTV Video Music Awards 1986 .

A memorial concert was held in Golden Gate Park one week after his accidental death in honor of Bill Graham . It played u. a. the Grateful Dead and John Fogerty .

In 1992 he was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the nonperformers category. The reason was: “Bill Graham permanently changed the way rock and roll is brought to the stage. His keen business and organizational acumen contributed significantly to the flourishing of the anarchist scene in San Francisco in the mid to late 1960s. "

That same year, the San Francisco Civic Auditorium , a multipurpose arena built in 1915, was renamed the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium .

Filmography

literature

  • Bill Graham, Robert Greenfield: Bill Graham presents. A life between rock & roll , Frankfurt am Main: 1996, two thousand and one. ISBN 3861501562
  • Oliver Trager: The American Book of the Dead - The Definitive Grateful Dead Encyclopedia , New York: 1997, Fireside. ISBN 0-684-81402-1
  • Carlos Santana , with Ashley Kahn and Hal Miller: The Sound of the World. Mein Leben , Munich: 2015, pp. 144ff. ISBN 978-3868835618

Web links

Commons : Bill Graham  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
Obituaries

Single receipts

  1. ↑ Family photo from 1936/37 on FamilySearch.
  2. ↑ Bill Graham Presents: My Life Inside Rock And Out , Chapter 1: From War to War .
  3. ^ New Life, New Family - Bill Graham in New York on FamilySearch.
  4. ↑ Michael Lang: Woodstock. Hamburg 2019, p. 109
  5. ↑ Bill Graham, Rock Impresario, Dies at 60 in Crash (obituary) In: The New York Times, October 27, 1991.
  6. ↑ Wayne Glausser: LSD Lexicon. Cultural history from A to Z , Solothurn 2018, p. 105.
personal data
SURNAME Graham, Bill
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Grajonca, Wolodja (maiden name); Grajonca, Wolfgang
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American concert promoter
DATE OF BIRTH January 8, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH October 25, 1991
Place of death near Vallejo , California