Vintage Ads

In addition to today being Bowiemas, it also marks the birthday of someone whose career in the music industry was every bit as significant to me, and I don't mean Elvis. Bill Graham would have been 86, had he not been killed in a helicopter crash returning home from the Concord Pavilion in 1991.

David Bowie’s first Bay Area show was a Halloween event at Winterland in San Francisco on Oct. 25, 1972. The show flopped, with only a few hundred people buying tickets to see the young British performer. Bill Graham talked Bowie into returning in February 1976, and that became the first of many successful appearances here. --Bill Van Niekerken in the San Francisco Chronicle, Jan 11 2016


His tale is the stuff of legends: a Jew born in Germany in 1931 and orphaned soon after, he was evacuated to France in 1939 and sent to the U.S. in 1941. He lived with a foster family in the Bronx, working as a waiter and cabbie until he found his calling as a rock impresario in 1960s San Francisco. Notoriety and controversy followed--for the next quarter century, he had a hand in everything from the Trips Festival to the Fillmore West to Woodstock to Live Aid to Amnesty International's Conspiracy of Hope tour. This look at a businessman unencumbered by timidity is recommended reading as an often hilarious overview of rock 'n' roll. --from the Publishers Weekly review of Bill Graham Presents: My Life Inside Rock and Out


Happy Birthday, Uncle Bobo. (It's a Deadhead thing.) We miss you, too.