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Thirteen years ago—on Friday, October 25, 1991—Bill Graham's life ended in a tragic helicopter accident after he worked a regular day in the office. A regular day, of course, in the sense that it included a call to Mick Jagger at his chateau in France in the morning and boarding a Bell Jet Ranger 206B helicopter that took him to a Huey Lewis and the News concert in the evening. For the 60 years before October 25, 1991, in fact, Bill Graham's regular was nothing less than extraordinary.
As a child he fled Europe to escape Hitlers armies, bouncing though orphanages and finally finding a foster home in New York. He grew up tough, on the streets of the Bronx and in the kitchens and dining rooms of the great Borscht Belt hotels. He fought in Korea, winning a Bronze Star, even before he was an U.S. citizen. In his twenties, he crossed America and Europe several times over, landing in San Francisco right before the summer of love. And the rest is music history.
In 1965, after a few office jobs and acting gigs, he founded the Fillmore and did nothing less than launch the careers of the rock icons of a generation—Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, Jefferson Airplane, Cream, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the Grateful Dead, just to mention a few. Along the way, he practically invented the concept of rock as a force for good in the world—not just in terms of giving the audience a great show—but as a means of raising huge sums of money for a variety of humanitarian causes.
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