Bill Graham:The Producer of the New Rock 1968....

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Bill Graham: The Producer of the New Rock

"I dream about doing the Beatles," Bill Graham said, hunched over his desk in the crowded office of the Fillmore West. Outside the office, the ballroom — at night a huge hot space of close-packed bodies, blaring rock ‘n’ roll and swirling lights — was empty and bright with afternoon sun; inside, everything was normally hectic — phones ringing and deals being dealt — but for a moment Graham was oblivious.
"I wake up in the middle of the night and I can see the show. I’d do it easy, cool, no pressure. Maybe a week on each coast. Everything they could possibly need would be there and they could just play. I’d do it free, nothing for myself. I mean, I might have to tie it in with a TV show, maybe closed circuit to college campuses, to offset costs a bit, but money isn’t the reason."
His phone rang and, oblivious no more, he grabbed it up, instantly truculent. "Yeah? No. Yeah, I’ll come down and see him. Don’t worry about me. Wear armor? I don’t need armor for that motherfucker!" He slammed down the receiver. "LA bastards think they’re so tough. Who do they think they’re dealing with? Get me New York." He came back to his subject, his voice if possible more intense, his darting eyes further under his black brows. "It’s because they’re the Beatles. There I am, living my life in a stuffy subway; I hear the Beatles, the door opens, and I’m at the ocean. I’m not a teeny-bopper, but I get excited. I’d like to believe in God, but I know the Beatles exist. Yes, I dream of putting them on so hard I can taste it." The New York call came through, and he was off again. "Listen, you mother, waddya mean by...?"
However enmeshed in the snarling reality of daily business, the dream has to be believed; for Bill Graham, master of the Fillmores West and East, to mount a Beatles concert would be an almost orgasmic consummation of his ambitions. It would certify him as the producer of new rock, the man who can do the impossible perfectly. It would be the ultimate challenge for one who hungers after and devours challanges, and a challenge which, when met, would make him a legend beyond the reach of the lingering crticism that has always rankled his pride.
A Beatles concert is a remote possibility, but for Graham it is not idle speculation. Three years after his first dance, when he was so green that he listed the Family Dog, San Francisco’s first hippie promoters, as a band, he is the Sol Hurock of rock, a "heavy" in a scene that abounds in lightweights. He and new rock have grown up together until it is impossible to imagine one without the other. Despite the "underground" commodity, he is a classic American success.
The two Fillmores are small mints. On a good weekend he can net $6000 at San Francisco’s Fillmore West and $10,000 at New York’s Fillmore East, which opened last March in the former Village Theater on Second Avenue at 6th Street. (By foregoing a dance floor and retaining the 2,267 theater seats, he found he could jam in more paying customers). As a spin-off from the Fillmores, he recently started a booking agency called Millard (Millard Fillmore, get it?) which has already signed five major bands, and negotiations with "a major record company" are in the final stages for a record bearing the "Fillmore" logo. There is also a steady, though relatively small income from the Fillmore posters, the beautifully illegible dance advertisements that started the craze for psychedelic posters. And his Tuesday night $1 concerts in San Francsico, in fact auditions for weekend dates (and now also for Millard and Fillmore records) bring in a trickle.

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Yet it is not just the size, efficiency, and profitability of this empire that make him a heavyweight. Rock musicians, indeed almost all entertainers, are dogged by producers who stick them on cramped stages with bad lighting and worse acoustics, in ill-sized halls, and then, if they can, pay less than the contract calls for. Even if competent, most producers treat the entertainers and their work as low-risk quick-return commodities, neatly labelled rock, rhythm and blues, jazz or pop.
Graham is an exception. Ralph Gleason, the knowledgeable critic of the San Francisco Chronicle calls him "the best producer since Norman Granz" (who did the Jazz at the Philharmonic tours and started Verve Records), and Graham himself says, "I am the best; people will rip up this magazine, it sounds so egocentric, but it’s true." Closing a deal with a band manager recently, he shouted, "Bring anybody in here who can honestly say, ‘Bill Graham cheated me,’ and you can have the place." The manager’s mourning face showed he knew the place would never be his. "He never once gave anybody an extra dime," said another manager, "but he never gave anybody less than what he bargained either."
Graham will go to any lengths to get the right conditions for a band. For the singer Donovan he searched for days to get a special harpsichord. "I found one, paid $6000 for it, and then that motherfucker played one lousy note on it," says Graham. But Donovan later sent him a handwritten thank you note: "Bill, you are, by far, the friendliest, most considerate promoter I have had the pleasure to work with."
Another time, when sherfiif’s deputies came to repossess a group’s organ, he slashed the tires of the truck, then persuaded them to let the group keep it over the weekend. He is at one or the other of the Fillmores virtually every night they are open (he divides his time about 70-30 beteen San Francisco and New York, where managing director Kip Cohen runs things in his abence), checking minute details of light placement, chewing out his soundmen for moving a speaker and, after hours, emptying ashtrays and helping sweep up.
While rock is the staple of the Fillmore diet and the money spinner, it is not all. "A real key," Graham says, "has been to broaden the musical taste of the public. A kid comes to hear the Doors, but he also hears the Staple Singers." With real devotion — he has lost money on many of his more exotic shows — Graham has ignored labels. Count Basie, Roland Kirk, Cannonball Adderly, Sun Ra, Lenny Bruce, Michael McClure’s The Beard and LeRoi Jone’s The Dutchman, Afro-Haitian dancers, Buck Owens, Willie Bobo, Bola Sete, Johnny Cash, Big Black, and Buddy Rich have all appeared at the Fillmores.
He has gone out of his way to present bluesmen, not only B.B. and Albert King, but also Albert Collins, John Lee Hooker, Freddy King, James Cotton, Magic Sam, and Jimmy Reed; to experiment with unknowns like H. P. Lovecraft and countless San Francisco groups; even to put on New Orleans’ Preservation Hall Band on a bill with the Grateful Dead. "Bill has given San Francisco and America a crash course in the history of American popular music," says Gleason. Once asked to stage a special San Francisco Music Festival, Graham said he couldn’t do it "because we have one every weekend."
Graham has also done dozens of benefits — benfits that really do benefit causes that wouldn’t stand a chance on the ordinary benefit circuit. The Radical Theatre Cooperative, the Black Panthers, the California Peace and Freedom Party, the Haight-Ashbury Medical clinic, the Columbia student strike fund, and many other "underground" and radical groups have found him willing to present dances at cost and turn all the profit over to them. "He only gives a benefit when he’s trying to present a nice image," groused one radical observer, but the fact is he does give them, and the cash raised — as much as $10,000 in a single evening — has kept many a struggling organization afloat.
The Fillmores are now what the Savoy, the Paramount, and the Apollo used to be — great stages on which anyone who counts apears; to make it on them is to make it with the whole youth market. "Buddy Rich played for me in New York because he loves me?" asked Graham. "No! But he broke the kids up and now every Joe College promoter wants him. The Fillmore likes you, you’re a smash." The same could be said for Charles Lloyd, the Chambers Brothers and, to a lesser extent, for Cream, Jimi Hendrix, and the Who. There are dozens of imitators — the now defunct Kaleidescope in Los Angeles, the Electric Circus in New York, the Tea Party in Boston — but they remain imitations. The Fillmores set the standard.
The man who’s done it was named Wolfgang Grajanka at birth, and he could still do justice to Wolf ("I wish I’d never changed it. Bill Graham is a nothing name"). Gaunt and tall, he moves quickly through his ballroom like the Phantom of the Fillmore, bending forward at an awkward angle, thrusting out his bony head as if in a constant showdown with an invisible opponent. His 5 o’clock shadow, now growing into a beard, and the gashlike lines between his nose and chin add to the aura of ready menace.
His huge mouth, with lips like thick elastic bands, is always going, talking the way Janis Joplin sings, battering the listener into silence. A boxing announcer should accompany his voice to suggest the impact of each phrase: "Gouge! Stomp! Kick! Slug!" On his desk are two wooden hands carved in a clasic obscene gesture of contempt; on the wall here is a picture of himself making the same gesture. "That’s his trademark," says an employe.
Edgy fatigue is part of the manner too. Twelve-hour days are common; on weekends they stretch to seventeen. "One night we met with him from dinner to four in the morning," said one source. "Then Bill was back at his desk at nine." "I get up early," he says when asked how he keeps ahead of his competition; alternatively: "God blessed me with a big adrenalin suply." The long days are because he does everything himself. He has technicians and assistants but, said one observer, "they’re messenger boys." "Bill says I run the place," said Paul Baratta, a former stage director who manages Fillmore West, "but it’s all Bill." Technical director David Freese, who has been with Graham from the start, said, "I get the feeling I’m paid more for my loyalty than my work."
Graham calls his organization a "dictatorship but one without time clocks or rules. I expect everybody to do their work. You do it, great; don’t, get out! If I was the s.o.b. everybody says I am, why do they all stay with me?" If not an S. O. B., he is, as one employee described him with smiling understatement, "a complex and difficult man."
He has the larger than life quality of a character in a novel and could be a Harold Robbins hero, a two-fisted Jew battling for survival and hungering for identity. His father died in 1931 when Graham was two days old. The first son and sixth child of a middle-class Berlin family, he was put in an orphanage so his mother could work. He remembers his mother and sisters visiting him and standing with the orphans at attention, arms out in the Nazi salute, waiting for Hitler to go by on parade, "but I’ve forgotten the rest. It was too unpleasant."
By chance, his orphanage had an exchange with one near Paris in the summer of 1939; when the war began, the children were not returned. "When the Germans invaded, the Jewish kids were told it was flight or the labor camps, so sixty-four of us with a teacher started walking to Marseilles — with a million other people." From Marseilles they walked to Lisbon; from there they got a boat to Casablanca, Dakar, Bermuda, and then New York, arriving in September, 1941. Eleven of them were left. "If one had made it, it would have been Bill," said a friend.
Processed through the Foster Home Bureau ("People came on Saturdays like they were picking out pets. First week no one took me. I was crushed"), he was taken in by a family in the Bronx where neighborhood kids teased him for being a Nazi. In defense, after losing dozens of fights, he taught himself English with no accent. In 1945 he learned that his mother and one sister had been gassed in Belsen.
He grew up a tough New York kid, playground athlete, messenger boy, and lucky crapshooter (actually he never shot the dice, being an inveterate side better. "It’s in my nature to bet against the guy who’s shooting") who wore the green and yellow (now the Fillmore colors) of the Pirates Social Athletic club. Drafted for Korea, he was court-martialed twice for insubordination, but also won the Bronze Star. On discharge in 1953, he went to the City College of New York, majoring in business administration, determined to make lots of money.

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But with his first job, paymaster for a railroad in San Francisco, he knew money wasn’t enough. He enrolled in acting school and "like in the movies, I caught the bug." From 1957 to 1964 he alternated between working and acting, with trips to Europe in between. He’d work until it got to him, then go to New York to study and beat on doors. "I thought I had talent for character roles and did get a few little parts, but my ego couldn’t take the rejections. So I’d build myself up with a job and money, but then I’d have to express myself again. This was my lost, searching time. I was always looking for one thing that would satisfy me."
His last job during that period as as regional office manager for Allis-Chalmers in San Francisco. It was, he says, "like being a theatre director." He made a game of extracting the most work possible from those under him, while at the same time raising morale. During his reign (and he did reign says his quiet brunette wife Bonnie, whom he hired as a secretary: "All we talked about was how to interpret his moods"), he cut the staff from forty-seven to twenty-one, as well as consolidating two offices into one that he designed entirely by himself. "That job was like my first Fillmore," he said, but after two years he decided that it too was too constricting.
So, in 1964, he quit the $18,000 a year job to become the $120-a month business manager of the San Francisco Mime Troupe. He was attracted both by its radical stance and by the chance to combine his two passions: the arts and management. It was a move that appeared at first a mistake, but turned out ultimately to be lucky.
Graham fitted the Mime Troupe not at all. His hard as nails business manner grated on the members; while they were a committed part of the San Francisco-Berkeley radical community, he was a non-political loner. He never joined the Mime Troupe in spirit; the posters always had "Bill Graham Presents" set at the top in different type as if he were an outside producer.
Graham’s job was to relieve the group’s founder and director, Ronnie Davis, of all business details so that he would be free to rehearse and direct the company. As Graham put it: "I said, ‘Ronnie, I’ll work like hell so you can work the way I’d give my right arm to work myself." But even though he had no artistic control, Graham was infuriated when the Troupe’s performances disappointed him. He was willing to be Davis’ hard-working servant only if Davis worked equally hard to make the Troupe live up to Graham’s dreams. But the Troupe was Davis’, and the two were at a biter impasse for a year. Just after he decided to quit, however, he staged a benefit for the Troupe on November 6, 1965.
It was a historic San Francisco occasion, a wild night-long meeting of all the city’s underground scenes. The Jefferson Airplane, the Fugs (in from New York), and John Handy’s jazz group played, the Committee did skits, Lawrence Ferlinghetti read poetry, and Allen Ginsburg capped it by leading the crowd — 3,000 radicals, students, artists, moviemakers, old beats and new hippies, all trying to get into a room that held 600 — in chanting mantras.
A month later there was a second benefit, but by then Graham had found the Fillmore Auditorium, a ballroom at the corner of Fillmore and Perry streets in the heart of San Francisco’s black neighborhood. "At 9:30 there was a double line around the block outside," Ralph Gleason wrote in his Chronicle column. "Inside a most remarkable assemblage of humanity was leaping, jumping, frigging, fragging, and frugging to the Grateful Dead, the Great Society, and the Mystery Trend. The costumes were free-form Goodwill cum Sherwood Forest." The ballroom scene, which had actually begun in October with a Family Dog dance called "A Tribute to Dr. Strange," was rolling.
In late January, 1966, Graham was asked to produce a Trips Festival, a three-day, mixed-media, LSD flame-out that introduced the light shows of Ken Kesey and his friends to a mass audience. Graham’s next dance, in February, advertised: "With Sights and Sounds of the Trips Festival." Astonished by the success of the dances, but intuiting that they could be the art-business enterprise he had been looking for, Graham decided to become a fulltime producer, took over the Fillmore’s lease, and started to present dances every weekend.
Wes Wilson did his first poster for the Fillmore in late February. In the spring Graham ended his brief partnership with Chet Helms of the Family Dog and was on his own. When police and city officials, suspicious of the innocent but wild affairs and the emerging hippy culture, tried to deny him a dance permit, he fought back, using his knowledge of the mores of the "straight" world to defend his "hip" enterprise. Won by his earnestness as much as the merits of his case (made obvious by police blundering), the Chronicle, businesmen, and vocal society "swingers" came strongly to Graham’s support. The police retired from the field and since then his relations with officialdom have been largely cordial. By the late fall of 1966, the whole San Francisco scene — music, hippies, drugs, and love — was national news, and the Fillmore was a key name.
It had been an extraordinary year for Graham. By its end he was a crucial figure in the San Francisco hippy community into which he had stumbled. During the next two years, which brought him greater success, that community fragmented and almost disappeared, and its beginnings became so buried in printed verbiage as to be unreconstructable. Yet if much is in doubt, it is certain that Bill Graham’s relationship to that community has been at best symbiotic and at worst deeply antagonistic; the inverse ratio of his and the community’s success has alays been controversial.
When Graham began, the San Francisco rock and hippy scenes were the same. Rock music had an important social role in a growing an optimistic community. The rock bands were not only community entertainers, they were its most convincing voice to the outside world, its breadwinners and, with the "families" grouped around them, ideals of brotherhood and the integration of work with pleasure. Not puritanical about money, the bands believed their economy would grow with the community and be independent of "the system."
But as musicians progressed as artists, they wanted to record; those who danced to local groups wanted to sit and listen to famous groups. The social role diminished as the musical demand increased. The musicians began to define their hippiness primarily as personal and artistic freedom vis-a-vis the record companies which deluged them with offers, and only secondarily as social freedom within a community. For the fans, digging a rock band became more important than community attachment. At the same time, the community’s center in the Haight-Ashbury was swelling beyond control and growing so ugly that it seemed best abandoned. So San Francisco rock moved out of the Haight and into the burgeoning world of new rock.
Now, while the community lies devastated, the San Francisco Sound is a $5 million business with dozens of successful bands all lucratively contracted to major companies (though some groups have broken up with bitter feeling), with large new redording studios, industry representatives, a natonal rock newspaper in Rolling Stone, and even squads of "under asistant West Coast promo men." San Francisco has become a provincial capital of the music industry empire, but "the vibes," those sweet, groovy, easy-livin’ psychic vibrations that made the city’s rock ‘n’ roll and the scene it sprung from a unique delight, have sadly faded.
Although the trend may have been inevitable (rock ‘n’ roll being intrinsically commercial music), Bill Graham has been made the villain of the piece by those who put community ahead of the music business. Graham, "with all his money," many sneer, stole his ideas from the cummunity, made them a commercial formula, worked the formula for personal profit, and in the process killed the vibes.

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In fact, he did not originate the "psychedelic dance," now an entertainment cliche like Hawaiian night. "Bill is a perfecter, not an innovator," concedes one of his staff. He does sell so many tickets, at a price higher than need be, that dancing — which is as much as anything the soul of the San Francico style — is impossible even at the Fillmore West.
For Graham, such complaints are "so much bullshit" that spark passionate soliloquies. "All that crap about vibes, feeling, who needs it? Act! Do somthing! That’s what counts! They think they’re really something with their ‘Hey, man, what’s happening, baby?’ — a lousy imitation of 125th and Lenox in Harlem where they do it so good I’ll book it. These hippies have got to learn that we live in a business world. When you’e involved with the public, artistic creativity can only survive in a business framework. Don’t accept it, but accept the reality of it. I can do that. I can put on a suit, go down to City Hall, so I can have my places open, which will do a lot more to change the world than going there like a freak. You want to rebel, great, but rebel for something! Hippies couldn’t do that. ‘Oh, man, like trip out, man.’ Bullshit! They call that changing the world?
"The Haight-Ashbury is a tragedy: from flowers and love to drugs and hate in three years. They had their chance, the whole world was watching, asking to be shown something. The creeps sat around with their fantasies, saying ‘Oh, wow!’ and thinking it was communication. And now it’s somebody else’s fault. I’ll never accept that a healthy white American kid can blame everybody but himself for his problems."
Pacing back and forth in his office, taking his voice from pain-level volumes to hushed whispers, Graham raged his justification, sounding like a 19th century industrial titan, glorying in having carved out a business that depends solely on himself. His business is an extension of himself: that it is his — all his and nobody else’s — is the paramount fact that all must recognize. The money his business makes is his best gauge of self-success. Power and property belong to him who earns them, and he believes he has. But to be sure of that belief, he has to earn and re-earn them every weekend.
"Am I a good producer? You’re goddam right I’m a good producer! Do I do it to feed my ego? Yeah, but it’s real ego, respect and pride. I wanna be the best; I want that Oscar every night. What keeps me going is challenge. Why did I once drive alone across the country non-stop? Sure, it was a $100 bet, but I had to see if I could do it. Here we’re gonna have the best shows, the best lights, the best posters, so when somebody puts down his three bucks, he gets three bucks worth of entertainment.
"When we started, we’d take the cash box after the dance, dump it out and stare at the pile of money. But I’ll never prove that it isn’t really the money. It was a thrill. I respect the dollar, I’m no liar. But why don’t I just rake it in, why am I here every night? Because I care, man.
"That’s what counts. For me, it’s like this with everybody: I got a job to do, you got a job to do. I hope we’ll be friends. But if I have to choose between liking and respect, I’ll take the latter. Like with musicians. They might be friends of mine, but when they step on my stage, they’re paid entertainers, and they’re not going to abuse my public. They come in late or goof off, I’ll blast ‘em. I work like hell all week to make things right for them, better than anywhere else, so they better deliver. I give you a chance, you don’t deliver, I’ll kill you; in my head, you’re dead,"
Instant and total delivery isn’t a practical thing to expect of hip artists, and Graham’s relations with many of them have been constant run-ins simlar to his fights with the Mime Troupe. In the fourteen months that Wes Wilson did posters, Graham was always angry about something. Wilson was often late for deadlines, but Graham attacked the posters themselves: the word "Fillmore" didn’t stand out clearly enough; the dates were lost in the swirl; the colors were ugly. When Wilson was recognizd as a brilliant artist and his posters were selling by the thouands, Graham refused to give him a raise. Wilson finally quit. On his last poster, the letters of "Fillmore" became a snake with a dollar sign in its mouth.
Graham’s management of the Jefferson Airplane ended in their firing him. They felt he had no understanding of them as a band, overbooked them to make them "stars," and was stingy with the money he banked for them. "When our bass player, Jack Casady, wanted a new amplifier for a new sound, Bill wouldn’t hand over the bread," said one band member. "He didn’t believe we needed it. You always have to prove things to Bill, to convince him of everything. It’s a drag."
"He’s been in this scene for years, man," said one observer, "and he still acts like a cross between a corporation executive and the leader of a street gang. He’s unnecessarily tough." "One time he asked for something," said one band’s manager. "I was stoned out of my skull, but I was trying to answer. ‘Yes or no,’ he shouted like he always does. I couldn’t help laughing and he got so mad he almost threw me down the stairs."
To have been kicked out of the Fillmores by an enraged Graham is almost a status symbol. Musicians, even Joan Baez once, often have to pay to get in. Free entry isn’t a right, but they think it would be nice. "He says, ‘I do the business, you do the art,’ but his idea of what his business is always starts squeezing my art," said one musician.
In sum, the problem is not that Graham does anything wrong, but his manner in doing what he does so well. Artists and fans who know that his are the best stages in the country, and that they owe much to him, feel that much the same could have been done more gently and loosely, that he is insensitive to the fact that such looseness could be more valuable to the music and its spirit than insistence on a business framework. "He’d be a good leader on a death march," said one observer, "but it’s hard to feel good with all his tension surrounding you. Who cares if every little detail is perfect if you’re having a good time?"
Sadly, the community that sees him as the villain has been unable to create an effective alternative. In part this is because he is not the villain in the trend from community hip to commercial hip. He has simply been unable to create that looser alternative which, though commercially viable, could have avoided complete integration into the music industry.

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Yet Graham is in a crucial part responsible for the absence of an alternative to commercialism. During the time when San Francico rock was becoming detached from its commnity base, a powerful local person who knew both the hip world and the dangers of sterility in the business world, and who had the guts and imagination to work out alternatives — cooperative managements able to make package contract deals, cheaper dance tickets and lower fees for bands were suggested — could have bucked the trend. Yet Graham encouraged the trend; such was the power of his personality and his position as the city’s most important producer — and, of course, the temptatons of established commercialism — that the trend prevailed.
Recent attempts at alternatives have been abortive. In San Francico, a few bands, led by the Grateful Dead, tried last winter by backing the Carousel Ballroom, a huge place well located at a major downtown intersection, could have given the Fillmore tough competition. The management ran it loosely and briefly did bring back the vibes. But within months they were deep in debt. By June they went under, and Graham took over the lease and changed the hall’s name to Fillmore West. Graham was glad to leave the original Fillmore. After the murder of Martin Luther King Jr, white dance customers had been increasingly harassed by black neighborhood residents and business slumped. Now the old Fillmore, still leased by Graham, is dark except when he opens it, rent-free, to black community groups.
In New York the "hip" challenge was pathetic. Rankled by his success and contempt ("One word sums up my feeling for the New York scene: pus. It’s a jungle, full of every kind of speed freak, hophead, wino scum imaginable"), hippie groups accused him of co-opting the cultural revolution and demanded the use of his theatre one night a week. Faced with a take-over during a Columbia student strike-fund benefit, Graham did agree to a meeting to discuss free use of the theatre ("My theatre," he reminded them). At the meeting they had no program and he kicked them out. He now admits anyone free of charge one night a week, but only as "my guest."
The success Graham sought with such focussed fixity of purpose — and, he says proudly, "absolutely ethically’ — is now his. "I’ve paid my dues; I deserve it." The power of success is such that the controversies surrounding its achievement become boring. Even the artists who fought with him end up liking him as well as granting him the respect he demands. "How can you hate the guy?" said one. "He’s weird being so uptight, but if he’s not shoving it all down your throat, it’s kind of funny." He gives bands free legal advice and last year even flew to Rome to check out a pop festival that sounded fishy and to which many groups had been invited (his advice was "no good" and everybody stayed home). Every year on Thanksgiving eve he throws a monster party in San Francico for the whole scene; it has become the party of the year, a grand reunion like the Mime Troupe benfit that started it all.
But the success still bugs him. He keeps an early-50s copy of a TV fan magazine with a picture of him and Eddie Fisher as an object lesson: Fisher was a pal when he sang at Grossinger’s and Graham worked there as a waiter, then snubbed him when he got famous. "I spent too much of my time in big shots’ waiting rooms to make anybody do it myself," he said. "I got no receptionist, no appointment book. You come in, I’ll talk to you. But talk fast!"
"Bill’s a millionaire," says a friend who has known him since the Mime Troupe days, "but he’s funny about it. He came over once in his new Mercedes and asked me if people would mind. ‘Hell, no,’ I said, ‘You earned it.’ Then he blurted out, ‘But I'm still wearing the same pants I had four years ago.’"
He’s bought a few stocks but a broker handles them. He and his wife and their three-month-old son live in a big aprtment in plush Pacific Heights, San Francisco’s Upper East Side, but he pads around its rooms as if he didn’t quite fit in. He took his first vacation in three yars in October, three days at a friend’s house in the Virgin Islands. "A big house overlooking a private beach and all that water," he said, eyes wide. "It was like Holiday Magazine, but real. I never knew that world existed. I never have time to discover those things. I work too hard making money to spend it. Those executives who work nineteen hours a day, then ride, play golf, and sail for hobbies? I can’t do it. Work is the whole shot."
Even if now rich, Graham insists that he is still involved. "I’m involved in the vocation/avocation of attemtping to change the taste level of the public. Half the people you see on picket lines, you ask them, ‘What are you here for?’ they say, ‘It’s fun, I guess.’ That’s not involved. I’m involved because I work! Does it mean I’m not for civil rights and freedom? I answer, ‘Is the civil rights man auditioning rock bands?’ Does that matter? Yes! Because that little girl in Peoria first found everything was not right in this lovely country, about social disorder, from Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Fred Neil and all those guys."
His voice drops a bit. "I've learned from them too. In my wound up anxiety to make sure that everything was done the way it should be done, my approach was too dogmatic, compulsive and pushy – bam-bam-bam all the time. I've learned that you can deal with some of these people different from the people in the garment district in New York where I used to shoot craps. There it was eat or be eaten. These people, they don't want to eat me! I never knew I was uptight until I saw waht an uptight was. Like from the time I was a kid I thought that a person who says hello is saying 'How can I use you?' But I've met people in this scene who, when they say 'Hello,' just want to say hello. As I'm saying, I'm learning."
Michael Lydon, New York Times, 15 December 1968