How Bill Graham Used Creativity and Design to Promote Music

The musical scene would be positively electric if you could transport back to 1967 San Francisco.

Imagine strolling down Haight Street – the counterculture movement's epicenter and the bustling music scene that complimented it.

Perhaps the city's architectural style or European flair manifested alongside the burgeoning counterculture scene and the powerful music emanating from San Francisco’s lively Haight.

San Francisco’s 1960s music scene evolved alongside those who lived there - regular folks living their life or seeking creative and spiritual growth. It just so happened that during that time, the musical livelihood born in the Haight was bleeding across into other neighborhoods and throughout the groves of Golden Gate Park.

710 Ashbury Street, San Francisco - a view from modern times.

If you walked by 710 Ashbury Street when their famous occupants – The Grateful Dead – lived there, chances are they’d often be present. Sometimes, they sat on the front steps, talking and joking with passersby. There are even oft-reported stories of Bob Weir, once nicknamed Mr. Bob Weir Trouble, tossing water balloons from the house to cops below.

The home became a focal point for the counterculture and, to some extent, remains that way to this day. According to band members, crazy stuff happened at the house constantly.

One of the most famous images that have forever sealed the house in music history lore is by Rolling Stone photographer Baron Wolman. The entire band posed just below the house address, and today, the snapshot remains one of the most endearing, enduring images captured of the Grateful Dead. It’s also one of the primary catalysts for fans who pilgrimage to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, with the ultimate stop being the steps of 710 Ashbury.

So, what about this time helped bring music out of San Francisco’s orbit and to the rest of the world?

For one, the location was a huge focal point – a central character in the story of how music grew and evolved in 1960s San Francisco.

The home of the Dead was within stumbling distance of one of America’s most famous intersections: Haight & Ashbury. When the band wasn’t working on music, business, or throwing parties at 710, they were hanging out in the neighborhood with the rest of humanity gathering there in San Francisco’s hippie gathering spot. The band became (and remains) synonymous with that movement because of where they chose to put down their business and musical roots.

The home and Haight were near another famous San Francisco landmark – Golden Gate Park.

If 710 Ashbury was symbolic of the greatness that lived and evolved in San Francisco, Golden Gate Park was where the music played out and drifted through the glades and up into the whisps of fog drifting through the park’s Cypress and Monterrey trees – a public space that was a crucial cog in the creative and musical wheel for hippies and the bands they loved and treasured.

Counterculture Was the Root of 1960s San Francisco Music

The existence of the counterculture in San Francisco converged with music at the perfect time. Because many musicians came to the city to share the moment, they also performed across the city, some busking on street corners while others played in cafes and parks.

In an essay describing how free concerts shaped this scene, author Mat Callahan highlighted three significant reasons why music perfectly complemented San Francisco’s scene at the time:

• Music was free for all – concerts were mostly always free, and musicians held court in cafes, coffee shops, bars, and the many open spaces in the Haight and neighboring Golden Gate Park. It’s one of the reasons why music in Golden Gate Park is such a huge tradition to this day, with the annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival and the relative newcomer, Outside Lands. These concerts unfold in a place where so much music history came before them.

• More than just music – the music was the message that underscored the social platform of the day. One of the reasons why the Grateful Dead rose to such musical heights is that their performance was challenging to sell – their music broke the rules and challenged people’s thinking. Their music was far more critical than a commodity. How could any company position, market, and sell music like this to the masses?

• Anti-capitalist – Money never mattered. There is a deep history of “tapers” that would have free reign to record shows, and to this day, catalogs of live shows document this history, and the bands universally encouraged people to record and share them with all.

So, in summary, Callahan notes:

“Music mattered because it consciously and directly challenged the state. It did this by granting permission to do things the state prohibited or restricted. Dancing, drug taking, and sexual adventure were all encouraged by music in defiance of laws regulating such activities.”

The Rise of Bill Graham

One of San Franciscos’ most legendary minds, Bil Graham, embraced much of this musical marketing ethos.

Who was Bill Graham? Today, his name adorns one of San Francisco’s notable music venues and is considered one of our time's most influential music promoters. Here are just a few of his accomplishments:

• As the promoter for The Grateful Dead, he is credited with booking their first show at The Fillmore on Jan. 8, 1966.

• In 1973, Graham promoted what was, at the time, the largest outdoor music concert ever held: The Allman Brothers, The Grateful Dead, and The Band, all headlining at Wakins Glen, New York. Initial plans were to accommodate 150,000 fans, but 600,000 appeared.

• Graham owned and operated influential Fillmore Records from 1969 to 1976 and signed artists, including Elvin Bishop, Rod Stewart, and Cold Blood.

• In 1976, he brought The Last Waltz and The Band together for one of the most monumental, historic, and memorable concerts ever at the Winterland Ballroom.

• In 1985, he produced Live Aid at JFK Stadium, raising over $45 million for African aid.

Bill was well ahead of his time, but he timed his genius and innovative musical promotion at the prescient moment of the late 1960s counterculture movement.

He moved to Bay Area in the early 1960s to be closer to a sister after working in the hospitality industry at mountain resorts of the Catskills – his work here was an early foundation for the promotion work he would do later in The City. Before that, he was drafted into the army and served in the Korean conflict, where he was awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart.

His arrival in San Francisco was met with an invite to an event in Golden Gate Park to see San Francisco Mime Troupe. The group got its name because they (mostly) performed silent shows but evolved into commedia dell’arte – a style evoking Italian theatre. They used costumes and face masks to provide commentary on the turbulence of the 1960s, including the conflict in Vietnam and the Civil Rights Movement. Notably, the group’s director, Peter Berg, was arrested during the Free Speech demonstrations at UC-Berkeley and was no stranger to his stand-offs with those who oppressed speech. Many shows started appearing in San Francisco parks, with increasing run-ins and conflicts with the San Francisco police.

At the Golden Gate show, Mime Troupe’s head actor, R.G. Davis was arrested for obscenity. An opportunity presented itself to Graham. To support Davis and the Mime Troupe, Graham decided to stage a series of benefit concerts.

In planning these benefits, Graham was able to seize a chance to market the important social events and concerts that were happening all over the city of San Francisco. They became an unofficial meeting spot for artists and musicians that discussed important events around civil rights, farmer worker rights, and others.

These shows were happening all around the city in rented venues, but Graham started to think bigger – what if he could have them at some of the larger auditoriums and concert halls in the city? Graham met with Charles Sullivan, a businessman, and entrepreneur who happened to hold the lease for the Fillmore Auditorium. Graham saw an opportunity to have a Mime Troupe benefit there and worked with Sullivan to find open dates for the benefit and other shows.

The Fillmore benefit on December 10, 1965, was one of the biggest nights of Graham’s future success in the music industry. Throughout his career, Graham credits Sullivan with getting his foot into the door of the live event and music industry. "If Mr. Sullivan, Charles, hadn't stood by me and allowed me to use his permit I wouldn't be sitting here,” he recalled.

Graham Finds His Market Through Design

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Graham was the consummate showman. He understood what people wanted and always tried to go above and beyond what people expected, whether it was the bands or their fans.

The poster scene centered in San Francisco in the late 1960s was unlike anywhere else. From top-billing, and headline shows to small arthouse events; posters were the means to attract people to the event.

Graham was all-in on these posters, and he made a name for himself early on with collaborations with local artists with an eye for design and typography.

The ‘Big 5’ of Bill Graham Poster Design

In 1987, Jerry Garcia reflected on the critical place these posters had on the music and, most importantly, the memories of the time:

“A poster unlocks memories just like a record does. You know how the records you listened to were the background music of your life? Well, the posters are the front pages, the covers of your life. I just can’t help looking at these and going BOING! I don’t know why. It’s what art is.”

The Dead was one band in a constellation of musicians who danced, sang, and played in the free-spirit Summer of Love era defined by experimentation, music, and art. The posters were one of the visual conduits that connected people to these experiences. Each style represented the day – a mind-melding array of letters, psychedelic colors, and surreal images.

Five artists defined themselves with poster art during Graham’s time in San Francisco, including Wes Wilson, Bonnie MacLean, Lee Conklin, Rick Griffin, and Alton Kelly and Stanley Mouse.

Here is a bit more about what made their work so special and unique:

Wes Wilson

Wes Wilson was the OG for Bill Graham’s posters and the first artist to create them. Initially, Wilson started at a shop that helped print flyers to promote the San Francisco Mime Troupe appeal parties. He also was printing posters for Family Dog, another San Francisco music production outfit, but it was the appeal of the creative flexibility that Graham provided to Wilson. As a student of San Francisco State, Wilson found inspiration in a poster exhibit of the Jugendstil Movement and Expressionism at UC Berkeley. He was drawn to the way that typography was used as negative space.

Wilson’s first poster was not to promote a concert but to make a political stance, which he wrote about here.

Wilson’s iconic style used lettering that blended and could dip into a menagerie of techniques that could help Graham add different varieties of acts to appear on the bill in a way that would never have happened in other venues. For example, a concert pairing at the Fillmore could feature Lenny Bruce and Mothers of Invention, and you would never lose context.

Famously, one of the myths born from Wilson’s mesmerizing style is that the first poster created and presented to Graham led him to supposedly say: “You can’t read that!” Unfortunately, that is a story that has grown in popularity over the years. Nevertheless, the style had an impact on the future designs of these posters and has created a market that has seen a continual uptick in investments. Wilson worked on posters for Graham until 1967.

Bonnie MacLean

A one-time wife of Bill Graham, she filled in for Wes Wilson in 1967, and hallmarks of her posters were vivid hand-drawn designs that featured bands like Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, and Pink Floyd. Graham, ever wanting the artists to experiment and tap creative outlets, provided that flexibility to MacLean, who was inspired to create 14-by-20-inch prints. She remained the in-house poster designer for the Fillmore until 1971. In the end, much like Graham, she understood that the point of the posters was to inspire people to come out to see a band play at the Fillmore. In an age before cell phones and targeted advertising, these posters were the best game in town. “I could do what I wanted, but the object was for people to notice the poster and hopefully come out, she explained in a 2015 interview.

Lee Conklin

As the artists started to gain credibility, others took notice. Lee Conklin was inspired after reading news articles about Wes Wilson and felt the magnetic pull of San Francisco enough to travel there and show his work to Bill Graham, who gave him a test assignment.

"The bell had gone off in my head that I should be a poster artist and I went out onto Haight Street with my portfolio. I was there for the poster action. It was the art world that I wanted to be a part of." – Lee Conklin

Conklin was tasked with doing posters for Fillmore West and the Winterland Ballroom. He also designed album art for Santana. Most of his designs were featured between 1968 and 1969, and his defining style was beautifully blending calligraphy and images into a completely new art form.

Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse

This San Francisco pair embodied collaboration and brought that to life in each poster. Kelley discovered found imagery – one of the most famous was Zig-Zag Man – and Mouse would find a way to surround it in lettering. Kelley would explain their working relationship in a world that existed long before the Internet by pouring through images and books deep in the San Francisco Public Library:

"We knew what to do. We didn't have to talk. Stanley and I had no idea what we were doing, but we went ahead and looked at American Indian stuff, Chinese stuff, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Modern, Bauhaus, whatever. We were stunned by what we found and what we were able to do. We had free rein to just go graphically crazy. Before that, all advertising was pretty much just typeset with a photograph of something."

Mouse would go on to create posters and album art for the Grateful Dead, Journey, and Santana. The duo is credited with designing the beetles and wings on Journey albums and the iconic skull and rose image for the Grateful Dead.

Rick Griffin

The last of the Big 5 in the pantheon of Bill Graham’s music posters was Rick Griffin, a SoCal surfer who was an artist for SURFER magazine. Before his work with Graham, he was most famous for creating a character, Murphy, an ‘always-stoked’ wave-chaser constantly shouting, “cowabunga!” Changing an industry with creativity and ingenuity is challenging, but Griffin did it twice. In a profile in SURFER Magazine, the editorial team noted his impact on surfing culture:

“It’s really hard to measure the impact of a single individual on our sprawling mass of a surfing culture. Yeah, Kelly Slater sold a million pairs of boardshorts and Tom Curren taught us what it meant to live as a high-performance soul surfer—though, hell, Duke Kahanamoku is technically responsible for all of our surfing lives in the first place, so his impact is actually pretty easy to measure. But for every marquee name in the surfing hall of fame, there are countless, less-heralded geniuses that have touched our surf lives in ways just as meaningful and impactful. Rick Griffin is one of those geniuses.”

Griffin had only completed eight posters when his time with Graham was complete, but they were masterpieces. His work on a Jimi Hendrix poster may be the most legendary of them all.

Today, the popularity of the posters rages on. Many of the posters are displayed in art galleries and museums across the country, including a traveling exhibit that is the largest ever to be displayed at the Narrows Arts Center in Fall River, MA.

Today, collectors feverishly look for original posters from the psychedelic period of the late 1960s, some fetching five figures or more. The value of these posters has created a fake, secondary market, and two of the most faked posters are Graham shows The last show at the Winterland Ballroom featuring the Grateful Dead on Dec. 31, 1978, and Led Zeppelin at the Oakland Coliseum in 1977.