Spotlight: Bill Graham and the Rock & Roll Revolution
The Apple watch may be the latest gadget to adorn wrists, but at the height of the counterculture, concert promoter Bill Graham had a timepiece with two faces created so that he always knew the time on both coasts. This artifact and countless others including Keith Richards’ boots and Jerry Garcia’s Wolf guitar are on display in Los Angeles at the Skirball Cultural Center‘s new Bill Graham and the Rock & Roll Revolution exhibition, that opens on Thursday, May 7. Graham needed the watch because he split each week between the Fillmore in San Francisco and the Fillmore East in New York, where he pioneered a new type of concert in the 1960s characterized by psychedelic light shows and artist-designed concert posters for such acts as the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Santana, the Who, Jimi Hendrix, and the Rolling Stones. Both clubs were wildly successful and eventually closed because Bill was exhausted and wanted to develop Winterland, a bigger venue in San Francisco, and to organize world concert tours for the Stones (among other acts). Work by poster artists Bonnie MacLean, Wes Wilson, David Singer, Greg Irons, and David Byrd as well as photography by Jim Marshall and the marketing genius of Graham are on display at the Skirball through October 11. And no show about Graham would be complete without a light show. So the question is: Are you experienced?
By Elizabeth Varnell
Pictured: Jim Morrison performing in 1967 at Winterland in San Francisco.
Photo By: Baron Wolman
