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Between Rock and a Good Cause

Concert promoter Bill Graham
  • Posted at 5:24pm
  • 14 December 2007
  • by SarahDempster-RT

"He wasn't a shark dressed in a dolphin suit," warned the voice, ominously. "He was a shark." As clunky descriptions of widely feared US concert promoter Bill Graham go, it was a corker. Not only did it encapsulate the frill-free ruthlessness of the legendary music impresario, it illustrated the vast shadow that the Notorious G.I.T. continues to cast across the crumbling coliseum of rock history.

As with the other testimonies that formed the basis of BBC Radio 4's excellent Between Rock and a Good Cause (Saturday 8 December), it also made Graham sound palpably, terrifyingly, alive - even though he'd actually died in 1991, and thus could no longer grab anyone by the lapels and slam them up against the nearest speaker stack before making unfounded and hurtful allegations about the size of their genitals.

(Or could he? Interestingly, the deliverer of the dolphin-suit declaration remained anonymous, suggesting that, where dead German-born millionaires are concerned, you can never be too careful. Such was the size of the balding leviathan's temper, it isn't difficult to imagine Graham exacting some manner of coffin-based vengeance on his haters: his fist punching its furious, decomposing way through his San Francisco grave like that bit at the end of Carrie, before doing something unpleasant to a passing priest.)

Make no mistake - Graham was as non-dolphin-suit-y a shark as ever there was. In the lawless aquarium that was the 1970s/1980s international concert promotion business, Graham was top dog(fish), an unapologetically unpleasant wheeler-dealer who earned respect and dollars from rock stars, managers and music fans alike by a) espousing a work ethic founded on rigid punctuality and enormous, stadium-stuffing showmanship while b) frightening everyone so much they soiled their embroidered velveteen loons. Probably.

"He could not be intimidated," said former mucker Peter Coyote, audibly trembling. "Not in any way. You'd have to kill him." Among those whose wrath was incurred by the small tycoon were the Rolling Stones (Graham had scrambled onstage during a gig to evict an overenthusiastic fan and ended up under the band's piano, punching their tour manager); Paul Simon ("I can't get on with Bill Graham," he'd once sighed, apparently); Ronald Reagan (Graham's office was firebombed after he publicly denounced the then president) and Bob Geldof, who'd asked Graham to organise Live Aid's American leg, only to be infuriated by the sight of the middle-aged promoter b****ring about in the background during Bob Dylan's climactic set. "It was chaos, a complete disaster," harrumphed Geldof. "I never said another word to him. I was disgusted."

What a cracking documentary this was. While kaleidoscopic plumes of psychedelic guitar swirled in the background, biographical details seeped, poignantly, through the cracks. Born Wolfgang Grajonca in Berlin, he'd ended up making his own way to New York, aged 11, after being separated from his mother and sister during the Second World War. A sickly child, he'd been bullied at school, had fought in Korea and, worse, managed an "anarchic counterculture mime troupe" in the late 1960s. No wonder he ended up such a sod, frankly.

We also learned that carved at the bottom of his gravestone is a single word that sums up, with fittingly matey understatement, Graham's vast contribution to the music industry. Said inscription? "CHEERS." All this and not a dolphin suit in sight. Now that's what I call music promotion.

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