At a telling point in “Bill Graham Presents,” the one-man show based on the life of the late rock ‘n’ roll impresario, Graham argues with a rabbi who is protesting the dance hall permit he needs to open the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco.
The rabbi insists the auditorium is desecrating his temple, which is located next door to the Fillmore. Too much noise, too many people. And Graham, he suggests, couldn’t possibly understand, because he doesn’t know suffering. “What do you know from persecution?” he asks. “What do you know from what happened to my people?”
The impresario, portrayed by actor Ron Silver, is puzzled for an instant before he realizes the rabbi has no idea he is Jewish. The promoter had picked his American name, Bill Graham, out of the telephone book, after all. The rabbi couldn’t possibly know that he was born Wolfgang Grajonza to a Jewish family in Berlin in 1931. Or that he had crossed Europe on foot to flee the Nazis.
Graham begins to speak to the rabbi in Yiddish. “Do you know my mother? Do you know my sister?… Dead,” he says. “My whole family, dead.”
Needless to say, Graham secured his permit; he went on to become the legendary owner of the Fillmore East and West, where 1960’s rock icons like Janis Joplin and Eric Clapton spawned a pop-culture revolution and a billion-dollar worldwide music business.
The pugnacious Graham, once described as “a cross between Mother Teresa and Al Capone,” was at the center of it all. “The Fillmore…was the church of rock ‘n’ roll, and Bill was the shepherd tending the flock,” as Mickey Hart, the drummer for the Grateful Dead, put it.
