The legendary Bay Area concert promoter Bill Graham was gone by the time I came to work for his company in 1993, but it didn’t feel that way. Everyone talked about Bill Graham in the present tense. Bill Graham Presents managed the Fillmore theater on Geary Boulevard and the Warfield on Market Street, both gorgeous old-school San Francisco live-music venues where I tended bar in my early and mid-twenties and saw hundreds of musicians perform. “I work for Bill Graham,” we staffers all said, but Bill Graham was dead, killed in a helicopter crash in 1991.
While I was growing up in San Francisco, his name was attached to everything to do with rock and roll; all the big concerts were Bill Graham events. I had seen Graham up close only once. My friends and I were trying to sneak into a Clash concert at the Civic Auditorium downtown. It was 1984. I had just turned fifteen. I was with another girl my age and some older guys from the Sunset District, the not-chic neighborhood where we all lived. To put it bluntly, we were ratty delinquents looking for beer, weed, and opportunities for theft and trespass. Our methods for getting into concerts, occasionally effective, were to rush emergency side doors and run for it, disappearing into the crowd so that security could not find us and drag us out. We were lurking outside the Civic Auditorium when the Clash started their set, with “London Calling.” One of the older guys, named Ray, tried to kick in a set of doors in his steel-toed boots, but the doors had a chain securing them. He was kicking repeatedly to bust the chain when I heard a roar. A person who looked homeless came charging at Ray, knocking him down, and Ray and this wild creature went tumbling and struggling into the bushes, wrestling each other. What was happening seemed no longer about us getting into the Clash concert. It was some kind of personal beef between our friend and this crazed man, who, it turned out, was not actually a homeless person. It was Bill Graham.
I don’t know if Graham enjoyed fistfights, or if he felt he had to take it upon himself to personally secure this large venue (now named after him, posthumously), or maybe both, but later I learned he was notorious for brawls like this one.
We didn’t get inside to see the Clash that night, but I’d seen the Clash before, when they toured with the Who in 1982. I was fourteen and had spent the night with two other girlfriends on a sidewalk outside the Oakland Coliseum, in order to position ourselves close to the stage when they started letting people into the stadium the next morning. We had sleeping bags but didn’t sleep; we partied with strangers, which is what I spent a lot of my youth doing. Just before the stadium entrances opened, an adult shared a joint with me and my friends. The joint was laced with PCP, and by the time the line started moving, I was stunned and wandering.
A lot of the concerts of my youth were scary like that, but also exciting, on account of the menace they promised. Like Black Sabbath at the Cow Palace in Daly City, when I was about twelve. I was in awe of these roving groups of older teenage girls who were all wearing tight bell-bottom jeans with an exposed zipper down the front, and then up the back—as if the pants, or maybe these girls, were held together entirely by this zipper that vertically bisected and looped their pelvises. The parking lot scene of the Black Sabbath concert, as I remember it, looked like Géricault’s painting of the half-dead shipwreck survivors on the raft of the Medusa, but with long-haired shirtless guys in boot-cut Levi’s passed out or throwing up next to someone’s van.
That year I somehow ended up at a Sammy Hagar concert, judge as you will. A painted portrait of Sammy Hagar with his famous red guitar was passed overhand by the crowd from the back of the Cow Palace to the stage, where Sammy Hagar accepted it to thundering applause. He placed the painting on his guitar stand like it was an easel. I can still see that painting, if not the dumpster where it probably ended up.
My very first concert had been the Rolling Stones, on their Tattoo You tour, at Candlestick Park. I went with my older brother. We got to go because our mother, while walking to work one morning, decided to get in line with the group gathered outside the Record Factory when she learned that everyone was waiting to get Stones tickets. I remember that the Stones were late going onstage. In his memoir, Bill Graham recounts why: the heel on Keith Richards’s boot broke off, and Keith was superstitious about wearing the right boots and refused to play unless the heel could be fixed. Bill Graham ran around until he found someone with a heel like on Keith’s boot, begged the owner for the shoe, offering one hundred dollars in exchange, tore the heel off the sole and hobnailed it to Keith’s old boot, yelling and swearing the whole time.
My first record, as a child, was Blondie’s Parallel Lines, which I bought with my paper route money when I was nine. I concentrated so hard on the photograph on the cover, of Debbie Harry in her cream-colored slip-dress and self-styled “militant” armband, her matching high-heeled Candie’s, that I can still make my heart ache with the yearning I felt, which was not for her but to be her. I thought my own far-off adolescence was going to manifest as a result of the hard work of concentrating on beauty as if it were a vanishing point. The soundtrack of anticipation, of this ardent waiting, was every song on Parallel Lines.
In college, at UC Berkeley, I worked underage with a fake ID as a cocktail waitress at a nightclub on Shattuck Avenue called the Til Two Lounge, where Bay Area soul and blues legends performed live. It was an entire world, inside this shabby place that reeked of empty kegs and stale smoke. The owner, Nat Bolden, sometimes stepped from behind the bar, took the mic and sang. He had a beautiful voice.
After college, I moved back to San Francisco and got a job serving drinks at a dive bar called the Blue Lamp, on Geary and Jones, at the top of the Tenderloin. The Blue Lamp featured live music at night, a mix of punk, torch singers, and rock bands. On Sunday afternoons there was a raucous and fairly terrible blues jam that was an entertaining gallery of personalities, with an eccentric band leader who once, while I was bartending, ran into the street, soloing in the pouring rain on his electric guitar, which allowed for freedom of movement because it was cordless. He shocked the hell out of himself in the rain. On weekday afternoons, the Blue Lamp was quiet except for the old drunks who sat at the bar. One of them, a regular, used to tell me he thought I could “do better” with my life. He would assess me physically as he said it, as if his approval of my looks was a sign that I might manage to avoid complete ruin. He was condescending, while I thought it was me who had the upper hand over him, since he was just an old Tenderloin bum who didn’t know I was an actual college graduate and aspiring writer. But if I admitted that to him, I would seem like a level of loser he hadn’t even contemplated: an educated person, working in a dump!
I don’t remember how I got my job at the Warfield, but it felt like a triumphant step upward. The Warfield was a glamorous old theater with an elaborate movie palace interior, grand antebellum-style stairwells, and enormous chandeliers. Everyone from Neil Young to PJ Harvey to Iggy Pop played there. Each evening was different at the Warfield, the mood created by the scheduled performer and their crowd, and whether or not the show was a sold-out affair.
If it was someone like Sonic Youth, we were there not just to make money but to see a great show. If it was Jerry Garcia, it was pure work, a meal ticket, since the Jerry Garcia Band performed at the Warfield scores of nights each year, and their crowd bought a lot of drinks. We made good money at their shows, but we employees were in a war with their patrons, the Deadheads, who set up encampments out front on Market Street, left their garbage everywhere, and didn’t respect us or pay attention to rules. They routinely spilled beer, vomited on the velvet seats in the theater, trashed the restrooms. If you reprimanded them, they’d tell you to “mellow” or “be cool.”
We didn’t just hate them because they were hippies but because a lot of them seemed like rich kids who had never had to work. We sometimes retaliated by shortchanging them. If they were wasted and handed over a twenty-dollar bill for a draft beer, we’d hand them arbitrary change, a couple of dollars, some coins, and keep the rest. At the time, it seemed like a fair tax. I never interacted with Jerry, but his backstage meal service requests were infamous, including dishes like scallops wrapped in bacon with a ready fondue pot for dipping them. Surprisingly, this diet was not the cause of his death. Instead, it was the mixture of heroin and cocaine he favored. He would get so high during the break between sets that on at least one occasion paramedics were called, and Jerry was revived before the band came back onstage to play their second set.
The load-in crew had their own stories about performers and bands. For instance Glenn Danzig toured with an extra eighteen-wheeler that was for transporting his mobile weight-lifting gym. When the Allman Brothers played a string of performances, each night we were on standby to find out if the show was actually happening, because, as we were told, Dickey Betts might not be able to play. He was having personal struggles of some kind—imagine what you will—and yet Dickey, the most notorious one, has outlived the rest.
When the blues legend Buddy Guy played the Warfield, in a moment that echoed the Blue Lamp bandleader running out to solo in the rain, Buddy Guy jumped from the stage and came up the aisle to the bar I was manning, and stopped playing to ask for a Heineken. I handed it to him, and he downed it and went back to playing.
One regular theater patron was Carlos Santana, who was friends with the managers and got to come in free. We were instructed to comp all his drinks. He was like a guy dressed up as Carlos Santana, with the mustache and the shallow-brimmed black fedora pulled down over his eyes. He always ordered Cuervo, neat, and he never left a tip—not even a dollar!
All of us employees were friends—the bartenders, cocktail waitresses, food servers, cooks, security, and stage crews. At the end of the night, we were allowed to stay for close-out, post-work drinks, when the theater was emptied of patrons. It was like a mating ritual, as everyone at the Warfield dated one another. I remember being told that while the rest of us were hanging out in the lobby, the general operations manager left through a side exit with a metal briefcase handcuffed to his wrist, the protocol for stashing the cash from a night’s take.
We were sometimes sent to bartend special off-site Bill Graham events, like a rare performance at the Oakland Paramount by Tom Waits that was a legal defense fundraiser for a friend of his awaiting trial. Tom Waits started talking to people in the audience as if they were old friends, and I understood immediately that it was improvised poetry. “You still workin’ out at the airport?” he asked a guy in the front row. And to another, “How many scorpions did you have to shake from those boots before you put them on?”
On the opposite end of the spectrum was a soulless event we worked for a company party at a giant stadium somewhere in the South Bay. It was a private concert given by Rod Stewart for the employees of whatever company it was (I don’t recall). We had to wear ugly polo shirts and khakis, and everyone was making fun of one another in these sad outfits. We served, at that event, four types of drink: Bud Light, Bud Dry, regular Budweiser, and some other Bud derivation. Attendees at this corporate event mulled the options like they were actual choices. “Hmm. So hard to decide. How about… a Bud Light?” Rod Stewart came out and preened and whooped like this wasn’t just some hellish money gig for him. The crowd loved it. Don’t want to give raises and benefits? Hire Rod Stewart once a year, and serve Bud Light.
When the historic Fillmore theater reopened in keeping with a long-held wish of the late Bill Graham, we all got to work there too. The Fillmore was an elegant Italianate theater that was built as a dance hall in 1910. It had suffered structural damage in the 1989 earthquake and was repaired and reopened in 1994 with a secret show by the Smashing Pumpkins, which sold out in less than a minute. After the show, a stagehand gave me a pale blue guitar pick that had been left on an amp by James Iha, whom I had a crush on. I probably still have that pick, even if the Smashing Pumpkins have not endured and it isn’t music I’d ever listen to again.
The Fillmore is a smaller theater than the Warfield; the environment is more intimate, and also keyed up, if the performer is someone really famous, because the audience is so close to them. I often worked at the bar that was facing the stage, so I had a great view of the show. Johnny Cash opened his Fillmore set with “Folsom Prison Blues” and later asked the crowd if they’d mind if he brought a special guest, June Carter Cash, and everyone went crazy. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds arranged with our sound people to have a Barry White song play before they went on. As “I’m Gonna Love You Just a Little Bit More Baby” filled the theater, the drummer of the Bad Seeds sat down at his kit. He started tapping his high-hat cymbal in beat to this Barry White song. One by one the musicians came onstage and joined in. In a sharkskin suit and white shoes, Nick Cave took the microphone, and the transition from Barry White to the Bad Seeds was complete.
Courtney Love’s band Hole played the Fillmore seven or eight months after Kurt Cobain died. His death still felt raw. Love came onstage and pointed out people in the crowd whom she’d dated or had bad sex with and described their various faults into the microphone. Mid-set, she stopped playing, looked up at the lighting rack over the stage as if at heaven, creating an awkward tension in the crowd, which was silent. She screamed, “COME BACK!” The response was raised eyebrows and shrugs: no one seemed moved by her theatrics.
A main ambition at that time in my life was to look as glamorous as the environments I worked in, or my interpretation of glamour—this was the nineties—which meant vintage clothes mostly in velvet or silver Lurex knits or leather. The Warfield theater manager was constantly on my case for my outfits, which she felt were inappropriate. Exposed midriffs were her special bête noire, but she found a way to shame me for whatever I wore. “I don’t ever need to see you naked,” she once said to me, “because those pants give me all the information.” We all made fun of her and the bar manager for being company stooges. The bar manager was the sort of person who shaved his head with hot water and a straight razor because that method, he said, was “more honest.” When Brian Setzer played one New Year’s, he gave me the once-over and invited me downstairs (backstage) after the show. The bar manager saw the exchange and told me if I went downstairs to hang out with Brian Setzer I’d be fired. I’m still mad about that, even if Brian Setzer was slightly old for my taste. These managers were killjoys, but that’s a manager’s lot.
Which was why it was so curious that we all got calls one day about a secret, private Halloween party we were requested to work, and the evening required “outrageous costumes: anything goes.” The theater manager even called me and bitchily said, “Go ahead and dress like a slut.”
It’s hard to keep secrets at a theater with a huge staff, and yet none of us knew whom this party was for until after we got there. The Warfield had been transformed into what looked like a surrealist film set, with purple gels over all the lights, fountains and waterways of floating gardenias, and the loge of the theater filled with silver and black balloons.
The party was for the Rolling Stones, who were on tour. Or rather, the party was being given by the Rolling Stones, as a way to thank their road crew. Apparently it was a tradition of theirs that each member of the band would work, serving drinks to their crew. Each of us bartenders was paired with one member of the band as our work partner. Reader, I was paired with Keith Richards. He was in keeping with the legends: drank Jack and gingers all night long, personally draining probably two bottles of Jack Daniel’s. He and the band’s business manager had to be kicked out of the theater at dawn by security guards, the two of them the hardest-partying attendees of the night. Mick Jagger was also in keeping with legends, at least the recent legends: he wore an ascot, drank Evian, and left before midnight with a socialite from Mill Valley. The rest of the band served their crew and took turns jamming onstage with a whole host of Bay Area musicians who were invited to play. I ran into people at that party I hadn’t seen in years, like childhood friend Arion Salazar, who was the bassist in the band Third Eye Blind. Imagine what he must have felt: he jammed with the Stones that night!
I started picking up shifts at another venue, the Great American Music Hall on O’Farrell. It was built as a bordello in 1907, and the interior was French rococo. Everyone who worked there was convinced the place was haunted. Duke Ellington had been a regular performer and his name was still on a dressing room door. The bar manager’s father had worked for Van Morrison. This manager once told me a story about Van Morrison being invited to a party given in his honor, after his gig. He showed up very late, in the rain, was mistaken for a hobo, and not invited in. This seemed right to me. To make the art, and disappoint those who want to put you in their limelight.
In the summer of 1995, I was on a road trip with a friend who worked with me at the Warfield and Fillmore. We were in my ’64 Ford Galaxie, at a stoplight in Jackson, Mississippi, when two guys in a pickup truck rolled up next to us and shouted, “Hey, California! Jerry Garcia died today!” I guess they thought two chicks in a classic with California plates would want to hear this breaking news. We both burst out laughing. I blame our coldhearted disaffection on the unhealthy dynamic of a workplace: we were subjected to Jerry’s fans, and so our feelings were at best very mixed about the whole phenomenon of him and his music.
And yet Jerry’s death did mark a change for me, by coincidence, or not. I was feeling, that summer, trapped into bartending, which pays well and trains a person for exactly nothing else, and I wanted to leave small and provincial San Francisco, move to New York City, try for real to become a writer. I started formulating plans.
A month after Jerry died, PJ Harvey played two sold-out shows at the Warfield, and after her second show she played a secret impromptu set at the Hotel Utah, a dive bar South of Market. The show began at one a.m., after her show at the Warfield. I don’t know how I got invited but I went. The Hotel Utah was a tiny room—it fit maybe forty people and about half those there that night were band members and other musicians who took turns onstage, sitting in. PJ Harvey played all night. I think I left at about five a.m., and she was still playing. She did not get tired, and she did not look tired. She looked joyous, like a person in a church, filling her soul with Holy Spirit as she sang. She stopped only to change guitars, and the entire time, she had this otherworldly glow. I was witness to an artist who wanted to play all night because she was born to do it. She had passion, talent, and incredible technical skills. She sang and played guitar for hours and hours, in an intimate setting, after she had performed a fully rehearsed stadium act for thousands, that very same night. This impressed me. The message I took from it was: to be truly good at something is the very highest joy. And by inference, I understood this: to merely witness greatness is a distant cousin, or even not related at all.
Just after that, I quit my job and changed my life.