Bill Graham Presents: My Life Inside Rock And Out

Bill Graham's career is the story of rock. In the original Fillmore Auditorium, Winterland, and the Fillmores East and West, his passionate genius for creating the perfect synergy of performer and audience shaped the music of a generation, spawning a pop-culture revolution as well as a billion-dollar worldwide business. Bill Graham's life is a twentieth-century fable, that of an eleven-year-old German refugee who fled the holocaust for the dream-bright shores of America, where his tenacity, vision, and chutzpah steered him on a course that reads like the plot of an epic novel. Born Wolfgang Grajonca in Berlin in 1931, he escaped the Nazis as a child by crossing Europe on foot. In America he grew up playing ball and delivering groceries on the streets of The Bronx. Awarded the Bronze Star for valor on the battlefields of Korea, he spent his summers working and hustling in the dining rooms of the great Catskills resorts during their heyday. After years of waiting on tables, driving cabs,