“OPENING THE VAULT”

by Todd Yearack

John Phillips of “The Mamas and the Papas” took only a few minutes to write the lyrics to the song “San Francisco” and said “If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair. If you come to San Francisco, summertime will be a love in there.” Solo artist Scott McKenzie released his version of the song in May 1967, as thousands of boomers did indeed set their eyes and minds on San Francisco, the “Summer of Love,” and the Monterey Pop Festival. San Francisco became the epicenter for a new social experience for boomers. Expression through music took on a life of its own. The hippie movement was born.

Right in the middle of it all was legendary concert promoter Bill Graham. Born Wolfgang Grajonca in Berlin in 1931, he escaped Nazi Germany and grew up in a foster home in the Bronx, later changing his name when he turned 18. After moving from New York to San Francisco to be closer to his sister, Graham attended a free concert in Golden Gate Park, where he was first introduced to the San Francisco Mime Troupe. He made the decision to forego his business career to manage the troupe in 1965 and shortly thereafter, began producing rock and roll concerts. Graham would become known as the inventor of the modern rock concert. Some of

“Napster was in its heyday. The trend of consumers downloading free music from the Internet dramatically impacted the sale of CDs. With the arrival of the IPod and ITunes, we became a ‘singles’ business with people buying single songs rather than entire CDs.”

“The reason I liked the Graham property and why it stuck out to me was that it owned an enormous amount of intellectual property. I became convinced that if you didn’t own copyrights and intellectual property, you were always at the whim of someone who did,” Sagan says.

Sagan purchased the Bill Graham collection in 2002 for around $5-million. He and his team began the arduous, 18-month process of archiving, counting, labeling, protecting, and storing the items after they were relocated using twenty-six 40-foot vans to their 20,000 square-foot building in San Francisco. All the while, “Wolfgang’s Vault,” a retail website like no other that had been seen before, was under construction. Sagan didn’t have to look far or dig too deep to find a name for his new business.

There were four components of the archive. The first included the millions of posters, artwork, tickets, and handbills from the 17,000+ worldwide concerts that Graham promoted during his career. Photography made up the second component. The meticulous Graham, and later the owners who kept his company going, had either an employee or work-for-hire photographer present to cover almost all of the performances that he promoted from the late 1960s to 2003.

“The third component was kind of made up of everything else that we didn’t expect,” Sagan says. “Bill Graham had the finest t-shirt collection you can possibly imagine. Not only rock and roll t-shirts from his concerts, but t-shirts from just about every other major concert that occurred in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. It was the most unbelievable t-shirt collection that I’ve ever seen. There were literally thousands of t-shirts.” And, there were concert pins, buttons, back stage passes, laminates, towels, water bottles, mugs; the list goes on and on. Upon closing the Fillmore West, Graham had the old gymnasium floor cut up into 1’ x 1’ cutting boards and then labeled them with his company logo. They remained in the archive and were never sold. “People love those things,” Sagan says. “I even have one at my house!”

The fourth, and quite possibly most exciting, area of product was the audio and video archive. “We found thousands of audio and video tapes with original concert recordings on them,” Sagan says. “This was the unknown part of Graham’s collection when we bought it. It’s unbelievable!” The audio was re-mastered, transferred to digital format, and then made available free of charge in February 2006 under the name “Vault Radio.” Expansion was just a few months around the corner. On November 13, 2006, Sagan’s company introduced “Concert Vault” (available at concerts.wolfgangsvault.com). Now, music buffs can listen for free to full, live performances on demand with the ability to move back and forth between tracks.

“We put 300 concerts up to start with and we are adding five new concerts each

week,” Sagan says. “Our visitors may choose to listen to Van Morrison at the Bottom Line in the 70s, Springsteen at Winterland in ’78, or Hendrix in ’68 at the Fillmore West. This is material that has generally never seen the light of day. Maybe a song or two here and there, but never the full concert.”

How have “Vault fans” responded? Sagan says visitor traffic has gone from about 10,000 people a day viewing the site before the launch of the “Concert Vault” to over 30,000 a day in what seems to be a blink of an eye.

“We have three objectives with the music,” Sagan says. “One is that the quality of music we put on the site is the best it can be as we take it from the original media it was recorded on by Bill Graham. In some cases it’s not perfect quality. A real concert that isn’t sweetened and smoothed by recording engineers is pretty raw. These are raw. They have imperfections. They have moments when you wonder, ‘What the heck were they thinking and/or playing?’ But, it’s what was played that night.”

Securing the music that’s made available on “The Vault” is also of utmost importance. Sagan says his company bought the best security money could buy to protect the online music stream. And third, Sagan’s team works to make sure there is a broad range of music made available to listeners.

“You’ll see punk, metal, great rock and roll from the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and then performers you’ve never heard of,” Sagan says. “Some of these bands that have never been heard of are just outstanding. That’s what makes this so exciting!”

Sagan has also made nearly a dozen acquisitions since purchasing the Graham collection to help fill-in some missing niche areas. “The Vault” now owns the archives of 60’s rock photographers Gene Anthony, Michael Zagaris, and Joe Sia, and the exclusive on-line rights for photographs from the well-respected Jim Marshall and Baron Wolman. The world’s second largest concert calendar service, MOJAM, now calls “The Vault” home, along with the archives, names, and trademarks from the popular “King Biscuit Flower Hour” and “Silver Eagle Cross Country” radio shows.

Who’s visiting, listening, and buying from “The Vault” you might ask? “There’s no question the boomer market is the dominant one for us because those of us who are a part of this great generation lived during this period of time, went to the concerts, and still listen to our music,” Sagan says. “But what makes us unique is that we are encouraging our children to listen to our music.”

Sagan recalls that one person who provided feedback on the site said, “I just forwarded a link to your site to my kid at college and he thinks I’m a lot cooler now than I ever was, even with him knowing that I attended the Jimmy Hendrix concert he was listening to on the Vault!”

“The 60s and 70s were filled with life, energy and vitality. Things were happening as people were changing. The music was to the core of it. Whether it was a group experience when people went to see a concert and dance, or whether it was the remarkable lyrics that artists like Dylan brought first to folk and then rock and roll music, and then all those that followed him like Van Morrison, the protest lyrics, or even Janis Joplin and Jimmy Hendrix, the music set the stage for what was happening at a given time. The lyrics were great. The music and the beat were phenomenal, and that was just a different time. We help you relive those days here at ‘The Vault.’”

Sagan’s mission for Wolfgang’s Vault is to see it become the preferred, all-in destination for anyone who wants to have anything to do with live performance music from the past forty-something years.

“If they want to hear it, see it, buy a poster from it, get a photograph from it, they can do it here,” Sagan says.

Today’s performers, and many others from the 60s and 70s whose careers continue, are playing in front of crowds around the world on a scale that even Bill Graham might have never imagined. Music continues to impact and transcend global cultures. But Bill Sagan has helped preserve rock and roll’s heritage in its purest form in the place where it all began. As the lyrics remind us, “If you’re going to San Francisco,” you may now do so from the comfort of your home or office and relive the “Summer of Love” for a lifetime.

Take yourself back at www.wolfgangsvault.com.

the biggest names in international rock and roll history like “Jefferson Airplane,” Janis Joplin, “The Grateful Dead,” and many more were given a leg-up on jumpstarting their careers by Graham. He operated many of the famous venues of the day, including the Fillmore West and Winterland in San Francisco, the Cow Palace Auditorium in Daly City, and the Fillmore East in New York City. His creative vision led him to commission true works of art to promote his shows, and his entrepreneurial instincts led him to overprint and preserve the exceptional art, photography, and recordings that came from these shows. Graham was tragically killed in a helicopter crash near Vallejo, California, in 1991, while returning home after attending a “Huey Lewis and The News” concert. Following his death, his company, Bill Graham Presents, was taken over by a new management team. The new owners sold the company to SFX Promotions, and SFX later sold out to Clear Channel Entertainment.

Enter boomer entrepreneur Bill Sagan. A Midwestern businessman, Sagan, who’s now 57, was impacted by rock and roll as a youngster and always kept his eyes open for an opportunity to be a part of the music industry. After exploring the purchase of a few music publishing, record, and management companies in the early 2000s, Sagan was made aware that the Graham collection was on the market. “This was a different time in the music industry,” says Sagan.