San Francisco rock promoter Bill Graham was never one to mince words. As he says in the documentary Fillmore: The Last Days: “I can be the biggest putz in the world, and yell a lot. But I ain’t dishonest. And I will always tell you how I feel.”
Personalities like Graham tend to attract satirists, and sure enough, in 1990, a Graham impersonator arrived on the radio waves here in San Francisco. “Fillmore Bill” was a weekly regular on the morning show at KRQR, “The Rocker,” poking laser-sharp holes into Graham’s penchant for slang-ridden tirades in his unmistakable East Coast monotone.
Stories about “Fillmore Bill” have circulated for the past 25 years, but no clips of the routine have existed online — until now. After writing a review of the Contemporary Jewish Museum’s current exhibit Bill Graham and the Rock & Roll Revolution, and wishing the show contained more of Graham’s famous prickly personality, a strange thing happened: I got a Facebook message from “Fillmore Bill” himself.
As it turns out, “Fillmore Bill” was the brainchild of David Gross, a radio DJ who I’ve known personally for years. He agreed to digitize his old tapes of the KRQR routine, which is why you can now hear “Fillmore Bill” negotiating with a pizza delivery guy 26 years after it originally aired:
As a diehard Grateful Dead fan, Gross heard Graham’s voice long before he ever knew what he looked like. Graham’s introductions on Dead recordings were well-known in the tape-trader circuit, and one particularly heated rant to an audience member climbing the scaffolding during a New Year’s Eve show at Winterland was amusing enough for Gross to whip up an impression.