The Fillmore
Related: American music - venue
The Fillmore, also known as Fillmore Auditorium or Fillmore West, is a legendary music venue in San Francisco, California. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fillmore [Jul 2004]
History
The original owner of The Fillmore property, Emma Gates Butler, hired James W. and Merritt Reid in 1910 to draw plans for an Italianate-style dance hall at the southwest corner of Fillmore and Geary. The Majestic Hall and Majestic Academy of Dancing opened in 1912 on the second and third stories of the building, where the usual fare was Wednesday night socials and masquerade balls.
The Fillmore was a dance hall operating under various names and managements - The Get Acquainted Society, Ambassador Dance Hall - through the 1930s, and a roller rink through the 1940s. In 1952, local entrepreneur Charles Sullivan began to book some of the biggest names in black music into The Fillmore. Sullivan booked West Coast tours for performers including James Brown, Bobby "Blue" Bland and Ike & Tina Turner. During the 1950s and 1960s, San Francisco gained a reputation as the preeminent Bohemian community in the United States. This reputation was never more deserved than during the mid-sixties, when the hipster of the Beat movement grew into the hippie of a more mainstream counter-culture. By the 1950s, the literary North Beach scene had given way to the emerging Haight-Ashbury, and radical politics had a niche across the Bay at the University of California at Berkeley. The line between culture and politics is easily blurred by young people in search of adventure.
In the search for fun and community, public dances became the craze in 1965. With Ken Kesey leading his band of Merry Pranksters to the outer limits of reality, and the Family Dog putting together dance concerts at Longshoremen's Hall, San Francisco was on its way to becoming the hip capital of the world. --http://www.thefillmore.com/history.asp [Jul 2004]
Bill Graham and The Fillmore
Bill Graham (January 8, 1931 – October 25, 1991) was a well-known concert promoter, beginning in the 1960s. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Graham_%28promoter%29 [Jul 2006]Fillmore posters
http://www.olsenart.com/fillmore1.html [Jul 2004]The Art of the Fillmore: The Poster Series 1966-1971
The Art of the Fillmore: The Poster Series 1966-1971 - Gayle Lemke, Bill Graham, Jacaeber Kastor [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
...a comprehensive, gorgeously reproduced and chronologically arranged collection... --San Francisco Chronicle, Regan McMahon
Legendary impresario Bill Graham began in January 1966 to commission posters to promote the concerts he was putting on at San Francisco's Fillmore Auditorium. The poster artists created vivid, irreverent banners that reflected their own sense of poetics, style, and wit. What resulted were signature juxtapositions of design, lettering, and color that represented a brand-new art form. These posters now occupy a place in art history while surviving as treasured artifacts of rock archaeology.
Published in cooperation with Bill Graham Presents, The Art of the Fillmore reunites for the first time in a single volume the original Bill Graham posters created exclusively for the San Francisco and New York Fillmore dance concerts. Indexes cross-reference the posters with the bands they advertised and the poster artists who created them. --Book Description via Amazon.com
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