Bill Graham days
After studying film at The School of the Arts in NYC with Martin Scorcessi for several years, I got an offer that led me to temporarily move away from film work: working as Bill Graham's chief engineer, mixing concerts at Fillmore East. When Bill's east coast operation closed few years later, I ran the audio department for Bill Graham Presents' San Francisco shows and BGP tours for five years. In addition to concert mixing, I oversaw BGP's sound system design and crew training. Touring with and shaping the musical blends of Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Dylan, the Dead, The Band, Santana, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, and many others, shaped me.

The San Francisco Examiner ran a puff piece on Bill's outfit while I was head sound guy there. Click on the image above to bring up some lavish press and photos from a few decades ago.
I toured several times with Bill as Bob Dylan's live concert sound mixer/engineer, and in that position of course had an important role in how his band was received, but Dylan and I hardly ever spoke. This was one of those rare moments.


The letter excerpt below from the Grateful Dead's management (click to see the whole thing) is significant because this is the same band that stomped off the Fillmore East stage in outrage seven years earlier, fed up with how I was mixing their sound. They had walked out on my first show as newly promoted head of sound for Bill Graham's East Coast operation. Fortunately Bill was at Fillmore West that night!

Years later, the Dead wrote Bill Graham to thank him for the job my sound crew and I did handling the first tour that went out without the Dead's legendary (in the 70s, anyway) sound system. (Their massive speaker array design was wonderfully innovative, but unfortunately took a huge crew days to set up for each show, and was leading them into bankruptcy.)