Fillmore Auditorium
History
The building at 1805 Geary Boulevard long predates the music that made it legendary. Raised in 1912 as an Italianate dance hall, it spent decades as the Majestic Academy of Dancing, then a roller rink, before a turn too often lost in the psychedelic legend: in 1954 the West Coast promoter Charles Sullivan — one of the most important Black businessmen in the city — took over the lease, named it the Fillmore Auditorium for the district around it, and made it a stop for touring R&B and soul royalty, from James Brown to Ike & Tina Turner.
The transformation the wider world remembers began in late 1965, when Bill Graham — then managing the radical San Francisco Mime Troupe — produced a benefit at 1805 Geary on December 10, 1965, headlined by Jefferson Airplane with the Warlocks (soon the Grateful Dead) on the bill. Graham took to it immediately, and when Sullivan died in August 1966, control of the hall passed to him. For roughly two and a half years — December 1965 through mid-1968 — the Fillmore was the engine room of the entire San Francisco ballroom scene.
In summer 1968 Graham moved his operation to the larger former Carousel Ballroom and renamed it the Fillmore West (a different building entirely — not to be confused with this one, nor with his Fillmore East in New York). The original Geary auditorium drifted on, was shuttered by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and reopened, restored, on April 27, 1994. It still operates today as a roughly 1,300-capacity hall — the room that gave its name to venues now scattered across the country.
Its Place in the Scene
If the San Francisco Sound had a cathedral, this was it. Under Bill Graham — a relentless, abrasive, brilliant impresario whose business instincts ran directly counter to the counterculture he was selling — the Fillmore became the stage where the city's homegrown bands grew up in public: Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead (some fifty-one times between 1965 and 1969), Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin, Quicksilver, and the touring giants Graham brought west. Its great rival was Chet Helms's Avalon; the Fillmore was the disciplined commercial operation, the Avalon the looser communal one, and the tension between the two men built the ballroom era between them.
Its other monumental legacy is on paper. The Fillmore was the single most prolific source of the era's concert-poster art through Graham's BG numbered series — some 289 posters drawn by the greatest artists of the day, with Wes Wilson as its defining house artist from early 1966 until a money dispute ended the relationship in 1967. His melting, vibrating typography became shorthand for the entire psychedelic 1960s.