Storied: San Francisco28 Jan 2025

The Fillmore Art Director Ashley Graham, Part 2 (S7E6)

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. We'd just learned of the call Ashley received from The Fillmore while she was working in Seattle. She'd visited San Francisco once to visit a cousin, but that stay lasted a mere 48 hours. She had one friend here at the time. Up in Seattle, the shows she helped produce were huge acts like Beyoncé and Rihanna. What especially excited Ashley about this opportunity at The Fillmore was the potential to work on smaller shows with groups and people more on their way up, so to speak. For fans and showgoers, it was more about music discovery, as she puts it. It was June 2012. Ashley's move to San Francisco was more or less sight-unseen. The City immediately felt like a "bigger" place for her, its music ... just a bigger city all-around. It was big, "but not that big." She landed in the Mission, moving in with a friend of that one friend she had in SF. Ashley lived at 24th and Potrero for nine years, until just three years ago. We shift to talk about Ashley's time at The Fillmore. She shares conversations among staff there about the history of the place and placing that at the forefront. The venue partnered with the Bill Graham Memorial Foundation this past fall to reintroduce the public to the place and its long history, as well as really getting Bill Graham's story out there. Ashley then shares that life story of Bill Graham. It was Graham who put The Fillmore on the map. His first show there was in December 1965. He had fled the Holocaust as a kid, went with family to New York, then ended up in San Francisco. He wanted to be an actor and found the San Francisco Mime Troupe. That first show at The Fillmore was a benefit for the Mime Troupe, in fact. The place had been a dance hall and a roller rink previously. Graham might have had a hunch, but when he took over putting on music shows, it was right at an inflection point for rock music in The City. Bands like Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Janis Joplin frequently played there. Bill Graham had a gift for pairing musicians from different genres together in such a way that shows attracted different groups of people. Ashley points out, though, that first and foremost, Bill was a businessman. He followed and created opportunities to make money. A few years after taking over at Fillmore and Geary, he opened The Fillmore West at Van Ness and Market. There's a fun tidbit about Bill Graham appearing on David Letterman back in the Eighties—which just speaks to how big a personality he'd become. Our conversation then shifts to two questions I had for Ashley. I wanted her to talk about the red apples that are always found in a bucket at the top of the stairs when you enter The Fillmore. That, and the posters handed out to showgoers on their way out of sold-out events. No one really knows how the apples got started, she says. There are versions of the story. One holds that Bill Graham gave them out as a simple gesture of hospitality. Another was that putting a little food in your belly after a night out can't hurt anything. A rather elaborate telling is that, as part of an exhibit on Bill Graham at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, someone who'd been in France with him when they were kids shared the story of sneaking out at night to go to an apple orchard. As for the posters, Ashley talks about their origins, when they were simply advertisements for shows at The Fillmore. The posters eventually took on a life of their own, though—for many of the early ones, the style of lettering worked better as a memento than an ad. It almost seems quaint at this point that the posters were anything but keepsakes. I ask Ashley what it's like to now have her name appear on these iconic pieces of art (in her role as art director). "It's strange ... but cool." She speaks to how much work goes into each poster. And then Ashley talks about the logistics of making posters for. "At this point, we have a pretty good idea of which shows are gonna sell out." (Seems obvious, but as someone on the outside, I wondered.) "It's not a perfect science, but we're pretty good at it," Ashley says. She thinks of her job as more art curation than direction. She considers the overall collection of posters a little more than the nitty gritty of what each poster's details are. We end the podcast with Ashley's thoughts on what it means to "keep it local," our theme this season. Follow The Fillmore on Instagram. Photography by Nate Oliveira

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