And then, there's the Fillmore. It's the virtual Vatican of rock ballrooms, a 1,000-plus-capacity site run by famed promoter Bill Graham in the late 1960s, then closed, and reopened in 1994. Guests can pick from a barrel of apples in the front hallway (a Graham tradition), and everyone gets a free poster from the night's event. I caught Chris Isaak's show at this acoustically stellar hall (which Graham used to rent for just $60 a night), and it was wild to see so many fans clutching posters at the exits, something I have never seen anywhere else.
If you like colorful rock art, you'll love the Fillmore's Poster Room, where the art work on the walls is arranged chronologically. It runs from the '60s, when the Dead, Chuck Berry, and Cream (who recorded their live "Wheels of Fire" album here) performed, to more modern dates by Elvis Costello, Los Lobos, and Boston's Guster.
The Fillmore is an antique (it opened in 1912), but an immaculate one. "Graham insisted on cleanliness. If he saw a wrapper on the floor, he'd go bananas. So his staff would leave wrappers on the floor as their way to get him off their back on show nights," says Dennis McNally, the former aide-de-camp of the Grateful Dead and their authorized biographer.
McNally graciously consented to take me around one day to give his insider's account of the city's rock history. Another day I went out with Joel Selvin, longtime rock critic at the San Francisco Chronicle, who wrote a must-read book, "San Francisco: The Musical History Tour" (Chronicle, 1996).
Selvin had his own take on the Fillmore. "They gussied it up. It's not the same Fillmore anymore," he says, "but if you look under the stage, you can see the old stage, which was smaller, like a postage stamp. That's where the Doors, Otis Redding, and Jimi Hendrix played. The stage only came up to people's knees. . . . It was so small that Jerry Garcia used to routinely have conversations with people when he played. And the walls were covered with sheets and the illumination from the light show was everywhere."
