Jan 28, 2025
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