Chet Helms - Style As Promoter

Style As Promoter

While Graham was an aggressive businessman and professional promoter, Helms presented a folksier image. He related easily to the San Francisco hippie subculture since, in essence, he was one of them. The San Francisco Chronicle called Helms "a towering figure in the 1960s Bay Area music scene," and indeed he was a huge contributor.

Helms embraced music for music's sake and the Beat-hipster-generation-turned-hippy philosophy. While the war raged in Vietnam and the nation coped with racial problems and assassinations, the anti-war, anti-establishment youth thrived in the throes of a social revolution. Meanwhile, Helms was cranking out bands and musicians espousing the same lifestyle as this new audience, while giving the very distinct impression that he was uninterested in financial gain.

His benign image could be deceptive. According to Jay Ferguson of Spirit, Graham would negotiate shrewdly and would frequently offer a lower fee to a band than Helms would, but when the concert was over, he would pay the band in full; Helms did not always do likewise. Some of the more serious bands (ones not subsidized by trust funds) came to prefer Graham's hard-nosed, businesslike approach. Graham did covertly help Helms financially at various times during the 1970s, keeping San Francisco in the fore as the West Coast Music mecca.

The core San Francisco rock bands, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Quicksilver Messenger Service (including pre-Dino Valenti), would play for both Graham's concerts at the Fillmore Auditorium, once a Black Muslim temple, and the Family Dog at Helms' Avalon dances.

Helms' shows were always more relaxed and offered a pleasant alternative to Bill Graham Presents dances, at a more reasonable admission, and with more room for the stoned, arm-waving type of solo dancing that personified the era. The nearby Mt. Zion Hospital kept a late-night clinic to accommodate the many drug overdoses from the Fillmore.