Yet another COOL thing: CHECK IT OUT
February 17th, 2006
SAN FRANCISCO–In 1970, 20-year-old student Bill Sagan had his first real brush with rock and roll history at an early Led Zeppelin concert at Chicago’s fabled Aragon Ballroom.
Now the entrepreneur owns one of rock’s biggest treasure troves of recorded shows by Zeppelin and other history-making bands, and he’s beginning to share it freely online. Since 2002, Sagan has owned the full archives of legendary promoter Bill Graham, whose concerts featuring performers such as the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix and others helped define the late 1960s and early ’70s. Late last week, Sagan began putting excerpts from these concerts, many of which have never been released, online by way of a free Internet radio station on his company’s Wolfgang’s Vault site.
Sagan is a businessman, on the surface very different from the bushy-bearded, long-haired artists depicted in the black-and-white photographs lining the walls of his warehouse office. But Graham was a businessman too, with a reputation for being hard-nosed about making money as he promoted the peace-and-love generation’s soundtrack.
The warehouse itself is a rock history buff’s dream. Three floors are lined with shelves, which are stacked full of boxes of posters, pristine tickets for the Fillmore West and Fillmore East shows, postcards, T-shirts and original photographic negatives. Sagan estimates there are more than 20 million individual pieces here. In the basement of the warehouse is the room that holds close to 5,000 hours of videotaped concerts, and a comparable quantity of audio. Nobody’s quite sure what Graham had intended to do with all the footage, Sagan says. The vast majority of it is unseen and unheard, with the exception of occasional bootlegs of the same shows. http://www.wolfgangsvault.com/
February 18th, 2006 at 9:30 am
excellent tip, my friends!!! Good luck on your Saturday move. I’m sad to see Dave go, but they couldn’t have picked a better replacement.
February 18th, 2006 at 10:10 am
Thanks Terry.
I have to say that it is a true honor to be thought of, not to mention actually recieving the coveted 9 ’til noon timeslot. I have been a listener of Daves for pretty much his entire tenure at the station. I mean come on: “Free Form Funk-a-Fied Filth” that is something I will certainly give a try. I hope you stay tuned for GreenArrowRadio as it looks to move on but always remember the Filthy Form from which it started. ROOTS IS ROOTS. We will continue to be free and all too often all to funky, on Saturdays from 9-’til Noon.
Mr.G
February 20th, 2006 at 1:47 pm
I’ve always been in favor of sharing. I can understand how some may be reluctant to share things that belong to them for free, but in doing so, it promotes that particular field of interest. By releasing portions of unseen footage, fans are able to relive moments that may have encapsulated the best years of their lives. Not to mention, it’s a considerate and nice thing to do for people. Unfortunately, putting all that footage online would require extensive storage space and bandwidth availability – so donations and volunteering services would likely be needed to perform such a task. At least there are portions of footage online.
February 20th, 2006 at 2:29 pm
Excellent point Jared. Who would have thought that greenarrowradio would emerse itself in such a wise audience. Just to let you know I have already e-mailed Bill Sagan to say thanks. Maybe I can land an interview with him too.