Bill Graham (born Wulf Wolodia Grajonca; January 8, 1931 – October 25, 1991) was an American concert promoter. In the early 1960s, he moved to San Francisco and in 1965, began to manage the San Francisco Mime Troupe. He had teamed up with local Haight Ashbury promoter Chet Helms to organize a benefit concert, then promoted several free concerts. Eventually it turned into a profitable full-time career and he assembled a talented staff. Graham had a profound influence around the world, sponsoring the musical renaissance^{[further explanation needed]} of the 1960s from its epicenter in San Francisco. Chet Helms and then Graham made the Fillmore and Winterland Ballroom famous; they proved to be a venue for rock bands and acts of the Bay Area including the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin, who were first managed and in some cases developed by Helms.

Graham was born on January 8, 1931, in Berlin, Germany. He was the youngest child and only son of lower middle-class Jewish parents, Frieda (née Sass) and Jacob "Yankel" Grajonca, who had emigrated from Russia before the rise of Nazism. There were six children in the Grajonca family. His father died in an accident two days after he was born. His family nicknamed him "Wolfgang" early in life.

Due to the increasing Nazi persecution of Jews and the death of his father, Bill Graham's mother placed her son and her youngest daughter, Tanya "Tolla", in a Berlin orphanage, which sent them to France in a pre-Holocaust exchange of Jewish children for Christian orphans. His older sisters, Sonja and Ester stayed behind with their mother. After the fall of France in 1940, he was among a group of Jewish orphans spirited out of France, some of whom finally reached the United States. Tolla Grajonca came down with pneumonia and did not survive the difficult journey. He was one of One Thousand Children (OTC), mainly Jewish children who managed to flee Nazi Germany and Europe and directly travel to North America, but whose parents were forced to stay behind. His mother died on the way to Auschwitz concentration camp.

At age 10, he settled into a foster home in the Bronx, New York. After being taunted as an immigrant and being called a Nazi because of his German-accented English, Bill Graham worked on his accent, eventually being able to speak in a perfect New York accent. He changed his name to sound more "American". (He found "Graham" in the phone book—it was the closest he could find to his birth surname, "Grajonca". According to Graham, both "Bill" and "Graham" were meaningless to him.) Graham graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx and obtained a business degree from the City College of New York. Graham was naturalized as an American citizen in 1949 and was drafted into the United States Army in 1951. He served in the Korean War, where he was awarded both the Bronze Star and Purple Heart. Returning to the U.S. he worked as a waiter/maître d' at resorts in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York during their heyday. He was quoted saying that his experience as a maître d' and with the poker games he hosted behind the scenes was good training for his eventual career as a promoter. Tito Puente, who played some of these resorts, went on record saying that Graham was avid to learn Spanish from him, but only cared about the curse words. Graham also mentions in his bio-pic Last Days At The Fillmore once working for 3M.

Graham moved from New York to San Francisco in the early 1960s to be closer to his sister Rita. He was invited to attend a free concert in Golden Gate Park, produced by Chet Helms and the Diggers, where he made contact with the San Francisco Mime Troupe, a radical theater group. After Mime Troupe leader R. G. Davis was arrested on obscenity charges during an outdoor performance, Graham organized a benefit concert to cover the troupe's legal fees. The concert was a success and Graham saw a business opportunity.

Graham began promoting more concerts with Chet Helms and Family Dog projects, which provided a vital function of the 1960s, promoting concerts that provided a social meeting place to network, where many ideologies were given a forum, sometimes even on stage, such as peace movements, civil rights, farm workers and others.^{[citation needed]} Most of Graham's shows were performed at rented venues, and he saw a need for more permanent locations of his own. He approached Charles Sullivan, an entrepreneur and businessman who owned the master lease on the Fillmore Auditorium, to put on the Second Mime Troupe appeals concert at the Fillmore Auditorium on December 10, 1965, using Sullivan's dance hall permit for the show. Graham later secured a contract from Sullivan for the open dates at the Fillmore Auditorium in 1966.

Mime Troupe leader R. G. Davis said, "Graham... got very excited about the success of the Fillmore Auditorium Show. He got a contract with the black guy who owned the Fillmore. He nails it. Closed." Graham faced battles with City Hall in getting a dance hall permit. By schmoozing with merchants and having criminologists and sociologists from U.C. Berkeley and U.C. Santa Cruz giving merit to the shows Graham managed to obtain a second permit hearing, but was again denied. He reported that Sullivan came to him sometime in March or April and announced he had to pull his dance hall permit. The morning of the next day, when Graham was returning to move out of his office in the Fillmore Auditorium, Sullivan met him on the steps. Graham claimed Sullivan poured out his life story, concluding with a pledge of support to Graham to beat City Hall. Graham added, "He was the guy, Charles. He was it. I don't know if I could have ever found another place. Why would I have even tried? That was the place."

Graham was denied by the Board of Permit Appeals who refused to overrule the first denial. Graham said, "Then on April 21, 1966, a Thursday, the Chronicle ran an editorial, 'The Fillmore Auditorium Case'... [I]t was a big turning point for me. In more ways than one"; he secured his permit.