Rage and Roll: Bill Graham and the Selling of Rock

Bill Graham, the flamboyant rock concert promoter whose life, as depicted here, was a quest for sex, drugs, megabucks and stardom, arrived in the U.S. as a penniless eight-year-old refugee in 1939. Born Wolodia Grajonca in Berlin, he lost his father to a construction accident when he was two days old and his mother to Auschwitz. In a fast-moving, colorful and well-researched portrait of the king of rock promotion, who died in a helicopter crash in 1991, freelance journalist Glatt limns an abrasive, hot-tempered impresario derailed by cocaine, sleeping pills, ego and self-doubt, who slept with a girlfriend while his wife Bonnie MacLean went into labor with their child. Filled with cameos of Janis Joplin, the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead and other stars, this ultimately depressing bio profiles Graham as a hip and versatile capitalist who ultimately became an anachronism, unable to mesh with the new age of MTV and video rock. Photos. (Jan.)