To see a show put on by Bill Graham at San Francisco's Fillmore Auditorium in the late 1960s was to see a new kind of concert experience.



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It started with the musicians. Graham cultivated many of the rock and roll acts that created a new kind of music, and provided the soundtrack for the counterculture revolution. Acts like the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Santana were regulars at the Fillmore.

"He used to book very unusual opening acts," said Bonnie Simmons, executive director of the Bill Graham Memorial Foundation. "You might be coming to see the Jefferson Airplane, but the opening act would be Andrei Voznesensky, the Russian poet."

But maybe the oddest aspect of Graham's Fillmore shows had nothing to do with the performances at all. At every show, concertgoers were greeted by a barrel of Red Delicious apples, free for the taking.

Simmons remembers seeing the apples when she went to concerts at the Fillmore in the 1960s. When the venue in the city's Western Addition reopened under new management in the mid-1990s, the apple tradition continued.

"Of all the shows that I've been to and all the different venues, it’s the only place that hands out fruit," said Sandra Julien, who's been going to shows at the Fillmore since she moved to the Bay Area eight years ago.

Julien wanted to know more, and asked Bay Curious: Why does the Fillmore hand out free apples?

Graham, who was killed in a helicopter crash in 1991, never explained his reasoning behind the apples, leaving others to guess at his motivation.

Some say that he wanted to give the broke hippies who came to his shows something nutritious to eat. Many believe that it was an extension of his famous hospitality, which he learned working as a waiter in the Catskills.

