Good Taste offers a menu for enjoyable Bay Area eating. This week, we learn more about San Francisco’s musical fruit (and we’re not talking about beans).
On Saturday, I attended an incredible private tour at The Fillmore that was offered to the public as part of new city recovery initiative SF Music Week, part of the Noise Pop Festival. Walking up the stairs and into the building, I was reminded that the legendary venue places a bucket of apples up front for people to help themselves to, for free. They’re far from average Red Delicious apples. They’re voluptuous, red, shiny and cartoonish in a way that recalls Snow White — and they always come in clutch at a show.
Bonnie Simmons, the executive director for Bill Graham Memorial Foundation, led a panel of Fillmore history that illuminated a big part of Graham’s life that he wasn’t public about: his childhood as a Holocaust survivor. Simmons found out from Graham’s 1992 autobiography Bill Graham Presents: My Life Inside Rock And Out that he was put on a Kindertransport train from Berlin to France at the age of seven. He lived in Paris for around a year, and then was sent with other kids to a few different chateaus in the French countryside, where they could be more protected.
When Simmons was helping to put an exhibit about Graham’s life together around 2013, she did some Internet research to try and find out more about the chateaus and that guarded part of Graham’s life. She eventually and quite miraculously connected with a former LA stuntman named Ralph who had been at one of the chateaus with Graham, whose birthname was Wolfgang. Ralph shared that he and Wolfie loved to get into trouble together.
“They’d run down to the farmer down the road and they would steal apples,” Simmons shared. “They would load them up in their shirts or in bags or whatever they had, and they’d bring them back to the Chateau so people would have apples.”
Everyone at the Foundation was stunned to hear this story, because they knew that free apples have always been part of The Fillmore tradition.
“Bill never said anything about it,” she continued. “I don’t even know if anybody ever asked Bill, ‘Hey, what’s with the apples?’ We just figured okay, The Fillmore’s open, we’re gettin’ apples. So this might be total disinformation, but we have all adopted the fact that this is somehow hooked together. And that the reason that Bill always had apples for people to take at The Fillmore is because of what happened to him as a kid. That is the red apple story.”
On the way out, I asked The Fillmore’s manager Amie Bailey-Knobler where the apples come from, and she revealed that they’ve always been sourced from Ted’s Market & Deli (1530 Howard Street), which also prepares sandwiches for concerts. Graham, she said, used to have an office nearby, and he ate at Ted’s every day.
Tamara publishes the California Eating website, newsletter, and zine.
