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It started in 65, I was with a theater group here, the San Francisco Meme Troupe, and I was known as a radical street theater gang, and we just ran out of money and I got to know a lot of the filmmakers and some of the musicians, some of the poets, and throwing in Ginsburg and some of the new groups that were forming then, and I had sort of an idea

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of getting them all together in our loft on Howard Street and just having a good time, and that was a great night, the first night, and then people had such a good time, they said, let's do some more of these, and I did another benefit, another benefit, and then we needed a larger place, and I started searching around town and found the old film, the film on Geary,

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and I went in there and here I am. At just about the same time, groups like Jefferson Airplane and the group we called the Warlocks, who became the Grateful Dead and the Charlatans, began to be around the hate because this was the music of the revolutionary young, so to speak, who wanted to be free from the straight man's turmoil, and it was the background music,

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the sound for every, for the activity of the young people, and we were part of that. When you say that it's a profit-making organization, it's doing well, why close? It's not that I'm tired. I'm tired of not calling my own shots of late, and I always have, and I just don't like having to get up and, oh, this group canceled, or those amplifiers didn't

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arrive, and I'd rather have it the other way. When I want to put on a show, I'll rent a place and put on a show. If I want to make a film, I'll make a film. It's not having to get up every day and being forced to take the shovel coal into the oven. I just don't want to have to do that. I'll have to do it every day. It's not telling me what to do, least of all, a corporation.

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Bill, what do you think is going to happen to rock music now? I think it'll be okay, just that I won't be involved as extensively as I have been. We'll still be doing shows in various places. I think it'll continue to go away from the people. This has been my argument for the last couple of years, ever since the festival started, that

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the bigger the business gets, the more money the guy on the stage will earn. In order to put him on the stage, the producer will have to put him into a bigger place and charge more money. It's just a matter of expansion. What that amounts to is that the music will be taken further and further away from the people. They're not sharing. They're sharing less and less as the place gets bigger

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and bigger. A guy used to play in a 20-people coffee shop. Then he goes into a 200-seat folkhouse. Then he comes into a 500-seat house and a 2000-seat house like this one. Then he will go to the Berkeley Community Center. Then he will go to the Civic Auditorium, which is 8,000. Then he will go to the Auckland Coliseum, which is 15,000.

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you