(continued from previous page)
Eve shows are stuck in boxes in the basement. The charred and twisted remains of Graham's ever-present megaphone and walkie-talkie, burned when his office was firebombed in the 1980s, sit atop a filing cabinet.
Sagan says he's still personally going through a collection of Graham's correspondence, to and from artists. The letters and yellow Western Union telegrams are "eye-opening, to say the least," he says.
A large portion of what is in these cabinets and on these shelves has been for sale for the last two years through the Wolfgang's Vault Web site (Graham's original name was Wolfgang Grajonca). Items range from tickets and postcards selling for a few dollars, to original Fillmore concert posters for Hendrix, the Dead or other bands, which command thousands of dollars apiece.
Moving memories online
In the basement of the warehouse is the room that holds close to 5,000 hours of videotaped concerts, and a comparable quantity of audio. Nobody's quite sure what Graham had intended to do with all the footage, Sagan says. The vast majority of it is unseen and unheard, with the exception of occasional bootlegs of the same shows.
The Wolfgang's Vault radio service, which launched last Friday, represents the first batch of this audio material to go online. For now, the 14-person company has decided to create a new 70 song to 80 song playlist every week, representing about 7 or 8 hours of music, and will stream it from the Web site.
Podcasts and music downloads are on the agenda for later this year, and probably video downloads by the end of 2006. These are where Sagan will begin to make money from the material, although he hasn't yet discussed pricing.
Some of this depends on technology. Right now Sagan's employees are busily going through the digitized audio tapes, preparing and organizing the concerts. Servers with 24 terabytes of storage sit in the air-conditioned basement, holding the audio data alone.
But the company is also working with the artists, labels, songwriters and others who still own rights related to the performances. As many other start-ups have found over the years, music distribution rights can be intensely complicated and time-consuming to secure, particularly for content recorded before digital media was a routine part of contracts.
Sagan says he'll probably wind up selling DVDs and CDs. But he'd rather not. Packaging and mailing takes time and money, and he wants to spend his money on building a better way to download.
That's what the company is focusing on right now. Sagan doesn't want to distribute the work through Apple Computer's iTunes or other services, he said. Instead, his company is trying to build a simple download interface that anyone can use, where "my 82-year-old dad could download a song, and find it afterward to play it," Sagan says.
The rest is depending on the work of the artists to carry itself. Hearing and seeing them live, at the peak of their powers, is a reward in itself, Sagan says. Reliving those experiences will be the thing that draws people, he hopes.
"I remember pretty much every concert I ever went to," he says. "I remember who I went with. I remember where I parked. I remember what the bathrooms smelled like. You really remember the damnedest things."
See more CNET content tagged:
Bill Sagan, warehouse, Clear Channel Communications Inc., archive, concert
Clear Channel's slimy embrace. I know how good a lot of that
audio and video is, because I was there when it was recorded.
You who weren't, now you can maybe see what we were into
back then. A world of Ipods it was decidedly not. We liked
listening to the same thing as a bunch of others at the same
time, because we got each other higher. Our brain waves
reinforced each other. You all have lost that ability. Maybe the
music will work on you anyway. I hope they release this stuff
soon because hey we're getting old and if we're dead we won't
buy any of it. What a great time that was! Hooray for Bill
Graham! May he be running the live (sic) music productions in
heaven. I hear they play a lot of Mozart. Cool.
It's too bad there is so much that has yet to be found by anyone who is willing to do this kind of thing.