• Storied: San Francisco

  • By: Jeff Hunt
  • Podcast

Storied: San Francisco

By: Jeff Hunt
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  • Summary

  • A weekly podcast about the artists, activists, and small businesses that make San Francisco so special.
    Copyright 2024 Storied: San Francisco
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Biographies & Memoirs Social Sciences
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Episodes
  • Whack Donuts' First Anniversary (S7 bonus)

    Whack Donuts' First Anniversary (S7 bonus)
    Jan 30 2025

    It's been a damn year, y'all.

    In this bonus episode, we catch up with friend of the show Vandor Hill, owner and creator of Whack Donuts. His brick-and-mortar shop in EMB 4 just marked its one-year anniversary (and last year was a Leap Year!), and I dropped by to chat with Vandor about the time since he opened, where things stand now, and the road ahead.

    This Saturday, to celebrate Whack Donuts' birthday, Vandor is hosting a breakdancing jam event:

    • 5x5 crew
    • breaking battle
    • $1,000
    • donuts
    • line dancing
    • free giveaways

    Follow Whack Donuts on Instagram for more info. And if you're able to, please donate to help offset some of the costs of putting on this event. We'll see you there!

    ​We recorded this podcast at Whack Donuts in January 2025.

    Photography by Jeff Hunt
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    29 mins
  • The Fillmore Art Director Ashley Graham, Part 2 (S7E6)

    The Fillmore Art Director Ashley Graham, Part 2 (S7E6)
    Jan 28 2025
    In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. We'd just learned of the call Ashley received from The Fillmore while she was working in Seattle. She'd visited San Francisco once to visit a cousin, but that stay lasted a mere 48 hours. She had one friend here at the time. Up in Seattle, the shows she helped produce were huge acts like Beyoncé and Rihanna. What especially excited Ashley about this opportunity at The Fillmore was the potential to work on smaller shows with groups and people more on their way up, so to speak. For fans and showgoers, it was more about music discovery, as she puts it. It was June 2012. Ashley's move to San Francisco was more or less sight-unseen. The City immediately felt like a "bigger" place for her, its music ... just a bigger city all-around. It was big, "but not that big." She landed in the Mission, moving in with a friend of that one friend she had in SF. Ashley lived at 24th and Potrero for nine years, until just three years ago. We shift to talk about Ashley's time at The Fillmore. She shares conversations among staff there about the history of the place and placing that at the forefront. The venue partnered with the Bill Graham Memorial Foundation this past fall to reintroduce the public to the place and its long history, as well as really getting Bill Graham's story out there. Ashley then shares that life story of Bill Graham. It was Graham who put The Fillmore on the map. His first show there was in December 1965. He had fled the Holocaust as a kid, went with family to New York, then ended up in San Francisco. He wanted to be an actor and found the San Francisco Mime Troupe. That first show at The Fillmore was a benefit for the Mime Troupe, in fact. The place had been a dance hall and a roller rink previously. Graham might have had a hunch, but when he took over putting on music shows, it was right at an inflection point for rock music in The City. Bands like Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Janis Joplin frequently played there. Bill Graham had a gift for pairing musicians from different genres together in such a way that shows attracted different groups of people. Ashley points out, though, that first and foremost, Bill was a businessman. He followed and created opportunities to make money. A few years after taking over at Fillmore and Geary, he opened The Fillmore West at Van Ness and Market. There's a fun tidbit about Bill Graham appearing on David Letterman back in the Eighties—which just speaks to how big a personality he'd become. Our conversation then shifts to two questions I had for Ashley. I wanted her to talk about the red apples that are always found in a bucket at the top of the stairs when you enter The Fillmore. That, and the posters handed out to showgoers on their way out of sold-out events. No one really knows how the apples got started, she says. There are versions of the story. One holds that Bill Graham gave them out as a simple gesture of hospitality. Another was that putting a little food in your belly after a night out can't hurt anything. A rather elaborate telling is that, as part of an exhibit on Bill Graham at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, someone who'd been in France with him when they were kids shared the story of sneaking out at night to go to an apple orchard. As for the posters, Ashley talks about their origins, when they were simply advertisements for shows at The Fillmore. The posters eventually took on a life of their own, though—for many of the early ones, the style of lettering worked better as a memento than an ad. It almost seems quaint at this point that the posters were anything but keepsakes. I ask Ashley what it's like to now have her name appear on these iconic pieces of art (in her role as art director). "It's strange ... but cool." She speaks to how much work goes into each poster. And then Ashley talks about the logistics of making posters for. "At this point, we have a pretty good idea of which shows are gonna sell out." (Seems obvious, but as someone on the outside, I wondered.) "It's not a perfect science, but we're pretty good at it," Ashley says. She thinks of her job as more art curation than direction. She considers the overall collection of posters a little more than the nitty gritty of what each poster's details are. We end the podcast with Ashley's thoughts on what it means to "keep it local," our theme this season. Follow The Fillmore on Instagram. Photography by Nate Oliveira
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    34 mins
  • The Fillmore Art Director Ashley Graham, Part 1 (S7E6)

    The Fillmore Art Director Ashley Graham, Part 1 (S7E6)
    Jan 21 2025

    Ashley Graham will be the first tell you, "There's no relation (to Bill Graham)."

    In Part 1 of this episode, meet Ashley. Today, she holds the titles of marketing manager and art director at The Fillmore, a San Francisco institution. But let's learn how she got here.

    ​Ashley comes to us from Spokane, Washington. Her mom is originally from there, too, but her dad's family moved around the Rocky Mountain West, from Colorado to Montana, and eventually, eastern Washington State. Her dad was a senior in high school when his family moved to Spokane.

    Her parents met a few years later and got married after knowing each other for a whopping five months (they're still married today). Ashley's mom worked at Bimbo's, a local Spokane burger joint. Her dad frequented the place ... with his first wife. At a certain point, he started to come in solo. And eventually, he asked her mom out. "The rest is history," Ashley says.

    Ashley's sister, Erin, is two years older than her. Growing up, the two had what Ashley calls "a classic older sister/younger sister vibe." They're close today, but it wasn't always that way. Ashley had severe asthma when she was young, and she thinks she was a drag to be around.

    Ashley is an Eighties kid. She was born in 1983 and grew up without cellphones and computers. At this point in the recording, we reminisce about those days and what it was like not having those things.

    She spent a lot of her early years playing Barbie with a cousin. She listened to a lot of music, too. She loved Michael Jackson, but it was his sister Janet who really stole Ashley's heart. Janet Jackson was her first concert, in fact. There's a good story about Ashley refusing to get on the school bus and her mom taking her home. After this incident, when she would take the bus to school, she'd receive a sticker. Once she accumulated enough of those, Ashley bought herself a copy of Rhythm Nation on cassette.

    Her high school years saw Ashley really, really dive into music. The Jacksons gave way to bands like Kiss (thanks to the movie Detroit Rock City), Aerosmith, and Poison. Then, in 1999, Ashley and her sister won tickets to see Sammy Hagar. "It was so good. So good," she says now. Looking back, she says that it was the relationship Hagar had with his fans that drew her in.

    The next day, she went out and bought a Sammy Hagar CD. A week later, she bought more CDs. She got a Hagar shirt on Ebay. Around this time, she also discovered Hedwig and the Angry Inch. She found the show thanks to her love of Stone Temple Pilots. Her, her mom, and her sister went to Seattle to see Stevie Nicks and Ashley seized the opportunity while there to see the Hedwig movie. Some in the theater were clutching their pearls, but the movie had a profound effect on Ashley. It "opened my heart and filled it with ... emotional intelligence," she says.

    ​Hedwig also helped open Ashley up to the wider world and the idea of possibility. This was all right before her senior year in high school. Despite her friends not really getting it, she took that inspiration and turned it into her drive to become a screen writer. And her senior English teacher encouraged those dreams.

    She read scripts while also writing her own. She graduated high school and moved to Los Angeles to attend Loyola Marymount. A year later, she came back to Washington to go to Seattle University and pursue a degree in "something between journalism and communications." But she says that about halfway through college, she decided that the old-school model of journalism school (think: hard news) wasn't a good fit.

    During her time in Seattle, though, music had started to take over her life. Ashley had gotten into The Strokes in her brief time in LA. "They felt like a band you could be friends with," the first time that had happened to her. At shows in Seattle, she started befriending bands. Eventually, she started a music site, and that blew up to the point that she cashed that in for internships at a local venue and a record label.

    One of those internships, the one at the venue, led to a job. And that led to her work with the Sasquatch music fest in Seattle. Rather than covering band quasi-journalistically, she was now working with bands behind the scenes, so to speak.

    Then, five years or so later, someone from The Fillmore called and offered Ashley a job.

    Check back next week for Part 2 with Ashley Graham.

    ​We recorded this podcast at The Fillmore in November 2024.

    Photography by Nate Oliveira
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    35 mins

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