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
