Jeffrey Pollack: Legendary San Francisco Music Promoter
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Jeffrey Pollack owned San Francisco
As soon as you meet Jeffrey Pollack, it pops into your head exactly why he was once considered a musical tastemaker in San Francisco and operated one of the most important nightclubs in San Francisco’s history. He holds forth in any conversation, wears his opinions on both sleeves, and has worked hard since he was 13 to build an ironclad reputation for himself–and he was in the right place at the right time.
“The three significant points of why I got into it was basically this: sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll,” said Pollack, half-joking. “And yes, everybody in 1966 got fully into sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll.”
When Pollack was 21 and in college, he was already immersed in the whirlwind that was San Francisco in the late 1960s. The city was ripe with hippies, anti-war protests, and psychedelia. Music was evolving rapidly and unexpectedly.
“Everything was new in ‘66,” he continued. “You were going from what was popular then, like the Supremes, to cutting edge rock and with that came a lot of diversity. People accepted more different styles of music, be it jazz, blues, country. It really opened up a whole horizon of music.”
The nexus of that new universe was the Matrix nightclub, which was started in 1965 by Marty Balin, the singer of psychedelic rock fountainheads Jefferson Airplane. It was built to showcase the band as well as other local pioneers like the future rock legends in the Santana Blues Band and the Steve Miller Band, which were the club’s house bands.
Once Balin and the band got famous, picked up a record contract with RCA and began to tour constantly, he handed the club over to three partners, of which Pollack was one. However, it turned out to be only a six-month gig for Pollack. “I left because I wanted to be in charge of booking and they wouldn’t allow me to so I just walked out. To their detriment, I might add.”
He took a career detour into bail bonds after he graduated from San Jose State University in 1968, bailing out anti-war protesters across the street from the Hall of Justice during the most tumultuous year of the Vietnam War. After pursuing a law degree at the San Francisco Law School simultaneously, he quit to start his own bail bonds agency in 1969 called North Beach Bail Bonds.
Pollack is a native San Franciscan who worked in his father’s restaurants Tommy’s Joynt and Lefty O’Douls at the same time he was grow up in the Richmond district. His confidence in his actions is the kind that come from a person completely at home in his surroundings.
But a strongly-ingrained work ethic from a childhood spent in the restaurant business and the creation of successful bail bonds agency soon left Pollack feeling stagnant.
“It got to the point where I was only working two and a half days a week, at age 27,” explained Pollack, shrouded in cigarette smoke. “Obviously when you’re that age, you need more activity than that. I wanted to look for something else and I was still interested in music.”
Even though it was a risk at the time, he opened the first incarnation of the Old Waldorf on California and Divisadero streets as a bar and music venue.
“I found a location and I decided to open up a bar there and serve dinner,” said Pollack. “I did that for a number of months and was not making any profits at all. It was only about 2500 square feet, but I decided to put music in which is usually the death of a business.”
He booked people he met from the Matrix, such as Michael Bloomfield and Bo Diddley, as well as local bands like Eddie Money, who usually played for $50 a night. The space proved to be too small for Pollack’s ambitions, so after an aggressive search, he snagged a larger place on Battery Street that could hold 750 per show. He traded in his half of the bail bonds business so he could devote his time to running the Old Waldorf.
The Old Waldorf on Battery Street did not take long to make Pollack a local music titan.
“I had basically 90 percent acts that were known nationally or internationally and you don’t get those in clubs anymore,” said Pollack. “At Slim’s and Great American Music Hall, at best those are minor acts. I had major acts. You don’t see them in L.A. you don’t see them in New York anymore. It’s just he way it is.”
Pollack had a genius approach when it came to the media. He saved 50 seats every show so journalists and radio DJs always had free seats. In return he got their loyalty, and one couldn’t go anywhere in the Bay Area without hearing or reading about Old Waldorf shows. “They would clue me in on who they were playing. They would say book him, we’re going to play him. I knew what was happening before anybody else in the Bay Area.”
His national acts ranged from absolute legends to some of the biggest artists of the day: Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, AC/DC, U2, Emmylou Harris, Journey, Van Morrison, Isaac Hayes and even Roy Orbison made appearances at the club.
“This was one of my coups,” said Pollack about booking Roy Orbison in 1978. “He’s one of my favorite artists of all time. I used to call his manager in Tennessee when I owned the original Waldorf every six months. He would always laugh at me and tell me to call when I had a bigger venue. And then I got the big venue so I still bothered the guy. Finally I called him one day and said ‘Come on now, for Christs’ sakes, be a mensch’ and he said ‘Alright, I’ll make you a deal. I’ll send him down there on one condition: you never call me again!’”
Roy Orbison had never played San Francisco before. He played two shows in one night at the Old Waldorf and the show was made the “Show of the Year” by the San Francisco Chronicle.
“By that time, I was booking acts that nobody else had at nightclubs, so they all watched me,” mused Pollack. “All the clubs in L.A. watched me and all the artists watched me, so they would get the pink section [of the Chronicle] and see what the Waldorf was playing. In this particular case, who saw it was the Eagles, so they showed up. They made a deal with Roy to open up their tour, and from that, Roy went to a second career.”
At his peak, Pollack owned four clubs in San Francisco: the Old Waldorf, Punchline comedy club, X’s, which was a dance club, and X’s Annex, which featured a local gamut of new wave bands. After four years of non-stop work and play, Pollack decided to relinquish his crown.
“I got out of it at 34 years old,” he said. “I had just been burnt out. To book it and to run it, not a lot of people did that. As a matter of fact, when Bill [Graham] took it over he had to get four people to replace me. I enjoyed it at the time but I was happy when the last day, February 29, 1980, came around.”
Going out with a bang, Pollack had booked two of the biggest acts he was ever going to get: Cher and Barry Manilow, each set up for a four-night run at the club. As soon as Billboard published that the Old Waldorf had been bought by Bill Graham, Cher and Manilow canceled. “Bill had his little idiosyncracies which I’m not going to get into because he was a dear friend of mine,” explained Pollack. “But let’s put it this way: the Waldorf basically put the Winterland out of business. Everybody came to play for me.”
Bill Graham, who died in 1991 in a helicopter crash, was one of the most celebrated impresarios in American rock. He revolutionized the San Francisco music scene, making Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, and the Grateful Dead household names while operating both Fillmores East and West as well as the Winterland Ballroom. He promoted and booked shows by the biggest acts in rock, and was an extremely polarizing persona in the industry. Graham and Pollack met when Pollack bailed out a slew of Graham’s clients for marijuana possession in 1969. By the end of the 1970s, Pollack had sold all of his clubs to Graham.
“Jeffrey was very good friends with Bill and Bill didn’t have too many best friends,” said Bill Thomson, manager of Jefferson Airplane. “Bill was like the guy who invented modern promotion for shows. First of all, rock n’ roll was treated like a second-class citizen. Every bathroom was dirty and the venues were dirty, and Bill wanted to make sure the Fillmore was clean and had cool posters and the best lighting and sound system. A lot of that rubbed off on Jeffrey as a promoter and he was very good at that and good at negotiations.”
The same year Pollack sold the Old Waldorf, he bought the landmark restaurant Julius Castle on Telegraph Hill. He sold that after much success in 2006, and has owned Nick’s Lighthouse in Fisherman’s Wharf since 1991.
“You have to listen to other people,” advises Pollack. “If I would have just booked the Roy Orbisons or the Chuck Berrys or the Santanas, I would’ve been running, instead of 350 days a year, only 200 days a year. The point I’m trying to make is that I dont know anybody that’s been successful who didn’t listen to someone. That’s really it. Forget egos. Egos never entered into my business life.”
Pollack walked away years ago but can still remember each minute detail like it was last night. Still working hard to this day with a personality as vital as a teenager’s, the legacy he built is all his own and one San Francisco may never see again.
Looking Back on Interviewing Jeffrey Pollack
My story turned out alright, except that it was really, really long. I spent quite a while attempting to edit it down, and after it shed a few hundred words I had to stop. There was no way I could cut out any more of the vital information in my profile on Jeffrey Pollack, and my justification is this: this man is 64 years old and has had a very full, exciting life. It’s hard to condense his story into 1000 words. I was also disappointed that I stupidly filmed my video in “night vision”, and that Mr. Pollack’s old club the Punchline wasn’t open when we wanted so we couldn’t go in. Thus, my video wasn’t as exciting as I originally envisioned. But overall, I think my profile on Jeffrey Pollack turned out pretty darn good.
I would organize my time better, especially when filming the video. It was just hard to coordinate with Mr. Pollack because he has a full schedule every day he’s in the city. But it would have been better to meet later in the afternoon/early evening so that we could have gotten into the Punchline. That would have really made the video. Oh, and a little more knowledge about how to use my own camera!
Putting It All Together
I used to think Audacity was my friend, but when it came to editing the soundbites for my slide show, I realized that the program had just been whispering sweet nothings into my ears this whole time. When I needed Audacity to work the most, it decided to be completely bratty and crash over and over and over just to make me angry.
Seriously though, when I was editing the soundbites, Audacity crashed about four times and it really upset me because it had never done that before. Granted, I was working with pretty big sound files, but there seems to be no way to save your work on that program. To get through it, I had to edit and export a bunch of tracks separately and then tack them all together at the end into one long mp3. It took about 2 hours longer than it should have. One in Soundslides, everything ran smoothly.
Filming my subject was difficult only because both of us have pretty full schedules. We tried to get into one of his old venues, the Punchline, but it was closed so we had to film outside it. Also I filmed the entire thing in night-vision, so my subject Jeffrey Pollack looks somewhat terrifying. Using Final Cut Express didn’t give me any problems once I remembered all the nuances of the program, and it surprisingly did not take very long to render and export. I was actually expecting the video portion of the assignment to take the longest and be the most difficult. Thankfully, it was also pretty smooth sailing.
Harassing Jeffrey Pollack, Part 2.
For my profile subject, I was lucky. I have an instant in because his daughter Hilary is one of my best friends. So when I initially called Mr. Pollack, he suggested that I accompany Hilary to their house in Palo Alto (where she hangs out most Sunday nights even though she lives right here in the city), spend the night and then do all my reporting the next day, Monday.
So on Monday morning, I began the reporting process at around noon. I began by interviewing Mr. Pollack for the text story, and the main challenges there were all the phone calls he was getting, from friends or from his restaurant Nick’s Lighthouse in the city, that interrupted the flow of the interview. In the end that turned out to be OK because I got some priceless soundbites out of some of his phone calls that I ended up playing with during the making of my slide show.
I realized a mistake I made when I was putting together my slide show. When I asked Mr. Pollack to explain the vast number of photos of famous musicians and people he’s worked with over the years that line the walls of his office, I should have known how fast he would go. He explained everything so quickly and with such vigor that I got swept up in his descriptions and stories that I forgot about taking all the photos and closeups I should have. As a result, my slide show is a little lacking in detailed photographs of the things he’s explaining (although the soundbites are AWESOME). I should have thought of that before hand. I think the main reason why that happened was because I use my digital camera to record audio, so I can’t take photos simultaneously.
My advice to a future Digital News Gathering student is an obvious one: think about EVERYTHING before hand, and how you’re going to capture all the sound, information and visuals. Make a list if you need to detailing the process and steps. The worst thing in the world is feeling like you’ve missed something after the interview, when there’s no way to go back and make up for it (I just don’t have time to go down to Palo Alto again to make up the missed photos). No one likes to feel helpless.
Harassing Jeffrey Pollack, Nightclub Owner Extraordinaire
Once I found out we were doing a profile story as part of our final projects, I knew immediately who I wanted to be part of my multimedia piece. My best friend’s dad, Jeffrey Pollack, has always fascinated me as someone who would be perfect to tell the life story of. He was one of the most important nightclub owners in San Francisco during the late 60s to the mid 70s, owning the legendary Matrix, the Punchline, the Old Waldorf, and X’s, as well as many upscale restaurants later in life such as Julius’ Castle and Nick’s Lighthouse. So nautrally, he has a million stories to tell, from his extremely close friendship with Bill Graham to all his rock n’ roll adventures with people who used to perform at his clubs (like Santana, Jefferson Airplane, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, and Roy Orbison). He has a larger-than-life personality, complete with his loud voice and the constant cloud of cigarette smoke around him, that is perfect for a multimedia project.
I already have a killer slideshow done of Jeffrey touring me through his office walls that are covered with photos of performances and artists he’s worked with over the years, and the interview is done. The video still has to be done, and I’m planning to have Mr. Pollack show me the Punchline, which still exists, and tell me a little about all the things that went down there. The entire thing is going to be a well-rounded glimpse into this great man’s life.
Ceviche: Nectar of the Gods
Ceviche. It’s the Peruvian dish that lives on the menus of so many San Francisco eateries, from tapas places, to Japanese and traditional Peruvian restaurants like Amasia Hide’s Sushi Bar, Inkas , and Mi Lindo Peru. Then there are other joints like fancy La Mar on the Embarcadero and the hip, loungey Destino on Market who are putting new twists on the almost 100-year-old dish with new fusion-esque ingredients.
For those of you who don’t know what ceviche is, it’s thin slices of raw fish (usually sea bass or halibut, but also shrimp, calamari or clams) marinated citrus (usually lime) juice, spices and herbs (like cilantro). It’s healthy and almost better than sushi. I talked with James Schenk, owner of Destino and Pisco Latin Lounge, both on Market Street, about his experience with ceviche, how Destino makes it unique and what makes it so damn delicious:
Ceviche is also easy to make, as James mentions at the end of the video. One night not long ago, Isaac and I made ceviche from a Costa Rican recipe I tore out of an old issue of Bon Appetit magazine. We used fresh sole fillets that we cut up into bite-sized pieces, red onion, garlic, habanero, tapatío, salt & pepper, tons of cilantro and a mountain of limes. Eaten with salty tortilla chips, this lean protein meal makes you the best kind of full. We also decided to eat brie and grapes and crackers and drink white wine. Obviously we weren’t going for a theme. Check out our handy work:
Isaac dealing with a couple pounds of limes:
A really dark photo of the finished product. It’s about 154,688,273 times better than it looks:
And here’s how the experts at Limón, a place on South Van Ness we frequent, do up their ceviche to perfection:
Life Between Polk and Fillmore
I live in lower Pacific Heights, smack in the middle of the alternate universes of Fillmore Street and Polk Street. Each has its charm: Fillmore is a sleek thoroughfare of the affluent, full of bustling, atmospheric restaurants, while Polk Street sports an edgier, seedy side made of local dive bar-venues, sidewalk characters and hole-in-the-wall eateries. Here is a tour of these dual neighborhoods.
Raw Night In
This is Round Two of raw eating, and it was a resounding success for dinner. I chose to make two quite incongruous dishes to put on a plate together: Zucchini Marinara and raw mashed “potatoes” (both recipes, again, from Choosing Raw). But what does it matter anyway? It’s all vegetables in the end, disguised as other things. I’m okay with that. I’m also okay with the gigantic mound of dishes afterwards, the vegetable bits that got all over the floor and with my insane raw garlic breath.
The first dish was easy: raw mashed “potatoes”, which is really a mixture of cauliflower and walnuts (or cashews) blended together, with olive oil, a clove of garlic and salt and pepper added in. I also added in a dash of golden flax seeds. It took no time at all, except while I was pushing down the cauliflower chunks into the blender blade with my wooden spoon, I knicked the spoon and a piece of wood landed somewhere in the “potatoes”. It’s possible I ate or am about to eat a not-small sliver of wood. Hm.
The zucchini marinara was a little more labor intensive. This recipe serves two:
1 very large red or yellow bell pepper, deseeded
¾ cup cherry or roma tomatoes
¼ cup sundried tomatoes
1 Tablespoon olive oil
¼ teaspoon salt
Generous sprinkle dried thyme
Generous sprinkle dried oregano
¼ cup basil
You throw it in the blender (minus the zucchini), and it becomes this totally fresh, basil-y sauce that you could put on almost anything, including actual pasta. The part that I hated was slicing up the zucchini as thinly as possible so it would resemble spaghetti–I don’t have a fancy mandolin, just my hands and some knives from Ikea. It was okay, though; I put Bad Brains on and sliced away.
Here’s the finished product!
I sprinkled some parmesan cheese on top. Sad face. Not exactly raw OR vegan (which raw eating always is!), but it’s still hard for me to imagine eating spaghetti without delicious parmesan. The whole thing was delicious! I wolfed it down, and was in agony afterwards because I was so full. I like thinking about the fact that I probably just consumed half an entire head of cauliflower, an entire red bell pepper, three tomatoes, and a few handfuls of walnuts and basil. It makes me laugh.
Raw-Curious
I’ve been having epiphanies lately. Fall is here and winter is looming, temperatures are dropping and I no longer want to be outside 24 hours a day. When it gets colder, I feel to urge to eat constantly, which I think everyone goes through during these months. That coupled with staying inside more often and not moving around as much means I’m gonna feel sluggish, tired and like I’ve got winter doldrums.
My solution, instead of just exercising to boost that serotonin, is to eat “raw” as much as possible.
What is eating “raw”, you might ask? Well, it’s eating nothing that’s been heated over 118 degrees. “Live” foods are full of enzymes that help our bodies digest food and metabolize energy more efficiently. That means there’s more energy for other bodily functions: cell repair, physical and mental activity, and immune function. Exactly what I need for the doom and gloom of winter! Plus, I figure eating raw allows me to eat gigantic quantities of food, which I would be doing with pizza, pasta and mexican food anyway.
I’ve been doing a lot of research on it lately, mostly via raw food blogs, and my plan is to eat raw as often as I can at home (going out to dinner if you only eat raw is pretty much out of the question). Eating raw can also be cheap (unless you’re buying tons of prepared raw stuff at expensive grocery stores), and pretty much all you need is a blender or food processor, your hands, knives and measuring utensils! I’m so excited.
My first attempt to start my part-time raw diet was to make this delicious-looking raw tortilla soup from Gena’s blog, Choosing Raw, which is a wealth of information about the raw lifestyle:
Raw Tortilla Soup (serves two people with appetites)
Ingredients:
2 tomatoes, chopped
2 large red bell peppers, chopped
1/4 cup sundried tomatoes, packed
1/4 cup fresh cilantro, packed
2 large stalks celery, chopped
3/4 cup water
1 tbsp lime juice
2-3 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp salt
3/4 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp chili powder
1/4 tsp paprika
1 clove garlic (optional!! raw garlic is powerful, folks)
Dash cayenne pepper (optional)
Optional toppings: tomato, avocado, onion, corn chips
Instructions:
Blend all ingredients in a minus the olive oil in a blender (a high speed blender will work best, but any will do). When the ingredients are well combined, drizzle in the olive oil with the motor running until the whole mixture is creamy and emulsified. Pour into bowls and top with the chopped veggies and the corn chips! Serve alongside more chips, some pita strips, an Ezekiel sprouted wrap that you’ve warmed in the oven, or simply some chopped veggies for a delicious lunch!
It was simple and took about 15 minutes. All I need were these:
And this magical tool:
A lot of chopping later, the mixture looks just like a delectable vegetable parfait:
The spices and sundried tomatoes are on top. I added tons of the Holy Trinity of C’s: cumin, chili powder and cayenne. After giving it a whirl in the Kitchenaid, it’s a beautiful, smooth light red flecked with green. I garnished it with cilantro, avocado and corn, with some Trader Joe’s flax seed tortilla chips on the side. I ate about half of the soup, which tasted just like a really good Mexican gazpacho, and boy, was I FULL. I still am! Good sign. Maybe this is just the ticket to get me through the dreadful months to come—take that winter doldrums!
The Importance of Salads, Pt. 1
I’m a salad fiend. When I’m not vacuuming up food at the city’s restaurants, I usually try to treat my body well by concocting utterly massive mounds of raw vegetables. There’s a few good salad places in the city like Pluto’s in the Marina or Cafe Gratitude on Harrison. Heck, even the school cafeteria has a great (and CHEAP!) salad bar–but really the best place to eat obscene amounts of rabbit food is at home, where no will make of you and it won’t make your wallet hemmorhage. I like to think of the act as detoxing from all the prepared foods my stomach is used to digesting.
My favorite salad building blocks include, but are not limited to:
raw kale
spring mix
bell peppers (roasted or raw)
cucumbers
tomatoes
mint
chopped roasted almonds
three bean salad
fake bacon bits
baked tofu
corn
peas
beets
three bean salad (green, kidney and garbanzo beans)
edamame
sundried tomatoes
olive oil & balsamic vinegar
shredded carrots
avocados
So here’s a guide to making one of my daily epic salads. Any amount of any ingredient will do, just as long as you’re filled with the good stuff and not left wanting more:
Photos courtesy of:
Megapixel13
Steven Jareb
Zeetz Jones
Wendy Copley
Sasakei
phxpma
Tony Banquet Committee
jcoterhal
