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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.