John Graham Interview
Interview with John Graham
April 1, 2023
Memorial Stadium
Champaign, IL
Interviewers: Rosette Pavkov and Christopher Schwartz
JG = John Graham
CS = Christopher Schwartz
RP = Rosette Pavkov
RP: So really quickly my name. So hi, my name is Rosette, and I'll be interviewing you today. We are recording on April 1st, at the Farm Aid history harvest.
JG: OK.
RP: All right. How's the weather outside? Is it still really?
JG: Windy, and it's it's 42 degrees, so it's warmed up a smidge.
RP: Well, that's good.
JG: Still windy.
RP: Well, at least it's not raining.
JG: Yeah. You need anything else or just sign it or?
RP: Umm that's for us. Don't worry about that. I will do that in a sec. We need that on the posted note. It's just 002 so.
JG: What's your name again?
RP: It’s hiding, I'm sorry.
JG: No problem. I heard you were talking, but I was filling this, you know. The brain can only do one thing at a time.
RP: I definitely understand that. Well, I'm gonna go ahead and get started with the questions if you’re alright with that.
JG: Sure, sure.
RP: Perfect. So you said that you were basically the brains behind the whole operation …managing it?
JG: No, no. I was the event manager for the University of Illinois for the event.
RP: OK.
JG: So our our crews ran the parking and the ushers and ticket takers and security and um that sort of thing.
RP: I'm just fiddling with the sound a little bit. I'm trying to get you up into this region. Just to make sure that we can have your beautiful voice on recording.
JG: No problem.
RP: Would you actually mind just stating your name for me? And then spell it ?
JG: Sure. John. J-o-h-n. Last name? Graham G-R-A-H-A-M.
RP: Perfect. Thank you very much. OK. Can you describe your experience working at Farm Aid?
JG: Well, it was a fairly short time for most of the events that I've done. I've been in this business for about 40 years, and I was the assistant director of the Assembly Hall. And so when the announcement came out that they were going to have Farm Aid. The Assembly Hall management group was tasked with putting the event on from the university standpoint, so we became the coordinators for that from the university side. And so my job as I had been the event manager at the Assembly hall, so I became the event manager here and that was coordinating the parking and the ushers and security and police and all the things that would be associated with putting the event on. It's called the front of house. So I we did everything this this side of the stage. The stage was positioned. About where the Illinois uh sign is on the on the field, facing this direction here. So it was. And we had about 20 days to put this thing together.
RP: That’s pretty short notice.
JG: Notice pretty short.
RP: Comparatively. Did you have any, like unique backstage occurrences like any run ins with any of the big names that came by or any like moments that stood out and maybe in like a negative or very positive way?
JG: Well, most of them were positive. I remember, once I started the work cycle for this, I was up for about 60 hours straight. He actually brought in, I had parked an RV over at the the the parking lot at the arena. And I lived out of that for about 2 1/2 days. So one night, about midnight, and if you ever see the layout, I've got photographs of the layout backstage where all the buses were in the production trucks and production trailers. They had nine production trailers in the back. And one evening, about midnight, I'm walking back to talk to their security crews and on the steps of one of the production trailers was Tom Petty, Lou Reed, Bob Dylan and um um Neil Young. And so they're all four sitting there smoking something. And I thought, man, this is really something. You see these guys, sitting right here, which in effect is the history of rock'n'roll, right there. And I thought that's that's pretty amazing, I said, excuse me guys, I got to get by and they were pretty cool and no problem. And that was kind of an interesting experience. The other one was. The Tyson Food company, Tyson Chickens, provided the backstage catering for everybody and they set up. They brought in two or three big semis full of basically fried chicken, corn on the cob, mashed potatoes and maybe green beans. That's probably was the that was the deal, at least for lunch and that sort of thing. So I'm back having lunch in one of the tents. They set up two large tents and it was sort of like picnic tables, and there were no egos allowed backstage. You can imagine you have 60 some artists performing. But there's an artist, and then there's a band. And then there's the management and there's their family. There's a lot of people backstage. So I'm at this picnic table having my fried chicken and corn on the cob and across from me is Johnny Cash with his daughter Rosanne Cash. Next to me is a woman who's an actress named Debra Winger. Debra Winger was famous for “An Officer and a Gentleman” which was an Academy award-winning movie. And so I thought, man, this is really wild, you know that you're in a situation like this and there were— There was a lot of that you could just see lots of people backstage that were, you know, and I I'd been in that field for a long time. But to see that many all in one place was kind of like the Academy Awards or something of music.
RP: Would you like to elaborate on like your emotions or feelings behind the stage then?
JG: Well, I've been doing this for quite a while by that time, and so most of it was just I'm trying to get the job done today and we're getting through whatever, whatever's happening. Usually when you're running an event like this, or any event with a basketball game, football game, whatever, you're, you have a plan and you execute the plan, you put it out, there and then. Once you're running, once the operation is going, then your whole job and your troubleshooting, so something will happen. Something will be a problem. Something will come up and so you're out there putting those little fires out before they become a big fire. And so hopefully if you've done all your planning, you have people in place and they're trained and they know what they're doing. And you've given them enough instructions to do it, that takes care of itself. So when something odd happens where, you know, somebody's upset about something, they got in a fight or they are high on drugs or something like that. Then you can deal with that without having to deal with everything else that's going on. Cause it's a massive operation. Your parking cars and letting people in. It was a general mission event. GA Events would never be done today. Not like that. I don't think so. You're dealing with a lot of kinds of moving parts. If you will.
RP: I'd like to segue I guess into a different set of questions. In that being, do you have any experience like living on a farm or any farm related past that you'd like to talk about like how you felt about the farm crisis or the things you learned at Farm Aid about the farm crisis if that was like your first exposure to? What was?
JG: Going on, no, it wasn't my first exposure. I I I grew up here. I was born here and I have relatives who are farmers, and were up until they retired. My family still owns a farm and out toward Mahomet, and so I was aware of that. The farming issues, certainly aware of the sort of farming economy, if you will. My family was fortunate in that we and our farm was paid for, but a lot of farmers have to borrow money. To operate and when you have, most people don't quite, they might have some associated with this now, but the inflation in the early 80s was running 20%. So you have inflation now running 7%. People are freaked out, naturally, but when it's running 18 to 20% and the cost of borrowing money is, I remember we bought our first house in probably 1980, we were paying 10%. Well, that's higher than it is now by far. So if you're a farmer and you're relying upon that cash flow where you borrow money, you pay for your seed and all that other associated elements to run your farm, and then you're trying to sell your product, but you don't know what the price of your product is going to bring because inflation is wild and you also can, you're getting hammered because of the price of oil. I mean was going up like mad. And so, I had some awareness of that, if you will.
RP: Okay. Do you have any questions to ask?
CS: I just had two questions. First, one I was going to ask related to this is why do you think people like now have kind of forgotten about the farm crisis and the Farm Aid concert.
JG: Well, I don't know if they've forgotten about the Farm Aid concert or not. I know they, I don't remember how many they've had since then. I think it's probably not every year. They had one in 86, I know after this one and then they skip a year or two and then you have another one. But none of them were of this scale, of this size where you had 80,000 people here in a stadium. Most of them after that have been in either arenas or amphitheaters, so they were smaller, not televise to the extent this one was this was televised is that time when the Nashville network later became CMT. And they televise, I think for 12 hours. So it was getting a lot of exposure out there. It raised more money than all the other ones I think combined. So I do think that people today have probably not. They don't have quite the connection of, you know, I'm eating that hot dog or the hamburger or the fried chicken and the corn on the cob. How does that happen? Where does it come from? Also, there's been a big change and that you have corporate farming is much bigger than it used to be. And so the family farms are far fewer. So you have fewer
people actually engage in that business and that work. So I think that there is a disconnect today from what it might've been. And maybe, you know, right now the last two or three years, farmers have probably made pretty good money. So even with some of the inflation issues going on, I don t think it's just not in the forefront of what it was then.
CS: Okay. And then the second question I wanted to ask you, which is very unrelated to this. But during foreigner’s set, they play the song. I Want to Know What Love Is and usually you bring in a local choir. You know who the local choir was in that showing?
JG: Well, oddly enough, good question by the way. Because we had done forei- foreigner at
the Assembly Hall probably six or eight months before that. And there was a black choir that was brought in. There was a woman that traveled with the show, who was the choir director.
And so and I don't know if it was the same choir, but I would bet it was. And it was from a black
church here in town.
CS: Do you know the name of
the church or the people?
JG: No idea. No, I don't remember. It might be in some of my not my Farm Aid notes,
but it might be in some of them. I kept a journal. I've been, I did this for 40 years. Both here at Illinois, ten years at the Assembly Hall, then 30 years at Texas, where we ran the arena and all the stadiums as well. And it might be in my Foreigner file somewhere about what that group was. But it was a black church, black choir brought in probably about 20-22, something like that.
The size of it as I recall that the assembly I'll show and I'm pretty sure it was the same group
because it'd be it would make sense. They'd gone through the training process over there learning that piece of music and having an association with Foreigner. And then less than a year later you're over here doing this one. I'm sure it was the same one, but I don't remember who it was. It was a black church.
RP: If you happen to stumble upon that name I think that'll be interesting for us. We've been trying to hunt down that choir, hopefully get a couple of their experiences from behind the scenes. But there's no pressure, of course,
PG: but I understand
RP: if you stumble upon something,
PG: No, No. Could you write that down
on one of your pads? And I'll just keep that in mind. I'll look it up later.
RP: Ok
JG: I have thousands of pages.
RP: I know I.
JG: this is just one, I'd been to 900 concerts and 3,000 basketball games, so that’s a lot.
RP: Well, I think this scanning station is going to have some fun today.
JG: Well, they have the operations book out there that they're copying which has everything in it, the contracts and everything. Are you all history majors?...So was I
RP: Really? Did you go to U of I?
JG: undergraduate degree in history and master's degree in theater.
RP: Theater really?
JG: yup.
RP: musical theater.?
RP: Or just theater?
JG: Theater. Only because at the time I had done a couple of shows. A friend of mine
was a writer and my family owns some apartment houses and one was all full of the theater students. So I ended up doing a couple of shows at Krannert and I thought that was kind of fun.
And I like doing it. So I just kept doing it for a while.
RP: I used to be a theater
kid so I can understand.
PG: My mission was because that's where I met my wife.
RP: Oh! There were secret intentions.
PG: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah there was. Girls were there.
RP: Okay.
JG: Sorry, that’s a fact.
RP: It makes sense.
CS: Sorry, I don't mean to inject like myself here but I was going to ask one more question. When you were operating, Were there any massive issues during the concert like was there a surprise thing that happened, that like freak you out as a manager?
RP: besides the rain.
JG: Good question. So, we anticipated far, far. You anticipate everything
and some of my notes here, there were rumors that there were going to be 500 members of the Hell's Angels show up to provide security for Willie Nelson. And then there was going to
be a mob of banditos would show up to provide security for the Hell's Angels. It was one of these things where…what are you kidding me? And so we had concerns about that. In reality, what happened was, I believe we may have had five or six arrests out of that many people. Now if you have a town of 80,000 people in 12 hours, you're going to have more than five people arrested. So we had five people arrested and all of It was for minor things. Some guy got in a fight. We didn't they didn't sell alcohol at that event, but People would bring it in any way, and consequently, there would be some kind of altercation. But we have arrested one guy twice because he got thrown out and then he went out got a…scalped to ticket from somebody
else and came in and got, this time he got arrested. So he he had two trips, but most of it was
pretty benign, honestly. Are, the one function that happened was it rained for about, I would say out of the 12 hours. It probably rained for 10 hours. So we had a slow drizzle occasion a little bit more, but it wasn't cold. It was kind of a warm drizzly, sometimes more than that rain, which in an odd way tamps down the kind of things that might happen where people get overheated or they become, they get really excited about what's going on. And for example in an arena,
if you did a show like stepping off from the topic here, but if you did New Kids on the Block and you had that many people, they would get excited. They would raise the temperature of the room. You could easily take the arena to over 100 degrees, just by the bodies of the people. Getting that excited and hot. Well, when you have the rain that tamps it down so you don't have as many people getting overheated Or, you know, once you get over 96 degrees your body, you can, that's when people start to have altercations and fights and that sort of thing.So that actually helped except for one problem. They had a row of Porta Johns that were set up about where the goalpost is in the south end. They were pink ones and blue ones. And some guy got into one of them in his enemies, his friends, HA, turned it over while he was in it. And that was an interesting problem for him. They actually found his wallet later, but and it was returned it
to him intact but it was blue because they have that blue water in those Porta Johns was the very few incidents, very few problems. In of course in the day, I had a lot more Guns and Roses.
JG: So anyway,
RP: Did you by chance run into a guy who is selling a mass amount of ponchos?
JG: There were a lot of ponchos. We made arrangements. I have the usher t-shirt here. We had a very short amount of time to make up, get t-shirts or any kind of thing like that. So we were buying we bought thousands of ponchos because that day you had people working eight-hour shifts. We actually opened the doors at I want to say eight in the morning. And so it's going to run til midnight. And actually the overtime would end up going till about two in the morning by the time we got everybody out of the arena and the stadium. So we had people reporting at 06:00 A.M. working to two and then you had two to eight. So we had almost three shifts of people. And so we had to get hundreds and hundreds of t-shirts in a short length of time. And those t-shirts were of the highest quality. You can imagine. I've got several still in there. And they are unbelievably great condition and we had to acquire thousands of ponchos too for the parking crews and the ushers into security and all that sort of thing else. Also, we worked with multiple police agencies, for example the state police, of course, were involved. And you have the local sheriff, you had the local champagne police, you had Urbana police, you had university police, but you also have the Secretary of State Police. And this is the only state
that I know of that has its own the Secretary of State had their own police force, and we had every single Secretary of State Police officer working that event. They all had to have ponchos, you know, they had their own but then they had these ones that were kinda mark, so we had to acquire a lot of gear.
CS: How's the cleanup effort afterwards?
JG: You've seen a picture of the field afterwards.
JG: It's pretty amazing out how bad it looked,
RP: Really?
JG: Yeah. The debris is everywhere. I mean, it looks like a hurricane and I've got
a photograph of it. It's actually from the same angle as this, only with all the afterwards and it's an unbelievable mess. The way this thing was put together was the, this is actually not
centrally pretty good. Underneath, underneath this. This is just tarpaulin that was rolled out to
cover the field. There's nothing under that. There's no plywood or anything. It just covers the field. Underneath this mixed position, which is where they mix the sound and the lights for this show. That mixed position has plywood underneath it, usually, and it was all donated
by Weyerhaeuser Wood Company. And underneath that light tower, underneath that light tower
is plywood. And then it's doubled deep underneath the stage positions itself. This stage was the same stage as used at Live Aid. This is a rotating stage. So you gotta, it's got a
turntable in the center. And on the backside of that, they would be setting
up the next act. So that then when the act that was out front was finished, and each act had 17 minutes, 17.5 minutes, because that's how long they would go between commercials for the
National Network. The commercials were please send money on the backside
they're building, The next act. Stagehands would come out and they put poles and these holes in the stage and they would rotate that stage round. And then boom, you'd have
the next act ready to go. Tear the other one down the backside, reload and away you'd go. So the debris that was on there, this was, probably 14 hours worth of, you know, Coke can bottles or whatever they were selling. Just junk, junk, junk, junk as far as you can see. And about that much water. So it was an interesting mix of stuff. Yeah. Just like
that right there. That's the same photograph. Here you go. That's what
it looked like afterwards. Oddly enough, the only spot where there was any problem was where they dumped the porto John over because some of that blue liquid leaked through and it did a little bit of stain work on the artificial turf underneath there. So yeah, those are
some good photographs. That was somebody working in the show. The only other person I know of that's alive from our group, everybody's dead except for like me and a guy named Michael Enich. Mike Enich.
[End of Recording]
Rory Tovcimak
History 358
4/13/2023
Interview with John Graham
April 1, 2023
Memorial Stadium
Champaign, IL
Interviewers: Rosette Pavkov and Christopher Schwartz
Minutes 22:00 to the end
JG = John Graham
CS = Christopher Schwartz
RP = Rosette Pavkov
JG: I was the front of the house guide and mike was the back of the house guy coordinating That And mike was our stage manager at the assembly hall And so mike was the universities stage manager For this And of course we worked with jam production out of Chicago The most of the design for the this From the operations side Was basically taken from the Bruce Springsteen concert At soldier field And so we had all of those people We imported about 150 Chicago police officers To come down and work with everybody Here because they had worked the Bruce Springsteen show At soldier field and we replicated what they did there and that's what we did here and yep anyway that's it, that was the other thing. It was. Yeah. One of the things that well I don't want to disrupt your question. It was a big concern about how you are going to open the, the doors for 80,000 people to come in its a what's the general admission event I mean everybody wants to get down there and be close, right and by what we did was we kept everybody off university property till midnight the day before. That was the idea. But we knew we would lose that. It's kind of like the Alamo, where you slowly retract your you're going to lose your defense line. So, we knew we would lose some of the parking lots before midnight, there just be so many people coming here that we would have to start parking some people there so we would know. We would slowly but surely lose this. What we did outside the stadium. On the east side and west side we took a 20 foot barricade that are used for street blocking off the street and we've built boxes. Infront of each exit all the way along each side of the stadium. And we filled in those boxes as people would just start to show up. They began showing up probably about 3:00 or 4:00 o'clock in the morning. That morning of the event itself And so as they would come in, we would put them in the box and the first person. And we told everybody we're going to open that set of gate down here and I can't remember what we called it what it was that far gate down on that end and the far gate down on this end. At 8:00 o'clock in the morning or 10:00 o'clock in the morning, I think it was what we said. We announced that. One person was sitting in box #1 that was the first person who got there on each side, and then as the day went on, as the hours continue, more and more people showed up. We then began adding more people into each box. At first it was five people, then it was ten, then it was twenty. Now you can put about 50 or 60 people In a box. And eventually you can actually put in 80 people and what you want to do is you go from people sitting down. OK, this is my space, which is roughly 4 square feet. I'm sitting down, I'm comfortable, I'm eating my sandwich or whatever. You didn't have cell phones back then. So you weren't talking to your friends, but maybe you read a book. And slowly but surely, you're moving those people into where they have to standup. Soo they go from sitting down and now we're standing up. So you're compressing the density of each of these boxes as they go along. Then what we did was when we got to I think at one point we had roughly 20,000 people lined up on each side. In the boxes stacked up. Instead of opening just one. We opened all the gates. And took everybody by surprise because the idea would be if you had all these people lined up and logically you would think all the pressure would be going down the side of the building to go in. Everybody was anticipating you could see their faces. Hey were looking all we're going, OK, it's coming, it's almost time. And then all of a sudden instead of that gate opening and everybody trying to push that direction boom they all go in this way. So instead of having thousands of people trying to. Mash their way into a single point. Suddenly had two or three hundred so there was no pressure and everybody then once they got into the stadium. You can put you can easily put 20,000 people on this field. Umm, easily. And so suddenly there's no pressure. So people are kind of, yeah, some people were running, most people were kind of just. Walking quickly. So there was no rush. There was no, you know, mayhem and that sort of thing. And the idea of that is to set in their minds, in the mind of the audience, hey, this is a calm procedure. Somebody knows what they're doing. So you, you already start to give people the idea that everything's gonna be cool we're all gonna be fine We don’t have a bunch of maniac running this thing it's it makes sense and they feel comfortable and then they feel safe and secure so when they do that then you have Fewer problems as a result with your audience, and that was just one of things that happened at the event. Crowd management and psychology. Well, it's very clever II. I don't think I've ever seen that done before. So yeah we we had all kinds of and that had to be top secret too because of the word got out that everybody would know and I remember having a conference with the Secretary of State and the. And our course our our director at the Assembly Hall Tom Parkinson and myself and there were only three of us and the Secretary of State was like man, this is going to you're going to get people killed. It's going to be a riot. Noo, here's the deal. We explained to him what was happening and then after that he said, man, you guys, you got it together. And because other than that he was very nervous and all of a sudden he was calm. But I said you can't tell anyone, you can't even tell your kids because if word gets out, none of this works. So we had very. Even those people, even working the event, knew that they were all told that about the last two minutes, it was the ultimate need to know deal.
RP: So anyway, could you speak to the composition of like students in attendance of versus like general public?
JG: Interesting question. We we used to wonder about that about 85% of the tickets were sold within five counties around Champaign County. So Champaign County and the surrounding 5 counties, you have people that did come from Iowa and Missouri and other states, but most of the tickets were sold in this area. It was during the school year. It wasn't during, you know, some holiday break or anything like that. So I think there probably were some portion of students. I think there was actually a student ticket price as I recall, but I don't know what how many of those were actually sold. Umm, and it would have been hard to train. The tickets weren't you know at the time. They were like 1819 bucks, I think which back then was be like maybe today would be 100, I don't know but I think the ticket, the student there was a student ticket price and it was less. Somebody somewhere probably has what that is, but I don't know how many we sold to the students.
RP: Is there anything else you'd like to add today or no?
JG: I think that's all I have. Yes, Sir.
CS: Just one last question. How long do you think it took to clean up? Like you estimate how long it took you guys to clean up the whole thing?
JG: It was, uh if we go from. The end of the show which is actually close to 1:00 o'clock in the morning. And I don't remember driving home. I was so tired. I was exhausted. I believe we had. Everything was out the stage. It was reset ready for football practice by Wednesday or Thursday, so it was probably about 3 1/2 days. Four days. But most of the cleanup of course started immediately. When I was in Texas, we ran our football too. So you you start cleaning up immediately because. You worry about vermin, you don't want rats and all the other things taking over. If you leave it out very long, you'll have a whole other population out there that you don't want. But you have to get that cleaned up quickly. So we had most of the trash probably was picked up by noon the next day. But because you gotta get that out of the way just to, you gotta undo and peel off the tarp off the field. And we had to get all that stuff out of the way. So yeah, it probably was pretty not too bad a shape by. There was a lot of dumpsters, I know that. Stuff.
RP: Great. Well, thank you so much for your time and coming out.
[End of Recording]