REMEMBER THE ‘60s? : THE MUSIC : BILL GRAHAM PRESENTS: My Life Inside Rock and Out, <i> By Bill Graham and Robert Greenfield (Doubleday: $24; 568 pp.)</i>

When a Bell Jet Ranger helicopter crashed into a PG&E; tower in the midst of a howling storm last year, it caused a momentary brown-out at the Huey Lewis and the News concert up the road at the Concord Pavilion in Marin County. But the lights soon went back on and the concert proceeded without anyone realizing that Bill Graham, the man who had promoted this and thousands of other mass rock concerts over the past quarter of a century, had died. A week later more than half a million people turned up at a funeral happening in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, although nobody could be sure if they were there in tribute to the man who had transformed rock or just to hear the big-name bands.

It was typical of so many Bill Graham Presents spectaculars. Did the fans come for the scene or the music, for Amnesty International or U-2, for the Stones or for sex? Probably for all of those and for dozens of other reasons as well.

“It was the height of the hippie world, wasn’t it,” Keith Richards recalls in “Bill Graham Presents,” a vivid autobiography/oral history masterfully edited and co-written by Robert Greenfield. The legendary Rolling Stones front man is remembering a Graham-arranged concert of the Rolling Stones at the Oakland Auditorium “where the promoter had a bigger personality in the building than anybody else who was on the show. It was like, ‘BACKSTAGE--Starring Bill Graham !’ I remember a poster of Bill Graham up in the dressing room. I want to look at Bill Graham in my dressing room? We threw food at it. We trashed the dressing room. At the time, the deal was, ‘Fine. We won’t work for him again.’ ”

But work for him again they did--he would manage their world tour--because, as most witnesses in this book attest, he was simply better than anyone else at balancing the needs of the fan, the artist and the accountants in the burgeoning business of rock. And he was better because he was complex and his neuroses, including guilt about making all this money, seemed to mirror that of the stars he promoted. Like all other “leaders” of that era, Graham helped shape his time but was more just a key part of its fabric, a cog in a Day-Glo, feather-decorated wheel of many colors. He concedes in scene after scene that he was never in control, but was instead dragged along by the events of a chaotic era.

Who could control such action? The basic appeal was one of cultural, and occasionally political, anarchy. Both stars and fans wallowed in that spirit, which was quite often comic and makes for a terrific read.

Remember when the Acid Test moved to the Trips Festival at Longshoreman’s Hall at Fisherman’s Wharf? Jerry Garcia does: “Here’s this guy (Graham) running around with a clip board . . . in the midst of total insanity. I mean, total, wall-to-wall, gonzo lunacy. Everybody in the place is high but Bill.”

Graham stayed on more or less good terms with that band of musicians, groupies, freaks and voyeurs that came to encompass at least three distinct generations around the world. Many are represented here in their own words, words that do not seem to have been heavily edited to Graham’s benefit: Peter Coyote, Peter Gabriel, Bob Geldof, Graham Nash, Ken Kesey, Carlos Santana.

Their analysis seems clearer here than it must have been back then, but there’s enough of the zany truth to make for a carefully woven and remarkably candid collection of memories about the maven of rock.

And what an unlikely maven. He came not in rebellion from suburbia, but from Hitler’s Germany, a Jew just barely escaping the concentration camps that took the lives of his mother and sisters. Then it was growing up in the Bronx, DeWitt Clinton High School at the end of the Grand Concourse, and of course jobs in the Catskills. There he learned the business of business, running craps games in a bungalow near the Concord Hotel.

Forget rock and roll for a minute; the collection of vignettes by headwaiters, busboys, nymphomaniacs and assorted other hustlers who worked the Concord with Bill is alone worth the price of the book. Life for Bill, as opposed to many of his rock clients, had clicked long before the ‘60s. When Grace Slick of the Jefferson Airplane says, “He was one of us and one of them,” she is referring to generational as well as occupational distinctions.

Bill Graham was born again as a rock promoter at a benefit for R. G. Davis’ San Francisco Mime Troupe. Graham was the somewhat square business manager of the troupe, which put on politically radical and ribald performances in public parks and squares. For the emigre from New York show-biz, the Mime Troupe was simply a hot act, and he was full of ideas for making it more commercial. Davis and most of the troupe, which lived by passing the hat, resisted Graham’s proposals as a sellout.

But then came the day when the police began cracking down on the Mime Troupe in earnest, demanding permits and the like, which the various city fathers were not about to grant. The Mime Troupe needed support for legal defense, and Davis and Graham agreed that a benefit concert was in order.

What they did not expect was that the show, featuring the Jefferson Airplane and other local groups, would be an enormous commercial hit, with the line of people waiting to get in snaking around several blocks. That night (and here I am the oral-history source) Graham concluded: “ This is the business of the future.”

He then went out and rented the Fillmore Auditorium, started signing up local bands and set the pattern for the rock scene of ensuing decades. In subsequent years, Graham booked the hottest groups, bringing the Beatles to the San Francisco Cow Palace and leading the Rolling Stones on a world tour.

The inside stories of all those concerts and tours are told here in a way that is only possible in a collection of first-person memories. How else can you authenticate the intimate revelations about sex, drugs and rock and roll? How else could you get them past the libel lawyer, except that here people are telling stories about themselves?

And to their credit, Graham and co-author Greenfield allow for this story to be told from many varied and contradictory vantage points. What is most honest about this book is the recognition that Graham was a largely accidental figure, befuddled as often as aware of what was really going on, never quite in sync with its throbbing pulse of generational rebellion.

In 1965, when Graham launched the Fillmore, he was already 34, and most of his audience considered themselves lucky if they could pass for 21. He determinedly put himself out there, but as the millions who saw him get uptight about people standing on the chairs or some other infraction of his rules can attest, he was never a perfect fit.

He came to like much of the new music, but he still preferred the salsa he first heard during his Bronx youth. He raised money for many causes, ranging from Soviet Jewry to the homeless, yet he profoundly distrusted political commitment. He professed to love people but bruised quite a few close to him, and he never managed a well-grounded personal relationship. He claimed money meant little and used a paper clip instead of a wallet, yet he shaved commissions with the toughest of them and seemed to need millions in secret bank accounts to feel secure. He frequently said out loud that he was happy, but got hooked on anti-depressants and could never obtain the sound, unassisted sleep of the innocent.

In another way, though, Graham was very much like the era he helped define: inherently restless, unfocused and unsatisfied. He ended the way he began, a displaced person who found much opportunity but never secure refuge in the land of the free. This was a guy who knew his rights, who shouted his rights at army sergeants, rock managers and the San Francisco Police. No one was taking his rights from him--but he wasn’t always quite sure what to do with them.

What made him complicated was that he was never sure himself if he put in those 20-hour-days and seven-day weeks for love or for money. People without money were schleppers, and Bill Graham did not scratch his way up from Germany through the Bronx to end up a schlepper. But the Mime Troupe and the madcap procession of artists who followed got to him with the insistence that love of something had to be part of what we call success. If the ‘60s meant anything for Graham, it is that the decade’s fearful preoccupation with selling out complicated his values. Money as a route to power remained central, but art and morality had to be factored in there somehow. Certainly his was not the relentless integrity of the Mime Troupe, but hell--it was damn near miraculous for the king of a wildly sleazy industry.