The open floor space was ringed by balcony seating. Under the balcony were rising seating. I remember feeling it was like an intimate college field house sized venue.
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I never sat beneath the balcony overhang because of who-knows-what coming down on you.
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Before 1973 the stage was on the side, the north side to be precise. All the bands had to walk through the crowd to climb the steps to the stage. After that, the stage was set up on the west end.
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In later years, the famed “Dark Star” banner was on the north side of the house, above the old stage configuration.
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I still miss Winterland. The painting on the floor before the show. The black lights. The giant mirror ball. The little shop upstairs. Willie the security guard who used to hassle anyone he had never seen before about puffing and drinking in line before the show. The Church nearby where we used to go and watch the Gospel before the show. Playing Frisbee across Geary Avenue with Sunshine. The giant Skull and Roses and Lick-it on both sides of the stage. The wood partitions that you could sit on and pound to get bands to come back out for encores.
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I'll never forget the lobby and walking up the stairs to the balcony, the smokey haze of pot and the mirror ball and screen showing past concerts at the place.
We always had a game plan at Winterland. With mostly general admission always being the policy, we'd get in line stupid early, like 2pm, and get the front row balcony seats in the middle. There was a railing we'd use to roll joints and eat those famous oversized chocolate chip cookies. Those seats produced the best acoustics I always thought.
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We used to go to the low center balcony. You’d see the same people at nearly every show. When you ‘had’ you shared… Stuff used to get passed down the row, and you never could be sure what it was. I got a ‘dusted’ joint once and stopped using anything that I didn’t bring, but the spirit of sharing was the rule of the day.
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For most shows we would stand up near the front of the stage. You would always start by sitting down, then it got more and more crowded, then you stood up, then it got really crowded and it was hard to move. It was always stuffy and hot and smoky. One night I actually passed out/fainted for a few seconds. I made it out of the crowd, to a water fountain, splashed some water on me, and actually found it back to my friends up in front, which was not an easy task - people wouldn't want folks moving in front of them.
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Besides waiting in line, my two other favorite places to hang:
In the back on the stage left side (where the stage was most of the time) there was a little tunnel/ramp where equipment was loaded in. When things got hot, it was a great place to cool down, since they usually had a door from the outside propped open. A nice breeze would flow through there. If you continued on towards back stage there was also a seldom used restroom.
The other place was in the balcony right behind the stage. Lousy seats for seeing, because of the scrim and the low catwalk, but the sound was ok and you had a good view of the band on stage. They usually wouldn’t let people go back there, except for Dead shows. One night, Jerry was pretty sick. He kept going behind his amp stack to ralph on the floor and then go out front and start playing again. A guy would come over with a towel and clean up the yack. A little while later Jerry would repeat the process. I watched this happen, maybe 3 or 4 times. The cool thing was Jerry always did it at the appropriate times when he didn’t need to be in the mix. The way the guy with the towel would show up each time, it was almost like it was rehearsed. I even remember they were playing “Casey Jones” at the time.
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There would always be a few of those green glow sticks being thrown around the audience.
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That place was always fun, but always hot and stuffy! I recall toward the end of some shows we could feel a cool breeze briefly, they must have had some HVAC system kick in. One show we sat in the very back, top row, it was incredibly smoky and hot up there.
What was cool is they had a big screen, I remember it being green, and they would shows acts that had played there before show time. I guess every act was filmed. So you could watch part of a concert while waiting. Always green video though (or maybe it was the questionable weed we had back then made it look green).
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Roadrunner cartoons were played on the video screen in addition to concert footage.
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There was a bar upstairs that had a TV showing the stage. I also recall a gift shop of some sort, perhaps in the hallway upstairs, I remember posters being sold.
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Holes in the wall, day glow painted murals, SAWDUST on the floor. Long steep stairs to the men's restroom.
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Yeah Winterland was a dump, and it had an anything-goes atmosphere (OK I only bought acid once from a stranger at a Montrose show - you remember the guys hanging around near the bathrooms "acid for sale, acid, acid..."). But for $6.00 or so, where else could you see so many great acts in one night?!
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The bathrooms were terrible, the men’s urinals were the trough kind, and would have a few inches of sawdust on the bottom of the troughs. Toward the end of the evening the bathrooms would smell terrible. Winterland was also the first time I remembered woman using the men’s room because of the long lines to the women’s bathrooms.
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Sometimes security was questionable - big guys patting down woman entering the hall. I recall altercations between the boyfriends of women being aggressively patted down and the security guys.
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I seem to remember turnstiles that you had to go through. I know a SF cop who used to do security at Bill Graham shows and he said Graham had people reset or remove and replace the counters to the turnstiles to under report the attendance - supposedly to make more money - payment apparently was based on attendance figures.
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My friend was trying to find the stairs to the balcony and accidentally opened a door to the outside. A security guard thought he was trying to let people in. My friend lipped off to the guy and the guard decked him and threw him out on the street.
Bill Graham was always out front or in the lobby before shows, so we went up to him, explained what happened. Uncle Bobo went out front, ran a block and a half down the street to get my friend and let him back in.
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Toward the end, chunks of ceiling plaster were starting to come down in the arena, one of the reasons Bill Graham shut it down. He didn’t want to spend the money to bring it up to code.
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One show I was standing next to a pillar in the upper right (facing stage) balcony. About mid way through the show a piece of ceiling fell and landed on my head. Fortunately, it was a small light weight chunk. I looked up and saw a rat about the size of my foot scurrying around the hole. The place was not one of the best venues I've been to, but it was like coming home every time I went there.
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I seem to remember reading about a chunk just missing David Crosby, who was standing with Bill Graham during a Grateful Dead sound check.
Thrasher's Wheat - A Neil Young Archives