"If I hadn't done it, someone else would have. …once we were going to do it, we wanted to do it right. …"

By the early 70's rock bands were burned out from the road. Performers wanted to travel less and make money faster.

Bill Graham's Day on the Green concerts were the first prototypes of "festival" shows - multi performer sets in stadium settings. Staged on the lawn of the Oakland Coliseum, the Day on the Green concerts were a summer series started in 1973 that continued until shortly after Graham's death in 1991.

"That was why I came up with the name "Day on the Green". I wanted to make these events special. I wanted to create giant outdoor sets so the bands would be going into a space that was like a theater piece."