EVERYONE KNOWS THAT corporate music is big business these days. The industry seems to be more about lawsuits, copyrights, image, marketing, and market share than it is about anything remotely related to art. But it wasn't always this way. Really, it wasn't.

Once upon a long time ago, there were two giants in the local music biz. One was Bill Graham, who started off as business manager for the Mime Troupe. By the mid-1960s, he'd figured out that there was real money to be made promoting concerts, and when he died in a helicopter crash, in 1991, he was rich and famous.

Graham was often a pain in the ass, but he always had a real love for music and musicians, and he cared about the community. When his company, Bill Graham Presents (BGP), was sold to Clear Channel, the evil corporate conglomerate, it was a real tragedy.

The other giant was Chet Helms.

Born in 1942 in Santa Maria, he grew up in Austin, Texas, moved to San Francisco in 1962, and – as the child of a mixed-race marriage – began doing benefits for the civil rights movement. Within a few years, Helms and Graham were producing concerts on alternating weekends at the Fillmore.

Helms was the authentic hippie promoter, the guy who cared more about the music and the people than about the money he could make. He did free shows. When he charged money, he let a lot of folks in for free. He loved everyone, and everyone loved him. If you could ever claim that anyone "produced" the Summer of Love, in 1967, it would have been Chet Helms.

In the end, he was never going to compete with Bill Graham, and by the 1970s he was out of the concert business altogether.

Helms died June 25, at age 62. As Bruce B. Brugmann reports, he was a San Francisco original, and he will be missed.

And now, in 2005, as Kimberly Chun and I report, New Times Newspapers, which owns our competitor, SF Weekly, has cut a deal with Clear Channel for the naming rights to the Warfield Theatre that includes an advertising contract that effectively cuts the Bay Guardian, and other competitors, completely out of the BGP concert advertising money.

It's the sort of thing you expect from big out-of-town corporations. Bill Graham and Chet Helms would never have let it happen.

Tim Redmond