March 20-22, 1970 Family Dog on The Great Highway, 660 Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Big Brother and The Holding Company/Kaleidoscope/Devil's Kitchen [FDGH '70 XI]

The Family Dog on The Great Highway, at 660 Great Highway, ca. 1969

The Family Dog on The Great Highway, 660 Great Highway, San Francisco, CA
The Family Dog was a foundation stone in the rise of San Francisco rock, and it was in operation in various forms from Fall 1965 through the Summer of 1970. For sound historical reasons, most of the focus on the Family Dog has been on the original 4-person collective who organized the first San Francisco Dance Concerts in late 1965, and on their successor Chet Helms. Helms took over the Family Dog in early 1966, and after a brief partnership with Bill Graham at the Fillmore, promoted memorable concerts at the Avalon Ballroom from Spring 1966 through December 1968. The posters, music and foggy memories of the Avalon are what made the Family Dog a legendary 60s rock icon.

In the Summer of 1969, however, with San Francisco as one of the fulcrums of the rock music explosion, Chet Helms opened another venue. The Family Dog on The Great Highway, at 660 Great Highway, on the Western edge of San Francisco, was only open for 14 months and was not a success. Yet numerous interesting bands played there, and remarkable events took place, and they are only documented in a scattered form. This series of posts will undertake a systematic review of every musical event at the Family Dog on The Great Highway. In general, each post will represent a week of musical events at the venue, although that may vary slightly depending on the bookings.

If anyone has memories, reflections, insights, corrections or flashbacks about shows at the Family Dog on the Great Highway, please post them in the Comments.

660 Great Highway in San Francisco in 1967, when it was the ModelCar Raceway, a slot car track

The Edgewater Ballroom, 660 Great Highway, San Francisco, CA
As early as 1913, there were rides and concessions at Ocean Beach in San Francisco, near the Richmond District. By 1926, they had been consolidated as Playland-At-The-Beach. The Ocean Beach area included attractions such as the Sutro Baths and the Cliff House. The San Francisco Zoo was just south of Playland, having opened in the 1930s. One of the attractions at Playland was a restaurant called Topsy's Roost. The restaurant had closed in 1930, and the room became the Edgewater Ballroom. The Ballroom eventually closed, and Playland went into decline when its owner died in 1958. By the 1960s, the former Edgewater was a slot car raceway. In early 1969, Chet Helms took over the lease of the old Edgewater.

One of the only photos of the interior of the Family Dog on The Great Highway (from a Stephen Gaskin "Monday Night Class" ca. October 1969)

The Family Dog On The Great Highway
The Great Highway was a four-lane road that ran along the Western edge of San Francisco, right next to Ocean Beach. Downtown San Francisco faced the Bay, but beyond Golden Gate Park was the Pacific Ocean. The aptly named Ocean Beach is dramatic and beautiful, but it is mostly windy and foggy. Much of the West Coast of San Francisco is not even a beach, but rocky cliffs. There are no roads in San Francisco West of the Great Highway, so "660 Great Highway" was ample for directions (for reference, it is near the intersection of Balboa Street and 48th Avenue). The tag-line "Edge Of The Western World" was not an exaggeration, at least in American terms.

The Family Dog on The Great Highway was smaller than the Bill Graham's old Fillmore Auditorium. It could hold up to 1500, but the official capacity was probably closer to 1000. Unlike the comparatively centrally located Fillmore West, the FDGH was far from downtown, far from the Peninsula suburbs, and not particularly easy to get to from the freeway. For East Bay or Marin residents, the Great Highway was a formidable trip. The little ballroom was very appealing, but if you didn't live way out in the Avenues, you had to drive. As a result, FDGH didn't get a huge number of casual drop-ins, and that didn't help its fortunes. Most of the locals referred to the venue as "Playland."

The Family Dog In 1969
Chet Helms had opened the Family Dog at 660 Great Highway to much fanfare on June 13, 1969, with a packed house seeing the Jefferson Airplane and The Charlatans. One of the goals was that the Dog would feature mostly San Francisco bands and a variety of smaller community events and groups. Since so many San Francisco bands were successful, and had record contracts, this didn't confine the venue to obscurity. A lot of great bands played the Family Dog in 1969, but the distant location and the gravitational pull of major rock events hosted elsewhere in the Bay Area kept the Family Dog isolated. We know only the most fragmentary bits about music played, events and audiences throughout the year.  Despite the half-year of struggle, Helms had kept the Family Dog on The Great Highway afloat. He had entered the new year of 1970 with a new plan.

• For a complete list of Family Dog shows (including FDGH), see here
• For the previous entry (March 18, 1970 Hot Tuna/New Riders benefit) see here
  
• For a summary and the link to the most recent entries in this series, see here
  

The San Francisco Good Times ad (March 19) for the March 20-22 weekend at the Family Dog is somewhat cryptical, a sign that they were appealing to a narrow audience

March 20-22, 1970 Family Dog on The Great Highway, 660 Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Big Brother and The Holding Company/Kaleidoscope/Devil's Kitchen (Friday-Sunday)
No band was more synonymous with Chet Helms and the Family Dog than Big Brother and The Holding Company. Back in the Fall of '65, Helms would host jam sessions in the basement of a big boarding house at 1090 Page Street. Some bands formed out of the jams, and a list of potential names was made up. Chet took two of the most promising--"Big Brother" and "The Holding Company"--and combined them for the group he would manage. A few months later, Helms would recruit fellow Texan Janis Joplin to be the lead singer, and the band rocketed to stardom.

Helms and Big Brother had parted ways--amicably--in the Fall of 1966, but Big Brother had continued to play the Avalon Ballroom right up until the end. Indeed, Big Brother had played the last Family Dog show at the Avalon on December 1, 1968. After that, Janis had left the group, bound for stardom, and Big Brother disintegrated. Guitarist Sam Andrew had gone on tour with Janis, fellow guitarist James Gurley had gone to the desert, and Peter Albin (bass) and Dave Getz (drums) had gone on a Spring tour with Country Joe and The Fish.

By Fall 1969, however, Big Brother's members were ready to reconstruct the band. The original quartet played the Family Dog benefit at the Fillmore West on November 19, 1969, and then a few more low-key gigs. In February of 1970, they had headlined a weekend at the Family Dog on The Great Highway. By this time, guitarist David Schallock had been added to the group. The band had three guitarists, and--rather confusingly--Gurley had temporarily switched to bass, with Peter Albin moving to guitar. Producer Nick Gravenites sometimes sang with the band, too.

We have no information about either the February or March Big Brother shows. Were they well attended? What songs did they play? Big Brother and The Holding Company had started recording in Hollywood and San Francisco with Nick Gravenites, and Columbia would release the underrated Be A Brother around July of 1970. It's reasonable to assume that they may have done some of that material, but all that is just a guess.

Kaleidoscope were from Los Angeles, and they were decades ahead of their time. They pretty much invented World Music, and pretty much no one was ready for it. In February, 1970 the band had released their fourth album on Epic, Bernice. On the album, the band's front line was guitarist/multi-instrumentalist David Lindley, multi-instrumentalist Solomon Feldthouse and organist/multi-instrumentalist Chester Crill, with too much instrument-switching to describe here. Paul Lagos was the drummer and Stuart Brotman played bass. Anyone who ever got to see the band live was lucky.

Kaleidoscope had been regulars at the Avalon, but were largely only popular with musicians (most famously Jimmy Page). Rock music fans were simply not yet ready for what Kaleidoscope could do. In 1969, Kaleidoscope had already played the Family Dog on two separate weekends (June 27-29 and October 3-5), and they returned for a final go-round. By the time of these shows, Kaleidoscope was falling apart and there had been several personnel changes. 

Solomon Feldthouse had left during the recording of Bernice, replaced by singer Jeff Kaplan (it's not clear how much Kaplan actually sang on the album). Right before the Family Dog shows, Chester Crill left the band, too (according to Crill, both were fired by David Lindley). Shortly afterwards, David Lindley left as well. It's not even certain if Lindley played the Family Dog shows. Lindley (the de facto leader by this time) told the remaining members that they were free to use the name, so there were a few Kaleidoscope dates after this, but they too had ground to a halt by April. The lineup for the Family Dog shows was probably

David Lindley-guitar, various instruments
Paul Lagos-drums
Ron Johnson-bass
Jeff Kaplan-vocals, piano
Richard Aplan -reeds, flute

As the decades have passed, the music world has caught up with Kaleidoscope, and save for the primitive recording techniques, their music sounds contemporary now. The band has had a few casual reunions over the years. 

Devil's Kitchen was a bluesy four-piece band from Carbondale, IL, that had relocated to San Francisco in late Summer 1969. For much of the Fall of 69, they had been kind of a "house band" at the Family Dog on The Great Highway. The group ultimately had little to show for it, however, and three of the four members returned to Illinois. Guitarist Robbie Stokes did stick around and remained part of the Bay Area music scene for the next dozen years.

Wolfgang's Vault has a tape of Devil's Kitchen from Saturday night (March 21, 1970) as well as Sunday night (March 22), and they were an enjoyable band. This seems to have been one of their last shows in the Bay Area, as far as I can tell. It is a peculiar curiosity that two tapes of the opening act have survived, in Bill Graham's archive of all places, with no trace of the headliner's tapes from those nights. Now, it's possible that some tapes were lost in the 1985 BGP fire, but it's strange that the Devil's Kitchen tapes even ended up in Wolfgang's Vault at all. Still, it's a minor but typical tale of the Family Dog on The Great Highway, as the oddest fragments of history survive, and we are left to try and piece together the whole from the potsherds.

For a link to the next post in the series (March 27-29, 1970-Youngbloods) see here