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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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."
- For a complete list of Family Dog shows (including FDGH), see here
- For the previous entry (July 18-20, 1969 w/Sir Douglas Quintet) see here
- For a summary and the link to the most recent entries in this series, see here
In July, the Family Dog began a fairly regular series of Tuesday night concerts. There were a number of sound reasons for this. For one thing, there were relatively few rock nightclubs in the Bay Area at this time, at least ones that welcomed hippies and featured original rock music (as opposed to covering hits). Certainly there were none beyond Golden Gate Park, or in nearby Daly City. So on a Tuesday night, the Family Dog would have had no competitors.
For another, the Family Dog initiated a series of community meetings called "The Commons," generally held on Tuesday nights. The Commons was intended as a gathering place for activists, artists, musicians and generally interested people, trying to find ways to better the world. At least in Summer '69, the meetings of The Commons held at the Family Dog had an influence on events like the Wild West Festival and other ongoing cultural issues, so they were relatively substantial. Also, I'm fairly sure that the idea was that people would attend meetings of The Commons and then go to the Tuesday night show. It wasn't a bad plan, although I'm not sure how well it worked in practice financially.
Chet Helms has had an unfair reputation as a poor businessman. Helms was actually quite innovative and forward looking, but he was undercapitalized and took too many risks. In 1967, it had worked just fine with the Avalon Ballroom, but he never managed to repeat the equation. Helms is always compared to Bill Graham, who was an excellent businessman, so saying that Helms was a worse business operator than Graham has little meaning--most people were.
Graham did more than any other single promoter to use the artistic and cultural importance of 60s rock music to make live rock concerts a financially lucrative proposition. Graham made many people rich by doing so, including himself. At the beginning of the Fillmore in 1966, however, it was Chet Helms who actually grasped the cultural connection between the music, the audience and the environment it was presented in. By 1969, that had been commoditized by Graham and others. With the Family Dog on The Great Highway, however, Helms recognized--in the day, it would have been said that he "grokked" it--that many hippies wanted more than to just grow their hair long and dance to interesting bands. From that point of view, using the Dog as a place to host "The Commons" was a pre-natal form of social media. Yet Helms couldn't quite monetize it enough to sustain it, exactly what happened with earlier forms of social media as well (who recalls MySpace, much less Friendster?).
The Tuesday night shows at the Family Dog tended not to favor louder rock bands. Two Berkeley acts, the comedy duo Congress Of Wonders and the folkie Cleanliness and Godliness Skiffle Band became the first acts to play the Dog twice. Congress Of Wonders had been booked on the second weekend (June 20, opening for The Sons), and the CGSB had opened the weekend of July 4 (for Big Mama Thornton and The Flying Burrito Brothers).
The Cleanliness and Godliness Skiffle Band had formed out of the same community of musicians that had given rise to Country Joe and The Fish. Initially, the CGSB did actually play skiffle music, which was a sort of New Orleans Jug Band style. By 1969, they were playing a kind of swinging country rock, no longer acoustic but not fully electrified either. They released one album in 1968 on Vanguard, The Cleanliness And Godliness Skiffle Band's Greatest Hits (back when such a title for a debut album was still clever). The CGSB had been playing around Berkeley since 1966, but they hadn't gotten beyond local success. They would fade away in early 1970.
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| Congress Of Wonders' debut album Revolting, released on Fantasy Records in 1970 |
Congress of Wonders were a comedy trio from Berkeley, initially from the UC Berkeley drama department and later part of Berkeley’s Open Theater on College Avenue, a prime spot for what were called “Happenings” (now ‘Performance Art’). The group had performed at the Avalon and other rock venues.
Ultimately a duo, Karl Truckload (Howard Kerr) and Winslow Thrill (Richard Rollins) created two Congress of Wonders albums on Fantasy Records (Revolting and Sophomoric). Their pieces “Pigeon Park” and “Star Trip”, although charmingly dated now, were staples of San Francisco underground radio at the time ("Pigeon Park" is from their 1970 debut album Revolting). The duo was one of a number of comedy troupes to take advantage of the recording studio, overdubbing voices and sound effects in stereo, to enhance the comedy.
The weekend booking featured three pretty interesting bands. Unfortunately, they are probably more interesting in retrospect than they would have seemed to rock fans at the time. I doubt that these shows were well attended, although I'll bet the music was really good.
Charlie Musselwhite had been born in Mississippi and moved to Memphis, and then ultimately to Chicago. He was one of a small number of white musicians in Chicago (including Nick Gravenites, Paul Butterfield, Mike Bloomfield, Elvin Bishop and a few others) who had stumbled onto the blues scene by themselves. A Chicago club regular, Musselwhite eventually recorded an album for Vanguard in 1967 called Stand Back, which started to receive airplay on San Francisco’s new underground FM station, KMPX-fm. Friendly with the Chicago crowd who had moved to San Francisco, his band was offered a month of work in San Francisco in mid-1967, so Musselwhite took a month’s leave from his day job and stayed for a couple of decades.
However, the enduring mystery of this weekend's booking at the Family Dog was Zoot Money. Organist George Bruno Money, called 'Zoot' in honor of saxophonist Zoot Sims, had led one of England's top R&B bands in the mid-60s, Zoot Money's Big Roll Band. When psychedelia hit, Zoot and lead guitarist Andy Somers dropped the horn section and made some amazing psychedelic rock as Dantalian's Chariot. However, the Chariot never found an audience, and by Spring 1968 Money had ended up in Los Angeles, joining Eric Burdon and The (New) Animals, effectively taking over as musical director from guitarist Vic Briggs. Somers, meanwhile, joined the Soft Machine for an American tour, but was promptly fired after six weeks when bassist Kevin Ayers decreed him "too jazzy." When Briggs left the Animals, Money brought in his pal Somers, and they played in the Animals until that group's demise in late 1968.
The activities of Eric Burdon and his former Animals in the year 1969 are somewhat vague. Eric Burdon briefly attended film school (he didn't like doing his assigned work), did a brief tour in support of a Best Of album with an unknown backing group (probably Blues Image) and finally joined the group War by July. Guitarist Somers, meanwhile, also stayed in Los Angeles, getting a degree at Cal State Northridge and marrying a Californian, but his biography (under his better known name Andy Summers, which he used in The Police) remains very vague about this year. Zoot Money also remained in Southern California and looked into being an actor, an alternative career that he has continued to this day.
Mysteriously, however, Zoot Money headlined a weekend at the Family Dog. Who was in the group? What kind of music did they play? Was this part of a project that got stalled, or just a creative lark? The newspaper article above, from the San Francisco Chronicle Entertainment section from Saturday, July 26, 1969, offers the only information I have ever found about this venture, and it's not much. It says
The Zoot Money Band, a British "classical jazz-rock" group, is making its first appearance this weekend at the Family Dog on the Great Highway
So, from knowing nothing, we now know that
they considered themselves a "classical jazz-rock group." That's it. At
one point, I had considered the idea that the Zoot Money group was some
sort of stealth Eric Burdon performance, but the timeline was all wrong,
as Burdon was already working with War. I wonder who else was in the
group? I have to think Andy Somers was a likely candidate, since he was
in Southern California, but it still poses a lot of questions.
I know of one other Zoot Money show in California during this period, at
a club called The Comic Strip in Santa Monica (on 120 Ocean Front),
from June 6-8. This only adds to the peculiarity--a weekend in a tiny
Santa Monica club, then a headlined weekend in San Francisco 5 weeks
later, then nothing? Zoot Money did return to England, where he has
continued to have a successful career as a musician, bandleader and
actor that continues to this day, but his brief sojourn as a Californian
band leader remains a cipher. Anyone with helpful information or
entertaining speculation is encouraged to Comment or email me (as a footnote, I posted about this many years ago, but still have heard nothing more).
For the next entry in the series (August 1 '69 Grateful Dead-canceled), see here
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