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| A cryptical listing in the September 4, 1970 Berkeley Barb for a rock dance at the Checkmate Inn in East Palo Alto. The listing says "2am-?" Was this some kind of all-nighter? |
Recently I have been focusing my research on rock shows in the Bay Area in the early 1970s, focusing particularly on the lower tiers. With patience, I have done good research on the Matrix, the Keystone Berkeley, the Long Branch and a few other clubs. Yet I consistently come across tantalizing details of other venues, different untold stories and an insight into the unexplained. Without further information, I am often stuck with just the hint, not anything like the actual story.
[update 18 February 2023: thanks to fellow scholar David Kramer-Smyth, I have a pretty good idea of the story of The Checkmate Inn. See below]
My research method focuses on finding dates and venues where bands have performed, and constructing a narrative based on available sources. It sounds simple, but it reaps many benefits. Rather than assume what the motives and goals of different bands or promoters might be, I can let the evidence of actual performances tell me what is desired and what has resulted. The limits of this method, ultimately, are constrained by the limits of my available sources. From the 1960s and '70s, we don't always have that much evidence, so it can be hard to figure out the story. Not all old sources have been digitized, and in many cases a lot of shows were not advertised in any paper. If no local flyers were preserved, or there aren't other sources we can be left with very little.
Lost Horizons, 1970
The Lost Horizons posts are a series of posts that I can't complete. In
some cases I wish someone else would write the post, in other cases I'm
hoping someone else has already written it, and in some others I am
hoping for more information so I can try and take them on. There's no
real connection between any of these topics, save for the device that
there was a live performance in 1970 that intrigued my interest. My
blogs have an explicitly rock and roll orientation, but my
methodological approach veers off in different directions. Fernand Braudel, Reynar Banham, Marcy (emptywheel) Wheeler--it's
still rock and
roll to me. I'm hoping that the magic of the Internet and eternal
Comment Threads will yield up information hitherto unknown to me. If you
have any insights, corrections or entertaining speculation, please
Comment.
The Berkeley Barb
The Berkeley Barb had been founded by Max Scherr in 1965. The weekly paper made a point of documenting the local counterculture. The readership was distinct from anyone subscribing to the local daily papers (the San Fransisco Chronicle or Examiner, the Oakland Tribune or the Berkeley Gazette). The Barb reported on protests, pot busts, sexual freedom and local rock shows. The ads were for organic foods, head shops or local crafts. The Barb was an alternative paper for an alternative audience. It was sold by hippies to other hippies for a dime or a quarter. I don't know if the Berkeley Barb was the first such "underground" paper, but it was one of them, and it was a model for such papers all over the country.
By 1970, the Barb was being read all over the Bay Area. I don't know the exact details, but I believe that even outside of Berkeley the paper was available in Head Shops, espresso joints and other hip places throughout the Bay Area. At the back of every issue of the Barb was "Scenedrome," a summary of upcoming and ongoing events in the next week that might be of interest to its readers. While that would always include shows at Fillmore West, for example, it also included performers at Telegraph Avenue coffee shops, foreign movies, political meetings, self-help groups and all sorts of other gatherings. Getting listed in Scenedrome any week was free--someone just had to call the Barb by Tuesday at noon. So for hippie events that were on a shoestring, or just free, calling the Scenedrome was the cheapest way to get publicity.
While Berkeley events had always been posted in Scenedrome every week since 1965, by 1970 it was plain that the rest of the Bay Area was paying attention as well. The Friday and Saturday listings in Scenedrome went well beyond Berkeley, a clear indicator that the Barb had a broader readership beyond central Berkeley. So we get tantalizing hints of what was going on around the Bay Area, without really knowing exactly what it was. Most of my notices below come from little more than the barest of listings in the appropriate issue of the Berkeley Barb, with occasional supplements from other sources.
September 4, 1970 Checkmate Inn, Nairobi Shopping Center, East Palo Alto Dance Concert with Metropolitan Sound Co (Friday) 2am-?
Palo Alto looms large in 60s rock and countercultural history, laying claim to Jerry Garcia, LSD, the Grateful Dead and the Internet, among other things. Of course, Palo Altans makes everything about Palo Alto--we roll that way--but there's always more to the story. Some years ago I laid out the issue that many of the seminal events in Palo Alto had really occurred next door in Menlo Park, and were simply claimed by Palo Alto. The Veterans Hospital where Kesey was an orderly, the Warlocks first show, and so on, were all actually in Menlo Park. But that's not how Palo Alto likes to reflect upon itself.
East Palo Alto was yet another community written out of the Palo Alto narrative. East Palo Alto wasn't even a town until the 1980s, just a community. Palo Alto was the Northern end of Santa Clara County, and the unincorporated area of San Mateo County between Santa Clara County and San Francisco Bay was known as East Palo Alto. Just North, and right next to it, was next to the town of Menlo Park, and that area was know as East Menlo Park or Belle Haven. By the mid-60s, the two areas had grown into each other, and were referred to generally as East Palo Alto.
When my Mother moved to the Bay Area in 1950, she initially lived in East Palo Alto. It was fairly rural, and people kept goats and chickens in their yards. Over time, more and more cheap housing was built in East Palo Alto and Belle Haven, serving people who couldn't afford Palo Alto and Menlo Park. Up through the early 1970s, East Palo Alto was cheap housing for new arrivals. In the early 1960s, for example, Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter lived in East Menlo Park (not actually East Palo Alto), because that was where hardly-working folk singers could find a cheap enough place.
On February 20, 1961, 18-year old Jerry Garcia got his name in the San Mateo Times when the paper reported on a fatal auto accident. One of Garcia's best friends, Paul Speegle, was killed. Garcia was a passenger and had to run to the nearby Veterans Hospital to get help. The Times gave Garcia's address as 1339 Willow Road in Menlo Park. Leaving aside that it was probably the address of a couch Garcia was sleeping on, a look at Google Maps tells us 1339 Willow was nearer the Bay, pretty far from Palo Alto proper, so very much the poor side of town. Today, of course, we see that 1339 Willow is opposite of Facebook, but that is the story of Silicon Valley, and outside of this blog.
East Palo Alto and Belle Haven became more and more African American throughout the 1960s. The borderline was San Francisquito Creek, which was both the county dividing line and the city limits for Palo Alto and Menlo Park. The farther East one got from the Creek (towards the Bay), the fewer white residents there were. Bohemian white people lived near the Palo Alto border, but that didn't extend far. The Bayshore Freeway (CA-101) was another dividing line, further cutting off East Palo Alto.
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| There were so many liquor stores on University Avenue in East Palo Alto, all serving comparatively dry Palo Alto, that the locals called it "Whiskey Gulch," without irony. Pictured is A1 Liquors, sometime in the 1960s (my father preferred Berrone's Liquors, right nearby). |
Of course, Palo Alto benefited enormously from the proximity of East Palo Alto. An old charter from Stanford University ensured that there were no bars downtown, nor any liquor stores within a mile of campus. Hardship? No, not really. Just across the Creek was East Palo Alto, in another county. That section of University Avenue was known un-ironically in Palo Alto as "Whiskey Gulch," since there was a line of liquor stores serving downtown residents. There were also bars, but as a child I didn't notice them.
In 1970, Palo Alto and Menlo Park were hardly as wealthy as they would become with the rise of Silicon Valley, but they weren't exactly poor. You can't escape the fact that the middle class residents of Palo Alto benefited from the cheap housing next door, where all the janitors, house cleaners and service workers lived. East Palo Alto wasn't incorporated, so it always got the least benefit from San Mateo County, lacking the political clout of the established towns.
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| Nairobi Village Shopping Center, 1675 Bay Road (at University Avenue) in East Palo Alto, ca 1970 |
In the late 1960s, East Palo Alto tried to establish some identity of its own. It's a complicated story, well-covered by Kim-Mai Cutler's 2015 article in Tech Crunch. In 1968, some residents wanted to change the community name to "Nairobi," but it was voted down by a slim margin. Yet until the mid-70s, East Palo Alto was often called Nairobi in various contexts. I recall the Nairobi Shopping Center, at 1675 Bay Road (at University). It was a conventional strip mall, at a main intersection in the center of East Palo Alto.
The Barb listing is intriguing. In the parlance of the time, "Dance Concert" meant "all-ages hippie event with no tables." The Metropolitan Sound Company was an Oakland band, African American teenagers from an Oakland High School (I think Tech or Skyline--I read about them in a 1968 Tribune), who played rock music with a soul twist. I presume they were broadly in the vein of Sly And The Family Stone. The Checkmate had been a long-time establishment in East Palo Alto, although I don't know if it had always been at the Shopping Center. From second hand sources, I think the Checkmate was one of the places that teenager Ron "Pigpen" McKernan used to visit in the early 60s (no doubt somewhat illicitly) to hear authentic blues music.
Lending even more intrigue is the notation of "2am-?" Most Barb concert listings said "8pm" or "7:30-midnight," but this one seems to suggest that it will begin at 2am. An all-nighter? Pretty wild. Now back in early 1968, the Poppycock in downtown Palo Alto would have "breakfast shows" from 2:30-6:30 on Friday and Saturday nights (or, more precisely, Saturday and Sunday mornings). Since the bars closed at 2:00am, officially no beer would have been served. Weekend "Breakfast Shows" were a jazz tradition, because all the musicians who had finished gigs would show up to jam and hang out. It's a little different here, but it is following a somewhat known pattern.
At the time, few white Palo Alto teenagers would have ventured into the largely African American neighborhood of East Palo Alto, other than to go to Whiskey Gulch with their older brother's ID. Even fewer would have ventured over after 2am. Yet the listing in the Barb indicates someone's desire to get the word out to white hippies. Whatever the plan was, it didn't seem to lead to much, but I think there's a lost story there.
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[thanks to David Kramer-Smyth for uncovering the story of East Palo Alto's Checkmate Inn]
Per the Palo Alto Times, the Checkmate Inn opened Halloween 1969, at 160 Bay Road (at University Avenue). It was owned by Robert Stevens and his brothers, who lived in East Palo Alto. Stevens was from Fort Wayne, IN, and sang with the popular soul group The Checkmates. The Checkmates played Redwood City (at The Embers) in 1964 and Stevens ultimately bought a house in East Palo Alto. By 1969, his mother and brothers lived there as well, running a janitorial service as well as opening the nightclub. The goal of the club was to bridge the hitherto separate white and black entertainment world.
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| The February 6, 1970 Palo Alto Times had a feature article on The Checkmate Inn: "East Palo Alto club bridges racial gap with top stars" |
In February, 1970, the Checkmate Inn expanded its offerings to include major names. Singer Lou Rawls opened on the weekend of February 4. Upcoming shows included BB King and Mongo Santamaria. It makes sense that a rock group was booked in September, no doubt in an effort to expand the club's audience. It seems that early morning weekend "breakfast shows" were standard fare.
An article in Summer 1972, however, reviews the Checkmates themselves performing at the Inn, and suggests that business is going poorly. The Nairobi shopping center never found traction in the community, and ultimately closed.
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| August 7, 1972 review in the Palo Alto Times of The Checkmates performing at the Checkmate Inn |
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