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| The Lion's Share, at 60 Red Hill Avenue in San Anselmo, sometime in the early 1970s |
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.
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.
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| The September 11 Berkeley Barb lists Golden Toad, High Country, J.J. Mad and Potter's Wheel playing the Lion's Share in San Anselmo on Wednesday September 16, 1970 |
September 16, 1970 Lion's Share, San Anselmo, CA: Golden Toad/High Country/JJ Mad/Potter's Wheel (Wednesday)
The Lion's Share was the rock club in Marin County that booked original rock music, open from 1969 through 1975. It was in San Anselmo, about 10 minutes West of downtown San Rafael. Some touring bands played there, at least for the first few years, but mostly it featured local bands. It being Marin County, the quality of the local music was a little higher than in some places. Wednesday night tended to be a sort of "audition night," a few bands with little or no cover.
Shows at the Lion's Share often had bands who intersected deeply with the local rock scene, and thus by extension the National one. Many of the bands playing the Lion's Share on any given night had someone on stage who had played at the Fillmore or Avalon, or played with Van Morrison or some other luminary. Despite the obscurity of the bands, this Wednesday night at the Lion's Share had a bill featuring some people with some of the deepest roots of all in the Grateful Dead scene. The cover charge was 50 cents.
For one thing, this night was the last known night-time appearance of the Golden Toad. I have written about the Golden Toad at great length, but I will try and recap it briefly here. An infamous figure named Bob Thomas, personal pal of Owsley, built his own pipes. They were copies of various medieval instruments. He formed a band to play medieval music--as best they could, as they couldn't exactly listen to the tapes--at the newly-formed Renaissance Faires in Los Angeles and California. The Fair Band could have as many as 23 members, depending on availability. There was also a social link between the Golden Toad and The Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company, in that I think they shared members. Sometimes the two ensembles would do "breakfast shows" in a Berkeley park that somehow involved baking bread. Only in Berkeley (side note: Bob Thomas designed the "skull-and-lightning-bolt" logo for the Grateful Dead, originally so that the band could distinguish its amplifiers backstage at rock festivals).
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| A ca. 1966 photo of The Golden Toad, in their Renaissance Fair finery |
Once in a while, the Golden Toad would appear at a regular rock venue. They opened a few Grateful Dead shows, they played the Freight and Salvage a few times, and so on. But this time at the Lion's Share was the last time I know of them being publicly booked at a club. The Fair Band, in its various forms, may have continued on for quite a while, but this seems to have been the end of the line for the night-time Toad.
For hip Marin musicians, proximity to the Grateful Dead or other Fillmore stars was a matter of pride and clout. So for most bands, much less a bluegrass band, Bob Thomas might seem like the most connected, inside guy in Marin County. But maybe not to Butch Waller.
High Country was a bluegrass band from
Berkeley, led by mandolinist Butch Waller. Waller had been an old
pal of Jerry Garcia's back in the bluegrass days, long before Owsley or Bob Thomas. Waller, in fact, was
Jerry's co-pilot for his first LSD trip in 1965 (as chronicled in Mojo by Jesse Jarnow). High Country had formed in 1968, and plays around to this day.
One night in 1969, in fact, High Country had no banjo player available,
and Garcia filled in (it's on tape, so there isn't any doubt). So Waller
was an insider if anyone was, even if he had made the fiscally unsound
career choice of playing bluegrass. In 1971, High Country would get signed to the Youngbloods imprint on Warners, Raccoon Records, and release an album.
Potter's Wheel, meanwhile, was a Santa Cruz band, probably playing a Marin gig in the hopes of getting heard in the central Bay Area. Three members of Potter's Wheel (drummer Ed Levin, guitarist Stan Muther and bassist Warren Phillips), however, had not only been in the San Francisco bands Phoenix and Mt Rushmore, but two of them (Levin and Muther) had been in the predecessor band The Vipers. The Vipers, a Palo Alto band, had played the second Mime Troupe appeal, the first at the Fillmore (December 10, 1965), and both had attended the Palo Alto Acid Test a week later.
It would be difficult to find a bill with more connected musicians than this one, with direct links to Owsley, Jerry Garcia, the first Bill Graham show at the Fillmore and more. Whether the bands played well that night is, of course, unknown, but this was probably the insiderest of insider shows ever, even by Marin standards.
JJ Mad is unknown to me, but by proximity alone I'm definitely intrigued.
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