November 12, 1970 Claremont Hotel, Berkeley, CA: Joy Of Cooking/Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen/Ghetto Bros (Lost Horizon IX)

The Joy of Cooking and Commander Cody headlined the only known rock concert at Berkeley's luxurious Claremont Hotel on Thursday, November 12, 1970

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.

George "Commander Cody" Frayne, where he belonged, on stage--in this case at the reunion of Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen at Provo Park in Berkeley, on April 2, 1978

The Claremont Hotel was Berkeley's premier luxury hotel, on a hill about a mile from the UC Campus. It had an elegant ballroom that was never used for rock and roll. Except, apparently, once. It was a Benefit for a UC Berkeley Law School (Boalt Hall) Defense Fund, probably for campus protesters. Appropriately, there were some local bands, but ones who became much more famous in later years. Particularly infamous was no less than Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, newly-relocated to the East Bay from Ann Arbor, MI, still a year shy of their debut album Lost In The Ozone. "Commander Cody," more or less, was pianist George Frayne, MFA '68 at U. Mich, former Assistant Professor at Wisconsin-Oshkosh, a role he gave up to play swinging honky tonk for hippies. Frayne  (1944-Sep 26 2021) and the Airmen created a genre that far outlasted the band, so its appropriate that they played the only rock show at the Claremont. Also its appropriate that there wasn't another rock show there, since the Airmen must have had too much fun.

Lost Horizons, 1970
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.

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.

The Claremont Hotel in Berkeley, at Ashby and Domingo, built in 1915

November 12, 1970 Claremont Hotel, Berkeley, CA: Joy Of Cooking/Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen/Ghetto Bros (Thursday) Benefit for Boalt Hall Legal Defense Fund 
For our last Lost Horizon entry, we get the unexpected listing of two of Berkeley's biggest hippie bands of 1970 playing at Berkeley's premier luxury hotel. The Claremont Hotel had been completed in 1915, and had been the nicest and most important hotel in Berkeley since then. After this night, I am not aware of another rock show at the Claremont. It must have been a great night.

The Claremont Hotel, at Ashby and Domingo (the formal address is 41 Tunnel Road), is on a hill above Berkeley. The hotel had been financed by Francis "Borax" Smith and others. Smith was one of the financiers of the Berkeley street car system, the Key Route. The Key System Transbay E Route Train terminated at the Claremont. That meant that patrons could ride from the Southern Pacific Oakland terminus right to the hotel, or from San Francisco via Ferry. Once the Bay Bridge was built, travelers could ride straight across from the city itself (old Oaklanders may recall the AC Transit "E" bus route, the successor to the old Key Route). The Claremont was Berkeley's premier resort destination.

I have been to the Claremont Hotel bar a few times over the years, and it's a wonderful place. If you go there, at least one member of your party has to take it easy, since the train no longer runs to the hotel, and the drive over the hill (in either direction) requires some concentration. I haven't ever been to the ballroom, per se, but I think I walked by it. The Claremont would have been a great place for a rock show. 

The Claremont had a nice ballroom and they had always had music. But the Claremont was about big bands and "real music" rather than grimy rock and roll. This one event seems to be the only exception. I don't know wny Boalt Hall (UC Berkeley's prestigous law school) needed a Legal Defense Fund, but I assume it was somehow related to endless Berkeley riots and cases associated with it. Younger law students would have had enough pull with elder relatives to obtain the Claremont ballroom for a fundraiser.

Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen, ca 1969. Not your usual Claremont band.

By 1970, Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen were an established Berkeley Band, even though they did not yet have an album. The Cody crew were all from Ann Arbor, MI, home of the Univerity of Michigan, Berkeley's sister university back in the day. I can say for a fact that there were so many Ann Arbor expats in Berkeley that anyone moving from Ann Arbor did not even have to make new friends, since they already would have so many living in the East Bay. So Cody and the Airmen had a following as soom as they arrived in Berkeley in 1969, and the band only got more popular after that. Both the Joy Of Cooking and the Airmen would release their debut albums in 1971.

Joy Of Cooking were an established Berkeley Band as well. Joy Of Cooking had formed as a duo in Berkeley called Gourmet’s Delight, featuring guitarist Terry Garthwaite and pianist Toni Brown.  Garthwaite was a veteran of the Berkeley folk and bluegrass scene, and Brown was an artist as well as a musician.  The group had expanded to include conga player Ron Wilson, bassist David Garthwaite (Terry’s brother) and drummer Fritz Kasten. They changed their name to Joy of Cooking and shared management with Country Joe and The Fish. Joy Of Cooking had been a regular performer weeknights at a tiny Berkeley club called Mandrake's, where they built up a solid following.

Joy of Cooking was a significant group on the Berkeley scene, because both Garthwaite and Brown were accomplished musicians. Although both were excellent singers as well, Joy of Cooking featured the same kind of lengthy jamming popular at the time, rather than short and sensitive neo-folk songs.  The group were ultimately signed to Capitol Records and would release their first of three Capitol albums in January 1971.

The Ghetto Brothers were a local band, described in a contemporary Barb listing as having an "Afro-ghetto sound," whatever exactly that meant (I see no chance that this group was any sort of predecessor to the mid-70s New York band of the same name). 

Commander Cody and guitarist Bill Kirchen (in Houston on Aug 3 '75), convincingly demonstrating that "there ain't no such thing as 'too much fun'"

So: a great location, a nice ballroom, some cool jamming from the Joy Of Cooking, some rockabilly swinging from the Lost Planet Airmen, and some funky soul music. All good for dancing, all good for fun. Yet never another rock show at the Claremont. Cody lead vocalist Billy C Farlow use to sing "ain't no such thing as having too much fun," but I suspect Too Much Fun was had at the Claremont. I was lucky enough to have seen the original Airmen open for the Grateful Dead (Oakland June 8 '74), and a quorum of the band having a reunion in Provo Park at Berkeley on April 2, 1978 (Joy Of Cooking had a great reunion set that day, too), so I don't have to take anyone's word for how good they were on stage. At the Claremont, I'm sure a lot of drinks got sold, and the Airmen probably burned a hole in the hotel ballroom. Nonetheless, it seems they were not invited back, nor was any other rock band, ever.

Musta been a really good time...too good to be repeated. Rest In Power, Commander Cody.