July 7, 1969 Family Dog On The Great Highway, 660 Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Joan Baez/It's A Beautiful Day/West (FDGH '69 V)

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."

• For a complete list of Family Dog shows (including FDGH), see here
• For the previous entry (July 4-6, 1969 w/the Flying Burrito Brothers) see here
  
• For a summary and the link to the most recent entries in this series, see here

 

Wes Wilson's poster for the two Wild West benefit shows at Fillmore West and the Family Dog on The Great Highway on Monday, July 7, 1969

July 7, 1969 Family Dog On The Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Joan Baez/It's A Beautiful Day/West (Monday) Wild West Festival Fundraiser
On Monday night, July 7, a night when the Family Dog (and almost every other rock venue) was not open, the Dog held a concert to raise funds for the upcoming Wild West Festival. The headliner was folksinger Joan Baez. While Baez was not as critical an artist as she had been a few years earlier, she was still a major star. Raised in Palo Alto, Baez had achieved stardom when she moved to the Boston area in 1958 (her professor father had moved from Stanford to MIT). By 1969, Baez had recently relocated back to the Bay Area. While Baez didn't really tour, she did perform, if not that much, so any appearance by her qualified as an event. On the bill with her was the band It's A Beautiful Day, who had just released their debut album on Columbia. The album featured the classic "White Bird," which was getting FM airplay and would go on to become an iconic hit.

Despite the attractive poster (above), Baez' appearance at the Family Dog seems to have been all but lost to history. The concert was a fundraiser for the proposed Wild West Festival, which was scheduled to be held in Kezar Stadium and Golden Gate Park from August 22-24. The context of the Baez concert at the Family Dog can only be understood in the frame of the debacle of the Wild West Festival.

 

The Wild West Festival
In 1969, San Francisco was one of the capitals of rock music, along with London, New York and Los Angeles. The Fillmore and the Avalon had transformed the live music business, and FM rock radio had done the same for the airwaves. With rock live and on the radio, and a huge audience of baby boomers, rock music was profitable like never before, and with entirely new paradigms. The whole rock music world paid attention to what happened in San Francisco, and how it happened as well, since it was where new things came from.

San Francisco had more or less invented the "free concert in the park model" (for more on that, see Gina Arnold's excellent 2018 book Half A Million Strong: Crowds and Power from Woodstock to Coachella-ok yes, she's my sister but it's a great book). By 1969, the outdoor free concert idea had expanded into the "Rock Festival," a vast multi-day outdoor exercise with dozens of bands and tens of thousands of fans. The Summer of '69 was rock festival summer: there were big outdoor events in Atlanta, Texas, Seattle, Atlantic City and of course, Woodstock, just to name the most prominent. If rock festivals were the thing, then San Francisco had to be the City That Knows How, and throw the biggest and best of them. 

The Wild West Festival was conceived as a three-day event in Golden Gate Park, in the center of San Francisco. Kezar Stadium, home of the San Francisco 49ers, was in the park, and there would be three days of high profile shows with the cream of the Fillmores: the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Quicksilver, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and The Fish, Santana and Sly and The Family Stone. Other cities should have been so lucky. On the grounds of the park, surrounding Kezar, there would be dozens of lesser bands playing for free. The concept was to merge the best of a free and a paid festival in one setting.

The actual subject of the Wild West Festival, and its ultimate cancellation, is too long a story to tell here. Fortunately, the story has been told very well and in great detail by Michael J Kramer and his excellent book The Republic Of Rock: Music and Citizenship in The Sixties Counterculture (2013 Oxford Press). Suffice to say, everybody wanted something different from the Wild West, and no one got anything. To summarize:

• San Francisco, always ahead of its time, showed the rock world that the expectations of fans, bands, promoters and cities could not be met, and the festival was not a lasting model. It took the rest of the country another 18 months to figure that out
• Thanks partially to the cancellation of the Wild West, the Rolling Stones ended up playing a concert at Altamont Speedway in December, and the whole rock world found out how badly an outdoor rock festival could really go (once again, SF ahead of its time)

In early July, however, that wasn't quite clear. In order to pull off the festival, it needed funds, and in those days it wasn't like there could be a corporate sponsor. So the solution was to have the bands play a benefit and the "community" would provide the funds through ticket sales. The compromise was that there would be simultaneous concerts on Monday, July 7, at the Fillmore West and the Family Dog. Jefferson Airplane would headline Fillmore West, and Joan Baez at the Dog. For reasons having to do with Wild West politics, the Family Dog produced the show at Fillmore West, although they hired Grahams' crew in order to do it. 

Almost no rock bands worked on Monday nights, so the bands and venues were free. Having the Fillmore West and Family Dog concerts on the same night seems odd, but there must have been some compromise that demanded it. A regular Fillmore West booking was scheduled to begin on Tuesday, July 8 (BB King would headline through Thursday), but nothing appears to have been booked on Tuesday for the Dog. Now, there might not have been much crossover between Jefferson Airplane fans and Joan Baez fans, so perhaps not much was lost, but the scheduling is typical of the strange compromises that fractured the plans for the Wild West.

 

David's Album, by Joan Baez, released on Vanguard in May 1969, but recorded in Nashville in September 1968. Baez's husband David Harris was a country music fan, and the album was all country songs.

Joan Baez had been a huge star when folk music was popular, and she was essential in getting Bob Dylan known to a wider audience. When the Beatles hit, however,  Baez did not "go electric." She didn't have any kind of purist prohibition about electric instruments,  but unlike Dylan, Baez wasn't really a rock and roller. In any case--again unlike Dylan--political activism was at the center of her life. Still, Baez continued to be a popular concert attraction.

At the time of the Family Dog booking, Joan Baez's current record was David's Album, which had been recorded in Nashville in September, 1968. Vanguard Records had sent Baez to Nashville to record a double album of Bob Dylan songs with Nashville pickers. Released in December of '68, Any Day Now had gone to #30 in the Billboard album charts. David's Album had been recorded at the same time, and was an album of country songs.  Baez's husband, David Harris, was a country music fan, and had made her more aware of country music. Harris was a prominent activist, and he would soon go to jail for resisting the military draft in opposition to the Vietnam War. With the title, Baez managed to personalize the recording, promote support for her husband's cause and make a contemporary record all at once. David's Album did pretty well, reaching #36 on Billboard.

Regardless of the backing on any current record, Baez generally performed solo. Sometimes she had additional musicians, as she did at Woodstock (with Jeffrey Shurtleff and Richard Festinger on guitar and harmonies), but she was still a folk performer in concert.

It's A Beautiful Day had formed in late 1967, but they had started playing around the Bay Area in early 1968. They were lead by electric violinist David LaFlamme, who shared lead vocals with Pattie Santos. LaFlamme's wife Linda played organ, and the rhythm section of Mitch Holman (bass) and Val Fuentes (drums) was solid. The band really took off in the middle of 1968 when guitarist Hal Wagenet joined. Wagenet had been in a group called Indian Head Band, which played a hybrid of Indian music and psychedelic jamming. Wagenet's guitar was a good counterpoint to LaFlamme's violin, and gave the band a harder edge that went over well in psychedelic ballrooms.

Already a popular local band, It's A Beautiful Day had released their debut album on Columbia in June 1969. Unlike the first albums of many groups, the band was fully realized. LaFlamme had been in an odd group called Orkustra in 1967 that played around the Haight, so he had learned some lessons from that. It's A Beautiful Day had originally been sent to Seattle by their manager, Matthew Katz, so they had "gotten it together" before they reappeared in San Francisco. The debut album had some great songs, and they got heavily played on FM radio. The most popular was "White Bird," which would go on to become a huge AM hit as well, and sort of 60s classic. 

At the moment of this Monday night at the Family Dog, It's A Beautiful Day was a band on the rise, seemingly another in a long line of bands whose glowing careers began at the Fillmore West and a smashing debut. It wasn't to be--manager Katz was already engaged in long-running lawsuits with his previous clients, Jefferson Airplane and Moby Grape. Katz is notoriously litigious: the Airplane suit was not resolved until the 1980s, and Moby Grape's lawsuits were not resolved until the 21st century. LaFlamme lost a significant lawsuit against Katz in the early 70s, and It's A Beautiful Day's career was derailed, as was his. But that was still in the future in July 1969.

[update] fellow scholar Michael J. Kramer unearths a receipt from the Family Dog for the July 7 Wild West benefit. Ticket sales totaling 1579 generate over $2400 for the Wild West after expenses (Berkeley Folk Festival director Barry Olivier had been hired to run the Wild West, so the receipt ended up in those archives).

Bridges, the second album by West, on Epic Records

Opening the show was West, a band on Epic Records who had just released their second album, Bridges. The group was led by Ron Cornelius and Mike Stewart, who wrote and sang, and Cornelius played lead guitar. Mike Stewart had been in the popular band We Five, who had had a huge hit with "You Were On My Mind" back in 1965. Cornelius had been in some local bands, like Justice League Of America. West was together for a few years, but was never really successful. Stewart left the band, and Cornelius fronted the band for the final album before they broke up.

Cornelius would move to Nashville, where he had a long career as a producer and session man (he played on Bob Dylan's New Morning album, for example). Stewart would become a successful producer in Los Angeles, for Billy Joel ("Piano Man") and others.

A San Francisco Examiner write up from July 6, 1969 for Joan Baez and the Jefferson Airplane, the next night at Family Dog and Fillmore West

July 7, 1969 Fillmore West, San Francisco, CA: Jefferson Airplane/Ace Of Cups/Fourth Way/Phoenix (Monday) Wild West Festival Fundraiser Family Dog Productions
The Fillmore Auditorium and the Fillmore West are the fabled wellsprings of San Francisco rock. Of course, great music was played there, great times were had, and such memories that were not obliterated remain glowing. For all that, what made the name "Fillmore" iconic was the posters. Long after the concerts, the posters from the Fillmore and Fillmore West were on the walls of bedrooms and dorms, and later framed in living rooms. The posters were reprinted, promoted and sold by Bill Graham (and to a lesser extent Chet Helms did the same for the Avalon). As a result, shows that may have been thinly attended took on an afterlife if it had a colorful poster featuring the likes of the Grateful Dead.

Paradoxically, San Francisco rock posters have formed a sort of canon, and a canon that excludes certain artifacts. Knowledgeable poster collectors have always been aware of the Wes Wilson poster up top, but it has never been considered part of the "official" Bill Graham or Family Dog series. In Paul Grushkin's 1987 book Art Of Rock, which was critical in establishing widespread knowledge of 60s posters, the numbered series for Graham (BG) and the Avalon (FD) doesn't include the July 7 poster, so it's as if the poster didn't exist. What few lists there are of Fillmore concerts (save for ours) are just transcribed lists of posters, so the concert effectively disappeared from history for all but the most determined scholars.

The Jefferson Airplane were the most popular live concert attraction amongst the San Francisco bands. Although the Family Dog would have effectively hired Bill Graham's crew to run the Fillmore West show, and turned over any profits to the Wild West, Graham still wanted to make sure he got paid. I don't think it's an accident that the biggest band in town was the one playing for Graham, ensuring that his production fees were covered.

Ace Of Cups was a fascinating all-female band that should have made it, but never did. At this time, the Aces were under the wing of Quicksilver manager Ron Polte, who himself was a key player in the Wild West saga. The Fourth Way was an interesting jazz-rock quartet, but not in a hypersonic fusion style. They would release their second album on Capitol sometime in 1969. Phoenix was an interesting local band, but they never managed to get themselves over the top. Yet because the show was a Family Dog production at Fillmore West, we seem to have no eyewitness account, recording or review of this likely very appealing event.

For a link to the next entry in the series (July 11-13, 1969 with The Youngbloods), see here