August 1, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, 660 Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Light Show Strike [Grateful Dead canceled] (FDGH '69 IX)

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 25-27, 1969 w/Charlie Musselwhite) see here
  
• For a summary and the link to the most recent entries in this series, see here

August 1, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Light Show Strike [Grateful Dead/Albert Collins/Ballet Afro-Haiti canceled] (Friday)
For the first weekend of August, the Grateful Dead were booked for a weekend at the Family Dog. Even back in 1969, with just 3 poorly received studio albums to their name, the Dead were a solid booking in the Bay Area. Their fans would come out for them, and it didn't matter how many times they had played in the previous few months--indeed, the more often they played, the more fans they drew. So Chet Helms and the Dog had to be looking forward to a successful weekend. 1969 wasn't 1966, however, and things weren't as copasetic as they had been. In particular, the operators of all the psychedelic light shows in the Bay Area had banded together as the Light Show Guild, and were threatening to picket the Family Dog and the Fillmore West, the two most high profile regular rock venues in the Bay Area. 

When regular rock concerts had started at the Fillmore Auditorium in February, 1966, light shows had been a critical part of the equation. Even though we look back at those early shows and reflect upon the bands that became famous, like the Airplane and the Dead, the reality at the time was different. In 1966, and even into early 1967, most of the bands playing the Fillmore and Avalon didn't even have records yet, and even those that did hardly got them played on the radio, so fans really didn't know their music. On top of that, for all their nascent talent, even the bands we admire now were still figuring out how to play electric instruments, write songs and sing together. They weren't always that good. 

What fans had liked in the early days was the environment--the loud sound, the dancing, the trip itself. The light shows were a big part of creating that feeling. Going to a concert at the Avalon or the Fillmore in 1966 was really different than seeing the Jefferson Airplane in a local civic auditorium with seats. The Fillmore formula defined the template for the modern rock concert that has persisted into the present day. 

By 1968, rock concerts were more popular than ever before, but fans' perceptions had changed. For one thing, the new hippie bands like Quicksilver, the Dead and Big Brother all had started releasing albums, and they were much better live than they had been just twelve or eighteen months earlier. On top of that, since KMPX-fm had gone on the air in San Francisco in April, 1967, those albums were getting played on the radio. Fans had started to focus on the music, and more and more when fans went to the concert, they wanted to hear the band they came to see, not just "hang out." In that context, the light show was part of the evening, but it wasn't why people were eagerly going to the Fillmore. The biggest shows were at the much larger Oakland Coliseum, and many of those didn't even have light shows.

The Light Show Guild
Although Light Shows were a defining feature of concerts at the Fillmore West and Family Dog, they were no longer essential to the enterprise. The Light Show Guild's demand profoundly missed their mark. Apparently there were 50 light shows who had banded together, but they failed to recognize that they were dispensable. In an article in the underground paper the Berkeley Tribe, the Guild laid out the scene:

It will be lights out tonight for the Family Dog Ballroom on the Great Highway.

The Light Artists Guild, representing more than 60 Bay Area light shows, will strike the Family Dog on Friday with picket lines around the ballroom.

What the sounds will be like (if any) is at this moment anybody's guess. Gerry Garcia, lead guitarist for the Grateful Dead--which is scheduled to play the Dog this weekend--has stated that he will not cross the Guild picket line.

If other rock groups follow Gerry's lead, both the Dog and Fillmore West will be shutdown by next weekend.

The article went to explain the demands of the Light Show Guild:

The Guild is seeking $600 for 3 nights of work at the Family Dog and $650 for the same time at the Fillmore. The Guild's third demand is that light artists be given at least 35% of the billing in all advertisements for a concert.

Essentially, the Light Shows were asking to be compensated like a band on the poster. The Tribe noted drily that Graham said that "the light show was not a draw factor and that he would fill up his ballroom just as easily without the light artists."

Even in 1969, it was pretty clear that fans were not going to the Fillmore West, the Family Dog or any other venue for the Light Shows, they were going for the bands.

The Hippie Labor Landscape
The Light Show strike was not the first hippie labor dispute, nor would it be the most important one. The first "underground" free-form FM rock station had been San Francisco's KMPX-fm, playing album tracks 24/7, starting in April, 1967. The station had been an instant success, but the hippie djs and employees felt they weren't getting rewarded, so they unionized and struck. The bands largely supported the staff, and ultimately they all moved over to KSAN-fm, which almost immediately became the dominant music station in the Bay Area (for a detailed analysis of the KMPX Strike, see Michael J Kramer's excellent 2013 Oxford University Press book Republic Of Rock).

Any likelihood of the Light Show Guild strike succeeding depended entirely on the bands. If the bands supported the Guild, maybe they would have negotiating room. If the bands stepped aside, the Light Shows would be marginalized, and Graham's comment that they weren't needed for ticket sales was fair warning. At this great remove, it seems quaint that anyone, even Light Show operators, thought that their contributions were essential to ticket sales. We have read plenty of contemporary reviews in college papers and the like, and almost none of them say "if you missed last weekend at Fillmore West, you missed a great light show!"

The one component that has been forgotten over the years is that the Light Shows probably employed more people than any other psychedelic ballroom enterprise. While the directors of Light Shows could make a case for being genuine artists, the execution of a 60s light show required a fair number of people, running film projectors, replacing colored filters, pouring oil into vessels, and numerous other mechanical tasks. More importantly, working on the light show didn't require any special background--if you couldn't play guitar, or fix electronics or draw a poster, you could still work in a light show. So in that sense, the Light Shows represented the lowest, broadest level of laborer in the psychedelic underground.

Jerry Garcia at a meeting at the Family Dog, around August 1, 1969 (from the Berkeley Tribe, August 8)

Friday, Friday, August 1, 1969 at the Family Dog
The Light Show Guild members had agreed to honor a contract with Bill Graham for this weekend at Fillmore West (headlined by the Everly Brothers and the Sons Of Champlin), and delayed the strike at Fillmore West until Tuesday, when the Butterfield Blues Band would headline a mid-week booking (replacing Fleetwood Mac). But the Guild was going to have a picket line at the Family Dog on Friday. Paradoxically, Chet Helms let the Guild run a cable from the Dog to provide power for their loudspeakers, thus supporting the laborers striking his own business.

Helms had a clearer picture of the community than Bill Graham, yet his position was more precarious. Graham was already the Big Bad Wolf of San Francisco rock, and he enjoyed playing "the Bad Guy." Chet was the Good Guy, however, and depended more on the good will of fans. Helms would also have been conscious how many hippies worked in light shows, and therefore, how many rock fans knew someone who worked in a light show, and was conscious of allowing the Guild their chance to strike. So there was a picket line of Light Show Guild members outside the Family Dog, a big crowd outside, and none inside.

WWJD (What Would Jerry Do)?
It came down to the bands, and it came down to Jerry Garcia. Even back in '69, before the Dead were really big, Garcia mattered. He had already told the press he would not cross the picket line. Garcia wasn't particularly close to his mother, but she had been a Union organizer, so Garcia didn't cross a picket line. Even though it was decades before the era of Social Media, the Light Show strike was covered by the press. Not crossing a picket line was one thing--but was Jerry going to stand with the strikers?

Talent aside, no one gets to be Jerry Garcia by accident. What would Garcia do at the Family Dog when faced with a picket line? Join the strikers? Make a speech, negotiate, what? Well, guess what--Garcia had another gig that night. In fact he had booked it at least a week earlier, possibly more. So Garcia guaranteed that he would have a conflict on Friday night, ensuring that he would not arrive at the Family Dog until after midnight.

Jerry Garcia had recently taken up the pedal steel guitar, and had formed a little band with his old Palo Alto friends John "Marmaduke" Dawson and David Nelson, performing Dawson's songs and some country covers. The band didn't have a name yet--within a week it would be called The New Riders of The Purple Sage--but they had a gig. After some shows as a trio, Garcia, Nelson and Dawson had added a rhythm section (drummer Mickey Hart and bassist Bob Matthews) and booked two shows on Friday night at the Bear's Lair, the little student pub on the UC Berkeley campus. The late show was at 10:30pm, so Garcia couldn't cross the Bay Bridge until after midnight. Newspaper accounts having him arrive at 12:30, and talking to some of the strikers, but never going into the Family Dog.

 

"Leadlerless Dead"
The Saturday (August 2) Examiner had the page 3 headline "Picket Line Splits Grateful Dead." The photo caption said "the leaderless Grateful Dead ignored the line and performed." The article carefully noted that Garcia refused to cross the line. There was no need to identify Garcia as the band's "leader," since despite Garcia's eternal denials, everyone knew that Jerry was Jerry. Since we know Garcia did not arrive until late, the tension surrounding that event must have defused considerably after midnight. Apparently there had been some kind of jam session, and a few members of the Grateful Dead had participated. One underground paper mentioned a flute player, a conga player and another drummer, to go along with Lesh, Weir and Kreutzmann (no mention of Pipgen or Tom Constanten, which in itself tells us nothing). The brief jam was terminated when Garcia arrived, but he never came inside or on stage.

In the Examiner article, Helms glumly noted that "there are only so many potatoes." The article said "The Grateful Dead took a step in that direction by offering to take a cut in wages to sweeten the salaries of the light technicians. But so far, no meeting has been arranged. "Helms also added that he was $20,000 in the hole on his seven-week old enterprise." $20,000 was big money in 1969--you could buy a suburban house for $20K, so the Family Dog was not doing well. Missing a Friday night payday with the Dead didn't help.

Berkeley Tribe article, August 1, 1969

 (for a complete view of various contemporary newspaper sources, see the indispensable Deadsources blog entry here)

For the next entry in the series (August 2-3 '69 Grateful Dead) see here

July 25-27, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, 660 Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Charlie Musselwhite/Poco/Zoot Money (FDGH VIII)

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 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

July 22, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Cleanliness and Godliness Skiffle Band/Congress Of Wonders (Tuesday)
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. 

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.

July 25-27, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Charlie Musselwhite/Poco/Zoot Money (Friday-Sunday)
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.

Musselwhite had released his second album on Vanguard, Stone Blues, in 1968. Sometime in 1969, Vanguard released Tennessee Woman. Musselwhite was a regular on the Bay Area club scene, and had played the Fillmore and Avalon as well. In Chicago, Musselwhite was just one of many fine blues acts, but in the Bay Area he stood out. Musselwhite had been a regular at the Avalon Ballroom, but he had never graduated to the Fillmore or Fillmore West. He would have been excellent live, but a Musselwhite show was not going to be a must-see event for local rock fans.

 

Poco was a new band at this time. Epic Records (a CBS subsidiary) had just released Pickin' Up The Pieces, the band's debut album in May. Poco featured two former members of the Buffalo Springfield, guitarists and singers Richie Furay and Jim Messina. Now, granted, Furay and Messina were far less known than Stephen Stills and Neil Young, but Buffalo Springfield had been very popular and much beloved, so Furay and Messina mattered too.

Up until this time, the Family Dog had mostly just featured San Francisco bands. There had been some good ones, and most of the headliners had albums, so they had a following. But it wasn't 1966 anymore. Rock was nationwide and international, not just a regional thing. People heard music on FM radio from bands across the country and London, and they wanted to see those types of groups. Generally, the Fillmore West had a lock on the touring bands the first time through town. 

Poco's appearance was an exception, and the type of exception that would be critical to the success of any rock venue. When a major record company sent bands out on tour, they could generally be counted on to advertise the new album in local underground papers or FM radio, perhaps adding "catch them this weekend at [the venue]." Whether this specifically happened with Poco at the Family Dog, I don't know, but it was rising new bands like them that could help make the Family Dog a destination. Unfortunately, the Poco appearance was an outlier. All the rising new bands from around the country or London mainly played the Fillmore West, and were almost never seen at the Family Dog.

Poco put out over 20 albums--they still played occasionally, up until Rusty Young's death in 2021, believe it or not--but they would not make themselves big successes until the 1980s, long after Furay and Messina had left the band. Nonetheless, they were a popular and influential country rock band for the industry, and a terrific live band throughout their performing arc. In June 1969, Poco was actually down to a quartet. Original bassist Randy Meisner had left Poco in early Spring, to join Rick Nelson's Stone Canyon Band. Lead guitarist Jim Messina switched to bass for a few months, until Tim Schmidt was up to speed, and Messina could return to lead guitar.

Pedal steel guitarist Rusty Young often played through a Leslie amplifier, typically used for Hammond organs, so it gave Poco a unique sound that worked particularly well in loud rock settings. Furay, Messina and drummer George Grantham had a unique harmony blend that gave Poco a distinctive sound. Schmidt, previously in the Sacramento band Redwing, would add his soaring tenor voice to that sound by September. Poco, even as a quartet, always put on a lively show, and in 1969 they would have been very forward looking. As is typical of the Dog of this period, however, I know of no review or eyewitness account of their performance.

 

Jim Messina left Poco in 1970, going on to great success as half of Loggins And Messina. Furay left at the end of 1973, but had some success as part of the Souther Hillman Furay Band. Schmidt would end up replacing Meisner in the Eagles in the late 1970s, right before Poco hit it fairly big. Rusty Young was in every lineup of Poco, until he traveled on in 2021 (RIP). All of the former members of Poco had periodically rejoined the band for reunions on stage and in the studio at various times. 

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

July 18-20, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, 660 Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Sir Douglas Quintet/Shades of Joy/Bycycle/Prince Albert and The Cans (FDGH '69 VII)

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 11-13, 1969 w/The Youngbloods) see here
  
• For a summary and the link to the most recent entries in this series, see here

July 18-20, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, 660 Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Sir Douglas Quintet/Shades Of Joy/Bycycle/Prince Albert and The Cans (Friday-Sunday)
The Sir Douglas Quintet were another band closely associated with Chet Helm and the Avalon. Similar to the Youngbloods, who had played the weekend before, the Quintet was at a high-water mark after some tough sledding the previous three years. Their latest album featured an actual Top 40 hit single, "Mendocino." This wasn't the first hit for the Sir Douglas Quintet, as they had scored a memorable National hit with "She's About A Mover" back in '65. Much muddy water had passed under many low bridges for the Sir Douglas Quintet before they wound up back in the charts.

Quintet leader Doug Sahm was an expatriate Texan, one of many in San Francisco. Chet Helms himself was from Texas, so there were many mutual connections. As for the Shades Of Joy, a minor but interesting band, guitarist Jackie King was a childhood friend of Sahm. Sir Doug persuaded King to join him in San Francisco, and he formed Shades Of Joy with transplanted El Paso saxophonist Martin Fierro.

An alternate poster for July 18-20 '69 at the Family Dog on the Great Highway

Bycycle, initially called Hoffmans Bycycle, was an obscure band, but they are interesting today for their bass player, Dan Healy. Healy was (and is) mainly known as an engineer and soundman for the Grateful Dead. He engineered Anthem Of The Sun and various other albums for the band, and he was the Dead's soundman for twenty years.

Kwane And The Kwanditos canceled, and Prince Albert and The Cans was clearly some kind of joke.

 

Mendocino released April 1969 on Smash Records (a Mercury subsidiary), engineered by Dan Healy. The single reached #27.

Doug Sahm was a childhood guitar prodigy from San Antonio, TX. He had been playing in dance combos since adolescence. When the Beatles and the British Invasion hit, a local producer named Huey Meaux was determined to cash in. He took the best musicians from the two best teenage rock bands in San Antonio, had them grow their hair long--daring for Texas in 1965--and gave them an English sounding name and Carnaby Street clothes. So Doug Sahm became Sir Douglas, and the band became The Sir Douglas Quintet.

Meuax also determined that the key to Beatles' hits was syncopation, so he had Sahm compose a syncopated hit. "She's About A Mover" was a huge hit nationwide, still familiar today from commercials and the like. The Sir Douglas Quintet, a killer R&B style dance band anyway, toured around to huge crowds by 1965 standards. The band released a few other singles as well, which had some regional success.

Disaster struck in December, 1965 when Sahm and the band were busted for marijuana possession at the Corpus Christi airport. The arresting officer was none other than future felon Joe Arpaio, many decades later the Sheriff of Maricopa County, AZ. In 1965 Texas, marijuana possession was a serious felony, subject to many years of prison. After five months, Sahm's lawyers managed to reduce the sentence to a few years of probation. Sahm decided to relocate to California. Organist Augie Meyers, co-leader of the band (and former leader of the rival San Antonio band that had been "merged" to form the quintet), was not able to leave Texas. For the next few years, the arc of the Sir Douglas Quintet took on an only-in-the-60s character.

Sally Mann Romano's The Band's With Me is a must-read 60s memoir

Doug Sahm and the band relocated to Hollywood, taking up residence at the Playmate Motel, near the Sunset Strip. They were only there for a few months. Fortunately, we have an eyewitness. Then-teenager Sally Mann had left the University of Texas to join her boyfriend, the Sir Douglas Quintet road manager, when they relocated to California. The story seems like a prime candidate for a Netflix series, including a trip to Mexico for the 17-year old Mann to marry her boyfriend, and some strange months on The Strip. I can't even summarize the tale, but fortunately Mann (now Sally Mann Romano) wrote a book. Read Chapter 2, it is well worth your time (as are Chapters 1 and 3, and every other Chapter). Mann abandons the Sir Douglas Quintet (and her new husband) as things fall apart by Summer 1966, so Doug and the remnants of the band moved to San Francisco. Once in SF, they start playing at the Avalon, a rare instance of an Avalon band with a widely-known hit single.

Meanwhile, back in Texas, Augie Meyers' probation had left him unable to leave Texas. Meyers toured around Texas with yet another lineup of the Sir Douglas Quintet. And that wasn't all. Sahm couldn't safely leave  California, nor could Meyers leave Texas, so it appears that a third band toured around the country as the Sir Douglas Quintet. The saga of Larry And The Bluenotes could probably be a Netflix series on its own, but sadly there was no Sally Mann present to capture the tale.

 

Around 1968, Mercury Records was signing every long-haired band in San Francisco, so they picked up the Quintet. The Sir Douglas Quintet returned to the recording studio and released their first complete album in 1968, The Honkey Blues. It was credited to the Sir Douglas Quintet Plus Two, since they had added a horn section. By 1969, Augie Meyers was able to join the band in California, so the band was more or less intact. Their first single, "Mendocino," was a hit, so Mercury rushed out a new album (on their subsidiary Smash Records) of the same name. The single would reach #27 on the Billboard charts. While Sahm produced the album himself, the engineer was Dan Healy, then making his living as a freelance producer while playing in a band. Now that Chet Helms had a new venue, it was no surprise that the Sir Douglas Quintet were back on stage as headliners.

Shades Of Joy
Second on the bill was Shades Of Joy, a spacey local jazz-rock ensemble with ties to Texas as well. As mentioned above, guitarist Jackie King was a childhood friend of Sahm, and Sir Doug had invited him out to San Francisco. Tenor saxophonist Martin Fierro, later well-known for playing with Jerry Garcia, was from El Paso, but I don't know if he came out with King or was already in San Francisco. Fierro was already recording on Mother Earth's 1968 debut--another set of Texas transplants--so he was already in the mix.

The other key figure in Shades Of Joy was organist Joachim (Jymm) Young. Young would go on to play with various Bay Area bands throughout the 70s, mainly Boz Scaggs. Although almost no one recalls Young's name now, pretty much everyone of a certain age recognizes his swirling organ intro to the Steve Miller Band's "Fly Like An Eagle." Filling out the band was singer Millie Foster, bassist Edward Adams and drummer Jose Rodriguez. 

Earlier in the year, Chronicle critic Ralph J Gleason had given a glowing review to the Shades Of Joy when they had opened for the Grateful Dead at Fillmore West (probably Friday, February 28, 1969. Gleason said

Shades Of Joy is a local group (a spin-off of several other local units) which features wild free form modern jazz saxophone playing by Martin Fierro, a roaring R&B rhythm section and two voices, Martin and Millie Foster, who is much better in this role than as a pure jazz singer. It's an exciting and interesting group.  

Sometime in 1969, Shades Of Joy would release their only album, on Fontana Records. They played around until 1971, and sort of faded away. Fierro (1942-2008) played with Doug Sahm in the 60s and 70s (parallel to Shades Of Joy), and then went on to play with Jerry Garcia and Merl Saunders for a few years, and later led the band Zero. Jackie King (1944-2016) played off and on with Willie Nelson, another old Texas friend, for decades, and also had a sterling reputation as a session musician and guitar teacher. I'm uncertain about the careers of the other band members.

A Berkeley Barb ad for Hoffman's Bicycle (later Bycycle) at the New Orleans House on October 18 and 19, 1968. Future Dead soundman Dan Healy was the bass player.

Bycycle
Bycycle, though quite obscure, have an intriguing history. Originally, they were called Hoffman's Bicycle, which (despite the misspelling of Albert Hofmann's name) any hippie would have recognized as an LSD reference. They first surfaced in late 1967, and started to play around in 1968. Rapidly they shortened their name to Bycycle, which was very often incorrectly spelled by promoters or newspapers as Bicycle. The intriguing detail about Bycycle was that future Grateful Dead soundman Dan Healy was the bass player. Healy is a rightly legendary name in Deadhead circles, both for the Dead's epic commitment to great live sound and his willingness to encourage audience taping. Yet Healy himself never mentioned that he was in working rock band back in the 1960s, at least not until queried in the 21st century.

Healy was originally from Humboldt County in Northern California, then very rural. He was in some teenage rock combos with his guitarist friend Richard Treece. Treece led an East Bay band called The Cheaters in the mid-60s, and Healy played with them at least some of the time (it's not clear if he played on their single). Meanwhile, in the early 60s Healy had gotten a job as assistant engineer (and janitor) at a studio called Coast Recorders, at 960 Bush Street in San Francisco (later The Boarding House). The studio mainly recorded commercial jingles and the like, but they recorded rock band demos as well. Sometimes, late at night, Healy would invite his proto-hippie friends to record demos on the sly. 

In early 1966, Healy lived on a houseboat in Sausalito, and on the next boat was the band Quicksilver Messenger Service. Healy became friends with them, and through them met the Grateful Dead. Healy criticized the Dead's live sound, and Jerry Garcia challenged him to improve it, which--apparently--Healy did. This led to Healy engineering the Dead's second album Anthem Of The Sun. Healy recorded several early '68 live Dead shows, and Healy, Garcia and Phil Lesh would merg them into an audio collage that was way ahead of its time.

By 1968 Healy was a freelance audio engineer, one of the few hippies who got along with the bands and yet really knew his way around the studio. Healy engineered and produced a variety of records for Mercury and Capitol in 1968 and '69, including Quicksilver's Shady Grove, Mendocino, Harvey Mandel's Cristo Redentor and the legendary Fifty Foot Hose album. Yet at the same time, he was in Bycycle.

According to a Healy interview by scholar Jake Feinberg, Bycycle played some kind of jazz-rock. His friend Richard Treece was on lead guitar, and the drummer was Butch Giannini, formerly of the famous East Bay band The Spyders. The organist was Al Rose, and the lead singer was Stephen Fiske, who had recently arrived from New York. Bycyle played many shows around the Bay Area, and had some interesting opening slots (I attempted to compile all the available information here).

So Healy, and hence Bycycle, was intimately linked to the other acts. Healy had engineered the Sir Douglas Quintet's then-current hit and he had already worked with Fierro in the studio on the first Mother Earth album (Make A Joyful Noise, on Mercury). Healy, not surprisingly, has tapes of Bycycle, but they have not seen the light of day.

The Friday, July 18, 1969 SF Chronicle lists Prince Albert and the Cans and an Cans as the opening act at the Family Dog.

Initial publicity listed the band Kwane And The Kwanditos as an opener, but they seemed to have dropped off the bill. Kwane And The Kwanditos were a Latin rock band featuring Todd Barkan on piano. Barkan would go on to achieve local fame as the proprietor of the Keystone Korner jazz club, starting in 1972. The Kwanditos would go on to play the Family Dog a few weeks later.

Both the flyer (above) and the Friday night (July 18) Chronicle listed Prince Albert and The Cans on the bill. This was clearly a reference to the old joke where you call a store and ask if they have Prince Albert (tobacco) in a can, and if they say yes, you should say "then you'd better let him out!" I don't know what the purpose of listing the joke was, and since we--as usual--have no eyewitness accounts of the show, we can only wonder.

For a link to the next post in the series (July 25-27, 1969 Charlie Musselwhie/Poco/Zoot Money), see here

July 11-13, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, 660 Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Youngbloods/Lamb/Rubber Duck/Mother Bear (FDGH '69 VI)

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 had 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 7, 1969 w/Joan Baez) see here
  
• For a summary and the link to the most recent entries in this series, see here

The July 7, 1969 SF Examiner lists the three bands at the Family Dog for the weekend

July 11-13, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, 660 Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Youngbloods/Lamb/Rubber Duck/Mother Bear (Friday-Sunday)
The Youngbloods were regarded as an "Avalon band," for good reason, so it's no surprise they were headlining a weekend for Chet Helms at the Family Dog. As it happened, in July 1969 the Youngbloods ship was about to come in. Their third album, Elephant Mountain, had just been released in April, and songs like "Darkness, Darkness" were getting good airplay on FM radio. More importantly, in spring, 1969 the National Council of Christians and Jews created a Public Service Announcement that used the Youngbloods' version of “Get Together.” The band had recorded the old Dino Valenti song on their February 1967 debut album, when it was already somewhat of a chestnut, having been recorded by the Jefferson Airplane and others. Yet the PSA had caused RCA to release the song again as a single, and by August '69 it would enter the Top 40 chart on Billboard.

The Youngbloods were happening, and they were playing for Chet Helms rather than Bill Graham. For one weekend, at least, Helms' connections were paying off.

 

The Youngbloods had formed in Cambridge, MA in 1966 when Jesse Colin Young (b. Perry Miller, Queens, NY) and Jerry Corbitt decided to expand their folk duo to play "Folk-Rock." Corbitt and Young shared the vocals, Corbitt played lead guitar, Young took up the bass, and they added drummer Joe Bauer and the versatile Lowell "Banana" Levinger, who could play dobro, slide guitar, piano, banjo and a lot more. The band had a little more bluesy feel, and a lot more flexibility, than contemporary folk-rock outfits. Their RCA debut, released in February of 1967, was produced by Felix Pappalardi (later the producer of Cream and a founding member of Mountain). 

The Youngbloods had toured around the country in 1967, but they found a home when they came to San Francisco. The band played a weekend at the Avalon in June (June 15-18, 1967 with the Siegal/Schwall Band), and spent the next six weeks playing shows all around the Bay Area. The band realized they had found where they needed to be. They were booked for a return weekend at the Avalon on the weekend of September 15 (Sep 15-17, 1967 with the Other Half and Mad River), but by that time they had decided to move. They threw all their gear and belongings into their cars, and drove across country to move to Marin County (then a largely agricultural place). 

From Fall '67 onwards, the Youngbloods were seen as a San Francisco band--and proud of it--and played all over the West Coast. In November, RCA released their follow-up album, Earth Music. The band kept up a steady regimen of live shows. Sometime around August 1968, guitarist Jerry Corbitt dropped out of the band. Although the Youngbloods were just a trio, they leaned on Banana's phenomenal versatility and the willingness of ballroom audiences to accept lengthy jams. The Youngbloods on stage probably didn't sound much like their records by 1968, but they were still popular.

In April of 1969, the Youngbloods finally released their third album on RCA. Elephant Mountain was produced by veteran Nashville session man  Charlie Daniels, later to become famous in his own right as a performer. The Youngbloods were just a trio, but the studio gave them ample opportunity to overdub. There were also some timely guest appearances, like fiddler David Lindley (then in Kaleidoscope) on "Darkness, Darkness." That song, as well as "Sunlight," became familiar on FM radio. 

Remarkably, however, the National Council of Christians and Jews created a Public Service Announcement that used The Youngbloods version of “Get Together.” The band's version was 2 years old by this time, a lifetime in the 60s, and the song had been recorded by numerous other artists. Yet somehow the record caught on, and RCA re-released it as a single. "Get Together" would enter the Top 40 charts in August, and stay there for 12 weeks, peaking at #5. Between their hit single and a solid new album, the Youngbloods managed to sign with Warner Brothers for good money. As part of their Warners' deal, the band was given their own record label (or "Imprint") to release whatever they wanted. Raccoon Records would actually put out some interesting music (like albums by High Country and Banana and The Bunch), but they weren't particularly successful. In any case, the Youngbloods had been a hard-working road band since 1966, and their ship finally came in in the Summer of '69.

Lamb was the songwriting duo of pianist Barbara Mauritz and guitarist Bob Swanson. Mauritz was the primary vocalist, but they were a writing partnership. By 1970, the pair would add a rhythm section and record some rock-oriented albums for Bill Graham's Fillmore Records label. In Summer '69, however, Lamb was just a duo.

Rubber Duck featured mime Joe McCord, backed by musicians who improvised behind him. McCord's backing band fluctuated, and on occasion even included Jerry Garcia and Tom Constanten, but since the Dead were out of town we know they weren't involved.

Mother Bear had a complicated history. Their first album had been released in 1968 on Cadet Concept Records, a subsidiary of the Chess label in Chicago. At the time, the band was called Salloom Sinclair and Mother Bear, as it featured Texas-to-Chicago transplants Roger Salloom (guitar) and Robin Sinclair (vocals). The duo would go on to record a country-oriented album for Cadet Concept in Nashville. Meanwhile, Mother Bear had relocated to the Bay Area in early 1969. I think that Saloom and Sinclair had left the band by this time--hence the name modification--and that the band was led by guitarist Tom Davis.

For the next post in the series (July 18-20, 1969 Sir Douglas Quintet), see here