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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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 GuildAlthough 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 article went to explain the demands of the Light Show Guild:
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 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.
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| 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.
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.
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| Berkeley Tribe article, August 1, 1969 |
For the next entry in the series (August 2-3 '69 Grateful Dead) see here
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