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