August 15-16, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, 660 Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Mike Bloomfield, Nick Gravenites and Friends/New Lost City Ramblers/Southern Comfort/Devil's Kitchen (plus Tah Mahal) (FDGH '69 XIII)

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 (August 12, 1969 New Riders of The Purple Sage) see here
  
• For a summary and the link to the most recent entries in this series, see here

A flyer for the Family Dog on the weekend of August 15-17, 1969

August 15-16, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Mike Bloomfield, Nick Gravenites and Friends/New Lost City Ramblers/Southern Comfort/Devil's Kitchen (15 only)/Taj Mahal (16 only) (Friday-Saturday)
August 17, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Taj Mahal (Sunday)
The weekend of August 15-17 is a textbook example of how difficult it has been to determine who actually played the Family Dog. The Chronicle, the Examiner, the Barb and the Tribe all have variations on who was booked, and they all contradict to some degree. I have posted a few examples here, but I will refrain from demarcating every possible variable, and just try and make my best guess. It seems that the Friday and Saturday headliner was Mike Bloomfield and Nick Gravenites, supported by Southern Comfort and the New Lost City Ramblers. On Friday, Devil's Kitchen opened the show, and on Saturday Taj Mahal replaced them on the bill (though in what order the bands played is unknown). On Sunday, Taj Mahal seems to have been the headliner. Someone else probably may have played on Sunday as well, but it's unclear who. 

Mike Bloomfield was a great musician and America's first great guitar hero. By late 1968, he had already left the powerful and influential Butterfield Blues Band for the Electric Flag, and he then would leave the interesting but unsatisfying Flag in mid-1968. He had also been a major part of Al Kooper's Super Session album, released to great fanfare in July of '68. Bloomfield was a restless soul, striving to make great music and uncomfortable with his own success, yet everything he touched seemed to turn to gold.

Members of the Mike Bloomfield Band casually refer to it by that name, but they were almost never booked under that name itself. The group was usually known as Mike Bloomfield, Nick Gravenites and Friends, or Bloomfield/Gravenites/Naftalin, or variations thereof. The basic band was

    Nick Gravenites-vocals
    Mike Bloomfield-lead guitar, vocals
    Ira Kamin-organ
    Mark Nafatalin-piano
    John Kahn-bass
    Bob Jones-drums, vocals

Kahn, Kamin and Jones had been in Memory Pain together. Gravenites had been in the Electric Flag with Bloomfield, and Naftalin had been in the Butterfield Blues Band. Bloomfield wasn't a bad vocalist, actually, but he wasn't that interested in singing, and in any case Gravenites was a great blues vocalist and songwriter. The first performances of the Bloomfield Band had been at the Fillmore West in late January, 1969. Columbia released a Bloomfield album, It's Not Killing Me, produced by Gravenites, in mid-year.

At this juncture, it's worth pointing out a certain parallel between Nick Gravenites and John Kahn with respect to their professional relationships to Mike Bloomfield and Jerry Garcia. Bloomfield let Gravenites organize his various projects in a way that was comparable to how Kahn would organize the Jerry Garcia Band in the next decade. Bloomfield was only interested in touring on the West Coast, and mostly just in the Bay Area, and he was more interested in playing live than rehearsing. When there was a scheduling conflict with a backing musician, a substitute was found, and the results were part of the improvisational flavor of the music. Substitutes were never a problem, as Bloomfield never rehearsed anyway. Bloomfield was the first SF rock star to play regularly around town, a practice later picked up by Jerry Garcia, Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady, Van Morrison and others.

Columbia Records released the Southern Comfort album (produced by John Kahn and Nick Gravenites ) in mid-1970

Southern Comfort had been formed in May 1969. All of the band members were playing regularly in San Francisco studios, mainly on records produced by Nick Gravenites. The idea was that Southern Comfort would both be an established studio rhythm section and a performing band, like Booker T and The MGs. The band members were

Fred Burton-lead guitar [aka Fred Olson, his given name]
Ron Stallings-tenor sax, vocals
John Wilmeth-trumpet
Steve Funk-keyboards
Art Stavro-bass
Bob Jones-drums, vocals

IIn the case of the August Family Dog show, Southern Comfort was sharing the bill with the Bloomfield band, so Jones could play both sets. However, Jones did recall (in an email) that on one night the party got out of hand and he left early, so he can't say who sat in on drums that night in his stead.

Bandleader Bob Jones (1947-2013) had played 12-string guitar and sang harmony vocals in a 60s group called The We Five. They had a huge, worldwide hit in 1965 with Ian and Sylvia Tyson's "You Were On My Mind," which sold millions of copies. Still, the We Five broke up, and Jones formed bands in San Francisco with John Kahn and a few others, first the R&B styled T and A Blues Band in 1967 and then the more bluesy Memory Pain in 1968. In the meantime, Kahn and Jones would go around to local jam sessions. Although Jones was a guitar player, Kahn would always ask him to bring a drum set (they shared a house with drummer John Chambers) and play it. Jones would complain that "he wasn't a drummer," but, as he told interviewer Jake Feinberg in the 21st century, he was "Kahned into drumming."

At a jam session in Novato around late 1968, Bloomfield had stuck his head into the room and enquired who was drumming and who was singing. When he found out that it was the same guy, Bob Jones had a new job. Jones considered himself a guitarist, but Bloomfield liked his drumming, and wanted to use him as a singer as well.

The New Lost City Ramblers had been formed in Greenwich Village in 1958. At the time, string band and “old-timey” music was inaccessible to all but the most determined of record collectors. By performing and recording this music, the New Lost City Ramblers were the essential actors in introducing early American music to serious folk musicians, from Bob Dylan and Jerry Garcia to everyone else. The original trio was John Cohen, Mike Seeger (half-brother of Pete) and Tom Paley. Tracy Schwarz replaced Paley in the early 1960s. By 1969, the Ramblers had released over 15 albums. They would stop performing regularly after 1969, but continued to play occasional reunions for decades. The Ramblers were going to play over the weekend at the Family Dog, as well as the Tuesday night show. At this time, their last album was Modern Times, which had been released in 1968 on Folkways.

The Ramblers had played the Family Dog on the previous Tuesday (August 12), paired with the newly-formed New Riders of The Purple Sage. Jerry Garcia and David Nelson had taken great inspiration from the Ramblers when they had started out as folk musicians in Palo Alto in the early 60s. The Ramblers, Garcia and Nelson had jammed together on stage at the end of the Tuesday show (per John Cohen), a passing of the torch only witnessed by only a few. The New Lost City Ramblers would break up later in 1969, although they would occasionally have reunion performances in the ensuing decades. It's hard to know how their old-time folk music might have gone over for a crowd primed for loud electric blues.  Of course, we don't know how many people were even there either night.

Devil's Kitchen were newly-relocated from Carbondale, IL. The band would stay in the Bay Area for about a year, and in late 1969 they were a sort of house band at The Family Dog. What exactly that meant isn't clear--probably that they kept their equipment at the Dog--but they did play the hall regularly. Devil's Kitchen played bluesy rock in the old Avalon style, led by slide guitarist Robbie Stokes and singer/organist Brett Champlin (a distant, distant cousin to Bill Champlin of the Sons). 

 

The Berkeley Tribe listing for The Family Dog on Saturday, August 15

 

 

The SF Examiner for Saturday, August 16 lists Taj Mahal at the Family Dog for Saturday and Sunday (Aug 16-17), with no mention of other acts

Taj Mahal probably replaced Devil's Kitchen on Saturday night, although I don't know what order the bands came on. The logic seems to be that Taj Mahal was the headliner on Sunday night. The Barb implied that Mark Spoelstra was on the bill, too.  Bob Jones didn't recall a third night, and John Cohen didn't refer to one, so the bill was likely a lot smaller in any case, since those bands apparently didn't play.

Taj Mahal (b. Henry Saint Clair Fredericks in 1942) had been raised in a musical family in Springfield, MA. He played in various musical ensembles in high school and in college (at U.Mass). By 1964 he had moved to the West Coast, and he formed a pioneering R&B combo called The Rising Sons, with Ry Cooder on lead guitar (a cd of their recordings was finally released in 1992). By early 1968, Taj had already signed and recorded his debut album with Columbia, with both Cooder and Jesse Ed Davis on guitars, although it would not be released until later in the year. 

Taj Mahal's equally excellent second album, The Natch'l Blues, still with Davis but without Ry Cooder, had been released later in '68. Taj Mahal, like many artists who played the Family Dog, had appeared regularly at the Avalon Ballroom. Sometime in 1969, Taj Mahal would release his memorable Columbia electric/acoustic double album Giant Step/De Ole Folks At Home. On stage, Taj Mahal was backed by a killer trio, with Davis on guitar, Gary Gillmore on bass and Chuck Blackwell on drums. Of course, he could have played solo as well. Without any evidence, it's impossible to know.

For the next entry in the series (August 19, 1969-New Riders of The Purple Sage), see here