August 28, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, 660 Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Grateful Dead/Mickey Hart and The Hartbeats/New Riders of The Purple Sage (FDGH '69 XVII)

 

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 26, 1969 Great SF Light Show Jam) see here
  
• For a summary and the link to the most recent entries in this series, see here

August 28, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, 660 Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Grateful Dead/Mickey Hart and The Hartbeats/New Riders of The Purple Sage (Thursday)
Prosopographical research on rock shows at the Family Dog on The Great Highway is closer to Archeology. We often have very limited information about what shows were even scheduled, and almost never have information about the bands that actually played or anything that happened. Since the shows were generally--apparently--thinly attended, eyewitness accounts on blogs and message boards are few and far between. For '60s research, Grateful Dead performances are usually our best hope of getting some information, since Deadheads and the Grateful Dead cosmos have made a half-century long effort to document everything.

Initially, Thursday, August 28, 1969 had no provenance save for the Grateful Dead. The Family Dog had advertised the Grateful Dead for Friday and Saturday (August 29 and 30), supported by the then unknown New Riders of The Purple Sage, Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen and Rubber Duck. The Dog pretty much never had shows on Thursday night as part of a weekend run. Yet the Grateful Dead vault had a tape labeled "Hartbeats" from the Family Dog, recorded by Owsley Stanley himself, and dated August 28. It should be noted that Owsley's tape labeling was scrupulously accurate.

I speculated about the tape and the mysterious performance in a blog post many years ago. My speculation at the time, reasonable but in the end incorrect, was that the Dead had set up their equipment in advance of their weekend show, and had taken the opportunity to jam a little bit. My blog Commenters and I generally speculated that this may have been a response to Jerry Garcia's request at a meeting of The Commons (on Tuesday, August 12) for the Dog to host jam sessions during the day. There was no flyer, no advertising, no trace of the event, so the general assumption was that the hour long tape was members of the Dead having some fun with some friends.

The lineup for the tape was Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart, organist Howard Wales and a brief appearance by a flute player. Starting back in 1968, Garcia, Lesh, Hart and Kreutzmann had played some gigs at the Matrix as Mickey Hart and The Hartbeats, sometimes joined by some guests. They typically played some instrumental Dead jams and a few blues numbers, which is exactly what transpired on the tape. It all seemed to fit--a weeknight jam for Garcia, for a few random hippies, when the Dead's equipment was already set up.

Yet one anonymous Commenter said:

I was there for the concert on the 28th and remember all the bands playing, the Dead, New Riders, and Commander Cody. There was also a short set from Mickey and the Heartbeats which played either during or after the normal Dead set. The hartbeats did High Heeled Sneakers and maybe even Schoolgirl. It was a fantastic night.

Memories are a tricky thing, and it was always possible that the Commenter was remembering Friday or Saturday, or combining Thursday and Friday. But guess what? Its looking like he remembered pretty well, whoever he (or she) was.

Eventually, I posted a version of this analysis elsewhere, and a fellow scholar found a contemporary poster. While it seems the Family Dog had initially advertised a Friday and Saturday booking for the Dead, a Thursday ad in the San Francisco Good Times underground paper listed a show on that night as well. So the Dead show was scheduled, and at least somewhat publicized.

The post on my Grateful Dead blog netted some other information as well. A correspondent wrote in with his recollections of seeing not just August 28, but the weekend's shows as well

I attended these shows. I have no memory of Commander Cody or Rubber Duck playing at all. Rather, there was a group called Phoenix. The line up was Phoenix as the opener, then New Riders, then the Dead with the bonus Hartbeats one night. There were stages at either end of the hall and while Phoenix was playing at one end, the Riders were setting up at the other and then the Dead while the Riders played. God showed up as well in the form of Pig and Jerry tearing it up and leaving we poor mortals smoking wrecks. When it was over, we stumbled out and across the Great Highway to collapse on the sand and let the crashing surf bring us back to earth.

Phoenix was a San Francisco band with roots going back to the Acid Test days (when they were known as Universal Parking Lot). Is the Internet great or what?  It's also fascinating to see that two stages were in use, in a complete break from rock concert orthodoxy. My correspondent also added that, at least on the first night, there were only around 300 people there.

 

Dawn Of The New Riders
In early 2020, the Owsley Stanley Foundation released a great 5-disc set called Dawn Of The New Riders of The Purple Sage. One of the discs had a complete New Riders set from Thursday, August 28 (see below for the list). As if that wasn't enough, Bob Weir joined the New Riders for several numbers, previewing a never-fulfilled concept called Bobby Ace And The Cards Off The Bottom Of The Deck. So that means Weir was at the Family Dog that night, so a Grateful Dead set suddenly seems very likely. It remains to be seen whether the Dead set was recorded by Owsley, and whether that tape can surface, but given the paucity of evidence we typically deal with for the Family Dog, I'm going with the likelihood that the Dead played a set, along with the "Hartbeats" jam and the New Riders.

Howard Wales and Jerry Garcia, from the back cover of their 1971 Hooteroll? album. Tame as it may seem now, passing a joint on the back cover of your album was A Statement at the time.

Howard Wales
Over the years, the most intriguing part about the Family Dog "Hartbeats" tape was the presence of organist Howard Wales. In a much later interview, Tom Constanten complained that Wales had "a bigger stack" (of Lesley Amplifiers, presumably) than him, a whiff that there was some competition involved. I had always assumed that Wales was sitting in when TC wasn't there, but now it seems more likely that the whole band was there, and the Hartbeats jam was something extra.

Now, Howard Wales was an experienced musician and a brilliant player. Wales was from the Cincinnati area, where he had backed guitarist Lonnie Mack in the mid-60s. Wales then ended up in El Paso, TX, working in a jazz trio with tenor saxophonist Martin Fierro, and after that in Seattle. By 1968, Wales had made landfall in San Francisco. He joined a blues trio that had just moved from Milwaukee, The New Blues. They became a quartet called the AB Skhy Blues Band. The band's debut had been released on MGM in 1969, and they performed regularly around the Bay Area.

Howard Wales was part of A.B. Skhy when they released their 1969 debut on MGM Records

Wales must have met Garcia somewhere. I'm not aware of AB Skhy opening for the Dead prior to this, and Garcia in general did not "hang out" at the Avalon or in bars, so it's mysterious how they connected. The geography of the Family Dog isn't irrelevant here. I don't know where Wales lived, but it's a safe bet it wasn't out in the essentially suburban Sunset district. Wales wouldn't have come to the Family Dog at all, and even less likely if he brought his own organ, without the guarantee of jamming. The Great Highway was a long way from anywhere, and nobody jammed with the Dead in '69 unless they were invited, which means they had received the Garcia seal of approval. So how Wales ended up at the Family Dog this night is not just a mystery, but part of a larger puzzle that may never be solved.

Of course, we now know the story that Wales and drummer Bill Vitt were managing the Monday night jams at the Matrix in the Spring of 1970, and Jerry Garcia started showing up. Garcia showed up because he wanted to jam with Wales. Vitt, in turn, would invite bassist John Kahn, and Garcia and Kahn's partnership would begin there. But the roots of it seem to trace back to the Family Dog. Somehow, Wales was invited to jam with the Hartbeats configuration, and we even had a tape. A few years later, we had the Howard Wales/Jerry Garcia album Hooteroll? (released on Douglas/CBS in 1971, but recorded in October 1970, yet it all seems to have started for undetermined reasons at an unpublicized Thursday night at the Family Dog. It's distinctly possible that Garcia had somehow previously jammed with Wales at the Matrix, a regular jamming site, and invited him out to the Dog for a more serious go at it. No wonder TC had some anxiety even years after the fact.

Known Facts

• Knowledge of the show comes from a Bear cassette master of the show labeled "Hartbeats," with the date of the show and  the location. 
• Although there are some tape flips and some resulting missing snippets of music, the tape seems to be 81 minutes and sounds like a complete set.
• The band lineup appears to be Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart and organist Howard Wales.
• A flute player joins in at the beginning of "Dark Star," just shy of the 10-minute mark, but he is hard to hear and seems to drop away 
• This is the first time I am aware of Howard Wales playing with Jerry Garcia

Unknowns

• Did anyone other than Owsley use the name "Hartbeats" for this show? Was that just convenient shorthand for a jam, or were they introduced that way? It wasn't actually used in 1968, and although I'm aware that it appeared on a 1969 bill at the Matrix and 1970 at the Dog and the Matrix, we don't have have tapes of any "Hartbeats" sets at those shows
• It's plausible but uncertain that Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen would play a set. They were new in town, and would not have been socially connected to the Dead at this point, so an invitation to a stealth event isn't as likely. In any case, they probably appeared on the next two nights, but we don't positively know that either (see the next Family Dog post for a more thorough discussion of Cody and the Airmen)
• My personal correspondent recalls Phoenix rather than Commander Cody. It may be that the Internet commenter was confusing one of the nights
  
• Who played flute? I discuss that a little bit here--one possibility is Steve Schuster, another is Andy Kulberg of Blues Project, both socially connected enough to be invited
  

Setlist: New Riders of The Purple Sage, August 28, 1969, Family Dog on The Great Highway, San Francisco, CA

John Dawson-acoustic guitar, vocals
Jerry Garcia-pedal steel guitar
David Nelson-electric guitar
Bob Matthews-bass
Mickey Hart-drums

Six Days On The Road (Dave Dudley-1963)
I Am Your Man (John Dawson original)
Last Lonely Eagle (John Dawson original)
Whatcha Gonna Do (John Dawson original)
[introducing the famous Bobby Ace]
Mama Tried [w/Bob Weir] (Merle Haggard-1968)
Cathy's Clown [w/Bob Weir] (Everly Brother-1960)
Old, Old House [w/Bob Weir] (George Jones-1965)
Me And My Uncle [w/Bob Weir] (Judy Collins-1964)
Seasons Of The Heart [w/Bob Weir] (George Jones-1965)
Slewfoot [w/Bob Weir] (Porter Wagoner-1966)

note: save for the Dawson songs, I have listed the best known cover versions, not the songwriters

Setlist: Hartbeats, August 28, 1969, Family Dog on The Great Highway, San Francisco, C

Jerry Garcia-guitar, vocals
Howard Wales-organ
Phil Lesh-bass
Bill Kreutzmann-drums
Mickey Hart-drums
#unknown-flute ("Dark Star Jam")

It's A Sin
High Heeled Sneakers
Dark Star Jam#>
  The Eleven Jam>
  Dark Star Jam

For the next entry in the series (August 29-30 '69, Grateful Dead), see here