September 12-14, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, 660 Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: It's A Beautiful Day/Sons Of Champlin/Fourth Way [FDGH '69 XX]

 

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 (September 6, 1969 Jefferson Airplane/Grateful Dead) see here
  
• For a summary and the link to the most recent entries in this series, see here

 

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The Sunday (Sep 14) SF Chronicle had a photo of The Fourth Way, noting their gig opening at the Family Dog on The Great Highway

The Family Dog on The Great Highway had opened in June of 1969, and it had never gotten on to firm financial footing. It was losing money each week, apparently, and proprietor Chet Helms had a huge tax bill from the IRS, left over from 1967, when the Avalon had been successful. Nonetheless, the Family Dog had some great bands throughout the month of August, and likely pretty good attendance. The Grateful Dead had played the first and last weekends (August 2-3 and August 29-30), Country Joe and The Fish (August 8-10) and Mike Bloomfield (August 15-16), had both played weekends, there had been a Wild West "makeup" extravaganza, and on the first weekend of September, the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead had played a stealth gig on Saturday, September 6. Still, the Dog was on the precipice, and they were on the verge of falling off.

The Tuesday, September 9, 1969 Examiner listed "Rock, Etc" at the Family Dog

September 9, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Sufi Dervish Dancing, Pakistani Fashion Show, Phoenix (rock) (Tuesday)
The Family Dog was regularly rented for promotions by outside groups. A Pakistani Fashion Show and Sufi Dervish Dancing sounds like a unique night out. Phoenix was a good local rock band that played pretty danceable music, and deep, complicated roots in the 60s Bay Area rock scene.

September 10, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, San Francisco, CA:  "Latin Rock" Kwane and The Kwanditos/Los Flamencos de la Santa Lucia (Wednesday)
Latin Jazz had gotten its start on San Francisco's Broadway back in the 1950s, and of course Santana had invented Latin Rock, so popular Latin music roots went pretty deep in the Bay Area. The previous Wednesday, the Dog had also held a Latin Music night. I have no idea if these consecutive weeks were tied together but it seems likely. 

Kwane And The Kwanditos played some sort of Latin jazz-rock, as far as I can tell. Their pianist was Todd Barkan, who would go on to take over San Francisco's Keystone Korner jazz club in 1972.

Los Flamencos de la Santa Lucia were a flamenco troupe that were regularly booked at rock venues.

 

September 11, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Purple Earthquake/Johnny Mars Band/Wisdom Finger/Osceola (Thursday)
This Thursday night booking of obscure local bands is intriguing for the possibility that the Grateful Dead may have made a guest appearance. As is typical with the Dead and the Dog, we have a tape fragment  but no other evidence.

The Bay Area rock market was booming, for both live performance and recording. The Fillmore West had regular audition nights on Tuesdays. Bill Graham had just re-started them for the Fall (in the Summer, the Fillmore West was open six nights a week with touring bands, but in the Fall and Winter it was just Thursday through Sunday). A few local or out-of-town bands would play the Fillmore West on Tuesdays, and sometimes there would be a jam afterwards, including some local heavyweights. It looks like Chet Helms had the same idea, but opted for a Thursday.

Purple Earthquake was a power trio out of Berkeley High School. They would evolve into the band Earth Quake, who had a fair amount of local success with their albums in the 1970s.

I recognize the name Johnny Mars Blues Band from listings around this time, but don't know anything else about them. 

As for Wisdom Fingers, we know a little about them from the miracle of the Comment Thread (in my Fillmore West Audition post)

Wisdom Fingers was a band lead by singer-songwriter Rip Masters on keys and vocals. Given name: Martin Masters. The band featured Lenny Giachello on drums and Geoff Pierce on guitar with Larry Brown on bass. Some gigs were as a trio with organ bass. The band also played at The Family Dog on the Great Highway with Purple Earthquake, and at the wrap party for the cult film "Glenn and Randa" [sic] among other appearances around the Bay Area. The band was based in Haight Ashbury with ties to Mill Valley and Santa Cruz. Music was mostly original. East Coast native and leader Masters went on to become a well known rockabilly artist and session player starting in the mid 70s through the present.

Guitarist Alan Yott of Osceola at the Family Dog on The Great Highway, probably 1970

 We know a fair amount about the band Osceola. This show at the Family Dog was probably one of their very first gigs. They would go on to play the Dog many times, and played around the Bay Area regularly until at least 1972. Osceola lead guitarist Bill Ande was a transplant from Florida. He had played and recorded with some modestly successful bands, like the R-Dells, the American Beetles (really), who had then changed their name to The Razor's Edge and had even played American Bandstand. Come '69, Ande had relocated to San Francisco to play some psychedelic blues. The musicians he linked up with were all Florida transplants as well, so even though they were a San Francisco band, they chose the name Osceola as an homage to their roots.

Osceola was a five piece band with two drummers, and played all the local ballrooms and rock nightclubs. Ande was joined by guitarist Alan Yott, bassist Chuck Nicholis and drummers Donny Fields and Richard Bevis. Osceola was a successful live act, but never recorded. Almost all of the band members would return to the Southeast (mainly Tallahassee and Atlanta) in the mid-70 to have successful music careers.

The Grateful Dead link is more tenuous. There is a fragmentary Dead tape consisting of one song that has circulated since at least the early 80s. It is an audience tape of one song, "Easy Wind," dated September 11, 1969. The provenance of the tape is obscure, as there is not a longer recording. It's also worth noting that there were almost no audience tapers on the West Coast at the time. Who made this tape, and where did it come from?

The "official" listings on the archive suggest that the tape was originally labeled "unknown venue," and the location of The Family Dog on The Great Highway was just a plausible suggestion. It is a plausible suggestion, but no evidence backs it up. The recording persisted as "tape filler" for many years since it's so interesting. It is an early performance of "Easy Wind," with a slide guitar part. For many years, this was assumed to part of some jam with a guest on slide guitar--making the Family Dog seem likely--but I reject that hypothesis now. I'm convinced it's actually Jerry Garcia on slide guitar, with Bob Weir playing lead. 

If the tape really was recorded at the Family Dog, we have to assume the Dead showed up on "new band night" for a blow. They very well could have. They had jammed at the Dog (possibly for no audience) on Thursday August 14, played a practically stealth show on Thursday August 28, and then played at least one stealth show with the Jefferson Airplane on Saturday, September 6. So, it's not far-fetched to imagine them dropping in on September 11.

It does beg the question, however, of why the above commenter, most likely Rip Masters or someone close to him, didn't mention opening for the Dead at the Dog. So the September 11, 1969 performance of "Easy Wind" remains a mystery that may or may not have emanated from the Family Dog.

 

September 12-14, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: It's A Beautiful Day/Sons Of Champlin/Fourth Way (Friday-Sunday)
It's A Beautiful Day had released their debut album on Columbia in June 1969. Unlike the first albums of many groups, the music was fully formed. LaFlamme had been in an odd group called Orkustra in 1967 that played around the Haight, so he had learned some lessons from that. It's A Beautiful Day had originally been sent to Seattle by their manager, Matthew Katz, so they had "gotten it together" before they reappeared in San Francisco. The debut album had some great songs, and they got heavily played on FM radio. The most popular was "White Bird," which would go on to become a huge AM hit as well, and a sort of 60s classic. It's A Beautiful Day had played one of the fundraisers for the Wild West, back on July 7, and then a Wild West makeup show on August 24, but this weekend was the band's first time headlining a paying gig at the Dog.

The Sons of Champlin were a tier lower than It's A Beautiful Day, but they were a Bay Area band on the rise. Capitol Records had released the Sons' debut album, Loosen Up Naturally--a double lp--back in May. The hard-working Sons had played all over the Bay Area for years, and they had played The Family Dog in June and again for a Wild West show in August.

The Fourth Way were an intriguing jazz-rock hybrid band who had just released their debut album on Capitol Records. The quartet played electric jazz, and was one of a number of Bay Area bands experimenting with jazz and rock, but in a less aggressive style than East Coast "Fusion" music inspired by Miles Davis' Bitches Brew band and album. The Fourth Way were led by expatriate New Zealand pianist Mike Nock, whose career is too long and interesting to summarize (although he does a pretty good job of it himself, when interviewed on his 80th birthday in 2019). Chief soloist was electric violinist Michael White, who had toured and recorded with John Handy in the mid-60s. Jazz veterans Eddie Marshall (on drums) and Ron McClure filled out the band. 

The Friday September 12, 1969 Examiner mentions opening act Fourth Way and the light show (Garden Of Delights), with no mention of the previously-booked Sons Of Champlin. They may not have played.

What Happened?
Like many Family Dog bookings, the event seems to have disappeared without a trace. I know of no review or eyewitness account. In fact, the Sons of Champlin may not have even played. The Friday Examiner did not list them, and Sons' road manager did not think the band played many weekends at the Family Dog, and didn't recall this one. Neither of those are proof that the Sons didn't play, but it's not a good sign when a venue either can't pay or the bands who played there can't remember it. There's not a doubt about the quality of music that would have been played, but for how many people?

After this weekend, the bottom fell out of Family Dog weekend bookings. Name bands did not play the Family Dog for the balance of the month, not even the old Avalon stalwarts that had been the regular fare. The skinny evidence suggests that this was a very poorly attended weekend, and the Family Dog couldn't recover for some time. The venue was rented to outside promoters, but that was thin gruel indeed.

For the next entry in the series (September 15-26 '69, various bands), see here