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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 (September 12-14, 1969 It's A Beautiful Day) see here
- For a summary and the link to the most recent entries in this series, see here
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| SF Good Times ad for The Family Dog on The Great Highway from September 18, 1969 |
The Family Dog on The Great Highway had been teetering on the edge of solvency since it had opened in June, 1969. In the second half of September, all the signs pointed to falling off the cliff. The Dog had usually managed to find a steady supply of old Avalon stalwarts to headline each weekend, but even those bands had stopped playing the venue. Publicity for the Dog was almost non-existent. There was a weekly ad in the San Francisco Good Times, an underground paper, but that is just about our only source of information about performances at the Family Dog during this period. Writers in the local mainstream and underground papers stopped writing about any events there. Very few events were even in the listings of the papers, too, meaning the Dog staff--if there was one--wasn't even doing the basic work of issuing press releases and phoning newspapers.
At this point, the Family Dog on The Great Highway was more like a Community Center. Various local groups used the venues to put on shows of various kinds. Sometimes the shows were probably pretty interesting, but there wasn't anything coherent about the bookings. It's true that the ethos of the Family Dog, represented by the Tuesday group meeting of "The Commons," favored a sort of Community Center. The problem was that such a model wasn't sustainable without some profitable bookings. The last two weeks of September are a random--if interesting--catalog of different hippie cultures in San Francisco at the time.
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| Stephen Gaskin's 1980 book, Amazing Dope Tales and Haight Ashbury Flashbacks |
September 15, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Monday Night class
Popular San Francisco State College professor Stephen Gaskin held his "Monday Night Class" regularly. It's not clear whether this was every Monday night, or only some Monday nights. SF State was just down the road a bit, at 19th Avenue and Holloway. Gaskin (1935-2014), a Literature instructor, talked on Monday Nights about what we would now call "Consciousness Expansion" or "Human Potential," but at the time he was called a "Hip Guru." This isn't my topic, but I will say that Gaskin was not a hustler or a charlatan, whatever you think of Self-Help.
Gaskin's Monday class was free, and apparently he regularly filled the Family Dog. The picture of the Dog interior at the top of the post was taken at a Gaskin lecture, for example. Still, while apparently Gaskin took some donations to cover his own expenses, in itself the class wasn't a profit-maker, and apparently the Family Dog must not have been able to convert Gaskin's "students" into weekend customers.
September 16, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: In Search of America (Tuesday)
I have no idea what "In Search Of America" might have been.
September 17, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Film and Light Spectacular (Wednesday)
The Light Show operators were trying to make their Art into a viable economic commodity. Since we have no eyewitnesses, we can only guess about this event. Presumably there were old silent movies, or nature films, or something, and probably records, and the light shows performed to those. This had been tried a few weeks before at the Dog, but apparently with only minimal success.
About a decade later, Planetarium-type light shows, like "Laserium" became popular, doing laser light shows to Pink Floyd records and the like, so the idea wasn't as far-fetched as it sounds.
September 18, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Richmond Symphony (Thursday)
The Richmond District was the San Francisco neighborhood just to the East of the Family Dog, running all the way along Golden Gate Park. The Richmond Symphony was likely some sort of neighborhood orchestra, although it could just as well have been a jazz ensemble or something. "Richmond Symphony" is hard to Google, so any insight is welcome in the Comments.
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| Doug McKechnie and his Moog Synthesizer, ca 1968 |
September 19-21, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Circus Of The Absurd Costume Ball: Carlos Carvajal/Moog Synthesizer of the SF Radical Laboratories/Shag/Devil's Kitchen (Friday-Sunday)
What was this event? Carlos Carvajal was ballet master and associate choreographer for the San Francisco Ballet at the time. In Spring 1970, Carvajal put on a dance performance that was very well-reviewed by staff critic Robert Commanday, and also got Carvajal fired. He went on to become an important figure in modern dance. The ad says that his presentation includes performers from the San Francisco Ballet and Opera.
As for the Doug McKechnie's SF Radical Laboratories, people were only just becoming aware of Moog Synthesizers. Walter Carlos had released his popular Switched On Bach album, and George Harrison had released Electronic Sounds. It's safe to say that almost no one had heard a live performance with a Moog Synthesizer.
Doug McKechnie's history was unique in so many ways. Around about 1968, McKechnie had lived in a warehouse type building on 759 Harrison (between 3rd and 4th Streets-for reference, 759 Harrison is now across from Whole Foods). Avalon Ballroom soundman and partner Bob Cohen lived in the building, and Blue Cheer (and Dan Hicks and The Hot Licks) practiced upstairs. One day, McKechnie's roommate Bruce Hatch acquired a Moog Synthesizer, and the instrument arrived in boxes, awaiting assembly. At the time, a synthesizer was like a musical unicorn, only slightly more real than a myth. Hatch had the technical ability to assemble the machinery, but he was basically tone-deaf. So McKechnie focused on actually making music on the Moog.
McKechnie and Hatch referred to their enterprise as Radical Sound Labs. Word got around--McKechnie helped the Grateful Dead record the strange outtake "What's Become Of The Baby" on the 1969 Aoxomoxoa
sessions in San Mateo (his memories are, uh, fuzzy). Thanks to the
Dead, McKechnie and his Moog--the size of a VW Bus--can be seen in the Gimme Shelter
movie, providing peculiar music on a gigantic sound system for the
anxious masses. When McKechnie opened for rock shows at the Family
Dog, he used the name "SF Rad Labs." McKechnie had just played the Family Dog a few weeks earlier, on Sunday, August 31.
Unlike the very few other synthesizer artists, McKechnie was not associated with an academic endeavor, he wasn't trying to sell an instrument, and he didn't have any record company affiliation. None of those things were bad, by the way--it's just that the thoroughly hippie underground McKechnie could do what we wanted. Now, probably, what he played at the Family Dog wouldn't have held up that well over time, if there was a tape. But at the time, a Moog was a Unicorn. If you saw at a Unicorn at a farm, you wouldn't say "it's not a good plow horse, though." So this must have been pretty far out to listeners at the time, even if it would sound less so to us now.
Devil's Kitchen were a bluesy quartet from Carbondale, IL, who had relocated to San Francisco and were sort of a house band at the Family Dog. I recognize Shag from listings, but I don't know anything about them.
The weekend sounds interesting--progressive dance, a cutting edge performance by an electronic musician, and some local rock bands. But was anyone going to go?
September 22, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Monday Night class
September 24, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Games Night (Wednesday)
The Tuesday and Wednesday listings suggest that the Family Dog was open, but not much else. Not a sign of a robust business. There wasn't a bar at the Family Dog, so walk-in business didn't really net the venue anything.
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| Ralph Gleason wrote about the Thursday Light Show at the Dog in his Chronicle column of Wednesday, September 24 1969 |
September 25, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Light Show Jam (Thursday)
In August, the Family Dog had held a Light Show event on a Tuesday night. Gleason wrote:
Tomorrow night at the Family Dog there's the second "San Francisco Light Show Jam and Preserves" with Crimson Madness, Optic Illusion, Sweet Misery, Clear Light Drive, Jerry Abrams Head Lights, Dr. Zarkov, Extraordinary Light Productions, Lightest Show on Earth, Albatross, Abercrombie Images, Missionary Light and Garden of Delights. Music is from unissued tapes of S.F. groups plus classical and electronic tapes.A variety of light show operators performed their shows to vintage tapes from the Avalon. There had been a similar show on August 26, so I looked into the trail of breadcrumbs, and it seems that the Avalon tapes were destroyed (by owner/taper Bob Cohen) to avoid a crooked record deal. While a few tracks were released as Vintage Dead and Historic Dead on MGM/Sunflower Records in 1971, the balance of the tapes were destroyed by Cohen. Thus it means that in August, and probably in September, what few fans there were heard some 1966 shows by the Grateful Dead and others that were never heard again.
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| The SF Good Times ad for The Family Dog on The Great Highway from September 25, 1969 |
The weekend headliner at the Family Dog was the Rhythm Dukes, a Santa Cruz band featuring Jerry Miller of Moby Grape. The original version of the band had another member of Moby Grape, former drummer Don Stevenson, who played rhythm guitar. Bassist John Barrett and drummer John "Fuzzy" Oxendine, both previously in a Santa Cruz band called Boogie, filled out the group. After one show, however, Stevenson had dropped out of the band. The Rhythm Dukes then toured the Midwest as a trio, often billed (against their wishes) as "Moby Grape" (Italian historian Bruno Ceriotti has a detailed history of the band).
Floating Bridge were from Seattle. They were a “heavy” band featuring the twin guitar leads of Rich Dangel and Joe Johansen. They had been an established band in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest since about early 1968, but were probably touring California in support of their album on Vault Records. Dangel had been the lead guitarist for Northwest legends The Wailers (today mostly known as The Fabulous Wailers, to distinguish them from Bob Marley) and Dangel was widely regarded as one of the best guitarists in Seattle (not least by his former roommate, Larry Coryell). At various junctures, Floating Bridge also featured an electric cellist (who doubled on saxophone), setting them apart from most contemporaries.
The Wailers, from Tacoma, WA had hit it big nationally with the song “Tall Cool One.” The Wailers and The Sonics had been the anchors of the early 60s Tacoma/Seattle scene, particularly a place called The Spanish Castle (memorialized by Jimi Hendrix in “Spanish Castle Magic”). Dangel had left around 1965 (The Wailers continued on, as they do to this day) and moved to California. After briefly forming a band called The Rooks, he ended up in The Time Machine, in San Diego. When the Time Machine broke up, Dangel and another member (bassist Joe Johnson) moved back to Seattle and formed The Floating Bridge.
The Floating Bridge were fondly remembered by those who saw them live. Their 1969 debut album on Vault Records featured a lengthy jam on a medley of “Eight Miles High” and “Paint It Black.” Dangel continued to be a highly regarded guitarist on the Seattle scene until his death in 2002.
Rather ominously, in his Friday roundup of weekend shows in the SF Chronicle, Ralph Gleason led off by saying "At the Family Dog (F, S&S): I dunno." This was not a good sign. The diligent Gleason had access to all the press releases, and venues would regularly phone the paper (or Gleason directly) with updates. Gleason listed Dog headliners almost every weekend--saying he didn't know was a total failure on the Dog's part. It suggests that maybe the shows were canceled.
The deadline for the Friday (September 26) Chronicle would have been Thursday at noon, far later than the ad in the SF Good Times. At best--and this isn't saying much--it's a complete failure by the Dog's staff to let the most important music writer in the Bay Area know who was playing this weekend. Note that on the only ad for the venue, the copy spelled the star's name wrong (Terre Miller instead of Jerry Miller). It's not something that inspires confidence.
As to the gallant listing in the Good Times ad that said "Surprise Group," Gleason would have indicated that if he had known. He wouldn't have broken a contract by naming them, but he would have given readers a heads up to pay attention. Instead, he said "I dunno." If the Rhythm Dukes and Floating Bridge played, the music would have been very good, but there's distinct doubt that they played at all.
For the next entry in the series (October 3-5 '69, Kaleidoscope), see here
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