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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 (October 17-30, 1969) see here
- For a summary and the link to the most recent entries in this series, see here
October 31, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Danny Cox/Alan Watts/Golden Toad/Hells Angels Own Band (Friday)
The Family Dog had lurched through October with little to show for it. The venue had been open almost every night of the month, mostly with a variety of community-oriented events that only charged $1.00 admission on weeknights. While in retrospect we can see that some of the weekend acts would have been playing some good music (Kaleidoscope or Brewer And Shipley, for example), they weren't really good draws. Yet Jerry Garcia had played there with the New Riders of The Purple Sage, and while the Riders were too new to really have a following, at least Garcia himself was a genuine star. Indeed, the scanty evidence available to us suggests that the Grateful Dead were the one consistent draw at the Family Dog on the Great Highway. They played there more than any other band at their level (i.e. Fillmore West headliner), so things must have gone well. The Dead would be back at the Family Dog on Saturday and Sunday (November 1 and 2). Why, then were the Grateful Dead skipping a Friday night Halloween at the Great Highway? Wasn't it some sort of Federal or Natural law that the Grateful Dead have to play on Halloween?
On Halloween, 1969, the Grateful Dead and the New Riders were booked at the newly opened Student Union Ballroom at San Jose State College. The room--later known as the Loma Prieta Ballroom, for any old Spartans out there--held about 700 in concert configuration. Now, granted, a big school like San Jose State had some kind of entertainment budget, so the Dead's fee would have been greater than playing a regular show for 700 patrons. The poster tells us that SJSC students were charged $2.00, and the public $3.00. Assuming a sellout and 50% students, that's a $1500 gate. Add some from the entertainment budget subvention, but it still isn't a huge number. The Dead were willing to pass on a potentially wild Halloween at the Great Highway for a tiny gate. It doesn't speak well of the band's confidence at drawing a good crowd at the Dog (for a more Grateful Dead-oriented discussion of this weekend, see my blog post here).
When the Dead played the Family Dog on Saturday and Sunday, I'm certain they weren't getting an advance, but rather taking a big slice of the gate. There's some risk associated with that. Now, Garcia didn't mind risk, and Grateful Dead manager Lenny Hart was not an honorable businessman in any case. The attraction of the San Jose State booking, however, must have been that the Dead were guaranteed their money. San Jose State wasn't getting hit with an IRS lien, and wouldn't go out of business the night before. Whatever number the Dead were promised for Friday night in San Jose, that would go to their account. They could take a chance at the Family Dog for the rest of the weekend.
There was another hangup, however, that increased the risk for the weekend: the Family Dog wouldn't be able to
advertise the Dead show until that very week. Bill Graham Presents had
booked the Dead with Jefferson Airplane for the prior weekend, and the
contract would have required that the Dead could not advertise a show
within 50 miles until their booking was complete. Now, it wasn't that
Dead fans wouldn't want to see the band again--that was never a problem.
It's just that concert attendance takes planning, and if you don't know
there's a Dead concert on Halloween weekend, what if you've got
something else going on? What if your sister already got the family car
and you've got no way to get there?
So for Halloween at the Family Dog, the putative headliner was the Golden Toad and folksinger Danny Cox, both of whom would be opening for the Dead on the subsequent nights. The unexplained billing was "Hells Angels Own Band." Who were they? What did it mean? We know it wasn't the Dead, since they were playing in San Jose. I guess you could claim they were going to show up late, but geography doesn't favor that, and in any case, why invoke the Hells Angels? I wouldn't go to any public event today that advertised anything to do with the Hells Angels, and this was Halloween in 1969. Also, the Hells Angels never took kindly to anyone using their name satirically, so the usage must have had some kind of informal approval.
Was this a biker party? Apparently--but why advertise it to the public? Also, bikers are bikers--were they going to look forward to a Renaissance Fair quintet playing 15th century melodies on hand-built replicas of medieval pipes (which is what Golden Toad did)? Sure, Golden Toad founder Bob Thomas was a personal friend (and sometime roommate) of Owsley, but would a bunch of cranked-up bikers care? Danny Cox was an enjoyable folksinger, but he was a big African-American guy, and the Hells Angels were never an advertisement for diverse inclusion.
Nothing about the Friday night booking
made any sense. I have one tiny clue: I had a clever, but inaccurate, theory that Owsley Stanley had made a tape of Danny Cox that would become the album Danny Cox Live At The Family Dog.
The Owsley Stanley Foundation looked into it, and it turned out that
Cox's manager would not let Owsley tape his act. Family Dog soundman Lee
Brenkman thinks that Cox was recorded on Halloween. Brenkman referred
to the event as the "Hell's Angels Halloween party", and added that "it
was the last calm thing that occurred that night." Intriguing. Anyone
with insight, rumors or clever speculation,
please post in the Comments.
The Grateful Dead headlined the Family Dog on The Great Highway on Saturday and Sunday night. Thanks to Owsley Stanley, we have tapes of both nights. The playing on both nights is magical. The existing tapes are both two hours, and seem to be complete shows with a few minor snips. So Golden Toad and Danny Cox must have each done sets, capped by a two-hour blast by the Grateful Dead in their early prime. David Browne, in his great Dead survey So Many Roads, reviews the November 2 (Sunday) tape, with its 30-minute "Dark Star" in its larger context, and it is well worth reading (as is the rest of the book). Whatever the commercial flaws of the Family Dog on The Great Highway, and they seemed to be many, the Dead played fabulously there. In early 1970, manager Lenny Hart would make plans to merge the Grateful Dead's operations with Chet Helms and the Dog, and it had to be at least in part because the band played so well there.
The Golden Toad had nothing to do with rock, of course. But they resolutely followed their own musical course, in a manner clearly aligned with the Grateful Dead's own single-minded mission. The Toad mostly played outdoors in at Renaissance Fairs (in Los Angeles and Marin) or in Berkeley, and usually only played indoors at Berkeley's Freight and Salvage or with the Grateful Dead. The Golden Toad were known to have a rather flexible membership, so they may have had numerous people on stage augmenting the root quintet (supposedly they had performed with up to 23 members) [I discussed the Golden Toad in detail in the previous entry].
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| Danny Cox's 3rd album was Birth Announcement, a double-LP released on Together Records in 1969 and produced by Gary Usher |
Danny Cox was from Cincinnati, but he had relocated to Kansas City in 1967. Cox, a large African-American man, defied rather primitive 60s expectations by singing folk music instead of blues. His current album was his 3rd, Birth Announcement, a double-lp on Together Records produced by Gary Usher. Cox sang folk classics along with Beatles and Dylan songs, lightly backed.
Cox shared management with Brewer And Shipley, and like them he would record an album for ABC/Dunhill in San Francisco with producer Nick Gravenites. Recorded at Wally Heider Studios, it was released in 1971. Both John Kahn and Merl Saunders played on that album. During demos sessions for the record in 1970, Kahn introduced Merl Saunders to Jerry Garcia, who was recording in another room. Some weeks later, when Howard Wales didn't want to come jam at the Matrix, Kahn recommended Merl and the Garcia/Saunders partnership began.
In between 1969 Birth Announcement and his 1971 ABC/Dunhill albums, Sunflower Records released a 1970 Danny Cox album called Live At The Family Dog. Sunflower, associated with MGM, was a fringe label that had released the legal-but-unauthorized Vintage Dead and Historic Dead albums in 1971. Danny Cox only played the Family Dog this weekend and the next weekend in 1969, so assuming that the material was really recorded at the Family Dog--that's no sure thing--they could very well have been recorded this weekend. House soundman Lee Brenkman, as noted above, suggested that Cox may have been recorded Halloween night.
(Scholarly readers will be interested to know that on the Family Dog lp, Cox records "Me And My Uncle," and it is credited to "Trad.--arranged Danny Cox.")
November 4, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Workshop with Family Circus/Rainbow Jam Sky/music by children of Mu (Tuesday)
Circus ephemera is beyond the scope of this blog, but it's possible that "Family Circus" evolved into "Pickle Family Circus," a local circus act without animals. The others are unknown to me.
November 5, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Family of Man-Family of God (Wednesday)
There were plenty of evangelical groups trying to recruit drifting young hippies. Such groups were referred to as "Jesus Freaks." A few were sincere, but many were just exploiters.
November 6, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Acoustic Strings Night/Pup Fisher/All God's Children (Thursday)
This repeated event seems like the equivalent of Hoot Night at a local folk club.
For the next post in this series (Velvet Underground, Nov 7-9 '69, see here)
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