November 7-9, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, 660 Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Velvet Underground/Danny Cox/Maximum Speed Limit [FDGH '69 XXVI]

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 (November 1-2, 1969 Grateful Dead) see here
  
• For a summary and the link to the most recent entries in this series, see here

November 7-9, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Velvet Underground/Danny Cox/John Adams (Sat-Sun only)/Maximum Speed Limit (Friday-Sunday)
On one hand, the story of the Family Dog on The Great Highway is a tale of disappointment, a San Francisco hippie ideal pushed literally to the outskirts of town, and struggling to remain viable. At the same time, the venue provided a space for some great musical performances, a sign of the musical vibrancy of the era. The most famous example would be the Grateful Dead, of course, who headlined the Family Dog more than any other major band. But just one week after the Dead had played a great weekend at the Dog, another legendary 60s band was the headliner--the Velvet Underground.

The Velvet Underground were not a particularly popular band in the 60s. If more people had heard them, the Velvets would probably not have been any more popular. But as someone famously remarked, not many people bought their album, but all of those who did formed a band. The Velvet Underground, with nary a hit, very little FM airplay and paltry record sales, were still a profoundly influential group. As a result, the history of the Velvet Underground has been the subject of scholarly research befitting 60s legends like the Dead or Led Zeppelin. The pinnacle of this scholarship is Richie Unterberger's book White Light, White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day-By-Day (Jawbone Press, 2009). Even if your interest in VU scholarship is limited, his excellent book is a great survey of different underground rock venues throughout the US in the era, and I highly recommend it to any 60s rock fan. For our purposes, however, thanks to Unterberger, we get a far more detailed analysis of the VU's weekend at the Family Dog than we do for most bands.

The Velvet Underground were so influential that once we get past the raw 60s recording techniques, the Velvets sound pretty contemporary to us. But that wasn't how they sounded in the 60s. For all the arty cred that came from the Velvets association with Andy Warhol and the "downtown art scene" of New York city, and the dark imagery of Lou Reed's lyrics, that wasn't what stood out in the end. Unlike almost every other band in the 60s, the Velvet Underground carefully flattened out any musical references to R&B, blues or jazz. The pulse of a Velvet song was completely at odds with the pulse of every other 60s band. The individual members liked black music well enough (it certainly turned up later in Lou Reed's music), but they purposely tailored the Velvet Underground away from that. Thus, on their 1967 debut album The Velvet Underground and Nico, Lou Reed's lyrics about buying drugs ("Waiting For The Man"), taking drugs ("Heroin"), strange practices ("Venus In Furs") and odd characters ("Femme Fatale") were filtered through a musical aesthetic opposite to the entire decade. They made sense to few people. But those that liked the Velvet Underground found it transformational.

The Velvet Underground's 3rd album, on MGM Records, released in 1969

By late 1969, the Velvet Underground had released three albums on MGM Records. Their current album was their third, Velvet Underground. There were still three members remaining from the band's famous debut album: Lou Reed (guitar and vocals), Sterling Morrison (lead guitar) and Maureen Tucker (drums). Original bassist (and electric violist) John Cale had been replaced by Doug Yule (bass, organ and some vocals). While we generally accept the idea that the Velvets were unpopular prophets without honor, Unterberger reports that the Velvet shows at the Family Dog were decently attended (although exact numbers remain obscure). Unterberger regularly reports that the Velvets drew decent crowds in the oddest places, one of the reasons the band was able to continue to tour. Despite the lack of radio play, somehow people found out about them. In the case of the Family Dog, the inconvenience of the venue didn't matter. Just like the Grateful Dead, those fans who had discovered the Velvets were going to seek them out. 

While the version of the Velvet Underground from their debut album, with the infamous John Cale on bass and viola (and Nico on vocals) is considered the "classic" lineup, Doug Yule was an excellent musician. Combined with the increased experience of the other three members, the '69 live configuration of the band is highly regarded by rock critics and the band's fans (which includes a fair amount of crossover).

A young guitarist named Robert Quine had met the Velvet Underground in St. Louis earlier in the year, and had since moved to San Francisco. As the Velvets were playing a weekend at the Family Dog and a few weeks at the Matrix, Quine resolved to tape them from the audience, a largely unknown practice in the 1960s. Quine recorded all three nights at the Family Dog. In 2001, highlights from the Family Dog were released by Polydor as The Velvet Underground Bootleg Series, Volume 1: The Quine Tapes (sadly, there never was a volume 2). Disc one gives a pretty good representation of the Velvets set, including some true classics (all songs from Saturday, November 8 except as noted): 

I'm Waiting For The Man
It's Just Too Much
What Goes On
I Can't Stand It
Some Kinda Love    
Foggy Notion
Femme Fatale [November 7]
After Hours
I'm Sticking With You
Sunday Morning [November 9]
Sister Ray [November 7: this tracks clocks in at 24:30]

Unterberger comments on the scene at the Family Dog, quoting Quine's liner notes from the box set:

"They started out with three nights at the Family Dog, a large Fillmore-type space," he [Quine] writes in his liner notes to [the record]. "The audience was large but fairly indifferent. A number of hippies brought tambourines and harmonicas to "do their thing" with the group. But the sound was great for recording--the band was able to play really loud." No tambourine or harmonica is audible on the two Bootleg series songs that Quine captures on November 7. [2009 edition, p.254]

Since the Velvet Underground were not hugely popular, the eyewitness account that there was a large, indifferent crowd suggests that the Family Dog had managed to carve out a hippie audience that saw whoever was playing each weekend. Certainly no one who had heard (much less liked) the Velvet Underground would have thought that bringing along a tambourine was the right idea. The fact that some sort of regular audience had built up would explain why Chet Helms kept looking for ways to refloat the Family Dog, which he would do in earnest at the beginning of 1970.

The 1970 Sunflower Records release Danny Cox Live At The Family Dog, most likely recorded in 1969

Folksinger Danny Cox opened all three shows. Cox, from Cincinnati, had moved to Kansas City in 1967. He shared management with Brewer And Shipley (who were also based in the Midwest). Cox's 3rd album Birth Announcement, a double-lp on Together Records, produced in LA by Gary Usher, had been released earlier in the year. In 1970, Sunflower Records released an album of Cox playing live at the Family Dog in 1969 (possibly recorded this weekend, and/or the weekend before, when had opened for the Grateful Dead). In 1971, Cox would release an album on ABC/Dunhill that was produced by Nick Gravenites at Wally Heider Studios in San Francisco [I discussed Cox's career and recording history in detail in a previous blog post].

Maximum Speed Limit was a Berkeley band, but I don't know anything else about them. Opener John Adams is unknown to me. 

November 11, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Mellowtime Review (Tuesday)
Your guess is as good as mine for the Mellowtime Review.

November 12, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Anonymous Artists of America "own axe night" (Wednesday)
The Anonymous Artists of America lived in a commune in Novato, and played weeknights regularly at the Dog during October and November of 1969. "Own axe night" sounds like a jam session, but it's also possible that the AAA was encouraging audience members to bring instruments and joined in. The rather Avant-Garde band (formed at Stanford University in 1966) had advanced--some might say absurd--ideas that everyone was an artist, so the request to the audience to bring their own "axe" may have been entirely sincere.

for the next entry in the series (November 19, 1969 Fillmore West benefit), see here