February 27-March 1, 1970 Family Dog on The Great Highway, 660 Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Grateful Dead/Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen [FDGH '70 VII]

 

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."

The Family Dog In 1969
Chet Helms had opened the Family Dog at 660 Great Highway to much fanfare on June 13, 1969, with a packed house seeing the Jefferson Airplane and The Charlatans. One of the goals was that the Dog would feature mostly San Francisco bands and a variety of smaller community events and groups. Since so many San Francisco bands were successful, and had record contracts, this didn't confine the venue to obscurity. A lot of great bands played the Family Dog in 1969, but the distant location and the gravitational pull of major rock events hosted elsewhere in the Bay Area kept the Family Dog isolated. We know only the most fragmentary bits about music played, events and audiences throughout the year.  Despite the half-year of struggle, Helms had kept the Family Dog on The Great Highway afloat. He had entered the new year of 1970 with a new plan.

• For a complete list of Family Dog shows (including FDGH), see here
• For the previous entry (February 20-21, 1970 Big Brother) see here
  
• For a summary and the link to the most recent entries in this series, see here

 

February 27-March 1, 1970 Family Dog on The Great Highway, 660 Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Grateful Dead/Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen (Friday-Sunday)
The Family Dog had a relatively brief but intriguing history from June 13, 1969 through August 22, 1970. Without a doubt, the band that had the most importance to the venue was the Grateful Dead. They played six weekends at the Dog, and Jerry Garcia and the New Riders of The Purple Sage played five other shows when the Dead were not on the bill. No other San Francisco band of any importance played anywhere near that number of shows at the venue. We have tapes of almost all the music the Dead played, and while we have few real eyewitness accounts, the evidence suggests the Dead sold a lot of tickets and did really well at the door. That was probably not as true of other bands, although we can't be sure. We have Owsley's tapes, though, so we know the Grateful Dead played really, really well at the former Edgewater Ballroom.

Hopes must have been high when this weekend was booked. The Dead and Garcia had helped keep the Family Dog afloat in the dark Fall of 1969, and come the Winter of 1970 Chet Helms seemed to have a bright new plan. Gone was the sincere but unprofitable effort to be a "Community Center," and there was a renewed focus on being a weekend rock venue that emphasized San Francisco bands. It was true that Bill Graham Presents had first dibs on all the bands at Fillmore West, but the SF scene was vibrant enough that it didn't really matter. Bands could play a weekend at Fillmore West and follow up a few weeks later at the Family Dog, and everyone could thrive. 

I have written earlier about how things appeared: after being closed for most of January, the Family Dog had re-established itself with a series of weekend bookings featuring top San Francisco bands. Jefferson Airplane had kicked it off (January 30-31), then Quicksilver Messenger Service (February 6-7), then Steve Miller Band (February 13-14), then the re-activated Big Brother (February 20-21) and finally the Grateful Dead to close out the month. Granted, most of these bands had played Fillmore West a few weeks earlier. The Dead, for example, were booked by BGP at Fillmore West the weekend of February 5-8. They were the Dead, though--even back in 1970, four San Francisco Dead shows at Fillmore West just made their fans want to see them even more. 

Chet Helms, by all evidence, had new financial backing for the Family Dog, the kind that gave the bands (and their managements) confidence that their guarantees would be met and that they would get paid. Most importantly, however, Chet Helms had new partners, namely the Grateful Dead. According to Dead historian Dennis McNally (the Edward Gibbon of Deadheads), the Grateful Dead were going to move their operation from Novato to the Family Dog and join forces. The mind reels--imagine the 1970 Dead with their own venue at the edge of the Western World, a permanent home for Alembic, the New Riders and Bobby Ace and The Cards Off The Bottom Of The Deck.

It didn't happen. The Grateful Dead offices moved to the Family Dog in the last weekend of January, with the band otherwise occupied down on Bourbon Street, but they did not stay. Chet Helms has been criticized over the years--unfairly in my opinion--for having weaknesses as a businessman, but he was no crook. When Grateful Dead manager Lenny Hart refused to show Helms the Grateful Dead books, Helms canceled the merger. And rightly so--the Dead themselves fired Lenny Hart a few weeks later, and it would turn out that he had absconded with over $150,000 of the band's money, a staggering number in 1970. Lenny Hart quietly returned the Dead office to Novato before January was over.

On Monday, February 23, 1970, with the Dead still on the road, San Francisco bands played a benefit for them to raise cash for legal expenses

So the February 27 show must have been bittersweet behind the scenes. Instead of a triumphal homecoming by the Dead as partners in a glorious new venture, they staggered back from a Texas road trip ready to fire their manager, the looming specter of being broke and a soundman who could no longer travel with them. On Monday, February 23, Bill Graham had helped organize a benefit at Winterland for the cash-poor Dead, as the Airplane, Quicksilver and others played a gig while the band was still in Texas. As to any merger, since both the Dead and Helms had no capital, any agreement would only have been another sinkhole. This weekend's booking was just a gig for cash, which everyone needed.

The electric Grateful Dead would not play another show at the Family Dog on The Great Highway after this weekend. In April, the band would play three nights (April 17-19) billed as Bobby Ace and The Cards Off The Bottom Of The Deck and the New Riders of The Purple Sage. From what we know, this appeared to be a test run for the "Acoustic Dead" and of the new configuration of the Riders, with new bassist Dave Torbert. Miraculously, a tape survived of one of the Acoustic sets, but we actually have no eyewitness accounts of that event either. But as far as plugging in and soaring through the cosmos--the electric Grateful Dead punched their last ticket at the Dog on these nights.

There is a poster for the Grateful Dead Family Dog shows. In 1970, very few Family Dog shows had posters or flyers, that I am aware of. The Dead poster seems to be professionally done. Now, the Dead show was pretty much a guaranteed moneymaker, so spending a little extra on a poster makes sense. Still, I wonder how widely it was circulated. Bill Graham had a deal with various shopkeepers, in that he would give them a poster and they would display it in their window until after showtime, when they could keep the poster. If his team tried to tack up Fillmore posters on telephone poles or public bulletin boards, they would immediately be snatched as collector's items. Since the Family Dog had so few posters, I wonder if they even had any kind of network.

Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen had relocated to Berkeley from Ann Arbor, MI in the Summer of 1969. They played some early gigs at the Family Dog, and were soon booked with some regularity. Only a few weekends after they arrived in town, Cody and the Airmen were booked to open for the Grateful Dead on the weekend of August 28-30, 1969. They must have hit it off, since they would open for the Dead and the New Riders many times over the next several years. George (Commander) Frayne ended up playing piano on the NRPS album, and eventually would become Jerry Garcia's neighbor in Stinson Beach. In 1973, when the Riders split off from Grateful Dead management, they shared management with Cody (manager Joe Kerr had been a college classmate of Frayne), accounting for the close working relationship between the bands.

Legend has it that the unassuming Emeryville house on the left was Lost Planet Airmen HQ back in the early 1970s

In February, 1970, however, the Lost Planet Airmen were still just getting their footing in the Bay Area. Their cosmic hippie cowboy rock and roll fit in with the evolution of the Dead that would begin with Workingman's Dead.  The Grateful Dead were in the midst of recording that album during this period. The New Riders were not really available, since they did not seem to have a bass player, so Cody and the Airmen were an appropriate alternative. Owsley taped Cody and the Airmen this weekend, and parts of the show turned up on the 2020 Owsley Stanley Foundation double-cd set Found In The Ozone. Most of the set was recorded in March when the Airmen would open for the Youngbloods, but there were a few tracks from the February shows.

At this time, Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen were

Billy C Farlow-vocals, harmonica
Bill Kirchen-lead guitar, vocals
West Virginia Creeper (Steve Davis)-pedal steel guitar
Andy Stein-fiddle, tenor sax
Commander Cody-piano, vocals
Buffalo Bruce Barlow-bass
Lance Dickerson-drums

Guitarist John Tichy had been in the band in the Summer, but he had returned to Ann Arbor to finish his PhD in Physics at the University of Michigan.

Appendix: Grateful Dead Setlists
Friday, February 27, 1970
Cold Rain & Snow, Mama Tried, Dancin' In The Streets, Easy Wind, Black Peter, Good Lovin', China Cat Sunflower> I Know You Rider> High Time, Hard To Handle, Casey Jones, Cumberland Blues, Not Fade Away> Turn On Your Lovelight

Saturday, February 28, 1970
I: Turn On Your Lovelight> Me & My Uncle, Cumberland Blues
II: Monkey & The Engineer, Little Sadie
III: China Cat Sunflower> I Know You Rider, High Time> Dire Wolf, Good Lovin', Big Boss Man, Casey Jones, Alligator> Drums> The Other One> Mason's Children> Turn On Your Lovelight, Uncle John's Band

Sunday, March 1, 1970
I: New Speedway Boogie Jam, Casey Jones, Big Boy Pete, Morning Dew, Hard To Handle, Me & My Uncle, Cryptical Envelopment> Drums> The Other One> Cryptical Envelopment> Black Peter, Beat It On Down The Line, Dire Wolf, Good Lovin', Cumberland Blues, King Bee, China Cat Sunflower> I Know You Rider
II: Uncle John's Band, Dancin' In The Streets, It's All Over Now Baby Blue

For the next post in this series (March 6-8, 1970 Lee Michaels), see here