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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."
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 (April 3-5, 1970 Eric Burdon) see here
- For a summary and the link to the most recent entries in this series, see here
The history of the Family Dog on The Great Highway was intimately wound up with the history of the Grateful Dead. For one thing, information about events out on the Great Highway has been hard to come by, and eternally thorough Grateful Dead scholarship has uncovered all sorts of information about the Family Dog, as it does with almost every 1960s venue. Critically, however, the Grateful Dead were the major San Francisco band who played the most on the Great Highway, and Jerry Garcia clearly liked playing there. So much so, in fact, that the Grateful Dead operation had nearly merged with the Family Dog at the end of January, 1970. Of course, Chet Helms figured out that then-Dead manager Lenny Hart was a crook, and prudently scuttled the arrangement.
One of our few ways of assessing the status of the Family Dog on The Great Highway has been assessing the implicit relationship of the Grateful Dead to the venue. By the time of April, 1970, the signs were ominous indeed. The Grateful Dead had headlined weekends at the Family Dog twice in August of 1969, once again on Halloween weekend and then at the end of February of 1970. In between, the New Riders of the Purple Sage had played numerous weeknight gigs, and a few weekend nights as well. The partnership had fallen apart in early February, but the late February weekend was no doubt already booked. Here it was April, and the Dead were playing the Family Dog under assumed names. The SF Good Times ad (above) says "if u haven't passed on guess whooooo-presenting> Riders of The Purple Sage avec Jerry Garcia joined by Mickey Hart and The Hartbeats alias Bob Ace and his Cards From The Bottom Of The Deck"
To hippies who read the small print in ads, the New Riders of The Purple Sage were a known band, even if very few fans--even Deadheads--had actually heard them. The more astute might even recognize Mickey Hart and The Hartbeats or Bobby Ace and The Cards Off The Bottom Of The Deck, who had occasionally been billed at some obscure events in the previous year. In any case, even though the words "Grateful Dead" were never used, any smart hippie could figure out who was playing. But why the subterfuge?
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| The 2013 cd release of the April 18, 1970 performance at the Family Dog |
"Acoustic Dead"
In typical Family Dog fashion, we have no eyewitness reports of these three nights at the Family Dog. Did they sell a lot of tickets? Who actually played? Did the crowd like it? We have to guess. But in typical Grateful Dead fashion, we do have a tape of one set from one night, so we know something. Carolyn (Mountain Girl) Adams Garcia, Jerry's ex-wife, found an old tape in a box. Lo and behold, it was a recording from the Saturday, April 18, 1970 show at the Family Dog on The Great Highway, and released in 2013. It was the earliest known iteration of the "acoustic set" the Dead would play throughout the Spring and Summer of 1970, in their "An Evening With The Grateful Dead" presentations. For those shows, the Dead would open with a four-piece lineup, mostly acoustic (Garcia and Weir, Phil Lesh and a drummer), slightly augmented by other players, then some honky-tonk country from the New Riders and finally the real electric Grateful Dead. Jerry Garcia would be on stage the entire time, sometimes up to 7 hours.
All the exterior evidence points to the Family Dog shows as being a dry run for the acoustic Dead set and the New Riders. At this time, while Garcia and Weir had played occasional acoustic duets on stage, the lineup with Phil Lesh on electric bass and one of the drummers had not yet appeared. The New Riders of The Purple Sage had played steadily since the Summer of '69, although in contrast to their own mythology, they had only very rarely opened for the Grateful Dead. The New Riders had a new bass player, Dave Torbert, an old pal of David Nelson's from their days in the New Delhi River Band. All the signs point to the Family Dog show as the debut for the newly rehearsed Torbert, as well. So I'm pretty sure that the booking was for the Dead to try out their new acoustic and New Riders configurations. The scrupulous insistence on not mentioning the Grateful Dead in the ads was partially because the band did not want to create expectations that there would be a full electric Dead set, since they probably didn't plan that. But remember--we don't know for sure.
Bill Graham and The Fillmore West
Throughout the whole time that the Dead had played the Family Dog, they had also played for Bill Graham at the Fillmore West. This was true of most headline acts who played the Family Dog on The Great Highway. Graham had the prestige gig, and he paid better, so he always got bands first. When a band played Great Highway a few weeks later, Chet Helms had to hope that there was enough left over demand for fans to still want tickets. Just about every advertised Family Dog headliner in February and March of 1970, certainly the big ones, had played the Fillmore West a few weeks earlier.
Of course, even back then, the Grateful Dead were a different animal. There weren't hordes of traveling Deadheads yet, but fans who saw the Dead usually wanted to see them again, preferably as soon as possible. So playing at one venue only encouraged fans to see them at another venue. In February, for example the Dead had played Fillmore West at the beginning of the month (February 5-8) before playing the Family Dog at the end of the month (February 27-March 1). It probably helped attendance at the Dog.
Prior to this Family Dog weekend, the Dead had played an epic four-night stand with Miles Davis at Fillmore West (April 9-12). As if that weren't enough, the Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver Messenger Service had rented Winterland on a Wednesday night (April 15) to put on their own show. The Dead's contract with Bill Graham would have stipulated that they could not advertise a show within three weeks or 50 miles of their Fillmore West booking (this was a standard clause). So even though Helms would have already booked the Dead, he couldn't have advertised it until after the Fillmore West shows. As if that weren't enough, the Dead had their own show, so they didn't want to detract from that. The ad above came from the San Francisco Good Times, which was published on Thursday. The issue here wasn't that fans might not want to see the Dead over and over--never an issue--but that without fair warning they couldn't make plans.
The Grateful Dead appear to have wanted a quiet tryout of their new, non-electric configurations, and chose the Family Dog. Bill Graham got the premier shows the weekend before, and the band themselves rented Winterland (from Graham, I might add) to book a big event with the Airplane and the Quick. Family Dog was now at the bottom of the chain. It wasn't a sign of vitality.
What happened on these three nights? It's important to emphasize that we don't know. We have a tape of one set from one night, no eyewitnesses and no review. We can guess about some things--I just did that above--but we don't actually know. I wrote a post about this show some years ago, and unfortunately we did not uncover more information from the Comment Thread. But let's make a list
- The New Riders of The Purple Sage had just signed up Dave Torbert as their permanent bass player. He was on his way from Hawaii to England, to join his old pal Matthew Kelly in the band Gospel Oak. Nelson and Dawson found out about it, and "coincidentally" called his parent's house in Redwood City when he was there. Torbert contacted Kelly, who told him to take the gig with Garcia. Presumably there had been a couple of weeks of rehearsal by the Riders, but no shows. These three Dog concerts appear to have been the test run for the run of New Riders shows begun in May. Of course, Torbert would have shined brightly.
- Bobby Ace and The Cards Off The Bottom Of The Deck seems to have been a proxy for the acoustic Grateful Dead. Earlier, I looked into the idea that Garcia was toying with some sort of ensemble like the syndicated Porter Wagoner TV show, with an array of musicians playing a mixture of covers and originals, but that seems to have fallen by the wayside. I believe this weekend's shows were the last time the Bobby Ace "band name" was used.
- Mickey Hart and The Hartbeats seems to have been a bit of a joke, but no less serious for that. Initially, the Hartbeats had been a jamming ensemble at the Matrix, for Garcia, Lesh, Kreutzmann and Hart, plus whoever felt like dropping in. The name had shown up a few times in the Chronicle, but it didn't really mean that much. The big question, particularly for Grateful Dead historians, is whether any configuration of the electric Grateful Dead had a jam-a-thon on any of the three nights. Did they? Honestly, we don't know.
The appearance of Charlie Musselwhite is an oddity in its own right. One thing that has been consistently absent from any discussion of the Dead's shows at The Family Dog in April of 1970 was any contemplation as to why Charlie Musselwhite was on the bill. Now, Musselwhite was a fine blues harmonica player and singer, and a popular local club draw. Born in Mississippi in 1944, he learned music growing up in Memphis, and moved to Chicago in the late '50s, where he learned harmonica from the blues masters themselves. Musselwhite, along with Mike Bloomfield, Paul Butterfield and a few others, was one of the core of younger white musicians in Chicago who played blues in both white folk clubs and black blues joints.
Musselwhite was a successful blues musician in Chicago, and in 1967 he released the excellent Stand Back album on Vanguard. The story goes that he was offered a month's work in San Francisco in August 1967, so he took a month off from his day job and stayed for 30 years. Although that is mostly true, it is also true that Musselwhite recognized that he would be one of the best blues players in San Francisco, whereas in Chicago he was just another harmonica man.
In any case, Musselwhite gigged around regularly,
playing all the clubs as well as the Fillmore and the Avalon. It remains
to ponder, however, why Musselwhite was on the bill at all. One peculiarity of of the Family Dog on The Great Highway was that were two stages. So the Grateful Dead road crew could have been working on the switchover from "acoustic Grateful Dead" to the New Riders, while Musselwhite could have been rocking out on the opposite side of the room. At the time, Musselwhite's current album would have been Tennessee Woman, on Vanguard.
The Family Dog had reconfigured itself and recapitalized in January 1970. A merger with the Grateful Dead was in the cards. It didn't happen. There were some good shows in February and March, but the Family Dog was still in the muck. By April, their most reliable booking, the Grateful Dead, was using the club for sub-rosa appearance. The ticket sales might have been alright--remember, we don't know--but even the Grateful Dead weren't betting on the Family Dog on The Great Highway. It was an ominous sign for what was to come.
For the next post in the series (April 24-26, 1970-Quicksilver), see here
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