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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 17-19, 1970 Mickey and The Hartbeats) see here
- For a summary and the link to the most recent entries in this series, see here
April 24-26, 1970 Family Dog on The Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Quicksilver Messenger Service/Osceola/Robert Savage (Friday-Sunday)
When the renewed Family Dog on The Great Highway resurfaced in February 1970, the first publicized shows had been with Quicksilver Messenger Service. Jefferson Airplane had already played a sort of stealth weekend show, and there was a midweek TV-only event for invited guests. But for civilian hippies, the first chance for them to go to the new Family Dog had been to see the reconstructed Quicksilver Messenger Service on the weekend of February 6-7, 1970.
By any calculation, Quicksilver Messenger Service was an original San Francisco psychedelic ballroom band, whose limited output from Back In The Day has paradoxically made them more popular rather than less. For most of us who weren't there, the band's first two Capitol albums, Quicksilver Messenger Service (released May 1968) and Happy Trails (released March 1969) are true San Francisco rock classics, lysergically etched in the brains of past, present and future hippies. What few live tapes survive of the band from 1967 and '68 are plenty impressive, as well.
The
roots of Quicksilver went back to late 1965 and the very beginning of San
Francisco rock. A few long-haired musicians were rehearsing at the
Matrix, before the band had a name. Jefferson Airplane poached thei band's guitarist, Skip Spence, and turned him into their drummer. The
unnamed-band's bassist (David Freiberg) spent 60 days in jail on a
parole violation for weed. Two guys in the band (guitarists John
Cippolina and Jim Murray) had gone to the very first Family Dog event at
Longshoreman's Hall on October 16, 1965 (pre-Chet Helms), and met two
musicians from Stockton, CA, whose band (The Brogues) had just fallen
apart. Once guitarist Gary Duncan and drummer Greg Elmore joined
Cippolina, Murray and Freiberg, there was a band. Quicksilver Messenger
Service even put on their own show at the Fillmore (February 12, 1966),
before Bill Graham had fully established his operation. So Quicksilver
went back to the very beginning.
Quicksilver Messenger Service was an essential part of every major San Francisco venue and rock event from 1966 through 1968, worthy of a book in its own right (actually, I know someone who wrote one, and it's very good, but I don't think it will ever see the light of day). Old tapes show us that the initial Quicksilver quintet had a broad palate and an interesting mixture of driving rhythms and folk-rock harmonies. By the time their debut album was released in May, 1968, Jim Murray had departed. There were fewer harmonies and more guitar, right in line with the explosion of psychedelia. Quicksilver toured the country, and the quartet killed it everywhere they went, less sloppy than the Airplane yet more direct than the Grateful Dead. Stardom beckoned for the band.
Unfortunately, guitarist Gary Duncan left Quicksilver Messenger Service at the end of 1968, feeling the band had stagnated. Duncan felt they had been playing the same set live for months, one of the things that made them powerful on the road. It's also why most '68 QMS tapes are pretty much the same, if uniformly enjoyable. Duncan's guitar was essential to the band's sound, and he shared lead vocals with Freiberg. Quicksilver still existed in 1969, but only as a ghost. Duncan went off to form a group with former folk singer Dino Valenti (whose story is too long to tell here).
In March, 1969, Capitol had released the band's second album, Happy Trails. Happy Trails, mostly recorded live, remains a psychedelic classic to this day. "Who Do You Love," taking up most of side two, showed the rest of the music world how psychedelia was done just right in San Francisco. The album got major airplay on the new FM rock stations all over the country. The band was a hit. But they weren't a band without Duncan.
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| Quicksilver
Messenger Service 3rd album, Shady Grove, released by Capitol in
December 1969. Nicky Hopkins was a member of the band, and Dan Healy was
the engineer. |
Quicksilver Messenger Service muddled through 1969, trying to record a follow-up to Happy Trails. Lead guitarist John Cippolina wasn't a writer, however, nor was Freiberg, even though he was a good singer. Pianist Nicky Hopkins, a friend of Cippolina's, joined the band, but he wasn't a writer or singer either. Producer Nick Gravenites contributed some songs, a few friends contributed some songs and the band released the messy album Shady Grove in December of 1969. Throughout the year, the band played perhaps a half-dozen gigs, mostly unsatisfactory ones. A band with great promise had been stopped in its tracks.
In 1969, however, Duncan and Valenti had achieved nothing together, so they rejoined Quicksilver Messenger Service at Winterland on New Year's Eve 1969. I'm not really sure what went down on stage that night (the tape circulating with that date does not seem to be from that show). Still, all their fans were happy to have Duncan back on the train. The new Quicksilver had the core quartet (Cippolina, Duncan, Freiberg, Elmore) with Hopkins on piano and Valenti as another vocalist. It seemed like a winning combination. The February booking at the Family Dog had been Quicksilver's re-introduction to both old and new fans of the band.
Come April, Quicksilver had been playing around the Bay Area somewhat. The band had evolved a little bit, too. The big issue for any Quicksilver fans, whether old or new, was lead singer Dino Valenti. In the 60s, the Quicksilver sound had been anchored in the twin guitars of Cippolina and Duncan. Hopkins' melodic piano only added to that tapestry, and was uniformly well received, as far as I know.
In the 60s, however, Freiberg and Duncan had inserted vocals when they were needed, but mostly hunkered down while the guitarists to do their thing. Valenti, however, had a long career as a self-possessed folk singer, dating back to Greenwich Village in the early 60s, and he didn't lay back. Also, he was a prolific writer, in contrast to any other members of the band. Thus the new Quicksilver did numerous Dino Valenti songs, and Dino did not defer to the guitarists. Now, some of those songs were appealing, like "Fresh Air" (and later, "What About Me"). But not everyone liked all his songs, and Dino took front and center for those songs, often repeating choruses and wordlessly vocalizing, much to the dismay of fans who wanted to hear Cippolina, Duncan and Hopkins lay down their mesmerizing groove.
We have Quicksilver Messenger Service tapes from this period (for example, a filmed performance at Sonoma State College in late March, 1970), so we have an idea of what Quicksilver sounded like. But we don't know what they played, much less how many people showed up or how they went down.
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| Osceola guitarist Alan Yott, live at the Family Dog on The Great Highway, sometime in 1969 or 1970 |
As for Osceola, they had been playing the Family Dog since September of 1969. They would play the Dog many times, and played around the Bay Area regularly until at least 1972. Osceola lead guitarist Bill Ande was a transplant from Florida. He had played and recorded with some modestly successful bands, like the R-Dells, the American Beetles (really), who had then changed their name to The Razor's Edge and had even played American Bandstand. Come '69, Ande had relocated to San Francisco to play some psychedelic blues. The musicians he linked up with were all Florida transplants as well, so even though they were a San Francisco band, they chose the name Osceola as an homage to their roots. To some extent, Osceola replaced Devil's Kitchen as the informal "house band" at the Family Dog, insofar as they played there so regularly.
Osceola was a five piece band with two drummers, and played all the local ballrooms and rock nightclubs. Ande was joined by guitarist Alan Yott, bassist Chuck Nicholis and drummers Donny Fields and Richard Bevis. Osceola was a successful live act, but never recorded. Almost all of the band members would return to the Southeast (mainly Tallahassee and Atlanta) in the mid-70 to have successful music careers.
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| Robert
Savage (Bobby Arlin), from the inner sleeve of the 1971 Paramount album
The Adventures of Robert Savage (In the 60s, Arlin had been in the
Leaves and later The Hook) |
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