August 19, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, 660 Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: New Riders of The Purple Sage (FDGH '69 XIV)

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 (August 15-17, 1969 Mike Bloomfield/Taj Mahal) see here
  
• For a summary and the link to the most recent entries in this series, see here

Owsley Stanley captured the second ever New Riders gig on August 1, 1969--before they were even named--and both sets were released in their entirety

August 19, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: New Riders of The Purple Sage (Tuesday)
While seminal Grateful Dead biographer Dennis McNally had discovered this New Riders date as part of his original research, I had doubted the likelihood of it actually having been played. For one thing, the New Riders had played the previous Tuesday (August 12), and exactly none of the available papers had any listing for the Family Dog on August 19. To top it off, the Grateful Dead were at the Woodstock Festival over the weekend, and their set at had ended after midnight Saturday, plus the band had played a gig on Wednesday in Seattle. It seemed highly unlikely that the August 19 show would really have been played, if it had even been booked. So I always discounted the event as spurious.

Nonetheless, the Owsley Foundation has a tape, so Garcia and Hart got home, and it happened. Owsley, by the way, was famous for scrupulous accuracy on his tape boxes, so if he wrote "August 19 1969" on the box, that was the date. So, we know nothing about the show, but we know what the New Riders played.
    The Next In Line
    The Mighty Quinn
    Fair Chance to Know
    Last Lonely Eagle
    The Lady Came From Baltimore
    Henry
    Six Days On the Road
    All I Ever Wanted
    Whatcha Gonna Do
    Truck Drivin' Man

The New Riders of The Purple Sage had arisen from Jerry Garcia's willingness to learn pedal steel guitar by backing his old Palo Alto friend John Dawson when he played his original songs at a Menlo Park coffeehouse. Old pal David Nelson had joined them on electric guitar in mid-May, and they kept playing around. With the some tentative variations involving different players, the band had settled on a lineup by July

• John "Marmaduke" Dawson-acoustic guitar, lead vocals
• Jerry Garcia-pedal steel guitar
• David Nelson-electric guitar
• Bob Matthews-electric bass
• Mickey Hart-drums

Matthews was one of the band's sound engineers, and another old friend from Palo Alto days. The group's first gig was opening for the Dead at Longshoreman's Hall (July 16, 1969), followed by two shows at the UC Berkeley Bear's Lair on Friday, August 1 (when the Dead were booked at the Family Dog, but Garcia was looking to avoid any confrontation with the Light Show Guild picket line). Thanks to soundman Owsley Stanley, there is an excellent tape of both Bear's Lair shows, and they have been released, so we have a pretty good idea of what the band sounded like. They still didn't have a name--at Berkeley, they had been billed as "Marmaduke with Jerry Garcia."

The next week, the band had played Wednesday through Saturday at the Matrix, and they had been billed as The New Riders of The Purple Sage (we have a tape of one of those nights as well). The name was apparently suggested by Robert Hunter. The prior Tuesday night show at the Dog (August 12) had been just the band's 7th show, and just their second booking under the New Riders name. To top it off, the band had been billed with the New Lost City Ramblers, who were musical heroes and primary influences for both Garcia and Nelson, and the pair had jammed with the Ramblers as well. It must have gone alright, as the New Riders returned for another show.

There weren't many rock club gigs at the time. The New Riders would spend the Fall of 1969, in between Grateful Dead shows, playing what venues there were for them. The Family Dog was one of them. and they would play a number of Tuesday nights throughout the year.

I presume that there was an opening act, but I don't have any idea who it might have been.

For the next entry (August 22-24, 1969-Wild West Makeup shows), see here

August 12, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, 660 Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: New Lost City Ramblers/New Riders of The Purple Sage/jam (FDGH '69 XII)

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 (August 8-10, 1969 Country Joe and The Fish) see here
  
• For a summary and the link to the most recent entries in this series, see here

The New Lost City Ramblers, ca 1960

August 12, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: New Lost City Ramblers/New Riders of The Purple Sage/jam (Tuesday)
It is a peculiarity of the scholarship of 60s rock in San Francisco that much of the history revolves around Jerry Garcia. It isn't just that persistent Deadheads have engaged in enormous efforts to capture Garcia's musical history. And it isn't just that numerous scholars expend huge bandwidth in contemplating what Garcia might have been planning at any point (I acknowledge myself as invested in that as anyone). Sure, Jerry Garcia is famous and important now. But there's no denying that even back in the 60s, long before the Dead had sold any amount of records, long before the band's fans were famous for following them everywhere, and back when the band itself was struggling for enough cash to keep functioning, Garcia's presence was noted and reported by those on the scene. What Garcia did got captured by journalists, even then, so often the surviving reports of many 60s events are told through the Garcia lens, even if he was just a minor participant. And so it was with the Family Dog, and specifically an important but largely forgotten meeting place known as The Common.

A description of a meeting of The Commons at The Family Dog (on August 12, 1969), from the August 22, 1969 Berkeley Tribe underground paper, by staff writer Art Johnson

"The Common" was a weekly meeting held on Tuesday afternoons at the Family Dog on the Great Highway. Everyone was invited. The concept was that everyone on "the scene"--artists, musicians, hippies, whomever--would meet and discuss on an equal footing what was needed. There wasn't membership, or admission, or a litmus test. People just showed up. If you dive deep into San Francisco rock or political history in the late 60s, "The Common" appears on the periphery, just as references to Facebook groups are invoked in modern discussion. And indeed, The Common was as close to a Social Media construct as could be had in those days. Still, I only know of one description of a meeting of The Commons, from the August  22 edition of the underground paper the Berkeley Tribe. And guess what? It seems to be the only meeting of The Common that was attended by Jerry Garcia. Garcia's new band, the New Riders of The Purple Sage, were playing the Dog that night, so Garcia had reason to be there.

The article, by Tribe staff writer Art Johnson, begins

It was Tuesday afternoon at the Family Dog. “Nights? Nights?” Jerry Garcia was shouting, “what about during the day? We got musicians running around looking for a place to jam – why not here?”. It was a meeting of the Common, and all the tribes had come together to discuss the form of what should happen at the Family Dog. About a hundred of the brothers and sisters sat around in a circle, with their dogs and their children...

Johnson describes a discussion that follows about tickets to weekend shows being too expensive. The $3.00 tickets are too much, people say, but if events cost just $1.00 so many more would come. Johnson goes on

The Common is a new form. It is all the people who want to do a trip on the Great Highway: musicians, light artists, impresarios, auctioneers, media people. And most important, the people in the streets who come to goof, and dance, and get high.

It is hard not to see a parallel to Internet economics. Chet Helms was always far more tuned into the hippie scene that Bill Graham, but Graham was the one who consistently found a way to make the economy work. Everyone who is part of "The Common" wants something from the Family Dog, but has no viable plan for its survival. The Family Dog has only been open since June, and it isn't clear how long The Common has been a regular event, but it is apparently already established by August. Johnson mentions another player who has already been established, with no fanfare: Stephen Gaskin.

Steve Gaskin is part of the Common. Steve is a sort of priest of the new age. Every Monday night, 1500 of his friends come out the Family Dog to rap with him, and get stoned together on each others vibrations...

Gaskin was a popular literature instructor at San Francisco State, which wasn't too far from the Family Dog. At the time, Gaskin was called a "hip guru." Now we would say he was trying to "elevate consciousness." There did seem to be a hunger of sorts for his sort of insight, and the "Monday Night Class" was a real thing. The picture on the top of this post is from a Monday Night Class, and it seems that Gaskin could outdraw most rock bands. Of course, his events were free, but they were on a Monday night, too, so he got people to come out. Not nothing.

So something was going on in the Sunset District, and Helms was tuned in to it, but the Family Dog itself was in financial distress. Its most popular event was a weekly free show that generated no revenue. Johnson's article grimly stated "The Family Dog is about bankrupt."

Yet on a more cheery note, the Family Dog held a Tuesday night concert with the legendary folk group The New Lost City Ramblers and the newly-christened New Riders of The Purple Sage. The article describes the event, one of the very few descriptions of a weeknight event at the Dog:

Last Tuesday night, the Common put on a good ol’ hoedown. The dance hall was transformed in to a psychedelic barn with bales of hay, charcoal-roasted corn at ten cents a hit, and the New Lost City Ramblers

Befitting the principles embodied by The Common, apparently there was a barter system that folks with no money could use for entry. The Tribe also gave what I believe to be the first published commentary on the New Riders:

At the square dance Tuesday a new San Francisco band made its debut (sic: not quite a debut but certainly an early show). The New Riders of the Old Purple Sage, with Jerry Garcia and Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead, and starring the fair-haired John Dawson on vocal and acoustical guitar. The sound was as smooth as the Dead is, yet it had this sweet country pulse and tune that made you swoon.

The New Lost City Ramblers had been formed in Greenwich Village in 1958. At the time, string band and “old-timey” music was inaccessible to all but the most determined of record collectors. By performing and recording this music, the New Lost City Ramblers were the essential actors in introducing early American music to serious folk musicians, from Bob Dylan and Jerry Garcia to everyone else. The original trio was John Cohen, Mike Seeger (half-brother of Pete) and Tom Paley. Tracy Schwarz replaced Paley in the early 1960s. By 1969, the Ramblers had released over 15 albums. They would stop performing regularly after 1969, but continued to play occasional reunions for decades. The Ramblers were going to play over the weekend at the Family Dog, as well as the Tuesday night show. At this time, their last album was Modern Times, which had been released in 1968 on Folkways.

The New Riders of The Purple Sage had arisen from Jerry Garcia's willingness to learn pedal steel guitar by backing his old Palo Alto friend John Dawson when he played his original songs at a Menlo Park coffeehouse. Old pal David Nelson had joined them on electric guitar in mid-May, and they kept playing around. With the some tentative variations involving different players, the band had settled on a lineup by July

• John "Marmaduke" Dawson-acoustic guitar, lead vocals
• Jerry Garcia-pedal steel guitar
• David Nelson-electric guitar
• Bob Matthews-electric bass
• Mickey Hart-drums

Matthews was one of the Dead’s sound engineers, and another old friend from Palo Alto days. The group's first gig was opening for the Dead at Longshoreman's Hall (July 16, 1969), followed by two shows at the UC Berkeley Bear's Lair on Friday, August 1 (when the Dead were booked at the Family Dog, but Garcia was looking to avoid any confrontation with the Light Show Guild picket line). Thanks to soundman Owsley Stanley, there is an excellent tape of both Bear's Lair shows, and they have been released, so we have a pretty good idea of what the band sounded like. They still didn't have a name--at Berkeley, they had been billed as "Marmaduke with Jerry Garcia."

The next week, the band had played Wednesday through Saturday at the Matrix, and they had been billed as The New Riders of The Purple Sage (we have a tape of one of those nights as well). The name was apparently suggested by Robert Hunter. So the Tuesday night show at the Dog was just the band's 7th show, and just their second booking under the New Riders name. To top it off, the band was billed with the New Lost City Ramblers, who were musical heroes and primary influences for both Garcia and Nelson.

Besides the mention in the Berkeley Tribe, we know a little about the event from John Cohen (via a book). Cohen recalled jamming with Garcia and Nelson, so that means that he, Mike Seeger and Jerry Garcia met on equal terms, albeit at different arcs in their careers. Musically, there is a profoundly important through-line from the New Lost City Ramblers to Jerry Garcia, and it's nice to know that the line did not go unnoticed. 

How many people were at the Family Dog that night? A few hundred, at most, if that. And how many stuck around until the end? The few that stuck it out on that Tuesday at the edge of the Western world heard the men who restored Old-Time string band music to the American musical landscape, and heard them play with the man who was most important at spreading that lexicon far beyond the confines of a few eager young musicians.

Footnotes: August 13 and 14, 1969
There is a flyer for this show that is dated August 13 (Wednesday). Either the newspapers had the listing wrong, or the flyer did. At this remove, I am more inclined to believe that this show was on a Tuesday. As a corollary to this discussion, the description of the Tuesday night hoedown could refer to the next week (August 19) when the New Riders also played. For a discussion of this murky topic, see the blog post here, followed by an interesting comment thread (on a different blog) here.

John Cohen's diary also refers to witnessing a jam by the Grateful Dead on Thursday, August 14. As near as I can tell, Family Dog practice at the time was to let fans in if bands were playing, whether the show was "advertised" or not. You can decide for yourself if this counts as a "lost" Garcia show. This may be a response to Garcia's request (above) for a place to jam. In Dead parlance, it may have been a "Mickey Hart and The Hartbeats" show, meaning it was the Dead's equipment, and Garcia and some others were there, but not the whole band. It's not clear whether there was an audience at this event. You can decide for yourself if it makes August 12 or August 13 more likely for the "Hoedown." The Ramblers would play Friday (August 15) and Saturday (August 16) nights at the Dog--unless they didn't play Saturday, but we'll get to that. 

 For the next post in the series (August 15-16, 1969 Mike Bloomfield) see here

August 1, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, 660 Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Light Show Strike [Grateful Dead canceled] (FDGH '69 IX)

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 (July 25-27, 1969 w/Charlie Musselwhite) see here
  
• For a summary and the link to the most recent entries in this series, see here

August 1, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Light Show Strike [Grateful Dead/Albert Collins/Ballet Afro-Haiti canceled] (Friday)
For the first weekend of August, the Grateful Dead were booked for a weekend at the Family Dog. Even back in 1969, with just 3 poorly received studio albums to their name, the Dead were a solid booking in the Bay Area. Their fans would come out for them, and it didn't matter how many times they had played in the previous few months--indeed, the more often they played, the more fans they drew. So Chet Helms and the Dog had to be looking forward to a successful weekend. 1969 wasn't 1966, however, and things weren't as copasetic as they had been. In particular, the operators of all the psychedelic light shows in the Bay Area had banded together as the Light Show Guild, and were threatening to picket the Family Dog and the Fillmore West, the two most high profile regular rock venues in the Bay Area. 

When regular rock concerts had started at the Fillmore Auditorium in February, 1966, light shows had been a critical part of the equation. Even though we look back at those early shows and reflect upon the bands that became famous, like the Airplane and the Dead, the reality at the time was different. In 1966, and even into early 1967, most of the bands playing the Fillmore and Avalon didn't even have records yet, and even those that did hardly got them played on the radio, so fans really didn't know their music. On top of that, for all their nascent talent, even the bands we admire now were still figuring out how to play electric instruments, write songs and sing together. They weren't always that good. 

What fans had liked in the early days was the environment--the loud sound, the dancing, the trip itself. The light shows were a big part of creating that feeling. Going to a concert at the Avalon or the Fillmore in 1966 was really different than seeing the Jefferson Airplane in a local civic auditorium with seats. The Fillmore formula defined the template for the modern rock concert that has persisted into the present day. 

By 1968, rock concerts were more popular than ever before, but fans' perceptions had changed. For one thing, the new hippie bands like Quicksilver, the Dead and Big Brother all had started releasing albums, and they were much better live than they had been just twelve or eighteen months earlier. On top of that, since KMPX-fm had gone on the air in San Francisco in April, 1967, those albums were getting played on the radio. Fans had started to focus on the music, and more and more when fans went to the concert, they wanted to hear the band they came to see, not just "hang out." In that context, the light show was part of the evening, but it wasn't why people were eagerly going to the Fillmore. The biggest shows were at the much larger Oakland Coliseum, and many of those didn't even have light shows.

The Light Show Guild
Although Light Shows were a defining feature of concerts at the Fillmore West and Family Dog, they were no longer essential to the enterprise. The Light Show Guild's demand profoundly missed their mark. Apparently there were 50 light shows who had banded together, but they failed to recognize that they were dispensable. In an article in the underground paper the Berkeley Tribe, the Guild laid out the scene:

It will be lights out tonight for the Family Dog Ballroom on the Great Highway.

The Light Artists Guild, representing more than 60 Bay Area light shows, will strike the Family Dog on Friday with picket lines around the ballroom.

What the sounds will be like (if any) is at this moment anybody's guess. Gerry Garcia, lead guitarist for the Grateful Dead--which is scheduled to play the Dog this weekend--has stated that he will not cross the Guild picket line.

If other rock groups follow Gerry's lead, both the Dog and Fillmore West will be shutdown by next weekend.

The article went to explain the demands of the Light Show Guild:

The Guild is seeking $600 for 3 nights of work at the Family Dog and $650 for the same time at the Fillmore. The Guild's third demand is that light artists be given at least 35% of the billing in all advertisements for a concert.

Essentially, the Light Shows were asking to be compensated like a band on the poster. The Tribe noted drily that Graham said that "the light show was not a draw factor and that he would fill up his ballroom just as easily without the light artists."

Even in 1969, it was pretty clear that fans were not going to the Fillmore West, the Family Dog or any other venue for the Light Shows, they were going for the bands.

The Hippie Labor Landscape
The Light Show strike was not the first hippie labor dispute, nor would it be the most important one. The first "underground" free-form FM rock station had been San Francisco's KMPX-fm, playing album tracks 24/7, starting in April, 1967. The station had been an instant success, but the hippie djs and employees felt they weren't getting rewarded, so they unionized and struck. The bands largely supported the staff, and ultimately they all moved over to KSAN-fm, which almost immediately became the dominant music station in the Bay Area (for a detailed analysis of the KMPX Strike, see Michael J Kramer's excellent 2013 Oxford University Press book Republic Of Rock).

Any likelihood of the Light Show Guild strike succeeding depended entirely on the bands. If the bands supported the Guild, maybe they would have negotiating room. If the bands stepped aside, the Light Shows would be marginalized, and Graham's comment that they weren't needed for ticket sales was fair warning. At this great remove, it seems quaint that anyone, even Light Show operators, thought that their contributions were essential to ticket sales. We have read plenty of contemporary reviews in college papers and the like, and almost none of them say "if you missed last weekend at Fillmore West, you missed a great light show!"

The one component that has been forgotten over the years is that the Light Shows probably employed more people than any other psychedelic ballroom enterprise. While the directors of Light Shows could make a case for being genuine artists, the execution of a 60s light show required a fair number of people, running film projectors, replacing colored filters, pouring oil into vessels, and numerous other mechanical tasks. More importantly, working on the light show didn't require any special background--if you couldn't play guitar, or fix electronics or draw a poster, you could still work in a light show. So in that sense, the Light Shows represented the lowest, broadest level of laborer in the psychedelic underground.

Jerry Garcia at a meeting at the Family Dog, around August 1, 1969 (from the Berkeley Tribe, August 8)

Friday, Friday, August 1, 1969 at the Family Dog
The Light Show Guild members had agreed to honor a contract with Bill Graham for this weekend at Fillmore West (headlined by the Everly Brothers and the Sons Of Champlin), and delayed the strike at Fillmore West until Tuesday, when the Butterfield Blues Band would headline a mid-week booking (replacing Fleetwood Mac). But the Guild was going to have a picket line at the Family Dog on Friday. Paradoxically, Chet Helms let the Guild run a cable from the Dog to provide power for their loudspeakers, thus supporting the laborers striking his own business.

Helms had a clearer picture of the community than Bill Graham, yet his position was more precarious. Graham was already the Big Bad Wolf of San Francisco rock, and he enjoyed playing "the Bad Guy." Chet was the Good Guy, however, and depended more on the good will of fans. Helms would also have been conscious how many hippies worked in light shows, and therefore, how many rock fans knew someone who worked in a light show, and was conscious of allowing the Guild their chance to strike. So there was a picket line of Light Show Guild members outside the Family Dog, a big crowd outside, and none inside.

WWJD (What Would Jerry Do)?
It came down to the bands, and it came down to Jerry Garcia. Even back in '69, before the Dead were really big, Garcia mattered. He had already told the press he would not cross the picket line. Garcia wasn't particularly close to his mother, but she had been a Union organizer, so Garcia didn't cross a picket line. Even though it was decades before the era of Social Media, the Light Show strike was covered by the press. Not crossing a picket line was one thing--but was Jerry going to stand with the strikers?

Talent aside, no one gets to be Jerry Garcia by accident. What would Garcia do at the Family Dog when faced with a picket line? Join the strikers? Make a speech, negotiate, what? Well, guess what--Garcia had another gig that night. In fact he had booked it at least a week earlier, possibly more. So Garcia guaranteed that he would have a conflict on Friday night, ensuring that he would not arrive at the Family Dog until after midnight.

Jerry Garcia had recently taken up the pedal steel guitar, and had formed a little band with his old Palo Alto friends John "Marmaduke" Dawson and David Nelson, performing Dawson's songs and some country covers. The band didn't have a name yet--within a week it would be called The New Riders of The Purple Sage--but they had a gig. After some shows as a trio, Garcia, Nelson and Dawson had added a rhythm section (drummer Mickey Hart and bassist Bob Matthews) and booked two shows on Friday night at the Bear's Lair, the little student pub on the UC Berkeley campus. The late show was at 10:30pm, so Garcia couldn't cross the Bay Bridge until after midnight. Newspaper accounts having him arrive at 12:30, and talking to some of the strikers, but never going into the Family Dog.

 

"Leadlerless Dead"
The Saturday (August 2) Examiner had the page 3 headline "Picket Line Splits Grateful Dead." The photo caption said "the leaderless Grateful Dead ignored the line and performed." The article carefully noted that Garcia refused to cross the line. There was no need to identify Garcia as the band's "leader," since despite Garcia's eternal denials, everyone knew that Jerry was Jerry. Since we know Garcia did not arrive until late, the tension surrounding that event must have defused considerably after midnight. Apparently there had been some kind of jam session, and a few members of the Grateful Dead had participated. One underground paper mentioned a flute player, a conga player and another drummer, to go along with Lesh, Weir and Kreutzmann (no mention of Pipgen or Tom Constanten, which in itself tells us nothing). The brief jam was terminated when Garcia arrived, but he never came inside or on stage.

In the Examiner article, Helms glumly noted that "there are only so many potatoes." The article said "The Grateful Dead took a step in that direction by offering to take a cut in wages to sweeten the salaries of the light technicians. But so far, no meeting has been arranged. "Helms also added that he was $20,000 in the hole on his seven-week old enterprise." $20,000 was big money in 1969--you could buy a suburban house for $20K, so the Family Dog was not doing well. Missing a Friday night payday with the Dead didn't help.

Berkeley Tribe article, August 1, 1969

 (for a complete view of various contemporary newspaper sources, see the indispensable Deadsources blog entry here)

For the next entry in the series (August 2-3 '69 Grateful Dead) see here

September 16, 1970 Lion's Share, San Anselmo, CA: Golden Toad/High Country/JJ Mad/Potter's Wheel (Lost Horizons VII)

 

The Lion's Share, at 60 Red Hill Avenue in San Anselmo, sometime in the early 1970s

Recently I have been focusing my research on rock shows in the Bay Area in the early 1970s, focusing particularly on the lower tiers. With patience, I have done good research on the Matrix, the Keystone Berkeley, the Long Branch and a few other clubs. Yet I consistently come across tantalizing details of other venues, different untold stories and an insight into the unexplained. Without further information, I am often stuck with just the hint, not anything like the actual story.

My research method focuses on finding dates and venues where bands have performed, and constructing a narrative based on available sources. It sounds simple, but it reaps many benefits. Rather than assume what the motives and goals of different bands or promoters might be, I can let the evidence of actual performances tell me what is desired and what has resulted. The limits of this method, ultimately, are constrained by the limits of my available sources. From the 1960s and '70s, we don't always have that much evidence, so it can be hard to figure out the story. Not all old sources have been digitized, and in many cases a lot of shows were not advertised in any paper. If no local flyers were preserved, or there aren't other sources we can be left with very little. 

Lost Horizons, 1970
The Lost Horizons posts are a series of posts that I can't complete. In some cases I wish someone else would write the post, in other cases I'm hoping someone else has already written it, and in some others I am hoping for more information so I can try and take them on. There's no real connection between any of these topics, save for the device that there was a live performance in 1970 that intrigued my interest. My blogs have an explicitly rock and roll orientation, but my methodological approach veers off in different directions. Fernand Braudel, Reynar Banham, Marcy (emptywheel) Wheeler--it's still rock and roll to me. I'm hoping that the magic of the Internet and eternal Comment Threads will yield up information hitherto unknown to me. If you have any insights, corrections or entertaining speculation, please Comment.

The Berkeley Barb
The Berkeley Barb had been founded by Max Scherr in 1965. The weekly paper made a point of documenting the local counterculture. The readership was distinct from anyone subscribing to the local daily papers (the San Fransisco Chronicle or Examiner, the Oakland Tribune or the Berkeley Gazette). The Barb reported on protests, pot busts, sexual freedom and local rock shows. The ads were for organic foods, head shops or local crafts. The Barb was an alternative paper for an alternative audience. It was sold by hippies to other hippies for a dime or a quarter.  I don't know if the Berkeley Barb was the first such "underground" paper, but it was one of them, and it was a model for such papers all over the country.

By 1970, the Barb was being read all over the Bay Area. I don't know the exact details, but I believe that even outside of Berkeley the paper was available in Head Shops, espresso joints and other hip places throughout the Bay Area. At the back of every issue of the Barb was "Scenedrome," a summary of upcoming and ongoing events in the next week that might be of interest to its readers. While that would always include shows at Fillmore West, for example, it also included performers at Telegraph Avenue coffee shops, foreign movies, political meetings, self-help groups and all sorts of other gatherings. Getting listed in Scenedrome any week was free--someone just had to call the Barb by Tuesday at noon. So for hippie events that were on a shoestring, or just free, calling the Scenedrome was the cheapest way to get publicity. 

While Berkeley events had always been posted in Scenedrome every week since 1965, by 1970 it was plain that the rest of the Bay Area was paying attention as well. The Friday and Saturday listings in Scenedrome went well beyond Berkeley, a clear indicator that the Barb had a broader readership beyond central Berkeley. So we get tantalizing hints of what was going on around the Bay Area, without really knowing exactly what it was. Most of my notices below come from little more than the barest of listings in the appropriate issue of the Berkeley Barb, with occasional supplements from other sources.

The September 11 Berkeley Barb lists Golden Toad, High Country, J.J. Mad and Potter's Wheel playing the Lion's Share in San Anselmo on Wednesday September 16, 1970

September 16, 1970 Lion's Share, San Anselmo, CA: Golden Toad/High Country/JJ Mad/Potter's Wheel (Wednesday)
The Lion's Share was the rock club in Marin County that booked original rock music, open from 1969 through 1975. It was in San Anselmo, about 10 minutes West of downtown San Rafael. Some touring bands played there, at least for the first few years, but mostly it featured local bands. It being Marin County, the quality of the local music was a little higher than in some places. Wednesday night tended to be a sort of "audition night," a few bands with little or no cover. 

Shows at the Lion's Share often had bands who intersected deeply with the local rock scene, and thus by extension the National one. Many of the bands playing the Lion's Share on any given night had someone on stage who had played at the Fillmore or Avalon, or played with Van Morrison or some other luminary. Despite the obscurity of the bands, this Wednesday night at the Lion's Share had a bill featuring some people with some of the deepest roots of all in the Grateful Dead scene. The cover charge was 50 cents.

For one thing, this night was the last known night-time appearance of the Golden Toad. I have written about the Golden Toad at great length, but I will try and recap it briefly here. An infamous figure named Bob Thomas, personal pal of Owsley, built his own pipes. They were copies of various medieval instruments. He formed a band to play medieval music--as best they could, as they couldn't exactly listen to the tapes--at the newly-formed Renaissance Faires in Los Angeles and California. The Fair Band could have as many as 23 members, depending on availability. There was also a social link between the Golden Toad and The Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company, in that I think they shared members. Sometimes the two ensembles would do "breakfast shows" in a Berkeley park that somehow involved baking bread. Only in Berkeley (side note: Bob Thomas designed the "skull-and-lightning-bolt" logo for the Grateful Dead, originally so that the band could distinguish its amplifiers backstage at rock festivals).

A ca. 1966 photo of The Golden Toad, in their Renaissance Fair finery

Once in a while, the Golden Toad would appear at a regular rock venue. They opened a few Grateful Dead shows, they played the Freight and Salvage a few times, and so on. But this time at the Lion's Share was the last time I know of them being publicly booked at a club. The Fair Band, in its various forms, may have continued on for quite a while, but this seems to have been the end of the line for the night-time Toad.

For hip Marin musicians, proximity to the Grateful Dead or other Fillmore stars was a matter of pride and clout. So for most bands, much less a bluegrass band, Bob Thomas might seem like the most connected, inside guy in Marin County. But maybe not to Butch Waller.

High Country was a bluegrass band from Berkeley, led by mandolinist Butch Waller. Waller had been an old pal of Jerry Garcia's back in the bluegrass days, long before Owsley or Bob Thomas. Waller, in fact, was Jerry's co-pilot for his first LSD trip in 1965 (as chronicled in Mojo by Jesse Jarnow). High Country had formed in 1968, and plays around to this day. One night in 1969, in fact, High Country had no banjo player available, and Garcia filled in (it's on tape, so there isn't any doubt). So Waller was an insider if anyone was, even if he had made the fiscally unsound career choice of playing bluegrass. In 1971, High Country would get signed to the Youngbloods imprint on Warners, Raccoon Records, and release an album.

Potter's Wheel, meanwhile, was a Santa Cruz band, probably playing a Marin gig in the hopes of getting heard in the central Bay Area. Three members of Potter's Wheel (drummer Ed Levin, guitarist Stan Muther and bassist Warren Phillips), however, had not only been in the San Francisco bands Phoenix and Mt Rushmore, but two of them (Levin and Muther) had been in the predecessor band The Vipers. The Vipers, a Palo Alto band, had played the second Mime Troupe appeal, the first at the Fillmore (December 10, 1965), and both had attended the Palo Alto Acid Test a week later.

It would be difficult to find a bill with more connected musicians than this one, with direct links to Owsley, Jerry Garcia, the first Bill Graham show at the Fillmore and more. Whether the bands played well that night is, of course, unknown, but this was probably the insiderest of insider shows ever, even by Marin standards.

JJ Mad is unknown to me, but by proximity alone I'm definitely intrigued.

1960s and 70s Rock Nightclubs Navigation and Tracker

 

285 UCB Campus Drive, Boulder, CO: Macky Auditorium November 23, 1975: Jerry Garcia Band with Nicky Hopkins

(an April 2011 photo of Macky Auditorium on the campus of the University of Colorado at Boulder. Construction on the 2000 seat venue was begun in 1910, although it was not completed until 1923)

Boulder, Colorado is the best American city without an ocean, and is in the top rank in any case. With perfect air that other parts of the country have to pay to simulate with air conditioning, the Rocky Mountains looming in the background and a perfect mountain stream running through downtown, it's not surprising that Boulder has been a preferred destination for emigrants and tourists for some decades now. For 100 years or so, the principal "industry" of Boulder was the University of Colorado at Boulder, the flagship of the CU system, founded in 1877.

Why, then, does Boulder have almost no meaningful 60s rock history? One 60s band came out of Boulder, the excellent Zephyr, featuring Tommy Bolin and Candy Givens, but even they say that they were the only band in Boulder. Denver has a very interesting rock history rock history in the 60s, if not a satisfactory one. Chet Helms opened a branch of the Family Dog in Denver, in an effort to compete effectively with Bill Graham. It was a very clever idea, providing touring bands with a paying show partway to San Francisco. However, the Denver Sheriff, with the support of the political establishment, harassed the Family Dog into closing, and Denver's role in the 60s rock scene was to some extent superseded by Salt Lake City, of all places.

Why, then, was there no rock scene in Boulder in the 60s? If the heat was on in Denver, why didn't bands play Boulder? While Boulder was not a big town--it still isn't--why wasn't it an incubator for bands to get it together, in preparation for heading to Denver and then the rest of the country? The Macky Auditorium, completed in 1923, was a 2000 seat venue that could have accommodated the touring bands of the day, and yet there seem to have been no meaningful rock concerts there until the Jerry Garcia Band (with Nicky Hopkins) on November 23, 1975. While there seem to have been regular concerts after 1975, I can find no record of anything remotely hip before that.

While only a few "college towns" like Berkeley and Cambridge were substantial enough cities to sustain a music scene on their own, college towns generally played an important role in music from the 60s onward. A modest town with a big University generally couldn't have its own Fillmore, but there was usually a folk club and a popular dive bar for the local talent. As the 60s wore on, bands like The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane or The Doors might come through and play the gym or the main auditorium, with the local heroes as the opening act. The students became fans for life, even more so if a band played for free one afternoon, and especially so if the College Dean banned all rock concerts after some legendary blow out. This narrative was particularly true of college towns in striking range of California, so there are lots of fond, if fuzzy, 60s memories in places like Palo Alto, CA or Eugene, OR.

The Grateful Dead, always the pioneers, did play the University of Colorado Student Union on Sunday, April 13, 1969. However, this unique event seems to have been a "throw-in," after the Dead had played shows at the University of Arizona (Friday April 11) and University of Utah (Saturday, April 12). The band was on their way to Omaha (Tuesday April 15) and then Purdue University (Friday April 18), so playing the no-doubt tiny Student Union was probably just gigging for gas money. When the Dead put out a few successful albums in the early 70s, why didn't the band play the Macky at CU? The Dead were playing theaters and gyms up and down the East Coast, so why weren't they headlining at the Macky?

Other than far too limited Grateful Dead activity (limited by the standards of the Dead's relentless touring, anyway), all my research into Boulder bands, venues or concerts in the late 60s and early 70s turned up a dry hole. While its true there have been demographic changes since the 60s, in that undergraduate enrollment at CU-Boulder has nearly doubled (15,000>29,000), and the population of the town has increased by 1/3 since 1970 (66,000>100,000), that has largely been true of many towns with flagship state Universities, and that didn't stop those towns from having it going on in the 60s.Why not Boulder?

Why Not Boulder?
It turns out that "Dry Hole" was the correct metaphor. While Colorado lifted prohibition in 1933, along with the rest of the country, the town of Boulder did not. The city of Boulder did not allow the purchase of alcohol until 1967, and the first bar in the city did not open until the Boulderado Hotel obtained a liquor license in 1969. As a result, 1960s Boulder was a very different town economically than most other major college towns.

Sophisticated archival research is my preferred mode of inquiry, but it's very difficult to uncover something that is not present--you can't read a review of a show that did not take place. Conveniently, however, one night in The Boulderado, Boulder's first luxury hotel (built 1909), I had a very informative conversation with a worldly Boulder resident named Phil, who was born and raised in Boulder, lived and worked many places, and had returned to Boulder in semi-retirement (if I were a country songwriter, his story might make a good song, but I'm not).

In 1960s Boulder, there were no bars, only places that sold 3.2% beer. A post-prohibition Colorado law defined anything with less than 3.2% alcohol as "non-alcoholic," and brewers rapidly figured out they could brew weak beer and skirt the law. This eventually became codified into practice, and watery beer was available for adults, but stronger beer, wine or mixed drinks fell under a different set of laws. While the rest of Colorado came out of Prohibition in a somewhat typical fashion (although the 3.2% beer thing turns out to a surprisingly critical to the rise of Colorado microbrews, but that is too tangential even for this blog), the city of Boulder limited its residents to the purchase of 3.2% beer. It wasn't illegal for adults to drink or possess alcohol, but they couldn't buy it in Boulder.

As a result, the city of Boulder was quite a sleepy place. All the good restaurants were outside of town, since otherwise they couldn't have served wine with dinner. There was no night life, because there were no bars. The adult men all belonged to private clubs--Phil's father often went to the Elks Club, across the street from the Boulderado, because he could get a drink there. Private clubs, however, cannot get a license for live music that allows outsiders, so none of those clubs could serve as a venue.

It may seem that hippie pyschedelic rock bands would not have needed bars, but in fact the opposite is the case. However much 60s bands liked playing free concerts and all night rave ups, the ecosystem of music requires paying gigs. If there aren't a few bars to provide steady work, you don't have working musicians, certainly not any drummers, and as a result you have no bands. It may also seem that coffee shops and folk music would be immune to an absence of bars, but the reality is that the opposite was the case. While it's true that the 60s Folk Scare started in coffee shops, so that high schoolers could get involved, coffee shops thrive in districts where there are bars. After all, what would be the point of meeting a pretty girl and bonding over Pete Seeger songs if you couldn't invite her across the street for a beer? Even Berkeley's Freight and Salvage (opened 1968), the first venue not to allow smoking, was across the street from the Albatross Pub.

The seemingly obvious parallel to 60s Boulder would seem to be Palo Alto, a town that Boulder generally aspires to be. Palo Alto had strange liquor laws, stemming from it's founding as the college town for Stanford University in 1875. In the 1960s, despite a profusion of Acid Tests and the like, there were still no bars in downtown Palo Alto, because of an old law (supported by most downtown area residents) that no liquor could be sold within 1 1/2 miles of the Stanford Campus. Yet Downtown Palo Alto was a bohemian enclave of folk clubs in the early 1960s, and Jerry Garcia was only the most famous of the early folkies hanging around Downtown looking to make music.  Why did sleepy Palo Alto--and trust me, it was sleepy--have a nascent little folk and rock scene, and Boulder seemingly have none?

One simple difference between Boulder and downtown Palo Alto's liquor laws was that Palo Alto allowed beer and wine to be sold at restaurants. Thus nightclubs (like St. Michael's Alley, The Top Of The Tangent or The Poppycock) could set themselves up as restaurants and at least sell beer. Furthermore, there could at least be restaurants downtown, which while they did not cater to young hippie musicians, at least created a downtown that provided some potential employment for their girlfriends. Boulder's restrictions had neither of these ameliorating factors.

The most important difference, however, was that despite downtown Palo Alto's restrictive liquor laws, it was a relatively tiny blip on a very busy suburban Peninsular strip from San Francisco to San Jose. Even within the city limits of Palo Alto, much less all the neighboring towns, there were bars, nightlife and music gigs. While the bands that formed in Palo Alto couldn't find a paying booking in downtown Palo Alto, there was no lack of employment in the bars, coffee shops and pizza parlors on the El Camino Real strip. El Camino (an extension of Mission Blvd in San Francisco) ran from The City all the way to San Jose, and parts of it were within walking distance of downtown Palo Alto. Thus downtown Palo Alto's isolation affected the town itself, but did not have much impact on the area just around it.

Boulder's metropolitan circumstances were very different. A Boulder County resident explained to me that in the late 1960s, the city of Boulder started buying up all the land around the city. Effectively, the city created a 7-mile wide Greenbelt around itself, but at 1960s prices. In this way, Boulder was far ahead of Palo Alto (oh, if Palo Alto had only bought up Menlo Park and Mountain View in 1966...). What this meant, however, was that while downtown Boulder was sleepy, there were no nearby towns to pick up the overflow. You could walk from downtown Palo Alto to downtown Menlo Park, which helps explain while the Palo Alto-born Grateful Dead actually got their professional start in Menlo Park. The nearest towns to Boulder were 10 or more miles away, as they are today, so Boulder was isolated by choice and not just geography.

Certainly the University of Colorado was full of students, probably about 15,000 undergraduates or so. However, CU is up on a hill above the town (mind you, a "hill" in the Rockies would be called a "mountain" in some parts of the country). While presumably the students enjoyed 3.2 beer in great quantities, any serious socializing or interesting dates probably required a car anyway, and if you had a car, why go to sleepy, dry Boulder when you could go to a bar in another town? You're in the car anyway--why not drive to where it's more fun?

Boulder Now
Now, of course, Boulder is Mile High Palo Alto. There are nice restuarants, lots of bars, some converted movie theaters that make great rock venues, and bands play the Macky Auditorium, the CU Events Center (gym) and even Folsom Field, if the bands are big enough to fill up a football stadium. Boulder's population has stabilized, since the city owns all the pristine land around it (Palo Alto's population has been the same since the 1970s), and as a result of the natural advantages of Colorado and the boom in Denver, Boulder is a desirable happening place to live, musically or otherwise, if you can afford it. The University of Colorado has joined the Pac-10, so Boulder is now rightly on a par with Berkeley, Palo Alto, Eugene or Westwood, and it certainly belongs there. Yet a look into Boulder's vacant rock history from the 1960s shows that Boulder has transformed itself into something very different than it was in the past.

I could be wrong about this. Maybe Zephyr was just the only Boulder band that made it out. None of the economic pointers suggest that, however, and I think that Boulder did not have an interesting 60s music history because the economic conditions did not support it. However much the creativity and desire of individual musicians is essential to making music, if the material conditions for a successful music scene are not in place, it will be no accident when there are no memorable bands or concerts to recall. Of course, as always, I will be delighted if if any long time or long ago Boulderites can prove me wrong, and tell me about a secret history of Boulder venues and musicians, but I think that Boulder's very virtues were foundational in insuring that its 60s music history was largely silent.

Winterland, San Francisco "Monster Jam" for Olompali, March 17, 1969

March 17, 1969 Winterland "Monster Jam"

Rancho Olompali was the Marin County retreat for the Grateful Dead in Spring 1966, before they moved to 710 Ashbury (via Western Marin) in September.  It was owned by Don McCoy, who later lived across the street at 715 Ashbury. In 1967, McCoy started a commune called The Chosen Family. A fire caused by faulty wiring burned down the mansion. I assume that this Ralph Gleason column item from the San Francisco Chronicle (from Monday, March 17, 1969), refers to the fire's aftermath. It says "Tonight at Winterland, there's a benefit for Olompali with a monster jam session, light shows by both Jerry Abrams and Glenn McKay and also the Garden of Delights."

I know nothing else about this show except what you are reading here. Nevertheless, a Monday night rock show at the largest rock venue in San Francisco, with three established light shows, suggests that someone interesting was expected to show up at the jam. Given the connections between Don McCoy and the Grateful Dead, it does at least hint that Jerry Garcia and/or members of the Dead might be there. Glenn McKay was the Airplane's light show man, so that hints at some members of the Airplane who might like to jam (as the t-shirt says, if you don't know Jorma, you don't know Jack).

Most San Francisco bands didn't work Monday nights, and both the Dead's and the Airplane's March touring itinerary puts them in town. I don't know how to pursue this any further, but I'd certainly be looking for a Jorma and Jack, Mickey and The Hartbeats kind of thing. [update: As you can see in the Comments, Ross found that my supposition was largely correct].

Rancho Olompali, and the mansion on it, had a long and complicated history dating back to 1843, General Vallejo and Mexican California. The property had ended up in the hands of the University of San Francisco by the 1950s. In the 1960s, they attempted to sell it various times, but when various buyers defaulted, the property kept reverting back to USF. I assume Don McCoy gave up on the property as well. In 1977, the State of California purchased the property from USF, and turned it into Olompali Historic State Park. The address of the park is 8901 Old Redwood Highway, 3.5 miles East of Novato, CA.

135 University Avenue, Palo Alto, CA November 8-14, 1969 The Poppycock

Palo Alto had a thriving bohemian scene in the early 1960s, spawning both Ken Kesey's acid tests and The Grateful Dead, among other things. However, the tiny scene centered around Dowtown Palo Alto and nearby Menlo Park (where Kepler's Books was located) rapidly scattered to San Francisco and Santa Cruz when things got interesting. Palo Alto was a college town, liberal and progressive, but oddly sleepy--one San Francisco columnist (a former resident) accurately called it "a hotbed of social rest," which it remains today. By the late 1960s, Palo Alto was in a funny niche--a town whose residents were tolerant of long hair, funny smelling smoke and new ideas, but not particularly interested in exploring it themselves.

The net result was that Palo Alto had a thriving if small concert scene in the late 1960s, which hardly bothered the tolerant residents, but at the same time not large enough to develop any traction on its own. The town of Palo Alto had a very odd history, the essence of which was that railroad mogul Leland Stanford founded the town on the basis of being anti-liquor, in contrast to sinful Mayfield just a few miles away (California Avenue to any locals from this century). Although the history of alcohol and Palo Alto had undergone some twists and turns, by the mid-1960s you could buy beer at a restaurant Downtown, but there were still no bars. Thus any local beer joints had a surprisingly important status in Downtown Palo Alto, since a frosty Budweiser was the closest thing you could get to a drink.

I have written previously of the epic 1967 Palo Alto Be-In and the surprising series of free outdoor concerts that followed. Along with a willingness to allow the local hippies to put on free concerts in the city park nearest downtown (El Camino Park), Palo Alto also had its very own rock club, The Poppycock, a peculiar little venue all but forgotten by everyone except Ross and me. It was located near the train station, on University Avenue and High Street--could you make this up?--and next door to the pizza parlor where Jerry Garcia and other folkies had honed their chops to tiny audiences in the early 1960s. The building is still intact: here is a 2006 photo, and while it has been remodeled it gives a sense of the modest scale of the structure.

(for former or current Palo Altans, the building is at 135 University at High Street. The Tangent (and The Top Of The Tangent) was next door at 117 University. At the time of this photo, it was a branch of Stanford University Bookstore, who has since vacated, but the building is still for lease last I checked. The building has been substantially remodeled since its Poppycock days).

Downtown Palo Alto had kind of died in the mid-1950s, thanks to the opening of the nearby Stanford Shopping Center. The moribund real estate market allowed some hippie types to buy the three story 135 University building in about 1967. While offices were rented upstairs, the owners (whose names remain inaccessible to me) opened a Fish "N' Chips take out shop on the ground floor, with a beer joint/night club, complete with light show providing nightly entertainment. A couple of historic facts stand out about The Poppycock at this time

• English readers of this blog will be startled to know that Fish And Chips was exotic enough in California to count as "ethnic cuisine", and
• With no bars downtown (because they were against the law), a hippie beer joint was exactly the only place the local longhairs over the age of 21 could go hang for a drink

In 1967 The Poppycock was sort of like a lounge, as near as I can tell, with regular entertainment but not "names" (a local jazz trio did play there regularly, featuring Woodside High School student Mike Shrieve on drums). By 1968, however, the club had switched to a more rock-oriented format, albeit with some folk and Theater mixed in. The Bay Area was the place to be for rising rock bands, and a circuit was developing for working bands, that included The Matrix in San Francisco, The New Orleans House in Berkeley and The Poppycock. Bands on the road could "tour" the Bay Area, in between more high profile gigs opening at The Fillmore and The Avalon. At the same time, local bands had a place to build their audiences.

The audience of The Poppycock was slightly at odds with the town. The hippest people in Palo Alto were the local High School students, but of course they couldn't get into a bar, and were "forced" to go the Fillmore or whatever other concerts were nearby. Conversely, long-haired 20 somethings from Santa Clara to San Mateo had few choices for nighttime entertainment, since while there were plenty of bars in the South Bay, they didn't always play original rock music nor were they necessarily sympathetic to hippies. While a hippie in the South Bay was rarely subject to physical violence (it being a hotbed of social rest, after all), the point of going out was to meet like minded people, preferably of the opposite gender, and for hippies in the South Bay that meant The Poppyock.

As a result, the hip Palo Alto residents couldn't get into The Poppycock because they were minors. Most young working people didn't live in Palo Alto, however, because it was too dull and expensive, but paradoxically for those who lived in in the nearby counties the Poppycock was a destination, particularly on weekends, because the cheaper suburban towns weren't tolerant enough of longhair hippie establishments.

November 8, 1969 Poppycock Calendar.
Ross found this poster somewhere, I don't know where, but in any case only he and I would care. Its actually a pretty good snapshot of the kind of acts who played The Poppycock.

Saturday, November 8, 1969   John Fahey/Billy Joe Becoat
John Fahey was Berkeley's legendary pioneer of acoustic guitar, a huge influence on both Country Joe and The Fish and Leo Kottke. If that makes sense to you, you'd like John Fahey. Billy Joe Becoat apparently recorded an album for Fantasy this year, but I know nothing else about him.

Sunday, November 9, 1969 The Rhythm Dukes
The Rhythm Dukes at this time featured former Moby Grape members Jerry Miller and Don Stevenson, along with bassist John Barrett and drummer John Oxendine, both formerly of the group Boogie. Stevenson had played drums in Moby Grape, but he switched to guitar for this group. This promising group lived in Boulder Creek in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and were a good example of the type of band that played The Poppycock because there were few other South Bay outlets for original music.

Monday, November 10, 1969 Open Mike-Auditions
Tuesday, November 11, 1969 Folk-Blues Workshop
The Poppycock was professionally connected to The Top Of The Tangent, next door, although it may have been called The Trip Room by then. The Folk Blues Workshop was a kind of "Best Of The Hoots" ensemble that played different clubs around the Bay Area. The best known graduate of this process was folksinger Jim Page (no, not him), now based out of Washington State.

Wednesday, November 12, 1969 Canterbury Fair
Although I know nothing of Canterbury Fair, they were a familiar name on Bay Area rock venues at small clubs during this period.

Thursday, November 13, 1969 New Riders Of The Purple Sage
At this time, Jerry Garcia had recently helped establish The New Riders Of The Purple Sage as a vehicle for him to play pedal steel guitar. Old Los Altos pal John Dawson wrote and sang the songs, and David Nelson provided the electric guitar licks, Buck Owens style. Phil Lesh played bass and Mickey Hart played drums. During this period, the New Riders played a lot of Bay Area clubs on weeknights, as long as the Dead were not on tour.

The Grateful Dead had formed in Palo Alto, as The Warlocks, but to my knowledge they never had a paying gig in the town. They played The Big Beat Acid Test (in South Palo Alto, at 998 San Antonio Road), and they had even auditioned at Palo Alto's first folk club, St. Michael's Alley, at 436 Hamilton (they flunked). But there were no gigs in Palo Alto for long hair bands, to my knowledge, and they had to start playing various clubs in the South Bay along the El Camino Real Strip, which ultimately led them to San Francisco.

The Grateful Dead had played the Palo Alto Be-In on June 24, 1967, but of course that was a free concert. I believe the November 14, 1969 Poppycock gig to be the first time Jerry Garcia got paid for a show in downtown Palo Alto since the days of Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Band Champions in 1965.

It very well may be that the New Riders appeared again the next Thursday--the band definitely were scheduled for Thursday November 20, and the poster seems to imply multiple Thursdays.

Coming Soon
November 28-29 Cal Tjader
[undated] San Francisco Mime Troupe
December 31 Charlie Musselwhite

Jazz musician Cal Tjader, a critical figure in Latin jazz, was actually born in the South Bay and of Swedish extraction. As such, he was a popular local figure, independent of local rock currents.

The San Francisco Mime Troupe had been a popular counterculture attraction for some years. The Poppycock had a fair amount of theater events, particularly on weeknights.

Charlie Musselwhite had taken a month's leave from his job in a Chicago steel mill in 1967, and he stayed for over 30 years. It is possible that his band already featured Ukiah guitarist Robben Ford.

We are working on a complete Poppycock venue history, but it remains in progress. Anyone with insights, corrections or recovered memories (real or imagined) please Comment or eMail.