September 6-7, 1969 Family Dog At The Great Highway, San Francisco Jefferson Airplane/Grateful Dead

I recently wrote an extensive review of the Grateful Dead's touring itinerary for July and August 1969. However, the first weekend in September of 1969 offers up some peculiar mysteries about the Grateful Dead's performing schedule that have not, to my knowledge, ever been addressed.

September 6, 1969 Family Dog At The Great Highway Grateful Dead/Jefferson Airplane
The September 6, 1969 Grateful Dead show is known from a circulating tape. There is also a circulating Jefferson Airplane tape with the same date, where Garcia and Hart join in for some jamming. This has led everyone to assert that The Grateful Dead and The Jefferson Airplane played The Family Dog at The Great Highway on Saturday, September 6, 1969. I am inclined towards that view, too, but it still begs a number of questions that have never been addressed.

• Most bookings at The Family Dog, and most ballrooms, were for Friday and Saturday--did the Dead also play Friday night (Sep 5)?
• If the Dead were playing on Sep 6 (and possibly Sep 5), why wasn't it mentioned on the August 29-30 poster, when the Dead headlined Friday and Saturday nights?
• The Jefferson Airplane did not have an extensive professional relationship with Chet Helms--they only played the Avalon one weekend in 1966--so why would they play a stealth show at The Family Dog?
• There is no known flyer of any type for the Family Dog this weekend. Given the drawing power of the Airplane and The Dead (the Airplane were much bigger at the time), they could easily sell the place out by word of mouth, but why?

I know of no eyewitness accounts, reviews or even second hand accounts of this show, so at this point all of my questions remain unanswered. What follows is some speculation about these shows--I don't know any more than anyone else, which is close to nothing, but most Bay Area Dead shows from the 60s have a wide variety of historical ephemera, like posters, reviews or eyewitness accounts, and this show has none.

There are a couple of things to consider about the Bay Area rock scene at the time, and particularly about Chet Helms. There was a lot of hostility in 1969 San Francisco between those who still thought music should be free, and those who were benefiting from the big business that rock music had become. Bill Graham was the symbol of commercialized rock music, and Chet Helms was the flag bearer for music as a benefit for the community. Helms Avalon Ballroom, fondly remembered though it was, had been a mess as a business and Helms had given it up at the end of 1968.

Helms had opened a new Family Dog operation out on Ocean Beach, called the Family Dog At The Great Highway (the address was 660 Great Highway). It was smaller than Fillmore West, and quite a few miles from downtown. It only arguably even competed with the Fillmore West, which was probably why Bill Graham was one of the people loaning Helms money to get the venture started. The venture had opened with great fanfare on June 13, 1969, with a concert featuring the Jefferson Airplane. The San Francisco rock scene was actually a lot like High School, and the Airplane and Helms were not particularly close. The Airplane only played the Avalon a single weekend (July 22-23, 1966), and as the Airplane were always associated with Bill Graham, they had no cause to play for Helms.

The fact that the Airplane played the opening of the Family Dog At The Great Highway was a clear implication that Bill Graham had indirectly blessed Chet Helms venue. My own belief is that Graham feared a major promoter from Los Angeles or New York backing Helms at Winterland, a much larger hall. Helms's savvy combined with competent financial controls would have made a formidable competitor for Fillmore West. However, Chet Helms in a modest sized venue some miles from downtown and freeway access offered little threat to Fillmore West or larger shows promoted by Graham in the East Bay. If Helms succeeded, Graham would have simply called in his loans. In any case, The Family Dog at The Great Highway offered some opportunities for bands on their way up, and if they were good then Graham could always book them at the Fillmore, just as he had done with the Avalon back in the early days.

By August of 1969, however, Helms financial situation at the FDGH was precarious, and he had had a significant falling out with Bill Graham. The Spring and Summer of 1969 was the time of great outdoor rock festivals, and the big San Francisco Rock Festival was supposed to be a giant free concert held in Golden Gate Park on August 22 and 23. The event collapsed under its own weight, with acrimony on all sides. Bill Graham was seen as the bad guy, insisting that a certain amount of money was required for the show to be safe and successful. At the same time, an effort by Light Show operators (led by Jerry Abrams) to unionize had led to more bad blood, including a picket line at a Grateful Dead show at the Family Dog on Friday August 1. The financial disaster that followed the thinly attended weekend, combined with Bill Graham withdrawing financial backing, nearly undermined the Family Dog operation entirely.

It was in this financial context that the Grateful Dead headlined another weekend at the Family Dog at the end of August. On Thursday, August 28 there appears to have been some sort of jam with Jerry Garcia and Howard Wales (the Bear cassette is labeled "Hartbeats") and the Dead headlined Friday and Saturday night (August 29 and 30) over The New Riders of The Purple Sage, Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen and The Rubber Duck Company, all making their San Francisco concert debuts (although all three had done a few low-key club gigs).

Thus it begs a series of questions: assuming the dating on the Dead and Airplane tapes to be correct (and there's no reason to doubt them), what were the Dead and Airplane doing playing an unadvertised show on a Saturday night, the weekend after the Dead had played the same venue? I know of no other scheduled show at the Family Dog that weekend, so the performance is plausible within both bands' timelines, but its still a strange event. With that in mind, here are my proposed answers.

• There is no known flyer of any type for the Family Dog this weekend. Given the drawing power of the Airplane and The Dead (the Airplane were much bigger at the time), they could easily sell the place out by word of mouth, but why?

Most major concert promoters had a contractual requirement that bands could not play advertised shows within a certain amount of time and distance of a booked performance, like 60 days and 50 miles. It was understood that musicians would play on the fly, but the shows couldn't be advertised. The Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead were booked by Bill Graham for two nights at Winterland on October 24 and 25, and neither band would have wanted to wreck their relationship with their best paying customer.

Since the show could not be advertised, it cut down on Chet Helms overhead--no poster artist, no radio ads--thus making it a more profitable show.

• The Jefferson Airplane did not have an extensive professional relationship with Chet Helms--they only played the Avalon one weekend in 1966--so why would they play a stealth show at The Family Dog?

Helms Family Dog may not have been the direct beneficiary. The sources of funding for Helms post-Avalon ventures have always been obscure, but it all seems to have been borrowed money. The scenario that makes the most sense here is that Helms owed someone (or several someones) money that were friends of the Dead and the Airplane, and the concert helped settle his debts. The Airplane weren't close to Helms, but they had plenty of mutual friends.

• Most bookings at The Family Dog, and most ballrooms, were for Friday and Saturday--did the Dead also play Friday night (Sep 5)?
• If the Dead were playing on Sep 6 (and possibly Sep 5), why wasn't it mentioned on the August 29-30 poster, when the Dead headlined Friday and Saturday nights?

If my thesis is correct, its clear why the Family Dog poster from the week before couldn't mention the secret Dead/Airplane show. But what benefit would there have been for Helms to keep his venue dark on a Friday night? I don't think the Dead and the Airplane played, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of jam session type event. Since the most determined jammers in San Francisco were Jerry Garcia, Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady, it seems like a good bet. If we ever find out anything about this weekend, I wouldn't be surprised to find some sort of event on Friday night as well, if a considerably less dramatic one.

September 7, 1969 Family Dog At The Great Highway
This show too is only known from a tape. Its about an hour of rock and roll oldies, from an ad-hoc group that appears to include Jorma Kaukonen, Jack Casady, Joey Covington along with Garcia and another drummer. I see two likely possibilities:

• the tape is really from the end of the night before (Sep 6), but was dated September 7 since it was after hours
• the bands left their equipment there and had a Sunday afternoon jam, a not uncommon event earlier in the Fillmore era. It makes sense that the players who were regular at The Matrix were the ones who showed up.

If you accept the second hypothesis (and that is the one I am most inclined to), I can't imagine a show just an hour long. Given the players present, I would have to expect a Hot Tuna set (although they did not use that name yet) and some sort of Garcia/Hartbeats type of configuration too (presumably with Garcia, Jack Casady and some drummers). The extant tape has a sort of "encore" type feel to it, and despite its raggedness would make sense as punctuation to a couple of hours of blues and jamming.

Of course this is all speculation on my part. However, I would point out that no one has anything else to offer that I am aware of. If anyone has any new ideas, distant memories or hard evidence they are eagerly invited to Comment.