September 1965, Dining Hall, Menlo College, Menlo Park, CA

The Warlocks played Menlo College in Atherton, CA around September 1965

I was recently fortunate enough to have a lengthy conversation with someone who was one of the very first fans of The Warlocks. I quizzed her about some hitherto mysterious legends about the performing history of The Warlocks and received some surprisingly specific answers. The Warlocks history is usually treated like a "Creation Myth" rather than as the actions of actual people, and I have been anxious to pin down some very vague rumors. Rock Scully, who did not even meet the band until several months later, had alluded to a performance at Menlo College in his autobiography, but since he described the band as "debuting" at Menlo College it seemed impossible.  My source knew perfectly well that the Warlocks had debuted at Magoo's Pizza, since she was there. However, she could confirm the Menlo College performance as well, since she was there also. Thus, we now have an eyewitness account of The Warlocks performance at Menlo College, and I will pass on what I have pieced together.

Early Warlocks
My source was one of the first two Warlocks fans. The internet being what it is, I won't identify her by name, although she may choose to reveal herself in the Comments (some scholars will figure it out anyway). In any case, she was a Palo Alto High School student (class of '66) who saw the Warlocks at Magoo's, Frenchy's and numerous other places where she was able to get in the door. She distinctly recalls seeing The Warlocks at Menlo College. She remembers that it was in some sort of dining hall or "rec room," and that numerous tables had to be pushed against a wall to allow everybody to dance. Her memory was that the purpose of the show was probably to encourage Menlo College students to recommend The Warlocks for paying gigs at school dances.

The performing history of The Warlocks remains murky. They played every Wednesday in May, 1965 at Magoo's Pizza, at 635 Santa Cruz Avenue in Menlo Park, but at the end of that run Phil Lesh replaced Dana Morgan Jr as the band's bass player. Apparently, however, the Warlocks raucous fans violated a local ban on dancing, and the shows at Magoo's had to end. Lesh debuted when The Warlocks played at Frenchy's in Hayward, on June 18, 1965, but they were fired after the first night of a three night engagement. Up until recently, the band's activities for the balance of the Summer had remained a mystery, but my source recalls that the Warlocks regularly played The Top Of The Tangent on a regular, if informal basis.

My source doesn't recall when the band played Menlo College. However, given the California school year, it seems pretty likely that the Menlo performance must have been at the beginning of the next school year, around September of 1965. The school would not have had student events in the Summer, and an informal event in a dining hall seems like a beginning-of-term event.
update: a Menlo alumnus tells me 

[I] remember what you call sock hops, but were actually called "mixers."  They weren't held in the dining hall, which was called the Commons, but in the student union building toward the entrance of the school with parking nearby.  I remember bands, but can't recall if it was the Warlocks or not.

By the end of the Fall session, the Warlocks would have more likely been looking farther North than school dances in Menlo Park. As a result, I am marking the Menlo show as September, 1965, although I am open to any recovered memories anyone may have.

Menlo College
Menlo College was a very peculiar institution for the West Coast, as it was an East Coast style Prep School located in the West, far from its native habitat. The Menlo School for Boys, at 50 Valparaiso Street in Atherton, had been formed in 1924, taking over a Military Academy on the same site. In 1927, the Menlo School for Boys also formed Menlo College, which was a sort of junior college that prepared students to go straight into the upper division. Menlo College was and still is located at 1000 El Camino Real in Atherton. Thus, the Warlocks appearance at Menlo fits in with the band's slow march up El Camino Real towards San Francisco.

Atherton, a very wealthy Peninsula town, was literally across the street from the town of Menlo Park, so the name was appropriate. Menlo students were given a program where they would be prepared for college, and then spend the first two years of college in their Prep School itself, transferring straight into their junior year at their chosen University. Menlo School always had close ties to Stanford University, and the programs were generally designed to get students directly into Stanford as juniors.

The public schools in the South Bay generally had a very good reputation, so private schools had to fill certain niches. By the 1960s, and certainly into the 1970s, Menlo School filled a very specific niche. There was a certain kind of South Bay teenager--one lived across the street from me--who were pretty bright but not very academically motivated, and who did not necessarily do well in the public schools full of  the children of college professors and the like. Menlo was a place where--for a price--they could get more attention and do the first two years of college, thus setting the table for their transfer to Stanford or a similar school, which is what their parents desired. Many of the Menlo students, besides being smart but not academic, were also very good at sports, a fact not lost on colleges looking for transfer students.

Thus the boys who went to Menlo School or College--remember, you could go to Menlo from 9th Grade until your Sophomore year of College--were often well off, good at sports and slackers, a clear recipe for fun. Yet where would these handsome lads find girlfriends? The nearby private girls school of Castilleja, in Palo Alto, was one possibility, and the former Grace Wing (later Slick) had gone there, so that wasn't nothing, but really the best bet was the public school girls at the public high school of Menlo-Atherton, located just a mile away (at 555 Middlefield). Menlo was in the Menlo-Atherton district limits, so the Menlo boys had to know who the prettiest girls at M-A were, and the M-A girls had to know there were some real catches at Menlo. Bob Weir, along with Bob Matthews, Matt Kelly (and later Steve Marcus, Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks) all went to M-A, but the real money would have been at Menlo.

Warlocks Plans, 1965
Magoo's Pizza, where the Warlocks had played there first shows, was in the Menlo Atherton district, but there's no way the buzz hadn't gotten over to Menlo College. Indeed, Menlo School was full of boarders, some from quite far away, and Magoo's was just a block away from the school (Menlo was up on El Camino).  There's no way some of the Menlo boys didn't walk over to Magoo's on those Wednesday nights. Warlocks fans from M-A looking to drum up business for the band would have definitely found a way to get them in at Menlo School. The story about pushing aside tables in a dining hall leads me to suspect that the band played an informal sort of sock-hop early in the school year, hoping to get hired on for Proms or Formals later in the season. Of course, by the time the big events at Menlo College rolled around, the Warlocks were playing the Acid Tests, the Trips Festival and the Fillmore, so they weren't so concerned about the missed opportunities.

Still, we can now confirm that some Menlo boys with ambitious parents found themselves at a sock hop event in their school cafeteria in about September, 1965. They were probably hoping for some pretty girls from Menlo Atherton High School, and they probably found some. They also found a strange, noisy band of barbarians playing something they had only heard on car radios in the middle of the night on the wrong side of town, but as long as the girls wanted to dance, it probably didn't matter to them who the strange guys were that were playing that weird, dangerous music.

A picture sleeve for the Rolling Stones "Little Red Rooster"/"Off The Hook" single

Off The Hook
My source had one other, peculiar, unique memory about the Warlocks playing Menlo College. She and a friend had the duty of writing down the lyrics to songs that the band wanted to learn, many of them Rolling Stones songs. One thing she recalled about the Menlo gig was that the band had learned the Rolling Stones song "Off The Hook"  (released in the US in February 1965 on the album The Rolling Stones Now). My source had carefully explained to Jerry Garcia that when Mick Jagger sang the lyrics "it's off the hook, " Jagger had mimed holding a telephone to his ear. Whether she knew that from having seen the Stones, or from some television appearance isn't quite clear.

Nonetheless, my source recalled Jerry not only singing "It's Off The Hook," but miming the telephone bit. He even smiled at her when he did it, to show he'd learned his part. How often the Warlocks played "Off The Hook" after that remains unknown, and I doubt Jerry mimed the phone much. But he did it once, at least, even if the Menlo boys had their eyes somewhere else.

Summer 1965, The Top of The Tangent, 117 University Avenue, Palo Alto, CA: The Warlocks

117 University Avenue in Palo Alto, the site of The Top Of The Tangent, as it appeared in 2006. The restaurant Rudy's is on the ground floor, approximately where The Tangent pizza parlor was located

The performing history in The Warlocks is shrouded in myth and legend. Like many events from over 40 years ago, as stories get repeated over and over even the people who were present remember the stories and lose sight of their actual memories. Members of the Grateful Dead have been interviewed many times about their early days, but like many musicians they only had and have a performer's perspective. They may remember clearly how it felt and what it was like, but they hardly recall where or when they actually played. Dennis McNally and Blair Jackson did fantastic research in pinning down some facts about where the Warlocks actually played before they became famous, and in an earlier post I framed known facts about those venues in the context of the South Bay rock scene at the time. Only a few venues can actually be identified, and there is no certainty about the dates.

The outlines of the Warkocks saga are well established, however. The Warlocks first shows were at Magoo's Pizza Parlor, at 635 Santa Cruz Avenue in Menlo Park, every Wednesday in May. Phil Lesh saw the final show, and accepted Jerry Garcia's invitation to replace Dana Morgan, Jr on bass guitar. Phil's first show was at Frenchy's, in Hayward (at 29097 Mission Blvd), on June 18, 1965. The band was not invited back. By the end of the Summer of 1965, the better rehearsed Warlocks had an agent, Al King, and he started booking them in some clubs on El Camino Real on the Peninsula, including the Cinnamon Tree, Big Al's Gashouse, The Fireside Room and ultimately the In Room in Belmont. The six-week stint at The In Room, on about the 800 block of Old County Road, made the Warlocks as a working band. They started to become regulars at Ken Kesey's events, and by the end of the year they were the Grateful Dead.

I have always been intrigued, however, by the fact that the Warlocks narrative has an empty space between the band getting rejected at Frenchy's in June and starting to find a little success on El Camino Real as the Summer ended and Fall began. While it's clear that the Warlocks were rehearsing during that time, no evidence had ever surfaced about any performances during this period. Recently, however, I had the pleasure to meet one of the very first Warlocks fans, and posed to the question to her as to where the Warlocks might have played during the Summer of 1965, and I received a logical and quite amazing answer: the Warlocks regularly played at The Top Of The Tangent throughout the Summer, the very same place that they had played in the previous year as Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Band.

The Internet being what it is, I'm not going to identify my eyewitness, although she may choose to identify herself in the Comments. She did not specifically request anonymity, but this is a blog, not a newspaper. Experienced scholars will probably suspect who it is in any case--suffice to say she is a Palo Alto High School graduate, class of 1966, and she saw the Warlocks at Magoo's, Frenchy's and many times thereafter. It turns out that no one had ever posed the question to her as to where the Warlocks had played in the Summer of 1965, so there was nothing secret or special about this information--it was just a question that had never been asked.

Rudy's Restaurant at 117 University Avenue in Palo Alto, as it appeared in June, 2011

The Top Of The Tangent, 117 University Avenue
The Tangent was a deli and pizza parlor at the very end of University Avenue in Downtown Palo Alto, near the train station. It was right on "The Circle," for those readers who know Palo Alto geography, and across the street from the Paris Theater, for those who recall 60s and 70s Palo Alto. The Tangent was at 117 University, two doors down from the building at 135 University that would become The Poppycock in 1967, Downtown Palo Alto's own little rock palace from 1967-71. The Tangent was owned by the Feldman family, and it was a typical local food joint. It also sold beer, a significant point in a city that did not allow bars downtown. Thus places like The Tangent were a little more of a hangout than you might think for the local bohemians, since there were no bars to lounge around in.

McNally reported (p.47) that The Top Of The Tangent was started by two doctors at Stanford hospital, Stu Goldstein and David Schoenstadt, who were looking for something interesting to do. The Top Of The Tangent was, as the name suggested, just a room above the pizza parlor, and it opened in January 1963. The room seated perhaps 75 people. While the Tangent kept regular restaurant hours, the Top Of The Tangent seems to have only been officially open for Wednesday night "hoot night," and on weekend evenings. Weekend admission was $1.50.

Nonetheless, there seems to have been only one other folk club downtown, a coffee shop called St. Michael's Alley (at 436 University, now a Peet's), and plenty of folk musicians to go around, so The Top Of The Tangent thrived in a quiet sort of way. All of the South Bay folk musicians played The Top Of The Tangent, and they booked touring folk musicians as well, although not particularly famous ones. While old Palo Altans used the names "Tangent" and "Top Of The Tangent" interchangeably, strictly speaking musicians performed at the Top Of The Tangent, and The Tangent was the deli/pizza parlor.

Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Band champions was formed by Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir in mid-1964, and it featured numerous members, including Ron McKernan and David Nelson. Jug Bands were very popular around 1964, building on the popularity of The Jim Kweskin Jug Band in particular. Garcia and others had seen the Kweskin band in Berkeley, probably at the Cabale in February of 1964. Some Stanford students recorded Mother McRee's at the Top Of The Tangent in 1964 for Stanford radio station KZSU-fm, and the tape was ultimately released as a cd. Once the jug band fad was over, however, Mother McRee's found themselves at loose ends, and Pigpen made the immortal suggestion that they could become an electric blues band.

According to my correspondent, the Warlocks spent the Summer of 1965 rehearsing. Her job, among others, was to write down the lyrics to songs that the band was learning, mostly Rolling Stones songs. The Warlocks went down and set up their equipment at The Top Of The Tangent and played various times simply to practice playing in public. Most of them had been going down there to play every week or so for some time, and in Jerry's case for years, so really this was no change. Although The Top Of The Tangent was a folk club, there was no specific prohibition against electric music, and in any case in 1965 blues was considered "folk" music so it wasn't really out of place.

The same few people who saw Mother McRee's saw The Warlocks. I don't think the shows were advertised in any way. It's even possible that the shows weren't even authorized, exactly. I have some reason to think that The Top Of The Tangent was always accessible from the pizza parlor itself, even if nothing was going on. Mountain Girl has told the story of going to The Tangent after work in 1963 or so and hearing banjo music from upstairs. Further investigation found a very determined man with dark, curly hair obsessively practicing the banjo.

My source doesn't recall how often The Warlocks played The Top Of The Tangent, but it was several times. The band may have simply invited themselves there on nights when nothing else was scheduled, perhaps on Wednesday hoot nights, and since they were mostly regulars anyway, they attracted no special attention. Thus by the time the Warlocks had an opportunity to perform to a slightly wider audience, the band had already had a series of public rehearsals in a comfortable space that they knew well. The Top Of The Tangent has always been cited as a source for the foundation of the Grateful Dead, but it's amazing to find out that the very same room played a much larger role in the band's founding than I had originally thought.

The Tangent-Aftermath
The Top Of The Tangent was a folk club, and folk clubs were fairly passe by 1966. By the end of 1967, Palo Alto had it's own rock club, The Poppycock, just two doors down from The Tangent. Although The Poppycock wasn't large by rock standards, probably holding somewhere between 300 and 500 patrons, it dwarfed The Top Of The Tangent. Nonetheless, the Tangent itself remained open, and in doing newspaper research I have seen bookings at least as late as 1969. I have a feeling that the upstairs room remained part of the restaurant, and was used occasionally for various folk or theater performances.

Around 1969, The Tangent became home for a weekly local songwriters "collective," started by an engineer named Chris Lunn. The events were basically "open mike" nights, a continuation of the Hoot Night folk tradition. The best of these songwriters played around Bay Area clubs under the name "Palo Alto Folk And Blues Collective." Ultimately Lunn moved to Tacoma, WA, for professional reasons, and continued his weekly songwriting workshops. Eventually it became well known under the name Victory Music, and it appears to be thriving to this day. The longest standing member of the collective was San Jose native Jim Page (no, a different Jim Page) whom some Deadheads may recognize for a song about "Going Down To Eugene" to see the Grateful Dead.

The door to the upstairs office of MindTribe, at 119 University Avenue in Palo Alto, likely in the same space as The Top Of The Tangent

117 and 119 University Avenue Today
I think The Tangent, or The Top Of The Tangent, anyway, changed it's name to The Trip Room in 1970 or '71. However, there was a large fire that burned down The Poppycock building in 1972 (which by this time was a jazz club called In Your Ear), and I have to think the Tangent building was damaged too. Thus the current building must not be the same as it was back then. Downstairs, at 117 University is a restaurant called Rudy's, which has a reputation as one of Palo Alto's last "regular" joints where you can get a burger and a beer instead of the more typical exotica (e.g. Croatian-Italian-Asian Fusion) that Palo Alto is now famous for.

There is a different entrance to the stairs to the second floor of Rudy's, and the door is marked 119 University. I have to think that the area of the offices of 119 University are roughly the same as The Top Of The Tangent, where The Warlocks were born and took some of their earliest steps. Earlier this year, the sign on the door shows it to be the offices of a company called MindTribe. MindTribe is a technology consultancy whose mission is "to develop successful products that expand the realm of human possibility."

If I'm correct, Mindtribe is not the first organization at the site whose mission was to expand the realm of human possibility. Right on cue, a look at their website tells us that just recently (August 25), Mindtribe moved to San Francisco (near Market & Third), so perhaps the aura of that corner of University Avenue at The Circle retains some surprisingly powerful Mojo.

North To San Francisco: The Warlocks in The South Bay, 1965

View Warlocks-Grateful Dead: South Bay 1965 in a larger map

The Warlocks formed out of the remnants of Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Band in Palo Alto, and played their first gigs in Menlo Park on May 5 of that year. By December of 1965, they had changed their name to the Grateful Dead and played the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco. Any band that forms in the suburbs has plans to make it big in "The City," but The Warlocks actually pulled it off. This post views the early Warlocks gigs as a geographical procession towards San Francisco. I have made a few concessions (which I will acknowledge) to illustrate my point, but it is a fair analysis to say that the stakes get bigger for bands as they get nearer the center of the action, and The Dead met the challenge.

Very little information survives about the Warlock's earliest gigs. Dennis McNally and Blair Jackson have done the best work in ferreting out memories of their earliest days, but actual details--dates, setlists, and so forth--are hard to come by. Some of the venues that The Warlocks played at are known, however, and some sense of the Warlocks development can be discerned from considering the standing of these forgotten outposts. For those not intimately familiar with South Bay geography, I have included a Google Map (above) marking the Dead's progress up The Peninsula. The map itself shows a steady Northward progression from Palo Alto, then a sleepy college town, to increasingly busy clubs near San Francisco International Airport, and finally to San Francisco itself, a geographic actualization of the Dead's musical and cultural transformation as they moved from Palo Alto to The City.

This post represents the best distillation of the limited information available to me at the time. Anyone with additonal facts, insights, corrections or recovered memories (real or imagined) please include them in the comments or email me.

The Top Of The Tangent, 117 University Avenue, Palo Alto

Downtown Palo Alto in 1965, where The Warlocks formed, had become a tiny bohemian outpost because it was kind of empty. The nearby Stanford Shopping Center had sucked the life out of downtown,  so housing was cheap and businesses few. As folkies, some members of The Warlocks had played a few of the coffee houses, but the main port of call for Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Band Champions was The Top Of The Tangent, at 117 University. The Tangent was a pizza parlor, and The Top Of The Tangent was a coffee shop on the top floor where folk musicians played and hung out. Mother McCree's debuted there in about June 1964, and most of their gigs were probably there.

Peninsula YMCA, 240 El Camino Real, Redwood City (January 16, 1965)

The Jug Band definitely played a few other places, such as The Off Stage in San Jose, but one of their last gigs was at a  "Hootenanny" at the Peninsula YMCA in Redwood City, on January 16, 1965 (there is a chance they played one final gig a few weeks later at College Of San Mateo). Redwood City was a few miles up the road on El Camino Real, the main "Strip" of the South Bay Peninsula.

El Camino Real (literally "The King's Road") was an extension of Mission Boulevard in San Francisco, and it went through the center of every town from South San Francisco to Santa Clara (originally a trail connecting Mission San Francisco to Mission Santa Clara). As a result, the El Camino Real was the main commercial strip for every town along the way. By day, stores on El Camino sold washing machines, automobiles or insurance; by night people went to movies, restaurants, bars and nightclubs there. Each town on the Peninsula had its differences from the others, but all of them looked somewhat similar from the vantage point of El Camino Real.

Magoo's Pizza, 635 Santa Cruz Avenue, Menlo Park (May 5, 12, 19 & 26, 1965)

The Warlocks formed in early 1965 because Mother McRee's had run out of gigs--Jug Bands seemed to be "over" in the South Bay, but electric blues and R&B, like The Rolling Stones played, was starting to come to life. The very first gig the Warlocks played was on May 5, 1965 at Magoo's pizza parlor in Menlo Park, at 635 Santa Cruz Avenue, just off the El Camino. The Warlocks played every Wednesday night in May at Magoo's. Most of the audience were High School students from nearby Menlo-Atherton High, or junior college students from equally near Menlo College. Santa Cruz Avenue was near Kepler's Books, a local bohemian hangout, and just a long walk from downtown Palo Alto, but a bunch of local High School and College kids were a lot more than had seen the Jug Band.

Frenchy's, 29027 Mission Boulevard, Hayward (June 18, 1965)

The Warlocks replaced their bass player, Dana Morgan Jr, with Phil Lesh, and played a gig on June 18 at Frenchy's, in Hayward. I have discussed this previously. This gig did not go well, and they were terminated after a day. The Warlocks seemed to have retreated to rehearse and lick their wounds. Since Dana Morgan Jr's father owned the music store that they borrowed equipment from, Garcia and Weir got jobs instead at Guitars Unlimited in Menlo Park, also on El Camino Real.

[This one known deviation from the Warlocks march up El Camino Real has been left off my map, because it made the map hard to read. I don't think this is a major point (crypto-Hegelians should email me for a detailed exposition on Hayward as Antithesis), but I wanted to acknowledge that I am aware I left something off]

Cinnamon Tree, 900 American Way, San Carlos (August 1965)

In August, The Warlocks renewed their assault on the world, this time with more success, although it may not have seemed that way at the time.They had a booking agent, Al King, who booked numerous acts into El Camino Real clubs, so even though the band was low on the totem pole, at least they had started to climb it.

The Cinnamon Tree opened in July 1965 as a "teen" club, with no liquor served (though no doubt plenty was consumed). The idea was to give teenagers something to do, particularly on weekends. The club was located on an industrial road between El Camino and the Bayshore Freeway. Since it featured teen audiences, one of the popular bills was a "Battle Of The Bands" were numerous groups played a song or two, hoping to win a cash prize (thus insuring that each band's friends came to the show). The Illustrated Trip places Warlocks gig(s) at The Cinnamon Tree in August.

Blair Jackson (in his fine 1999 book Garcia: An American Life) quotes Mike Shapiro, lead guitarist for a South Bay band called William Penn And His Pals, who says "we used to Battle Of The Bands with [The Warlocks] at The Cinnamon Tree...we actually lost to them and I thought they were the sh*ts"(p.70). Its not clear from Shapiro's context if they played one or several Battles with The Warlocks, but its clear they played. While "Battle Of The Bands" judging was notoriously suspect, for The Warlocks to win, it must have meant that rowdy, raggedy blues had some incipient following on the Peninsula.

Big Al's Gashouse, 4301 El Camino Real, San Mateo (August 1965)
Big Al's Gashouse was a pizza-and-beer joint, affiliated with similarly named places in North Beach and around the Bay Area (there really was a "Big Al"). Big Al's was another pizza place, like The Tangent or Magoo's, but at least it was connected to the City, if not really part of it. The exact date of the Warlocks gig (or gigs) is unknown, but McNally and Jackson (in The Illustrated Trip) place it in August.

Big Al's Gashouse burned down in January 1966. It was eventually replaced by a suburban hipster bar called The Trip, which opened in November 1966, but by that time the Warlocks were very far past that road.

There was also a Big Al's Gashouse in Palo Alto, at 4335 El Camino Real (next to the bowling alley). I know that live bands performed there, but it was a pizza and beer joint, not a topless place. It closed around 1968. I'm not sure which Big Al's The Warlocks may have played in--possibly both of them.

Fireside Lounge, 2322 El Camino Real, San Mateo (August 1965)

The Fireside Lounge was run more on the Las Vegas model, if without the gambling. There was dinner and drinks to go with the dancing, sometimes a floor show, or topless dancers late at night. The object for a band was to keep people dancing so that they would buy drinks. I have written about the Fireside Lounge elsewhere, albeit with respect to another band.

According to McNally and Jackson in The Illustrated Trip, The Warlocks played one or a few gigs at The Fireside Lounge in August of 1965. It was probably a sort of "audition" gig, but the band didn't return there, to my knowledge.

The In Room, El Camino Real, Belmont (mid-September to late October 1965)

The In Room was a popular nightclub in Belmont, although I have not yet been able to identify the exact location (on the map, I located it El Camino Real and Ralston Avenue, a principal intersection the business strip, and The In Room was certainly near there). McNally describes it as

a heavy hitting divorcee's pick-up joint, the sort of swinging bar where real-estate salesmen chased stewardesses and single women got plenty of free drinks. Dark, with red and black as the color scheme, it was the kind of place that sold almost nothing but hard liquor (p.88)

The Warlocks were booked at the In Room for six weeks, from mid-September until late October of 1965. They played five 50-minute sets a night, five nights a week. 150 sets later, The Warlocks were a real band. The first week they had backed The Coasters for a set each night, but for the balance of the run they covered the gig themselves. They would start out playing almost straight-up, but as they got higher and the night got looser, their playing got more "barbaric." Oddly enough, they started to build their own audience of nascent freaks, who would show up for the later sets, distinctly different than the hard-drinking pick up crowd. One night, for example, a band of Tacoma transplants called The Frantics ended up hanging out there, which is how Moby Grape guitarist Jerry Miller and Jerry Garcia first met.

The In Room was in Belmont, half way between Palo Alto and San Francisco. The Warlocks had played a little further up the El Camino (The Fireside and Big Al's), but the In Room stood for a mid-point. The Warlocks were a real band making real money (if not a lot), but they were still doing their own thing and finding their own audience, so they were half way there.

An ad for the In-Room at The Chalet, a hotel at 635 Old County Road in Belmont. This ad was from the Friday, February 12, 1966 edition of the San Mateo Times

Update: Fellow scholar Dave Sorochty tracked down a contemporary ad for The In-Room, in the San Mateo Times (from February 12, 1966). The hotel was called The Chalet (see the picture above), and the lounge was called the In-Room. The actual address was 635 Old County Road. Note in the ad that the host is Rich Romanello; about a year later, Romanello was running a nearby club called Winchester Cathedral, and he promoted the initial incarnation of the groundbreaking Sly And The Family Stone. 

[There is some general talk that The Warlocks played some High School dances in the South Bay in Fall 1965. It is possible, but its important to remember that in the 60s and 70s everybody in the South Bay had a Grateful Dead/Jerry Garcia story, and most of them were wishful thinking. Every High School had a story about how the Dead played there back in the day, or Jerry Garcia went there, and they can't all of been true. Supposedly the Warlocks played Palo Alto High School on September 19, 1965, but it has been impossible to confirm this]

Pierre's, Broadway at Columbus, San Francisco (early November 1965)

At some point, The Warlocks made Phil Lesh's former roommate, Hank Harrison, into their manager. Harrison did very little for the group in his brief tenure. One gig he did get them was playing at a topless joint on North Beach called Pierre's. Pierre's, on the corner of Broadway in Columbus, the same corner as City Lights Bookstore, had been a popular Latin Jazz nightspot in the early 1960s. As topless joints took over Broadway, Pierre's went topless as well, but the club was fading.

Topless dancing in the 1960s was considerably tamer than strip clubs today. The Warlocks had at least intermittently backed topless dancers at The In Room. Club owners didn't care what weirdness a band played as long as they kept the beat going, so topless clubs were a chance for fledgling bands to work on  their chops.

The Warlocks played a brief and unsuccessful stint at Pierre's in early November of 1965. A friend of the band wandered in (I believe it was Peter Albin) and found them playing to a nearly empty house. The Warlocks had made it to San Francisco, but they were in a club that was past its prime, where music wasn't even the main attraction.

The gig wasn't a complete bust, however. While in San Francisco, they made a demo on November 3, 1965, for Autumn Records, San Francisco's leading independent label. At this time, the band was worried that there were other bands called The Warlocks, and was experimenting with different names, and the demo is colloquially known by the name The Emergency Crew. The material was eventually released on Birth Of The Dead in 2003.

Parallel to the commercial fortunes of The Warlocks, the band had been hanging out with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. In their new incarnation as The Grateful Dead, they had begun playing Acid Tests with the Pranksters (remember, LSD was legal until October 6, 1966). The band was unbilled, since The Acid Tests themselves were only cryptically advertised. I have not dwelt on the underground side of the story, since it has been so well covered by Tom Wolfe and others. During this period, however, after some band members attended a private event in Soquel (at Ken Babbs's spread), the band played an Acid Test at a house in San Jose on December 4 (near downtown).

Fillmore Auditorium, 1805 Geary Boulevard, San Francisco (December 10, 1965)

By early December, The Warlocks were officially The Grateful Dead, although they were still known as The Warlocks. On December 10, 1965, they played the second Mime Troupe Benefit, which was the second Bill Graham production and the first Bill Graham event at the Fillmore. On the bill were two of the leading San Francisco "underground" bands, The Jefferson Airplane and The Great Society (with Grace Slick). The Warlocks presence was acknowledged by Chronicle columnist Ralph Gleason and by night's end the Grateful Dead were part of that scene for good.

The Grateful Dead's first appearance on a poster was at the January 14, 1966 Fillmore show. The fact that Bill Graham made sure the poster said "Grateful Dead-formerly The Warlocks" suggests that the Warlocks had enough of a following that it was worth mentioning. This suggests there were many more Warlocks gigs than we currently know about. At this point, however, we only have this telling but fragmentary smattering of performances, leading The Warlocks up El Camino Real in their journey to San Francisco and transforming themselves into The Grateful Dead.

The Big Beat, 998 San Antonio Road, Palo Alto (December 18, 1965)

The Grateful Dead had played San Francisco, and after an acid test in the wilds of Western Marin (Muir Beach Dec 11, 1965), in a symbolic moment they returned to Palo Alto for an Acid Test. The Big Beat was Palo Alto's first rock club, but Prankster Page Browning rented it the Saturday night before it opened. Although The Big Beat was in South Palo Alto, far from the bohemian downtown, it was ironic that Palo Alto got its first rock club just as Palo Alto's most famous rock export had graduated.

After playing at The Big Beat Acid Test, the band was now playing in a different league, briefly journeying to Los Angeles with Owsley in February of 1966, but returning to San Francisco, not Palo Alto, and ultimately to Marin. They did play nearby Stanford University numerous times over the years, as part of regular rock band touring, but the scruffy Warlocks had made the journey up El Camino Real and become something different in the process. The Grateful Dead only played Palo Alto itself one more time, at the free Palo Alto Be-In on June 24, 1967, and only the tiniest traces remain of their peculiar 1965 oddysey up The King's Road.

June 18, 1965, Frenchy's, Hayward, CA: Lords Of London

The first gig of The Warlocks was May 5, 1965 at Magoo's Pizza in Menlo Park. They played every subsequent Wednesday in May. It rapidly became clear to other band members that bassist Dana Morgan, Jr had to go, and Jerry Garcia invited his friend Phil Lesh to join as bassist. Lesh saw the band at Magoo's (probably May 26), and he was in. Never mind that Lesh didn't play bass--Garcia showed him the notes, and Lesh figured out the rest.

The first gig of The Warlocks with Phil Lesh--the original Grateful Dead quintet of Garcia, Lesh, Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann and Ron "Pigpen" McKernan--was at a Hayward club called Frenchy's. Frenchy's (at 29027 Mission Blvd in Hayward) was an oddity, the hippest club in an unhip area, which I have written about elsewhere. According to legend (Dennis McNally and Phil Lesh tell the same story), the fledgling Warlocks were hired for a three-day engagement at Frenchy's, and after a night of weird, stiff rhythm and blues they came back the next evening to discover they had been replaced by an accordion-and-clarinet duo (McNally, p.84). The Warlocks retreated to rehearse and lick their wounds, and began their assault on the Peninsula and the World in August, 1965.

I had hoped that I would find some trace evidence in the local papers of The Warlocks gig, but so far I have found none. This ad is from the June 18, 1965 edition of The Hayward Daily Review, the main local paper, in which Frenchy's had a prominent ad every week. As you can see, the featured act is a group called Lords Of London. Given that Frenchy's was the sort of venue that was open early and late, my guess is that The Warlocks and the "accordion-and-clarinet duo" were in effect opening acts. As a practical matter, they may have alternated sets or something with the headliner, but an unknown band from Palo Alto probably did not ad any value to the marquee, and in any case may have been added too late to promote.

I do not know who the Lords Of London might have been. There was a somewhat popular Canadian band called Lords Of London, who had a 1967 Canadian hit "Cornflakes And Ice Cream." Based on the biography, however, the band broke up before they could tour California. The members later morphed into Nucleus and then A Foot In Coldwater, who had a few Canadian hits in the early 1970s. The group would still have been in High School in Ontario in 1965, and a stealth tour would seem out of the question.

Update December 2023: A Commentator took some present-day photos of 29027 Mission Boulevard. The old Frenchy's site is being prepared for demolition. These are photos of the exterior, the stage and the interior (probably looking from the stage). I assume the site has been changed over the decades, but the scale is still likely the same.

29027 Mission Blvd, Hayward, December 2023 (former site of Frenchy's)

29027 Mission Blvd, Hayward, December 2023 (what remains of the stage)

29027 Mission Blvd, Hayward, December 2023 (interior, probably from the stage)