Magic at the Edge of the Western World

Ron Polte on the Demise of the Carousel

Bottom line:

A bunch of hippies, a bunch of good people, got together and refused to run a business. And, I'm sorry, you've got to live in that world if you're gonna run a business.

On Rakow, in particular:

What Ron Rakow did to those people, he chained them to a machine that couldn't make money. It wasn't free. And the energy of all those good people in that building wasn't going anywhere, It was being trapped. Because he chained them to a financial problem, which was $9,000 a month rent, plus 20%. They couldn't have made it in 25 million years, man.

And then when he was going down, and he was $66,000 in the hole and they were in danger of losing it, they ran to the community and said, "Let's get the community together, together we can save it." It was a bummer to lay on the community.

In front, had Ron Rakow been honest with himself about business, he would have said, "$9,000 a month is too fucking high. And if we can't get this dance hall for $5,000, let's not take it. But instead, he took it. So it just went down the tubes.

On Graham taking over:

The only reason that Bill Graham got that dance hall was because they gave it to him. He would not have taken that dance hall. Ask Ralph Gleason, Ron Rakow, Bill Thompson, Rock Scully ... They said, "If we can't score it by Wednesday, if we can't make any deal with the owner to come up with the eight grand or a new ballroom manager, and a new organization, then you're free to go do whatever you want on Thursday. And that's what he did.

Ideas for the future:

Let's get together, do a benefit or a festival, and rent two places like the Matrix for a year, one at the south end and one at the north end of the city. And hire a couple of people to manage those 2 or 3 hundred capacity rooms, and put the young bands in there. … We should do that. Right now, there's a lot of wounds to heal and everybody is tired after the Carousel, so it's gonna take a little while. But it should come to pass.

The festival idea would manifest as the ill-fated Wild West Festival. At the same time, the Matrix really did take up some of the slack left by the Carousel (the  Tuesday Night Jam morphed into the Monday Night Jam), and the Family Dog had the south end of town covered, albeit in a bigger room with the problems of rent and overhead and all that Polte identified as problematic for the prospective hip community musical operations. Indeed, Chet Helms never could make the Dog work, and he was out in less than a year.

REFERENCE:

Darlington, Sandy. 1968. Ron Polte: A Good Word for Bill Graham. San Francisco Express Times, July 31, 1968, p. 13.

The Common: September 5-6-7 ish, 1969

Berkeley Tribe, August 8-14, 1969, p. 3.

Regular readers will know that I have been chasing the idea of "Jerry and the Jeffersons" in my head for a good long while. It narrates the arc of Garcia's life as a process of gradual privatization. I started it years ago, have picked it up and put it down repeatedly, have kept adding to it, etc. It is stewing in my brain.

Annie's photo at the center of p. 3 of the August 8, 1969 Berkeley Tribe shows Jerry Garcia dressed as Bluto, standing and talking at a meeting of The Common, in the Family Dog On The Great Highway on the afternoon of Saturday, August 2, 1969. (This copy is a scan from my old photocopy, with all of my marginalia and stuff. Within a few years, this page will become accessible via the Independent Voices collection.)

I have a lot to say about this moment in time. I have a lot to say about The Common, though it's already very nicely trated in Michael Kramer's Republic of Rock. Kramer scooped me in using the Bluto photo - I had been holding back on it for the book, but he beat me to it. It's a great image, and he has good taste!

The idea of being scooped is a weird one that I don't want to get into. Needless to say, there are some really good bits that I am holding back for the book, some really great stuff. On the other hand, I am swimming in data, more stuff is coming out every day, and odds of really losing anything are pretty small.

Correspondingly, I wanted to drop this little nugget on you.

Good Times, September 4, 1969, p. 19.

The great Good Times entertainment listings for Friday, September 5, 1969 in the prior day's issue list at Family Dog "Malachi, Rubber Duck (mime) and a jam with members of 3 groups we're not allowed to name. Lights by Temporary."

Verrryyyy innnnterresssssssting.

First, note Rubber Duck, which is the psychedlic mime-and-minstrelsy thing around Joe McCord (see here), sometimes involving TC and Garcia.

Second, more importantly, "a jam with members of 3 groups we're not allowed to name". I don't know why, exactly, they couldn't name the bands, nor at whose request. But I wonder where Mr. Garcia was, this Friday night?

Third, the reason we ask this is that it sheds light on the tapes made by Owsley Stanley ("Bear"), dated September 6, 1969, featuring the Jefferson Airplane at the Family Dog with Garcia, Mickey Hart, and others sitting in, and Sunday, September 7th, featuring Jorma and Joey Covington, Garcia possibly playing some drums (see Dick Latvala's cassette copy jcard below), and the lot of them playing a weird little set of drunken surf music at the Edge of the Western World.

Latvala!

Naturally, Corry is on the case.  I can't really try to parse the specific dates of the specific materials, but I do think that the Good Times listing sheds new light on this event, especially in terms of my "Jerry and the Jeffersons" frame.

The guy who wrote the book which is to Airplane stuff as my listening notes are to Garcia stuff says that the jam on 9/6/69 is the "longest time of an Airplane improvisation, jam or song ever!" (Fenton 2007, 158). The Jeffersons played their asses off this night. Though the sonic journal bears some imperfections (sorry, couldn't resist), it has been featured as some sort of quasi-official release.

The Family Dog Presents the Jefferson Airplane at the Family Dog Ballroom, Featuring Special Guest Jerry Garcia (Charly SNAP 293 CD, 2007SNAP 293 CD, 2007)

Furthermore, the Jeffersons had never really been very close to Chet Helms, by appearances. I have generated some data (not ready for prime time) suggesting that these parties crossed professionally less than they should have, given the contexts in which they moved (compare JA to GD in this respect). The Jeffersons were more Bill Grahamers from the beginning, and the Dead were more Chet Helmsers. So the fact that the Airplane would play an unadvertised gig for Chet in September 1969 is noteworthy (LIA). This and the 2/4/70 "Night At The Family Dog" filmed session (see) are really the only two instances I can find of the Jeffersons doing something for Chester.

My big takeaway, though, is what this tells us about The Common, a very fragile little bloom that burst out momentarily and then faced the fate that things that live must.

REFERENCES:
Arnold, Corry. 2010. September 6-7, 1969 Family Dog At The Great Highway, San Francisco Jefferson Airplane/Grateful Dead. Lost Live Dead, January 30, 2010, URL http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2010/01/september-6-7-1969-family-dog-at-great.html, last accessed 1/19/2012.
Fenton, Craig. 2007. Take Me To A Circus Tent: The Jefferson Airplane Flight Manual. West Conshohocken, PA: Infinity Publishing.
Johnson, Art. 1969a. Out on the Edge. Berkeley Tribe, August 8-14, 1969, pp. 3-4.

Where Was the Grateful Dead on Sunday, August 24, 1969?

Here are the listings from the great San Francisco Express Times, vol. 2 no. 32 (August 21, 1969), p. unk. There's lots of interest here, of course. But I have circled the item that interests me most greatly. It's under the listings for Sunday, August 24, 1969, and reads as follows:

Hippy Hill: Trans-Cultural Rip-Offs, Inc. presents Steve Gaskin & the Grateful Dead in concert with Shiva Fellowship. Bring dope (the sacrament) and good vibes. noon. free.

"Hippy Hill", a.k.a. Hippie Hill, is apparently at the far eastern edge of Golden Gate Park, close to the entry from the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. It seems like a perfectly good place to go share a sacrament and a free show by the Dead.

The Grateful Dead List traditionally shows the GD at Paradise Valley Resort, Squamish, BC, at the Vancouver Pop Festival [dead.net | deadlists]. There is a handbill, but I have never seen any eyewitness or other accounts of the GD's performance. This listing makes much sense given the band's presence in the Northwest (Bullfrog Festival in Oregon on 8/23/69).

That said, I find the listing in the Express Times to have a lot of verisimilitude. I have been reading a lot of stuff from ca. August 1969 around The Common and the Wild West Festival. The Dead doing a free gig in the Park makes sense in the context of all the shit that was going down, about which I will be writing, soon.

Thoughts?

NRPS: Bear's Lair, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, August 1, 1969

update: LIA has posted text from the various goings-on at the Family Dog On The Great Highway this night.

Corry at Lost Live Dead has just posted a GD/JG performance list from July-August 1969.

I don't have much to add, but since he mentions the New Riders of the Purple Sage gig(s) from August 1, 1969 at the Bear's Lair, UC Berkeley, I thought I'd post some scans that I have.

I especially like the one above ... "Jerry Garcia with Marmaduke", but the picture shows Jerry and Mickey Hart.

 

A few notes from all of this.

1) there seem to have been two shows, at 8:30 and 10:30

2) Mickey Hart was on drums (no surprise there), but as Corry notes we don't know who played bass. I'd have to guess Phil, but it's just a guess. update: Bob Matthews, I guess!

3) they appear not yet to be called the New Riders of the Purple Sage, though that's how I'll refer to this. As Corry notes, Ralph Gleason's "Ad Lib" column from August 6th first publicized that name.