Watching

1990 – 1992

This is the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park 1895.  The Museum still looked a lot like this when I first visited there in 1960.

1990-1992    

Michel Bastian and I did a lot of gigs together in Big Brother and also in The Sam Andrew Band.

24 May 1990   Chi Chi Club   San Francisco

Elise Wainani Piliwale.

25 May 1990       River Theatre      Guerneville  California

James Gurley always called me mon jumeau malveillant, or, when he spoke English, my evil twin.   When he broke out into German, I became der Übelzwilling.

James very modestly called himself Saint James.

In the 1960s, he called himself The Archfiend of the Universe, a much more interesting appellation, not necessarily more accurate, just more interesting.

26-27 May 1990      Caspar Inn      Caspar     California

Photo:   Polly Belinda Rendall

28 May 1990   Live Wire  Grass Valley  California

Tara Coyote-Finch

Peter Albin

14 February 1991    Sam Andrew Band    Paramount Theatre    Seattle   This is a beautiful old theatre.

Our guitar player on this gig was Mick Taylor, and he did a great job. Veronica Vitti came and sang beautifully.

The always inventive Rob Moitoza played bass and Chris Leighton was on drums.

When Chris plays, I always feel like a Klieg light went on somewhere. It’s like, “OK, we’re in the big time now.”

23 March 1991

23 April 1991   I-Beam   San Francisco

21 May 1991

Once when we were playing Piece of My Heart (Pizza My Heart?) in Lake Arrowhead, California, Eric Burdon came in, sat in the front row and ordered a pizza to be delivered. Here he is talking to an old friend of mine.

1 June 1991              The Cannery              San Francisco

20 July 1991                  I-Beam                  San Francisco

2 August 1991    Anna Bananas   Honolulu

Elise’s aunt Shirley Piliwale’s stage name was Varoa Tiki.  She was a very good singer and she played every instrument.

Silver Piliwale is Elise’s grandfather. Many places in Hawaii are named Piliwale after him.

The Queen of the Nile

27 September 1991           The Queens of Denial            Seattle

24 October 1991      Rock and Roll Hall of Fame   Cleveland    Ohio

Nothing like misspelling a performer’s name on a poster.  It does make it extra collectible, I suppose.

Dusty Springfield and Ronnie Spector

How many Cokes have you drunk in your life?  Can you imagine anything worse for you? Loaded with sugar and other harmful ingredients. Empty calories.

25 October 1991

Todd Bolton.

7 November 1991    I-Beam    San Francisco

In Tacoma with Chad Quist who did some beautiful playing with us.

Especially on the Hold Me CD.

Cheryl Little Deer made this business card.

Elise Piliwale with Sheba.

13 April 1992   Sam Andrew Band     White Rabbit    Austin

16 April 1992

23 April 1992

12 May 1992

9 October 1992     One Family Festival    Golden Gate Park   San Francisco

28 November 1992         An invitation.

4 December 1992          Linda, an old friend of ours, introduced us to her husband at this event.

So, to celebrate the occasion, I threw a party at The Troubadour.

Adolfito de la Parra was the drummer.

Larry Taylor played bass.

Mark Riley played guitar.    And just to show you that he’s not always that serious, he also plays with hairstyles.

Our old road manager John Byrne Cooke came back for this one, and he made everything run smoothly.

Lotus Mahon was with me this weekend which made everything extra special.

Linda and David LaFlamme came to the party.

Lester Chambers was there with his brothers.

Deborah Morrison sang back up with us.

Robby Krieger played.

Carl Gottlieb was there…

… and Howard Hessman.

And a cast of thousands.

Willie Chambers.

Darby Slick was there. Hey, he wrote a book and a song.  Well, many songs actually.

Peter Albin playing my guitar.    John Byrne Cooke took this photograph.

31 December 1992   Pescadero   California    This was a fun gig. We had Peter Albin on bass and Spencer Dryden on drums.

Rich Kirch played guitar.

Peter Albin and James St. Pell.

with Kathi McDonald.    Can a blue man sing the whites ?

Some people have made a career out of playing nothing but the pentatonic scale.

Alton Kelley, square deal, always real.

Thank you and I’ll see you next week.

____________________________________________________________

 1972-1989             

I only have eyes for you.

Big Brother crashed in 1972 or 1973. I was the only original member in it for a long time, and finally Kathi McDonald and I decided that it was time for a break.

Some of the grim events of the late sixties began to be repeated in a minor key in the seventies. In 1968, there were those horrible assassinations. In the 1970s, Lynette Squeaky Fromme (Manson family) and Sara Jane Moore (SLA)  make an attempt on Gerald Ford. Instead of Viet Nam, there’s the failed Mayaguez rescue operation. In place of the Moratorium to End the War, we had Chevy Chase on Weekend Update.

My girlfriend Carol Cavallon decided to move back to the East Coast and attend Windham College in Putney, Vermont.

I went with her and we lived in a little cabin in Grafton, near where this schoolhouse stands.

Later, we moved to Manhattan, first on the Upper East Side with her parents who were wonderful people.

Later, Carol and I moved to 278 West 11th Street between West 4th and Bleecker Streets. I lived in that apartment longer than I have lived anywhere else in my life.

The loudest sound I heard all day long was children playing in the gardens out in back, which was good because the time had come for serious study.

I went to the New School for Social Research over on Twelfth Street. I had always read music, but I mainly played by ear and wrote music intuitively. Now I wanted to study composition formally.

Frank Wigglesworth, winner of the Prix de Rome, taught me counterpoint, the art of putting two or more independent melodies together so that you can hear them all at the same time.

James Gurley and I had often played two different melodies over the same harmonic background but we had done this by trial and error, of course, notably on Summertime and Hall of the Mountain King, but generally throughout our playing. I now began a classical study of this technique.

The top line is the fixed song, the cantus firmus, the original melody, and then you learn how to put a second melody with the first, one note against one note.

Then, you move on to two notes against one…   (I see a “mistake” here, but let it pass.)

Then you learn to put four notes against one and so on until you arrive at a fugue with complex rhythms and four or five voices.

I used two classic works to learn counterpoint:  One was Fux’ 1725 treatment Gradus ad Parnassum. (In 1994, Big Brother were to go to Moscow to play an event called Steps To Parnassus, a translation of this title.) Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and many other composers used Fux’ book in their contrapuntal practice.

The second book I profited from in the study of counterpoint was by Knud Jeppesen who interpreted Fux and put him in a historical context. Just looking at this book takes me back to that intense time of study. I wrote hundreds of exercises in this discipline.

This was a lot of fun and very educational. Something like three dimensional chess perhaps. Or four dimensional, because time, rhythm, is also an essential part of this technique.

The rules for counterpoint are like the rules for perspective in art. They can be a principal or an ancillary study. Some artists, some composers, will make counterpoint and perspective their main focus.

Two of these counterpoint/perspective masters come to mind: J.S. Bach and M.C. Escher.

In 1975, I met Laura Gomez and my motto that year became “Alive in ’75.”

Laura and her daughter.

I was writing a lot of music at this point, inventions, fugues, string quartets, a symphony that I heard performed exactly once. (Too bad it wasn’t in the Royal Albert Hall where I could have at least heard it twice.)

Sometimes I wrote cereal music, sometimes it was serial music and sometimes it was traditional music. Snap, crackle, pop.

I knew a lot of characters in New York. Ronny Sunshine was one of them. Here he is photo bombing the Pope.

4 February 1974    Café Wha ?   Ronny put me on the same bill with Richie and Yoko.

David Amram, serious composer, showed up at the Wha? and played flute with me on this gig.

Recording at Atlantic.

4 July 1976     The tall ships came sailing into the Hudson and I was there on a pier mere blocks from my apartment enjoying the spectacle along with thousands of other people. This was such a great moment.

25 July 1977      There was a blackout in New York City.  I walked the streets enjoying the silence. I could actually hear conversations four or five floors above me. It made me feel as if I were living a hundred years earlier. There was a camaraderie during this emergency, despite all the alarmist stories one hears.  You don’t realize how noisy modern life is until the electricity goes out for some reason.

1 October 1978   Tribal Stomp    Greek Theatre     Berkeley

Judy Davis and Patrisha Vestey worked hard on this event.

Look at that phone. You did something called “dialing” with it.  Patrisha Vestey.

The Tribal Stomp was a big deal. I had been living in New York for ten years. Now I was coming home.

Big Brother and the Holding Company would start playing again.

We could work with Kathi McDonald and continue some of the good ideas we began after Janis left.

So, imagine my surprise when everyone said good bye and so long after the gig.  They were all going back to their private lives.

James was going back to the desert.   Peter was going back to his model shop.

There was no interest in doing Big Brother again.

I had finished my New York life and left my apartment on the East Coast. Now what to do ?

I had to learn how to paint, sculpt, play the saxophone and do a variety of other activities to keep busy for the next eight years.

19 April 1980           Snooky Flowers and I formed a band with a gay man Joey Amoroso who called himself Pearl.

Pearl had more than a little in common with Louis XIV.

19 April 1980       Pearl Heart        Oakland Auditorium

Playing with Frank Alsing from the Pearl band.

Pearl was very flamboyant. He sang Janis’ songs in the same key that Janis did, something that very few of the Big Brother singers have done since. Pearl was a natural contralto.

1980    We played the Gay Day Parade at the Civic Center.

I played clarinet in one of the gay day parades up in Seattle, but this one in San Francisco was a whole other thing.  We played on a stage right in front of City Hall to thousands of people.

July 1980    I also performed with a band called Little Bumps Garden at The Haight Street Fair.         Jym Fahey    Lenny Kobiela

I miss New York.

November 1981         Bringing home the pumpkin.

I begin to sculpt some very large heads.

I was practicing the saxophone wherever I could. You have to play saxophone loud to learn it. With almost every other instrument there are ways to play quietly. With an electric guitar you can simply leave it unplugged and practice to your heart’s content. Even with a trumpet, you can mute it. Drummers can work with practice pads. Not saxophone. You can stuff a sock in the bell, but that’s about it and it won’t make it much quieter. You simply have to blow into it with passion and dedication for it to work, so saxophonists are notorious for playing in some strange places.

Sonny Rollins practiced on the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s perfect because the traffic seems to filter out the mistakes, and no one is complaining about the noise. It’s a bit like singing in the shower. Only bigger, louder, freer, more spacious.

So, I practiced anywhere I could that wouldn’t bother anyone.

Empty buildings were good.

Lots of space, natural reverb, freedom.

Playing saxophone seriously, scales, arpeggios, memorizing Charlie Parker solos.

This was a long saxophone meditation and it introduced me to some great players.

Players like Joe Henderson, Jack Montrose, Dexter Gordon, James Moody, Mel Martin and Cannonball Adderly who played with technical proficiency and intense emotion.

I loved Cannonball, his technique, his sense of humor, his precision, his soulfulness, everything about him. Still love him.

I started making assemblages and hope to get back to that some day.

I decided to form a group of musicians to play some of these three or four hundred ballads and jump tunes from the 1920s, 30s, 40s that I was memorizing on the saxophone.

I had the opportunity to hire musicians who were a lot better than I was.

I learned that if you get the gig, you can get the musicians and the audience.

The gig comes first and everything else will flow from that.  It took me a long time to learn this. I thought that if you practiced real hard and seriously, then the gigs would come to you. Uh, uh. You get the gig and practice on the gig.

The Sam Andrew Quartet slowly morphed into The Sam Andrew Band and I switched between saxophone and guitar for a while.

We played all over the USA, including many places where Big Brother would later play.

People seemed to like what we were doing.

Snooky Flowers, Peter Walsh, Robin Sylvester, Scott Matthews.

This was a good outfit, maybe the best ever.

Relaxed, swinging, accurate, sympathetic vibrations. Great players.

I was still sculpting, painting and photographing.

.

Not “finding myself,” but creating myself.

Let’s see, how can I get Big Brother and the Holding Company together again?

I know. I’ll build a rehearsal studio.

They’ll get a good laugh out of that.

1986   Then it happened. An agent called and asked if we would like to play again.

The occasion was a special anniversary, the Summer of Love.

The Summer of Love was always a rather suspect phrase.

It smacked of commercialism.

They used to sell Love burgers on Haight Street as attested in this Baron Wolman shot.

I wonder how the cows felt about those Love burgers. Did they feel all that Love ?

Anyway, we decided not to play that Summer of Love gig, but it started us to thinking, Maybe we should get together again.

20 August 1987      Cotati Cabaret     Cotati    California

27 August 1987   New George’s     San Rafael     California

I loved her singing, and her mom’s, and her aunt’s.  In fact, I used to rehearse down the hall from Dionne Warwick in New York.

29 August 1987     Fillmore Auditorium    San Francisco       Our new singer’s name is Michel. That’s the name she likes and that she was born with.

2 September 1987    WOW Hall      Eugene    Oregon

3 Septembeer 1987    Pine Street Theatre     Portland   Oregon        She is Michel Bastian. She has a warm gospel voice right out of Oakland.

4 September 1987     Seattle Center Exhibition Hall    Seattle

5-6 September 1987    Alaska State Fair     Borealis Theatre

9 September 1987     Parker’s    Seattle

12 September 1987   Twentieth Anniversary Summer of Love  Polo Field  Golden Gate Park    San Francisco

24 September 1987     Sweetwater      Mill Valley      California

17 October 1987       The OMNI     Oakland     California

I was once playing saxophone in the Omni with a cordless set up and I wandered off the stage out into the traffic at this intersection, blowing away. That was fun.

20 October 1987  The Church San Francisco

Sam Andrew Band, Texas division. Lips played bass. Gloria Meehan sang backing vocals. Good band.

9 December 1987    Palace of Fine Arts    San Francisco

12 December 1987      Cotati Cabaret      Cotati     California

1988     With my brother Dan in Austin.

19 February 1988       Catalyst       Santa Cruz

21 May 1988      Golden Gate Park       San Francisco

22 July 1988        The Backstage       Seattle

23 July 1988      Pine Street Theatre    Portland    Oregon

7 August 1988      Molson Park    Barrie      Ontario

8 September 1988  Alice’s Champagne Palace   Homer  Alaska

The Kenai Peninsula is a beautiful, beautiful place.

18 November 1988     “Living in Seattle is like being married to a beautiful woman who is sick all the time.”

Herb liked that.

19 January 1989         Port Arthur     Texas

20 January 1989   Rockefeller’s     Houston

27 January 1989   Psychedelic Summer of Love  Universal Amphitheatre  Universal City California   I was trying to chat up Debbie Harry at this gig and a very persistent fan came between us.

The moment was lost.

April 1989    Luther Burbank Center for the Arts    Santa Rosa    California

With Joe Healey

23 April 1989    IBeam    San Francisco

Michael Dolgushkin did that poster.

22 April 1989      Club Lingerie     Hollywood        with Vala Cupp and Michel Bastian

Sam Andrew Band     Washington chapter     KK Ryder    Mark Riley   Todd Zimberg

7 June 1989        Rexville Grange     Washington

Bainbridge Island        Washington

27 July 1989       Great American Music Hall     San Francisco

18-19 August 1989        Wetlands       New York City

26 November 1989       Earthquake Benefit    Kaiser Auditorium    Oakland

Downstairs at The Fez under Time, New York City, with David Peel, Dorothy Rothschild and Lenny Kaye.

The Four Stooges at four in the morning.      New York

Sam Andrew

_______________________________________________________________________

This is the story of Big Brother and the Holding Company.

January to June 1968

Linda McCartney took this photograph when she was Linda Eastman.  Linda and I and quite a few other people became vegetarians at this time, not for our health, as Isaac Bashevis Singer might say, but for the health of the chickens.

Hey, I get to be Kermit the Frog.

5 January 1968   Rainbow Ballroom    Fresno     California

6 January 1968      Sacramento State College       Steve Brown captured this lovely image of Janis.

12 January 1968           Shrine Auditorium      Los Angeles

13 January 1968       Barnes Park Bandshell         Monterey Park          California

16-21 January 1968     Golden Bear Club    Huntington Beach    California

25 January 1968      Fillmore Auditorium     San Francisco

26-27 January 1968  Winterland  San Francisco    John Byrne Cooke, son of Alistair Cooke. John studied Romance Languages at Harvard. He was our estimable road manager and has remained a good friend.

I don’t want to say that John is tall, but here he is hovering over Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, Mimi Fariña and Joan Baez.

John writes western novels, he’s a photographer, he sings Louvin Brothers songs and he introduced us to a whole new world.

John is now writing a book about his days with Janis in Big Brother, the Kozmic Blues Band and Full Tilt.

John took this photograph of Debbie Green and Mimi Fariña.

28 January 1968       Avalon Ballroom     San Francisco

We’re playing Oh, Sweet Mary.

Chet and Lori Helms with Bill Graham.   Bill is doing the talking. Imagine that.

2 February 1968     The Cheetah    Los Angeles

3 February 1968     Earl Warren Showgrounds     Santa Barbara

9 February 1968      Santa Clara County Fairgrounds        Santa Clara      California

10 February 1968       Community Concourse Exhibit Hall  San Diego

16 February 1968  Palestra  Philadelphia

A palestra was originally a wrestling school in Greece (palaistra). In Italian, the word now means gymnasium.

17 February 1968   Anderson Theatre  New York City

This restaurant was right next door to where we played so we spent a lot of time there.

Tastes, feelings, colors, smells, enthusiastic people who were personal, direct and kind, the people we encountered were the opposite of the stereotype of New Yorkers.

Ukrainian easter eggs, Afghan coats, secondhand shops, it was like a giant bazaar.

23-24 February 1968   Psychedelic Supermarket Boston     I walked into a store in Boston, asked for yoghurt and the grocer almost spat at me. Yes, folks, there was a time when yoghurt was seen as exotic, something that only a Democrat would eat.

25 February 1968  Rhode Island School of Design  Providence  Rhode Island

I lived in Paris 1962-1964 and a friend there was feeding yoghurt (yaourt) to his baby. First time I tasted it. Delicious. Tastier then… and there. We often had it with meals in the student cafeteria at the Sorbonne.

1-2 March 1968      The Grande Ballroom    Detroit   Michigan

8 March 1968   Fillmore East opens.   Linda Eastman (McCartney) made this poster.

We were living in the Chelsea Hotel.

Jane Fonda lived in the Chelsea at that time. So did Julie Christie.

Combination of the Two

9 March 1968      Wesleyan University     Middletown   Connecticut

15-17 March 1968   Electric Factory   Philadelphia

22-24 March 1968     The Cheetah       Chicago

2-6 April  The Generation  New York City

7 April 1968  Honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. with Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Guy, Richie Havens, Paul Butterfield. B.B. King inspired us that night with his sacred words and music.

10 April 1968             Anaheim Convention Center

11 April 1968       We play Summertime on ABC-TV Hollywood Palace.

11 April 1968             Fillmore Auditorium with Booker T and the MGs and Iron Butterfly

12-13 April 1968     Winterland    San Francisco

14 April 1968             Carousel Ballroom

19 April 1968                   Selland Arena             Fresno

20 April 1968    University of California     Santa Barbara

24 April 1968            Straight Theatre          San Francisco

26 April 1968      Foothill College      Los Altos      California

27 April 1968     San Bernardino    California

1 May 1968   College Field   Chico State College   Chico  California

2 May 1968                 Carousel Ballroom                San Francisco

1968   3-4 May   The Shrine Expo Center      Los Angeles

3-6 May 1968

10 May 1968       Cal-Poly State University     San Luis Obispo     California

Sam Berdofsky drew this poster for our gig in Santa Rosa.

11 May 1968

12 May 1968    San Fernando Valley State College     Northridge    California

15 May 1968

Fairly typical set list at this time.

16 May 1968    That doesn’t look like one of James’ usual guitars.

17 May 1968    Freeborn Hall   University of California at Davis

18 May 1968   Santa Clara County Fairgrounds  Santa Clara   Northern California Folk Rock Festival

This was a special gig, quite memorable.  The weather was beautiful and there was a spirit of togetherness.

19 May 1968      Civic Auditorium  Pasadena   James singing Easy Rider.   “And I will even buy you some cardboard fruit.”

21 May 1968        Bermuda Palms     San Rafael    California   One dollar seemed to be the going rate for these Angels affairs.  Would be about $10 now.

I used to play saxophone in this building with a big band.

Five errors ?   Dave, Janis, Sam, James and Peter.  That was easy.

24-26 May 1968   Carousel Ballroom with the Clara Ward Singers

31 May 1968

9 June 1968   Whisky-A-Go-Go    Hollywood

13 June 1968     Fillmore Auditorium

14-15 June 1968     Winterland      San Francisco

16 June 1968      Fillmore            Matrix Benefit

22-23 June 1968        Carousel Ballroom

Owsley Stanley put us on tape many times. SONY released his recording of this engagement.

24 June 1968      Burlingame Country Club     Burlingame  California

26-29 June 1968                   Denver

Janis Joplin

See you next week?

Sam Andrew

___________________________________________________

July to Decmber 1967

1 July 1967     Avalon Ballroom    Big Brother and the Holding Company   Quicksilver      Mount Rushmore      Horns of Plenty

“Big Brother and the Holding Company ?”        How did you get a name like that ?  Well, on a beautiful spring day in 1965, Chet Helms held in his hands two legal tablets full of quirky, eccentric, purposefully puerile names.  Names like Tom Slow and his Sarcastic Grand Mo. Or Country Schmo and The Knish. Or Quicksilver Military Service. The Grapefruit Head. The Jefferson’s Bear Pain.

On one legal tablet, Chet had the name “Big Brother,” no doubt prompted by a recent reading of  Orwell.  On another legal tablet page, Chet had the words “The Holding Company.”   ‘Holding ?’  Why Holding ?  “Holding” was slang at that time for “possessing,” as in, “Hey, man, are you holding any drugs ?”

So, on one yellow tablet Chet had “Big Brother” and on the other he had “the Holding Company.”   “Big Brother ?”   “Holding Company ?”  “Big Brother” was big government. “”Holding Company” was corporate government. Corporations weren’t people yet. Their ‘free speech’ hadn’t yet become protected by the Supreme Court, which was still an honorable institution.

“Big Brother ?”     “Holding Company ?”      Very political.  Country Joe and The Fish were a political group, but their name was non political. They should have had our name and we should have had theirs.  Country Janis and The Fish would have been something to consider, even if we didn’t have Janis yet.

James Gurley said, “Hey, how is a name like Big Brother and the Holding Company going to fit on a marquee or a record label ?”

And I thought, “You mean there’s going to be a marquee… and a record label ?”

2 July 1967         Mount Tamalpais          Marin County, California.

I had a difficult time driving down off Mount Tamalpais after this gig. We had a 1955 Cadillac hearse which was unwieldy anyway, and I didn’t know Marin County yet, and especially Tamalpais, so I had a fun time negotiating all those curves, peaks and valleys after cocktails and cannabis.

4-6 July 1967         Fillmore              Bo Diddley        Big Joe Williams     Quicksilver       Big Brother

7-8 July 1967    Circle Star Theatre     San Carlos    California    Theatres in the round, such as the Circle Star, can be quite tricky. Westbury Music Fair on Long Island is another one. When they begin revolving there is a slight jerk that you should be ready for or otherwise you could spill your Bombay martini.

14-15 July 1967               Continental Ballroom grand opening.

We’re playing Cuckoo here, a song that became Oh, Sweet Mary on Cheap Thrills.

20-21 July 1967  Avalon Ballroom      Big Brother and the Holding Company     Mount Rushmore

23 July 1967   Straight Theatre    San Francisco  Grand Opening   Big Brother and the Holding Company  Freedom Highway    The Phoenix    Wildflower    The Grateful Dead  Mount Rushmore  Quicksilver Messenger Service   New Salvation Army Band   Mother Earth  Country Joe and The Fish   The Charlatans   Blue Cheer

The Gurley man

28-30 July 1967     California Hall      San Francisco

Josie and Eddy

31 July 1967        Haight Ashbury Free Clinic Benefit

8 August 1967  Denver Dog   Denver    Colorado  A band at this event played Bye, Bye, Baby. The guitar player even copied my mistakes. First time I heard that.

10 August 1967  Kaiser Dome San Bernardino

11-12 August 1967  Continental Ballroom   Santa Clara   California

13 August 1967  Avalon Ballroom

16 August 1967  Golden Gate Park

Sharrie Gomez and I doing a Macy’s ad.

Bo and his balalaika

24-27 August 1967           Avalon Ballroom          Big Brother    Bo Diddley        Bukka White        The Salvation Army Banned

28 August 1967  Lindley Meadow   Golden Gate Park

Hunter S. Thompson

We had a shoot in Sausalito at the Heliport with Irving Penn.

This is the way Irving Penn’s portrait of us and the Grateful Dead looks on the wall at The National Portrait Gallery, London.

1-3 September 1967     Straight Theatre    Haight Ashbury             San Francisco

4 September 1967   La Dolphine Estate  Debutante Party   Burlingame  California

6 September 1967

8-9 September 1967  Family Dog  Denver

Truth in advertising

You probably cannot see that Janis and I are committing some kind of nefarious act over there under the tree.

15 September 1967         Canceled

September 16, 1967     Monterey Jazz Festival    Big Brother  T-Bone Walker   B. B. King   Richie Havens   The Clara Ward Singers    Afternoon Blues Show

T-Bone Walker was my guitar hero since I was 14, so I was very excited to see him here.

19-24 September 1967       Golden Bear       Huntington Beach   California with Big Mama Thornton.

5  October 1967   The Matrix  San Francisco

6 October 1967  The Ark   Sausalito   California

7 October 1967      Avalon Ballroom

8 October 1967             Santa Clara Fairgrounds              Santa Clara          California

13-14 October 1967     Eagles Auditorium      Seattle   This engagement was canceled, I believe, and we played at The Ark instead.

15-16 October 1967                Avalon Ballroom

20 October 1967           Contra Costa College     San Pablo    California

27 October 1967   Cal State    Hayward    California

28 October 1967        McNear’s Beach             San Rafael         California

28-29 October 1967       Peacock Country Club            San Rafael

31 October 1967   Trip Or Freak  Hallowe’en Ball    Winterland    San Francisco

2-3 November 1967      Fillmore          San Francisco            with  Richie Havens

November 1967           Golden Bear Club            Huntington Beach          California

4 November 1967           Winterland             San Francisco           with Richie Havens  and  Pink Floyd

James Gurley plays an F# minor.

4 November 1967    The Ark         with Baltimore Steam Packet and  Moby Grape

Sally Mann photographed by Rosie McGee

Way Beck in the old days

13 November 1967         Avalon Ballroom           Big Brother and the Holding Company     The Grateful Dead        Quicksilver Messenger Service

16 November 1967           Cubist stock certificate

This event never happened.  In any year.      I wish it would have.

23-25 November 1967     The Family Dog presents Thanksgiving Turkey Strut and Trot at The Avalon.

24 November 1967   California Hall           San Francisco

25 November 1967          Avalon Ballroom           Mount Rushmore

1 December 1967   The Matrix    San Francisco    with Sandy Bull  and  Dan Hicks

2 December 1967          1st L.A. appearance, it says.  I didn’t realize that.

17 December 1967

18 December 1967             California Hall

19 December 1967       Shrine Auditorium      Los Angeles

20 December 1967            Whisky-A-Go-Go              Hollywood

22 December 1967             Turlock Fairgrounds             Turlock           California

25 December 1967                   Sokol Hall                Christmas Party

26-31 December 1967                    Winterland              San Francisco

Happy New Year !          31 December 1967

See you next week?

Sam Andrew

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