Whisky A Go Go, Sunnyvale, CA Summer 1965-January 1966

Elsewhere I had speculated about a nightclub in the San Jose suburb of Sunnyvale called Wayne Manor, a unique "Batman" themed dance club. This speculation lead to some amazing information about the choice of the Batman theme for the club, as the son of the owner explained that as an 11-year old who liked Batman comic books, he persuaded his father to remake the club into a sort of Batcave, complete with waitresses dressed as Bat Girl. With this inspiration, Ross and I have an interesting page on Wayne Manor, complete with a somewhat complete list of performers from the club for about a year (mid-1966 to mid-67).

The most startling piece of information we learned, however, was the prior incarnation of Wayne Manor: a Sunnyvale "franchise" of West Hollywood's famed Whisky A Go Go. Initially, I found this too unlikely to believe, but lo and behold, here is a photo from the nightclub's opening, with "Whisky A Go Go- of Sunnyvale" clearly visible above the bandstand. We had originally thought that the band was a combo called Sandy And The Vikings, but an infallible expert assured us included Bob Mosley on bass, two years before he joined Moby Grape. Mosley himself looked at the photo, and identified singer Joni Lyman, guitarist Joel Scott Hill and drummer Johnny Barbata, so this was in fact the Joel Scott Hill Trio, who were regulars in Northern California clubs at the time.

Apparently, the club only used the name Whisky A Go Go from mid-1965 until about February 1966, when it adopted the Batman theme and changed its name to Wayne Manor. Apparently the club advertised for Go Go dancers in the San Jose State student newspaper when school opened, but the exact opening date of the club remains uncertain. Since we have addressed the interesting nature of Wayne Manor, I am using this post to consider what this new information tells us about the history of the Whisky A Go Go.

Whisky A Go Go-Background

The West Hollywood Whisky A Go Go was founded by Elmer Valentine (1923-2008), a former Chicago policeman. The story goes that while in Chicago, Valentine ran nightclubs for "The Mob," and he was "on the take" from them as well. He left Chicago in the early 1960s because, apparently, he could not remain there. He was running a restaurant in Los Angeles, but took a trip to Paris where he went to a nightclub called The Whisky Au Go Go where young people were dancing, and he took the idea back to Hollywood.

The Whisky A Go Go opened at 8901 Sunset Boulevard on January 11, 1964 with Johnny Rivers as its featured attraction. The serendipitous innovation of the Whisky was to have pretty girls in fringed miniskirts dancing to the music on elevated "cages" above the audience. The Whisky A Go Go became a place to see and be seen, Johny Rivers became a huge star, and "Go Go" dancing became a nationwide craze, so much so that Smokey Robinson wrote a hit single about it ("Going To A Go-Go"). Imitators of the Whisky A Go Go sprung up on the West Coast and around the country, as exciting rock music from England and later America gave teenagers and young adults something fun to dance to.

As West Coast music exploded from 1966 onwards, the Whisky was well positioned to book legendary bands on their way up, most famously The Doors, but also including Buffalo Springfield, Jimi Hendrix, Steppenwolf  and numerous others. The Whisky had live music 7 nights a week, and only paid bands Union Scale (headliner or opening act), but it was such a prestige gig that every rising band wanted to play there. The rock market changed in the 1970s, but the ever-shrewd Valentine had opened the Roxy Theater and stayed at the center of the Hollywood rock scene.

The principal source for the history of The Whisky was Elmer Valentine himself. A legendary racounteur, he charmed reporters for decades, retailing his amazing stories of his pre-and-post Whisky carreer, right down to his various Mob connections (who had probably passed on by the time he talked about them). While there is no reason to think that Valentine was anything but truthful in his stories, like all good story tellers he emphasized the parts of the story he wanted to tell. In particular, as the post 1966 Whisky loomed larger in rock history, people asked Elmer about the likes of Jim Morrison, and fewer people inquired about the genesis of The Whisky A Go Go.

The Whisky A Go Go Revisited

The Whisky A Go Go in West Hollywood opened on January 11, 1964. Initially, its entertainment was designed on the Las Vegas model, open with live music 7 nights a week, generally featuring the same band. Initially the club featured Johnny Rivers, whose countryified rock made him a huge star by 1965. Rivers played the Whisky for all of 1964, and some of 1965. Other bands played too, but Rivers was the featured attraction. In April 1965, however, Valentine opened another club in West Hollywood called The Trip (at 8572 West Sunset). The Trip was oriented towards a younger clientele, and the featured acts changed with some regularity. The name acts at The Trip were a bigger attraction than The Trip itself. Over time, it appears that Valentine adopted The Trip's booking policy for The Whisky, and by mid-1966 The Trip had closed and The Whisky featured new name acts each week, sometimes every few days.

Throughout 1965, however, another entirely different business model for the Whisky seems to have been promoted, which promptly faded away, and the shrewd Valentine rarely or never referred to it and was largely never asked. In April 1965, the Whisky partnership (led by Valentine) opened a branch of the Whisky A Go Go in San Francisco, at 568 Sacramento. This club has mostly been forgotten, and I appear to be the only person doing research on it, although the Whisky site itself indicates it was definitely owned by the original Whisky partners. Over the years, there have been a variety of vague stories about Whisky A Go Go clubs in Atlanta, Denver, Minnesota and Washington, DC about which only snippets are known. According to Wikipedia, there was a Whisky A Go Go in Chicago (on Rush and Chestnut) that opened in 1958. I have never found it credible that Elmer Valentine, a connected Chicago cop who ran nightclubs for organized crime (per his own admission), knew nothing about this joint.

The discovery that there was a Sunnyvale Whisky A Go Go, that opened shortly after the San Francisco outpost, suggests an entirely different narrative. The Whisky was a very repeatable formula, and it sounds like Elmer Valentine and possibly other backers were interested in creating a chain of sorts, a kind of circuit where bands could play. Johnny Rivers success had proven that there was money to be made in the record industry, and since clubs could make money at the bar by selling drinks, it seemed like a good formula. Whatever the exact details of Joe Lewis's franchise, in mid-1965 a Sunnyvale Whisky that acted as a midway point of sorts between the San Francisco and Hollywood branches seemed like a good idea.

A Left Turn

It was not to be. The Whisky A Go Go caught the beginning of the sixties wave, but events moved very quickly. Formulaic dance clubs were rapidly replaced by self-contained rock bands who wrote their own songs and music became "art." The Hollywood Whisky, located at one of the prime wellsprings of talent, had no problem adjusting, but even in bland suburban Sunnyvale Go-Go dancing got old quickly. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen reported on January 31, 1966--after the club had only been open for about six or seven months--"Are the go-gos going-going? Could be: Joe Lewis has tranformed his Sunnyvale Whisky a Go-Go into a Batman cave, called Wayne Manor."

We have found some correspondence between bands playing the SF Whisky and the Sunnyvale Wayne Manor, so it seems like they shared Talent Agents. 1964 style seemed very old by 1966, however, and whatever financial arrangements may have been in place with the Sunnyvale Whisky were superseded by its transformation into a Batcave, in its new incarnation.This incarnation too would pass on, as the club appeared to become a topless joint called Murphy's Station, and the building was ultimately torn down as part of the renovation of downtown Sunnyvale.

Our tale here, however, is a lost story of an attempt to franchise the Whisky A Go Go like McDonalds. It seems that a grand scheme was hatched that did not come to fruition, so Elmer Valentine simply left the story out of his subsequent Whisky sagas. My discovery of the Sunnyvale Whisky now leads me to wonder about other such places, and how they might have been connected to the Hollywood Whisky, as well as curiosity about what partners may have been interested in creating a talent circuit of Whisky A Go Gos.

Sanpaku Performance List 1968-69 (Work In Progress)

(an updated version of this post is available here)

Many artists, musical or otherwise, fall out of the public eye and their work remains submerged. One of the benefits of the Internet is that as attention returns to deserving performers, blogs can act as a kind of periscope, providing a snapshot of the ocean as they surface. In 1968 and 69, Sanpaku was a seven-piece jazz rock band from Sacramento with a two-piece horn section, well regarded by their peers but largely unknown today. Some members of the band have recently gotten in touch with each other, so I am presenting this list of their known concert performances--surely just a fraction of their total number of gigs--as a starting point for the band's look backwards. 

Background

Sanpaku was a Sacramento based band that formed from a group called The Working Class. They spent the Summer of 1968 in Lake Tahoe, playing at the Kings Beach Bowl on North Shore and The Sanctuary on the South Shore. Later in the Summer and Fall of 1968 they played a number of gigs at Sacramento's Sound Factory. The proprietor of The Sound Factory, Whitey Davis (worthy of a whole book, not just a blog post) wanted to manage the group, but Sanpaku were booked at a Tuesday night audition show at the Fillmore West where they were spotted by Bill Graham's organization.

In the late 1960s, Graham was trying to expand his concert business into a more vertical model, with band management. a talent agency and two record labels. Only parts of these business enterprises were successful, but Graham's Millard Talent Agency gave a lot of opportunity to rising bands. Talent Agencies provide acts to promoters, since no promoter could know every act, nor could an act know every promoter. Sanpaku was a client of the Millard Agency, along with The Grateful Dead, Santana, Its A Beautiful Day, Elvin Bishop, Aum, Cold Blood and others. As a result, Sanpaku played on some very high profile shows in the late 60s where they apparently acquitted themselves quite well. The band never made a formal recording, however, and seems to have broken up in late 1969.

Sanpaku featured guitarist Mark Pearson, later in Sacramento's Nielsen-Pearson Band, Gary Larkey and Stan Bagdazian on horns, Bob Powell on keyboards, bassist Kootch Trochim and drummer Duane (Motor) Temme, joined in mid-1969 by singer/conguero Rico Reyes. This list only has the gigs that I have been able to uncover (with the gracious help of road manager Hewitt Jackson), and that mostly means high-profile shows, shows where they played with an interesting act who had a history of their own, or shows with a surviving poster. Anyone who recalls seeing the group, or additional gigs or has other relevant information is encouraged to Comment or email me. When I get enough new information, I will update and later re-publish the post.

List of Known Performances

October 22, 1968 Fillmore West Crystal Syphon/Sanpaku/Crazy Horse   
There is a flyer, but the date is difficult to discern, yet I am assuming this was the show that brought Sanpaku to the attention of the Bill Graham organization. This was a Tuesday night audition (the poster says “1.00 Jam”).  Crystal Syphon was a Merced band, and Crazy Horse was probably a Merced band also.  There is a chance that this show is October 21, 1969 and that San Paku's audition was on another date altogether in the late 68-early 69 time frame (although I should add that if the show is from 1969, it is still unlikely that Crazy Horse was Neil Young's backing band, though not entirely impossible).

It is a very little known fact of Fillmore West history is that from September 1968 until it closed in July 1971, the Fillmore West had a concert almost every Tuesday night. Almost none of these were on the famous poster series, and as a result these shows have been ignored by Fillmore historians. They generally featured a popular local band and two new bands, or at least newly-arrived-in-town bands. Admission was $1.50, and it was a popular stop for record company reps and managers to see what might be happening.

Sanpaku played one of these gigs, at any rate, and I believe this to be the date. They were good enough to be snapped up by the Graham management operation. Their shows were booked by the Millard Agency, providing them access to many great Northern California gigs. Sanpaku may have played more than one Tuesday night show, as was common practice. A successful audition band often got another shot as the Tuesday headliner.  

October 26, 1968 Freeborn Hall, UC Davis Glass Thunder/Sanpaku
Freeborn Hall was the biggest auditorium at UC Davis.

December 6-7, 1968 New Committee Theatre, San Francisco Initial Shock/Sanpaku/Devils Kitchen (6th)/Notes From The Underground (7th)
The Committee, the Bay Area's groundbreaking improvisational comedy troupe, had opened a new Theatre at 836 Montgomery. The venue also put on rock shows as well as the regular improv fare.

January 4, 1969 Sound Factory, Sacramento Glad/Country Fog/Sanpaku/Rush/Big Foot
This was a benefit for the FM station that became KZAP. The Sound Factory, at 1817 Alhambra, was run by former Crystal Ballroom (Portland) proprietor and Avalon Ballroom manager Whitey Davis. It featured great groups, but was always on shaky financial footing. Sanpaku apparently opened quite a number of shows at the venue (and attended most of the rest of them) while the venue operated between June 1968 and March 1969.

February ?, 1969 Fillmore West Sanpaku
As alluded to in Ralph Gleason's column below (see March 13-16, 1969, below), Sanpaku had played a great set on a Tuesday night audition. My assumption is that their October audition put them in Bill Graham's orbit, and a February (more or less) Tuesday night appearance was like a coming out party. The next step up was to open the Creedence/Jethro Tull show on March 13-16 (below).

February 28-March 1 Dream Bowl, Vallejo, CA Santana/Sanpaku
The Dream Bowl was on Highway 29, between Vallejo and Napa, in the general vicinity of Sears Point Raceway (now Infineon Raceway). The venue dated back to at least the 1940s. During World War 2, so many transplanted Southerners were in California working in the defense industry that the West Coast became a key entertainment center (Bob Wills even moved to California). There was substantial shipbuilding in Vallejo, so there were many country music fans. The Dream Bowl was an important stop on a local country music circuit around the Bay Area.

After World War 2, Vallejo returned to being a sleepy suburb, but the Dream Bowl continued to present country style music, at least into the early 1960s. There seems to have been a brief effort to make it into a suburban rock venue, but it seems to have been some years before Sonoma and Solano Counties had enough population to support their own venue.

Note that almost all the groups on the poster were booked by the Millard Agency.

March 13-16, 1969 Fillmore West Creedence Clearwater Revival/Jethro Tull/Sanpaku
Bands who did well at a Tuesday audition were given a chance to open a show, and if they succeeded they were given a chance to be 'on the poster.' Sanpaku's presence at this high profile gig indicates that they must have been signed up by the Millard Agency by this time.

Influential San Francisco Chronicle columnist Ralph Gleason gave a favorable notice to the band in his march 17, 1969 column. He wrote

Sanpaku, which is a young band from Sacramento, was also on the bill. They appeared at one of the Tuesday night Fillmore sessions a few weeks back and blew everybody's mind. They are one of those marvelous mixtures of free form jazz and blues and rock. They opened with "Parchman Farm" and went on to do an exciting set with good solos from the two horn players. The lead singer is very good, too.

March 26-30, 1969 Whisky A Go Go, West Hollywood Aum/Sanpaku
The Whisky A Go Go was a high profile club in West Hollywood. Bands actually played for Union Scale, but so many record company and industry professionals saw the bands that it was worth it to play the gig. Both Aum and Sanpaku were Millard Agency bands, and this was the organization's way of showcasing the groups outside of San Francisco. Aum was a power trio led by guitarist Wayne Ceballos.

April 18-19, 1969 Rose Palace, Pasadena John Mayall/Deep Purple/Sanpaku
John Mayall would have had his acoustic Turning Point lineup (with Jon Mark and John Almond) and Deep Purple's first American tour would have featured the "Hush" lineup (with Rod Evans on vocals and Nick Simper on bass).







April 22-23, 1969 New Orleans House, Berkeley Its A Beautiful Day/Sanpaku
The New Orleans House was a popular rock club in Berkeley. Bands played gigs like this on weeknights (this was a Tuesday and Wednesday) in between opening for larger shows. Its  A Beautiful Day was a very popular local group, but they did not yet have an album. They too were booked by the Millard Agency.

May 10, 1969  Pacific Memorial Stadium, U of Pacific, Stockton, CA Santana/Cold Blood/Sons of Champlin/Elvin Bishop/Counry Weather/Sanpaku/  
“Pacific Pop Festival” (noon to 7 pm)
Pacific Memorial Stadium was a modest sized football stadium. Every one of these bands was a Millard Agency client. Santana had not yet released their first album, although they had probably signed to Columbia by this time and may have begun recording it already.

May 30, 1969 Merced County Fairgrounds, Merced Memorial Day Rock Festival
Santana/Elvin Bishop Band/Sanpaku/Crystal Syphon/Crazy Horse/2 others
Santana, Elvin Bishop and Sanpaku were all Millard clients, and Crystal Syphon (and probably Crazy Horse) were Merced-area bands.

May 31, 1969 Berryessa Bowl, Napa Sanpaku/Crystal Syphon
Beryessa Bowl was a amphitheatre at man-made Lake Berryessa. This relatively local gig, in the Bay Area but many miles from San Francisco, was probably typical of a lot of Sanpaku gigs

June 13, 1969 Convention Center, Fresno, CA Grateful Dead/Aum/Sanpaku
The Grateful Dead were booked by the Millard Agency in 1968-69, mainly as a way to pay back money they had borrowed from Bill Graham. During this period, many of the opening acts at Grateful Dead shows were Millard clients. At this show, Sanpaku flautist Gary Larkey, Aum guitarist Wayne Ceballos and legendary singer Ronnie Hawkins all joined in with the Dead to play "Turn On Your Lovelight."

June 20-21, 1969 The Barn, Rio Nido Country Weather/Sanpaku/Jaybyrd
The Barn in Rio Nido was probably another name for the Rio Nido Dance Hall, but I'm not certain of that.

June 24-26, 1969 Fillmore West Iron Butterfly/Cold Blood/Sanpaku

July 19, 1969 Gym, Monterey Peninsula College, Monterey Santana/Sanpaku/Fritz
Once again, San Paku opened for a Millard client. I'm not certain if the opening act was the Menlo Park band called Fritz, featuring bassist Lindsay Buckingham and singer Stephanie (Stevie) Nicks.

The Monterey Peninsula College gym was a modest sized venue, which probably held about 2000 in a festival seating type arrangement.

Around this time, some band members recall a meeting in which Bill Graham explained to them that Santana rather than Sanpaku would be going to a large rock festival in upstate New York called Woodstock.


August 5, 1969 The Matrix, San Francisco Sanpaku/Bigfoot
The Matrix, at 3138 Fillmore, was still a musicians' hangout. While not a big gig, it was an important place to be heard. Chronicle critic Ralph Gleason regularly mentioned the bands scheduled to play The Matrix (to the delight of all Rock Prosopographers). The clip below is from Monday August 4, 1969.

August 8-9, 1969 The Poppycock, Palo Alto Sanpaku/Terry Dolan
The Poppycock, at 135 University Avenue in downtown Palo Alto, was that city's venue for the original rock club circuit. Second-tier bands played clubs like The Poppycock, New Orleans House and Matrix regularly between higher profile gigs.

August 14, 1969 Coliseum Arena, Oakland Blind Faith/Delaney & Bonnie & Friends/Free/Sanpaku
The band played unbilled at the Bay Area stop of the biggest rock tour to date.

August 20, 1969 El Roach, Ballard, WA Grateful Dead/NRPS/Sanpaku
The Dead, New Riders of The Purple Sage and Sanpaku were supposed to play Seattle's outdoor Aqua Theatre, but they got rained out. Instead, they went to the nearby El Roach Tavern (at 5419 Ballard Avenue in suburban Seattle) and put on a surprise show. I'm not certain exactly who played, but Sanpaku members were definitely there.

August 21, 1969 Aqua Theatre, Seattle, WA Grateful Dead/NRPS/Sanpaku
The bands finally got to play their show the next day. The interesting venue was not in good repair, and this was the last concert at the facility. However, flautist Gary Larkey joined the Dead for a few songs. For many decades it was arbitrarily assumed that the guest performer was Charles Lloyd, but in fact it was Larkey.

The Grateful Dead and probably the New Riders played a rock festival in Oregon on Saturday, August 23 (The Bullfrog 3 Festival at the Pelletier Farm in Helens, OR), so I would not be surprised to find out that Sanpaku played it as well.

September 8, 1969 Quad, Irvington High School, Fremont, CA Aum/Sanpaku
A September 11, 1969 Fremont Argus "Teen" section article reported (above) that a Monday night dance in the School Quad was a huge success, with over 1000 students attending. Gigs like this, besides being a nice payday on an otherwise non-working night, helped build a band's audience as well.

September 10, 1969 The Matrix, San Francisco Sanpaku/Ice

September 16-18, 1969 The Matrix, San Francisco Sanpaku/Mendelbaum
Mendelbaum had arrived from Wisconsin in the Summer, and had become almost the house band at the Matrix. Bands played weeknight gigs at tiny clubs like The Matrix (this was Tues-Wed-Thurs) because it gave them a chance to have fun and work on stuff for the bigger gigs on the weekends. 

September 24, 1969 Fillmore West   
Bay Area Drug Committee Presents At Bill Graham’s Fillmore West A Benefit Show Save The Children 
It’s A Beautiful Day/Sanpaku/Sons of Champlin/Ace of Cups/The Outlaws (Dino Valenti and Garry Duncan)/Terry Dolan

October 5, 1959 Frost Amphitheatre, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA Its A Beautiful Day/Mike Bloomfield-Nick Gravenites/Cold Blood/Southern Comfort/Sanpaku/Old Davis
Benefit for MidPeninsula Free University
Photos exist of Sanpaku performing at this Sunday afternoon event (the clip above is from Ralph J Gleason's Chronicle column of October 3, 1969). By this time, New Jersey born trumpeter David Ginsberg had replaced Stan Bagdazian on trumpet. Ginsberg had been at the University of Wisconsin, and had recently moved to San Francisco.

October 9, 1969 Pauley Ballroom, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA Sons of Champlin/Sanpaku

October 11, 1969 Cal Expo, State Fairgrounds, Sacramento, CA Janis Joplin and Her Kozmic Blues Band/Blues Image/Sanpaku
Sanpaku opened for Janis on their home turf, at the fairly new State Fairgrounds.

Sanpaku had formed a basketball team to challenge Bill Graham's Fillmore Fingers on Tuesday nights. They named their team the Paku Jets, and had t-shirts made up. They lost, big time. But they won in a way, since their friend Carlos Santana wore one of the shirts when Santana appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show on CBS-TV on October 24, 1969. On the video (Youtube), the "K" in Paku is visible on Carlos's t-shirt as the band launches into "Persuasion."

October 28-30, 1969 The Matrix Sanpaku/Mendelbaum

October 31, 1969 M.V. Gym, [city?]  Country Weather/Sanpaku/First Time Around  
“Barefoot Dance”
I have seen a flyer for this, but I don't know where the school was. Many flyers for school dances had very little such information, since the only audience was students who knew the location of the gym.

November 6, 1969 Gym, College Park High School, Pleasant Hill Mike Bloomfield and Friends/Country Weather/Bronze Hog/Sanpaku/Orion/Daybreak
This concert was mentioned in Ralph Gleason's column on November 5. I'm not sure why six bands would play a High School gym on a Thursday night--I assume this wasn't a school event. The High School was across from a Junior College (Diablo Valley) so perhaps it was associated with that institution.

November 7, 1969  Gym, Contra Costa College, Richmond Cold Blood/Sanpaku/Little Johns
There were actually quite a few rock concerts at the Contra Costa College gym in the 1960s.

November 8, 1969 [venue], Hayward State College, Hayward Sanpaku/Dry Creek
I assume this was a student event at Cal State Hayward, but it was on a Saturday night and presumably open to the public, as it was mentioned in Gleason's column. I'm not certain of the exact venue. Hayward State (now known as Cal State University, East Bay) was opened in 1957. At the time, there was only the main campus above Mission Boulevard,

Dry Creek featured drummer Sammy Piazza, who ended up joining Hot Tuna.

November 14-15, 1969 The Old Fillmore Country Weather/Sanpaku/Floating Bridge
A series of shows were put on at the original Fillmore Auditorium (at 1805 Geary) in 1969, but the venue had gotten too small for the booming rock market(h/t Colin for the long-lost poster).

Floating Bridge were from Seattle.

November 20-23, 1969 Fillmore West  Jethro Tull/MC5/Sanpaku
Sanpaku played again with Jethro Tull, this time on Tull's triumphant return to Fillmore West as headliners. The ad above is Bill Graham Presents regular display ad in the Sunday Chronicle. Each ad had the same format, listing the bands and with a picture of a prominent member of the headline group (in this case Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull). For weeks on end, the ad said "illmore West."

Sanpaku were advertised for a Friday night (Nov 21) show at the Santa Rosa County Fairgrounds in Sonoma, supporting Its A Beautiful Day and Cold Blood, but they were replaced by Joy of Cooking, as a Fillmore West show always took precedence over one in the hinterlands.

December 3, 1969 Fillmore West Creedence Clearwater Revival/Billie Joe Becoat/Gary Wagner/Clover/Sanpaku/Joy of Cooking
In his November 30 column, Gleason tantalizingly mentioned a Wednesday night Fillmore West concert, headlined by Creedence and featuring numerous popular local club acts. The show was a benefit for KPFA-fm in Berkeley, as Wednesday was the usual night for such things (this show is outside the known list of BGP events). Yet by the next week, Sanpaku was off the bill (replaced by Commander Cody), and it appears they broke up shortly after this.

Anyone with additional information (band members and road managers, I'm lookin' at ya), please post them in the comments and I will update as needed (thanks to Sanpaku road manager Hewitt Jackson for carrying the flag, sending some great scans and letting me know that Sanpaku was just one word--see the band blog here).

The Rock Garden, San Francisco, 4742 Mission Blvd March 21-May 2, 1967

Elsewhere I have been working through some of the permutations of a short-lived 60s San Francisco rock venue called The Rock Garden. In general, this venue is only known because a few Michael Woods posters from its month of psychedelic shows were published in Paul Grushkin's book Art Of Rock. I do not know the provenance of the posters or how they endured, but if they had not this venue would be even more obscure than it is currently. Thanks to some shrewd research by Ross and doggedly reviewing the Entertainment pages of the San Francisco Chronicle for 1967, I have pieced together some significant pieces of the story, which I am presenting here.

The Rock Garden was a former movie theater that had apparently been converted into a club presenting Latin music. At the time, Latin jazz was popular for dancing in San Francisco, but it was somewhat passe. 4742 Mission Boulevard (at Ocean) was in the Excelsior District, next to the Mission District but just about as far from downtown San Francisco as you could be. In many ways,  the community was more like the Peninsula suburbs nearby. I have to presume, however, that since it had a liquor license and an all-important dance permit, it was easier to convert into a rock club than a place with neither such approvals.

Apparently, a Merry Prankster named Lou Todd persuaded Dave Rapkin, a succesful North Beach club owner, to convert the Rock Garden into a premier rock club. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Latin Jazz had somewhat replaced Be-Bop as the entertainment of choice in North Beach, San Francisco's primary entertainment district.  By the mid-1960s, the North Beach scene on Broadway had been taken over by topless dancing. The whole topless thing is very hard to explain, but suffice to say it was rooted in Burlesque, and while the attraction was --duh--women dancing with their tops off, it was usually part of a sort of revue with bands, dancing, comedians and magic acts (with and without tops). Topless shows were considerably less graphic than strip clubs are today, but of course it was somewhat more innocent time. Going to a topless club was the equivalent of going to an R-Rated movie (which did not exist at the time): a racy thing for adults to do, but not shameful.

Rapkin's most successful club was called The Galaxie, on Broadway and Kearny. For much of 1965 and 1966, the club featured the band Stark Naked And The Car Thieves. They were actually from Indiana, where they had been called The Checkmates. How they ended up in San Francisco playing as Stark Naked And The Car Thieves is quite a story, but too long to tell here (the ad is from the February 11, 1966 San Mateo Times).

By 1967, Topless Clubs were starting to peak, although the newspapers were still full of ads for such clubs. The new gimmick seemed to be "amateur" topless dancers, and "amateur contests," somewhat hourly. I doubt the performers were true amateurs, even if the odd drunken patron must have participated (no doubt thankful now that YouTube had not been invented). In any case, there were fewer "name" Topless" performers. There were still bands, however. In the second ad (from the April 29, 1967 Chronicle) vocalist Rick Stevens leads a quartet; Stevens would go on to be lead singer for Oakland's Tower of Power during some of their finest moments (such as 1972's "You're Still A Young Man").

Rapken's other North Beach club was The Moulin Rouge, at 412 Broadway. Given that there were fewer ads for it, it must have been a notch lower on the food chain, since it was in walking distance of the Galaxie (the ad is from the Chronicle listings of April 2, 1967. Sharp-eyed readers will note that the address is 412 Broadway, and it would later become the "second" Matrix, then Soul Train, and then The Stone).

In early 1967, the Fillmore and The Avalon were booming, and psychedelic rock concerts were being put on all over the Bay Area, with various degrees of success. A shrewd club operator must have seen the financial opportunities in promoting rock concerts, and while it shared some trappings with the Fillmore, there were also some very different things about the Rock Garden.

The Rock Garden attempted to distinguish itself by printing diamond-shaped posters. The few surviving posters were apparently the only diamond-shaped posters known, at least in San Francisco (the one above is for the debut March 21-26 shows with Love, Big Brother and The Holding Company and The Citizens for Interplanetary Activity h/t Ross for the scans). However, there were a number of other critical distinctions between the Rock Garden and its competitors.

First of all, the Excelsior District is very far from downtown San Francisco, so far that most San Franciscans who do not live there have never been there. Not only is it a fair distance, there are some substantial hills between it and downtown. Since the 1970s, BART has serviced that area of town (at the Glen Park Station) but in the 1960s it would have been a very long bus ride, not conducive to late night celebrating. The club was much nearer to the Peninsula suburbs. However, a peculiarity of San Francisco geography was that most visitors took the freeway straight downtown, and had as little idea about the Excelsior as any who lived outside the district. In any case, if you lived in Burlingame or San Mateo, it was no harder to drive to the Fillmore than to the Rock Garden, even if you knew where it was. As a result of its location, the Rock Garden was largely inaccessible to the Haight Ashbury and Berkeley hippies who made up a big part of regular Fillmore and Avalon attendance.

The other big difference between the Rock Garden and the Fillmore and Avalon was that the Rock Garden served drinks. Bars are very profitable, but a significant percentage of the rock audience at this time was under 18 or under 21, and the Rock Garden's bar would prevent them from entering (18-year olds were allowed in some circumstances in California, but the main point is still the same). Also, drinking was considered "square" by the hippies, and most of them could barely scrape together the money for a Fillmore ticket, much less have 20 bucks to drop on drinks all night.

The Rock Garden was open for 6 nights a week, from Tuesday to Sunday, with regular display ads in the Chronicle (the one at the top is from the opening weekend) and fancy posters, trying to entice patrons from all over the Bay Area to come to the Rock Garden any time for a great evening. This was a great idea---about 10 years early. The rock audience was definitely getting older and heading to the suburbs, but that would not reach fruition until some years later (in San Francisco it was a club called The Old Waldorf).

The other interesting twist was that Dave Rapkin hired local engineering whiz Charlie Butten to design a state-of-the-art sound system. Some years later, in Rolling Stone, Butten explained

 Charlie determined to use the stage to enclose the speakers - literally build them below the musicians!

"The stage was eight by 16 by three feet high," said Charlie, smiling puckishly. "And I was building a folded four-throated 16-cycle exponential horn into it. We got the bass speaker done, but then Todd left and Rapkin wouldn't let us go any further. He said the sound was too muddy, which, of course, it was because there was nothing to go with it.

"The bass stopped at 100 cycles and the highs didn't go below 500. And I think some of the musicians complained that it hurt.

The Prankster connection seems to have provided a direct line to top-of-the-line bands. Big Brother and The Holding Company were managed by a former Prankster (Julius Karpen), and Love (whom you will note is actually billed above Big Brother) were a very hip LA band (Citizens For Interplanetary Activity were Charlie Butten's housemates). The second week was even more impressive, with the Grateful Dead on board for the week of March 28-April 2 (perversely described as April 28-March 2 on the poster).

Jerry Garcia had grown up on Harrington Street, in the Excelsior, and had probably gone to the venue when it was a movie theater. His brother Tiff helped prepare the theater for rock bands, too. Most memorably, Jerry Garcia's mother, who still lived nearby, saw her son perform for the first time in years. Ralph Gleason of the Chronicle attended opening night, and while positive, implicitly warned that the drinking-age only plan won't work.

Besides an implicit crack about the location ("2 miles due north of San Luis Obispo") Gleason says (in the March 29, 1967 Chronicle)

The club is low, dark and somewhat stiff but has a big-time sound system with speakers under the bandstand and once they drop the booze and get set for youth, it should be a big success.

The third week featured less popular groups, although they resonate some more today. Steve Miller Blues Band was locally popular, but a long way from National prominence. The Orkustra featured future Its A Beautiful Day violinist David LaFlamme (and future Manson Family member Bobby Beausoleil on guitar) but they too were little known. The Steve Miller/Only Alternatives/Orkustra billing was featured from Tuesday April 4 through Sunday April 9. The discovery of this ad has caused me to wonder whether there was a diamond shaped poster for this event as well.

The fourth week of operation featured the Buffalo Springfield, supported again by The Orkustra. The Springfield were a fine live band, and while apparently there were problems in the band at this time, since the problems were expressed by fiery guitar dueling between Neil Young and Stephen Stills, that may have been a good thing.

Trouble seems to have set in by the fifth week. According to Butten, the sound system had exceeded Dave Rapkin's budget, so while the awesome understage bass cabinets were complete, the rest of the PA was unfinished, which cannot have been ideal. Also, for the first month of operation, the Rock Garden had substantial ads three times a week in the San Francisco Chronicle (some reproduced here). By the fifth week, however, I could only find a single smaller ad for the bill featuring Country Joe and The Fish. I do not know whether there was ever a poster for the event.

This Chronicle ad for Country Joe and The Fish (on Sunday April 16, for April 18-23) was all I could find for show publicity, a distinct sign that the promoter had cut back. A remark in the Berkeley Barb two weeks later by Fish manager ED Denson, alluding to untrustworthy promoters, suggests that either the gig was canceled or the band did not receive promised money. The next week, only small display ads promote Larry Younger and The Epics.

Larry Younger and The Epics were a dance band from Erie, PA (later to become Orange Colored Sky), probably quite professional but very different from the underground legends who had populated the club the previous month. According to soundman Butten, "the place went back to Latin music and Rapkin put the bass speakers into one of his Broadway joints."  The dissatisfaction of Country Joe and The Fish, the drop off in advertising and the smaller scale groups all suggested that the psychedelic Rock Garden experiment was over, and indeed by the end of the month the Rock Garden was advertising "Dance: Rock-Swing-Latin."

The story of The Rock Garden itself was not over--in some ways it had just begun. It briefly returned to a more conventional supper club arrangement, probably featuring Latin jazz. It then evolved into a sort of soul club under the name The Ghetto Club, where along with a nearby joint called The Nite Life (at 101Olmstead, near San Bruno Avenue) San Franicisco's Latin Rock explosion had its first ignition, with groups like The Aliens and Abel and The Prophets.

The current, or most recent, tenant at 4742 Mission Blvd is the El Tapatio Nightclub. The Rock Garden itself is only slightly more than a memory, a month long grand experiment that failed, ahead of its time and misguided at the same time.

View Latin Rock San Francisco 1969 in a larger map

Cafe Au Go Go, New York City 152 Bleecker Street Rock: Performance List July-October 1969 (Au Go Go IX-End)

The Cafe Au Go Go, at 152 Bleecker Street in New York City's Greenwich Village, was a critical venue for aspiring rock bands in the 1960s. Whatever the indisputable charms of the West Coast, the commercial and cultural capital of the United States has always been New York City, and bands had to make a good showing in New York if they expected to make it. Perhaps because the venue had no collectible poster art, the club has been somewhat unfairly left out of many rock chronicles, when in fact it played a crucial role in introducing new bands to New York City, and by extension to the whole country.

The iconic New York rock venue has always been Bill Graham's Fillmore East, and rightly so. The Fillmore East only opened in 1968, however, when the rock business had become fairly established. The less imposing Cafe Au Go Go had opened on February 7, 1964. It was a brick room with a low ceiling, long and narrow, and not ideally designed for electric music. Prior to the rock boom, it had been a haven for jazz, folk and comedy performers, but the Cafe Au Go Go became one of the first clubs in Greenwich Village and New York City to regularly book "name" rock acts, particularly from out of town. Within a few short years, it was primarily a rock club, and one of the first places bands had to play for the critical but enthusiastic New York audience.

Thanks to my friend Marc, I have had an excellent list of performers at the Cafe Au Go Go from 1965 to 1969, when it closed. I was lacking much of a context, however, but now that I have discovered the excellent New York City site prosopography blog Its All The Streets You Crossed Not So Long Ago, and its exceptional post on the Cafe Au Go Go, my performers list can be put into some kind of context.

My goal for this series is to list all the rock performers at the Cafe Au Go Go from July 27, 1965 through late 1969, when the club closed. I have included some brief information about where each performer stood at the time each of their Au Go Go performance, such as their current album and lineup, but I have not tried to create exhaustive biographies for each band. I am trying to capture how different bands came through Greenwich Village and New York City in their efforts to succeed. I have listed folk, jazz or other performers but have largely refrained from commenting on them.

The Café Au Go Go was an oddity, a music club that didn’t serve liquor. This made it accessible to underage patrons, but it also meant that there were no bar receipts to rely on when things were slow on the bandstand. By coffee house standards, the Au Go Go was large, with room for 300 to 400 people. However, when the Greenwich Village folk boom started to die down, it became more of a struggle for the club to survive. Electric Rock and Blues acts began to be billed regularly at the Au Go Go in mid-1965, and this list picks up the story there.

This list is mostly drawn from advertisements in the Village Voice and other papers, and a few biographies and other sources when the Au Go Go was mentioned. Like all nightclubs in big cities, who was advertised was not always who appeared. Missing dates are more likely due to a lack of advertising or missing issues of The Village Voice, as the Au Go Go probably presented live music almost every night from 1965-69. It is possible that nights that were not advertised simply featured local groups, but those too may have been of historical interest. The Au Go Go advertised regularly in the Village Voice, and there were occasional flyers around, but there is probably much more to be learned, particularly about opening acts and casual guest appearances.

This is a work in progress. Anyone with additional information, corrections, insights or recovered memories (real or imagined) about any of the rock performers is urged to post it in the Comments or contact me. For ease of navigation, this series will be divided into nine parts (late 1965, early and late 1966, early and late 1967, early and late 1968 and early and late 1969).

Cafe Au Go Go Rock Performers List 
pre-rock: February 1964-July 25, 1965

Part I July 27, 1965-December 1965
Part II January 1966-June 1966  
Part III July 1966-December 1966
Part IV January 1967-June 1967 
Part V July 1967-December 1967
Part VI January 1968-June 1968
Part VII July 1968-December 1968
Part VIII January 1969-June 1969
Part IX-July 1969-October 1969


The Cafe Au Go Go had been closed at the end of June 1969, as Howard Solomon had sold the club. Apparently he moved to Florida to manage Fred Neil. I'm not sure who ran the Cafe Au Go Go for the Fall of 1969, but there was a brief effort to make it a competitive rock club again. We are missing numerous dates, mainly due to missing ads in the Village Voice. Its hard to be certain how things we're really going, but I'm presenting the information as we have it.

update: thanks to a correspondent, a Rolling Stone article about the closure of the Cafe Au Go Go (below) tells us that the new owner was one Moses Baruch, who added singer Richie Havens as a partner. There are some contradictions between what the article says and who was actually advertised. The article suggests that the Au Go Go was closed from June to September, when in fact it seems to have re-opened in July.

July 8-14, 1969 Head Band Blues Band/Bruce Pain/King Biscuit

July 15-21, 1969 Budddy Miles Express/Uncle Dirty
The Buddy Miles Express had been formed by the drummer in late 1968 after The Electric Flag had disintegrated following the departures of Mike Bloomfield and Nick Gravenites.

August 15-21, 1969 Tyrannosaurus Rex
Tyrannosaurus Rex was a hippie folkie duo featuring guitarist/singer Marc Bolan and Steve ‘Peregrine’ Took on bongos and congas. They were very different than the gritty glam rock machine Bolan would lead in the 70s, known for the hit single “Bang A Gong.” This was part of Tyrannosaurus Rex’s brief American tour, supporting their 3rd album, Beard Of Stars.

August 29-31, 1969 Van Morrison/Holy Modal Rounders/Tom Brimm
Van Morrison’s group probably consisted only of John Payne (flute and sax) and Tom Kielbania (bass).

The Holy Modal Rounders were from the Lower East Side, and were primarily an Acid Folk duo, featuring Steve Weber and Peter Stampfel. They are credited as the first musicians to release a song with the word “psychedelic” in it (in 1964!). They had released 4 albums by this time, not counting their stints as members of The Fugs, their most recent being 1968’s The Moray Eels Eat The Holy Modal Rounders. By this time, they were sort of a folk-rock group—an acid folk-rock group—but the exact configuration of the group for these gigs is unknown. The pair have continued to record intermittently as the Holy Modal Rounders through at least 2006.

September 24-27, 1969 Ace Trucking Company/Holy Modal Rounders/Eric Mercury
The Ace Trucking Company were a ‘sketch comedy’ group. Fred Willard (from Fernwood 2Nite and many other shows) was a member.

Eric Mercury was a black R&B singer from Canada, who moved to Chicago in the late 60s. He was probably promoting his Avco Embassy album Electric Black Man.

September 29-October 1, 1969 Grateful Dead
It seems odd that the Dead would play a venue as small as the Au Go Go, but the Dead on the road would fill any open night with a gig (and perhaps there had been a latent favor with former booker Barry Imhoff?). Tapes exist, so the shows definitely happened, and the Dead were at their ripping '69 best.
Update: an eyewitness reports that there were different opening acts each night: Eric Mercury, Lonnie Mack and the Holy Modal Rounders, although the precise order is forgotten. The Dead played early and late shows. There was so little room on the stage that Pigpen's congas were set up out in the audience. 

October 2, 1969 Peter Walker
Billed as “Peter Walker and some friends of the Café Au Go Go.”

October 7-8-9, 1969 Elvin Bishop Quartet
Elvin Bishop had moved to San Francisco after he quit the Butterfield Blues Band in Fall 1968. By mid-1969, he was managed by Bill Graham’s Millard Agency, one of whose agents (Barry Imhoff) was the former booker for the Au Go Go. By this time, Bishop had released his debut album on Epic (The Elvin Bishop Group). The band had Bishop on lead guitar and vocals, Art Stavro on bass, John Chambers on drums and Applejack (Jack Walrath) on harmonica. Bishop had just debuted at the Fillmore East the previous weekend (Oct 3-4).

October 9-12, 1969 The McCoys/Waldrop and Roundtree/Blues Project II with Danny Kalb
The McCoys featured brothers Rick and Randy Zehringer, from Indiana. The band had had a hit with “Hang On Sloopy,” but the group were largely embarrassed by it. They had moved to New York, where they were managed by local promoter Steve Paul (proprietor of the midtown club The Scene, among other things). The band had “gone psychedelic” with their 1969 album Human Ball, but it was very difficult to be seen as anything other than a “Top 40” group.

In 1970, Steve Paul teamed the McCoys up with another of his clients, Johnny Winter, and formed the group Johnny Winter And. The cruelly underrated 1971 album of the same name featured the original recording of “Rock And Roll Hoochie Koo”, written by guitarist Zehringer (who by then was known by his Nom Du Rock Rick Derringer)

October 13, 1969  Benefit for Billy Cheeseboro with John Mayall, Tim Hardin and many friends
I do not know who Billy Cheeseboro was. John Mayall was apparently touring around the East Coast at the time (he played Fillmore East on Oct 3-4), so he was probably expected to just make an appearance, rather than bring his entire band.

October 14, 1969 Tuesday Night Jam Session

October 15, 1969 Vietnam Moratorium

October 16, 1969 Tim Hardin/Eric Mercury
   
October 17-19, 1969 Eric Mercury

October 21-22, 1969 Elvin Bishop

The Café Au Go Go seems to have closed soon after this, and this chapter of rock in Greenwich Village came to an end.  It is fitting that the rock era at the Au Go Go began with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band in July 1965, and a member of that original group closed the club.

Scheduled shows in November that were never played included Santana and Jack Cassidy [sic] and Friends (the fledgling Hot Tuna). update: According to a Rolling Stone article from the December 27, 1969 issue (p.14--h/t Iver)

Rock & Roll Offed At Café Au Go Go

New York – The Café Au Go Go in Greenwich Village is no more.  In its place is the Café Caliph, serving up Middle Eastern entertainment and fare.

The decision to drop the rock was made by club owner Moses Baruch who bought the lease from Maidmen Realty Inc., after original owner Howard Solomon left New York last June for Coconut Grove, Floriday, to manage Fred Neil.

“I took over the club to run it the same way as a jazz club, but for rock and roll,” says Baruch.  “I put in a couple of big groups like the Grateful Dead but I couldn’t make a go of it.  I tried to do it and even took in Richie Havens as a partner.  But it’s impossible.

“The big groups go to the Fillmore East and personally, if I wanted to see them I’d rather go there since you see a show and it’s not too expensive.  I just can’t cover the costs.”

The club was closed from June to September when it re-opened with a benefit headlining Blood, Sweat and Tears.  Havens wanted to turn the Au Go Go in to a showcase for rock in New York, but management difficulties and fiscal problems kept it in the red.

The demise of the Café Au Go Go leaves New York with few rock clubs.  Ungano’s on the Upper West Side continues to prosper, as does The Bitter End in the Vllage.  The East Village’s tacky temple of tourism, the Electric Circus, also remains.  Cheetah caters to the R&B crowd.  Tarot, a new club on Union Square, is attempting to pick up where the Scene left off, and has two dance floors and a liquor license, plus, for better or for worse, the former musical director of  Hair hiring performers.

According to the Streets You Crossed blog, the building seems to have been torn down and replaced by apartments built sometime in the 1980s.

Cafe Au Go Go, New York City 152 Bleecker Street Rock: Performance List January-June 1969 (Au Go Go VIII)

The Cafe Au Go Go, at 152 Bleecker Street in New York City's Greenwich Village, was a critical venue for aspiring rock bands in the 1960s. Whatever the indisputable charms of the West Coast, the commercial and cultural capital of the United States has always been New York City, and bands had to make a good showing in New York if they expected to make it. Perhaps because the venue had no collectible poster art, the club has been somewhat unfairly left out of many rock chronicles, when in fact it played a crucial role in introducing new bands to New York City, and by extension to the whole country.

The iconic New York rock venue has always been Bill Graham's Fillmore East, and rightly so. The Fillmore East only opened in 1968, however, when the rock business had become fairly established. The less imposing Cafe Au Go Go had opened on February 7, 1964. It was a brick room with a low ceiling, long and narrow, and not ideally designed for electric music. Prior to the rock boom, it had been a haven for jazz, folk and comedy performers, but the Cafe Au Go Go became one of the first clubs in Greenwich Village and New York City to regularly book "name" rock acts, particularly from out of town. Within a few short years, it was primarily a rock club, and one of the first places bands had to play for the critical but enthusiastic New York audience.

Thanks to my friend Marc, I have had an excellent list of performers at the Cafe Au Go Go from 1965 to 1969, when it closed. I was lacking much of a context, however, but now that I have discovered the excellent New York City site prosopography blog Its All The Streets You Crossed Not So Long Ago, and its exceptional post on the Cafe Au Go Go, my performers list can be put into some kind of context.

My goal for this series is to list all the rock performers at the Cafe Au Go Go from July 27, 1965 through late 1969, when the club closed. I have included some brief information about where each performer stood at the time each of their Au Go Go performance, such as their current album and lineup, but I have not tried to create exhaustive biographies for each band. I am trying to capture how different bands came through Greenwich Village and New York City in their efforts to succeed. I have listed folk, jazz or other performers but have largely refrained from commenting on them.

The Café Au Go Go was an oddity, a music club that didn’t serve liquor. This made it accessible to underage patrons, but it also meant that there were no bar receipts to rely on when things were slow on the bandstand. By coffee house standards, the Au Go Go was large, with room for 300 to 400 people. However, when the Greenwich Village folk boom started to die down, it became more of a struggle for the club to survive. Electric Rock and Blues acts began to be billed regularly at the Au Go Go in mid-1965, and this list picks up the story there.

This list is mostly drawn from advertisements in the Village Voice and other papers, and a few biographies and other sources when the Au Go Go was mentioned. Like all nightclubs in big cities, who was advertised was not always who appeared. Missing dates are more likely due to a lack of advertising or missing issues of The Village Voice, as the Au Go Go probably presented live music almost every night from 1965-69. It is possible that nights that were not advertised simply featured local groups, but those too may have been of historical interest. The Au Go Go advertised regularly in the Village Voice, and there were occasional flyers around, but there is probably much more to be learned, particularly about opening acts and casual guest appearances.

This is a work in progress. Anyone with additional information, corrections, insights or recovered memories (real or imagined) about any of the rock performers is urged to post it in the Comments or contact me. For ease of navigation, this series will be divided into nine parts (late 1965, early and late 1966, early and late 1967, early and late 1968 and early and late 1969).

Cafe Au Go Go Rock Performers List 
Part I July 27, 1965-December 1965
Part II January 1966-June 1966  
Part III July 1966-December 1966
Part IV January 1967-June 1967 
Part V July 1967-December 1967
Part VI January 1968-June 1968
Part VII July 1968-December 1968
Part VIII January 1969-June 1969


Our information for 1969 is very limited, due mainly to the fact there were not as many ads in the Village Voice. The bookings had skewed away from rising rock bands (who preferred the Fillmore East) to Village locals and Folk acts.

January 3-4, 1969 Tim Hardin

January 7-12, 1969 Ian & Sylvia

January 17-19, 1969 Earth Opera/Soft White Underbelly
Earth Opera were a Cambridge, MA band featuring once and future bluegrassers Peter Rowan and David Grisman. The group recorded two interesting but arch albums for Elektra.

Soft White Underbelly was a Long Island band who ultimately evolved into Blue Oyster Cult.

January 25-31, 1969 Colwell-Winfield Blues Band/Vince Martin
Colwell-Winfield were a Boston group.

February 3-6, 1969 Savoy Brown
Savoy Brown were an established British blues band determined to break into the American market, where they ended up being way more successful than they ever were in the UK. This initial tour (which the Au Go Go advertised with the band's outdated name Savoy Brown Blues Band) would have featured the lineup that recorded Blue Matter (released April 69) and A Step Further (September 69). Besides bandleader Kim Siimonds on lead guitar, the group had ¾ of the future Foghat (guitarist Lonesome Dave Peverett, bassist Tone Stevens and drummer Roger Earl) and lead singer Chris Youlden (pianist Bob Hall rounded out the lineup).

February 21-23, 1969 Danny Kalb Quartet with Roy Blumenfeld/Buzz Linhart

February 27-March 2, 1969 Tim Hardin

March 4-16, 1969 Danny Kalb & His Friends

March 20-29, 1969 Ian & Sylvia/Danny Kalb Quintet/Uncle Dirty
Uncle Dirty was an “adult comedian” who released a 1971 album on Elektra (recorded in 1970 at the Gaslite in Greenwich Village), back when Elektra would sign anyone, including David Peel and The Lower East Side. Uncle Dirty (and David Peel) were popular with at least one New Jersey hoodlum (no doubt tragically corrupted by seeing “Absolutely Free” for his birthday in 1967 at the tender age of 13).

April 2-4, 1969 Tim Hardin

April 5-20, 1969 Bob Gibson/Karen Dalton/Vince Martin (14-20)
Karen Dalton was an established Greenwich Village folkie, though apparently not well known beyond about 23rd Street. She released a Capitol album in 1969, Its Hard To Know Who’s Going To Love You The Best.

April 22-23, 1969 Fred Neil/Great Train Robbery/Uncle Dirty

April 24-27, 1969 Great Train Robbery/Uncle Dirty/Otis Spann
Otis Spann had been Muddy Waters pianist throughout the 1950s and a regular on all Chess sessions. Although an established solo artist by the late 60s, his health had started to fail by this time.

April 29-May 12, 1969 Seatrain
Seatrain, freed of their Blues Project obligations (see July 9, 1968), made their first Sea Train album for A&M, released in 1969.  The Sea Train album is a baroque, eclectic and somewhat rambling album.  I do not know how close either Planned Obsolescence or their debut album was to Sea Train’s live performances.

May 23-25, 29-31, 1969 Tim Hardin

June 6-8, 1969 Tim Hardin

June 10, 1969 Ian & Sylvia
This week the Village Voice advertises “For Lease 150-154 Bleeker Street-World Famous Café Au Go Go-Legal Occupancy Cabaret 285, Theater 200.”

June 20, 1969 Howard Solomon sells the Cafe Au Go Go.

June 24-30, 1969 Jam Thing
This was apparently an improvisational show with invited guests. Steve Elliott and Tim Hardin were featured on the 29th.

for the next installment see here

Cafe Au Go Go, New York City 152 Bleecker Street Rock: Performance List July-December 1968 (Au Go Go VII)

The Cafe Au Go Go, at 152 Bleecker Street in New York City's Greenwich Village, was a critical venue for aspiring rock bands in the 1960s. Whatever the indisputable charms of the West Coast, the commercial and cultural capital of the United States has always been New York City, and bands had to make a good showing in New York if they expected to make it. Perhaps because the venue had no collectible poster art, the club has been somewhat unfairly left out of many rock chronicles, when in fact it played a crucial role in introducing new bands to New York City, and by extension to the whole country.

The iconic New York rock venue has always been Bill Graham's Fillmore East, and rightly so. The Fillmore East only opened in 1968, however, when the rock business had become fairly established. The less imposing Cafe Au Go Go had opened on February 7, 1964. It was a brick room with a low ceiling, long and narrow, and not ideally designed for electric music. Prior to the rock boom, it had been a haven for jazz, folk and comedy performers, but the Cafe Au Go Go became one of the first clubs in Greenwich Village and New York City to regularly book "name" rock acts, particularly from out of town. Within a few short years, it was primarily a rock club, and one of the first places bands had to play for the critical but enthusiastic New York audience.

Thanks to my friend Marc, I have had an excellent list of performers at the Cafe Au Go Go from 1965 to 1969, when it closed. I was lacking much of a context, however, but now that I have discovered the excellent New York City site prosopography blog Its All The Streets You Crossed Not So Long Ago, and its exceptional post on the Cafe Au Go Go, my performers list can be put into some kind of context.

My goal for this series is to list all the rock performers at the Cafe Au Go Go from July 27, 1965 through late 1969, when the club closed. I have included some brief information about where each performer stood at the time each of their Au Go Go performance, such as their current album and lineup, but I have not tried to create exhaustive biographies for each band. I am trying to capture how different bands came through Greenwich Village and New York City in their efforts to succeed. I have listed folk, jazz or other performers but have largely refrained from commenting on them.

The Café Au Go Go was an oddity, a music club that didn’t serve liquor. This made it accessible to underage patrons, but it also meant that there were no bar receipts to rely on when things were slow on the bandstand. By coffee house standards, the Au Go Go was large, with room for 300 to 400 people. However, when the Greenwich Village folk boom started to die down, it became more of a struggle for the club to survive. Electric Rock and Blues acts began to be billed regularly at the Au Go Go in mid-1965, and this list picks up the story there.

This list is mostly drawn from advertisements in the Village Voice and other papers, and a few biographies and other sources when the Au Go Go was mentioned. Like all nightclubs in big cities, who was advertised was not always who appeared. Missing dates are more likely due to a lack of advertising or missing issues of The Village Voice, as the Au Go Go probably presented live music almost every night from 1965-69. It is possible that nights that were not advertised simply featured local groups, but those too may have been of historical interest. The Au Go Go advertised regularly in the Village Voice, and there were occasional flyers around, but there is probably much more to be learned, particularly about opening acts and casual guest appearances.

This is a work in progress. Anyone with additional information, corrections, insights or recovered memories (real or imagined) about any of the rock performers is urged to post it in the Comments or contact me. For ease of navigation, this series will be divided into nine parts (late 1965, early and late 1966, early and late 1967, early and late 1968 and early and late 1969).

Cafe Au Go Go Rock Performers List 
Part I July 27, 1965-December 1965
Part II January 1966-June 1966  
Part III July 1966-December 1966
Part IV January 1967-June 1967 
Part V July 1967-December 1967
Part VI January 1968-June 1968
Part VII July 1968-December 1968


July 1-7, 1968 Blood Sweat and Tears/James Cotton (28th>29th only)
At this point, Al Kooper had left the group, and singer David Clayton-Thomas appears to have already joined. However, they would have still mainly been performing Kooper’s material.

July 9-21, 1968 Seatrain/Albert Ayler
In early 1968, two original Blues Project members, drummer Roy Blumenfield and bassist/flutist Andy Kulberg, reorganized the group and based it in Marin County.  The band featured John Gregory on guitar and vocals (ex-The Gordian Knot and the final lineup of Mystery Trend) and Don Kretmar on bass and saxophone. Sea Train had been formed from the ashes of that last Blues Project.  Violinist Richard Greene had departed the Jim Kweskin Jug Band (based in Cambridge, MA) in the Spring of 1968 to join the Blues Project on the West Coast. For various murky reasons, the group changed their name to Sea Train.  Greene’s classical training and bluegrass sensibility (he had toured with Bill Monroe) gave him a distinct and powerful sound, and his fiddle acted more like a horn in the group.

The Blues Project still owed an album to Verve, so this lineup of Sea Train (Kulberg/Blumenfield/Kretmar/Gregory/Greene) recorded their “first” album as the last Blues Project album with the title Planned Obsolescence, released in December 1968. 

Albert Ayler was a cutting-edge “free jazz” saxophonist (“out there” is just a starting point).

July 23-25, 1968 John Lee Hooker

July 26-27, 1968 Blood Sweat and Tears

August 2-4, 1968 Blood Sweat and Tears/Buzz Linhart
Buzzy Linhart had been the lead guitarist of a Greenwich Village band called The Seventh Sons, who had an obscure album on ESP Records, but he had begun a solo career.

August 6-10, 1968 Blues Magoos/Buzzy Linhart
The Blues Magoos were a Bronx band who had originally been Village regulars who made it big with “(We Ain’t Got) Nothin’ Yet” in 1967. They toured nationally with Herman’s Hermits and The Who in the summer of 1967, but by 68 the band had fallen apart. However, lead singer Peppy Castro put together a new lineup with Erik Kaz on organ, among others, and the band put out another album, but they never recaptured their initial success.

By August of 1968, the Fillmore East was becoming the prime spot for bands in the Village. Although the Cafe Au Go Go still had relationships with certain bands, up and coming groups seemed to prefer being second or third on the bill at Fillmore East to playing the Au Go Go. Probably not coincidentally, by August of 1968 Au Go Go booker Barry Imhoff had moved to San Francisco to work with Bill Graham's talent agency, the Millard Agency.

August 23-25, 1968 Blood Sweat and Tears

August 28-September 2, 1968 Butterfield Blues Band/Buzzy Linhart
The Butterfield Blues Band’s first album without Mike Bloomfield had been recent The Resurrection of Pigboy Crabshaw (released in November 67), which represented a more soulful sound, with a horn section. Their new album was In My Own Dream (August 68), still featuring Elvin Bishop on lead guitar, although Bishop had left the group shortly after these shows and moved to San Francisco to start a recording career.

September 6-7, 1968 Blood Sweat and Tears

September 10-15, 1968 The Nazz/The Wind In The Willows   
The Nazz were a popular group on the Philadelphia psychedelic scene, and featured lead guitarist and songwriter Todd Rundgren. The Wind In The Willows featured a brunette lead singer named Debbie Harry.

September 16, 1968 Tyrannosaurus Rex
This appears not to be the English Tyrannosaurus Rex (see August 15, 1969), who did not play in America until the next year.

September 19-26, 1968 Rhinoceros/John Lee Hooker (20 and 21 only)
Rhinoceros was Elektra’s attempt to put together their own Electric Flag-like “super group”, featuring ex-Iron Butterfly guitarist Danny Weis and ex-Mother Billy Mundi. One of the strange features of their founding was competitive, sports team-like auditions to determine band membership (with Doors producer Paul Rothschild deciding who made the team).  Rhinoceros was playing shows in New York nightclubs to build up a buzz about their forthcoming first album (Elektra Nov 68). Similar to Moby Grape’s experience, although Rhinoceros was a pretty good group, with a sort of heavy rock/R&B sound (midway between Iron Butterfly, Booker T. and The Band), they had great difficulty overcoming their own hype.

The band was originally booked all the way through to Ocotober 19th, but the gig was foreshortened.

September 27-October 5, 1968 Tim Hardin/Van Morrison
Tim Hardin, a Cambridge folkie and ex-Marine, was a bit older than his contemporaries, but according to Richie Unterburger’s excellent book Turn Turn Turn (Backbeat Books 2002), was the first musician to mix folk with a blues rhythm section, and was a huge influence on the likes of The Lovin Spoonful. Hardin became somewhat well-known as a songwriter (“If I Were A Carpenter” and “Reason To Believe”) but his drug and personal problems prevented him from being a real success.

Van Morrison was probably still living in Woodstock at this time and playing with a trio. He was in the midst of recording his immortal Astral Weeks album.

Its possible that Van Morrison was replaced by Rhinoceros, or put another way, that Van Morrison never replaced Rhinoceros, or that all three acts played.

October 12-17, 1968 Moby Grape/Mom's Apple Pie

Moby Grape, despite all their talent, never caught a break. Due to severe personal difficulties, guitarist Skip Spence had left the group and the band was now a four-piece.

A play called "The Moke Eaters" was also presented at the Cafe Au Go Go during this time, probably between Moby Grape and Dino Valenti, and possibly other times as well.

October 30-November 4, 1968 Dino Valenti
Dino Valenti had been an influential Greenwich Village folkie in the early 60s, but had moved to California (supposedly Richie Havens act was modeled on Valenti's). In 1965, Valenti was busted for pot, forcing him to sell the rights to his song “Get Together.” While Valenti was in jail, Quicksilver Messenger Service was formed to provide a backing band for him, but they became successful in their own right. Valenti got out of jail and went solo. This was one of his relatively rare performances outside of San Francisco. Although Valenti did not come off well on rccord, contemporaries such as Paul Kantner speak glowingly of his charisma as a performer.

There is a review of a Rhinoceros show on November 1, 1968, and The Nazz may have played Cafe Au Go Go as well.

November 12-16, 1968 Ian & Sylvia

November 26-December 1, 1968 Blues Bag with Danny Kalb/Richie Havens/Dave Van Ronk/Ultimate Spinach/Big Joe Willaims/Butterfield Blues Band/Bloomfield and Kooper
It is unlikely that Bloomfield and Kooper did any kind of perfomance together, Super Session style. However, it is a reasonable assumption that either or both showed up to jam on various nights. By this time, The Butterfield Blues Band featured Buzzy Feiten on guitar.

December 3-9,1968 Silver Apples and Tommy Flanders (with Danny Kalb 7-9 only)w/Pacific Gas & Electric (5 only). 
Pacific Gas & Electric (later shortened to  P,G&E at the firm request of the California utility) were a Los Angeles based blues rock band who released several albums (on Kent and then Columbia) from 1968 to 1973.

December 20-31, 1968 Tim Hardin

for the next installment see here