"The Dog," "The Denver Dog" | |
Full name | The Family Dog Denver |
---|---|
Location | 1601 West Evans Avenue Denver, Colorado |
Coordinates | 39°40′43.22″N105°0′23.64″W / 39.6786722°N 105.0065667°W |
Owner | Chet Helms, Bob Cohen, Barry Fey |
Opened | September 8, 1967 |
Closed | July 19, 1968 |
The Family Dog Denver (also known as The Family Dog or simply The Dog) was a concert dance hall located at 1601 West Evans Avenue in Denver, Colorado. Opened from September 1967 to July 1968, it is regarded as a seminal music venue [1] that launched Denver on its trajectory to its current status as a major concert destination by introducing never-before-seen acts like The Doors, Van Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Buffalo Springfield, Janis Joplin, Chuck Berry, and many others. Many acts, like The Doors and Van Morrison, for example, had yet to become famous when they played The Dog, evidenced by the poster artists having to stylize the names of their leading songs into the poster art for the shows. The Family Dog is also seen as a cultural turning point in Denver from the conservative, western-minded sensibility of the early and mid-20th century to the current, liberal-minded climate. [2] The venue's history, surrounding drama and ultimate impact had been largely unknown and unrealized until it was unearthed and detailed for the first time in the 2021 documentary The Tale of the Dog , [3] [4] produced and directed by Dan Obarski & Scott Montgomery [5] and distributed by Cinedigm. [6] As there are no useful photos, no video and little written history remaining of the Family Dog Denver, the film's oral history format told in first person by the people who were there serves as a definitive reference for “The Dog.” [7]
Denver, prior to the opening of the Family Dog, was not a major music destination. There had been a modest jazz scene in the Five Points neighborhood which hosted international acts such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. [8] Beginning in the early 1960s there had also been a folk music scene, led by Harry Tuft at the Denver Folklore Center, [9] who brought in the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Judy Collins. [10] Otherwise, most music venues, like the Exodus, Catacombs and The Cave, featured local bands with limited, if any, national exposure.
In early 1967, Barry and Cynthia Fey, who had been booking concert acts like The Association, Alice Cooper and Eric Burdon at the University of Denver, flew with his wife to San Francisco to meet with Chet Helms, co-owner (with Bob Cohen) of Family Dog Productions. At that time Helms was a primary figure in the San Francisco hippie scene, with his Family Dog Productions running the legendary Avalon Ballroom, where he cultivated acts like the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, and Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company.
The Feys brought with him a demo tape of a Denver psychedelic rock band named The Eighth Penny Matter as evidence that the music was popular in Denver and that importing the Haight-Ashbury music scene to Denver could be a successful business venture. They subsequently convinced Helms and Cohen to co-open up a music venue similar to the Avalon Ballroom, in Denver.
The hippie scene had already been germinating in Denver by mid 1967. That summer on Sunday July 30 1967, a Love- In was held in Washington Park. The Love-In was organized by "Great American Tea and Cement Company of Denver," described as “a colony of working hippie artists.” [11] Some of the local Denver bands that played at the Wash Park Love-In included Beggar's Opera Company, Hannigan's Greenhouse, and the Crystal Palace Guard. Odetta closed as the last performer at the Love-In that evening.
In order to jumpstart the Family Dog Denver, Barry Fey, and the leaders of the Dog, including Tony Guillory, James “Butch” Grayer, Marc Arno Richardson, and others, put on a Human Be-In Denver's City Park that summer, modeled on the famed event that took place in San Francisco in January of that year. The goal of the Be-In, in addition to generating interest in the Family Dog Denver, was to organize an event around the common sentiments of that time, including peace, love and brotherhood. Bands that played the Be-In included the Grateful Dead, Odetta, and Captain Beefheart. 5,000 people were reported to have attended.
With the impending opening of the Family Dog Denver, the arrangement was made for each of the concert posters to be done by the legendary San Francisco psychedelic poster artists, including Rick Griffin, Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelley, Victor Moscoso, Bob Schnepf, Bob Fried, and Dennis Nolan.
The first concert at the Dog was Janis Joplin & Big Brother & The Holding Company, Blue Cheer & The Eighth Penny Matter. [12] The poster for the show was designed by Rick Griffin.
As a result of bringing the San Francisco scene directly to Denver, Denver for a brief time had one of the first and potentially biggest, liquid light shows on earth, run by Diogenes Lantern Works and owner Marc Arno Richardson. The liquid light show was a groundbreaking experience where light was projected through textured glass that was filled with colored liquids and onto the walls of the Family Dog while the bands were playing. This was the precursor to the modern concert light show.
A group of musicians from Denver formed the band Lothar and the Hand People in 1965. Using a theremin as their primary instrument, and subsequently being sponsored by Robert Moog, inventor of the synthesizer, Lothar and the Hand People took top billing over The Doors and Captain Beefheart when they played the Family Dog Denver for the first time in 1967. They went on to become enormously influential as one of the pioneers of electronic music and had an outsized impact on the development of rock & roll, with its members opening Electric Lady Land Studios with Jimi Hendrix, and helping to produce some of the most famous rock albums ever made.
As the popularity of the venue exploded that fall, and the so-called hippie phenomenon and drug use that accompanied it became more prevalent around the city, parents and city leaders became concerned and exerted pressure on the police to shut down the Family Dog and eradicate the city of the hippies. Detective John Gray became the face of the police leading the efforts to get a hold of the situation at the Family Dog. This involvement lead to numerous municipal court cases as well as a federal court case.
One of the most controversial and dramatic episodes of the Family Dog's tenure was the bust of Canned Heat for marijuana possession, [13] at the Ranch Motor Inn, located at Santa Fe and Florida Ave, prior to their scheduled show at the Family Dog on October 21, 1967. During this episode, Canned Heat claimed the Denver police planted the drugs on them. The Denver police deny this was the case. In order to pay their bail, Canned Heat signed over their publishing rights to Al Bennet of Liberty Records. Regardless of who was telling the truth, the result was that Canned Heat has never made a dime off of their major hits, including the Woodstock anthem, Going Up the Country. [14]
Due to a combination of pressure from the city and miss-management of funds by the venue, by December 1967, after four months in operation, Family Dog Productions left Denver. After a brief closure, the Feys reopened the Dog and ran it themselves, bringing in acts like Cream, The Byrds Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin.
As Barry Fey's vision grew, The Dog closed and he moved on to become one of the world's biggest and most influential rock promoters. The Feys started Feyline Productions, and helped pioneer and define the era of Rock promotion. Feyline held the 1969 Denver Pop Festival, Cynthia opened up the Denver concert venue Ebbets Field with Chuck Morris. Feyline re-developed Red Rocks Amphitheater into a major concert venue, and opened the Rainbow Music Hall. Along the way Feyline was pivotal in the early promotion of countless bands like Led Zeppelin, Queen and Black Sabbath. Of particular note was Barry's promotion of the 1983 U2 Live at Red Rocks: Under a Blood Red Sky, which has been credited for catapulting U2 to global fame as well as making Red Rocks Amphitheater an internationally recognized music venue. He is also heavily responsible for helping save the Colorado Symphony Orchestra [15] and for a decade-plus long effort to bring Major League Baseball to Denver, [16] which helped land the Colorado Rockies franchise. Barry Fey was inducted into the Colorado Music Hall of Fame in 2012. [17]
According to the primary sources in the documentary The Tale of the Dog, the Family Dog Denver was the genesis of the city's current flourishing, world-class music scene. Specifically, it was Barry and Cynthia Fey's vision of bringing an Avalon Ballroom- type of venue to Denver and successful efforts to convince Chet Helms to open up the Family Dog in Denver that put Denver on the so-called music map permanently. [14]
Janis Lyn Joplin was an American singer and songwriter. One of the most successful and widely known rock performers of her era, she was noted for her powerful mezzo-soprano vocals and "electric" stage presence.
The Summer of Love was a social phenomenon that occurred during the summer of 1967, when as many as 100,000 people, mostly young people sporting hippie fashions of dress and behavior, converged in San Francisco's neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury. More broadly, the Summer of Love encompassed the hippie music, hallucinogenic drugs, anti-war, and free-love scene throughout the West Coast of the United States, and as far away as New York City.
A hippie, also spelled hippy, especially in British English, is someone associated with the counterculture of the 1960s, originally a youth movement that began in the United States during the 1960s and spread to different countries around the world. The word hippie came from hipster and was used to describe beatniks who moved into New York City's Greenwich Village, in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, and Chicago's Old Town community. The term hippie was used in print by San Francisco writer Michael Fallon, helping popularize use of the term in the media, although the tag was seen elsewhere earlier.
Canned Heat is an American blues and rock band that was formed in Los Angeles in 1965. The group has been noted for its efforts to promote interest in blues music and its original artists. It was launched by two blues enthusiasts Alan Wilson and Bob Hite, who took the name from Tommy Johnson's 1928 "Canned Heat Blues", a song about an alcoholic who had desperately turned to drinking Sterno, generically called "canned heat". After appearances at the Monterey and Woodstock festivals at the end of the 1960s, the band acquired worldwide fame with a lineup of Hite (vocals), Wilson, Henry Vestine and later Harvey Mandel, Larry Taylor (bass), and Adolfo de la Parra (drums).
The Human Be-In was an event held in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park Polo Fields on January 14, 1967. It was a prelude to San Francisco's Summer of Love, which made the Haight-Ashbury district a symbol of American counterculture and introduced the word "psychedelic" to suburbia.
The Monterey International Pop Festival was a three-day music festival held June 16 to 18, 1967, at the Monterey County Fairgrounds in Monterey, California. The festival is remembered for the first major American appearances by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Who and Ravi Shankar, the first large-scale public performance of Janis Joplin and the introduction of Otis Redding to a mass American audience.
Big Brother and the Holding Company is an American rock band that formed in San Francisco in 1965 as part of the same psychedelic music scene that produced the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Jefferson Airplane. After some initial personnel changes, the band became well known with the lineup of vocalist Janis Joplin, guitarists Sam Andrew and James Gurley, bassist Peter Albin, and drummer Dave Getz. Their second album Cheap Thrills, released in 1968, is considered one of the masterpieces of the psychedelic sound of San Francisco; it reached number one on the Billboard charts, and was ranked number 338 in Rolling Stone's the 500 greatest albums of all time. The album is also listed in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.
Chester Leo "Chet" Helms, often called the father of San Francisco's 1967 "Summer of Love," was a music promoter and a counterculture figure in San Francisco during its hippie period in the mid- to-late 1960s.
While Denver may not be as recognized for historical musical prominence like such cities as Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago or New York City, it still manages to have a very active popular, jazz, and classical music scene, which has nurtured many artists and genres to regional, national, and even international attention. Though nearby Boulder, Colorado has its own very distinct music scene, they are intertwined and often artists based there also play in Denver.
The Avalon Ballroom was a music venue in the Polk Gulch neighborhood of San Francisco, California, at 1244 Sutter Street. The space is known as the location of many concerts of the counterculture movement, from around 1966 to 1969. It also had a reopening 34 years later, from 2003 to 2005.
The Denver Pop Festival was a three-day music festival promoted by Barry Fey (Feyline) on June 27–29, 1969 which was largely overshadowed by Woodstock two months later. The peak attendance was estimated at 50,000.
Lothar and the Hand People were a late-1960s American psychedelic rock band, known for their spacey music and pioneering use of the theremin and Moog modular synthesizer.
The Atlantic City Pop Festival took place in 1969 on August 1, 2 and 3rd at the Atlantic City race track, two weeks before Woodstock Festival. It actually took place in Hamilton Township at the Atlantic City Race Course. There was heavy security at the festival, and the stage the acts performed on was created by Buckminster Fuller. A ticket for the entire 3-day weekend was $15.00 to see all of the performers listed. Attended by some 100,000+ people.
The hippie subculture began its development as a youth movement in the United States during the early 1960s and then developed around the world.
The Aerodrome was a nightclub located at 1588 State Street in Schenectady, New York.
Barry Fey was an American rock concert promoter from Colorado who was best known for bringing prominent music acts to the United States for the first time.
The Heroes of Woodstock Tour was a North American concert tour celebrating the 40th anniversary of the 1969 Woodstock Festival. The tour featured several bands, most of which performed at the original Woodstock festival or feature members that performed at the festival. The musicians featured differed slightly from venue to venue but most of the concerts featured Jefferson Starship, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Canned Heat, Ten Years After and Tom Constanten. Some dates featured Melanie, Edgar Winter, John Sebastian, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Mountain and the Levon Helm Band. Country Joe McDonald hosted all of the concerts, playing a couple of songs in between the different sets. The tour was widely viewed as a financial failure as attendance proved to be dismal across most of the dates.
The New Orleans Pop Festival was a rock festival held on Labor Day weekend, two weeks after the Woodstock Festival. It was held at the Louisiana International Speedway in Prairieville, Louisiana, about 65 miles up the Mississippi River from New Orleans and 15 miles south of Baton Rouge. Over 26 bands performed during the three days of the festival, including seven veterans of Woodstock. It had a peak attendance of 25,000–30,000 people.
The Tale of the Dog is a documentary film produced and directed by Dan Obarski and Scott Montgomery. The film unearths the story of the Family Dog Denver, a music venue opened in 1967 by Chet Helms' San Francisco-based Family Dog Productions and Barry Fey. The Family Dog was pivotal in changing the cultural course of the city of Denver by bringing in up-and-coming acts like The Doors, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, The Byrds, and many others, subsequently creating a nexus for the hippie movement to flourish in the otherwise western and conservative town. Prior to the documentary this historic episode had been lost to time. The film ends up delivering a broader, previously unknown chapter in the history of the 1960s in America, and in particular that of rock and roll, the blues, psychedelic poster art, and the infamous culture clashes between hippies and mainstream society of that decade. As a result, the film serves as a definitive reference for the significance that the venue and many of the individuals involved in it had on the city and on the rock and roll era.