3138 Fillmore Steet, San Francisco, CA, January 6, 1969: Open Jam with Peter Albin and Dave Getz

(San Francisco Chronicle Datebook listings from Monday, January 6, 1969)

The San Francisco Chronicle Datebook section was full of interesting listings in the 1960s, even if they often only provide tantalizing clues to events that would otherwise have disappeared. San Francisco's Matrix club was one of the few hippie hangouts, and all sorts of surprising events took place there. Ironically, as a hangout rather than a major venue--The Matrix was too small to be "major"--many of the most interesting events seems to have taken place on weeknights. On January 6, 1969, the first Monday of the year, the listings of openings (above) are topped by this one:

ROCK CLUB--Peter Albin and David Getz in an open jam session at The Matrix, 3138 Fillmore.

Peter Albin and Dave Getz were the bassist and drummer, respectively, of Big Brother and The Holding Company. Big Brother had just broken up in late 1968, when Janis Joplin had left the group. Janis had not been an original member, but she rapidly eclipsed the group itself, and when their 1968 album Cheap Thrills became a mega-hit, Janis ended up leaving the band behind. The rocket ride from underground hipsters to National rock stars had been very hard on some of the band members, and Big Brother did not survive her departure. Janis Joplin and Big Brother played their last show at the Avalon Ballroom on December 1, 1968. Afterward, guitarist Sam Andrew continued on with Janis's new band, while fellow guitarist James Gurley took some time out from making music. Albin and Getz were left adrift.

I had known from various Family Trees and the like that Albin and Getz started jamming together in early 1969. David Nelson, an old South Bay friend of Albin, was known to be one of the participants. Nelson's group The New Delhi River Band had ground to a halt in early 1968, so he too was at loose ends. A few other musicians are vaguely alleged to have jammed with Albin and Getz, but it was difficult to ascertain. However, until I found this listing, I had no idea that Albin and Getz had led any kind of public performance. Who played with them? What did they play?

From 1968 onwards, at least, Monday night was usually "jam night" at the Matrix. A local band or musician would host a jam session. Usually someone was the host for many Monday nights in a row, but sometimes individual musicians or bands would host a single Monday night session. Monday night was a very thin night for performances, so in many ways it was like "musicians night out." When you read about various rumors about famous San Francisco players sitting in at the Matrix, often as not it turns out to have been on a Monday night. Also, to some extent the term "jam" implied as much that the show wouldn't be "regular" rather than specifically that there was a jam. Thus if a group of players wanted to work on something different in public, billing it as a "jam" implied that you wouldn't be seeing a regular set.

In any case, you know what I know. Albin and Getz, who had probably been jamming with their friends somewhere, led a jam session at The Matrix. I would suspect David Nelson was there, since he has acknowledged hanging out with them at the time, but even that is just a guess. Albin and Getz knew everybody and were well liked, and on a Monday night in January almost no musican in San Francisco was working, so absolutely anyone could have played with them.

Tantalizing as this event was, it doesn't seem to have been repeated. The next weekend, January 13, the bill wasn't Albin and Getz--it was "Carlos Santana And Friends," if anything even more fascinating. The next two Mondays (Jan 20 and Jan 27) were not listed in the Chronicle, so while there may have been even better shows, we don't know anything about them. Needless to say, anyone with insights, recovered memories (real or imagined) or amusing speculation is encouraged to chime in.

Postscript: I am no expert on this, but it is plausible that "The Commodores" who are playing at Nero's Nook in Palo Alto, were in fact the Lionel Richie-led band from Tuskegee, AL, who hit it very big in the 1970s. They did sign to Atlantic in 1968, and Nero's Nook, at the swanky Cabana Hyatt House, would be the sort of supper club engagement Atlantic might have tried to find for them.

Matrix, 3138 Fillmore Street San Francisco, CA Lightnin' Hopkins, JC Burris, Jean Ball: October 1, 1965

I have posted this review from Rag Baby magazine (Vol 1, No. 2 - October 1965) as it provides a good insight in to the structure of the performances at the Matrix shortly after it opened on August 13. The article is uncredited but I am pretty certain that it was written by ED Denson, who would go on to help shape the careers of Country Joe and The Fish. The only changes I have made to the review are a minor edit to the first paragraph, the addition of the graphics and the amendment of Lightning to Lightnin'. Otherwise the review has stood the test of time for nearly 45 years.

Lightnin’ Hopkins opened at the Matrix, a folk club, to a varied audience. The hippies turned out, and were mixed with the collegiate crowd and a few people who looked society. A few blacks were here and there in the audience - almost all in the collegiate or society categories. The emcee asked Lightnin’ how to introduce him: "just say an old blues singer". But when he hit the stage he was king. He slowly and carefully made certain that everything was set as he wanted it, and between numbers for the first half of the set he had his manager or one of the club owners come up and make adjustments on the amplifier, or move things around on the stage.

The set opened with a fast rocker, and then a Chicago sounding modern blues. Slowing down the pace he played a really fine version of "Baby Please Don't Go" - the audience was beginning to yell now when he hit long notes - and then he dropped into a really slow blues. He was playing flashily: hitting slam chords at the ends of measures, picking the bass strings all the way up the neck, moving his hands all over the gui tar, striking long slow "soul" notes, and mak-ing those incredible long runs which are his trademark. The audience was picking up on it. Cries of "play it baby" rang out, and J. C. Burris - a long time friend of Lightnin's - was whooping and yelling from his seat by Lightnin's wife. When the number stopped the requests began to come in, and he played "It’s Mighty Crazy (how they keep on rubbing at the same old thing)" - a bawdy novelty piece. The next request was for "Rocky Mountain", a blues with mediocre lyrics , and then the set was closed with a fast finger-picking piece Lightnin’ calls "The Old Folks Dance". It is a raggy song in the style of John Hurt or Mance Lipscomb, and is a half-joking put-down. Lightnin’ picked so fast that the notes blended in the amplifier and sounded like a horn. The audience was wild.

During the break the house, which had been jammed, cleared somewhat and Lightnin’ sat at his table talking to his wife, cousin, and J.C. Burris, surrounded by an entourage which had swollen to 12, all drinking free as the performer's party. Jean Ball played, and then J.C. Burris, and the audience was warmed up. When Lightnin’ got back on the stage the house was full and excited. This time he gave them a set with messages in it. He started with a genre song:

I don't want your woman, mister,
please don't mess with mine.
She's bowlegged and knock-kneed
and she sticks out behind,
but she's mine.

and the audience really dug it. They laughed so much they could hardly hear the words. He followed it with a song about J.C. Burris. The audience laughed thru the first half of it before they realized that he was serious when he said they should help J.C. out when they could. "You know when a man got to leave all he's got, that's hard". He was talking between the verses, telling about J. C. losing his house in New York, and his family. J.C. would yell "that's right" periodically and nudge the boy at the next table so that he would give him another glass of beer.

The mood lightened with "Mojo Hand" and you could see people in the audience intently following every note, every twist and turn in these Hopkins runs. They were yelling comments now, and after the song requests came in thick, Lightnin’ joked about wigs for a while and then sang "Deep Sea Diver", the party song for the set. Once the listeners realized what it was about they howled, and then Lightnin’ got serious again.

In the afternoon he had told the reporter that he was born in a field, and had spent his youth travelling in wagons, and now he was afraid of airplanes. Whereas the younger generation had it easy - they had been born into a modern world, and their parents had enough money to send them to college. "If I had gone to college ..." he began. But "some people hold guitars in their hands and some people hold pencils". The gulf had been deeper than Lightnin’ had realized, for the reporter had grown up in Chicago and never heard of Howling Wolf, or Little Walter, or Sonny Boy Williamson - his parents wouldn't let him go into the section of town where the blues clubs were. Anyway Lightnin’ was still thinking about his childhood that evening, and he played a piece that never stopped rocking, and yet was one of the most beautiful blues I have heard. He told about being a child and peeping into his girlfriend's house and seeing her asleep in the moonlight. "Mean Old Frisco" followed, and then Lightnin’ sang another song about his childhood. This time it was about picking cotton in the hot sun and watching his mother tally up the day's wages for the family. When he got up to end the set the audience cheered and called for at least a full minute while Lightnin’ hesitated. He sat down again, played a take-off on Ray Charles, and then left the stage.

On the way back to Berkeley he talked about J. C- Burris.

660 Great Highway, San Francisco August 26, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway: Great SF Light Show Jam

 

This paragraph from Ralph J. Gleason's column in the August 25, 1969 San Francisco Chronicle says

Tomorrow night at the Family Dog on The Great Highway there will be a lightshow spectacular--The Great SF Light Show Jam--with 13 different light shows and taped music from three years of unissued tapes from the Matrix including tapes of Big Brother, Steve Miller, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver Messenger Service

I had seen the Great SF Light Show Jam listed on various obscure flyers and thought little about it, since Light Shows are inherently of the moment. The idea that the Light Shows were performing to years of unissued live shows recorded at the Matrix--well, that's something else entirely.

Now, various Matrix tapes have circulated over the years, and I wouldn't be surprised if the ones that were used for the Family Dog show were the ones that we have already heard. Still, its a really intriguing thought. And the tapes must have sounded awfully good, not degraded (since so little time had passed) and blasted over a real concert sound system.

Sic transit gloria psychedelia. 

Update: The event seems to have been repeated a month later (on Thursday, September 25, 1969). Given the description, I don't think new tapes were added to the mix (since other, non-Matrix, tapes were used also), but its still interesting to think about (the clip is from Ralph Gleason's SF Chronicle column, September 24, 1969).

3138 Fillmore Street, San Francisco The Matrix pre-opening

This paragraph from Perry Phillips's Night Sounds column in the August 13, 1965 Oakland Tribune may be the earliest listing of The Matrix in print--at the minimum it was one of the first.  Phillips's column was a typical sort found in Daily newspapers at the time. On Tuesdays and Fridays, Phillips would survey the week's entertainment options, covering nightclubs, restaurants and special events. While the major focus was on Oakland and nearby towns, he also made some mention of goings on in San Francisco, Lake Tahoe and Reno. The coverage was generally positive and skewed heavily towards Tribune advertisers, but someone like Phillips clearly enjoyed going out most nights and liked a wide variety of music, entertainment and food. Obviously hoping to encourage the Matrix to become a Tribune advertiser, he wrote

A new nightclub opens tonight in San Francisco, the Matrix. It will feature a combination of folk and rock-and-roll music. Matrix' owners are opening the club for the specific purpose of promulgating the folk art but will divert occasionally to jazz and comedy. When I asked about the unusual name, they told me Matrix means "a place where something of value originates and develops." If the club lives up to this definition, it will be a huge success. The Maitrix [sic] is at 3138 Fillmore Street.

Although this prose is typical of Entertainment columns in daily newspapers at the time, in this specific instance there was a large amount of truth. The Matrix was founded by Marty Balin and his father Joe, and they intended the pizza-and-beer joint primarily as a place for Marty's new group The Jefferson Airplane to perform. As the first "long-hair" joint in San Francisco, it featured the San Francisco debuts and critical early performances of many great bands, like the Great Society, Quicksilver Messenger Service (under another name) and Big Brother and The Holding Company.

Although the rock market rapidly outgrew the Matrix, it was still a primary stop for new bands, and a hangout for established groups on weeknights. The list of performerances at The Matrix reads like a Who's Who of San Francisco rock bands of the time. While The Matrix was never the financial success that Perry Phillips suggested, it was indeed "a place where something of value originates and develops," and its legendary status is assured. In the context of the page of advertisements where Perry Phillips column appeared so many years ago, I thought I would highlight some of the other establishments, to show how different the Matrix truly was at the time. All of these scans are from the same page as Phillips column in the August 13, 1965 Oakland Tribune.

Ann's New Mo, a club that has utterly mystified me for some time, was a few miles from downtown and seemed to feature Swing Dancing and Jazz. I cannot fathom what "New Mo" referred to, and the iconography only became stranger later in the 1960s.

The Ali Baba (at Grand and Webster) and The Sands Ballroom (at 19th and Broadway, near what is now the BART Station) had persisted since the Swing Era. In fact, had any promoter been willing to put on rock shows at either venue, Bill Graham and Chet Helms would have had formidable competitors, but it was not to be. The Sands, at 1933 Broadway, had been known as McFadden's when Benny Goodman rolled into town in August 1935, and the club made his career.

Cal Silva's Hitchen Post, on the Northern edge of Oakland at San Pablo and 61st St (1850 San Pablo), had a sort of Western Swing motif (connected to his similar venue in Hayward), but at this time it featured Go Go dancers, apparently in bikinis. Performing were the rockin' Au Go Gos. Although the place was probably a fun joint to go to, the iconography suggests a kind of rocked up Cowboy bar, with twanging Telecasters and a lot of honky tonk gals.

The It Club, much farther North on the other side of Berkeley in low-down El Cerrito (on San Pablo and Central Avenues, near the Bay), was presenting an "All Bosom Revue," with "Girls direct from the PLAYBOY CLUB in L.A." Song stylist David Thornton appears to have been providing the music.

If you were thinking of food, why not go to Zombie Village? "Lunches-Dinners, Cantonese and American Cuisine," per the ad. Mmm--Zombies! 6485 San Pablo was near San Pablo and Alcatraz, close to Emeryville and Aquatic Park (and the Hitchen Post). The place advertised in the Tribune for years--no one has ever explained the appeal of a Chinese restaurant called "Zombie Village," but there are many things we don't understand about the 60s.

Ravazza's was an Italian restaurant that had been across from the old Oakland Oaks (Pacific Coast League) baseball park, at 41st and San Pablo in Emeryville. Alone among the advertisers listed here, it actually survived until the 1980s, and I actually ate there. It was mostly a pizza place by then, but it was like stepping into a time machine, with pictures of PCL players like Joe DiMaggio and Billy Martin on the walls, smiling in pictures from the very same tables (with the same decor) that you were sitting at. Ravazza's was torn down to provide a parking lot for the Card Club across the street (The Oaks Club, on the site of the old stadium), although the last three letters of its sign were used by Zza's Tratoria. Zza's opened in the mid-1980s, and it was a fine place--and no doubt still is--located at 552 Grand Avenue in Oakland (across from Lake Merritt), a final tenuous link to its predecessor.

This was the context of The Matrix, on August 13, 1965. To a Tribune reader, its competitors would have been The All Bosom Revue, a Cowboy Go Go joint, some old Swing Music, a Zombie Village, an ancient Italian restaurant across from a long-gone landmark. Knowing what we know now, the Matrix was far and away the best choice that week, a place where something of value would originate and develop. Ironically enough, this was the only mention (to my knowledge) of The Matrix in the Tribune, as they did not advertise in the paper and were thus ignored in future columns, but Perry Phillips got it right the first time. Right across the bay, something of value was originating and developing,  starting with the Jefferson Airplane and followed closely by the rest of the sixties.

Research continues on the Zombie Village.

412 Broadway, San Francisco, CA: The Matrix Iggy and The Stooges/The Tubes October 31, 1973

San Francisco's Matrix is best known as the club originally backed by Jefferson Airplane vocalist Marty Balin, and through the 1960s it was the local venue for all the Fillmore bands on their way up or their night off. Located at 3138 Fillmore Street, in the Marina District, it was an essential part of San Francisco rock history. There was also a little known second incarnation of The Matrix, however, at 412 Broadway.

The first Matrix closed in early 1971. Original Matrix owner/operator Peter Abram (along with John Barsotti and Dave Martin) re-opened the club at a new site in late Summer 1973 . Although the second Matrix was not really a success, there were a number of good shows there in the second half of 1973. The New York Dolls played there in September (Sep 4-6), and the then-unknown Bob Marley and The Wailers played some legendary gigs there in October (Oct 19-20, 29-30).

In retrospect, an equally legendary gig has to have been the Halloween 1973 show featuring Iggy and The Stooges and The Tubes. The ad (from the Fremont Argus of October 26, 1973) says "Halloween Party with Iggy and The Stooges, The Tubes and Sugardaddy." Iggy Stooge--as he was known in those days--was a notorious engine of destruction. His new album Raw Power featured original Stooges Scott Asheton on drums and Ron Asheton (on bass), along with new guitarist James Williamson (whose presence nudged Ron Asheton over to bass). Iggy's stage act typically featured frenzied madness and self-mutilation. If I remember correctly--I cannot find the direct reference--Joel Selvin's review (he was the SF Chronicle rock critic) could barely describe the lunacy of Iggy's show, including a young lady in the audience performing a certain act (which wasn't described). Iggy soon ended up in the Hospital.

The Tubes would become one of San Francisco's rock legends within 18 months, but at the time they were just hard rocking nuts from Phoenix. They had originally been called The Beans when they arrived in San Francisco, but they changed their name and morphed into a parody of a deranged hard rock band, complete with costumes, props and dancers. In 1973, still playing the local clubs, they were much sloppier players, with low-rent props and stunts, but that of course added to the "performance art" aspect of portraying a deranged and debauched hard rock band with pretensions towards English glam rock. The band that would perform on their debut album (and next several) in 1975 was already intact, including future Grateful Dead keyboardist Vince Welnick.

The new Matrix did not last much beyond this show--and indeed how could you top a week of the Wailers, Graham Central Station (on the 26th and 27th, above) and then Iggy and The Stooges with The Tubes? The venue became a soul club called The Soul Train (after the TV show), and then hosted a play called Bullshot Crummond (which I believe I saw) and finally from 1980 to 1990 it was The Stone. The Stone was linked to the Keystone Berkeley and Keystone Palo Alto, and was an important part of the Bay Area rock scene in the 1980s.

Currently the venue is the home of a club called Broadway Showgirls Cabaret (don't google it at work).