March 7, 1982 The Saddle Rack, San Jose, CA: Jerry Garcia Band KFAT Fat Fry (FM XIX)

 

Patrons at the Saddle Rack in San Jose, ca 2001

March 7, 1982 The Saddle Rack, San Jose, CA: Jerry Garcia Band KFAT Fat Fry (FM XIX)
Melvin Seals played organ in the Jerry Garcia Band from 1981 until 1995, playing with Garcia for several hundred shows.  Yet Seals was only on a Garcia radio broadcast a single time, on KFAT-fm from Gilroy, CA, recorded at an Urban Cowboy bar called The Saddle Rack, in San Jose. The entire time that Seals played with Garcia, both Garcia and the Grateful Dead became a greater and greater attraction. Yet Garcia radio broadcasts became a thing of the past, so Melvin only participated in that single one. In many ways, the early '82 period showed the Jerry Garcia Band at a crossroads, on the verge of separating itself from any normal part of the 20th century music industry. This post will examine how the Jerry Garcia Band not only came to play the Saddle Rack--a Silicon Valley joint that nonetheless had live, actual bulls in a stockade--but to see how it came to be broadcast on the radio.

Jerry Garcia Band: Status Report, 1982
In 1982, the Grateful Dead were not in a good financial way. Their concerts were still fairly lucrative, but they were carrying a lot of staff and had expensive gear, so profits were probably not high. Their record sales had cratered, too, so royalties were not adding to the bottom line. Songwriters would still be getting a little money, but with record sales down, their fortunes were not swelling. Also, by the early 1980s, none of the Grateful Dead or their extended family wanted to live commune style on an old ranch. They all wanted a somewhat middle class life in a house with their family members and a car that worked, so their expectations of what was a reasonable to receive as compensation would have been higher than it was a dozen years earlier. The Grateful Dead members, crew and staff were generally hurting for cash. 

The Jerry Garcia Band had gigged steadily throughout 1981, ending their year with a substantial Eastern tour in November. In late December, the Jerry Garcia Band had started recording at Club Front, and they would continue recording through February, in between some Grateful Dead shows. The JGB played just a few shows in early 1982, two at the Old Waldorf, two at the Catalyst in Santa Cruz, and five at the various Keystones (Berkeley, Palo Alto and The Stone). On Wednesday, March 3, the band had played an afternoon show at a tiny (300 capacity) room at San Francisco State. 

Unknown to most fans at the time (certainly unknown to me), "Jerry Garcia Band" was not just a name under which a band was booked, but a corporate partnership between Garcia, John Kahn and Ron Tutt, dating back to 1975. Originally the LLC had included pianist Nicky Hopkins, but he had been written out when he left the group at the end of '75. The Jerry Garcia Band had released one album, the poorly-received Cats Under The Stars on Arista. Tutt had stopped performing with the band before the album was even released, and I don't know whether this was directly related to the death of Tutt's other employer, Elvis Presley. Buzz Buchanan and then others had taken over the drum chair in the meantime.

The Fall '81 Jerry Garcia Band tour had stood out not least because Ron Tutt had returned to the band on drums. I can remember calling the Grateful Dead Hotline and hearing (I think) Steve Marcus announce the tour as "The Return of Ronnie Tutt." Drummer Daoud Shaw had left the band at the end of the Summer, Bill Kreutzmann had briefly filled in, and Tutt came on board for the big East Coast tour. When Garcia had returned to the stage, however, for three Keystone shows in December, 1981, I asked someone who went and he assured me that Kreutzmann had played drums. Did this mean Billy was just the filler for local gigs, or that Tutt was out of the band? In retrospect, it looks like Kreutzmann was just intended as a fill-in drummer for local gigs, but Tutt ultimately left the group without making any more live appearances with the Jerry Garcia Band.

Run For The Roses Sessions at Le Club Front
The Jerry Garcia Band still existed as a company, and it appears that Garcia and Kahn were bringing back Tutt in order to record. There were Club Front sessions intermittently between September 1981 and February 1982. Tutt played on the tracks that were released on Run For The Roses, but I don't know exactly when he was recording. Given that Bill Kreutzmann drummed for the Garcia Band in September and December 1981, its possible that Bill had some involvement in the sessions, but more likely in a rehearsal role.

The Run For The Roses album would not be released until Fall 1982, and the release was confusing to fans. We now know that while 5 of the tracks were recorded in 1981, two of them were 1974 outtakes from Compliments Of Garcia. That wasn't clear from the album credits, however, and to contemporary record buyers (like me) it had appeared that Merl Saunders had been invited to Garcia Band sessions, even though he hadn't played with Garcia since Reconstruction in 1979. It is difficult to explain how little information there was about the Jerry Garcia Band at the time. A few insiders may have known (or figured out) that Roses included two outtakes from the prior album, but it was largely unknown when the record came out.

Based on a Jake Feinberg interview with Melvin Seals from just a few years ago, it appears that Ron Tutt was surprised at what bad shape Garcia was in. Now, sure, Tutt was no innocent, and he had toured with Elvis, so he wasn't naive about the pressure on rock stars. Certainly the Garcia of 1975 through 1977 hadn't adhered to any kind of clean living. But Tutt was still surprised, and did not stick around. As far as I can tell, Tutt did perform on the October tour, and recorded the basic tracks (probably in 1981), but had left the band by the beginning of 1982. I assume that the release of Run For The Roses as a "Jerry Garcia Band" album was the vehicle for Tutt exiting the partnership with Garcia and Kahn. 

For the purposes of this post, however, it's important to remember that in the Spring of 1982, Garcia was still looking to make a viable proposition out of the Jerry Garcia Band as a recording and performing entity in line with the music industry orthodoxy of the time. The Garcia Band was recording an album for a major label, and was at least thinking about how they might present the album to the record-buying public.

Jerry Garcia FM Broadcasts
Live FM broadcasts were an essential part of the Grateful Dead's history, and their Fall 1971 tour was an integral component in making the band a long-lasting phenomenon. Most early 70s bands (or their management, anyway), wrung their hands in anxiety that any FM broadcast might create a bootleg LP. The Dead, while no fans of bootlegs, nonetheless benefited hugely from the bootleg phenomenon. For major market FM broadcasts, however, the critical component was a record company willing to compensate the radio station for lost advertising time. Warner Brothers had shown themselves willing to do that in 1971, and the Dead--and Deadheads--had been the beneficiaries.

The Jerry Garcia ensembles of the early 1970s did not have the backing of any major record company. Yet Garcia managed to play on the radio anyway, due to a combination of the unique conventions of Bay Area rock radio, and Garcia's own willingness to appear live on the air. KSAN-fm regularly broadcast live shows, mostly from local studios, and some other stations followed suit. So the Garcia-Saunders ensemble and Old And In The Way had appeared live somewhat regularly around the Bay Area, thanks to these practices.

Another Bay Area practice, probably somewhat related to KSAN's habits, was that local college stations also broadcast shows live. Stanford's station KZSU, for example, just had a 10-watt signal that could  only be heard on campus and in Palo Alto, but Garcia was willing to allow broadcasts on the station (not surprising, when you find out that Garcia had been broadcast live on KZSU since 1963). Old And In The Way also had some broadcasts on other local college stations, in a nod to the post-WW2 tradition of bluegrass bands. So even without record company backing, live Garcia was not without a presence of FM radio.

Once Garcia became a solo artist on Arista Records, the Jerry Garcia Band had a live FM broadcast in Washington DC on March 18, 1978. I assume that Arista supported this, even though the 1978 show was prior to the release of Cats Under The Stars. I think Clive Davis had a long enough view to see that Garcia's appeal was over a long period of time, so he made sure there was a broadcast.

KFAT-fm, 94.5 Gilroy, CA
The Jerry Garcia Band show from the Saddle Rack in San Jose was recorded on March 7, 1982, and broadcast on KFAT-fm, out of Gilroy, CA, as part of an ongoing series called The Fat Fry. The tale of KFAT is hard to imagine these days, and I can only sketch it out. Suffice to say, the KFAT Fat Fry appealed to fans in the range of KSAN and the Bay Area tradition of live rock broadcasts, and it was largely self-supporting. Thus a band did not require support from their record company. My guess is that the Garcia Band was offered a lucrative gig at the Saddle Rack, in return for allowing the show to be broadcast throughout San Jose and the South Bay. Unlike many acts, FM broadcasts were always fine with Garcia. It would have been a good paying show and broadcasting was normal for him. Who knew that it would be the last live broadcast of a Jerry Garcia Band show?

The Keystone Palo Alto broadcast a live show on KFAT every Monday night back in the late 70s and early 80s, as part of The Fat Fry. KFAT was a legendary psychedelic country station in then-tiny Gilroy, CA (pre-Cisco Systems), whose story is too bizarre to believe (read it and weep--radio was like this once, but only once). Every Monday night a local live attraction would play the Keystone Palo Alto and their first set would be broadcast on KFAT, audible all over the South Bay, and even in South Berkeley if you were lucky. To some extent, this was to advertise the bands themselves, and to some extent this was to promote the Keystone Palo Alto.

KFAT broadcast a quirky mix of country, blues, old-timey music, raunchy comedy, bluegrass, Hawaiian, and whatever struck the fancy of the disc jockey. It was on the air from mid-1975 to January 1983 at 94.5 FM. From high atop Mt. Loma Prieta (site of the famous 1989 earthquake) near San Jose, its signal reached to the edge San Francisco to south of Monterey and east to the Sierra Nevada mountains. Some of the original KFAT staff carries on the tradition (updated for the 21st Century) at KPIG in Freedom, CA (107-oink-5 fm). KFAT wasn't really audible in San Francisco, and reception was sketchy in South Berkeley (and non-existent further North). So the real audience was the greater San Jose, Santa Cruz and Monterey areas, back before the area was dominated by well-off Silicon Valley suburbs. It wasn't exactly rural--although there were some farms and ranches--but it wasn't really suburban either. 

On December 5, 1977, the headliner for the second-ever Monday Fat Fry had been Robert Hunter and Comfort. They brought along Bob Matthews and Betty Cantor (Hunter name-checked them from the stage) to ensure a great sound. They performed a complete version of Hunter's "Alligator Moon" suite. Since Hunter never allowed the Comfort version of the suite to be released, the live Fat Fry version remains the definitive recording. As at any Fat Fry from that era, the first set was broadcast, and Hunter encourages the listening audience to come down to Keystone Palo Alto for the second set. So the Dead family, if not actually Garcia, was familiar with the Fat Fry, and must have been positively disposed.

A promotional belt buckle for KEEN, San Jose (1370am). "Country Music 24 Hours A Day"

San Jose and The San Jose Country Music Scene
San Jose had initially been a medium-sized California city, but in the 1960s it underwent explosive growth. At a time when San Francisco's population growth was capped by geographic limitations, the flat plain of the Santa Clara Valley was custom-made for suburbs. San Jose boomed, and the suburban cities around it (Santa Clara, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Campbell and others) expanded as well. Given that the city was full of teenagers, its no surprise that San Jose had a thriving rock scene in the 1960s, even if much of it was somewhat self-contained. Certainly the Grateful Dead and all the other San Francisco bands regularly played outdoor and indoor shows in San Jose, because it was too lucrative not to. 

Comparative Population (Census Data)
Census    San Francisco    San Jose
1960        740,316             204,196
1970        715,674             459,913
1980        678,974             629,400
1990        723,959             782,248
2019        881,547            1,019,995

Come the 1970s, however, while San Jose was bigger than ever, the rock market had regionalized. Rock promotions were focused on San Francisco and Berkeley, mostly at shows promoted by Bill Graham Presents. Rock fans from San Jose or the nearby suburbs had to expect to get in their cars (or their parents' cars) and drive to Winterland, Berkeley Community Theater or Oakland Coliseum to see big rock shows. There were a few venues in San Jose, but there weren't that many memorable rock shows. 

As far as the 1970s went, Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead had each played a show at the San Jose Civic Auditorium in 1972, the Jerry Garcia Band had played Cupertino in 1975 and the Grateful Dead had played the San Jose State football stadium in 1979, but that was about it. Jerry Garcia and The Grateful Dead had played Palo Alto and Stanford in the 70s, so San Jose Deadheads had some opportunities, but Palo Alto wasn't San Jose, and everybody knew it.

By 1982, San Jose was not only booming, it was getting wealthy. The early harvests of microprocessors had made Silicon Valley increasingly prosperous. It is a long-forgotten fact that the original coinage of "Silicon Valley" was a play on the Santa Clara Valley. The Santa Clara Valley had been a prosperous agricultural area since the mid-19th century, and up through the 1960s, San Jose had basically been a farm town. All of the farms and ranches throughout the greater South Bay bought their feed and tractors in San Jose. The Bay Area's biggest country radio station was KEEN-1370-AM, out of San Jose. When Bob Weir and Jerry Garcia talk about hearing country music on the radio growing up, they were talking about KEEN. As far as the Bay Area was concerned, San Jose was a farm town, and a big city like San Francisco or a college town like Palo Alto was always going to look down on San Jose. San Jose got no cultural respect from anywhere else in the Bay Area, and once rock music became "Art," that was true of rock as well. 

Don Cox, owner of Cowtown in San Jose, had a local hit with "Crazy Gringo" in 1976

As it happened, however, and not surprisingly, San Jose was the heartbeat of a thriving country music scene since at least World War 2. Not only was there KEEN, but there were numerous venues and bars for country and honky tonk music. This was true well into the 1970s. Among the biggest country music venues in San Jose was Cowtown, at 1584 Almaden, opened in the late 1950s by local country singer Don Cox. Cowtown had a house band, playing music for dancing and sometimes backing visiting country stars. Cowtown was open on Almaden up through the early 80s, and when it closed Cox re-branded his other joint, Sam's Club (over on Monterey Road), as Cowtown, and the successor stayed open until 1988.

In fact, there were a few Grateful Dead connections to Cowtown. In the early 1970s, one of the regular pedal steel guitarists in the house band was Bobby Black. The story goes that Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen heard Black--they may have been booked at Cowtown--and were so impressed that they ended up hiring him in 1972. In 1978, Black would spend a year in the New Riders of The Purple Sage, after Buddy Cage quit (and before Cage returned). Black was a fine steel player, with a more pronounced Western Swing style than Cage. It was Black on pedal steel with the Riders when they opened for the Grateful Dead on the night Winterland closed, New Year's Eve 1978.

A more intriguing Cowtown connection, however, involved Garcia's old pal Peter Grant. According to Grant, back in '64 or so, when Grant and Garcia were in the Black Mountain Boys together (Grant on dobro, Garcia on banjo), they were driving around in Garcia's Corvair when they hear Buck Owens' new hit "Together Again," with the great pedal steel ride by the Buckaroos' Tom Brumley. Both Grant and Garcia agreed on the spot that they each had to learn pedal steel. Although Garcia had bought a Fender pedal steel in 1967, he sold it because he couldn't keep it in tune, so Grant had learned the instrument first. It was Grant that played pedal steel on "Rosemary" on Aoxomoxoa. 

By April 1969, however, Garcia had bought a Zane Beck Double-Ten (ZB10) pedal steel at Guitar City in Lakewood, CO. He had started to play it with John Dawson, then the Grateful Dead and then the New Riders. He also played some sessions on some rock albums, including the Jefferson Airplane's Volunteers and "Teach Your Children" by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. By 1970, the New Riders were turning into a serious enterprise, and for his own Garcia-reasons, Jerry bought a new Emmons DB 10. So--being Jerry--he called up Grant and asked him if he wanted his earlier one. Grant owned a pedal steel guitar, but it wasn't nearly as good as the ZB10 that Garcia was moving on from, so he gladly said yes.

Peter Grant and Jerry Garcia's old ZB10 Pedal Steel Guitar at Cowtown in San Jose, ca 1974

By the mid-70s, Peter Grant was a regular member of the house band at Cowtown. Grant was a full-time musician, and though he went on tour once in a while (with Hoyt Axton, for example), he lived in San Jose and his main gig was Cowtown. And so it came to pass that Jerry Garcia's legendary ZB10 was live at 1584 Almaden Avenue in San Jose at a honky tonk bar many nights of the week in the mid-70s, just as it was intended. Garcia never played Cowtown, but his steel guitar was regularly in the house. 

The Saddle Rack opened on August 13, 1976, at Lincoln and Auzerais Avenues, near downtown. Unexpected as it may have seemed, in the heart of early Silicon Valley, it was a savvy move to open a Cowboy bar in urban San Jose. True, San Jose had not really been a Feed And Seed hub for some years, and many of the former orchards in San Jose were now housing developments. Thanks to San Jose's inferiority complex towards Palo Alto and San Francisco, however, the city was an attractive place to live for the kind of guy who worked in a factory and liked Merle Haggard. 

It's largely forgotten now that the first wave of Silicon Valley, from the early 60s onward, was oriented towards manufacturing. There were a lot of factories, and the men and women who worked there didn't have advanced degrees from Stanford. When that bell rang at 5:00pm, they wanted a cold one, dim lights, thick smoke and loud, loud music. The Saddle Rack hit the mark, and was an instant hit. The 1980 Urban Cowboy movie, with John Travolta, captured this dynamic in Texas a few years later, but it was already in full force at the Saddle Rack.

According to a 2001 Fare-Thee-Well retrospective of the Saddle Rack in the San Jose Metro, Travolta's Urban Cowboy movie supercharged the atmosphere at the Rack. The club's manager said "At the time the movie came out, it moved from a little country bar into a massive, and I mean massive, country bar." The Saddle Rack had a mechanical bull, and for a year or two, they even had some real ones. Yes--it's possible that the Jerry Garcia Band played a live concert in a room with real actual bulls:

[owner Hank] Guenther turned up the cowboy mystique when he incorporated a bull pen--yes, live bulls--in the back corner, where the dance floor closest to the bathroom now stands, around 1982. The story sounds familiar. On a busy Thursday night [in 2001], Patty Gergel, 22 and a recent graduate of San Jose State University, tells her group of friends that she heard a rumor about the bulls. 

"They got loose and started running on 280," she tells her sorority sisters.
"Shut up!" one of them screams. 

"It ran on Meridian [Avenue], not 280," says [manager Andy] Buchanan, clarifying the rumor later that night. 

Was it all the bulls?
"Just one. It jumped over a 10-foot fence. That was amazing to see. An 1,800-pound bull jumping the fence." 

An automobile traveling on Meridian hit the bull and ended its spree of freedom. The bull arena didn't last much longer and in 1984, after their insurance company said they wouldn't cover it, Guenther shut it down. These days, the mechanical bull is one of the largest draws, with many just-turned-21, it's-my-birthday gonzos tanked on liquid courage lining up for a crack at it. (Wednesday bull riders pay $1; Thursday is free and Fridays and Saturdays is $2.)

More importantly for our story, however, was that the Saddle Rack became a live venue. San Jose had no nightclubs booking original music at the time (notwithstanding The Bodega in the nearby suburb of Campbell), at least not on any level beyond local bands. Somewhere around 1981, the Saddle Rack took over from the Keystone Palo Alto as the sponsor of the Fat Fry. In 1981, the Saddle Rack was a big, booming operation and the financial arrangement was probably better for the bands. In any case, San Jose was right in the center of KFAT's audience, even if Palo Alto had a bigger irony quotient. More from the Metro:

Beginning in 1981, the Saddle Rack hosted live shows and concerts featuring singers and rockers--heavy metal and country--on the way up and on the way down, Buchanan says. Over the years, they've booked such acts as James Brown, B.B. King, Garth Brooks, Huey Lewis, Roy Orbison, the Charlie Daniels Band, Johnny Cash, Tammy Wynette, Loretta Lynn, Martina McBride and an all-star roster of other bands and singers. And it's not all Texas-style bragging. Inside Guenther's office, just like in the movie where Wes attempts to rob Gilley's (which inspired Guenther's Rack), wood-framed photos of celebrity singers line the faux wood-paneled walls.

Recap: The Jerry Garcia Band at The Saddle Rack, San Jose, CA March 7, 1982
The Jerry Garcia Band played an Urban Cowboy bar, perhaps for the only time. There was a mechanical bull in the house, and just maybe a couple of real ones. It was perhaps Garcia's only direct nod to the country tradition in San Jose, even if Jerry himself hardly thought about it. Garcia had played a fair amount in San Jose in the 60s, but despite the increasing size and importance of the city in subsequent decades, it remained outside the Garcia and Grateful Dead orbit (save for a Jerry Garcia Band show at the Events Center in San Jose State University on April 25, 1992, capacity 7400).

The Saddle Rack show was the last Jerry Garcia Band live broadcast, and I believe his last non-Grateful Dead live broadcast of any kind. I taped it myself, in my Berkeley apartment. I was thrilled to get some current Garcia on my cassette deck, of course, but it never occurred to me that it would be the very last one. No doubt, Garcia rocked the house, and everyone was dancing--I wonder if there was any line dancing? It is a latterday Garcia irony that in contrast to most touring bands at the time, Garcia's manager would have been more concerned about the payday for the show--no doubt pretty darn good--and unconcerned about the virtues or defects of performing live on the radio. Garcia, with and without the Dead, had appeared so many times on air by 1982 that he would have had no reservations, and rightly so.

One indeterminate question is whether the show was broadcast live or tape-delayed. KFAT Fat Frys were always on Monday, and March 7, 1982 was a Sunday night. I do know that while the Keystone Palo Alto Fat Fry was always live--artists always encouraged listeners to come on down for the late set--at least some Saddle Rack shows were taped. According to one internet posting, at least once the Saddle Rack had multiple bands that were then broadcast on successive Monday nights over the next few weeks. I myself taped the Garcia Band show, but I no longer recall if it was broadcast or tape-delayed to the next night. I also no longer recall if they only broadcast one set. My guess is that they probably just blasted out one set, since I think I would have recalled an all-night Fat Fry (I long since gave up my original cassette to the four winds).

And as for the Jerry Garcia Band in 1982, its future arcs were unexpected in any number of ways. Run For The Roses was released by Arista in November, 1982, to very little fanfare. Only the title track passed into the regular JGB repertoire, with the rest of the new material fading into obscurity. The covers were unmemorable, including a needless "Knocking On Heaven's Door." Presumably Ron Tutt opted out (or was bought out) of any partnership, and the Jerry Garcia Band would not release any material until a live double cd in 1991. The Jerry Garcia Band retreated into the silo of Grateful Dead fandom, and disassociated itself from the rest of the music industry in almost every way. 

Yet, remarkably, the Jerry Garcia Band thrived against all odds. It wasn't just that the Grateful Dead became huge, massively huge, far beyond the dreams of even the most devoted Deadhead. It was also that, in some strange way, the Jerry Garcia Band was a contrast of sorts to the Dead themselves. Given, of course, the inevitable effect of "The Garcia," the Jerry Garcia Band strove to minimize the trappings of a Grateful Dead concert. The pacing and song choices at JGB shows minimized the raucous drama of Dead shows, and Garcia's own choices de-emphasized his most famous songs. For many years, the Garcia Band never did an encore (before caving in to the inevitable). As a result, many aging Deadheads, myself included, stuck with the Garcia Band long after going emeritus on the full circus of the Grateful Dead themselves. Thus, the Jerry Garcia Band developed into a massive concert attraction, outside the scope of the music industry at the time.

The condominium development at the former site of The Saddle Rack uses the old club as its street name (above: 1390 Saddle Rack St, San Jose, CA)

The Saddle Rack in San Jose closed on August 5, 2001. The site is now a high-density condominium unit. The condo is now located on Saddle Rack Street, which did not exist when the club was there. The club moved to 42011 Boscell Road in Fremont, across the Bay. It continued to thrive for many years, but finally went out to pasture amidst many other closures in May, 2020. 

Two big questions remain about the Jerry Garcia Band's last live broadcast on March 7, 1982 at the Saddle Rack:

• Was the show broadcast live on Sunday night, or delayed until March 8 (Monday)?, and
• Were there live bulls in the house while Garcia played!

Anyone who knows, or thinks they know someone who knows, or has something interesting to say anyway, please suggest it in the Comments

Appendix: Setlist from The Saddle Rack, San Jose, March 7, 1982
I: Sugaree, Catfish John, Valerie, Second That Emotion, Tangled Up In Blue
II: The Harder They Come, Mystery Train, Knockin' On Heaven's Door, Tore Up Over You, Midnight Moonlight

Note: while it is suggested in JerryBase that Dave Torbert played bass this night, no evidence seems to support this claim (unfortunately). Torbert did sit in for the first set in Chico just 10 days later, as John Khan was delayed by fog.

Halloween Weekend 1969: Loma Prieta Room, San Jose State and Family Dog on The Great Highway (Oct 31-Nov 2 '69) [FDGH V]

 

The Grateful Dead: Halloween Weekend, October 31-November 2, 1969
Over the years, it seemed like a Law Of Nature (or a Federal statute) that the Grateful Dead had to play on Halloween. Skeleton iconography attracts skeleton iconography, and a Dead concert on Halloween always seemed like a good idea. 

A close look at Halloween 1969 poses a paradox for the band. They were booked for the weekend at the Family Dog on The Great Highway, where they could draw 1500 or 2000 fans each night at $3.50 a head. Yet they only played the Dog on Saturday and Sunday, leaving the actual Friday night of Halloween for a campus event at San Jose State College. The newly-opened Student Union Ballroom held, at most, 700 people. Even if it was oversold, since student admission was only $2.00, the payday wasn't going to be the same as at the Dog.

What were the Grateful Dead and their management thinking? This post will take a look at the different threads in play for the Grateful Dead over the weekend of October 31-November 2, 1969.

Grateful Dead Economic Status Report, Fall 1969
In late 1969, the Grateful Dead were hurting for cash. They had spent so much money on Aoxomoxoa that they weren't earning anything back on royalties. Live/Dead would be a kind of success, but it wouldn't be released until November, so royalties wouldn't show up until later. The Dead, being the Dead, of course, were always spending too much money on equipment, and keeping a lot of friends and girlfriends on the payroll. This took cash, and the Dead didn't make that much.

Of course, the Dead's cash flow problem was greatly aggravated by the fact that manager Lenny Hart was absconding with a significant amount of the band's money. Hart's management "strategy" was dubious, at best, and in hindsight some of it may have been oriented towards bookings that facilitated Hart's greedy fingers, rather than the band's best interests.

The Family Dog on The Great Highway had a capacity of something around 1500 (the Fire Department capacity may have been a bit lower). Some contemporary comments in the Examiner suggest that a full house at the Dog approached 2000. Whether that meant they oversold the house, or people came and went throughout the night, it gives us an idea that the gate was about $6500 per night (assuming paid attendance of about 1850). Assuming costs for expenses, opening acts and profits, figure that the Dead could clear $4000 on a great night. 

The Student Union Ballroom at San Jose State held, at most, 700 patrons. Students would only pay $2.00, and they would have been the bulk of the audience. So even assuming a little bit of overselling and a few non-student admissions (at $3.00), and the possibility that a lot of students might come and go throughout the evening (allowing for more ticket sales), the realistic gate would be around $2000. The catch here was that San Jose State would have had an entertainment budget, and that ticket sales were meant to only defray the cost, not cover it. It's reasonable to assume that the Dead would have cleared $2500 or even $3000 for the Friday night show, which was still less than the Dog.

The difference in the two bookings was that San Jose State, though likely cheaper, was a sure thing. San Jose State was not going to go out of business. The Family Dog on the Great Highway, conversely, was always in a precarious financial situation. A band who booked a future show at the Dog had no guarantee the venue would be in business by that time. On top of that, rock concerts, like any live entertainment venture, were inherently risky ventures. The Grateful Dead, by what little evidence we have, had drawn well when they had played at the Family Dog for two weekends in August, and there was every reason to think they would do so again. 

There was one hangup, however: the Family Dog wouldn't be able to advertise the Dead show until that very week. Bill Graham Presents had booked the Dead with Jefferson Airplane for the prior weekend, and the contract would have required that the Dead could not advertise a show within 50 miles until their booking was complete. Now, it wasn't that Dead fans wouldn't want to see the band again--that was never a problem. It's just that concert attendance takes planning, and if you don't know there's a Dead concert on Halloween weekend, what if you've got something else going on? What if your sister already got the family car and you've got no way to get there?

Also, on any given night, anything could happen--rainstorm, earthquake, fire in the venue, riots in the neighborhood--that would lead to a financial debacle at the Dog. This risk was magnified by the prohibition on advertising until the previous Monday. Now, sure, the same things could happen at San Jose State. My guess, however, was that some part of the San Jose State concert booking was guaranteed, and that would be paid regardless, and very possibly paid in advance. The Dead were hurting for cash, and Lenny Hart was hungry for it, so a smaller, ensured payday on Halloween took precedence over a potentially larger one at the more uncertain Family Dog. So the Dog had a ghost of a show on Halloween without the Dead, and the Dead turned up for the balance of the weekend. Although non-musical details are scant, it seems that the Dead did well both nights at the Dog, so it was a financially sound weekend in the end.

Loma Prieta Room, Student Union, San Jose State University, 211 S 9th St San Jose, CA 95112
San Jose State College (now Cal State San Jose University) was the oldest college in California, first established as a Teacher's College in 1857. After various name changes, it became San Jose State College in 1935. After World War 2, thanks to the GI Bill and the Baby Boom, San Jose State expanded enormously. By 1969, it probably had 15,000 students or more (currently it has over 33,000, with 3/4 of them as undergraduates). The school is right at the center of downtown San Jose, which itself was expanding in the 1960s. The Student Union building at 211 9th Street had just been built in 1969. The main ballroom was on the third floor, and depending on the configuration, was either called the Ron Barrett Ballroom (capacity 588) or the Loma Prieta Room (capacity 700). The new ballroom had only opened on Tuesday, October 13, 1969. The very first rock concert at the Student Union Ballroom was held on the first Friday it was open. On October 17th, the New Riders of The Purple Sage played with a jazz-rock band called The Fourth Way.

 

The Daily Spartan of Thursday, October 16 reported on the upcoming dance the next night at the Student Union Ballroom

Two Bands To Appear For Dance
"Riders of the Purple Sage with special guest appearances by Jerry Garcia and Mickey Hart of the "Grateful Dead" will be one of the two bands playing tomorrow night in the new College Union on Ninth Street

A dance sponsored by the College Union Program Board will feature "Sage" and "The Fourth Way," with guest appearances by members of the Charles Lloyd Quartet and John Handy's group.

The dance will be held from 9 pm to 1 am in The BALLROOM on the third level of the College Union. Admission will be $1.50 for students and $2 for the general public. There will be no pre-sale; all tickets will be sold at the door.

By October 17th, the Grateful Dead would have already booked their Halloween show at the same venue. In this instance, besides booking a paying gig for the New Riders, it seems like the Dead were checking out the venue in advance. It was a very odd feature for the New Riders to headline a venue on a Friday night, and then for the Dead the same venue two weeks later. This suggests to me that the Dead booked the Halloween show, and then realized they could book another show two weeks earlier. 

The Fourth Way was an interesting electric jazz-rock band. There were a lot of bands in the Bay Area fusing rock, jazz and electricity, but Fourth Way did it in a less frantic style than Miles Davis or the Tony Williams Lifetime. Fourth Way did release three albums on Capitol, now long out-of-print. Bandleader Mike Nock, formerly pianist with Yusef Lateer, Steve Marcus and many others played electric keyboards. The lead soloist was electric violinist Mike White, best known for playing with the John Handy Quintet. Bassist Ron McClure had played with Handy, and then with a Charles Lloyd Quartet lineup when it was based in San Francisco (along with Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette). Drummer Eddie Marshall rounded out the quartet.

We don't know what happened at this show. Was it well attended? Who knows? In the peculiar way of Dead history, however, while we don't have an eyewitness account, we have a tape. The Owsley Foundation was kind enough to transcribe the setlist for us. We can see that Bob Weir showed up for a few numbers, so there was a taste of Bobby Ace and The Cards Off The Bottom Of The Deck.
    Crossover
    Hello Trouble
    Long Black Limousine
    Six Days on the Road
    Next In Line
    Games People Play
    To Have the Hurting End
    Whatcha Gonna Do
    The Race Is On (w/Bob Weir)
    Cathy's Clown (w/Bob Weir)
    Saw Mill (w/Bob Weir)
    Mama Tried (w/Bob Weir)
    Me & My Uncle (w/Bob Weir)
    Fair Chance to Know

In any case, Owsley and the crew probably had a chance to figure a few things out about the room setup, and that had to help for Halloween.

October 31, 1969 Loma Prieta Room, San Jose State College, San Jose, CA: Grateful Dead/South Bay Experimental Flash (Friday)
We know the Grateful Dead played the Student Union Ballroom on Halloween, because we have a tape. It's around 90 minutes, and my guess is that it's the entire Grateful Dead performance.  We don't really know anything about the show itself.

There were two articles previewing the event in The Spartan Daily

GRATEFUL DEAD BRING LIVE MUSIC TO LIVELY SJS HALLOWEEN FLING

This Friday evening SJS is having its own “trick-or-treat,” when it brings out The Grateful Dead to play in the College Union Ballroom. 

The Grateful Dead, pioneers of the San Francisco sound, will be making their first appearance at SJS Halloween night.

“The Dead” have added a little country to their blues and psychedelic elements, and the blend works well, according to people who saw them last weekend at Winterland.

“The Dead,” whose music has what many people term a euphoric effect, will play two sets, a total of one and a half to two hours. It is hoped that they will play some of their more famous sets which range from straight country, as in “Mama Tried,” to the blues encore, “Good Morning Little School Girl.” In the former, bass guitarist Phil Lesch produces a good country vocal sound, and in the latter, Ron (Pig Pen) McKernan is at his vocal best. 

Lead guitarist Jerry Garcia also has a good set as does organist Tom Constante and rhythm guitarist Bob Weir. The dependable work of drummers William Kreutzman and Mickey Hart is ideal in the country tunes. 

Accompanying “The Dead” will be the far out sounds of the “Experimental Flash.” In addition, two color horror films will be shown, “Billy the Kid vs. Dracula” and “Godzilla vs. The Thing.” Both films will be shown silently behind the bands. 

The dance will be held from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. and admission is $2 for students and $3 for the public. Tickets are on sale in [the] Student Affairs Business Office, located on the second level of the College Union.

(by Marty Pastula, from the Spartan Daily, San Jose State College, 29 October 1969)

BANDS TO PLAY AT MASKED BALL IN COLLEGE UNION

The Grateful Dead and Southbay Experimental Flash will perform at 9 p.m. tonight in the College Union to a masked audience.

In keeping with the theme of Halloween, the College Union Program Board (which is sponsoring the dance) has asked that all those attending tonight’s dance wear masks.

It is hoped that the debut of The Grateful Dead at SJS will be a pace-setter for future “name groups,” according to [the] CUPB student director.

The CUPB will provide masks for those who “forget their disguises.”

Tickets are still available in the Student Affairs Business office. [...]

[The] CUPB director added that in case it gets too warm, there will be “bobbing for apples” as refreshing but perhaps “ghostly” fun.

(from the Spartan Daily, 31 October 1969)

Setlist
Casey Jones, Dire Wolf, It Hurts Me Too, Cryptical Envelopment-> Drums-> The Other One-> Cryptical Envelopment, China Cat Sunflower-> I Know You Rider, Mama Tried, High Time, Sitting On Top Of The World, Next Time You See Me-> Easy Wind, Turn On Your Love Light

South Bay Experimental Flash
The South Bay Experimental Flash were a jazz-rock quintet from San Jose, although by 1969 they actually lived in Richmond. The main soloist was flautist David Ladd, well known over later decades in the South Bay as a session man and music teacher, along with organist Harry Critchfield and drummer Kirk Harwood.

The Poster
There is a relatively well-known poster associated with the San Jose Halloween concert (at the top of the post). I am no poster expert, by any means, but it does raise a few questions:

• Why was there a poster? This was a student show, subsidized by the college, and not intended to turn a profit. Why authorize a color poster, since it's a needless expense?
• I can understand some hippies on the "Entertainment Committee" who wanted to commission a poster because it was cool. But why print it? Why print hundreds of copies at real cost? For one thing, even by 1969, any Fillmore or Fillmore-type poster accessible on a telephone pole was immediately removed and put up in someone's dorm room. So posters were not only a cost, they didn't help sell tickets.
• I can see one poster for display outside the Student Union ticket office. But why print more? Do they circulate? Some part of this doesn't add up, although it may be that the posters were reprinted later because they were appealing.

Loma Prieta Room: Aftermath
The brave comment in the Spartan Daily about the Grateful Dead being the "pace-setter" for future name groups at the Loma Prieta Room turned out to be outrun by events. There were some more rock concerts at the Loma Prieta Room in Fall '69, the biggest name of which was Lee Michaels. Rapidly, however, the rock business got way bigger than any tiny 700-seat room on a campus, so while I'm sure there were occasional events, the Grateful Dead were far and away the biggest band ever to play the Student Union Ballroom.

The Loma Prieta Room was remodeled, and thus while the building is still in use, the Ballroom is not the same as when the Dead played there. During November 5-8, 2014, Cal State San Jose University held So Many Roads : The World in the Grateful Dead, A Conference & Symposium  in the Student Union building (though not the Loma Prieta Room, then under re-construction).

The Family Dog on The Great Highway, at 660 Great Highway, ca. 1969

The Family Dog on The Great Highway, 660 Great Highway, San Francisco, CA
The Family Dog was a foundation stone in the rise of San Francisco rock, and it was in operation in various forms from Fall 1965 through the Summer of 1970. For sound historical reasons, most of the focus on the Family Dog has been on the original 4-person collective who organized the first San Francisco Dance Concerts in late 1965, and on their successor Chet Helms. Helms took over the Family Dog in early 1966, and after a brief partnership with Bill Graham at the Fillmore, promoted memorable concerts at the Avalon Ballroom from Spring 1966 through December 1968. The posters, music and foggy memories of the Avalon are what made the Family Dog a legendary 60s rock icon.

In the Summer of 1969, however, with San Francisco as one of the fulcrums of the rock music explosion, Chet Helms opened another venue. The Family Dog on The Great Highway, at 660 Great Highway, on the Western edge of San Francisco, was only open for 14 months and was not a success.

One of the only photos of the interior of the Family Dog on The Great Highway (from a Stephen Gaskin "Monday Night Class" ca. October 1969)

The Great Highway was a four-lane road that ran along the Western edge of San Francisco, right next to Ocean Beach. Downtown San Francisco faced the Bay, but beyond Golden Gate Park was the Pacific Ocean. The aptly named Ocean Beach is dramatic and beautiful, but it is mostly windy and foggy. Much of the West Coast of San Francisco is not even a beach, but rocky cliffs. There are no roads in San Francisco West of the Great Highway, so "660 Great Highway" was ample for directions (for reference, it is near the intersection of Balboa Street and 48th Avenue). The tag-line "Edge Of The Western World" was not an exaggeration, at least in American terms.

The Family Dog on The Great Highway was smaller than the Bill Graham's old Fillmore Auditorium. It could hold up to 1500, but the official capacity was probably closer to 1000. Unlike the comparatively centrally located Fillmore West, the FDGH was far from downtown, far from the Peninsula suburbs, and not particularly easy to get to from the freeway. For East Bay or Marin residents, the Great Highway was a formidable trip. The little ballroom was very appealing, but if you didn't live way out in the Avenues, you had to drive. As a result, FDGH didn't get a huge number of casual drop-ins, and that didn't help its fortunes. Most of the locals referred to the venue as "Playland." 

October 31, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Danny Cox/Alan Watts/Golden Toad/Hells Angels Own Band (Friday)
The Family Dog had opened to great fanfare on June 13, 1969, but since then it had lurched through October with little to show for it. The venue had been open almost every night of the month, mostly with a variety of community-oriented events that only charged $1.00 admission on weeknights. While in retrospect we can see that some of the weekend acts would have been playing some good music (Kaleidoscope or Brewer And Shipley, for example), they weren't really good draws. The Dead were taking the sure payday in San Jose on Halloween, but they would be back at the Family Dog on Saturday and Sunday (November 1 and 2).

So for Halloween at the Family Dog, the putative headliner was the Golden Toad and folksinger Danny Cox, both of whom would be opening for the Dead on the subsequent nights. The unexplained billing was "Hells Angels Own Band." Who were they? What did it mean? We kind of know it wasn't the Dead, since they were playing in San Jose. I guess you could claim they were going to show up late, but geography doesn't favor that, and in any case, why invoke the Hells Angels? I wouldn't go to any public event today that advertised anything to do with the Hells Angels, and this was Halloween 1969. Also, the Hells Angels never took kindly to anyone using their name satirically, so the usage must have had some kind of informal approval. 

Was this a biker party? Maybe--but why advertise it to the public? Also, bikers are bikers--were they going to look forward to a Renaissance Fair quintet playing 15th century melodies on hand-built replicas of medieval pipes (which is what Golden Toad did)? Sure, Golden Toad founder Bob Thomas was a personal friend (and sometime roommate) of Owsley, but would a bunch of cranked-up bikers care? Danny Cox was an enjoyable folksinger, but he was a big African-American guy, and the Hells Angels were never an advertisement for diverse inclusion. 

Nothing about the Friday night booking made any sense. I have one tiny clue: I had a clever, but inaccurate, theory that Owsley Stanley had made a tape of Danny Cox that would become the album Danny Cox Live At The Family Dog. The Owsley Stanley Foundation looked into it, and it turned out that Cox's manager would not let Owsley tape his act. Family Dog soundman Lee Brenkman thinks that Cox was recorded on Halloween. Brenkman referred to the event as the "Hell's Angels Halloween party", and added that "it was the last calm thing that occurred that night." Intriguing. Anyone with insight, rumors or clever speculation, please post in the Comments.

November 1-2, 1969 Family Dog on The Great Highway, San Francisco, CA: Grateful Dead/Danny Cox/Golden Toad (Saturday-Sunday)
The Grateful Dead headlined the Family Dog on The Great Highway on Saturday and Sunday night. Thanks to Owsley Stanley, we have tapes of both nights. The playing on both nights is magical. The existing tapes are both two hours, and seem to be complete shows with a few minor snips. So Golden Toad and Danny Cox must have each done sets, capped by a two-hour blast by the Grateful Dead in their early prime. David Browne, in his great Dead reflection,  So Many Roads, reviews the November 2 (Sunday) tape, with its 30-minute "Dark Star" in its larger context, and it is well worth reading (as is the rest of the book). Whatever the commercial flaws of the Family Dog on The Great Highway, and they seemed to be many, the Dead played fabulously there. In early 1970, manager Lenny Hart would make plans to merge the Grateful Dead's operations with Chet Helms and the Dog, and it had to be at least in part because the band played so well in the room.

The Golden Toad had nothing to do with rock, of course. But they resolutely followed their own musical course, in a manner clearly aligned with the Grateful Dead's own single-minded mission. The Toad mostly played outdoors in at Renaissance Fairs (in Los Angeles and Marin) or in Berkeley, and usually only played indoors at Berkeley's Freight and Salvage or with the Grateful Dead. The Golden Toad were known to have a rather flexible membership, so they may have had numerous people on stage augmenting the root quintet (supposedly they had performed with up to 23 members) [see here for more about the Golden Toad].

Danny Cox's 3rd album was Birth Announcement, a double-LP released on Together Records in 1969 and produced by Gary Usher

Danny Cox was from Cincinnati, but he had relocated to Kansas City in 1967. Cox, a large African-American man, defied rather shallow 60s expectations by singing folk music instead of blues. His current album was his 3rd, Birth Announcement, a double-lp on Together Records produced by Gary Usher. Cox sang folk classics along with Beatles and Dylan songs, lightly backed.

Cox shared management with Brewer And Shipley, and like them he would record an album for ABC/Dunhill in San Francisco with producer Nick Gravenites. Recorded at Wally Heider Studios, it was released in 1971. Both John Kahn and Merl Saunders played on that album. During demo sessions for the record in 1970, Kahn introduced Merl Saunders to Jerry Garcia, who was recording in another room. Some weeks later, when Howard Wales didn't want to come jam at the Matrix, Kahn recommended Merl and the Garcia/Saunders partnership began.

In between 1969 Birth Announcement and his 1971 ABC/Dunhill albums, Sunflower Records released a 1970 Danny Cox album called Live At The Family Dog. Sunflower, associated with MGM, was a fringe label that had released the legal-but-unauthorized Vintage Dead and Historic Dead albums in 1971. Danny Cox only played the Family Dog this weekend and the next weekend in 1969, so assuming that the material was really recorded at the Family Dog--that's no sure thing--they could very well have been recorded this weekend. I speculated that Owsley might have recorded the tape, but it turned out not to be the case. Cox's manager, Howard Wolf, wouldn't allow Owsley to tape his act. As mentioned, soundman Lee Brenkman thinks that Cox was recorded on Halloween. (Scholarly readers will be interested to know that on the Family Dog lp, Cox records "Me And My Uncle," and it is credited to "Trad.--arranged Danny Cox.") 

Summary

• The Grateful Dead played a tiny ballroom for 700 or so people on a college campus on Halloween Friday in 1969.
• What went down on Halloween '69 at the Family Dog? Why book a Renaissance Fair pipe band and a folksinger and advertise Hells Angels Own Band? What was that?
• The Grateful Dead played Saturday and Sunday night at the Family Dog. They played great music, and ticket sales were probably pretty good, because they usually were.
• Opening act Danny Cox may have had his Halloween show recorded and released on Sunflower Records as Live At The Family Dog
  

David Nelson and The New Delhi River Band, July 1967-February 1968 (David Nelson IV)

A flyer for the last known New Delhi River Band show, at Cowell College in UC Santa Cruz, on January 27, 1968 (submitted by people who attended)

The New Delhi River Band were founded in Palo Alto, CA in the Summer of 1966. They were one of the first psychedelic blues bands formed in the South Bay--though of course not the very first--, and they had a significant following in the South Bay underground. The group is usually remembered today, if at all, for being the first rock band for future New Riders of The Purple Sage David Nelson and Dave Torbert. Since the band never released any recordings, however, and the venues where they thrived are lost in the mists of time, the New Delhi River Band is just a ghost.

Despite substantial efforts by the group in 1967, The New Delhi River Band never succeeded outside of their South Bay turf, and the members moved on to other pursuits. My research seems to suggest, however, that they were an interesting and popular band in the little universe of the South Bay underground in 1966 and 1967, and their story makes a great case study on how regional bands help shape scenes while getting left behind themselves—the story of The New Delhi River Band stands for the tale of every cool local long haired band in 1966 and 1967 who never got big past the County Line, living on as a fond, hazy memory of their fans.

David Nelson was one of Jerry Garcia's best friends, and Nelson's career presents an interesting counterpoint to Garcia's. The Grateful Dead were the South Bay's first psychedelic blues band, of course, and the New Delhi River Band's ups and downs shed light on different ways in which the Dead were both fortunate and special. By the time Nelson and Garcia reconnected in 1969 with the New Riders of The Purple Sage, Nelson had had his own odyssey, far less legendary than Garcia's but fascinating nonetheless. This post will be part of a series on the hitherto lost history of the New Delhi River Band.

In a 21st century interview for RD Records, drummer Chris Herold recalled

NDRB was a really fine band. Some very fond memories of the formative time. We were one of the first white blues bands, probably THE first in the Bay Area. We were Butterfield Blues Band fans and it showed in our music. We also drew from all the old greats Robert Johnson, Willie Dixon, Lightnin' Hopkins, Muddy Waters . . . the list goes on. The band members were: Sweet John Tomasi (vocals and harmonica), Peter Sultzbach (lead guitar), David Nelson (rhythm guitar), Dave Torbert (bass) and me [Chris Herold] on drums.”

David Nelson played a critical role in Jerry Garcia's career, both before the Grateful Dead and during their existence. After the New Delhi River Band ended in early 1968, Nelson re-appeared in Garcia's universe at the end of 1968, participating in the Aoxomoxoa sessions (although probably not appearing on the record). More importantly, Nelson, along with Garcia and John Dawson, was a founding member of the New Riders Of The Purple Sage, Garcia's first extra-curricular band. In subsequent decades, Nelson made all sorts of great music, with and without Garcia, and continues to do so in both the revitalized New Riders and the David Nelson Band.

This chronology would not have been possible without the dedicated efforts of Ross Hannan, Chris Recker, the late Russell Towle, the Magic Theater and David Nelson. Anyone with additional information, insights, corrections or recovered memories (real or imagined) is urged to Comment or email me.

Recap: The First Year Of The New Delhi River Band
Part I of the New Delhi River Band story reviews how David Nelson was a bluegrass musician in Palo Alto, just like his friend Jerry Garcia. The arrival of the Beatles and LSD electrified the tiny community of bohemian musicians, and the hitherto acoustic Nelson started to get interested in plugging in. By mid-1966, Nelson and his Channing Avenue housemate Carl Moore had joined forces with a Los Altos band called Bethlehem Exit, and hatched the idea of The Outfit. The Outfit was intended to be a sort of permanent Trips Festival in sleepy little Palo Alto, with a venue, a band and a light show all called The Outfit. According to Nelson, there was only one show, a memorable mini-Acid Test in June 1966 graced by Neal Cassady himself, but the enterprise never got any further. The New Delhi River Band found a name, however, and started to play a few shows in the South Bay, opening for Them and The Doors.

In Part II, The New Delhi River Band found a home in the Fall of 1966 at The Barn in Scotts Valley, a tiny unincorporated community in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The Barn, known as 'The Fillmore of The Mountains," was only open from mid-66 through mid-68, and indeed it was closed during much of that time as well. What little information is available on The Barn mostly comes from our site, and what is posted there is fairly outdated. By the Fall of 1966, the New Delhi River Band would become the "House Band" of The Barn, whatever exactly that meant. After The Barn closed, it disappeared without a trace. The fuzziest and warmest memories of The New Delhi River Band stem from those lucky enough to be part of that tiny scene, when the few long-haired bohemians and some younger aspirants gathered together every weekend in the mountains in one of the earliest Bay Area hippie hangouts beyond San Francisco and Berkeley.

By early 1967, most  of The New Delhi River Band had moved to an old house on Euclid Avenue in East Palo Alto, along with various other denizens of the Channing Avenue house, including Carl Moore and Russell Towle. Nelson lived in the house, and Dave Torbert and John Tomasi were around there pretty much, while the more staid Peter Sulzbach and Chris Herold only dropped by when needed. East Palo Alto was across Highway 101 from Palo Alto, and was unincorporated county land (and San Mateo County at that), relatively sleepy and poor compared to well-to-do Palo Alto proper. The band used the house as a rehearsal space, and they stayed there throughout '67.

The rock market was starting to explode in the Bay Area in 1967, but it was still a collection of local scenes, even if the Fillmore and the Avalon in San Francisco were biggest and most exciting of them. Thanks to constantly playing The Barn, the New Delhi River Band were a popular act in the South Bay. They were booked at a variety of local venues, sometimes as a headliner, and they were very much a leading 'underground' band on their home turf. However, the NDRB had a difficult time breaking out beyond Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties. They regularly played free concerts in Berkeley, particularly at Provo Park, so they were somewhat known, but that had transferred into very few paying shows. By the end of June, 1967, the New Delhi River Band had played a benefit at the Fillmore and a free concert in The City as well, but they had no traction in San Francisco, the most lucrative of  the Bay Area scenes.

The New Delhi River Band, July 1967
Sweet John Tomasi-vocals, harmonica
Peter Sultzbach-lead guitar
David Nelson-guitar
Dave Torbert-bass
Chris Herold-drums

By July 1967, the New Delhi River Band had been performing for a year. As they were Palo Alto's second psychedelic blues band, it is worth considering their progress in relation to the first one. Let's take a snapshot of some of the differences and similarities between the Grateful Dead after their first year of existence (July 1966) and the New Delhi River Band after one year.

A Special Genesis: Acid Tests and The Barn
After six months of playing bars and teen dances, the Warlocks wormed their way into Ken Kesey's infamous Acid Tests. With the collaboration of one Owsley Stanley, the Grateful Dead were at least the musical center of an important cultural change, and they were infamous long before they recorded a note.

Although the New Delhi River Band's cultural impact was limited to two counties, they were part of some original bohemian happenings in Palo Alto (at The Outfit) and in Santa Cruz (at The Barn). The Barn was the hippest place in the South Bay at a time when hippies were few and far between, and public events weren't really possible without excessive police interference. The New Delhi River Band were the house band at The Barn, and with Ken Kesey's bus "Furthur" parked out back, they were pretty hip in their own little Universe.

Venues: A Base Of Operations
New bands, particularly new bands playing what at the time was not commercial music, will not endure if they cannot find a place to play. Before the Summer Of Love, almost every rock band that made an impact, even at the local level, had some places to play where they could do their thing and build an audience. Even if they didn't make a lot of money, they made enough to keep going. That is why legendary rock bands are so often associated with a foundational venue, as well: there wouldn't have been the Beatles without the Cavern Club, and vice-versa.

The Grateful Dead, of course, were regulars at The Fillmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom throughout 1966. Along with many other bands, the Dead made their music and made a living, and along with a host of other bands, not only made San Francisco the capital of the music world, however briefly. The Fillmore and the Avalon defined the modern rock concert as we know it today, so an entire industry was established along with the bands that started it. As far as the Grateful Dead were concerned, without the Fillmore and Avalon, the band would not have made enough money to get by, as they were too far outside the mainstream to play what they wanted to play anywhere else.

In the Fall of 1966 and into 1967, the New Delhi River Band regularly played The Barn, and the group built a South Bay following and made enough to keep going. For about six months, The Barn was a self-sustaining operation for all concerned, and there would have been no New Delhi River Band without it. However, by the middle of 1967, the rock market had exploded, in a large part due to the Fillmore scene. The Barn closed due to pressure from its neighbors, and the New Delhi River Band lost their base. Although the NDRB were popular in the South Bay, more fans wanted to see the big Fillmore bands come to their town, rather than see their locals. Thus New Delhi River Band bookings became fewer and less lucrative, in part due to the increasing impact of Fillmore bands like the Dead.

Music: Jamming The Blues
From what we know of the New Delhi River Band's repertoire, they played straight ahead blues songs and some funky R&B songs like "Youngblood" and "Suzie Q." Memories are foggy, of course, but it seems like they had their own arrangements and didn't rush through the songs. The material that the New Delhi River Band were mining in mid-1967 was roughly from the same vein that the Grateful Dead were pulling from: music from black radio stations in the early 60s. The NDRB's business card said "We Jumps," so they were definitely trying to be fun to dance to, not just purists.

However, by mid-1966, at the end of their first year, the Grateful Dead were experimenting with numerous original songs. In fact, they had worked up a handful of original songs after their first six months, as we know from a November, 1965 demo tape.. In fact, only one original song from the Dead's first year survived even into 1967, namely "Caution: Do Not Stop On Tracks" and that was a sort of mutant version of Them's "Mystic Eyes." Nonetheless, the Dead were experimenting with songwriting from the very beginning. It took a while to get it right, not to mention the arrival of Robert Hunter, but the Dead were working on it from the beginning. In contrast, there's scant evidence that the New Delhi River Band had any original material beyond some instrumental jam-type numbers.

Management: Working The Phones
Early in their career, the Grateful Dead had found a patron in the notorious Owsley. Owsley thought big, really big, and he did things his own way. Garcia and Phil Lesh in particular were sympathetic to Owsley's self-directed vision of success, even if they did not individually subscribe to all his ideas. On a less dramatic scale, David Nelson's friend Carl Moore had tried to start a venue in Palo Alto called The Outfit, for which the proto-NDRB were to be the band. Although the venture only seems to have had one event in June, 1966, it put the New Delhi crew on a different path far earlier than their peers. Moore continued to be a useful influence throughout 1967.

However, after Owsley stepped aside from the Grateful Dead, fellow travelers Rock Scully and Danny Rifkin acted as managers. Rather than being "10-percenters" like the traditional Hollywood managers, Rock and Danny were part of the collective consciousness of the band. While the Dead rehearsed and played, Rock and Danny worked the phones, looking for the next booking. For a busy, ambitious band, whether hip or unhip, trusted managers who could focus on finding paying gigs was crucial for success.

According to David Nelson, however (via David Gans), the New Delhi River Band arranged and booked their own shows. That insured that no one ripped them off, but it also meant that all the band members were wearing multiple hats. To some extent, the paucity of NDRB bookings may have been partially due to the fact that they had no dedicated manager. In mid-1967, the New Delhi River Band had a name as a hip band around the Bay Area, even if not that many people had heard the band. A hustling manager could have worked the phones enough to find some gigs, and the musicians could have done enough by playing well. The New Delhi River Band had no such assistance, however, and so their world of contacts was limited.

Recordings
The Grateful Dead made their first studio recordings in November, 1965, before they were even the Grateful Dead. They had made a six-song demo for Tom Donahue's Autumn Records (the 'Emergency Crew' demo). Five of the six songs were original. In June of 1966, the Dead had recorded a single ("Don't Ease Me In"/"Stealin'") at a San Francisco studio.

The New Delhi River Band had also recorded during their first year, some time in 1967, although the exact date remains uncertain. David Nelson told me (when I spoke to him after a New Riders show) that the band recorded 15 or 16 songs in 1967 in "some guy's garage in Berkeley." There was a garage studio in Berkeley, known--I think--as Reggie's Guerage, but I don't recall Reggie's full name. I know that Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, among others, recorded a demo in the same garage. I believe the Masked Marauders album was recorded there as well.

Nelson promised me that he never throws anything out, so we may yet be lucky enough to hear the New Delhi River Band, perhaps on some Grateful Dead Marathon on KPFA.  Still, from what little I can piece together, the NDRB were regarded as a fine live band without much in the way of original material. Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead got over the hump by engaging Robert Hunter as their in-house lyricist. Hunter had to return from a difficult situation in New Mexico to join up with the Dead, but he had contacted Carl Moore who sent him a little money to get him home.

Ironically enough, an eyewitness recalls a much-worse-for-wear Hunter sleeping on the couch at the New Delhi River Band house on Euclid Avenue, waiting for the Dead to fetch him. Legend has it that Phil Lesh drove to Palo Alto (technically, East Palo Alto) to pick up Hunter and return back to Rio Nido, where Hunter wrote "Dark Star" shortly afterwards. I have to wonder: while Hunter was hanging out with his old pal Nelson, did either of them consider the idea that Hunter could have written songs for the New Delhi River Band as well? It would not have inherently interfered with the Dead's plans, and the history of the New Delhi River Band would have been very different indeed.

New Delhi River Band Performance History, July 1967-February 1968
Despite my diligence, I have only been able to uncover a smattering of performance dates by the New Delhi River Band in their final 7 months. I feel confident that there were quite a few more, but I have not yet been able to find them. Anyone with any additional information or recovered memories (real or imagined) is encouraged to Comment or email me.

July 2, 1967 El Camino Park, Palo Alto, CA: Grateful Dead/New Delhi River Band/Anonymous Artists Of America/Solid State/The Good Word/others Mary Poppins Umbrella Festival and Be-In
The Grateful Dead headlined a Be-In in Palo Alto, and the NDRB were one of many other bands at the event. I have covered this unique moment in Palo Alto history elsewhere.

July 9, 1967: The Steppenwolf, Berkeley, CA: County Joe and The Fish/Loading Zone/New Delhi River Band/Notes From The Underground
The Steppenwolf was a folk club at 2136 San Pablo Avenue. This was probably a benefit, as Country Joe and The Fish had long since graduated to being a Fillmore headliner, and either Loading Zone or Notes From The Underground (both East Bay groups) could have topped the bill at the modest club on their own. Once again, the New Delhi River Band was playing Berkeley effectively for free. Plenty of Berkeley rock fans had heard them, but the band hadn't really made any money out of it.

July 15 and 16, 1967:  Devonshire Meadows Raceway, Cal State Northridge, Northridge, CA  Fantasy Fayre and Magic Music Festival
Saturday, July 15 running order (10:00am-8:00pm): Second Coming/Kaleidoscope/Whirling Dervishes/Doors/Solid State/Iron Butterfly/Grass Roots/New Delhi River Band/Thorinshield/Kaliedoscope/Solid State/The Factory/[unknown]/The Groupies
Sunday, July 16 running order (10:00am-8:00pm): Solid Sate/Humane Society/Sunshine Company/Butterfield Blues Band/Country Joe And The Fish/Heather Stones/New Delhi River Band/ Jefferson Airplane/Thorinshield/Sunshine Company/Merry Go Round/Canned Heat/Solid State
To my knowledge, the New Delhi River Band only made two road trips outside of the Bay Area. One of them was to Southern California, for the "Fantasy Fayre" at Devonshire Meadows. There had been a similarly named event in Northern California the month before, on Mt. Tamalpais (June 10-11, 1967) and the NDRB had played in the parking lot. I assume there was a connection between the two events. Presumably the NDRB had played well enough to get added to the Southern California shows.

Some major bands headlined the festival. The actual acts who played were different than who was booked, as The Mothers Of Invention, among others, were advertised but did not play. However, the running order is known from a photograph at the festival grounds. The New Delhi River Band played both days. On Saturday (July 15), they were booked at 4:45, after The Grass Roots and before Thorinshield. On Sunday (July 16), the NDRB were booked at 2:30pm, after Heather Stones and just before the Jefferson Airplane. All acts, including the big names, were scheduled 45 minutes apart, so sets would have been short. Who actually played, and for how long, remains somewhat obscure.

Summer 1967: [unknown venue], Vancouver, BC: New Delhi River Band
David Nelson told David Gans that the New Delhi River Band made their longest road trip in the Summer of '67, in Nelson's '62 Chevy station wagon. All five band members plus John Tomasi's girlfriend made the trip. I know quite a lot about the booming 60s Vancouver rock scene, but I haven't yet found a trace of the New Delhi River Band. However, there was a lot of Bay Area bands that got booked in Vancouver, particularly from Berkeley, so it's not at all surprising that a locally popular but unsigned Bay Area band played around Vancouver.

Nelson recalled that they went to "Queen Elizabeth Island in Vancouver, " which can't be quite right. The actual Queen Elizabeth Islands are much farther North. However, there are numerous parks and buildings in Canada named after English royalty, for obvious reasons, and there are also islands and promontories in Vancouver, so I am assuming that Nelson's memory is about 2/3 correct, I'm just not sure which third is muddled (Update: a fellow traveler surfaced, and he recalled that the main venue couldn't find the money to pay the band, so they didn't play the gig. However, the group did play University of British of Columbia and Simon Fraser University, presumably at some casual student dances).

While I don't have any date for the Vancouver expedition, the entire adventure must have taken at least a week, so the late July/early August period provides a good window. One thing to note was that if the trip took a week or more, since the band were booking themselves, they could not have made many phone calls on their own behalf to book shows while on the road. Thus, a few weeks after they returned, they would have found their calendar fairly empty. This illustrates one of the pitfalls of bands who booked themselves, particularly back in the 1960s. Even if they completed a phone call, how would they leave a callback number? Its not a surprise to see the New Delhi River Band's gig sheet thinning out as the Summer of 1967 ended.

July 21, 1967 Cafeteria, Berkeley High School, Berkeley, CA: New Delhi River Band/Anonymous Artists of America
The July 13, 1967 SF Chronicle reported this Friday night show as the first in a series of folk-rock dances. I don't know if others were held. There was an idea to move the Provo Park scene indoors, but it never really got traction (thanks JGMF for this).

Palo Alto Times, July 20, 1967

July 22, 1967 Burgess Recreation Center, Menlo Park, CA: New Delhi River Band (Saturday)
The Menlo Park Teen Club put on a Saturday night dance at the local park. The Rec Center was a small indoor building. Presumably The Magic Theater provided the light show (thanks Ross for finding this one).
 

A poster for the New Delhi River Band show at Azteca Hall in San Jose on August 25, 1967

August 25, 1967: Azteca Hall, San Jose, CA:  New Delhi River Band/Weird Herald/Ohms Band/Warriors of The Rainbow
Azteca Hall was at E. San Antonio and S. 24th St, not far from where Highway 101 meets Interstate 280 today. I don't know anything else about it, but it probably wasn't too big. This sort of show was where the New Delhi River Band had a following. The NDRB were a known quantity in the tiny South Bay underground, so they could headline a concert in San Jose, albeit a modest one.

Weird Herald were a legendary San Jose band that featured guitarists Billy Dean Andrus and Paul Ziegler, along with bassist Cecil Bollinger and drummer Pat McIntyre. Both Andrus and Ziegler were old friends of Jorma Kaukonen’s from his South Bay folkie days.  Ziegler was briefly in the electric Hot Tuna around 1970.  Andrus was a true South Bay legend, and when he died unexpectedly in November 1970 it upset all his friends greatly: Jorma wrote "Ode For Billy Dean," and another old friend, Pat Simmons of The Doobie Brothers, wrote "Black Water" for and about him. Weird Herald only released one obscure single, but they did record an unreleased album, and having heard a few tracks I can assure you their legendary reputation had some basis in fact.

Warriors of The Rainbow were another band of ex-San Jose State folkies, featuring guitarist Page Brownton, who is still performing in the Santa Cruz Mountains today, as far as I know. The Ohms Band is a mystery, even to me.

Robert Hunter would have arrived in East Palo Alto right around this time. The Grateful Dead were playing in Lake Tahoe this weekend, but I believe Phil Lesh would have picked up Hunter on Euclid Avenue shortly afterwards.

A poster for the planned show at the football field at Cabrillo College in Santa Cruz County on September 2-3, 1967. There is no evidence that the shows ever took place, sad to say.

September 2-3, 1967:  Cabrillo College Stadium, Cabrillo Junior College, Santa Cruz, CA
Benefit for SCA at Santa Cruz [canceled]
Grateful Dead/Canned Heat/The Leaves/Andrew Staples/Sons of Champlain (sic)/New Delhi River Band/Second Coming/New Breed/Butterfield Blues Band/Gross Exaggeration/Yajahla/Tingle Guild/People/Jaguars/Art Collection/Morning Glory/Ben Frank’s Electric Band/New Frontier/Chocolate Watch Band/The Other Side/E-Types/Mourning Reign/Imperial Mange Remedy/Omens/Ragged Staff/Talon Wedge & Others.
This was scheduled as a two-day event on the Saturday and Sunday of Labor Day weekend. Cabrillo College is a Junior College about six miles from the UCSC Campus, with a view that would be the envy of a million dollar resort. The event is widely known because the poster appears in Paul Grushkin's book The Art Of Rock.

However, I looked into the subject at some length, and there's no evidence that the event actually occurred. I talked to numerous old South Bay rockers who wouldn't have missed it, and even someone who was in a band that was booked at the show (the E-Types) and not a one recalled anything about it. It's impossible to prove a negative, but I have to believe this event was planned and then got scuttled by finances or the powers-that-be.

In theory, the Grateful Dead would have played Cabrillo on Saturday, September 2, because they were playing Rio Nido on Sunday (September 3). Remember that with Labor Day weekend, Sunday would have been like Saturday night, and shows could have run late. Most chronologies have the Dead at Cabrillo, but I don't think they, or anyone, was there. It's too bad. For one thing, it would have been a chance for the New Delhi River Band to play with the Grateful Dead, but this never occurred. More intriguingly, if the Dead had played, they would have bought Hunter along, and perhaps having already accepted the offer to be Garcia's co-writer, perhaps Hunter would have considered the possibility of writing with Nelson, but that too was not to be.

September (8?), 1967 San Bruno Recreation Gym, San Bruno Park, San Bruno, CA: New Delhi River Band/Cleanliness and Godliness Skiffle Band (date assumed)
[update 20230626] A Commenter writes in

In the late sixties, my friends and I put on a couple of concerts at the San Bruno Recreation Gym located in San Bruno Park. One of the concerts had both The New Delhi River Band and the Cleanliness and Godliness Skiffle Band. We also had our own light show called Temporary Optics which provided the lights for the show. I don't remember what year, but the month was September. We had a great crowd and both bands were well received.

San Bruno is on the Peninsula, just above San Francisco Airport (SFO).  San Bruno City Park is on Crystal Springs Avenue, just near El Camino Real, but below Junipero Serra Park. Temporary Optics was the regular light show at the Family Dog on The Great Highway for many of the 1970 shows at the venue. The Cleanliness And Godliness Skiffle Band were from Berkeley, and had arisen out of the same scene as Country Joe And The Fish. I have assumed the date to be an open weekend, but it just as well could have been at the end of the month (September 29-30).

A poster for Moby Grape and the The New Delhi River Band at the Continental Ballroom in Santa Clara on September 15-16, 1967. Note the odd spelling of NDRB (thanks to Colin for the scan).

September 15-16, 1967: Continental Ballroom, Santa Clara, CA:  Moby Grape/Nu Delhi River Band/Om
The Continental Ballroom was San Jose's leading rock venue, although it was actually in the nearby town of Santa Clara, at 1600 Martin Avenue. All of the major San Francisco bands played there, albeit for a variety of different promoters. Moby Grape was riding quite high at this time, soon after the release of their debut album, and the shows were probably well attended. Why, exactly, the New Delhi River Band's name was misspelled on the poster is a mystery, but I assume it was an intentional one. I assume the opening act 'Om' was the same as The Ohms Band who had played at Azteca Hall the month before.

September 17, 1967: Provo Park, Berkeley, CA: Cleanliness and Godliness Skiffle Band/New Delhi River Band/Strawberry Window
The New Delhi River Band played yet another Sunday at Provo Park, with Berkeley's own Cleanliness and Godliness Skiffle Band and the Strawberry Window, from San Leandro.

A flyer for the New Delhi River Band's show at The Bold Knight in Sunnyvale. Once again, note a variant spelling for the band's name--I don't think these were accidents

September 22, 1967 The Bold Knight, Sunnyvale, CA New Delhi River Band/The Art Collective
The NDRB were still popular in the South Bay. The Bold Knight was one of the best paying gigs in the area. On this September weekend, the NDRB played a free concert Thursday in Palo Alto, a well paid show in San Jose on Friday, and a San Francisco show on Saturday where they may not have made much money at all. That pretty well summed up the NDRB's career.

A poster for the New Delhi River Band's performance at the Western Front on September 23, 1967 (thanks to Ross for the scan)

September 23, 1967: The Western Front, San Francisco, CA: New Delhi River Band/Mad River/The Other Half
The Western Front was an obscure concert venue at 895 O'Farrell (at Polk), just 4 blocks from San Francisco's run-down Tenderloin District. The venue was a former car dealership. Like many such venues, it has a vague, murky history, which I have done my best to sort out. After a dramatic opening weekend around July 4 of 1967, it closed for over two months, due apparently to the lack of a dance permit. The New Delhi River Band played the second night of their re-opening weekend.

The bands on the bill were very hip: Mad River had relocated to Berkeley from Ohio, and are widely revered today as being far ahead of their time, although they were merely strange back then. The Other Half have also become popular in collector's circles, with the great guitarist Randy Holden. However, I have never read an eyewitness account, much less a review of any Western Front show, and despite being one of the NDRB's few bookings in the city, it can't have led to much.

The building that housed the Western Front is just two doors down from the Great American Music Hall. 895 O'Farrell now houses the notorious Mitchell Brothers Cinema (don't google it at work).

October 1, 1967 El Camino Park, Palo Alto, CA Steve Miller Band/Blue Cheer/New Delhi River Band
Palo Alto had a series of Be-Ins at El Camino Park, the city's first downtown park. The Grateful Dead had played one on June 24, and unlike most cities Palo Alto continued to have free concerts in the park all the way through the Summer of 1968. This Sunday afternoon Be-In was produced by the Mid-Peninsula Free University (or "Free You" as it was known), yet another one of those South Bay stories that's too much of a tangent to explain. At this time, all three of the acts were popular locally, but none of them had a record. Blue Cheer went on to a certain kind of infamy, and the Steve Miller Band, along with rhythm guitarist Boz Scaggs, went on to huge success. Yet the New Delhi River Band, somewhat on a par with these groups at the time, has slipped into total obscurity outside of my blog [note: i had originally thought that this show was September 21, but JGMF found a mention of the date in the September 26, 1967 Stanford Daily].

>Fall, 1967 Fraternity Row, Berkeley New Delhi River Band
An eyewitness remembers a trip to Berkeley where the group played a hall overlooking ‘Fraternity Row’ in Berkeley. This could have been any number of smaller buildings. In fact, Frat Row at the time was moving from Northside (Euclid Ave and Hearst St) to Southside (Piedmont Ave and Warring St), so I'm not even sure which side of campus it would have been on.

Fall, 1967 Peninsula School, Menlo Park, CA
Peninsula School is a legendary Menlo Park instituion, a K-8 school founded in 1925 on Quaker principles. It was very popular with progressives prior to and during the 1960s (not to mention afterwards), and it was the kind of place where kindergartners addressed their teachers by their first name. Jerry Garcia and Bob Hunter played their first paying gig at Peninsula in 1961, and the school has been intertwined with Grateful Dead history ever since. Alumni of the school include John Dawson, Bob Matthews, Steve Marcus and me. Jerry Garcia's first wife Sara worked there at one point, as well.

There was a fundraiser type rock concert at Peninsula in the Fall of 1967 for Pacific High School, and a then-student thinks that the New Delhi River Band may have been present. Given the social circles, this seems like a very likely possibility. Pacific High School is another of those 60s South Bay tangents that cannot be summarized easily. Pacific was sort of conceived as the High School successor for Peninsula School graduates. Suffice to say, students calling teachers by their first name was just the starting point.

From the Fall of 1967 onwards, it gets harder and harder to find any evidence of the New Delhi River Band performing. There were more and more rock shows around the Bay Area, but as the underground and commercial scenes started to merge, as Fillmore music started to appeal out in the suburbs, not every band made the transition. I think the New Delhi River Band's lack of formal management meant that they didn't have any entree into the universe of booking agents and promoters that lead to paying shows. Without any recording opportunities on the horizon, the band seems to have just slowly ground to a halt.

October 28, 1967 Channing Place, Berkeley, CA: New Delhi River Band
JGMF found a listing in the SF Chronicle of October 21, which mentioned several bands that would be playing Channing Place over the next several days, through Saturday October 28. Channing Place was at 2511 Channing Way (at Telegraph). The other bands mentioned were the Cleanliness and Godliness Skiffle Band, Purple Earthquake and Ball Point Banana. It's possible Ball Point Banana was a Palo Alto band.

An ad from the San Jose State College newspaper, the Spartan Daily, for a Nov 3 '67 show headlined by The Doors (h/t JGMF).

November 3, 1967: Continental Ballroom, Santa Clara, CA: The Doors/Heatherstones/Orphan Egg/New Delhi River Band
JGMF uncovered this gig, advertised in the San Jose State's Spartan Daily.

November 7, 1967: Rancho Diablo, La Honda, CA: New Delhi River Band/Black Shit Puppy Farm
This was more of a party than a gig. This was actually a birthday party for a popular student at Pacific High School (the date was inferred from a friend who recalls her birth date).

The friends of the birthday girl lived at a La Honda Road commune known as Rancho Diablo. Rancho Diablo had been the location of the commune that housed the group Anonymous Artists of America, who had to some extent succeeded the Merry Pranksters and taken over their equipment, including Ron Boise’s ‘Thunder Machine.” However, the AAA commune had moved out mid-year and others had moved in. Many of the others were former or current Pacific High School students who later became known as the Black Shit Puppy Farm, which was both a light show and a rock band, depending on the gig. The band was named after the commune dog, a Black Lab named Arnold.  The lead guitarist of BSPF remembers this birthday party event with the NDRB, as it was one of their first public performances.

November 22, 1967: The Bold Knight, Sunnyvale, CA: Heatherstone/New Delhi River Band/Bogus Thunder/Art Collection
The Bold Knight usually only put on shows on Friday nights. However, the audience was primarily teenagers, so the Wednesday before Thanksgiving was like a Friday to them. The NDRB played along with some other South Bay stalwarts. Bogus Thunder (is that a 60s name or what?) were connected to groups like The Chocolate Watch Band and The Other Side, and The Art Collection, though a South Bay band, were fronted by New Zealand singer Ray Columbus. Heatherstone, sometimes billed as Heather Stone, are familiar to me from old flyers, but I don't know anything about them.

December 17, 1967: The Steppenwolf, Berkeley, CA: Mad River/New Delhi River Band/Lincoln’s Promise/Sky Blue
I have a suspicion that this show was another benefit, since Mad River could have filled the tiny place by themselves, and their was hardly a need for four groups if they were all expecting to get paid. This was a comparatively early show by the Berkeley group Sky Blue.

January 5, 1968: The Bold Knight, Sunnyvale, CA: New Delhi/Blueberry Jam/Steve Jenkins Group/Glare
The Bold Knight was a well paying booking in the South Bay, as the shows were held on Friday nights in a restaurant ballroom that could include up to 1000 patrons. Since no drinks were served, it was accessible to the many young people with cars in the South Bay. If the NDRB could still headline the Bold Knight in early 1968, they definitely had a following in the South Bay. Yet they had been headlining the Bold Knight six months earlier, and they had gotten no further in other markets. According to Nelson, around this time the New Delhi River Band simply stopped playing, without really breaking up.

It's not clear from the poster whether "Blueberry Jam" and "Steve Jenkins Group" are the same or different. Glare was a Los Altos High School band.

According to a 1977 interview with Kingfish leader Matt Kelly in the English fanzine Dark Star, Kelly's group St. Matthews Blues Band had opened for the New Delhi River Band sometime in late 1967, although I have been unable to determine exactly when or where. Kelly said that he took to jamming regularly with the NDRB so regularly that he became a member of the group. This too has been hard to pin down, but it must have been around this time [update: Kelly told me he was never actually a member of the New Delhi River Band, and did not start jamming with some of the members until after they broke up]

I know the name of the woman in the poster, and I know that the cat belonged to one of her roommates. Her roommate, however, can no longer remember whether the cat in the modified photo was "Fear" or "Trembling." Research continues.

January 27, 1968: Cowell College Dining Commons, UCSC, Santa Cruz: New Delhi River Band/Living Color
The last trace of a New Delhi River Band performance that I have been able to find was a Satruday night show at the Cowell College Dining Commons, at the newly opened University of California at Santa Cruz. The Cowell Dining Commons is within walking distance of the McHenry Library, the site of the Grateful Dead Archive. A very nice copy of the poster endures (thanks to Queenie, Kindy and Georgiana). It's uncertain if Kelly had joined the band by this time, but the NDRB fully evaporated shortly after this, whether or not Cowell was truly their last performance, which it very well may have been.

Aftermath
In the Dark Star interview, Kelly recalled that David Nelson and John Tomasi left soon after Kelly joined. Peter Sultzbach soon followed. He and Nelson were replaced by guitarists Ryan Brandenburg and Tim Abbott, another Palo Altan from various groups including The Good News, from whence Torbert and Herold had come. Abbott had also had a stint in San Jose's great Chocolate Watch Band.. Around this time the band changed its name to Shango. Kelly recalls that the biggest gig Shango did was headlining a wake for Neal Cassady at Big Sur (on March 21-23, 1968), a weekend show attended by as many as 4000 people. Shango led to Horses, but then that group too disintegrated. I will tell the whole story of the subsequent adventures of the band members, but for now a brief survey will have to suffice.

David Nelson went to ground after the New Delhi River Band, surfacing several months later with old friends like Jerry Garcia and Peter Albin. After playing some bluegrass and almost joining Big Brother and The Holding Company, he joined Garcia and John Dawson in the band that became The New Riders Of The Purple Sage. He still leads the group.

Dave Torbert went to Hawaii after 1968 to go surfing. In early 1970, Torbert was on his way to England to join Matt Kelly in Gospel Oak, when he 'coincidentally' received a call at his parent's house from John Dawson, who invited him to join the New Riders. After a few fine years and five albums with the Riders, Torbert and Kelly finally teamed up in the band that would become Kingfish. Torbert died of long-standing health issues in 1982.

Sweet John Tomasi remains the most elusive of the New Delhi River Band members. For the next few years, he performed periodically as the singer for the groups Mountain Current and Lonesome Janet (with Matthew Kelly and Chris Herold), but his subsequent activities remain obscure. Hopefully he is well and well-off somewhere.

Chris Herold managed avoided the draft as a Conscientious Objector. However, he was obligated to other service, in his case driving a hospital truck from 1969-71. As a result he could only play on weekends. He played in an apparently excellent Santa Cruz Mountains band called Mountain Current, but they only played the local haunts. I have always thought that when the drum chair for the New Riders opened up in late 1970, with the departure of Mickey Hart, Torbert and Nelson would have liked to get Herold into it, but it would have been impossible. With the initial demise of Kingfish in 1976, Herold seems to have stopped playing music professionally, although every few years he seems to have sat in with Kingfish for a song or two. Herold is now a widely respected writer of Haikus.

Peter Sultzbach joined Linda Tillery's band after NDRB broke up. Tillery had been in The Loading Zone, with whom NDRB had shared the stage many times at Provo Park, so I assume that was the initial connection. In 1968-69, Columbia was trying to make her a star as 'Sweet Linda Devine.' Ultimately she returned to the Loading Zone. Loading Zone, a fine band, faded away after 1972. However, they had shared management and rehearsal space with Oakland's finest, Tower Of Power. Sultzbach became Tower's road manager, and a google search of his name will turn it up on the credits to some of their albums. Sadly, Sultzbach died of cancer in 1981, far too young, fondly remembered by his friends.

The New Delhi River Band lived on, however faintly, when Nelson and Dawson's pre-New Riders history was ever alluded to. They were never huge, but they were big in their county. Still, being Palo Alto's second psychedelic blues band didn't quite have the impact of being the first one. Hopefully Nelson will rescue their demo tape from his garage, and some South Bay grandparents can have a long awaited flashback or two.