By the summer of 1969 the Family Dog had run out of road, and the road it ran out of was the Great Highway. Chet Helms — the soft-spoken Texan who had made the Avalon Ballroom on Sutter Street the psychedelic rival to Bill Graham's Fillmore — had lost the Avalon to permit trouble the year before, and in the spring of 1969 he took over the lease on the old Edgewater at 660 Great Highway, a weathered dance hall pressed against Ocean Beach at the fog-bound western edge of the continent. The Family Dog on the Great Highway opened on June 13, 1969 with Jefferson Airplane, and for a little over a year it hosted the Grateful Dead, Santana, Big Mama Thornton, and the Flying Burrito Brothers. It was the last chapter of the Family Dog, and everyone seems to have half-known it. The ballroom was beautiful and the ocean was right there, but it was a long, cold drive from anywhere that mattered — downtown, the Peninsula, the East Bay — and the casual crowds that had once climbed the Avalon's stairs mostly stayed home. The venue was closed by August 1970 when the city declined to renew the permit.

Into this last stand, on the weekend of July 18-20, came the Sir Douglas Quintet, and the pairing had a certain fugitive symmetry. Doug Sahm was himself a Texan transplant. Arrested for marijuana possession at the Corpus Christi airport in late 1965 and handed five years' probation the following spring, Sahm decamped to Northern California, settling near Salinas and then in the Haight, trading San Antonio's Tex-Mex conjunto and West Side soul for the Avalon and the Fillmore. The Quintet had broken through in 1965 with the Beatles-slanted "She's About a Mover," and by early 1969 they had their second and biggest American hit: "Mendocino," released on Smash in the fall of 1968, climbing to No. 27 on the Billboard Hot 100 across a fifteen-week run into 1969 — a Farfisa-organ postcard of Northern California written by a homesick Texan who had made the coast his own. That a band who had just put a Mendocino County town on the pop charts should turn up a few months later on the literal edge of San Francisco, on a crude hand-drawn handbill promising "That which is right rises twice," feels almost too neat to be coincidence, and yet it was simply a Friday night booking.

The handbill itself — titled "This Week's Party" — covered two runs at once, July 11-13 and July 18-20, an economy that tells you something about how the Family Dog was operating by then. Below the Quintet on the July 18 leg sat openers whose names have all but vanished: Bicycle, Kwan Ditos, and Chapter 3 of Junior G-Men, local acts who left almost no recorded trace. They are the ordinary texture of the ballroom era — bands that played a weekend on the ocean and were gone.