On Friday, August 21, 1970, the Family Dog on the Great Highway put on its last show out at Ocean Beach: Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Robert Savage Group, the Backyard Mamas, and Deadly Nightshade (bill, catalog, and handbill per classicposters; the piece is FD-700821 in Eric King's reference).

The handbill says the thing out loud. San Andreas Fault drew the Family Dog logo half under water and set the last line of text beneath it: "Fall by before the Family Dog submerges." Chet Helms' operation had moved to a former amusement hall at the edge of the continent, as far from the Fillmore's downtown gravity as you could get and still be in San Francisco, and by that August the water was coming in. It is a rare thing for a poster to announce its own ending, and rarer for it to be funny about it.

There is a small puzzle on the sheet worth preserving rather than smoothing over: the artist credit reads "SAF69," but the show was held in 1970. The artifact and the event disagree by a year, and this record follows the event.

This page is the far bookend of a story told elsewhere on this site. The Great Highway hall is where the Light Artists Guild struck in August 1969 and where the Grateful Dead played through it. A year on, the lights went out for good.

The Family Dog on the Great Highway had lasted about sixteen months.

Chet Helms lost the Avalon in late 1968 — a permit fight with the city, a landlord, and debts — and reopened in June 1969 out at Ocean Beach, in a building at 660 Great Highway that had been part of the old Playland-at-the-Beach amusement complex. It was as far west as it was possible to go and still be in San Francisco: the Pacific on one side, Golden Gate Park on the other, and forty blocks of the Sunset District between it and anywhere the audience actually lived. That distance is most of the story. The Fillmore and the Avalon had been in the city's middle, walkable from the Haight; the Great Highway required a car or a long ride on the N Judah, and the fog out there comes in hard enough that the beach is often invisible from the road.

Helms ran it as he had always run rooms — communal, unbusinesslike, generous with free shows and benefits — and the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Santana and Quicksilver all played it, sometimes for very little. The Light Artists Guild strike in August 1969, when the light-show operators withdrew their labour over pay and credit, happened here; the Dead played through it and Jerry Garcia honoured the picket line, in one of the odder labour disputes in American music.

By August 1970 the money was gone. Quicksilver headlined the last night, which has a symmetry to it: they were among the bands the Avalon had built when nobody outside the city knew them, and they closed the operation's final room.

What makes the handbill remarkable is that it knew. San Andreas Fault drew the Family Dog logo half submerged and put the line underneath: "Fall by before the Family Dog submerges." Posters in this series announce openings, benefits, festivals and returns; they very rarely announce an ending, and almost never with a joke. Helms went on promoting occasional shows for decades and died in 2005, but the Family Dog as a going concern stopped on Ocean Beach that Friday.

One discrepancy on the sheet is preserved here rather than tidied away: the artist credit reads "SAF69" though the show was in 1970. The artifact and the event disagree by a year. This record follows the event, and notes the mark.