Family Dog Denver
History
The Family Dog's Denver room was Chet Helms's attempt to export the Avalon Ballroom's model beyond San Francisco. It opened at 1601 West Evans Avenue in the summer of 1967, ran the same kind of bills the Avalon ran — touring San Francisco bands, local support, a light show, a commissioned poster for each weekend — and was gone within roughly a year. Local licensing authorities and police were hostile to the operation from the outset, and the venue never established the footing its parent had in San Francisco. Its posters carry the Family Dog's numbered series with a parallel Denver index (FD-79 is also FDD-1), and the artists Helms used in San Francisco — Rick Griffin among them — drew for Denver too. The room is a short chapter, but it is the clearest evidence that the Family Dog understood itself as something replicable rather than as a single hall.
Its Place in the Scene
The Family Dog's only sustained attempt at a second city, and the counter-example to the assumption that the poster scene was purely a San Francisco phenomenon.