History

The Straight Theater was a former movie house at 1702 Haight Street, in the heart of the Haight-Ashbury, that neighborhood residents and artists converted into a community-run ballroom and performance space. Its grand opening weekend, July 21–23, 1967, ran three nights and culminated on Sunday the 23rd with the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company — the night Neal Cassady delivered a spoken-word rap over the Dead's jam, a fragment of which later surfaced on a flexi-disc in Hank Harrison's 'The Dead Book' (1973). Unlike the Fillmore or the Avalon, the Straight was not a promoter's operation but the neighborhood's own room, and its documentary record is correspondingly homemade.

Its Place in the Scene

The Haight-Ashbury's grassroots, community-run alternative to the promoter-driven ballrooms — a venue the scene built for itself.

The Facts

Shows at this Venue