THE MATRIX AS ANARCHIC JOY
Is it possible to enter the Matrix, San Francisco's persistent musical stronghold, without immediately knowing it to be a most unusual institution? On the wall of the engineering booth is the answer: a photograph, magnificent in its rarity, of Jorma Kaukonen smiling. Smiling. Not smirking sarcastically, but smiling a big, boyish grin of innocent happiness, his guitar in hand.
And such, in a capsule, is the pattern of existence at this club that gave birth to Jefferson Airplane, and with them, a community of feverish musical activity. Just about everyone started, or was helped to start here. The Grateful Dead did, after transcending Palo Alto; Steve Miller, upon arrival in San Francisco from Chicago, did; The Quicksilver Messenger Service, and of course Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Charlatans, the Final Solution, the Great Society, and on and on and on...
Why does Jorma smile in his photograph? Because the Matrix is a fine gig to play, it possesses few of the pretensions of the ballrooms, and because it has retained those elements that were once essential to the city's atmosphere. Musicians here are human beings, not stage idols to be indiscriminately pawed and patronized.
Sitting with Dave Martin, for all practical purposes now the club's manager, in the cramped tangle of the engineering room, talking in rambles and circles and digressions about the history. Half-empty glasses of beer occasionally sipped at, Dave doing his best to salvage his electronics while speaking from his head on the story of the Matrix.
"The club was really built for the Airplane," he began. "Ted Saunders was the primary person; he financed the Airplane." They opened the club on August 10, 1965. Saunders scraped together the money to rent the building, and to pay the band's equipment and personal expenses. "He's suing them now, because they broke a contract they had signed with him to play here 15 times a year."
There are actually two halves to the Matrix. One is the U.S. Pizza Corporation, which Saunders still owns, and which handles the beer and wine concessions (yes, there is a bar); the other is Matrix Recording, the organization responsible for both of the Great Society albums, and more recently, the "Early Steppenwolf" collection on the Dunhill label.
Peter Abram and Ray Bregante own the recording endeavor. "Pete had been here since 66," Dave continued, recording various groups." At the beginning of the next year, roughly January, he became the manager, and as June 67 was the co-owner, with Ray.
Since then, the club has been gradually reasserting its financial strength. It had been so heavily in debt that on two separate occasions the gas and electricity were turned off. "We'd come in at 9:00, turn everything on, run till 2:00, and close up quick," said Dave. But nothing's been turned off since 67.
Well, at least not for economic reasons.
On October 31, 1967, the man raided the Matrix, convicted Peter on a charge of disturbing the peace, fined him $250.00, and hit him for a 30 day suspended sentence and a year's probation.
On October 4, 1968, once again, but this time there was no conviction. Harvey Mandel was tuning, and Pete walked into a cop's arms. The problem had been an open door, left so accidentally by the band, which had loosed the amplification to storm the neighborhood. The door is usually closed; do you think the residents could have been polite enough to phone the club and tell the owners that the door was open? Come now.
After one added threat to bust for noise, the club shut down for a spell to soundproof the premises. But now there is a new ordinance: any sound is excessive that can be heard more than 50 feet from its source. In a commercially zoned area?
"A new trauma every night," remarked Peter.
In a time when musicians are charging higher and higher fees for their services, and when promoters are resorting to baseball stadiums in order to retain a good profit margin, how is a small (104 person capacity) club like this able to survive, and still present excellent talent, as it consistently does?
Peter: "The groups realize that we're not making much money, and old people have a loyalty to the Matrix. They know that it's a relaxed place, and they feel that they can come in here and enjoy it."
Thus you can come in on a Monday night and blow your mind over as stellar a collection of talent as you could encounter anywhere. You may see Earl or John Lee Hooker...or Jack Casady of the Airplane...or Michael Bloomfield...
The entire Airplane will occasionally play. Elvin Bishop is there quite often, Janis Joplin may drop by, or Jerry Garcia, and a lot of good black blues cats like Lightning Hopkins.
Unfortunately, you have to be 21 to get in, because alcohol is very bad for anyone younger, and once you are inside no dancing is very feasible, as most the floor area is covered with tables and chairs.
And you won't see the same audience you do at the ballrooms. Those who frequent the Matrix usually come, surprisingly enough, to listen to the music, not to hustle chicks or whatever. And it's not a very glamorous scene, stuck out in the Marina, with very little of the bright-light big-city feeling found at the Fillmore.
Instead, a lot of good persons and music, with pastrami sandwiches and wine from the bar, and a lot of generally healthy vibrations.
Finally, some few ecstatic words about Matrix Recording.
Because the club has served, as its name implies, as a fountainhead for the San Francisco rock community, it has compiled mountains of tapes, all of them cut in the club during performance, of a quite outstanding selection of musicians. Sitting casually on the shelf in the recording booth are some 20 reels of the Elvin Bishop group alone.
This may serve as indicator of both the quality and quantity of the library. Just think what an album it would make.
Guess what?
A three record anthology of the San Francisco bands is now being readied for distribution. When the tapes are edited, and musicians' approval is had, the albums will be released, on a new label called Together (headed by Gary Usher, late of Columbia Records, who has produced, among others, the Byrds). Each of the three lp's will probably come out separately, though they may be packaged as a set. I think enough said.
The club itself, in the meantime, continues to present exceptional name talent, and to nurture local unknowns. It's a house of delightful colors, heavy with rich memories from the past and warm realities from the present.
(by Raymond Lang, from the Daily Californian, July 15, 1969)
* * *
JOY, JOY: THE MARINES AT KELLY'S COVE (excerpt)
Friday, August 8, sometime between 2 and 6 in the morning, someone ripped off the Matrix, San Francisco's oldest house of rock (this week is its fourth birthday).
The theft was for about $4,000 worth of hardware, including some priceless tapes. The owners are in a very cramped corner and desperately need their merchandise. If anyone can supply a lead, a 10% reward waits, eager to be given.
What's missing: two tape recorders (a TC 500 Sony - 2 and 4 track, and a 777 Sony); three mixers (one custom built, one Allied-Knight, and one Sony); ten microphones (six Electra-Voice, three Senn-Hauser, and one MB); two Dyna 70 amplifiers, and one pair of headphones.
The tapes, though, are the big deal, fans. Precious music cut live in the club over the past two years, of Jefferson Airplane, The Steve Miller Band, The Blues Project, Elvin Bishop, Johnny Winter...
Enough pain is enough pain. To the thief or anyone who knows him: copy the tapes if you like, but please don't record over them, and do return them to the Matrix somehow. No questions asked, no trouble needed, just the tapes, and desperately. If you have them, mail them COD, or phone anonymously and say where they can be picked up, or nail a message to the front door, but bring them back somehow. 3138 Fillmore, San Francisco, 567-0118.
Our atmosphere is increasingly feverish with negative energies. I will not be Ralph Gleason proffering bromide in the guise of explanation, but I will exhort us all to view the changes to which we have subjected our "movement."
(by Raymond Lang, from the Daily Californian, August 15, 1969)
For the outcome of Together Records, see:
No Dead content here - just including this as some interesting background for the Matrix, particularly the "mountains of tapes" made there. It's interesting how open the recording routine was, with reels of tapes sitting on the shelves there for sometimes two years. 20 reels of Elvin Bishop is quite a sample - much of that must have been from jam nights, since I think Bishop had played only about a half dozen billed shows at the Matrix in the previous year, but he showed up to jam "quite often." Some of the taped groups mentioned like the Steve Miller Band or the Blues Project hadn't played there since 1968, I think?
ReplyDeleteOffhand I don't know the outcome of the tape theft, if anything was returned - that might have been reported in other papers. But it's quite possible that a number of 1969 Garcia/Hartbeats jam tapes vanished into the night.
Much still remained - on August 26, the Family Dog held a light show featuring "three years of unissued tapes from the Matrix."
(Lang gives the impression that "Matrix Recording" was releasing its own albums, but they were providing tapes to actual labels to release - Great Society on Columbia and Steppenwolf on ABC Dunhill.)
Nothing much came of the planned Together Records anthology of SF bands. The story's told in the links, but in brief, the label dissolved and was bought by another MGM label which proceeded to put out a couple of semi-authorized albums of live Dead from '66, which put an end to the whole plan.
What intrigued me is that the story hadn't really been connected to the Matrix before - the assumption was that the deal was for soundman Bob Cohen's tapes from the Avalon, but a couple of Matrix tunes slipped onto those Dead albums too. Here Lang implies that the Together anthology is going to come entirely from the Matrix stash.
But the original intent, whether the music came from the Matrix or the Avalon, seems to have been that the Together releases would benefit the Family Dog.
Howard Wolf, who worked with Together Records, played the Matrix tapes at the Family Dog light show. The Berkeley Tribe reported (8/22/69) that "Wolfe, who worked with the Family Dog for two and a half years, wants to get together a musical and pictorial history of what went down in San Francisco... The tapes to be played Tuesday will hopefully be released as records, Wolfe hopes, to help pay for the expenses of the Common."
Jerry Garcia remembered the plan the same way in a 1972 KSAN interview: "It was originally gonna be a whole different thing... This was back in the days when there was an attempt to sort of communityise the Family Dog. It was in the wake of that whole light show strike...and originally that record was gonna be made - the proceeds were gonna go toward keeping the Family Dog running at the time, and it was originally a whole different record company. But the record company that was originally doing it was bought up by MGM [and] some weird swindle went down."
And so, in one way or another, the mountains of tapes became more or less a graveyard of tapes.
I hadn't ever parsed that they were looking to do records to support The Common. That's pretty fucking incredible. You are a gem!
DeleteI haven't poked around for other Matrix content, but here's a random example of a Monday night at the Matrix that summer, which complements this article well:
ReplyDeleteSOUNDS ALIVE
What with the heavy-handed superstar rock hype of recent times and its complementary "heavy draw" theory, a great gap has begun to arise between musicians and their vital constituents, the listening people. However, anyone who has ever ventured down to the Matrix for the weekly Monday night jam would have to deny the present persistent accusations of 'musical capitalism.' On these nights anyone can make it down to 3138 Fillmore to groove, jam, or get it on for free, or at times a nominal 50 cents.
For example, in recent months I have seen such rock stars as Johnny Winter, Steve Stills, Jerry Garcia, Buddy Miles, and Elvin Bishop doing their thing in this small club for what is usually a jam-packed enthusiastic, if not ecstatic, crowd. The club seems to be just small enough for everyone to feel intimately involved in the music of the stars as well as that of those multitudinous lesser known musical souls of our city who are jamming side by side.
This past Monday proved to be an extremely exciting night featuring a four-piece brass section of George Cash of Mendlebaum, Richard Drake of Sebastian Moon, Roluf Stuart of Womb, and David Ginsberg driven alternately by Chris Mickey of Mendlebaum and Elvin Bishop on guitar with Keith Knudson of Mendlebaum on traps. Particularly impressive was Elvin asserting his usual dynamic ability to turn everyone on, leading a ballsy impromptu version of the J.B. Lenoire tune "How Long?"
And upon leaving the club at the 2 a.m. closing hour, I once again felt that glorious sense of musical intimacy which no heavy-handed promotion is ever able to accomplish.
(from the San Francisco Good Times, 9/11/69, p.4)