He made the announcement at the site of the Family Dog.įey, who died in 2013, was a University of Pennsylvania dropout when he promoted his first concert, starring a cover band called Baby Huey and the Babysitters, on Easter Sunday 1965, in Rockford, Illinois.īy 1967, Fey was based in Colorado but looking for other worlds to conquer. “Everybody loved Chet, but he wasn’t a businessman,” maintains Obarski, who believes, as does Montgomery, that the idea of franchising the Family Dog was born of financial instability.Įnter Fey, who shared the Family Dog Denver’s origin story with us as part of “The Long Goodbye,” an article published in August 1997, when he sold his share of Fey Concerts to onetime rival Universal Concerts. Helms and associates began staging what the Family Dog website calls “weekly dance hall revues gave local bands a forum to perform their groundbreaking music.” And since those groups included the Jefferson Airplane, the Dead and plenty of other sonic adventurers, the Family Dog quickly became a phenomenon. This cool factor was imported from San Francisco, where the late Chet Helms founded Family Dog Productions in 1966. And there’s Barry Fey,” a concert promoter who leveraged the experience he gained at the Family Dog into a Colorado entertainment empire.Īs such, Montgomery sees the Family Dog as much more than just a rock club: “I would say it is absolutely the foundational seed of Denver’s status as a hip city.” It’s not just rock-and-roll savagery, and it’s not just the hippies versus the straights.
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Obarski calls this incident “the dramatic lynchpin” of the movie that he and Montgomery are making - “but the more we’ve gotten into this story, the more levels we find.
“The posters don’t lie,” Montgomery stresses, “but history can kind of pull the rug out from under them.” As an example, he points to the placard advertising appearances by Canned Heat on October 20 but before the blues-rockers could take the stage on October 21, they were busted for marijuana possession. And while sixteen eye-popping posters for gigs at the venue have survived, Montgomery concedes that their existence falls short of proof that the concerts they touted actually happened. Likewise, questions about authenticity remain about the small handful of recordings on YouTube that purport to have been made at Denver’s Family Dog, including a take of “Light My Fire” by the Doors. According to Dan Obarski, who’s working with University of Denver professor Scott Montgomery to create The Tale of the Dog, a documentary expected to debut in 2018, the fiftieth anniversary of the venue’s demise, “we have three photos of the club, I think, but nobody has found photos or video from inside.” But the Dog was put down in less than two years, and while its 1601 West Evans Avenue building still exists, the business currently operating there is PT’s Showclub Denver, a strip joint whose performers specialize in baring their bodies instead of their rock-and-roll souls.Ĭlearly, the space is very different now than it was in its psychedelic heyday, but specifics about the changes are scarce. The club debuted just shy of a half-century ago, on September 8, 1967, and subsequently played host to a slew of seminal acts, including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead and more. The Family Dog may be the most influential rock-music venue in Denver history.
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