Retrochrome

I pulled this slide out of a very large collection I bought in the San Gabriel Valley back in the aughts of the 21st century. It caught my eye because of the bright red, 19th century building, the old cars parked on the side of the road and the giant blue and red sign marking the establishment. It has intrigued me for years and every once in a while I’d come back to it and discover more of the history of this place. This slide transparency was developed in July 1966 and that lines up with the hey day of the Red Dog Saloon. But before I get to that, let’s back up a century give or take. 

Virginia City is the birthplace of Mark Twain. A fact most of you will recognize as a lie. Samuel Clemens worked in town as a reporter for the local paper and it is here he first used Mark Twain as his famous nom de plume. So a truth inside a lie, let’s say. Twain came west to seek adventure and avoid the civil war. Ironic because war is generally full of adventure, but also full of death so maybe it makes sense. A few years later a silver strike put Virginia City on the map — quite literally. The town was a boom town for a few decades, but eventually the boom was over and the town began a decline for the next 100 odd years. Then with the help of legalized gambling and a hit TV show called Bonanza — a western set just outside Virginia City on the Ponderosa Ranch with the Cartwright family — tourism became a boom. 

Around 1965 a few folks from San Francisco got together and thought of a great idea, buy the old Comstock House there in V-city and transform it into a music venue for acts coming to the west coast to stop and play on their way the the city by the bay. The Red Dog Saloon was born. Why is this so important that I spent hours exploring a internet rabbit hole that some how lead me to more than a few trivia game winning nuggets of knowledge? I’d share them here, but as it has played out in my mind a few times I plan on impressing people with that knowledge at a trivia night in my future. Yeah, we’ll see how you like them apples  Alex Treviabeck — a name of a fictional trivia team I just created for the sole purpose of beating them on the last question of Trivia Night. 

Where was I? Ah yes, what’s the big deal about the Red Dog. So these hipsters and artists from San Fran came out to transform the place into a hip new music venue and French restaurant. And they did it. In the summer of that year they brought in a cowboy, country, rock band named the Charlatans. Not to be confused with the Charlatans from the UK who charted 20-some years later.

You may have never heard of them, they recorded only one album that I could find and they didn’t make much of a splash around the world during those years of the San Francisco sound. However, they were a band that left a pretty big footprint on the culture of the time. First of all, their look. They leaned into the whole 19th century American west vibe inspired by the surroundings of Virginia City. They dressed like cowboys and in Victorian garb and carried guns on their hips and had rifles on the stage. This look evolved into the signature look for hippies in the next few years.

Photo: Taken at Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Cleveland, OH.

Two members of the band created the poster advertising their shows at the Red Dog, and it is claimed by some to be the prototype for the graphic design aesthetic of the psychedelic era.

Photo: Taken at Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Cleveland, OH.

The owners of the club also brought in an artist to create his liquid light shows while bands played. Bill Ham, the founder of Light Sound Dimension (LSD for short.See what he did there?) brought his overhead projectors and created the psychedelic aesthetic of liquid light art on the walls of the Red Dog Saloon. If you’ve ever seen a sixties movie that features a drug trip or a trippy party then you’ve seen his kind of kinetic, exist in the moment art of floating and colliding bubbles of colorful water and oil. It’s hard to say that the psychedelic movement was born here in Virginia City. There was so much going on at the same time in SF, it may be impossible to pin point the genesis of this cultural shift to one thing. Peter B. Mires quotes film maker Mary Works in his book Wicked Virginia City. I’ll paraphrase what she said in her movie The Life and Times of the Red Dog Saloon: The psychedelic sixties may have been born in San Francisco, but it was conceived at the Red Dog Saloon.   Side note: anyone know where I can watch this film please let me know.

The first thing I ever learned about the Red Dog was Big Brother and the Holding Company also played here and had a run of shows at about the time this picture was taken. And about this same time they added a new lead singer named Janis Joplin. In my head canon, the station wagon in this picture is the band’s make shift tour bus. The back weighed down with equipment and everything else on top of the car. I can’t prove whose car that is and I guess in light of everything else I found out about the Red Dog, it seems trivial to obsess over this detail. But isn’t it fun to think even if the picture doesn’t include a famous band, at least it includes their car?