Talk:Chet Helms
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ummmm - I agree that this article needs to be cleaned up and cited better, but NPOV? I am not sure that I see that. Obviously the person that wrote it is a fan, but is there some kind of controversy there? I just wonder what the NPOV tag is about. UncleCheese 03:32, 5 December 2005 (UTC)
[edit] updates
Also, if I have some time over the next few weeks, I will try and do some of the clean up work on the article. Chet really is a pretty seminal figure in modern American music that is often overshadowed by Bill Graham's large shadow. UncleCheese 03:33, 5 December 2005 (UTC)
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4:14 PM PST Sat Feb. 25, 2006
Apparently the above comments were made on a Chet Helms page that predated mine and was removed. Looking back, the old one looked better than mine, and I wonder why it was removed.
Moving on to this new one, though, I need to check out the Winterland/Fillmore West question. My memory tells me:
1. Bill Graham first produced the bigger non-Fillmore music shows at Winterland, even on the same nights as his regular "Fillmore Auditorium" shows, but Winterland was still called Winterland. "Fillmore East" had not officially been started yet.
2. Meeting with great success, Bill Graham may have started billing this venue as "Fillmore West," while the huge "Winterland" sign stayed up.
3. They started having shows at the Market Street place and this eventually became "Fillmore West[?]."
At some point in time, at the Carousel they'd have music on Tuesday nights for $1 or $2, where you could see local bands and friends playing for free to get exposure. These shows tended to draw non-flower youths. Drinking and "reds" and "yellows" proliferated and there were some fights.
DonL 00:10, 26 February 2006 (UTC)
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Sunday Feb. 26, 2006 12:41 PM PST
======On Winterland====== Winterland Skating Rink Photo, 1941
Sorry everyone, but plowing through the various vendor websites [music, poster, memorabilia sites] has not been that helpful in finding out where BGP's "Fillmore West" officially began. Poster art may not be definitive unless it has the address, and Mr. Graham could have just arbitrally had the word "Fillmore West" on advertising content like posters before having legally established the business name. A trip to the City Recorder or looking at old newspaper ads might clear this up. My recollection is that Fillmore West started at Winterland and got moved to the Carousel Ballroom on Market Street, where they had Tuesday night "audition nights," which were BIG fun. Also remember that after BGP started using Winterland, the arena continued to host several more events that were more African-American-centric.
Winterland and the Fillmore Auditorium, a few short blocks from each other, were located in San Francisco's Western Addition, a large district west of the commercial, auto-row Van Ness Avenue. A large part of this area south of Sutter Street was loosely called "the Fillmore" and later, "the 'Mo," by some. This area extended as far west as Fillmore Street, with the less "hardcore" Fillmore stretching three blocks west to "Divis" (Divisadero Street). The neighborhood, with its still-considerable African-American population -- the people who had survived the "Redevelopment" phase of the 1950s or 1960s, effectively an eviction of a large number of low-income African-Americans, who apparently flocked to other unenriched areas of San Francisco, like Visitation Valley ("Viz Valley"), Hunter's Point ("HP" or "the Point"), the Bayview, "OMI" (Oceanview-Merced-Ingleside), the Mission ("la Mission"), the Tenderloin ("T.L."), downtown, and Portrero Hill (O.J.'s old neighborhood), or low-rent apartments in the East Bay, primarily "the Town" (Oakland) -- was an incongruous gathering place for the predominantly young, white, middle-class rock-concert-goers. I seem to recall gospel-music events or religious events, and other Soul concerts at Winterland "Auditorium." I saw a James Brown concert there during the Helms era, at a wild, awesome show, which was definitely not a Chet Helms or BGP show. A site named "An Unofficial History of San Francisco's 60's Music Halls" [1] by David (It's A Beautiful Day) La Flamme, confirms other promoters' use of Winterland in the late 60s. Winterland also hosted "closed-circuit" network presentations of sporting events like the World Cup and the heavyweight championship fights.
[edit] Pre-Helms/Graham Fillmore Auditorium
I don't see much of this in the Fillmore/Rock lore, but the Fillmore Auditorium, for a time, in the early-to-mid 1960s, was a Black Muslim temple. The sense of the later-rock hall was entirely different and when the Muslims had it, I seem to remember pews and an immaculate, kept-up interior. I think this may have been after the beginning of the fallout between Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X. Next door, post-heydey, was the People's Temple, led by the ignominious James Jones. Mr. La Flamme's site above mentions this building was used as a rehearsal spot for some of the SF bands.
Since I do want to give the Fillmore district support during its present somewhat faltering, underfunded "rebirth," here's a "Short Fillmore History" [2] link, though I'm more than a bit surprised that any history of the Fillmore, otherwise fairly accurate, would exlude the major part that San Francisco's Redevelopment Agency (a non-San Francisco entity) played on the economic and ethnic makeup of one of San Francisco's largest residential districts. It saddens me, and with a totally NON-NEUTRAL, OPINIONATED, POLITICAL SLANT, this site [3], would tend to indicate that the SFRA may still be a whole bunch of M.F.s. The "Short" history site does go into the migration of African-Americans from the South, into the Fillmore the homes of the the interned WWII Japanese; and how pre-WWII Western Addition was a highly diverse, lower-income area. Going back further to the Gay 90s the Western Addition north of Sutter was luxurious.
DonL 20:40, 26 February 2006 (UTC)
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Wd like to look into adding images per the Wikipedia rules and w/o infringing on anyone's copyrights. I have photos from at least some of the later events and an analog [yipes!] video of possibly the 30th Annual T.S, maybe the Beach Chalet event and the Polo Fields event, tho i think the latter was a Bill Graham memorial. Also wondering how to fit in Joel Selvin who also was an astute music reviewer. It was Ralph J. Gleason, however, who was right there forging new frontiers as a jazz critic of v. high renown suddenly starting to be the sole commentator on the hippy phenomenom as a social phenomenom through the lens of a music critic. Mr. Selvin was also an excellent music critic, and did produce good work relative to this, although much of this was produced at least years and decades later.
DonL 18:09, 28 February 2006 (UTC)
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I've found a concert poster image of a BGP March 20, 1969 Janis Joplin concert billed as "Winterland - Fillmore West." That would confirm my memory that the Winterland shows were at least for a time billed FW. I remember the incongruity of the place never changing its "Winterland" sign even as it hosted the shows. Yet, having found at least two sources that said FW opened at the Carousel in 1968, plus posters touting Fillmore West at Winterland in 69, definitely conflicts with my memory of events at the time, so maybe there was some overlap or going back and forth.
Apparently Bill Graham liked the larger 5,000 or so audiences he could pack in for shows at Winterland. He began throwing concerts on three or four nights a week. The larger spaces and crowd made for a less personal experience that resembled a hockey game (since it WAS a big skating rink). I lost that feeling the time I caught the last part of a show, with Hendrix doing his thing with his guitar. Musicians have told me that Winterland was difficult to play because the large metal objects and distances made for difficult echoes, necessitating huge, reliable monitor speakers near each bandmember. I doubt there was much acoustic building- and auditorium-tuning at all in those days -- not a rock concert.
After asking his permission, I've inserted a merged JPG I found on a site by Bruce Eisner. I told him Wiki was asking me for copyright status, and haven't heard from him other than that he'd merged it and that it's Creative Commons. Also have found a Slick & Joplin image in Marshall Vault that I'd like to use.
DonL 08:50, 7 March 2006 (UTC)
Found the Eisner site image removed, based on copyright uncertainty, so I removed credit I'd given to Mr. Eisner. Received E-mail from the Marshall photography director, stating they thought Mr. Marshall would not want the Janis Joplin/Grace Slick image used, so I won't use it, even though it looks like a JPG photo of someone else's poster. I'll respect their wishes.
In a similar situation, I'd heard that Chet Helms had had a copyright contention of sorts with some of the Avalon or Family Dog poster artists. I read Helms went after someone using some of his dance concert poster art, then one or more of the original poster artists themselves came after Helms, even stating they'd never been paid anything by him for the original art. Reminds me of the "Look And Feel" lawsuit: In the 1980's Apple sued Microsoft for copyright infringement by MS's using a design in its early Windows user interface[s] (desktop, icons, and menus) that had the "look and feel" of Apple's desktop design. Afterwards, Xerox Parc, said "Hey, Apple got that from us!" referring to Apple's engineers' visits to the XP facility, when XP had a viable working model. I think the judge told XP, "Too late!" But XP may have reached a settlement with Apple and there may have been an amicable and common academic interest between these two that I doubt Microsoft had with anyone at the time.
DonL 09:27, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
A friend told me Chet Helms' step-daughter works for her so here's hoping we may have some input from her in two weeks on her return. Thanks for your patience. In the meantime I found my photos of the Chet Helm's Memorial (the Tribal Stomp). Reason I couldn't find was I didn't take my digital cam that day and instead took a throw-away camera, so I'd stored the JPG scans in a different directory. Will u/l when i get a chance.
DonL 23:34, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
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R_ told me this page has gone to Chet's brothers for review. I've started contributing on French Wiki and hope to do the Helms piece in French and Spanish [someday!].
DonL 07:03, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
