50 years ago today: the Mysterious Death of the 'Mayor of the Fillmore'

Charles Sullivan

Fifty years ago today, businessman and music promoter Charles Sullivan died in San Francisco. His death remains a significant and controversial mystery. However, what is undeniable is that Sullivan played a critical role in San Francisco’s cultural life during the mid-1960s and paved the way for some of the most significant music events in California history.

From left: Charles Sullivan, known as “the mayor of the Fillmore”; Ralph J Gleason, jazz and rock critic for the San Francisco Chronicle; Lionel Hampton wearing Wesley Johnson’s 10-gallon Stetson hat; two unknown men at Wesley Johnson’s Texas Playhouse. Photo: Wesley Johnson Jr Collection

Sullivan was born on a farm in Monroe County, Alabama, but ran away at the age of thirteen. Making his way to California, he arrived in Los Angeles in 1928 at the age of eighteen, and washed cars while going to night school to become a machinist. He worked his way up to the position of journeyman machinist, only to be refused admission to local unions because he was black so he came to San Francisco at the height of the Great Depression. When Sullivan found Northern California unions also closed to minorities, he began working as a chauffer and mechanic for George Nicholls, Jr.—a Hollywood film director living in Hillsborough.

He and his first wife, Iola, scrimped and saved for six-odd years, and opened a hamburger stand in San Mateo in 1939. He soon purchased a bar in Pacifica for $7,000 solely to acquire its liquor license and expand Sullivan’s Cafe. Sullivan was getting his first taste of success, but not everyone was pleased with his triumph. San Mateo residents initially petitioned City Hall to block the transfer of the liquor license. Sullivan claimed the move was motivated purely by racism.   Ultimately, Sullivan prevailed and, in June of 1944, he was issued a permit to put a “dark room” in his pool hall and café. He expanded Sullivan’s to include a card room, becoming the first black man to own a gambling license on the Peninsula, and set his sights on opening a “colored USO” to accommodate America’s unserviced servicemen.

In addition to the aforementioned enterprises, he also worked as a machinist in the shipyards throughout the World War II—allegedly admitted to a union that previously refused him following the personal intervention of President Roosevelt. With his Café running soundly, he opened a jukebox rental business called Sullivan’s Music Co., and later rented cigarette vending machines. Soon, the son of illiterate Alabama farmers was living in a comfortable two-story house near Alamo Square in San Francisco.

In the city, Sullivan continued his reign of success and earned the nickname “Mayor of the Fillmore.” The Fillmore was a bustling neighborhood in San Francisco’s Western Addition district that would soon be known as “Harlem of the West” for its numerous jazz clubs and African-American businesses. Sullivan bought the Booker T. Washington Hotel and also acquired a liquor store, renting rooms above in his newly renamed Sullivan Hotel. In 1949, a local musician named Slim Gaillard borrowed money from Sullivan to open a chicken and waffles joint. Named Vout City, the club and Gaillard were immortalized by Jack Kerouac in On The Road; in the novel, Kerouac recalled “a little Frisco nightclub” where “great eager crowds of young semi-intellectuals sat at his feet and listened to him on guitar, piano and bongo drums…he does and says anything that comes to his head.”

Bop City

When Gaillaird chose greener pastures in Los Angeles, Sullivan convinced John “Jimbo” Edwards—the first black car salesman working in downtown San Francisco—to take over the joint. Sullivan paid the first three months of his rent to help establish him, and Edwards opened Jimbo’s Waffle Shop. Local musicians would come by for food after shows downtown and an unused room in the back soon became a well-known jam space. To capitalize on this, Edwards installed a stage, brought in a piano, and renamed the spot Bop City after a recently closed club by the same name in New York City. Local musicians came by after work and shared the stage with big-time acts like Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holliday thanks to Edwards’ friendship with big band leader Billy Eckstein.

Fillmore Street, looking south from Post Street, taken late 1940s. Photo: David Johnson

Sullivan had the Midas touch. In 1952, he became the master lease-holder of The Ambassador Dance Hall at 1805 Geary Boulevard. By the 1950s, The Ambassador had already been through many changes. Built in 1912 as an Italianate-style dance hall by Emma Gates Butler, it was originally known as the Majestic Dance Hall & Academy and the venue hosted socials and masquerade balls. The name changed to the Majestic Ballroom and then the Ambassador Dance Hall, which hosted big bands in the 1930s, and was operated as a roller rink from 1939 through 1952. Throughout the venue’s lifespan, “people of color” were allowed to perform at but not to attend the shows until Sullivan took over the lease, and changed the name to something more familiar to contemporary concertgoers, something that better reflected the neighborhood: The Fillmore Auditorium.

Although he did very little to promote The Fillmore, distributing a few handbills in the neighborhood and running a short commercial on black radio station KSOL, he drew a huge, integrated audience. He wore a suit and tie every day, and insisted that his performers always looked sharp—often picking up their suits after shows to personally ensure they were cleaned and pressed for the next. In addition, he was known to carry a large roll of cash in this pants pocket to use “whenever he needed to take care of somebody.” He booked the biggest and brightest acts of the era, from James Brown to Ike & Tina Turner—whose band included a young guitarist named Jim James, known better today as Jimi Hendrix. But jazz was on the way out by the 1960s, and venues began to close as audiences swayed towards electrified rock-n-roll. The Fillmore District was also changing as the city moved forward with drastic redevelopment plans that would decimate the physical and cultural landscape in a few short years.

To stave off both of these encroaching forces, Sullivan, the Mayor of the Fillmore, allowed white promoters to use his venue in the hopes that it would save the building from redevelopment. In December 1965, Sullivan allowed an up-and-coming promoter named Bill Graham the use of his dance hall license to hold a benefit for the San Francisco Mime Troupe at The Fillmore. A success, Sullivan thereafter allowed Graham to book the venue’s off nights along with another promoter, Chet Helms—a generous act that effectively started a legendary Bay Area rock music rivalry. However, residents of the neighborhood took issue with the new music these new promoters brought to the neighborhood, and Sullivan encouraged Graham to apply for his own license under pressure from officials who, in turn, encouraged Sullivan to stop subleasing The Fillmore. In early 1966, Graham and Sullivan came to an agreement: Graham secured a contract for all open dates at The Fillmore that year, and a four-year lease option on the Auditorium if anything unforeseen happened to Sullivan.

The Fillmore Auditorium

On August 1^st of that year, Sullivan returned to San Francisco from Los Angeles with $6,000 in receipts from a Southern California gig. After driving a female companion home to Oakland, Sullivan crossed the bridge and exited the freeway in San Francisco at 5^th Street, instead of taking Fell Street to his west side home. For reasons unknown, he turned left into what was then an industrial district, and was never seen alive again. Charles Sullivan was found shot to death in the early morning hours of August 2^nd, sprawled on the street next to his rented Chevy near 5^th and Bluxome Streets. The car headlights were left on, his empty valise and keys were found in the open trunk, and Sullivan had a single .38 through the heart—the gun resting on the ground beside his hand. Finding a black man dead from a weapon still on the scene in South of Market, the San Francisco Police ruled Sullivan’s death a midnight suicide. The City coroner ruled it a 2:00am homicide, and Sullivan’s wife, Fannie, and brother, Marion, believed he had been robbed and murdered for the contents of his valise: the missing $6,000; although, newspaper reports at the time noted the police later found the missing cash. Other acquaintances of Sullivan agreed with the family and City coroner, and stated Sullivan was too selfish to commit suicide.

To this day, the case remains unsolved. Homicide inspector Jack Cleary stuck with the suicide theory, despite Diane Feinstein’s attempts to convince him otherwise. The African-American newspaper, Sun-Reporter, assigned Belva Davis to investigate the story, and she was told that powerful interests were behind Sullivan’s murder…before she was pulled of the story and the newspaper stopped covering it. Sometime later during a raid of Marion Sullivan’s speakeasy, a participating police officer made the family connection and told Marion he knew who killed his brother, but Marion was too afraid to follow up on the officer’s claims.

So what happened to Charles Sullivan? Perhaps the better question is: what wouldn’t have happened without Charles Sullivan? Without Charles Sullivan, San Francisco would have been short a few essential after-hours jazz clubs, and Jack Kerouac may never have been inspired to stay and think and write his signature bop prosody. The Majestic Ballroom might have remained a derelict (and segregated) roller rink, certainly wouldn’t have been renamed The Fillmore Auditorium, and would never have given rise to “The Fillmore Sound” that became synonymous with the Summer of Love. For a man who ran a dozen eponymous businesses and was crowned the Mayor of the Fillmore, very little is left to mark his presence on the neighborhood—largely due to the San Francisco Redevelopment Authority’s wrecking ball. The Fillmore survived a stint as a Black Muslim Temple and a punk club called The Elite before the Sullivan name was restored but associated with one of the most famous names in rock and roll. Graham always credited Sullivan with paving the way for his success. “Had that not happened, I would have done anything Charles wanted,” Graham said. “Just out of gratitude.”

Nicole Meldahl

CHS Intern

Sources

·         Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love by David Talbot: https://books.google.com/books?id=-WIlCFe-iB4C&pg=PA60&lpg=PA60&dq=san+francisco+fillmore+%22charles+sullivan%22&source=bl&ots=e8IqFU-B87&sig=65Tj3llT5cdljOTTfOt04zNAeo8&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiRjITAu5nOAhVS4mMKHR9FAjo4FBDoAQhDMAg#v=onepage&q=san%20francisco%20fillmore%20%22charles%20sullivan%22&f=false

·         Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era by Elizabeth Pepin, Lewis Watts: https://books.google.com/books?id=CmXozgOGN3wC&pg=PA126&lpg=PA126&dq=san+francisco+fillmore+auditorium+%22charles+sullivan%22&source=bl&ots=OGwRGBcThN&sig=NUJavHgSB57pPFYz8qk9r4Y3rGc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi4quWKiZnOAhVW2GMKHUPECJIQ6AEIQjAF#v=onepage&q=charles%20sullivan&f=false

·         The Two Underdogs: Sly Stone & The Great Fillmore Whitewash by Chris Stroffolino: https://web.njit.edu/~newrev/3.0/stroffolino3a.html

·         “Western Addition: A Basic History” by Gary Kamiya: http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Western_Addition:_A_Basic_History

·          “Who Shot the Mayor of Fillmore” by Gary Carr, The New Fillmore, 4 September 2014: http://newfillmore.com/2014/09/04/who-shot-the-mayor-of-fillmore/

·         Becoming Jimi Hendrix: From Southern Crossroads to Psychedelic London… by Steven Roby, Brad Schreiber: https://books.google.com/books?id=5dclAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA102&lpg=PA102&dq=san+francisco+fillmore+%22charles+sullivan%22&source=bl&ots=m0mNeVdw1p&sig=COO6z6xiVTTeh77FC8h0B2DO6uc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiRjITAu5nOAhVS4mMKHR9FAjo4FBDoAQgbMAA#v=onepage&q=san%20francisco%20fillmore%20%22charles%20sullivan%22&f=false  

·         “Permits for June 7, 1944,” The Times (San Mateo), 8 June 1944: https://www.newspapers.com/image/38868002/?terms=Charles%2BSullivan  

·         Landmark Designation Report, Landmark No. 266: Marcus Books / Jimbo’s Bop City, 1712-1716 Fillmore Street, 18 September 2013: http://www.sf-planning.org/ftp/files/Preservation/landmarks_designation/Final_Adopted_LM_DesignationReport_266_Marcus.pdf

·         “Obituary of Marion Floyd Sullivan,” San Francisco Chronicle, 21 February 2014 : http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/sfgate/obituary.aspx?pid=169766483

·         “Jim Edwards: In remembrance”: http://users.rcn.com/jazzinfo/v10n01May00/FinJimbo.html

·         Contemporary Jewish Museum Complete Wall Text for “Bill Graham and the Rock & Roll Revolution”: http://www.thecjm.org/storage/documents/Exhibitions/2016/03_Mar/2_BillGraham_CompleteWallText.pdf

·         “Council Hears Protest Over Colored USO,” The Times (San Mateo), 8 August 1944: https://www.newspapers.com/image/38869898

·         “Sullivan’s Death Probe,” The Times (San Mateo), 3 August 1966: https://www.newspapers.com/image/52513696/

·          “About”, The Fillmore, http://thefillmore.com/about/

·         “Fillmore History,” The Fillmore: Heart and Soul of San Francisco, http://www.thefillmoredistrict.com/history4.html

·         “Blues for Charles” Indiegogo Campaign Website, https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/blues-for-charles#/

The Trips Festival Explained

The Trips Festival was a transformative event that helped mark the beginning of the hippie counterculture movement in San Francisco. Organized by Stewart Brand, Ramon Sender, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, and Bill Graham at the Longshoremen's Hall for January 21-23, 1966, the event brought together the city’s diverse underground arts scene, including rock music groups, experimental theater performers, dance companies, light show artists and film producers

Courtesy of http://rosamondpress.com/ 

Over 10,000 people, many taking LSD, attended the three-day event. Although the event included music, it was not billed as a concert per se. Rather, it was promoted as an immersive and participatory multi-media experience. Virtually the entire Bay Area’s avant-garde arts scene was involved, including the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the Open Theater, the Dancer’s Workshop and the San Francisco Tape Music Center. Yet it was the performances by emerging rock music groups the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company which captured the attention of attendees. It was the first major performance by the Dead in San Francisco, and the combination of the band’s music, the hall’s sound system and the visually captivating light shows over the three days that created a format that would soon dominate the city’s music halls. Bill Graham took over the Fillmore Auditorium for good just two week later, and his first weekend was advertised as the “sights and sounds of the Trips Festival.” As Tom Wolfe says in the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, “the Haight-Ashbury era began that weekend.” The world would never be the same.

The 1960s Revisited: A 50th Anniversary Celebration

Since the mid-20th century, San Francisco has been a beacon supporting underground movements, a vibrant arts and culture scene, and being one of the top music destinations in the world. Its dedication to preserving a singular voice – often independent of national trends – sets it apart from other highly sought-after international destinations. With the current influx of a stunning number of technology companies occupying the regional landscape, it’s essential to take a step back and reexamine pivotal historical moments that helped shape San Francisco into the tech hub and arts mecca it is today.

The 1960s Revisited kicks off on the exact 50^th anniversary of one of the most celebrated events of the 1960s counterculture: The Trips Festival. Considered a watershed event in the history of San Francisco’s underground arts scene, the launch of the psychedelic 1960s era, and a pivotal event in the growth of the region’s technology industry, The Trips Festival was the first large convention (essentially a widely attended and publicized Acid Test) bringing together all the major Bay Area figures in rock ‘n roll, beat poetry, technology, experimental theater, dance, indie films, light show production, overhead visual projections, costume design, and of course Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters distributing LSD throughout the crowd. Virtually the entire local avant-garde was involved: Committee Theater, San Francisco Mime Troupe, Open Theater, and San Francisco Tape Music Center. Anna Halprin and the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop participated in the Trips Festival.

Stewart Brand emerged from The Trips Festival as a countercultural entrepreneur, and it set forth Bill Graham’s legacy at the Fillmore (Brand conceived The Trips Festival, while Graham organized it with Kesey and Ramon Sender). The festival itself, which had an attendance of 6,000 people, was as Walter Isaacson says in his book Innovators, “a quintessential display of the fusion that shaped the personal computer era: technology, counterculture, entrepreneurship, gadgets, music, art and engineering…. From Stewart Brand to Steve Jobs, those ingredients fashioned a wave of Bay Area innovators who were comfortable at the interface of Silicon Valley and Haight-Ashbury….”

“The Trips Festival flared of individual expression and collective communion under the spell of its incredible arts production,” says Michael Kramer (author of The Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture). “It set the stage for many experiments and innovations to come, from rock festivals to performance art to flash mobs to Burning Man to the Internet itself.”

The Trips Festival documented the emerging social movement that would soon culminate in 1967 with thousands of youth from around the country migrating to Haight-Ashbury, the Human Be-In, and the Summer of Love. The Trips Festival was an all-inclusive affair, bringing the brightest minds across diverse fields together for what’s now considered the birth of the Haight-Ashbury era. The festival served as one of the first official Grateful Dead concerts. Post-modern dance pioneer Anna Halprin (Founder, Dancers’ Workshop) engaged as a self-described movement “catalyst,” giving audience members ideas for dancing.

The California Historical Society is proud to host a 3-Day Arts Festival featuring renowned scholars in conversation regarding the monumental cultural impact of several 1966 happenings. The 1960s Revisited: A 50th Anniversary Celebration includes four events:

January 22, 2016: The Music, Technology & Significance of The Trips FestivalJanuary 22, 2016: Looking Back: The Dawn of the Grateful DeadJanuary 22, 2016: VIP Reception with Stewart BrandJanuary 23, 2016: Independent Psychedelic Film Festival

The Music, Technology & Significance of The Trips Festival
January 22, 2016, 1:00 - 4:00 PM
The Contemporary Jewish Museum
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As Andrew Kirk notes in his most recent book, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism, “The Trips Festival was not the first event of the era to unite commerce and technology with the cultural trends of the sixties, but it captured an important convergence of interests better than any previous single happening.” The technology symposium spotlights the influence of The Trips Festival and San Francisco’s mid-1960s counterculture movement on the emerging personal computer era. A keynote speech from author/historian Michael Kramer will set the stage for an intriguing panel of authors and historians, including Greg Castillo, David Bernstein, and Andrew Kirk. Film Director Eric Christensen will also make a special introduction prior to the screening of his famed documentary, The Trips Festival Movie.

Michael J. Kramer is a historian, writer, teacher, dramaturg, editor, and author of The Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture (Oxford University Press, 2013). His latest book-in-progress, This Machine Kills Fascists: Technology and Culture in the US Folk Music Revival, revises understandings of the folk revival as an anti-modernist movement, arguing instead that it offers a hidden history of people grappling with how to live more humanely in an increasingly technological society. With a related multimedia project, he focuses on the Berkeley Folk Music Festival, which ran on the University of California, Berkeley campus from 1958 - 1970. Kramer’s also at work on a set of essays about intellectuals and the counterculture. He has served as an editor at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the New York Times, and currently teaches various courses (history, American studies, digital humanities, and civic engagement) at Northwestern University.

Greg Castillo, an Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at University of California, Berkeley, has investigated the Bay Area’s counterculture design legacy through a U.C. Berkeley Arts Research Center Fellowship (2014) and an Associate Professor Fellowship from the Townsend Center for the Humanities. His research informed a 2014 exhibition, Design Radicals: Creativity and Protest in Wurster Hall, reviewing “outlaw design” enterprises undertaken by faculty and students in the late-1960s and early-1970s at U.C. Berkeley. For the catalogue of the Walker Art Center exhibition on counterculture design, Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, Castillo contributed the essay “Counterculture Terroir: California’s Hippie Enterprise Zone” and delivered a public lecture at the exhibition’s opening symposium. Castillo will serve as Guest Curator for the expanded Hippie Modernism exhibition when it travels to the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive in February 2017.

David W. Bernstein is Professor of Music and Head of the Music Department at Mills College. His various publications include The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde; Writings through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art (co-edited with Christopher Hatch), Cage (Re)Considered, a special double issue of Contemporary Music Review, and essays for Cage & Consequences, ed. Julia Schröder and Volker Straebel; The New York Schools of Music and the Visual Arts, ed., Steven Johnson; the Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed., Thomas Christensen; Theoria, Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Center, Music Theory Spectrum, Contemporary Music Review, and Current Musicology. Bernstein is presently writing a book on Pauline Oliveros for the University of Illinois Press and Experiments in the Fault Zone, a history of experimental music at Mills College. He is also editor of Music Theory Spectrum, the flagship journal of the Society for Music Theory.

Director Eric Christensen’s independent documentary, The Trips Festival Movie, offers an in-depth look inside the famed Trips Festival. Due to the lack of footage taken at the actual festival, the film relies on fascinating photos, interviews with some of The Trips Festival’s organizers such as Stewart Brand, Ken Kesey and Bill Graham, and a wild and bizarre short of the festival shot by experimental filmmaker Ben Van Meter. The Trips Festival is said to have birthed the entire hippie scene and the revolution of the late 1960s. Influences of The Trips Festival can be seen in present day festivals such as Bonnaroo and Burning Man. Actor Peter Coyote narrates the film.

The 1960s Revisited
January 22, 2016
Obscura Digital
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The 1960s Revisited kicks off on the exact 50th anniversary of one of the most celebrated events of the 1960s counterculture: The Trips Festival. Considered a watershed event in the history of San Francisco’s underground arts scene, the launch of the psychedelic 1960s era, and a pivotal event in the growth of the region’s technology industry, The Trips Festival was the first large convention (essentially a widely attended and publicized Acid Test) bringing together all the major Bay Area figures in rock ‘n roll, beat poetry, technology, experimental theater, dance, indie films, light show production, overhead visual projections, costume design, and of course Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters distributing LSD throughout the crowd. Virtually the entire local avant-garde was involved: Committee Theater, San Francisco Mime Troupe, Open Theater, and San Francisco Tape Music Center. Anna Halprin and the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop participated in the Trips Festival.

Stewart Brand emerged from The Trips Festival as a countercultural entrepreneur, and it set forth Bill Graham’s legacy at the Fillmore (Brand conceived The Trips Festival, while Graham organized it with Kesey and Ramon Sender). The festival itself, which had an attendance of 6,000 people, was as Walter Isaacson says in his book Innovators, “a quintessential display of the fusion that shaped the personal computer era: technology, counterculture, entrepreneurship, gadgets, music, art and engineering…. From Stewart Brand to Steve Jobs, those ingredients fashioned a wave of Bay Area innovators who were comfortable at the interface of Silicon Valley and Haight-Ashbury….”

Schedule:

6:00 PM - Looking Back: The Dawn of the Grateful Dead 
Featuring Peter Richardson, Dennis McNally and Nicholas Meriwether
Many of the initial Grateful Dead performances were as the primary band for the Acid Tests, including at The Trips Festival. It’s well documented that the Dead went on to become one of the century’s most influential groups in rock history. With their shows operating more like social laboratories, fans and the band alike were on a collective musical and psychological crusade. The beginning days of the Dead will be the focus of this panel discussion featuring Peter Richardson, Dennis McNally and Nicholas Meriwether.

7:00 PM - Reception with special guests Stewart BrandJoin Peter Richardson, Dennis McNally, Nicholas Meriwether, Stewart Brand, and many others at a special reception celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Trips Festival and the dawn of the 1960s. Enjoy craft cocktails, hors d'oeuvres, and the incredible creations of Obscura Digital. 

Independent Psychedelic Film Festival

January 23, 2016, 12:00 - 6:00 PM
Hobart Building
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The California Historical Society completes its 3-Day Arts Festival with the public screenings of three period films: The Trips Festival Movie, Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place, Rockin’ at the Red Dog: The Dawn of Psychedelic Rock.

Films:

Magic Trip: Ken Key’s Search for a Kool Place is a freewheeling portrait of Ken Kesey and the Merry Band of Prankesters’ legendary cross-country road trip to the New York World’s Fair in 1964. Until the film’s release date in August 2011, the footage of the road trip had never been seen before. The footage serves as a rare and extraordinary piece of American history that most have no understanding of. The film was directed by OSCAR-winning director Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood.

Rockin’ At The Red Dog: The Dawn of Psychedelic Rock documentary chronicles the history behind the wild times at the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City, Nevada. It is said that the psychedelic sixties were partially conceived there. The film stars The Charlatans, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Don & Roz Works, and Lynne Hughes. The film is directed by Mary Works. It was originally released in 1996 under the title The Life and Times of the Red Dog Saloon, but in 2005 when it was re-released on DVD, the title changed to Rockin’ At The Red Dog: The Dawn of Psychedelic Rock.

Director Eric Christensen’s independent documentary, The Trips Festival Movie, offers an in-depth look inside the famed Trips Festival. Due to the lack of footage taken at the actual festival, the film relies on fascinating photos, interviews with some of The Trips Festival’s organizers such as Stewart Brand, Ken Kesey and Bill Graham, and a wild and bizarre short of the festival shot by experimental filmmaker Ben Van Meter. The Trips Festival is said to have birthed the entire hippie scene and the revolution of the late 1960s. Influences of The Trips Festival can be seen in present day festivals such as Bonnaroo and Burning Man. Actor Peter Coyote narrates the film.