DU Magazine: Art professor re-animates Denver rock club the Family Dog
DU Magazine: Art professor re-animates Denver rock club the Family Dog
By Greg Glasgow Posted January 22, 2018 at 2:36 pm
It was in existence for less than two years, but the Family Dog rock club — located just down the street from DU, near Evans and Santa Fe — was the epicenter of ’60s cool in Denver. Opened in 1967, the venue — an offshoot of concert promoter Chet Helms’ Family Dog club in San Francisco — saw performances by Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, the Doors, Jefferson Airplane and many more.
DU art history professor Scott Montgomery, an expert in ’60s psychedelic rock posters, first learned of the Dog and its legacy through a poster exhibit he mounted at DU’s Vicki Myhren Gallery in 2014. Intrigued, he began to study the venue’s history and its impact on Denver’s cultural legacy.
“It was really the first nexus that pulled a disparate counterculture together [in Denver],” he says. “It created critical mass. It took places to do that. You had pockets of counterculture everywhere, but often it congregated around rock clubs. They were the church, for the lack of a better way to put it.”
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