Red Dog Saloon, Virginia City, NV
History
The Red Dog Saloon on C Street in Virginia City, Nevada, was a Comstock-era building in a silver town that had been emptying since the 1870s. In the summer of 1965 a group of San Franciscans took it over and ran a season of music there, with the Charlatans in residence -- dressed in Victorian and Edwardian thrift-store clothes, playing to a room where bartenders carried guns and the audience took LSD while it was still legal. The handbill made for that residency, George Hunter and Michael Ferguson's "The Seed," is widely regarded as the first psychedelic concert poster. The season ran roughly June to September 1965; other Bay Area groups, including Big Brother and the Holding Company before Janis Joplin joined them, passed through the rotating bill. The venue kept no systematic records, and what is known about individual nights comes from surviving handbills, photographs and participant memory.
Its Place in the Scene
The origin point. Everything the Family Dog and Bill Graham built in San Francisco over the following four years descends from a season of shows in a Nevada bar four hours away, and from the handbills printed to advertise it. The Red Dog is where the poster-as-art-object begins.