Welcome
This picture was taken back in 1967. My room mate and I had just bought the Wintonia Tavern (on Pike Street in Seattle, WA). Our plans were to convert the tavern to a live music “Blues Bar”. We had a pair of huge Voice of the Theater speakers, a Macintosh Amp, a Sony reel-to-reel, and a B&O Turntable. For the next few summers, Pike Street rocked out during the weekdays.On the weekends we brought in live Blues acts like Albert Collins, Son House, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Johhny Guitar Watson, and Lightning Sam Hopkins. The following year we changed the name of the Tavern to The Medicine Show. By then we had people lined up, out the door, around the block, and up the back alley. Luckily, the office building next door had a huge parking lot that our customers turned into a Tailgate Party every night and on the weekends.
By that time, the Medicine Show Tavern was known up and down the West Coast as the place to go for live Blues. We took advantage of our (unexpected) popularity and rented a vacant Ballroom up the street called the “Encore Ballroom” so we could have live concerts. (It later came to be known as the “San Francisco Sound Ballroom”). It had a legal limit of about 1000 people, but we packed in about 1200-1500 on good weekends. We started out holding small concerts featuring John Lee Hooker, Mojo Hand, Butterfat, and The Floating Bridge. But we quickly moved up to larger acts like the John Hammond Trio, Dan Hicks & his Hot Licks, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the Youngbloods, and our favorite, the Taj Mahal Tuba Band. Today, I’m a lot older and walking pretty slow. But before I start pushing up daisies, I have a goal of uploading some of the fabulous live concert recordings I made, (plus my 3000 track collection of Blues, R&B, and Rock)…. Feel free to listen or watch 24/7… . Enjoy the videos… 🙂