CHET HELMS didn’t strike people as “a towering figure,” words describing him in the lead of the San Francisco Chronicle’s obituary yesterday (June 26). Certainly, Chet cut a tall and lean form, often capped by his signature white fedora. But the drape of long gray hair and salty beard, the scholarly spectacles and Texas-softened voice spoke more of the mild-mannered art dealer, which he was, than the true legend of rock-and-roll history, which he was, also. No one could spend more than a few minutes with this, in the words of Grateful Dead drummer MICKEY HART, “sweet as sugar” 1960s rock impresario without knowing that something was amiss with the Svengali-like caricature once applied to him by members of JANIS JOPLIN’S family. Chet, whom I never heard express an angry or bitter word about life’s difficulties, promised to tell his side of the tale one day. When I last saw him in December, he mentioned, after some prodding, that he was finally going to do it, to write his memoirs.

In past years, I’d heard the story more than once: How rock-and-roll dreams led him to form a band for freewheeling parties in the Haight, but, ironically, never to learn to play the guitar; how he encountered his college friend, Janis, also from Port Arthur, and paired her with Big Brother and the Holding Company; how things went so well he started renting out a public hall and called his operation The Family Dog; how the guys in the band couldn’t stand Janis’s rough personality and ejected her from the group—but were musically flaccid without her; how Chet found her again on a trip to Port Arthur and convinced her to drive back to San Francisco; how the rest was, well, history.

The Chronicle obit quoted BARRY MELTON, lead guitarist for Country Joe and the Fish, “Without Chet, there would be no Grateful Dead, no Big Brother and the Holding Company, no Jefferson Airplane, no Country Joe and the Fish, no Quicksilver Messenger Service, and the list goes on.”

Chet struggled with hepatitis C in recent years and succumbed to a stroke early Sunday at age 62. I always knew him to balance his disappointments with a feathery chuckle and philosophical air that seemed acceptant of circumstances and his limitations. When we first met in the early 1970s, he laughed as he told me of his fleeting grasp of fortune, if not fame. He recalled what is now the stuff of the annals of rock. He and a colleague sat on the office floor at the Fillmore auditorium trying to count a pile of money, the take from the previous night’s concert. Weed-buzzed and sleep deprived, they had little notion of how to manage and bank the gate. Chet’s friend and rival BILL GRAHAM walked in and, looking down at them, shook his head incredulously. As Mickey Hart told the Chronicle Sunday, Chet’s “business sense wasn’t as keen as Bill’s, but he really loved the music.” In his own self-effacing way, Chet related this story to me more than 30 years ago in sympathy with my own encounter with the hard-edge of rock, in my case at Rolling Stone, where I’d been an editor for a year. Chet’s good-humored self-acceptance in the face of disappointments far larger than any of my small ego bruises was both a comfort and hand of friendship I was glad to shake over the years.

When I last saw Chet at the annual holiday beer-and-burrito bash at the Last Gasp underground comics factory, he was playing with his digital camera, a favorite pursuit of recent years. A couple of us kidded him about his recent surfacing on, of all places, “The Antiques Road Show.” Chet wasn’t on the program in person, but his name appeared prominently on screen. During a 2004 foray to San Francisco, the Road Show featured a segment with a local rock-poster collector who’d come for an appraisal of 8 or 10 originals. Most were not the bright and color-blossomed psychedelic posters that the Family Dog helped to originate but the plain and drab handbills with big Helvetica lettering announcing the earliest musical fare and listing his name, CHET HELMS. The Road Show appraiser enthused over the collection, announcing it worth $10,000. $10,000! “If only you’d known,” I ribbed him, “you could have practically printed your own money for your retirement years.” “The Antiques Road Show”? It was ludicrous, of course. There was nothing remotely antiquated about Chet Helms: ever in the moment, always a smile around his eyes, forever and sweetly young.

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This reminiscence first appeared in Age Beat Online, e-newsletter of the Journalists Exchange on Aging and appears here with permission.