By Bruce B. Brugmann

The call came in to us at the Bay Guardian from Matt Gonzalez, former president of the Board of Supervisors. Chet had gone into the hospital and might not be coming out.

Photograph by Robert Altman

The word about Chet's hospitalization quickly whipped around his vast network of friends, allies, and admirers (he had no known enemies), and the calls flooded in to Chet's wife, Judy Davis, and Lee Houskeeper, his longtime friend and crisis manager. People started coming by in droves to see him at the Pacific Medical Center. Davis, Houskeeper, and friends by his bedside tried to keep upbeat as the news worsened. It was a special San Francisco moment.

Photograph by Robert Altman

"No discussion involving the '60s, the source of the 'San Francisco sound,' or the 'Summer of Love' can take place without mentioning Chet Helms, a front-line contributor to the people, ideas, and events surrounding the most dynamic decade in American history."

Chet kept his sense of humor throughout the ordeal and died surrounded by friends who did their best to make his last hours at the hospital a Chet party. "It was a beautiful death," Davis told the Chronicle for its Sunday obituary. "It was a good-bye party. We all sang and told stories. We had a chance to really show our love and say goodbye. He died as he lived – surrounded by love."

The Chronicle, to its credit, ran a nice obit (as did P.J. Corkery in the Examiner); both papers treated him better in death than they had in life. Chet would have been delighted to know that the Chronicle obit referred to him l9 times as "Mr. Helms."

Mr. Helms? In the four decades I have known Chet, I have never heard him referred to as "Mr. Helms." He was always simply Chet. And he will always be simply Chet.

Photograph by Barbara Langer

He was one of a kind, a Texas gentleman in a white suit and wide-brimmed hat, who proudly carried his hippie lifestyle and the missionary zeal of his fundamentalist minister grandfather into San Francisco and became a San Francisco original. He didn't play an instrument or sing, but he became a founder of the San Francisco music scene in the 1960s with pioneering shows at the Avalon Ballroom, the Fillmore, and even in Golden Gate Park.

He managed Big Brother and the Holding Company, and brought in his old friend Janis Joplin from Texas to give the group flashes of fame. But his real skill lay in creating what Houskeeper calls "immersive experiences among the artists and audience": Pulsating rock music. Psychedelic light shows that are now known as multimedia. Colorful posters. Low stages to keep the performers close to the audience. And – what Chet often told me was the key – the feel of a good, rousing party.

"If you took the music in the abstract, it was loud folk music," Barry Melton, the lead guitarist for Country Joe and the Fish, told me. "But when you put it in a pulsating, womblike environment like the Avalon, you are protected from the outside, and you are nurtured from the inside. You feel as if you are in a protected space where you will be taken care of from beginning to end." Melton credits Chet and his production company, the Family Dog, with nourishing a long list of groups, from Country Joe to the Grateful Dead to Jefferson Airplane. Promoters all over the world tried to duplicate Chet's format.

Alas, Chet was a creator and not really a businessman. The city revoked his sound permits at the Avalon, and Bill Graham muscled him out of the local concert business.

Photograph by Robert Altman

Chet retired from the concert business in 1970, but he kept on as an influential presence and spirit in the city, running an art gallery, doing digitized photography and exhibiting it, putting on benefits, helping friends, founding an informal club called "Boys Night Out," and keeping the faith with his hippie ideals. He came out of retirement in 1997 with a vintage Chet cliff-hanger: a successful 30th anniversary "Summer of Love" event in Golden Gate Park with his friends, without much money, and taking potshots from the city all along the way. It was a wonderful event on a sunny day that featured his old bands, great music, 60,000 people, no arrests, and no incidents.

Then Chet got a $30,000 bill from the city for police overtime costs. (The reason Chet was personally liable was because he had neglected to incorporate the Summer of Love group, as he had been asked to do at early meetings in the Bay Guardian office.) He came to me for advice. I said, just lie low, Chet.

The next thing I knew, Chet was confessing before a City Hall committee and on television, saying he had no money but would gladly give up his jacket. The city kept pressing, and he came back to me for advice once again.

Chet, I said, next time lie lower.

It tickles me to know that he died still owing $30,000 to the city. Considering all that Chet has done for San Francisco for so long, it was more than a fair deal.

Besides wife Judy Davis of San Francisco, Chet is survived by his stepdaughter, Sarah Davis of San Francisco; two brothers, John Helms of San Francisco and Jim Helms of Hawaii; and three grandchildren. Services are private, and his remains will be interred in a public place where friends and family can visit him (TBA, to be announced, as Chet would say). The veteran Chet brigade that put on the 30th "Summer of Love" event is planning a celebration in Chet's memory so that, as Lee Houskeeper says, "people will get to see what they missed by not being at Chet's Avalon Ballroom or meeting Chet." So many artists and bands have offered to play that the plan is to hold several concerts. The events are being coordinated by musician Joli Valenti, son of Dino Valenti of the Quicksilver Messenger Service who wrote the '60s hit "Get Together."

Links to more on Chet:

Obituaries and remembrances:
In memories awake - A tribute to Chet Helms
A towering figure, a quiet friend: A Remembrance by Paul Kleyman
Rolling Stone
San Francisco Chronicle
Glide Magazine
Washington Times
New York Times
National Ledger

Website of the 30th anniversary of the Summer of Love

Photographs and guestbooks:
http://www.digfotos.com/
http://www.familydog.com/
http://www.herzer.org/gallery/ChetHelmsBirthday2001