This is one of the rarest of all videos in San Francisco 60’s rock and roll history
the video was recorded on home equipment, circa 1969, on the old style reel to reel video, long obsolete. It was recorded by Ray Anderson, who owns Grooves Records at Market and Octavia, in 1969, at the Fillmore West. Ray used to run the “Holy See” light show for many of these bands back in the 60’s and he recorded some of the concerts using his own video equipment by simply putting the camera on the table and hitting ‘record’
Ray has already spent over two years going to different places that still have the capability of transferring the original 1969 reel to reel video tapes onto VHS, and then to digital
One of the main problems seems to be tracking of the video head on the original tapes. I forgot to ask him where the problem was isolated, but this video shows what the problem is with this 40 year old tape. It’s a flicker associated with tape head tracking, it looks like, and 40 years later, it’s very difficult to get it transferred without spending huge sums of money.
This tape, and there are two more concerts he recorded of It’s A Beautiful day, is the ONLY known video of the original band with all the members, including Linda “neska” Laflamme, the keyboard player on the right (hammond B3 organ). She left the band in 1970, soon after the first album came out in 1969, which went gold. And part of the reason was, she told me once, that she got tired of lugging that huge thing around…
and now for the first time, we can see just how big that thing was. This is just a preview, and whenever Ray manages to get the tape cleaned up, it will be posted right here. This video and photos is of Rays Macintosh, and he used Final Cut Pro
this is the album, one of the most classic San Francisco albums ever…it went gold in 1970
this concert was recorded just before that. because of the artwork and music, originally recorded on the record in October of 1969 at CBS studios in Los Angeles, it remains, to this day, one of the all time San Francisco classics
it is one of the most sought after albums of all time, in mint condition