Quick Telecast
Expect News First

The debauched story of San Francisco’s most rock ‘n’ roll house

0 38


The 3-mile stretch of Fulton Street on the northern edge of Golden Gate Park has some curious historical landmarks — the tiny red chalet that was once the center of the city’s booziest district, the Dutch windmill overlooking Ocean Beach, the small hidden statue of the park’s statue-hating founder.

But one 17-bedroom home on the northeastern corner of the park, fronted by four monumental faux-Greek columns, may have the most storied rock ’n’ roll history of any site in the neighborhood. The mansion’s lore includes its time housing an opera singer in an earthquake, a drug-dealing martial arts instructor in the basement and maybe the most drug- and sex-fueled band in the history of the psychedelic San Francisco scene.

The four-story Neoclassical Revival mansion at 2400 Fulton was built in 1904 by a lumber magnate from Eureka named R.A. Vance. At the time, the area north of the park, which would become the Richmond District, was little more than sand dunes. Vance, who had made a fortune up north in lumber and banking, spared no expense in building his lavish San Francisco home.

According to the Western Neighborhoods Project, beyond the stately columned Greek facade, the interior featured mahogany finishings shipped from India, a grand staircase, stained-glass windows, eight fireplaces and a master bedroom fresco featuring reclining, seminude women.

It was maybe this classical European excess that attracted Italian opera singer Enrico Caruso. The apocryphal story goes that on the morning of the 1906 earthquake, the world-renowned tenor was staying at the Palace Hotel while performing a series of shows in the city. To escape the destruction, Caruso headed west to stay with his friend Vance at his lavish home. There, he holed up as the quake and subsequent fire destroyed the eastern half of the city, including the Palace Hotel. Caruso then left San Francisco and vowed never to return.

Whether or not Caruso actually sought shelter with his friend that day, the mansion stayed in the Vance family for generations as the Richmond District built up around it. The family eventually sold it in 1968, when it would enter its most famous era in the city’s history books.

In 1968, Jefferson Airplane was as famous as Caruso was in the early 1900s. The pioneering San Franciscan psychedelic rock band, founded by Marty Balin and Paul Kantner and fronted by an icon of the era, Grace Slick, had already scored two top 10 hits with “White Rabbit” and “Somebody To Love.” After living in various apartments across the city, the band decided to invest its newfound cash into what would be the closest thing San Francisco ever had to its own Graceland.

Members of Jefferson Airplane smile for a photo on the steps at 2400 Fulton St. in San Francisco, circa 1970.

Michael Ochs Archives

As luck would have it, after 64 years in the family, the house was put on the market by Vance’s remaining relatives in May of that year. The band and its management bought it for $70,000, with every band member’s name on the deed. The band moved in and promptly painted the white exterior black and gold. The mansion became the Airplane’s hub, where they would live, conduct business, rehearse and party.

“It was like a culture center for the Haight-Ashbury,” veteran San Francisco music writer Joel Selvin says. “There were some very famous parties. I think the Thanksgiving party of ’68 was one where Owsley had obtained an advance copy of ‘Hey Jude’ and wired the house and played it over and over in every room.”

Augustus Owsley Stanley III was another icon of the era, an audio engineer as famous for being the first to synthesize his own LSD as he was for creating the Grateful Dead’s “Wall of Sound.”

Selvin himself visited the house many times and has some outlandish tales from inside its walls. It is worth noting here that nearly all stories told over the years from the late ’60s and early ’70s at 2400 Fulton are cloudy. Nearly all involve a good amount of drugs and many celebrities, groupies and eccentrics passing through the tall glass-paned door.



One unnamed character, described only as a “carpenter, martial arts instructor and drug dealer” by Jefferson Airplane’s Slick, reportedly moved into the basement around the time the band purchased the house, where he set up a number of nitrous oxide tanks.

“The members of the band would go down there from time to time and sit in a circle on the floor around the big blue metal totems,” Slick recalled in her 1998 memoir, “while our road manager, John Scheer, adjusted the six-spigot contraption on the top that allowed a group of people to get high, all at the same time.”

Slick also recalls pulling a gun on David Crosby in the house, thinking he was an intruder. “Since I didn’t fire the gun, Crosby is still around,” Slick wrote. (Crosby died this year.)

According to Selvin, one epic bash went down the night after the band returned from a European tour with the Doors. Long tables with white tablecloths were laid out throughout the house as a celebratory banquet and housewarming of sorts. Bassist Jack Casady was photographed with his head on the table grasping a champagne bottle — a photo later used on the cover of the band’s live album, “Bless Its Pointed Little Head.”

"Bless Its Little Pointed Head," Jefferson Airplane, 1969.

“Bless Its Little Pointed Head,” Jefferson Airplane, 1969.

RCA Victor

Selvin says teen girls would hang out on the wall next to Golden Gate Park looking over the mansion: “the Apple Scruffs, just sitting around on the wall across the street.” Some of these groupies would reportedly later work secretarial and public relations jobs for the band, inside the house.

The most storied party at the house came in the latter days of its infamy, on New Year’s Eve 1978, the night the Grateful Dead closed down the Winterland venue for good, playing through the night at the iconic venue’s final show.

“The Blues Brothers were the opening act for the Dead,” Selvin recalls. “And they just retired to the Airplane house after their performance with the biggest bag of blow I ever saw in my life.”

The basement and three above-ground floors of the home had a hierarchy of sorts during these all-night parties, with the third floor being the most exclusive. “There were levels of security,” Selvin says. “There was a door at the top, and if you got behind that door, there was a table that was just covered in cocaine. You would have thought it was a pile of flour.”

Through all the lore of parties and drugs and mayhem at the house, at the center of it all stood one of the most ornate homes in the city. “It had this extraordinary grand staircase that came down into the foyer. It was a magnificent house,” Selvin remembers. “And these unbelievable views from the top floor.”

Grace Slick backstage at The Family Dog, San Francisco, June, 1969.

Grace Slick backstage at The Family Dog, San Francisco, June, 1969.

Robert Altman/Getty Images

Slick’s memoir described the upper floor of the mansion as a “fancy turn-of-the-century house of ill-repute,” with numerous beds for “quickies,” adding that she slept with all the members of the band at one time or another, except for Balin.

Part of the mythology surrounding the goings-on at 2400 Fulton comes from the fact that the late ’60s counterculture scene — which would later spawn countless books and movies and be remembered as one of the biggest societal shifts in American history — was almost totally missed by the San Francisco media outlets at the time.

“The Chronicle, outside of [critic and Rolling Stones co-founder] Ralph Gleason, ignored the rock scene entirely,” Selvin says. “There are no photos, no coverage of anything. It was kids, you know, underground radio. It meant nothing to the mainstream media.”

The only time news made print from that scary psychedelic world was when things started to go bad: The Dead getting arrested for weed. Slick crashing her car on Doyle Drive while racing bandmate Jorma Kaukonen at 100 mph through the rain. Or the disaster at Altamont, where Airplane founder Balin was knocked unconscious by a Hells Angel, before things took an even darker turn.

The lack of press coverage at the time is evidenced in there now only being two or three photos publicly available of the mansion painted black and gold, one of which made the back cover of the band’s 1987 “best of” compilation album, named after the address, “2400 Fulton Street.”

2400 Fulton St. in San Francisco, circa 1970.

2400 Fulton St. in San Francisco, circa 1970.

Image via RCA; Illustration by SFGATE

As the drug of choice reportedly moved from LSD to cocaine, band members moved from the Haight to Sausalito, “Airplane” turned to “Starship” and things started to fall apart.

After the band split acrimoniously into two entities, Starship and Hot Tuna, the house was sold in 1986, and the mansion was painted white again.

“So many people, so many parties,” the band’s road manager Bill Thompson rued when it hit the market. “It’s kind of a sad feeling. But the times have changed. Most of Starship live in Marin now.”

For a while, legendary music promoter Bill Graham toyed with the idea of turning the house into San Francisco’s own Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, an idea that never came to fruition.

Today, the home is privately owned once again. Four tall queen palm trees reach the third-floor balcony, matching the white columns on Fulton. A dog park now lies behind the nondescript stone wall on the edge of Golden Gate Park where teen girls would once sit, waiting for their chance to get inside the famous house across the street.

2400 Fulton Street. 

2400 Fulton Street. 

Andrew Chamings / SFGATE

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated Paul Kanter is photographed inside the house. The story has been corrected.


The 3-mile stretch of Fulton Street on the northern edge of Golden Gate Park has some curious historical landmarks — the tiny red chalet that was once the center of the city’s booziest district, the Dutch windmill overlooking Ocean Beach, the small hidden statue of the park’s statue-hating founder.

But one 17-bedroom home on the northeastern corner of the park, fronted by four monumental faux-Greek columns, may have the most storied rock ’n’ roll history of any site in the neighborhood. The mansion’s lore includes its time housing an opera singer in an earthquake, a drug-dealing martial arts instructor in the basement and maybe the most drug- and sex-fueled band in the history of the psychedelic San Francisco scene.

The four-story Neoclassical Revival mansion at 2400 Fulton was built in 1904 by a lumber magnate from Eureka named R.A. Vance. At the time, the area north of the park, which would become the Richmond District, was little more than sand dunes. Vance, who had made a fortune up north in lumber and banking, spared no expense in building his lavish San Francisco home.

According to the Western Neighborhoods Project, beyond the stately columned Greek facade, the interior featured mahogany finishings shipped from India, a grand staircase, stained-glass windows, eight fireplaces and a master bedroom fresco featuring reclining, seminude women.

It was maybe this classical European excess that attracted Italian opera singer Enrico Caruso. The apocryphal story goes that on the morning of the 1906 earthquake, the world-renowned tenor was staying at the Palace Hotel while performing a series of shows in the city. To escape the destruction, Caruso headed west to stay with his friend Vance at his lavish home. There, he holed up as the quake and subsequent fire destroyed the eastern half of the city, including the Palace Hotel. Caruso then left San Francisco and vowed never to return.

Whether or not Caruso actually sought shelter with his friend that day, the mansion stayed in the Vance family for generations as the Richmond District built up around it. The family eventually sold it in 1968, when it would enter its most famous era in the city’s history books.

In 1968, Jefferson Airplane was as famous as Caruso was in the early 1900s. The pioneering San Franciscan psychedelic rock band, founded by Marty Balin and Paul Kantner and fronted by an icon of the era, Grace Slick, had already scored two top 10 hits with “White Rabbit” and “Somebody To Love.” After living in various apartments across the city, the band decided to invest its newfound cash into what would be the closest thing San Francisco ever had to its own Graceland.

Members of Jefferson Airplane smile for a photo on the steps at 2400 Fulton St. in San Francisco, circa 1970.

Members of Jefferson Airplane smile for a photo on the steps at 2400 Fulton St. in San Francisco, circa 1970.

Michael Ochs Archives

As luck would have it, after 64 years in the family, the house was put on the market by Vance’s remaining relatives in May of that year. The band and its management bought it for $70,000, with every band member’s name on the deed. The band moved in and promptly painted the white exterior black and gold. The mansion became the Airplane’s hub, where they would live, conduct business, rehearse and party.

“It was like a culture center for the Haight-Ashbury,” veteran San Francisco music writer Joel Selvin says. “There were some very famous parties. I think the Thanksgiving party of ’68 was one where Owsley had obtained an advance copy of ‘Hey Jude’ and wired the house and played it over and over in every room.”

Augustus Owsley Stanley III was another icon of the era, an audio engineer as famous for being the first to synthesize his own LSD as he was for creating the Grateful Dead’s “Wall of Sound.”

Selvin himself visited the house many times and has some outlandish tales from inside its walls. It is worth noting here that nearly all stories told over the years from the late ’60s and early ’70s at 2400 Fulton are cloudy. Nearly all involve a good amount of drugs and many celebrities, groupies and eccentrics passing through the tall glass-paned door.



One unnamed character, described only as a “carpenter, martial arts instructor and drug dealer” by Jefferson Airplane’s Slick, reportedly moved into the basement around the time the band purchased the house, where he set up a number of nitrous oxide tanks.

“The members of the band would go down there from time to time and sit in a circle on the floor around the big blue metal totems,” Slick recalled in her 1998 memoir, “while our road manager, John Scheer, adjusted the six-spigot contraption on the top that allowed a group of people to get high, all at the same time.”

Slick also recalls pulling a gun on David Crosby in the house, thinking he was an intruder. “Since I didn’t fire the gun, Crosby is still around,” Slick wrote. (Crosby died this year.)

According to Selvin, one epic bash went down the night after the band returned from a European tour with the Doors. Long tables with white tablecloths were laid out throughout the house as a celebratory banquet and housewarming of sorts. Bassist Jack Casady was photographed with his head on the table grasping a champagne bottle — a photo later used on the cover of the band’s live album, “Bless Its Pointed Little Head.”

"Bless Its Little Pointed Head," Jefferson Airplane, 1969.

“Bless Its Little Pointed Head,” Jefferson Airplane, 1969.

RCA Victor

Selvin says teen girls would hang out on the wall next to Golden Gate Park looking over the mansion: “the Apple Scruffs, just sitting around on the wall across the street.” Some of these groupies would reportedly later work secretarial and public relations jobs for the band, inside the house.

The most storied party at the house came in the latter days of its infamy, on New Year’s Eve 1978, the night the Grateful Dead closed down the Winterland venue for good, playing through the night at the iconic venue’s final show.

“The Blues Brothers were the opening act for the Dead,” Selvin recalls. “And they just retired to the Airplane house after their performance with the biggest bag of blow I ever saw in my life.”

The basement and three above-ground floors of the home had a hierarchy of sorts during these all-night parties, with the third floor being the most exclusive. “There were levels of security,” Selvin says. “There was a door at the top, and if you got behind that door, there was a table that was just covered in cocaine. You would have thought it was a pile of flour.”

Through all the lore of parties and drugs and mayhem at the house, at the center of it all stood one of the most ornate homes in the city. “It had this extraordinary grand staircase that came down into the foyer. It was a magnificent house,” Selvin remembers. “And these unbelievable views from the top floor.”

Grace Slick backstage at The Family Dog, San Francisco, June, 1969.

Grace Slick backstage at The Family Dog, San Francisco, June, 1969.

Robert Altman/Getty Images

Slick’s memoir described the upper floor of the mansion as a “fancy turn-of-the-century house of ill-repute,” with numerous beds for “quickies,” adding that she slept with all the members of the band at one time or another, except for Balin.

Part of the mythology surrounding the goings-on at 2400 Fulton comes from the fact that the late ’60s counterculture scene — which would later spawn countless books and movies and be remembered as one of the biggest societal shifts in American history — was almost totally missed by the San Francisco media outlets at the time.

“The Chronicle, outside of [critic and Rolling Stones co-founder] Ralph Gleason, ignored the rock scene entirely,” Selvin says. “There are no photos, no coverage of anything. It was kids, you know, underground radio. It meant nothing to the mainstream media.”

The only time news made print from that scary psychedelic world was when things started to go bad: The Dead getting arrested for weed. Slick crashing her car on Doyle Drive while racing bandmate Jorma Kaukonen at 100 mph through the rain. Or the disaster at Altamont, where Airplane founder Balin was knocked unconscious by a Hells Angel, before things took an even darker turn.

The lack of press coverage at the time is evidenced in there now only being two or three photos publicly available of the mansion painted black and gold, one of which made the back cover of the band’s 1987 “best of” compilation album, named after the address, “2400 Fulton Street.”

2400 Fulton St. in San Francisco, circa 1970.

2400 Fulton St. in San Francisco, circa 1970.

Image via RCA; Illustration by SFGATE

As the drug of choice reportedly moved from LSD to cocaine, band members moved from the Haight to Sausalito, “Airplane” turned to “Starship” and things started to fall apart.

After the band split acrimoniously into two entities, Starship and Hot Tuna, the house was sold in 1986, and the mansion was painted white again.

“So many people, so many parties,” the band’s road manager Bill Thompson rued when it hit the market. “It’s kind of a sad feeling. But the times have changed. Most of Starship live in Marin now.”

For a while, legendary music promoter Bill Graham toyed with the idea of turning the house into San Francisco’s own Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, an idea that never came to fruition.

Today, the home is privately owned once again. Four tall queen palm trees reach the third-floor balcony, matching the white columns on Fulton. A dog park now lies behind the nondescript stone wall on the edge of Golden Gate Park where teen girls would once sit, waiting for their chance to get inside the famous house across the street.

2400 Fulton Street. 

2400 Fulton Street. 

Andrew Chamings / SFGATE

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated Paul Kanter is photographed inside the house. The story has been corrected.

FOLLOW US ON GOOGLE NEWS

Read original article here

Denial of responsibility! Quick Telecast is an automatic aggregator of the all world’s media. In each content, the hyperlink to the primary source is specified. All trademarks belong to their rightful owners, all materials to their authors. If you are the owner of the content and do not want us to publish your materials, please contact us by email – [email protected]. The content will be deleted within 24 hours.

Leave a comment
Ads Blocker Image Powered by Code Help Pro

Ads Blocker Detected!!!

We have detected that you are using extensions to block ads. Please support us by disabling these ads blocker.

buy kamagra buy kamagra online