In the 1960s, Denver was arguably in cow town mode, except for when it became an epicenter of rock and roll, a destination for the likes of The Doors, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, and Jimi Hendrix. This Camelot of Sound existed in a nondescript building on the outskirts of town.

The Family Dog, a “hippie” music club on Evans Avenue, was around for less than a year but turned Denver into a musical destination. There’s a new documentary about its supernova of an existence from September 1967 to July of ‘68. Dan Obarski and Scott Montgomery are the filmmakers behind “The Tale of The Dog.” It’s streaming now on AppleTV, iTunes, Amazon, and other platforms.

Until recently, the long-gone Family Dog concert hall in Denver lived mostly—if not only—in the memories of a few oldtimers.

Haven’t heard of the Family Dog? That’s about to change.

The music club on Evans Avenue, just 2½ miles from the University of Denver, was open for a mere 10 months in 1967–68. But it hosted some of the biggest names in rock ’n’ roll, music legends such as the Grateful Dead, The Doors, Jefferson Airplane and Canned Heat.

Many concerts were accompanied by eye-popping psychedelic light shows that brought counterculture pizzazz to the Mile High City. With its music and kaleidoscopic spectacle, the club emerged as a cultural hub in a city transitioning from staid cow town to happening metroplex. But for all its significance, the Dog has languished in obscurity, barely earning mention in the history books.

Enter Scott Montgomery, a professor of medieval art in DU’s School of Art and Art History. Along with Dan Obarski, a counselor in health care, Montgomery decided the Family Dog merited a better fate. Together, this unlikely pair decided to make “The Tale of the Dog,” a 100-minute documentary that chronicles the club and its important role in turbulent times.

Already, the movie has earned the first-time documentary filmmakers tons of kudos and plenty of awards, including the best U.S. Documentary at the Mile High International Film Festival and Rocky Mountain International Film Festival. Other honors have come from overseas, including recognition as Best Music Feature from the Reykjavik Visions International Film Festival.

“The story starts at DU,” Montgomery says. “I love that the story starts on campus. A lot of DU students worked with the light show, and they did volunteer work. They decided it was a fun thing to do on a Friday night, and the Family Dog was just down the street.”

Montgomery had been working on an exhibit of 1960s psychedelic posters when he was invited to stage one about the Family Dog. While conducting preliminary research, he realized the Dog’s story had never been presented in a comprehensive way.

“My eyes got bigger and bigger, and I thought, ‘Wait, there’s more here,’” Montgomery recalls. “Most of the history is not written down; it’s in people’s heads. So we decided to make a movie, which was incredibly naïve because neither of us is a filmmaker.”

That started a six-year journey to piece together the venue’s story. “It was a labor of love,” Montgomery says.

The Montgomery-Obarski collaboration goes beyond documenting a rock club. It touches on the hippie counterculture, acknowledges the artistry behind the psychedelic poster advertisements, exposes corruption in the music industry, and captures the tension and clashes between Denver police and the music venue.

“I see it as a really pivotal moment in Denver’s evolution, because Denver has changed so dramatically as a city,” Montgomery says. “I think it is part of the coalescing of the culture and the counterculture.

“The whole tale of ‘The Tale of the Dog,’ as we call it, is epic. It’s this adventure.”

It’s also artistically significant, so Montgomery is using the film in some of his classes to discuss the psychedelic poster movement.

“I think we preserved something that would have been lost,” Montgomery says. “I hope what this does is put the history back on the map. We’ve preserved a piece of history that was in oral history, in the archive of individual memories.”

Obarski and Montgomery say they made this documentary just in time, as several key players already died. In the interviews, they learned that the spirit of the Dog relied on the passionate people who worked there
and who considered one another family over the club’s short lifespan.

“I met a lot of really amazing people,” Montgomery says, noting that he and Obarski were welcomed by the Dog’s alumni. “It’s a beautiful, open family, but it’s a tight family, and they embraced us.”

Hippie History: The Tale of the Dog Chronicles a Denver Rock Landmark

Dan Obarski and Scott Montgomery’s documentary The Tale of the Dog, which starts streaming to the public on  Tuesday, June 8, tells the previously untold story of the Family Dog rock club in Denver. The music venue, which was only open for ten months in the late 1960s, kickstarted the city’s music scene by bringing in acts like the Doors, the Grateful Dead, Cream, Big Brother and the Holding Company and Jefferson Airplane, while also launching the career of Denver legend Barry Fey, who went on to become one of the country’s biggest promoters, turning Red Rocks into a rock-concert destination.

The film was six years in the making, with Obarski and Montgomery amassing thirty hours of interview footage they eventually cut into a hundred-minute film. Cinedigm Corp recently acquired all U.S. and Canadian rights for The Tale of the Dog, which will be available on Apple/iTunes, Amazon, Google Play/YouTube, FandangoNOW, Vudu and Hoopla.

The doc includes the voices of musicians who played the Family Dog, including Otis Taylor and Paul Conley of Lothar & the Hand People, as well as venue employees; renowned artists Stanley Mouse, Victor Moscoso and Raphael Schnepf, who made psychedelic posters for the venue; Marc Arno of the pioneering light crew Diogenes Lantern Works; Twist & Shout owner Paul Epstein; and others.

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The University of Denver Premiere: The Tale of the Dog

by Lisa Wheeler, Sunday, February 23, 2020

So last night I was honored to be invited to the exclusive premiere showing of Tale of the Dog – The Untold Story of Denver’s Greatest Rock Club, a fantastic documentary on the history of Denver’s short-lived Family Dog concert venue.

A who’s who of 1960s-1970s Denver music was in attendance – Harry Tuft, the founder of the Denver Folklore Center, Colorado Music Hall of Fame inductee Otis Taylor, New World Blues Dictionary drummer James (Denny) Townsend, Eighth Penny Matter’s Brent Warren, Lothar and the Hand People’s Paul Conly, as well as Mike Stelk, whose tireless efforts to preserve Colorado music history helped inspire the film.

The Tale of the Dog is a long-overdue movie on The Family Dog, the “pioneering hippie rock club,” which was only in business from Sept. 8, 1967, through July 19, 1968. The club made a huge mark on the early Denver rock scene, hosting the Grateful Dead, the Doors, Cream, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, and Canned Heat, whose famous run-in with the Denver police department is well documented in the film.

The brainchild of Dan Obarski and University of Denver art professor Scott Montgomery, The Tale of the Dog spends an equal amount of time spotlighting the visual representation of the nightclub, both with its promotional posters (created by Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelley, Rick Griffin, Michael Ferguson, George Hunter, and Robert Fried), and its multimedia light shows, by Diogenes Lantern Works.

“My training is as a medievalist,” said filmmaker Scott Montgomery. “I got involved in this because I think it’s significant art, and it seemed to be under acknowledged. It’s not that far off from what I do, in medieval art. I still look at the iconography, the style… so I don’t think I’ve changed my field, but I just embraced a movement of art that I think is under acknowledged, and I think is one of the more significant art movements of the second half of the 20th century.”

“I didn’t know anything about this place,” said filmmaker Dan Obarski. “It wasn’t until I was in my 30s, I saw a picture of Jim Morrison playing at DU, and about fell out of my chair. I went searching for this Family Dog thing, and found this one website, that a guy named Mike Stelk had – it was the only website with the only piece of information out there, on the Family Dog. It listed all of the concerts. Nobody knew this. It was completely unknown. Then I saw Scott at a poster show, and he was the only other guy who knew anything about it. And we both thought it was important, and we needed to tell this story.”

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By Greg Glasgow Posted January 22, 2018 at 2:36 pm

It was in existence for less than two years, but the Family Dog rock club — located just down the street from DU, near Evans and Santa Fe — was the epicenter of ’60s cool in Denver. Opened in 1967, the venue — an offshoot of concert promoter Chet Helms’ Family Dog club in San Francisco — saw performances by Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, the Doors, Jefferson Airplane and many more.

DU art history professor Scott Montgomery, an expert in ’60s psychedelic rock posters, first learned of the Dog and its legacy through a poster exhibit he mounted at DU’s Vicki Myhren Gallery in 2014. Intrigued, he began to study the venue’s history and its impact on Denver’s cultural legacy.

“It was really the first nexus that pulled a disparate counterculture together [in Denver],” he says. “It created critical mass. It took places to do that. You had pockets of counterculture everywhere, but often it congregated around rock clubs. They were the church, for the lack of a better way to put it.”

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Westword: The Mystery of the Family Dog, Denver’s Most Storied Rock Venue

MICHAEL ROBERTS | AUGUST 16, 2017 | 7:00AM

The Family Dog may be the most influential rock-music venue in Denver history. Yet it’s also the most mysterious.

The club debuted just shy of a half-century ago, on September 8, 1967, and subsequently played host to a slew of seminal acts, including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead and more. But the Dog was put down in less than two years, and while its 1601 West Evans Avenue building still exists, the business currently operating there is PT’s Showclub Denver, a strip joint whose performers specialize in baring their bodies instead of their rock-and-roll souls.

Clearly, the space is very different now than it was in its psychedelic heyday, but specifics about the changes are scarce. According to Dan Obarski, who’s working with University of Denver professor Scott Montgomery to create The Tale of the Dog, a documentary expected to debut in 2018, the fiftieth anniversary of the venue’s demise, “we have three photos of the club, I think, but nobody has found photos or video from inside.”

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