Welcome to the "original" Trident Restaurant's web log!  This site would like your help collecting photos, stories, and memories, from employees, patrons, and anyone that frequented this unique establishment/ experience from 1966 to 1976. 

The Kingston Trio's Trident, at 558 Bridgeway in Sausalito, uniquely reflected what was going on in the late 60's and through the mid 70's in the Bay Area.  Janis Joplin had her own table when she came in.   In 1972 and 1975, after their concerts, the Rolling Stones held  private parties thrown by Bill Graham.   The night the Trident closed in 1976, most of the employees had taken some sort of mind altering substance ,and the "kind" was freely indulged in throughout the evening ... without any incidents or trouble from the Sausalito Police who were in attendence.
What a trip!

Have the times changed?  Your thoughts, stories, photos, and memories are welcomed!

Email photos, stories, or videos to : Endorfunns@aol.com  or post your comments on the site, and enjoy the conversation.

What ever happen to the Neptune Spears that lined the walkway to the entrance of the Trident Restaurant?
  (Trident Drink Coaster)

I got my drivers license when I was 16 and my first car when I was 17.  The first place I took my high school sweetheart was a road trip to Sausalito.  I was a major fan of Nick, Bob, and John, The Kingston Trio.  The Trident was a bit expensive for high schoolers but we could get a Coke Cola.  My high school girl friend, now my wife of 43 years, still has a coaster and napkin from The Trident.  When I was drafted, Sausalito is where I told her.  When I asked her to marry me it was the little village by the bay.  After I returned from Vietnam we where married and we honeymoon at the Alta Mira.  Thanks for reopening a little piece of my heart. David Willey, Sacremento
 Bob Shane 1963

From an interview with David Crosby in this month's Santa Barbara Magazine David ends the interview with a wonderful compliment about the Kingston Trio.  At the time of the interview David and CS&N were playing at the Santa Barbara Bowl. David was asked, "You're playing the Santa Barbara Bowl - which I'm sure you love and have played many times before. Do you remember the first concert you went to there?" And David replied, "The first show I saw there was the Kingston Trio and I was absolutely thrilled. I was folksy, I loved it! They were very good! I think that's how far back it goes - my relationship with the Bowl.  I consider Santa Barbara my home. I love it very much, and hope to live out my life here."

(Image from Santa Barbara Magazine)
Excerpt lifted from David Crosby's "Since Then" How I Survived Everything And Lived To Tell About It:
     "After a series of adventures, the Mayan and it's crew sailed into San Francisco Bay and found moorings in Sausalito. David lived upon the boat and recorded his solo album "If I Could Only Remember My Name" at Wally Heider's studio in San Francisco.  He made the Trident  (a local restaurant and bar) his personal watering hole.
      Built on pilings over the water on Sausalito's main street (Bridgeway), it had a deck with an expansive view of all of San Francisco Bay and the most gorgeous waitresses north of the Playboy Mansion. No airbrushing and no implants.  Trident women had rings in their noses and tattoos of flowers and butterflies where you could see them, and sometimes where you couldn't.  There was no house uniform so waitresses could wear anything from Victorian Velvet to see-through Indian gauze.  Some shaved, some didn't.  
      The line between staff and clientele often blurred: beautiful women would hang out waiting for an interview or a job opening, and female staff would stick around after work, fraternizing with guys who could afford the tab (it was not a cheap place to eat). If sex, drugs, and rock and roll had caused a revolution, the Trident was it's Reign of Terror!"

The "New" Trident is Open! Formerly Horizons, and formerly the Kingston Trio's and Frank Werber's Trident (circa late sixties through late 70's).
Here's the new Trident's web site for reservations, and email updates for events:

The Trident Restaurant

Trident Preview Party
The World Famous Trident Restaurant has reopened in Sausalito, and owner Bob
Freeman invites Historical Society members and other locals to a preview
party on Friday, November 16.   From 5:30 PM to 7:30 PM, enjoy  $3.50 wine
and well drinks and complimentary hors d'oeuvres, as well as music by The
Rowan Brothers.
Started by the legendary Kingston Trio, the iconic Trident restaurant was
famous for its music, food and "anything goes" atmosphere. It was a "home
away from home" to famous (and infamous) musicians, artists, actors and
eccentrics. The Trident developed a reputation as "the" place to be. The
restaurant changed hands during the late 1970s and became known as Horizons.

The building was constructed in 1898 and served as the first Yacht club in
the Bay Area. It has been refurbished but Bob has kept integral parts of the
original Trident, including most of the custom built wooden interior and the
1960s ceiling mural, painted by artist David Richards. Renovations include
the addition of a Sky Deck on the 2nd level that boasts one of the premier
views of San Francisco and the bay.
An "official" opening is being planned for some time in the New Year, or
sooner, but here's a chance to preview this historic Sausalito landmark with
friends and neighbors.

The Trident is at  558 Bridgeway (415) 331-3232.

The National Geographic's article on the creation of the Tequila Sunrise, and the Rolling Stone's connection thereof.

Click here for the whole article: The National Geographic Trident Article 2012

"Long-haired freako" embraced by the Mill Valley golf society By Jason Walsh
This article appeared in the Pacific Sun in March of 1977


     One of Marin's finest golfers of the 1970s was facing something of a personal dilemma - should he give up Marijuana if it would lower his handicap?
     Larry Kimzey, a "confirmed pot head" of eight years, according to Sun reporter George Frazier, wasn't taking lightly the possibility of sacrificing his passion for the "greener" in favor of his passion for the greens. But alas, he worried his frequent lighting of the chronic was hurting his short game.
     "It's affecting my memory," lamented Kimzey, whose average score was then in the 80s. "And what is putting the memory - trying to remember that 'touch' of 'feel' of putting" The 26 year old held dreams of going pro, but was concerned the he too often "ends up looking like a spazo around the greens."
     Kimsey, at the time, was living in a diplapidated truck near Sausalito's Gate 5 and he estimated his cost of living at about $250 a month. He was also the newest member of the prestigious Mill Valley's Golf Club.
     "That long hair freako often seen hitch hiking between Sausalito and Mill Valley with a bag over his shoulder is Kimzey," wrote the reporter.
     But why, in the words of Frazier, would the posh Mill Valley's Men's Golf Club "totally accept...a stoned golf nut?"
     Kimzey put it down to two primary qualities his fellow golfers were looking for in a club member: "I don't run off at the mouth in a crazed manner...and I don't smoke dope with the older guys."
     At this juncture in his life, Kimzey considered golf his chosen profession. " I don't play golf for pleasure," he said. "It's like a job...this is what I do." But it wasn't long before that when Kimzey was juggling a pair of careers that may have ultimately kept him out of Mill Valley "High Society": selling pyramid schemes and dealing drugs.
       When the pyramid scheme/drug dealing scene turned sour ("people were getting killed"), he took a job scrubbing pots and pans at the famous Trident Restaurant.  Just when it seemed his career in the service industry might be taking off (he'd been promoted to vegatable slicer) Kimzey's fate took a turn: He cut his foot on a  piece of glass while leaving the Trident.  Several months and one worker's compensation suit later Mr. Kimzey was $10,000 richer.
     Still, that kind of money  doesn't last too long being an out of work golf fanatic in Marin. " I pinched pennies, but I'm spending money and I just don't like it," said Kimzey. "Golf, food, and chicks, my money just dribbles away."
     Kimzey, now 56, currently lives in San Francisco and has upgraded from a truck to an apartment. Aside from that, not muched, has changedc.
     "I'm still the last of the independents.  I didn't go corporate.  I'm still just a small time chisler just like I was then," he says.
     Kimzey still hits the links with regularity - he's won flights in the San Francisco City Golf Championship and has an 8 handicap.  All this despite never having abandoned the loco weed.
     "The one thing that has been universal in my life these 30 years has been golf and pot," reflects Kimzey.  "Your right, that's two things."

Special thanks to Jason Walsh and the Pacific Sun Newspaper for permission to reprint their article here!
And, Larry, how the hell are ya? Check in when ya can....will ya?

Special thanks to Jay Daniel for his contributions here. Jay is listed as the principal photographer for Black Cat Studios: jay@blackcatstudio.com   For those in the know this was an extension of the Kingston Trios and Frank Werber's Trident restaurant.

From Edwin Brown, "We were Hippies living in the Haight.  Summer would hitchhike across the Golden Gate Bridge to work. She always got a ride!"

For those of you that follow this site you may have noticed a lack of activity the past few months. What happened? I moved ending my forty year love affair with Marin, and have moved down to the Central Coast - Santa Barbara. 

With the re-opening of the Trident this year there is much to report. Jiro/ Melvin has come up with some new photos from "Benny" that will be posted here shortly.

But, the biggest news is Trident alumni Ed Gutekunst has written an amazing Movie Treatment/ Short Story (currently 36 pages - Treatments are 20) about three women coming of age in 1974 while working at the Trident.  One of them is the Manager (Dagny?), and the other two...well, you'll just have to wait and see.  Ed would love Robin to play Lou Ganapolar.  Possibly with the "Benjamin Buttons" effect he could play Lou and himself back in the day? 

More about The Trident movie to follow...

For decades now, Sausalito's Horizons has been a place for tourists to sit on a sun-filled, Bay-bordering patio, while paying a premium for average renditions of shrimp Louis and friends. Now owners Ron Davis and Bob Freeman, who also own Wharf fixture Buena Vista Cafe, have a plan to switch things up. Since the America's Cup will be bringing big crowds to the area next year, it's a perfect opportunity to revamp and bring back some of the luster of years past. Freeman has hired former Michael Mina sous chef James Montejanoto help. (Yes, that's the same chef who just turned down the Lot 7 gig.) Next year, they'll shut down Horizons and reopen as Trident—a restaurant last seen at this address during the drug- and music-loving counterculture heyday of the 60s and 70s, when Janis Joplin had a regular table inside.

 

The move resembles Moonraker's recent revival in Pacifica, and the history of Trident is certainly a fun one. Led Zepplin, Santana and Vince Guaraldimade regular appearances, and Bill Graham would hold regular private parties, many of them with the Rolling Stones. You can read a lot more about the good old days right here.

When Trident reopens next year, Janice Joplin obviously won't be there, but ahuge new upper level deck will host prime seats for watching the America's Cup, and the existing decor downstairs will have enjoyed a much-needed refresh. Montejano has already spruced up the menu, fixing classics like cioppino and Nicoise salad with an eye towards sustainability and local sourcing. He'll continue doing this in the new year, bringing in local oysters,Brandt beef, Mary's air-chilled chickens, and more. There's a Humphry Sloclombe Irish coffee ice cream in the works, and there may even be a totally separate menu upstairs. "Tourists are a given here with the views and everything," says Montejano. "But we also want to cater to locals and the industry."

After meetings with the Sausalito City Council in mid-January, the powers that be will know a lot more about what exactly can be done to the decor, and how quickly. Horizons will stay open as is through the new year, until the exact plan is nailed down. Expect an update on all this early next year.

Special thanks to Jiro Yoneshige aka "Melvin" and the many photo contibutions he's  made here. Kadi Kiss featured waitress alumni here.
Like the sign says, "Do Your Brain A Favor, Let It Rest Each Day."

Special thanks to the Tequila Whisperer aka Michael Lipman "Lippy" and Jeff Burkhart  aka the Barfly!  Might need to turn the volume up here a little.  This first appeared "live streaming" on Thursday August 11, 2011 on www.TequilaWhisperer.com which broadcasts "live online" every Thursday night at 7pm.  This video is 15 minutes long. Excerpted from the 112 minute show.  Go to the Tequila Whisperer web site and click on "Archives" for the whole show.

Photos provided by Ruggero Milano (back in the day Rodger) the owner of Milano ristorante at 1 Blackfield Drive in Tiburon, California (415) 388-9100  www.milanotiburon.com
Rodger, Michael, and Lisa.   And, Rodger and Bobby!

MIGHT NEED TO TURN THE VOLUME UP, LOT OF BACKGROUND NOISE, BUT A GREAT STORY NONETHELESS!

This article appeared in the Marin Independent Journal on June 19,2011.  The author is Jeff Burkhart.   Two of Jeff's websites are: The Barfly Online Real Life Adventures in Bartending  and Jeff Burkhart

ABOUT A YEAR AGO Mark Lomas, a former bartender who runs the Trident Restaurant website, and I had lunch. We sat in the main dining room of Horizons in Sausalito — the former Trident — and swapped bar stories. I had once worked at the briefly reopened Ondine, which was above the original Trident.

Owned by the Kingston Trio, the Trident was way ahead of its time. From 1966 to the mid- 1970s it was the place to be in the Bay Area. Famed for its beautiful waitresses and musical pedigree, it also featured such innovations as sashimi, a fresh juice bar and an espresso bar.

After numerous stories about rock 'n' rollers, waitresses, Robin Williams (once a busboy at the Trident), Lomas mentioned that the tequila sunrise had been invented there.

Now, I was reasonably sure that the tequila sunrise had been invented long before that, but I tucked away that information along with the phone number of the bartender who supposedly did that inventing.

From my research, I learned that:

• The Arizona Biltmore hotel claims that bartender Gene Sulit invented the tequila sunrise there in the late 1930s, consisting of tequila, lime juice, soda and crème de cassis.

• The recipe most people are familiar with; tequila orange juice and grenadine appeared for the very first time in the 1974 version of Mr. Boston's Bartender's Guide.

Hmmm.

Drink origins are always a little murky. Take the martini, for instance. The town of Martinez claims that it was invented there in 1874. In fact it put up a historical landmark to "certify" the event. It doesn't seem to matter that the drink invented there was called the Martinez Special, or that it included bitters, as well as a different kind of gin and a totally different kind of vermouth. There it sits, certified in stone: "Birthplace of the Martini."

Eventually I called the so-called inventor of the tequila sunrise. Bobby Lazoff, 63, splits his time between computer IT work and teaching tutorials while living in Hawaii. But back in 1969 he was a fresh-faced 20-year-old looking for work in Sausalito.

"I did about two or three days as a dishwasher," he said. "Then I was a busboy and when I got old enough I became a bartender."

He claimed to have taken the bartending very seriously.

"The Trident was a rock 'n' roll haven and tequila was the 'in' drink," he said. So he and another bartender, Billy Rice, started experimenting. "Anything made with gin or vodka we started making with tequila," he said. "A couple of them didn't turn out too well."

One drink that did turn out well was a resurrected tequila sunrise.

"We built it in a chimney glass; a shot of tequila with one hand, a shot of sweet and sour with the other hand, the soda gun, then orange juice, float crème de cassis on top, grenadine if you wanted, and that was it, the tequila sunrise."

Eventually, the bartenders simplified the recipe to just tequila, orange juice and grenadine.

"We had a Rolling Stones party (the kickoff of the media frenzy that was their 1972 tour) one Monday night when we were usually closed," Lazoff said. "The owner called me in and put me behind the bar. We had a select menu, a couple of the prettier waitresses and that was the party. Bill Graham brought in about 35 people, and you know the place holds several hundred. Mick came up to the bar and asked for a margarita, I asked him if he had ever tried a tequila sunrise, he said no, I built him one and they started sucking them up. After that they took them all across the country."

OK, I thought, all I had to do was get the Rolling Stones to verify that and we could reasonably assume that Lazoff might be indeed be responsible for the most recognizable incarnation of the tequila sunrise.

Rather unlikely. As a result, the story sat until I picked up Keith Richards' book "Life," published this past October. Chapter nine, sentence No. 1: "The '72 tour was known by other names — the cocaine and tequila sunrise tour ... " I could not believe my eyes.

I realized that I should probably be a little more trusting, and that Horizons might want to look into historical markers.

John Stewart  who passed away three years ago, was recently honored posthumously as a member of the Kingston Trio.  He replaced Dave Guard in the legendary group in 1961.  His wife, Buffy Ford Stewart, acceptted the lifetime achievement Grammy for John for his work with the Kingston Trio.   Paul Liberatore wrote a beautiful remembrance in today's Marin Independent Journal. 
For the whole article click on the link here:
Paul Liberatore's John Stewart Marin Independent Journal article They Do Remember Him

On February 10, 2011 Paul Liberatore reported in the Marin Independent Journal newspaper that:

In 1965, just before he was cast in "I Spy," becoming the first African-American to co-star in a dramatic television series, Bill Cosby lived on a houseboat in Sausalito with his young bride, Camille, while he worked at San Francisco's hungry i.

The 73-year-old entertainment industry icon, educator and activist returns to Marin on Feb. 12 for two shows at Marin Center in San Rafael.

During a recent telephone interview, Cosby, the winner of nine Grammys, six Emmys and two Golden Globe awards, reminisced about his idyllic time in Marin.

During the day, he'd often hang out at the Trident, a legendary fern bar and restaurant on the Sausalito waterfront.

"I remember afternoons at the Trident, enjoying the jazz performers," he recalled, mentioning "the little Italian fellow with the 'Peanuts' thing," referring to Marin pianist Vince Guaraldi.

The '60s were the nascent days of the counterculture, when educated young people were dropping out, going back to the land, experimenting with alternative lifestyles.

For the whole article click here:
Bill Cosby Remembers the Trident and Marin County in the Mid Sixties

Bill Cosby will be performing at the Marin Center for 2 shows February 12, 2011

Happy New Year! Make it a Great Year! 2011, finally!

Etchings created "back in the day" by Trident Alumni  Ed "Eduardo" Gutekunst
Ed can be reached at: egutekunst@fhallen.com

I was a former “patron” if that is the correct description for some one who had just turned 18 and was in the company of my older brother Seth. I have some fond memories of the Trident and a lot of blurry  images in my brain from nights of over indulgence.

At the time, (1971)my brother and I were sharing a house in Sausalito and he was running the Magnolia Cinema in Larkspur with two partners Barry Bedrick and Charlie Kessler. Seth had been involved with Janis Joplin and we often were hanging out with former members of the Holding Company, the Cockettes and various other nefarious and colorful characters from the Bay area. There were often impromptu gatherings at our house with various substances being laid out on the coffee table and then a trip to the Trident for late night drinks. At my age, I variously fell in love with every single waitress who worked there, none of whom seemed to find the attentions of an eighteen year old particularly enchanting.

There were several hilarious incidents which took place, one of which sticks in my memory. The Trident used to have sliding glass doors which opened onto the outside deck. They were always kept spotlessly clean so it was difficult to tell they were even there. If my memory serves me correctly, there was a carved wooden son on each of the doors which should have served to warn you that you needed to slide the door open before proceeding to the deck area, but newcomers often walked smack into them to the combined merriment of the patrons.

One afternoon, just such an event occurred and Seth was laughing his head off at the misfortune of some poor tourista,  the only funnier thing in the world being when he performed exactly the same stunt about an hour and several drinks later.

Some memories are not as nice....

Being in the back of a borrowed Volkswagon Beetle  on the way back from the Trident where Seth had picked up a hooker and they both had done some drugs. He kept trying to put the moves on her as the bug sped along the twisting hillside roads around the town, swerving at the last minute to avoid collisions and cliff edges. Requests that he pay attention to his driving were ignored or answered with snarls and eventually the inevitable happened and he side swiped a parked vehicle and then fled the scene.

It was a foreshadowing of his death in 1990 when he crashed his Harley on a New Orleans bridge killing both himself and his passenger. He left behind a novel based on his prison experiences in the late 1970’s which was critically acclaimed.

But he loved the Trident and so did I!.

The link here is to a photo I took of Seth at the Trident in the summer of 1971. He is on the right and the gentleman on the left was a fellow named Tim who ran the Boogie Bakery in Larkspur which was next door to the Magnolia cinema.

 Vince    Dean Reilly, Eddie Duran

          John Beck wrote in the Marin Independent Journal's Here Magazine recently that, "Vince Guaraldi became an institution at Clubs like the Hungry i in San Francisco, and the Trident in Sausalito."

          At this year's Sausalito Film Festival director Andrew Thomas and producer Toby Gleason premiered their new film The Anatomy of Vince Guaraldi. Guaraldi saw himself as a boogie-woogie player, and didn't want to write hits, he wanted to write standards. Vince Guaraldi passed away at the age of 47. In this film, putting his life into perspective are such luminaries as George Winston, Dave Brubeck, Dick Gregory, Malcolm boyd, and David Benoit.
 
          Curiously, the one time Mill Valley resident may be best remembered for scoring more than a dozen songs for the "Peanuts" TV Specials and pulling off the ultimate slight of hand where he made parents and children bob their heads and tap their toes without even knowing they were listening to Jazz.

For the entire John Beck article click on:  Vince Guaraldi The Most Unknown Jazz Musician

Click here for Paul Libertore's Vince Guaraldi article: George Winston Pays Tribute to Marin Jazz Pianist Vince Guaraldi

Turn Up Your Speakers

This post first appeared on: Jason Lewis Interview with Sam Andrew on Marin Nostalgia

Sam Andrew is a musician, playwright, and painter from west Marin and knew the Trident (Horizons today) well. He was Janis Joplin's guitar player in Big Brother and the Holding Company and her Full Tilt Boogie Band.  The Trident was one of their favorite hangouts.

Notes by Sam Andrew about the Trident restaurant when writing a play about the "Counter Culture" movement:

     " A guy came into the Trident with a roll of Necco Wafers.  You remember the candy?  And, each wafer had a drop of Blue Acid on it. He went around the Trident one morning giving one to each person, waitresses, busboys, the manager, who was then Skip Cutty, and all the kitchen staff.  The place was dosed big time and as the lunch hour peaked so did the staff!  One waitress was pouring coffee until the customer started shouting at her as the coffee was overflowing from the cup to the saucer and on to the table as the waitress stared at the wonder of it all!
     Also at the Trident, "windowpane" was being passed around the kitchen.  The two cold side cooks, the guys that made the salad and sandwiches as opposed to the guys on the hot side that made steaks and hot dishes, decided to share a hit.  So they put it on the cutting board in front of the refrigerated containers that held ample portions of ambrosia, green and mixed salads, to cut it in half.  As the chef's knife cut through the gelatin of window pane the two halves popped out of sight.   They froze looking at each other for a second and then started laughing.   Later that afternoon, a woman customer was so enthusiastic about the deliciousness of her salad that the maitre d' thought maybe she was a bit tipsy."



More Remembrances of the Trident by Sam Andrew 2010

Image provided by Brad "Flash" FlahARTy
Check out Brad's Blog: Bradisms on the right hand column "Love Links" under Brad Flash Flaharty

The following take on the Trident Waitresses is Published here with permission from Baron Wolman from the pages of "Rags"

 

          I think there may be some confusion with regard to these robberies. There were at least two that I know of. Bobby’s account of  the first Trident robbery is accurate as far as it goes and I was there, but that’s not the robbery I had to testify in. That occurred three or four years later. Here’s what happened:
  

          Shortly after re-opening the Trident in May of 1969 when most of the kinks had been worked out, Frank and Lou realized that they were spread kind of thin…they needed some floor managers and they tried quite a few people at this position. Skip Cuddy was a friend of Billy Rice, who was at the time the number two bartender, Michael Ishmali was the bar manager – a volatile little Persian dude who had worked at the old Trident. Anyway, Frank hires Skip and Grover to be night and weekend floor managers.  Neither of them turned out to be very good at the job but for different reasons. Skip did a lot of blow and was rather spaced-out while Grover could sometimes be too abrasive with the staff. One could sometimes find them locked in the office banging waitresses, hostesses, and customers - anything that moved, really. Then they got the idea of promoting the harder-working busboys. There was Austin Broadwater from Virginia, John, who worked in the kitchen was from New York – he had about the shortest career – only about a month. Then there was Blythe Nelson, busboy and John Abrahms, also a busboy. Richard, Lisa, Dagney, Marshall, Dennis, and Bobby Weckle all came much later.
 

          John was, by far, the strangest choice. He was a fairly stout lad but had a mellow disposition and was a superb ass-kisser, which might explain how he came to be hired. John lived at Bobby’s house – a delightfully cheap little place down in Sausalito’s banana belt on Johnson St. across the street from the police station and as roommates they threw some terrific after-hours parties. Now you have to understand, Bobby and John were a couple of heavily armed dudes. Both were into collecting all sorts of knives, crossbows and other exotic weapons as well as always having the finest in consumable drugs…not to put too fine a point on it.
 

           My belief is that John became a little too dependant on coke and decided he could get away with taking money out of the cash receipts and nobody would notice. I believe he had been taking small amounts over a period of months because I’d hear Lou grumbling about missing money from time to time. Such unbelievable amounts of money were generated in that place it was a tempting target.

          Anyway, one weekend night, after everyone had mostly gone home and we (the cleanup crew and myself ) were sitting down to eat and John comes out of the office with a brown paper sack in his hand and we greeted him like always with entreaties to join the table, have a smoke – whatever, which he declined, to our surprise. He was acting strangely, agitated – nervous about something. In retrospect, he really didn’t have the guile necessary to pull this off. He was always up for little doobie and when he passed it up, it stuck in my mind and I remember remarking to Chris Leitz, one of my troops, that something was up with John.

  

          Anyway, next morning comes and Lou comes in to find that there is not even enough money in the safe to make up the banks. Lou gets some guy to come in and he’s going to start giving lie-detector tests to the short list of people who had keys to the office. So I hung around to see what would happen and sure enough, John was one of the first people they tested. Turns out John spent nearly all the stolen money on blow and rather than prosecute him Frank asked for the blow…don’t know how he explained it to Tong and Fong, the accountants the Trident used back then, but anyway it went down pretty much like Bobby said with Frank bad-mouthing the quality of the blow (he was a notorious drug snob) and somehow I didn’t get to try that particular batch. Ah well…

 

          After that, they got a new safe, installed a key-activated alarm system, put in new locks and generally set up some safeguards to protect the establishment. There were already a couple of panic-buttons installed behind the main bar and espresso bar so they just tied the new alarm system into a police notification circuit and they were all set. The new system had an infrared detector set up in the office so that any movement there would set it off…a silent alarm to the Sausalito Police Dept. 

Patrick Pendleton: Gizmo754@aol.com

          This worked just fine for a couple of years. But then one Sunday night in about 1974 or 1975, at about 2:30 in the morning, I’m mopping the kitchen floor and I felt something and turned around to see the largest gun I’d ever seen pointed right at my face. The guy holding it was a little shorter than I and dressed in a wetsuit that was not wet with a neoprene hood that covered everything but his eyes and his nose.   He asked me who was here and I told him about Tom, the window washer in the dining room and we were the only two there that night and they grabbed a dish-apron off a counter and threw it over my head and then Tom and I were led to the men’s room and told to sit on the floor and stay there, a request with which we were only too happy to comply. They asked about how the alarm system worked and we told them. We could hear them hacking through the thin plywood door between the rear office and the employee locker room where the time-clock was. The IR detector only covered the front office, not the rear office where the two safes were; another design flaw corrected in subsequent incarnations.
          We could hear the guys drilling the safe and coming in periodically to check on us. After about an hour and a half, we risked talking and determined between ourselves that these guys had gone and we ought to tell somebody about it. So we got up and quietly checked the premises for stray bad-guys and hit one of the panic-buttons and I went out into the parking lot to wait for the cops to show up. We didn’t have long to wait. The cops came and I called Lou, who called Frank and it was a pretty big deal because these guys weren’t a bunch of strung-out hippies, they were professional thieves who had taken the time and trouble to plan this thing. Of course, we planned too and were careful to clean up any incriminating evidence of our nightly debauchery before the police got there. After being interviewed by the detectives assigned the case, I still had to finish cleaning the kitchen – Pierre was not one those guys I wanted to disappoint and I was just finishing up when he came in at about 6:30 am.  

 

          So I told him our sad tale of woe and he had this slightly amused look on his face as if to say, “Goofy…I’m glad you managed to not get your head blown off”. He always had this kind of stern look but he was a very sweet man. I never did find out how much was taken but on a weekend that place might have had as much as seventy-five to one hundred thousand dollars in the safe on a Sunday night. I’m sure Frank told them it was more because the insurance was picking up the tab for it. Frank was always smart when it came to money.
   

          Naturally, there came to be more and more security and the lock thing really got to be a pain-in-the ass so I asked for and got a set of master keys of my own and they made me a manager too. The whole thing got old quickly after the initial telling and retelling of the story and I felt at the time that my life really didn’t bear the kind of scrutiny it was getting, so the looking at mug shots, and talking with the DA and police detectives was somewhat unsettling to me. Since I couldn’t identify any of the guys from the book of mug shots, I thought that perhaps they wouldn’t call me to testify but they did and I was able to identify the guy I saw in court, which made the state’s case, the DA happy, and me?
 
          Well… I got a clean driving record out of the deal so all in all, not too bad. It turned out that the guys had come all the way over from San Francisco in a zodiac boat and somebody saw them on their way back and that’s how they came to be caught. Cool, huh? The Marin newspaper, Independent Journal, started calling it the Frogman Heist or something like that and we got quite a kick out of that because we knew the guys didn’t swim up to the deck – their feet were dry.

 

          So that’s the story…I don’t know about John Abrahms being a Sonoma County District Attorney. I lived in Sonoma County for eighteen years and never crossed paths with him and if I’m being honest, I have trouble believing the guy could ever pass the California Bar Exam but stranger things have happened. There is a weird kind of karmic symmetry to that idea which appeals to me somehow.... 

The Trident Robberies by Patrick Pendleton Gizmo754@aol.com

 

Nick and Me 

In the spring of 1964, a week or so past my sixteenth birthday, I found myself taking a motorcycle ride on Sir Francis Drake Blvd., heading west through Marin County towns like Greenbrea,Kentfield, Ross, San Anselmo, and Fairfax. I have a significant history of adventures in some of these towns but they are not my destination. I’m headed for a house in the San Geronimo Valley town of Lagunitas, owned by a man named Ken Howard.  Ken Howard was a local writer, activist for liberal causes and father to two lovely girls. I am on my way to meet Sarah Howard, the older of his two daughters, but it his younger daughter, Debbie, who first caught my attention.

Debbie was a dark haired beauty with deep-set, brown eyes and a smooth, tan complexion. Sarah, older by a year or so, had light brown hair with a persistent wave bordering on frizzy, paleskin with some freckles and intense blue-grey eyes. They hardly looked like sisters but as I rode, I did not dwell on this but rather on my mission.

Strapped to the back of my red Honda 150, held in place with bungee cords, was my first guitar, which my parents had given me as a birthday present about a week earlier. The guitar was a Montgomery Ward special (“Monkey Wards” my parents used to call it) worth all of thirty bucks with the strings sitting about a half an inch above the fingerboard.  By any standard it was a real piece of shit,  but it was what I had and I was determined to learn to play it. After the money they had spent getting me an accordion and lessons starting back in the fourth grade, I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised when they didn’t fork over the big bucks for a Gibson or a Martin. Sarah, my best friend Gary Steadman assured me, that they knew the words and chords to Guantanamera, a folk song made popular by Pete Seegar, and my mission was to have her teach me to play the song.

                I also had it on reliable authority that Sarah Howard was known to make out when the stars were aligned, and the wind was just right.

            So with the promise of an auspicious launching of my new musical career, and the prospects of a handful of boob throbbing in my loins, I crested the hill leaving Fairfax and dropped down into the San Geronimo Valley, the sun was getting ready to set over the hills in West Marin, and I soon arrived at their house in Lagunitas. I went inside and said my hellos to everybody, and her family asked me if I wanted to stay for dinner.

            “Yes, I’d love to.” I replied and off to the living room we went.  Debbie said she had to babysit and someone was coming to pick her up. I went out to the driveway  to fetch the guitar from hell, and only then learned that it was woefully and criminally out of tune. The Howards had an old upright piano in their livingroom and Sarah and I worked for a while trying to get that guitar in tune and presently the guy Debbie was supposed to babysit for showed up to take her tohis house. He introduced himself as “Nick” and he looked vaguely familiar. He saw that we were having trouble getting the guitar tuned, and offered to help.       

            “He plays in the "  Kingston Trio  ”, Sarah whispered.

            “Huh?” I stammered. Well no wonder he looked so familiar. I had four of their records at home and played them all the time. My dad had worked in radio and TV all my life, and one of the perks of such a job was that the station where he worked,KJBS in San Francisco gave away hundreds of records that didn’t meet the criteria of the program director’s play list. Thankfully, The Kingston Trio, arguably one of thehottest acts in the country in the late fifties and early sixties, fell into this category, along with about a ton of other records including jazz, blues,and priceless old comedy records. KJBS played a sickeningly sweet format of“middle-of-the-road”, post-war standards. Patty Page, Rosemary Clooney, Perry Como with a lot of lame string arrangements…elevator music for the fifties –that’s the crap Dad’s radio station played, and their “dump bin” became my playground.

 Nick Reynolds at Capitol Records     

So here’sthis well-dressed, and young looking guy with a kind of soup-bowl haircut, who is standing at the very epicenter of the music scene as I understood it back then, and he’s teaching me to tune my first guitar.

   “Start withthe E string…that’s the fat string at the top of your strum. Hold down that string at the fifth fret and turn the tuning peg on the next string down –that’s the A string, until the sound matches – like this…” and then he showed me! I was almost in a state of rapture, forgetting for a short while all about boobs, and the sweet smell of Sarah Howard’s hair. Nick Reynolds drew a little chart for me to use and wrote down the changes to Tom Dooley and MTA on a piece of Sarah’s notebook paper. He was very nice to me, and I’ll never forget that day. I never could have anticipated that five years down the road, I would beworking for Kingston Trio Inc. and I surely didn’t know that nearly fifty yearslater, I would be recounting this story to his widow, Linda Reynolds, one ofthe first friends I made when I started working at the Trident. Years later,when Frank Werber sort of introduced us again, I told him about that day and what it had meant to me.

            “Oh yeah,”he said. “I remember…how’s the guitar coming?”

            “Pretty good”, I said, “But you were right…it does take a lot of practice.”

            He laughed and asked me how Sarah was doing. I told him Ihadn’t seen her in awhile, but I still saw Debbie from time to time. “She’sliving in Mill Valley.”

             Even Frank got a kick out the story when I explained how Nick and I had met.

            Anyway, I eventually taught myself the song and along the way figured out that songbooks and chord diagrams were easier to understand than notes scribbled on scraps of note paper and soggy cocktail napkins and thus began a life-long, love – hate relationship with the guitar. I never really hated my guitars…just the fact that I wasn’t able to play them better. 

            Not long after meeting Nick Reynolds, I got this part-time job working the door at this little night–spot in Sausalito that featured live music called TheLion’s Share. It was owned by a guy named Mike Considine and he was able toconsistently book some of the top acoustic acts around at the time. Rambling Jack Elliot,  Sandy Bull,  Eric Anderson ( whom we jokingly used to call “Blind Eric Flatpick”),  Dave Van Ronk and a host of others played there often. Even Stevie Winwoodsat in one night. Some of the guys that went on to form Jefferson Airplaneplayed there regularly.

           One night,  KJAZ disc jockey Richard Conti, came in with Mose Allison, who even played a set. The place served pub-food; chili, beefstew and hotdogs and in my relatively impoverished state, I was glad to have some place other than my parents house to eat. The club burned down in about 1967, and Mike moved to San Anselmo and reopened it with the same name - but Idon’t think it was ever as successful as the Sausalito incarnation, but a lot of local Marin County bands got their , start there. 

(Nick and Josh Reynolds)          

The point is, music was ever a recurring theme in my life andcontinues to be to this day, but I thought it proper that after all these years, I write this small tribute to the guy who kind of got me started…so, thanks,Nick, wherever you are.

Nick Reynolds of the Kingston Trio

By Patrick Pendleton      email Pat at:  Gizmo754@aol.com  

If you think there's anything suggesting part of the male anatomy here, phallically speaking,
you might be correct. This proof was provided by Kurt "Crowbar" Kangas,
and signed by the artist in the bottom left hand corner. Now, the flip side...

In the summer of 1972 an amazing event took place at the Trident. I was working late Monday night – the start of my work week back then, when I got a call from Lou Ganapoler, general manager of the Trident Restaurant. He asked me how long it would take for me to get the place show time ready. So I asked Lou what he had in mind. He told me that Bill Graham wanted to bring the Rolling Stones to the Trident for an impromptu private party and that he was in the process of getting Frank sprung from the Honor Farm, where he was serving a short sentence on a possession for sale of marijuana charge. I’ve often wondered just how that conversation unfolded. I mean…here’s a guy doing his time on a drug charge and in the middle of the night he wants to get released so he can go preside over a party for a bunch of other guys famous for stirring the passions of rebellious youth and…you guessed it – taking drugs! So I told Lou…sure I can get the place ready in an hour or so – if you don’t look too closely at it…more help would be better and Lou said, “No problem…Milt was on his way down to help me.”

So I went into maintenance overdrive, swamping out the restrooms, replacing the paper, sweeping, vacuuming, dusting and mopping the floor…I had a pretty good sweat worked up when Bobby Lozoff walked in about twenty minutes later to set up the bar. I had called home after I got off the phone with Lou because we needed some seasoned help to pull this off. And, let me share a word or two about one of the seasoned help named Iris…who was a tough, blond, Jewish girl raised in a small Long Island suburb of New York. She had a body to die for, and a mouth that would make a longshoreman blush – and she wasn’t a bit bashful about using either one. Never a respecter of persons, she was perfect for this occasion. I mean…all of us were used to seeing and dealing with the rich and famous – it just wasn’t all that uncommon. We had a burgeoning population of musicians, performance artists of all stripes, and movie stars…all of whom were part of our targeted clientele. 

Also part of the evening's cast was Paul Broadhurst from an upper crust English family who'd come to the US for a better life and was a great choice for the evenings festivities with all the mad-dogs and Englishmen running around...Soon after Bobby arrived and then Milt showed up, and together we whipped the club into some semblance of order. Pierre, Thomas Eng, Big John and Steve Burrus all came in to get the kitchen fired up. Basically, anyone who would answer their phone at 2:30 am was there. Josie from the Dominican Republic, Patsy Petty, Cathy Civale, Sophie Kurtz, Kathleen Delaney, Noreen, Iris, Linda and Sharlee all showed up to help out. Diane and Frank came in along with Richard, Marshall, Lisa Sharp and Dagney.  There are large tie-dyed curtains covering the arched windows on the south side of the restaurant so that people driving down Bridgeway Blvd. could not see what was going on inside.

I have a distinct memory of Patsy and Josie in the ladies room trying to decide if Josie should go sans panties for this affair. The ladies of the Trident generally dressed fairly provocatively simply as a matter of course but I do believe some of them pushed the envelope to its logical extreme that night. I know Iris and Sharlee did. Even Pierre had a tough time trying to keep the smile off his face as nipples struggled through their bonds of diaphanous lace to the light of kitchen florescence.

In due course, Bill Graham arrived with about eight stretch limos and our “guests” were shown inside. The Stones traveled with a huge entourage…let’s face it – by any yardstick imaginable they set the bar for all past, present and future standards of excess.

           The point man for this motley crew of rockers was a foppish little Brit by the name of Peter Rudge. Many of the guests were wearing white newsboy caps, which was, I’m guessing, some kind of inside joke. They brought their own security team, their roadies, a few ladies and assorted hanger-oners. Frank stood prominently near the door to greet his guests, a charming Buddha-daddy guru proudly showing off his baby to a new cast of discerning characters. Once the ice was broken, he and Bill Graham and Lou retired to a quiet corner to swap “promoter stories” that nobody but themselves would ever appreciate. At one point, Frank asked me to turn on the tiny faux fireplace for the sake of “ambience”. Fingers of fog crept over the hills and down towards the Bay in Sausalito, as they did most nights, but it wasn’t cold. As I finished lighting the fireplace, I felt something hit the back of my head, so I turned around and there was Keith Richards, biting into cocktail shrimp and tossing the uneaten tails around the room. He had a mischievous grin on his face, like he was daring me to do something about it and suddenly I felt this presence next to me. I turned and found myself eye to eye with one of the most menacing looking black men I had ever seen.

            “I know what you’re thinking – don’t do it”, he said to me.

            “Who are you?” I asked.

            “My name’s Leroy and I’m the head of security for this tour.” he replied. He was built like a linebacker – a fireplug in a suit complete with the requisite white newsboy cap.    

“You want a drink, Leroy?” I asked.

“Nope – workin” he replied.

“Well…how ‘bout some coffee?” I asked.

            “Sure” he said. So I went and got him a cup of coffee, anxious to defuse what could have been a messy situation. Bad behavior at the Trident was nothing new and I had, on occasion, been part of the posse delegated to remove unruly patrons from the premises. Normally, someone would have called the cops but this situation didn’t call for action that drastic and when I came back with Leroy’s coffee we sat and talked for a couple of hours.

            Meanwhile, the party is in full swing around us. There is a steady stream of folks going to and from the deck outside, which seems to be the designated drug ingestion station. The restrooms are also a popular meeting place and after awhile, it’s pretty clear that both the staff and the guests are getting wasted. Hell – I’m getting wasted!

            Stones bassist, Bill Wyman is sitting nearby, getting tag-teamed in backgammon by Jerry Pompili and Barry Imhoff. Peter Rudge is vainly chasing Josie all over the restaurant and saxophonist Bobby Keys is telling hilarious stories from his life on the road in his gentile southern drawl. I hear little snatches of his stories about how he and Waylon Jennings burned down a hotel room somewhere in Ohio and Bonnie Bramlet punched out Elvis Costello onstage. Charlie Watts is sitting in rapt attention, drinking what looks like scotch.

     The “STP” tour as it came to be known followed the release of Exile On Main Street and was the first US tour without Brian Jones. You may remember the distinctive album cover – a waist-down shot of a pair of leather pants with a working zipper embedded in it. Mick Taylor, late of John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, handled second guitar duties on the tour and was conspicuously absent from the party – not that anybody missed him. Jagger himself seemed rather subdued for all the publicity surrounding his escapades…maybe he was pacing himself as the tour was only about a week into it. Frank was drinking Perrier water, wisely understanding that he was almost assured of having to provide the honor farm with a urine sample upon his return.

            About 5:30 the whole thing started to wind down…the sun was going to come up soon.  it’s been a very good night but I know that there are hours of work ahead of me. Those working the day shift stayed…except for the day waitresses, who managed to get a few hours sleep before returning. Iris told me she made almost $200 that night with her share of the tip pool – not bad for about 4 hours work. The registers were never used that night – Bill Graham paid for everything. (Presumably, he was able to bill his young charges for services rendered) And everyone who was there had a nice story to tell so here’s mine.

Rolling Stones 1972 Tour

By Patrick Pendleton     email Pat at :  Gizmo754@aol.com

             In the three years between Rolling Stones tours, partying for many of the wonderful folks working at the Trident became elevated to a high art.  Everybody was throwing parties all the time – the Record Plant threw a lot of them. They had this big house in Tamalpais Valley where Mick Fleetwood Mac stayed, and it seemed like every Friday and Saturday night, there was some kind of party. Peter Greene, who founded Fleetwood Mac threw a couple of great ones at his home in Mill Valley. Of course, this was before the feds took over the Record Plant from Gary Kellgren, who used to ride around in this purple Rolls Royce Cornishe with license plates reading “GREED.” 

   (The Alton Kelley/Stanley Mouse (Kelley Mouse), Randy Tuten, and Crazy Arab poster for the 1975 show. Alton Kelley just passed away , a dear friend, and with the help of Keith Impink (the Dead's web guy) we've created a tribute site to Kelley and Dave Sheridan. We've also revived Kelley's Artista Gang. For more information go to The Artista Gang and check out the links there! Arab did the pin stripping for this poster in about 45 minutes, amazing! Mark Lomas) Now back to the story...

Compared to the Stones party in 1972, the affair in 1975 was almost sedate. This time around we had a little more lead-time on who would be there so there wasn’t as much scrambling to staff the event, and prepare the food etc. There was even time to arrange a little entertainment – Laura Cholos and her daughter, Anastasia performed a very provocative belly-dance for those who attended.

            Instead of the tour staff, roadies, and other support personnel, those in attendance were strictly members of the band and whatever ladies they chose to bring, BGP inner circle, Trident family and friends, and BGP security staff. I didn’t stay long at this party because I wanted to go home and get some sleep before I went to the much bigger and wilder bash planned for Mick Jagger’s birthday at the Orphanage, a rather run-down old theater near the Boarding House in San Francisco. The Harder They Come, a movie filmed in Jamaica starring Jimmy Cliff had recently been released and reggae music was then taking the country by storm. Chris had arranged to have Toots and the Maytelles to play that night and the rumor was that the Stones would be there as would about half the SF music scene. That was the rumor.

I was driving this big old orange utility-body truck at the time – filled with tools and I didn’t want to park it on the mean streets of SF at night so I arranged to ride over to the City with Don Lewis and Cathy Civale. We got there about mid-night and the place was jumpin’. We went in this closet-sized office and Chris is in there with this bowl of cocaine. There’s also about ten other people in there. Iris, my longtime roommate and one-time lover, is sitting on this old couch not partaking in anything because she is about four months pregnant with her first child. So I wandered out to get some drinks and check out who was also there. Toots and the Maytelles were pumping out some great reggae music and everyone is buzzed to a fair-thee-well. You know you’ve had a rough night when you wake up the next day with condor feet on your third eye. Anyways, about 1:30 am the Stones arrive and the energy level in the place just takes off. There are close to 500 people in that old theater and I don’t know what its rated capacity was but I’m pretty sure we exceeded it. Robin Williams was there with Linda Ondeyko, a gorgeous brunette who also worked at the Trident. Robin was just starting to hit the comedy clubs and always a riot to be around. He was always…on!

I wish I could say I remember what happened after that but the sad truth is…I don’t. I’ve probably made a few mistakes in the chronology of events but to the best of my knowledge, it’s all true. Sleep and I were strangers.

By Patrick Pendleton   February 17, 2010   Seabrook, NH

Email Pat at: Gizmo754@aol.com 

February 15,2010 by Bobby Lozoff

There was definitely a party which I was at on a Monday night in 1972. There was another Stones Trident affair in 1975 but no private party.  BGP just gave the crew a block of tickets for this 75 concert tour. This latter tour was the one with the fancy-assed stage which housed a huge inflatable phallus.

BTW:  If you are documenting Trident and Rolling Stone interaction don't neglect Altamonte.  Milton Hunt had something to do with security for that ill fated affair.

I remember the very private 72 party because I was the only bar tender and previously Billy Rice and myself had invented the Tequila Sunrise (another documented long story) so when Mick walked to the bar and asked me for a margarita I asked if he would like to try a sunrise.  He liked it  to the extent that he and the rest of the crew took the recipe across the country on the 72 tour.  By this time we had simplified the recipe to tequila orange juice and grenadine.  

Bill Graham hosted this party,it was not a Trident party and we didn't know about it till several hours before the event.  It was for the Stones personnel and BGP heavy weights.  We were always closed on Mondays and late Monday afternoon Frank showed up at my Sausalito house, and asked if I would go in to set up the bar for a private party that night.  The party was not open to all Trident employees only those of us who were working to take care of the guests. Our gift and payoff  were tickets to the show for all employees the following day.  BGP security was used to block all access to the Trident especially media. Heaviest security I ever saw at the big T.  This was a very sedate dinner party considering it was for the Stones.  No jamming and carrying on.  Just a nice place to host the Stones quietly.

October 7, 2006 (First Posted on this site) By Brad "Flash" Flaherty
My memory of the "Stones" party was that it was the first tour with Ron Woods on guitar, and Mick was still married to Bianca.  There was a rift with Bill Graham so the band all wore the same white caps and kept changing jackets with each other so they could divert attention from Mick (the birthday boy).  They were so pleased at the success of their stunt when the cake was placed by (Bill Graham) in front of Bianca, totally dumbfounding him.  Bill Graham wore a purple velvet robe trimmed with ermine, Ron Wood had on a chamios suit, the waitresses had on their most revealing string vests and "hotpants."

Thanks for fanning the embers (with a magnifying glass) on the focal point of an era.  The camp atmosphere was the networking style of a youthful creativity for many seekers.  May many find inspiration in your information.
Brad "Flash" Flaherty
 
The Stones earlier that evening at the Cow Palace
Mick an Ron                    Photo: Flash


*Bill Graham generously gave all the Trident employees a pair of tickets to the Stones Concert at the Cow Palace in San Francisco.   The first night Mick said, "Hey Oakland, how're you doing?" and was booed.  The next night he corrected himself. . . no problem.
Photo: Flash

I realize there are many interpretations for or of "getting your freak on", but until I saw this photo did I really ever understand...if anyone has a clue what's going on here, please fill in the blanks....

     It was the archetypal fern bar, the creme de la hip Sausalito saloon that floated on sex, drugs, and Rock and Roll.  The Trident  was open from 1961 to 1980.
     Launched as a Jazz Club by the Kingston Trio, it was refurbished in 1968 by the group's manager Frank Werber, who sought to catch the spontaneous, give peace a chance spirit of the day.  It became a mecca for rock stars,celebrities and hipsters, young and old.
     "It was like riding a hurrican," says Werber, now 61 and living in Maui. "The Trident was definitely a manifestation of it's time and a forerunner and trendsetter for multitudes of restaurants, and it's effects are still being felt in the cool 90s.  Staffers were like family members who regarded the place as a chapel, it was a spiritual experience."
     The Trident hosted impromptu concerts by Mick Jagger, Janis Joplin, threw legendary parties and provided the setting for a scene from Woody Allen's "Play It Again Sam""    
It's story attractions included platoons of attractive waitresses hired as much for their good looks as their ability to charm customers.  Robin Williams, then a struggling comedian, worked there for a time as a busboy, getting the job "because of his antics," Werber said.
     Employees were hired after Trident executives reviewed Polaroid pictures of them.  A prospect's persona was also critical.              
     Among the Trident's hallmarks were handcrafted wood, stained glass, art and music.
     Organic food laced an eclectic menu.  The menu - a psychedelic work of art that now sells for $100 a print - exclaimed: "Welcome to our space. Positive energy projection is the trip."
     Located at 558 Bridgeway beneath the old Ondine's and now the home of Horizons, the Trident was favored by Woody Allen, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Clint Eastwood, Tommy Smothers, Groucho Marx, David Crosby,StevenStills, Pink Floyd, Allan Watts, and scores of other noted customers.

Article by Nels Johnson IJ Associate Editor

The ever popular Trident Matches....this way you don't have to turn your monitor upside down...unless of course you want to.
And, who was the Artist?  These matches served many creative purposes, including ...oh well, ..nuff said. 

May 2010 be your best year ever!

          Hi everyone, Patrick Pendleton here…the nearly normal night-shift manager.  (Maintenance!) I started working for the Kingston Trio Inc. in May of 1969, a few weeks after my 21^st birthday. My god…has it really been more than forty years?

          I’ve tried several times over the years to describe; no, to recount, explain and capture what it was like to work or even “be on the scene”  at the Trident. Even now, I think there’s a book in this at least. As I age, I’ve noticed that nostalgia isn’t what it used to be and I wonder if I haven’t over-romanticized the whole era. Yet when I stumbled onto this website while fooling around in Google, I realized that so many of us who worked there were on our way to becoming something or someone and that it had a huge impact on us. So nice to connect with you all again! 

        Night times, the right  time! For seven years more I think, I thought I had the best job in the world. After the big 1000 watt custom-made, improvised work lights – cobbled together from old studio microphone stands came on, after the last alcoholics-in-training had been sent home (You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here), the waitresses, busboys, bartenders have all gone home (mostly) and the night managers have doled out all the blow and boo they’re going to…that’s when the real fun began. It was like a club within a club. Membership was small – there was Milt Hunt, owner and operator of an enterprise known as Great Northern Maintenance Co. Milty didn’t like to come in at night – he had me for that…but he was a great friend ,and man could he make you laugh!  

         He was also a very useful buffer between the maintenance crew and the Trident brain trust. C’mon, you can say it…Frank could be uh, Difficult? Challenging?  Then there were the boys, my troops. Chris Lowe, who we used to call “Chicago” for reasons which escape me now, he was really from Kansas was there for a few years. Then there was Chris Leitz, and Henry Socorso, collectively known by their nom de guerre, Cosmic Popcorn. They were a couple of New York kids who came to California to start a rock band and the last time I heard from them, they were living in LA. When I first started, Clem Borraseau, who started doing the plants when Brian and Frank had a falling out, was the gardener and Thomas Charles Ribar AKA “Squeege Sam” was the window washer. That cat grew the best herb I’ve ever smoked. He’d been a Navy Aircraft Mechanic in the service and he was wound rather tightly. Later on, his duties were expanded to include caring for the over four hundred plants that were rotated in and out of the Trident. We would all gather at the big table just beyond the kitchen and everyone would have something to smoke, and often there were more exotic substances. The point was…this was a place and a time where we weren’t supposed to be caught not high! What a concept! We had the radio blasting, KMPX or KSAN playing all that incredible music that we now call “oldies”. George Horn, who was a recording engineer with Columbia Records, put together what was for the time, a very exceptional sound system.         
         Of course, from time to time, there would be visitors…I remember one night in particular when Steve Elvin had his scaffolding set up to finish his ceiling mural. The work on sweeping and mopping couldn’t begin until he’d finished so to pass the time, I got up on the scaffold and helped him paint. A local Chronicle reporter asked him if he ever felt like Micheangelo painting the Sistene Chapel, and he replied, “Listen, I paint exactly the way Micheangelo would if he had taken peyote and lived with the Indians.” 

        Anyway, on that particular night, Grover Boaz, who had done a significant amount of the carpentry and who was at the time one of the night-managers, came in with Don Lewis, Roger Lewis, Ramblin’ Jack Eliot, and John Stevens, noted songwriter and drunk. (No meetings for him) They’re all three sheets to the wind and fixin’ to hoist another sail. Needless to say, the booze and blow flowed. And the music…wow. Every time I hear “912 Toulouse St.”, it brings me to tears simply based on the emotional charge that experience bestowed on me. Somehow, no matter how much dope was consumed, or how late the parties lasted, or how late the ladies stayed, “Club Swell” was always left shiny and clean the next day. We were rewarded with what are arguably the most amazing sunrises I’ve ever seen. Later on, as I recall, Lisa Sharp’s brother, Mel joined the crew. Someone told me he is still there…is that true? About the time Frank was doing his six month stint in stir, I lost my license for a couple of months and also had to do my bit at the Honor Farm.  Mel Sharp and Betty Laverene would pick me up and drive me to work. What a beauty! There were a lot of girls actually… I may have fallen in love with twenty or more during the seven + years I worked there. As I die and my strange but rich life passes before me, I’ll remember fondly some of those ladies. Small wonder…during that whole period of my life and many years afterward, I was, for all practical purposes, a caboose for my penis. It seems funny to me now when viewed against the grey schmere that is contemporary California political correctness. The place I grew up in and loved just isn’t there anymore. “.We have met the enemy and he is us.” And I still say there is a book here.           

            I remember well the night of the robbery. These guys came in about 2:30 am wearing wetsuits. The papers started calling it the “Frogman Robbery”. They threw dish aprons over our heads (there was only Squeege Sam and I there that night) and made us sit on the floor in the men’s room and told us to stay there until morning but we only waited about forty minutes before calling the police at about 4:30am. We subsequently had to look at mugshots and testify at the robbers’ trial. It was supposed to be a scary deal because one of the defendants was allegedly affiliated with crime boss Sam Giancana but it ended up working out okay and I was able to get the DA, Ernest Zunino, to quash a bunch of old traffic warrants for me. That isn’t the only time there was an attempted robbery either. One time, Robin Williams, myself and this beautiful blond hostess, Bonnie were smoking a joint across the street in what was the maintenance shop and my dog, Einstein, started barking like crazy and this raggedy guy with a gun wanted the combination to a safe he believed was upstairs in Frank’s playhouse. We all kinda talked him out of it though. Who knew the job could be so dangerous?  

            There sure were a lot of good memories in that place. I gradually started working more and more as a carpenter and cabinet maker. I think we worked on this big tour bus for Neil Young for about two years…that was a lot of fun. I now live in a little seaside beach community in New Hampshire and I have never been able to adequately describe the crazy place in which we all once worked. I bet Dagney  could do it!        Cio for now. And , Merry Christmas
Email Patrick at: Gizmo754@aol.com

Sharlee

Did you know about Manager John my roommate at the time, who got coked out and stole the contents of the safe?. However he left enough money in banks to open the restaurant the following morning!   Next, the opening manager Skipper Cutty cleaned out the bank money before calling Lou, Frank, and the police ... so, when we all had to take lie detectors in a suite they booked at  the Alta Mira ... Skipper was going to fail, so John confessed.   Frank didn't turn him in, but confiscated the stash John bought, and Frank shared it with staff commenting on each line what poor taste John had.  I didn't think it was that bad.

The punch line?  Rip-Off John ended up, and still may be the DA in Sonoma County?  All because Frank didn't charge him.

By the way, for the Trident talent show Sharlee did a strip tease as the finale.  Her main talent.

I was also held up at gun point twice in my Trident history, and I was working the time the nude streaker guy ran down the bar surface, across the floor, and dove into the Bay. 

When I met Mick Jagger at a private party he asked for a margarita and I turned him onto a Tequila Sunrise which Billy Rice and myself invented in 1970,  when the Trident served more tequila then all the other bars in the US combined.  There is documentation on this somewhere.  Anyways, Mick took the drink across country in 1972 and promoted it.

And of course I was tending bar for the Hell's Angel's Sunday afternoon take over and subsequent fight with the offensive line of the San Francisco Forty Niners.  The next day it made the headlines of the San Francisco Chronicle. And,the San Francisco Forty Niners won! The Hells Angels used glass coffee pots from the bus stations as frisbee type weapons and damaged some players.  Which became the reason thereafter we only used metal coffee pots.  I never used a pyrex pot again in my career. Dangerous weapons!

More excerpts from emails:

Frank's original lawyer was Michael Metzger, Metzger was brought in by the Feds from NY to prosecute Frank.  He lost.   Metzger quit the prosecutors office and then got divorced, and then joined Frank's law team, and took up with the Trident waitresses. The Feds then busted him and Frank, at the DeSilva Island house and it made a big stink in the newspapers.

Shirly, aka Thunder Pussy, Styles, and Debris was among the most exotic girls to work at Trident.  Hard core sixties Gate Fiver.   One week Lou ordered her to do cocktails on deck against her wishes, and she went out and changed into a riské Pre WWII sleazy cocktail outfit.  A tiny red crinoline sticking out perpendicular from the crotch and not much more, but very artsy.

She also starred in the non commercial porno "Marriage of Captain Garbage andThunder Pussy"  filmed in the mud  location at Gate Five around 1969.  In that era non commercial meant for fun of it.  She also sang with "the Tubes" for years.

BTW:  After the Jazz Club days up to the beginnings of the Trident Frank's nick name in the press was "High Priest."   Tommy Smothers was also in attendence for the trial with other celebrities like the Reverend Cecil Williams!

Email Bobby in Maui at: bobby@lahaina-maui.net

 

       
Trident Interior                                          Bobby in Maui                           Bob's Blue Max in Maui

Join the conversation on Facebook: Search: the Trident

        

        I don’t know if this is true with all vocations but I know from personal experience that there comes a time in every struggling musicians career when you just have to say “this is the shits…I’m tired of constantly being broke” and go find a “day gig”. Well….armed with a lofty resume and a great opening interview line..”Hi! I’m a  20 year old  struggling musician, high school drop out w/ a grand total 3 yrs. dishwashing experience”……fortunately for me the girlfriend of one of my bands mates had taken note of my situation and said “hey, why don’t you go apply at the Trident in Sausalito where I work. They take applications on Mondays and they’re lookin’ for dishwashers”. So I went the very next Monday and applied & was hired on the spot. Little did I know just how drastically this “career choice” would affect my life’s path…even to this very moment. I learned an incredibly diverse array of skills in a relatively short span of time (and no, it wasn’t the fine art of de-glazing a brandy snifter after some asshole had demanded a “Spanish Coffee” or the art of not actually getting in “The Big Soup Pot” after they cooked up that God awful cold fish soup (I don’t know how to spell it but I’m sure y’all know what I’m referring to) but still getting it spotless and w/o smellin’ like a huge dead tuna. Most of the kitchen staff were pretty cool about showin’ ya the ropes. Especially the sauté (or “hot side”) guys. I think mostly because they wanted their stuff prep’d just so. I got real proficient with an assortment of cutlery. I began to diversify my budding mechanical career fixing “Old Hobart” at least once a week (until that time it had been strictly automotive born of the 16 year old need to drive….Father to son ..”if you can make that POS run I’ll buy it for you….all of $175  for a ’48 Ford F1 flatbed w/ a Chevy 283 V8 in it….what a mutt!) and if you wanted extra work, you could come in on Mondays and work w/ ace handyman Chuck Fallo on all kinds of stuff. (Ron Good/Busperson)           All that was and still is useful, but the knowledge gained and experiences I value the most are from the interactions with the people that I worked for & along side during my 8 year career at Trident. Christ! What a character study! Like a Goddamn Fellini flick! From Pierre the chef to Iraj (aka Roger), Terry Lawson, Bobby Lozoff at the bar, Lou Gannapoler & Dagne to Big John, Mike Toomey & the late Jim Sassani to Richard L, Marshall Bloomstock , Dennis Wright & Lisa Sharp……..and the supporting cast in the kitchen and on the floor the names of whom will undoubtedly arise somewhere in the following text. And then of course, there were……the women. Ah yes…the famed “Trident Waitresses”. This, I have to admit, was definitely a new development & addition (and a welcome one boy howdy!) to my food services employee experience. DAMN!

These weren’t just “good lookin’”…no, more like….exquisite……stunning… ….ravishing………….WOW!  Needless to say this could be heaven or some sort of cruel torture for a 20 yr old walking hormone. I probably could have made a fortune selling my “dry side” shifts as well! For those of you who didn’t get to experience the dishwashing environment, “dry side” was the dishwashers station parallel with and had a direct view of, the waitress station side of the kitchen. I’ve often wondered if the amount of dry side breakage increased substantially during the warm summer months.  

        All adolescent hi jinx aside I have to say that their physical attributes not with standing, most of these ladies were and still are some of the sweetest, caring human beings I have ever known. 

Post by Evan Palmerston and Images by Jiro/Melvin

Evan's email: psyckn@sbcglobal.net

Jiro's  email: bookofshadows4@yahoo.com

          As it seems to be a natural evolution of sorts, as one gets more proficient and confident with the task at hand, suddenly (well…maybe not too suddenly) you get the itch to advance, try different and more challenging tasks & skills…..hang out in the dinning room where the real action is. By this time I had become the lead “dish maintenance tech” aka King dish dog on whatever shift I pulled. This had definite advantages over being the “new boy”. The most useful was being able to delegate any number of the “not so desirable tasks” to the newer (but not yet wiser) dish cadets. The more significant fact at this juncture was that  Pierre & most of the cooks had decided they wanted to groom you for either prep, cold side, and possibly even “hot side”….but that was a stretch ‘cuz the guys they had back there were institutions, they were like fighter jocks with sauté pans instead of machine guns, micro wave ovens instead of airplanes (and in top dog Pierre’s case the Enola Gay aka big soup pot) with all the “attitude” and “swagger” one would expect from someone in the ah…restaurant business. So one day I was told that they thought I was doin’ an outstanding job and would I like to “train” to do cold side……but I had already been beckoned by the lure of “the floor” with it’s promise of actual interaction with the “Trident Waitresses” (as in actual verbal communication instead of the looks of pity you get as a “dish dog”) interaction with consumers, better tips, etc., etc., So yes, I went the way of the college drop out turned pro athlete (a figurative analogy here folks) and turned them down to be a “busboy”. I must declare here & now that my experience working in an industrial kitchen, especially this one, is directly responsible for solidifying my work ethic (originally instilled in my psyche by my mom). These people worked their asses off! And expected no less from anyone else at the establishment and it rubbed off on me permanently for which I am eternally grateful.          But none the less I accepted the offer to get “on the floor” and put that work ethic to use as a Trident busboy! Whoa! I was actually there…….and this job turned out to be just as jammin’ as doin’ wet side or anything else for that matter. But it was different. You were treated different, not better or worse, just different. If the hot side guys were fighter pilots, the busboys & dish dawgs were ground support. The waitresses were Vegas showgirls & the bartenders gunslingers! It was a stage, a show case that people came in droves to witness while dining, drinking or just “hangin’ out” (which there was a lot of) and just when you thought you could catch your breath and take in some of this spectacle, the unmistakable sound of “carry out” would find you at the very deepest recesses of the dining room. I could even detect the faintest hint of a  “carry out” at the farthest ends of “the deck”. These requests would invariably come when your hands were full and your momentum was carrying you in the exact opposite direction but hey you just dropped what you were doing and did the carry out….that was the gig. When there were 4 and I think once in a great while (I may be wrong here about numbers) 5 busboy’s on the floor  and they were all hustler’s, the room ran like a well oiled machine. You worked your tail off but it was rewarding when you knew you had kicked ass and “run the room”. I think that is one of the main factors the made working at the Trident so unique. Instead of just going through the motions and waiting for that pay check at some funky greasy spoon, you actually strived to make it easier on the waitresses & bar crew (this is my opinion of course). Of course I’d be full of BS if I claimed that I looked forward to going to work at the “Dent” everyday I was scheduled but I never felt that it was boring or useless. And I think the diversity of the staff was what kept things interesting. All walks of life, with lots of different takes on the whole scene. And low and behold if you were an artist….of any type you were openly accepted and even encouraged to pursue your art. I never felt I had to conceal the fact that I was carving out a life as a musician and that the “Dent” was just a stepping stone for a lot of us. So if you “got hot” as the saying went and did your job everything was cool. Though every now and then there would be someone who would test the strength of that institution but that was fairly rare.  

Post by Evan Palmerston: email: psyckn@sbcglobal.net

Photos by Jiro Yoneshige: email: bookofshadows4@yahoo.com

 You Want Me to What?!!!

      Bussing was not without it’s hazards though. There were a lot of “events” that occurred on my watch but there are but 4 that really stand out in my mind. One: Picture a summer Sunday brunch with beautiful weather……place is packed, we’re slammin’ and all of a sudden a manager beckons me over to the phone booth (popular rendezvous spot for secret conversations…among other things) and in a slightly shaken whisper announces “I need you to go look for a bomb”…….Well, you can imagine the multitude of questions running through my head not the least of which was “you want me to what?!?” which I asked in no such whisper. But when asked again I had grasped the situation and like a trained robot went off and looked for what I thought a bomb might look like (visualize Wiley Coyote here).  As I was walking around all the places I thought someone could possibly put such a device the police had been summoned and the restaurant cleared and no bomb found by either yours truly or the police. This happened one more time in the same year I think which made it obvious that it was some disgruntled former employee calling in these threats to wreak havoc during the rush. Not funny! (Photo late seventies)
   Two: One year, I forget what triggered the idea, it was decided that someone had too “streak” through the restaurant at the height of the rush. I think it was the opening day of yacht season and possibly to compliment our annual topless woman in an Indian headdress buzzing the deck on a very expensive looking yacht. Anyway I’m not sure how it came about but Eric Shuggar was to be the “streaker”. The plan was for him to bolt from behind the cashiers box  run to about mid room, execute some complimentary pirouettes & and exit to the bench at mid deck where myself and I think two other streaking assistants were waiting to toss old Eric off the deck into the bay. This was all fine and very trendy until I realized that I hadn’t really thought about how we were gonna grab a naked dude with enough grip in a place where we wouldn’t hurt either him or his pride, to “toss him up and over the bench … clearing the deck railing and the flag poles that stuck out every few feet or so. As he came racing out and towards us I just kept saying to myself…”self, if ever there was a time for you to be extremely accurate this is it”……..and so into the drink, went Eric… maybe not as gracefully as he could have but to our relief all hand prints were accounted for on his back and lower legs and his voice retained the lower register…….whew!      Three:  There were just everyday type hazards associated with this type of work as well. Cuts, burns, etc,. and even if you’re as careful as can be there will be something that gets ya sooner or later. One of the most feared hazards were the ever present “black holes”. These were small pools of water on the floor from spills or plants draining, any number of causes. Because the floor was wood and coated with an incredibly hard thick plastic finish you couldn’t always detect them. One fine summer day I happened to find one of these little buggers as I was coming out of the kitchen doing the “One handed goblet tray balancing while running act” passing just in front of a packed dinning table. Of course it it was the height of the rush….and I did not see the large, multi pronged “black hole” directly in my path. The table referenced here is one of two very large tables capable of seating at least 10… anyway, down I went. It was so fast that I didn’t remember the trip down, just that one moment I was cruisin’ the next I was on the floor with my right arm buried in a pile of broken glass. The goblets I was carrying were big heavy glass mugs on stems. I think you could only get 12 on a tray but they were heavy so when you were carrying them to any specific place, you wanted to pick ‘em up transport and deliver in as few moves as possible…..which I did…just minus the third or delivery phase. The sound was as though a bomb had gone off. It literally froze the room. You could hear a pin drop and I’ll never forget the look on the faces of my direct audience seated ring side. Picture this: the audience reaction to the number at the end of the first act in Mel Brooks “The Producers” called “Spring Time for Hitler” same look, but some were terrified because apparently it looked by the way I was holding my arm when I got up, as though it were broken and I was bleeding pretty good from all the chards of glass stuck in my forearm.   
     
Gary/ Espresso Bar 

Jan McDonald                                           Sue C.

Post by Evan Palmerston: email: psyckn@sbcglobal.net

Photos by Jiro Yoneshige: email: bookofshadows4@yahoo.com
 
 

I’ll never forget my final shift as a Trident busboy. I had already advanced to the “espresso bar” & been there for almost a year (I think) and was still doin’ some bus shifts when the “Dent” had to close for repairs to the deck or more importantly the pilings that held the whole place up. This was December of 1975 I think and there was a closing party that they need people work. Well nobody wanted to work that shift of course because there was just too much partyin’ to be had. I don’t remember if I volunteered or they asked me to bus but I wound up working that night which in and of itself was odd because I usually only worked days due to my musical commitments. Now that I think of it I believe it was the bar crew that asked specifically for me to bus. I had always hustled extra hard for the bar guys because the better you took care of them the faster they got the drink orders out and the happier the waitresses were. I would appreciate that myself I would come to learn a few years down the line. Anyway, long story short, it was mayhem. The place was absolutely packed. Busier and more crowded than I certainly had ever witnessed. We were just slammin’ all night long..no let up (until it was over)  The kitchen & bar staff were trying to empty the place of inventory and it was pretty evident they were going to be successful. The trick was getting to the areas where the stock was when all access across the floor was blocked by increasingly well lubricated party goer’s.  
     

FOR OPTIMAL VIEWING CLICK ON HQ (HIGH QUALITY)
ON YOUTUBE'S LOWER TOOL BAR
Special thanks to Rob Lawson, Terry's brother, for providing the video (SHOT BY TERRY) and the additional footage that's recently surfaced. Rob Lawson works for West Coast Mortgage and can be reached at: 415-328-8866 Email:Robert@WestCoastmtg.com

From LaDonna in Florida

Watch in "HQ" on the lower toolbar for best effects...

Chris and Lorin talk about moving to California and falling into the West Coast music scene.  From their first album record party release at the Trident restaurant in the early 70s to the release of their new album Now and Then. May 28, 2009

May 24, 2009 the San Francisco Chronicle ran this two page article in the Sunday Pink Section about Chris and Lorin:
The Rowan Brothers: Rubber Soldiers

And, check out their web site: Rowan Brothers

May 28, 2009   Chris and Lorin knock out a Beatle's "MashUp" and an original song from their new album: Now and Then

Rowan Brother's Web Site

Special thanks to Horizons Restaurant for their gracious hospitality!

There's a gravitas you feel when you stand in a place where something important happened. 

The Sausalito Historical Society's April 23 fundraising dinner for this year was a sellout, with every table packed with people ready to turn back the clock to recreate the legendary Trident Restaurant of the 1960's and 70's.  The event was almost surreal, since it was held at Horizons Restaurant, the current incarnation of the Trident's building, which still features much of the look of the original 1960's and 1970's decor: beautifully hand-carved woodwork, wall and ceiling murals and gracefuly curved arches and windows.  The feeling was amplified by many guests arriving decked out in their memories of the clothing of 40 years ago, some with stunning accuracy.  I wondered if the people sitting at or near "Janis Joplin's table" knew its significance, but the place was so packed it was impractical to work my way over there to ask.  For the rest of this story go to: The Legendary Trident Rises Again!

The Rowan Brothers Web Site

Rene titled this photo: Hippy Family. And, here's what Rene had to say," After a year on the big island I returned to Marin broke but brown in 1973.  I got a job washing dishes at Scoma's, and within a few weeks Lou and Frank hired me to wash dishes next door at the Trident.  I knew them both in North Beach in San Francisco when I worked for Enrico at the Hungry I during the late 60's.  When Lou's son David quit I filled his slot as a bus boy along with Robin and Eric.  At some point someone gave me a 50 pound bale of Guajira Gold and suddenly I could afford to hang out at the Trident !  (Pictured: Rene, Laureen, Michelle, and Shannon Pittet)

On Thursday April  23rd, 2009 there was a fundraiser for the Sausalito Historical Society at Horizon's Restaurant.  The "Theme" was  the Trident Restaurant from it's early days as a Jazz Club through the late sixties into the seventies as one of the most unique, creative, and wonderful experiences to ever take place along the Sausalito waterfront.  Click on the orange links below for more information and a link to photos of the event that can be ordered through that photographer's web site:
The Legendary Trident Rises Again!

The Rise of the Legendary Trident event Photos

In 1971 and 1972 I lived on a houseboat at Gate 5 on Waldo Point and loved to go to the Trident and share a brown rice and steak dish with my boyfriend. My mouth still waters thinking about how good it was. But it wasn't quite as mouth watering as the musician I was dating who played lead guitar and sang with his band at the Trident. I had just moved out to California from Chicago right after graduating high school. It was an incredible time and very surreal... Marin County was the mecca of creativity and talent and the Trident was one of the main stomping grounds. The whole town of Sausalito buzzed and Gate 5 was totally tripped out. I lived next door to Shel Silverstein and I was a waitress at the Sweetshop just down the road. I often waited on David Crosby and friends for breakfast and lunch. Almost everyday this great looking sandy haired guy would come in and bring me flowers. It turned out he was this incredible musician at the Trident who also played a lot of clubs in San Francisco. I can remember a lot of great things about him, but there are a lot of things I can't remember from that time, and I can't remember his name or the name of his band... One of my favorites songs they sang was Van Morrison's, "Crazy Love." The Trident had incredible musians play there as well as patronize it. I was pretty naive, but every thing was so laid back and over the top...it was just another day in the life to have Jerry Garcia or Grace Slick or, well, you name it, come into to town and come to the Trident. I know that having so much creative energy from that time still influences me as a singer songwriter today. The Trident will live on with great memories for all of us.
www.AnnettesMusic.com

There was a party on a beach near Point Reyes. There were a bunch of Trident people there, though I think it might have been Terry's chef/friend Joaquin who threw the party, (he would collect mussels at low tide, and use them in the Paella he cooked right on the beach). It had been a windy day, and the waves were quite choppy. Terry however, jumped in to someone's kayak, and started paddling around. After a little while, we noticed that Terry was waving to us. It became apparent, as he kept going further and further out, that he was caught in a rip current, and couldn't get back in. Someone (it might have been Richard) hiked back up to find a payphone to call police. The Coast Guard came down, and said it was too dangerous to go out in their zodiac, so they radioed out to a big tanker off shore. It seems it was a Turkish ship, and no one spoke English. They did eventually get the message, and plucked a shivering Terry out of the channel, and dropped him off at Treasure Island after they docked, sometime the next day. What a story he had to tell.  There were certainly angels watching over Terry Lawson that day, as I am sure they are now.


Teren and Terry 1974 North Beach Photo Fair

 I was only a casual background item at the old Trident. I did work there when it was Horizon's, and my mother even worked there (around 1960) when it was called The Yacht Club (I remember her calling it "The Yacht Dock" though). Most of my memories come from dating the infamous bartender Terry Lawson.
Remembering Terry Lawson...
Can you believe that Terry Lawson would have been 60 years old this week?

I started dating Terry in 1974 when I was barely 17 years old. He used to smuggle me in to the dark corner bench seat at the far end of the bar. Sometimes I would have to sit in his old VW with his dog "Say Man" waiting for the weekly meeting to end (that was back when they still let him park on the parking deck). I remember watching Robin and Eric come out the kitchen door, cutting it up and making me laugh. Terry moved with me when I went to college in LA in 1976, then I accompanied him to Maui in 1978. We hung out with Bobby L. at The Blue Max, who even invited us to a private performance there by Stevie Nicks. Terry and I stopped living together shortly after that. But we remained friends until the end. Later on, (I think it was 1980, but those times are hazy at best) I went to work at Horizon's as a "Hostess with the Mostess", but didn't last long.

I used to call Mary Lawson each year on this day to wish her a Happy Birthday after Terry had passed, but now that she is gone too, I thought I would honour his memory by posting my thoughts here.

Happy Birthday Terry!

YOU!

Teren (Umphress) Lawler
Marinite27@aol.com

      My name is Michael Toomey.  I worked at the Trident from 1970 until the last days in 1980.   I found this site by accident.  I don't know where to begin, except up to this date it was the best job I ever had.
      In one of the pictures you'll see a North Bay Produce truck and that's where I've been the last 24 years.  I still have one friend that I stay in touch with.  That's Jones Pollard.  He was a busboy at that time.  Above my bed I still have the Trident menu framed.  
      I started off on the broiler and was making $5 an hour.  It was a decent wage for the times.  I worked with Jim Susana and Big John.   I remember the Trident closing briefly in 1976 by Ron, the owner, for repairs.  Shortly thereafter Jim Susana died in a motorcycle accident.  We were all across the street in a meeting when Jim's brother walked in and told us the horrible news.  We were all in shock.  It gets worse.  In 1974 Pierre was diagnosed with cancer and that's when I became Chef.
     I think I was 25 years old and had no idea what I was doing.  Add to the fact that I was doing one hundred cross tops a day and all the other stuff that was going around then, I don't know how I managed to get through the day, or should I say days?  I didn't have a clue what food costs were, and all the other responsibilities that went along with running a kitchen.  If it weren't for the kindness and the compassion of Lisa Sharp I don't think I would have made it.  Lisa, I just want to take this opportunity to say, "Thank You!"
    Between the years of 75 and 76 it was apparent that Pierre was losing his battle with cancer. One afternoon he looked at me and said, "Goofy, come into my office." In his office he handed me a folder with all the Trident recipes.  He looked me straight in the eye and said, "the management will try to procure them, whatever you do, keep them to yourself."  He also gave me all his knives and other apparatuses.  He came in less frequently until his death in 1978.
    Pierre lived about two blocks away from the Trident at the time, and after work I would go to his house periodically and talk about what specials I'd served that day.  It's so devastating to see a man deterorate so rapidly.  As predicted  they did come after the recipes, and I never did give them up.  In the last two years the menu started to change along with an era.  I was fortunate to be a part of it, and the memoirs that parallel.
     Yes I worked with Robin Williams.  We closed the restaurant for the Rolling Stones and the mighty Led Zeppelin along with many famous people that passed through..  the women were something to die for.  I was married at the time and swear I never touched one but came pretty close.
     Sundays were always coke night.  My wife at the time was working down the street at a T-shirt place called Stevens.  We'd go back to my place and pull all nighters.  Before you knew it, here comes the sun.  The Trident was closed on Mondays, and was a prep day. Anyway, I'm 55 now but look back on those years as the best days of my life.
Mike Toomey can be emailed at: toomboom@comcast.net

HAPPY HOLIDAYS from The TridentRestaurant.com!
May peace break into your house, and may thieves steal all your debts.
May the pocket of your jeans become a magnet for $100 bills.
May love stick to your face like Vaseline, and may laughter assault your lips.
May your clothes smell of success like smoking tires.
May happiness slap you across  the face,
And, may your tears be those of joy!
May 2009 be the best year of your life !!!   

 

No L?  Holiday Salutation on Bridgeway in Sausalito.....NOEL!

 Hello Stranger!

This is Carla Heine. My dad Edmund Heine was chief architect for Kingston Trio Properties. He designed the Trident Restaurant, and Frank Werber's house on De Silva Island.

My brother and I found an eight car garage full of classic cars from the 60's in the wine country. Amongst them was Frank Werber's car, the bright red convertible Cadillac! If that car could talk!

Carla's email is: sonoma1@hotmail.com



PS: My Trident memories are not of the Rock and Roll Variety, I came with my dad for the Trident's famous Shirley Temples when my dad came in on business, However:

Do you remember the trap door under the Trident?
I remember it. The secret passage into the Trident from Frank Werber's sailboat.

Do you remember the tattoo on Frank's wrist?
I had never seen an Auschwitz tattoo before. I asked him if it was his Social Security Number, and he thought that was pretty funny. Later my dad told me what that kind of tattoo meant.

Do you remember when Tommy Smothers spoke as a character witness for the trial, after the authorities caught onto the trap door and the Sailboat trips to Mexico for quality and quantities of some very righteous weed?
Tommy told the Judge that he had known Frank for years, and that he was a much nicer person since he started smoking marijuana. The courtroom was crammed, and even the Judge laughed.

Did you know that the original Trident wood-worker artists had a working reunion in Sonoma in 1972, when the mortuary that is now Deuce Restaurant on Broadway was converted to a restaurant? All the wood and wrought iron there were done by the same men!

Do you remember Ronnie Shell's audition with Frank for the Kingston Trio? He came in right before John Stewart. After the audition, he said: "Well, I have to go now. I have another guitar lesson in twenty minutes."

The Trident sure was the Eye of the Cyclone!

Do you remember when John and Buffy Ford fell in love, and didn't surface for five weeks? That was a panic!

The first time I saw Nick he was parked in his new sports car on the deck-parking lot of the Trident, and he was picking his nose. The last time I saw him was at his son's little league game. We were lying on the lawn and I asked him why he wanted to move to Oregon. He said he needed the change, and the whole Sausalito scene was getting too built up, and he had had a good run with the Trio, but he wanted to move forward with his own life. He was chewing the white pulp of a green grass stem and looking off into the future.

Were you at the Hungry I, when Frank was working there in North Beach as a dishwasher? He was up to his elbows in suds and dishwater in the back, and he heard these three kids from Stanford singing out front, and he cornered them after the show and outlined his plans for them and signed them on the spot, and quit his job. That's how he told it to me.

Did you go to the KFRC Magic Mountain Festival in the late 1960's? Frank was instrumental in putting that together. He was there so far in advance that he had a big Indian Tee-pee set up just a short distance from the stage. We were burning several jumbo joints, and his girlfriend was a little nervous, because she had seen this black net shirt at Marin Army Surplus Store, and asked Frank to buy it for her, and he said he would, but only if she promised never to wear anything under it. Which was why she was a little nervous in the tee-pee.

That was a great concert. We were in the tee-pee when we heard a helicopter, and Frank said "That's Donovan; he's always late."

Another great tee-pee line was : "Who the Fuck are the Doors?"

And: "Canned Heat and their Canned Shit!"

That's about it from me, for Trident Memories.

Carla in Sonoma

(If you'd like to know more about the Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Festival on Mount Tamalpais - check out my site with the Marin Independent Journal newspaper at:  Marin History   * * *  scroll down a couple of post for photos...and then scroll down further to a copy of the program...this was the first large outdoor Music Festival - before the Monterey Jazz and Pop and before Woodstock - once more, Marin County leading the way...and, the Doors playing before their first large audience.... only in Marin!)

Our thoughts and prayers go out to the family and friends of Nick Reynolds who passed away at the age of 75. Bob Shane, John Stewart, and Nick Reynolds are pictured here in a January 31, 1967 photo of the Kingston Trio. Nick was a founding member of the Kingston Trio that jump started the revival folk music scene of the late 1950s and paved the way for artists such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.

(These are the first offerings of photos provided by Suzanne...more will follow in the next couple of weeks)

I love the warm nostalgic feeling upon viewing the The Trident pictures, and reading all the comments.  I don't know what possessed me to look The Trident up, but I am so glad I found this site.   What a treasure to have worked there.  Susan Holsapple and Carol trained me I believe.  I made many friendships there, and remain in contact with a few.   Bless all of you.  I remember The Trident as working with truly beautiful people, inside and out.  I have worked with Aerosmith for the past 20 years, and many others, and I love it!

http://www.suzyshacklechick.com
Suzyshacklechick@aol.com


Suzanne


Halloween Group Shot


Suzanne, Kathy, and Dale


Trident Waitressess

(Suzanne worked at the origninal Trident, and continued on in the subsequent versions of the Trident after it's initial closing in 1976)

Thanks again to Lisa and Mel Sharp! Here you go, Pierre's Cheesecake Receipe (food stains and all). Scroll down past Pierre's handwriting and Lisa has included a translated version.  Lisa has wow-ed family and friends with this cheesecake who say this is the "Best Cheesecake they've ever had!"  Enjoy!

Graham Cracker Crumbs, butter, 16 oz. Cream Cheese, 1 pt.Sour Cream, Lemon, Vanilla,Honey and 3 Eggs
________
Crust: Preheat oven to 350 degrees, prepare crust according to box or mix, 1/4 cup crumbs with 1/4 cup melted butter. Line 9" pie plate with mixture & bake at 350 degrees for 8-10 minutes. Let cool.
________
Preheat oven to 375 degrees, mix softened cream cheese with 3 beatened eggs, 1 teaspoon lemon juice, 1 teaspoon vanilla: then blend in 3/4 cup honey (electric mixer makes it smoother), pour into crust and bake 25 minutes.  Cool completely to room temperture.
________
Preheat oven to 425 degrees, mix sour cream with approximately 2 1/2 tablespoons honey, 1/2 teaspoon vanilla, 1/2 teaspoon lemon juice, pour over baked part and bake 10 minutes.  Allow to cool, then refrigerate for 6 to 10 hours (the hardest part!) Enjoy!

Photo 2008 by Paul Chinn - San Francisco Chronicle

Found this accidently in "My Documents" not sure who the source is?  Mel Sharp?

     I don't have any photos or stories about famous folk, just boyhood memories about the Trident. My father, Joe Morin, worked there and often my mother, sister and I would visit there.  Memories include the best steak teriyaki ever, a meal i have tried to re-discover in the ensuing 40 years in vain.  Then there was the feel of walking across the timbered dock parking lot and the salty smell of the bay.  My sister and I would go crabbing from the barnacled pier, letting down our traps and later pulling on the rope to reveal some wonderful clawed monsters moving about in their little cages. Back indoors were more tasty smells, a seat at the bar (Shirley Temples for my sis, a Roy Rogers for me), a glimpse of Lee Marvin out on the deck, staff Christmas parties, playful banter with the usual outrageous bunch of restaurant staff and good views of the July 4th SF marina fireworks display (when it wasn't foggy).      Al Morin    ta.morin@virgin.net email

     On January 20th, 2008 John Stewart of the Kingston Trio passed away.  He was 68 years old. John became a well known figure in the 1960's folk music revival as a member of the Kingston Trio.



     John recorded 13 albums as a member of The Kingston Trio, but his biggest success was "Daydream Believer," a   song he wrote but didn't record.  It was a number 1 hit for the Monkees in 1967 and went to number 12 for Anne Murray in 1980. John died a day after suffering a massive stroke or brain aneuysm.
     The Kingston Trio web site announced that, "The world has lost one of its best men, but a man who lived well and made many people happy with his love, his wit, and his music!" (see link below)
     Stewart joined The Kingston Trio in 1961, three years after the band released its verison of an old folk song, "Tom Dooley," that went on to become a hit.  Stewart replaced the band's founder Dave Guard, who had left to pursue a new musical direction.   After the band disbanded in 1967, Stewart went on to an acclaimed solo career that included recording more than 40 albums.  John's wife Buffy and children were at his side when he died. Memorial services, at this time, have not been announced.
     Our thoughts and prayers go out to John's family and friends.  God bless!

Los Angeles Times John Stewart Article January 21, 2008

USA Today John Stewart

The Kingston Trio's Web Site John Stewart Tribute

Trident Deck



Is the 3rd person over in the top row from the left and the 4th person over on the bottom row the same person?


Rodger and Dagney
Lou and Belle

      In the summer of 1960, Louis Ganapoler commuted daily in his dull green 50's Pontiac from his home in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey over the George Washington Bridge to Greenwich Village, New York.  Here the scent of espresso coffee from Little Italy mingled with the scent of marijuana from Harlem.
      Lou managed the seminal Jazz nightclub called the "Village Vanguard" owned by Max Gordon.  At the Vanguard the greatest names played nightly to crowds of beatniks, mobsters, hustlers and intellectuals all gathered to hear and see the cutting edge of entertainment.  If you wanted to see Miles, Coltrane, Dizzy, Cannonball, the Weavers, Peter Paul and Mary, Woody Allen, Mort Sahl or Lenny Bruce, you went to the Vanguard.
      Lenny Bruce had just finished a week as a comedy headliner.  Each night after Lenny was paid, he would go down to Alphabet City to cop a fix.  Each night, after he'd gotten high, street thugs rolled Lenny for what was left of his pay.
      Lou said, "Lenny, why don't you put your bread in your sock before you split?"  When they tried to mug Lenny the next night they didn't get his pay, instead Lenny got smacked in the eye for pissing off the hoods.
      One night Lou and Lenny went to a Gypsy to get Lenny's fortune read.  After a few minutes of what seemed like bullshit to Lenny he got up to leave without a word, and his way was blocked by the Gypsy's two sons (Lenny was notoriously cheap, and the madam wanted her money).  After an awkward moment, Lenny leaned to Lou and whispered something.  Lou said to the Madam, "Lenny wants to know if they'll ever cure his deafness?" 
It was a punch line, but like everything else in Lenny's life it was a defense against his own worst impulses.

      The Kingston Trio was scheduled for a week long engagement at the Vanguard.  Frank Werber who was the manager, visionary and baby sitter of the Trio that had booked the gig for prime dough because at that point, the boys were a sensation. "Hang down your head Tom Dooley" had crossed over from college radio to mainstream, and had gone gold two years before.
      Lou liked the kids and their manager.  Back in 1957, they had come east from Palo Alto, California, played clubs like the Vanguard and the Hungry I, and started to make a name for themselves. They were broke then, and Lou knew it.  He reached into his pocket and gave them some cash and told them about a flop house they could crash in nearby.  They never forgot that goodwill.  After the 1960 gig had finished, Frank told Lou about a club they had bought near San Francisco as a tax write off.  That's how wealthy they had become. "We'd like you to come out and see the place.  Maybe you could recommend someone to manage it for us."
      Now Lou stood on Bridgeway Street, the fishing town of Sausalito.  From this vantage, he could see the outline of San Francisco through the drifting fog on the bay.  Sailboats tacked lazily to avoid the return of the fishing fleet.
      The "club" that the Trio owned sat over the water on creosote soaked pilings.  Named "The Dock", it was less a night club than a way-station for mariners wanting drinks and snacks.  Sawdust covered the floor to soak up the spilled drinks and vomit.  But Lou could see the potential, and he trusted Frank's vision.  After sizing it up, he met with the guys.  "So what do you think Lou?" Bob Shane asked.  "Could be a gold mine.  Lotta work though..."  "Can you recommend a manager?" Frank asked.  "Yeah,"Lou said, "Me."   There were no papers signed, no money discussed.  Hand-shakes all around was all.
      Lou had always liked the Coast ever since he and his young bride Belle had spent time there during the War.  Before Lou shipped out to Hawaii in 42, they had vowed that one day, they would come back.
      Lou flew back to the East Coast to give the Vanguard notice and told Belle to sell the house and car in Jersey, pack up all their stuff and get ready to move the three kids to California.   Lou carried some of the beat style of New York with him to Marin County.  Black suit, white shirt, skinny black tie and goatee was his signature look.  In the daytime he looked out of place, but against the setting sun, he cut a rakish figure.  He was 42 years old.
      Lou had always worked in restaurants.  His parents owned a deli and sitdown restaurant in the Bronx called "Janoff's".   Janoff's had an advertising slogan: "At Janoff's it's good.  You always get the very best food".  Lou had worked there throughout high school and stayed on even after while his older siblings had gone off to college.   Then the war came.  But Lou knew how to run a kitchen and a floor crew.  He knew how to manage people and most important, he could make money in a restaurant.  Not a lot of people could.
      As the carpenters cleaned up The Dock for it's reincarnation to The Trident, Lou hired a young Escoffier trained chef named Pierre Flaubert.  Pierre and Lou worked out the menu.  New York steak, escargo, beef ragout, fresh fish, soups and stews, salads and sides.  It was an agreement of style and substance.  Pierre was a multiple level black belt Karate master who was invited back to Japan each year by the pre-eminent Senseis to judge and award degrees to the creme-de-la-creme of black belts who competed.
      Most of the bus boys, and dishwashers that were hired for the opening of the Trident were Korean.  Guys with names like "Park" & "Sook".  They were all martial artist who could kick higher than their own heads.  They all knew Pierre could kick all their asses jointly, or severally.  There was an air of respect that flowed through the kitchen onto the floor of the Trident.  It came from top down.   And most of all they loved " Mr. Lou" (MistahRooh) what was always there to explain what, why, and how something had to be done.
      There were only waiters in the original Trident.   In those days, waiters could make a good living for themselves, and their families.   All the floor crew wore matching starched gold or turquoise single button coats with white shirts and ties.   This was a classy joint.  No more sawdust on the floor.  Lou began a practice that ensured that the place always ran smoothly.  He told the captain, Joe Morrell, and the waiters that tips were to be pooled and shared with the busboys and dishwashers.
      When the Trident was busy, as it was almost every lunch and dinner rush, the place ran like a beautiful, simple machine.  And, everyone looked forward to those little manilla (tip) envelopes at the end of the shift.
      Lou used his contacts and reputation from the Vanguard days to book the acts into the Trident.  Local talent was used as much as possible and there was plenty of it.   In those early days Vince Guaraldi, Jean Hoffman,  George Duke, Flip Nunez, Don Scaletta and Denny Zeitlin lived near enough to play on weekends.  Headliners included Jon Hendricks,   Sergio Mendez & Brazil 66, Bola Sete, Willie Bobo, and Bill Evans.
      Round about 1967 the Jazz scene was in decline.  Even Miles had begun to play what would become known as "Fusion" music.  Acid was still legal, and the Haight Ashbury district had become a Mecca to kids everywhere.  Frank once again saw it coming and made a decision.  They would re-invent not just the Trident, but innovate for restaurants and bars everywhere, for all time.

Jon Hendricks Trident Contract



The Origin of the Trident, Part One   by Martin Ganapolar    mganapoler@earthlink.net  

Thanks to Rob Lawson, Terry's brother, we have about 1 minute and 15 seconds of video posted on YouTube. Rob is a Mortgage Broker for West Coast Mortgage in Marin County.  This was first shot on 8mm, then transfered onto  tape, then digitalized for YouTube.  It's grainy, muted, but it's all we have at this time.  Much thanks to Rob and his family!  robert@westcoastmtg.com  Rob's email

So  I'm  too-da-ling  along  on  the  net  and  ran across this picture....must  admit it brought a little tear to my eye! Talk about an  era  gone  bye...in  picture 

      Early spring 1972.  Welcome to the dumping ground—the dark end of the kitchen—the place where high and mighty busboys sneer at you as they dump another bin full of dirty dishes on the bottom shelf.  But I had done this kind of thing before the Trident, before the Army, before this dishwasher heaven where you got to do it and watch the soft parade of beautiful young women as they came into the kitchen where Pierre would drill them with his disdainful devil eyes as though every one of them was bad, and just barely tolerable.  I looked at them somewhat differently.  After all, there I was backstage at a hippie playboy club, and how bad could that be?  And, oh those girls.  Wearing everything from the diaphonous to the skin tight. The impossible to miss hundred pound party girl Nancy MacAllister in those shiny pink pants—the impossible to forget Kathleen Delahanty in her well fitted, subtle but sexy I. Magnin gabardine slacks and crepe de chine tops—Noreen, the sweetest woman since Donna Reed in "It' a Wonderful Life", floating unflappably above it all, and Lynn, the cool, imperious cocktail waitress in her tight cowgirl jeans that none of us could help but notice after she walked by.  So many wonderful women.  But I was still just one of the trolls toiling in the shouting and clatter of the bright white cave.  The busboys got to follow these goddesses out into the rocking and rolling rounded wood and draping greenery of the big sun-splashed room, where the customers were merely the necessary extras who had to pay to watch the show. 

 

Frank Werber (1930 - 2007) for more information about the Memorial Services please go to: www.WerberMemorial.com
                  

On May 20, 2007 Ken Flagg wrote, "Hello, I found your web site while searching for Frank on Goggle and thought you would want to know that he passed away Saturday in Silver City, NM.  He suffered a stroke in February of 2004 and his health had been on the decline ever since.  He is survived by his children Chala, Bodhi, Aari, and Miska and two grandchildren.  I think it is wonderful that you are keeping his memory of the Trident alive, as that was one of his proudest accomplishments.

From the Kingston Trio web site:  "We are sorry to report that Frank Werber, the Kingston Trio's original manager, passed away at his New Mexico Ranch Saturday afternoon, May 19th.  His loss is deeply felt by us all.  Frank helped make the Kingston Trio what it was and is today, and was our dear friend for over 50 years.  Frank we will miss you greatly, and you will live on in our hearts and souls forever.MUSIC mogul. Trend-setting restaurateur. New Age guru. Back-to-the-land pioneer. Holocaust survivor. Small-town newspaper editor. Defendant in a star-studded Marin County drug trial.

ALEC PALAO on FRANK WERBER: http://www.acerecords.co.uk/content.php?page_id=1316

KING OF COOL'S WILD REIGN   By Paul Liberatore,     Marin Independent Journal's  June 15th  headline

Frank Werber, who died May 19 at 78, was all of those things. To hear the stories being told about him in the wake of his passing, he was a few others as well.

Werber made pop music history as the savvy manager of the Kingston Trio, turning three clean-cut college boys into superstars, the biggest singing group in the world in the early '60s, igniters of the folk music boom.

He was the charismatic creator of the Trident, a jazz club that he transformed into a legendary Sausalito fern bar and organic restaurant, a "Hooters for hippies," as one former employee describes it, where the braless waitresses wore see-through blouses, a young Robin Williams worked as a bus boy, the Rolling Stones celebrated Mick Jagger's birthday, Janis Joplin had a special table by an arched window overlooking the bay and Woody Allen shot a scene for his 1972 movie, "Play It Again, Sam."

The Trident closed in 1980. The building, at 558 Bridgeway, is now occupied by Horizons Restaurant.

"There was a time when Frank Werber was the center of what was going on,"

recalled comedian Tommy Smothers. "The girls were cool, the place was cool, the music was great. He was a guru, a Svengali kind of guy. He was a guy who could spin a story and make you laugh. With Frank, there was always something interesting going on."

Kentfield psychiatrist and jazz pianist Denny Zeitlin was one of the musicians Werber booked to play for the Trident's fashionably hip clientele.

"Frank's spirit pervaded the whole place," Zeitlin recalled. "I remember his energy, his sparkle, his openness to music. I thought the Trident was one of the all-time great jazz clubs. It was as special as any place I've ever played."

In a 1990 interview, Werber told the Independent Journal that those days were "like riding a hurricane."

"The Trident was definitely a manifestation of its time and a forerunner and trendsetter for multitudes of restaurants," he said. "Its effects are still being felt."

Werber's reign as the king of cool began to thaw in 1968 when he was busted for having hundreds of pounds of marijuana stashed in his lavish Marin County home - an ultra-modern mansion on Richardson Bay's Da Silva Island.

Reflecting the tenor of the times, his 1970 Marin Superior Court trial was a counterculture circus. Pot was so pervasive in those days that half of the first 10 prospective jurors admitted that they'd smoked it.

With a half-dozen of his comely, miniskirted girlfriends in the front row of the courtroom, the bearded defendant would often appear in court with his long hair pulled back in a pony tail, wearing leather pants and embroidered shirts with hippie beads around his neck.

His attorney, the combative celebrity lawyer Terrence "KO" Hallinan, argued, unsuccessfully as it would turn out, that his client used marijuana for spiritual purposes and therefore was protected by Constitutional guarantees of religious freedom.

Among the character witnesses were philosopher Alan Watts, prostitute union founder Margot St. James and Smothers.

"I testified that I'd had some religious experiences with Mr. Werber," the comedian remembered. "As I recall, we went out and smoked a joint between one of the sessions. That was the mindset at the time."

The jury, which included two admitted pot smokers, found Werber guilty of marijuana possession. He was fined $2,000 and sentenced to six months in jail. In San Francisco, a federal jury acquitted him of marijuana smuggling charges.

Even as a child, Werber's life was extraordinary. Born in Cologne, Germany, he arrived in the United States in 1941 with his father. The story goes that they escaped from a concentration camp after the elder Werber was spared execution - along with his son - because he was such a good cook that the Nazi commander didn't want to lose him.

In San Francisco, Werber developed a talent for show business, managing Enrico Banducci's famed North Beach nightclub, the hungry i.

During that time, he went to see an unknown collegiate singing group, the Kingston Trio, discovering them at a little club in Redwood City, the Crack Pot.

"Somebody had told him about us and he loved what he saw," remembered the Kingston Trio's Bob Shane, now retired and living in Phoenix. "We made up a contract with him on a paper napkin."

Shane credits Werber with coming up with the Trio's button-downed image and squeaky-clean persona.

"As much as we were, he was responsible for getting us started," he said. "He helped mold us, got us rehearsing on a regular basis, got us working on a show, helping us get our outfits together so that we'd be a visual act, too. We went to Stanford, so they had us billed as America's clean-cut college kids, but don't think any of us even knew one."

Werber may have been a wild flower child, but Nick Reynolds, another original member of the Kingston Trio, thanks him for keeping the group's phenomenal success in perspective, encouraging them to invest their fortune - in the Trident, in a number of homes and properties in Marin and San Francisco, including the Columbus Tower, now owned by Francis Ford Coppola.

"We were the biggest group in the world for four or five years," Reynolds said from his home on San Diego's Coronado Island. "We had five albums in the top 10 at one time. The main thing I can say about Frank is that he kept us safe. We stayed in San Francisco, we didn't move to L.A. We never had any mob scenes around us. We all kept our sanity. I know I did. He kept us together. He was like a second father to me."

By 1967, the Kingston Trio were on their way out, replaced on the pop charts by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and the rest of the British invasion.

In the early '70s, with his trial behind him, Werber moved to a little mining town, Silver City, in southeast New Mexico.

"When he first got here, he did a lot of hanging out in the hot springs, playing the pseudo cult leader guru, smoking a lot of weed, probably doing a lot of acid," Werber's daughter, Chala, 35, recalled.

"In typical Frank Werber fashion, the first thing he did was open a health food store, the Sunflower, so he could have a place to get good food. It was the first health food store around here."

After a year or two, Werber tired of town life and moved his family to a remote ranch two hours away, becoming a pioneer in the back-to-the-land movement.

"We had chickens and goats and horses and an organic garden that was at least an acre," Chala said. "We'd only go to town every month or two. We were pretty much self-sustaining. It was a great place to grow up as a kid."

Werber eventually moved back to town, rescuing a failing newspaper, the Silver City Enterprise, publishing it for a few years.

But his health had steadily been failing since he developed diabetes in his 50s, his daughter said, and he suffered the first of several strokes three-and-a-half years ago.

When he died of heart failure at home last month, he had his four children around him - Chala, Mishka, Aari, Bodhi - and a number of others who were close to him.

"We all gave him parting gifts of water from the spring, crystals, beads, Buddhas, cologne, good drink and good smoke," Chala said in an e-mail. "He had the ashes of his dog, Jet, at his feet. He was the center of everybody's universe. He was very much himself to the end."

A memorial service is planned for October.


http://www.kingstontrio.com/html/kt_news.htm

From SFGate.com  (San Francisco Chronicle web site) 
To view or sign an online Guest Book, click link below:

http://www.legacy.com/SFGate/DeathNotices.asp?Page=LifeStory&PersonId=88361221


Frank Nicholas Werber Born Cologne, Germany, March 27, 1929 Died Silver City, NM, May 19, 2007 Survived by his children, Chala, Bodhi, Aari, Mishka and Daniel; his grandchildren, Anahi and Mylena; and the children's mothers, Diane and Cathrine; as well as a myriad of other loves and friends who's world has become more empty with his passing. His life full to overflowing, Frank was among other things: a Holocaust survivor, refugee, Navy sharpshooter, student of architecture, hobo, beatnik, photographer, music and entertainment entrepreneur, night club owner, race car driver, marijuana advocate, hippy visionary, restaurateur, health food pioneer, single parent, conservationist, newspaper owner and hermetic guru. He passed away at his daughter's home in NM, and per his wishes was laid to rest the next day in a natural burial on his ranch in the Gila Wilderness. Sometimes credited with having started the folk music movement, and possibly best know as the manger/producer of the Kingston Trio, Werber was also the creator of the famous Trident Restaurant, a 1960s and '70s Bay Area hot spot which was long considered one of the top restaurants in the country. While many of the most famous and influential people of the era counted him as a friend, fame and fortune were never a most important measure of esteem to Frank. Tiring of the California "scene" he purchased a remote hot springs ranch in the mountains outside of Silver City, NM, in 1974 and slowly turned his energy inward toward the wilderness and his family. Frank will be greatly missed, but his light burned so brightly that those who truly knew him will always feel the glow. A memorial is being organized for this fall. For info, or to offer a donation please contact werbermemorial@yahoo.com
Published in the San Francisco Chronicle on 5/27/2007.

San Francisco Chronicle June 8, 2007

If anyone ever lived up to the image of the swinging 1960s hipster, Frank Nicholas Werber was the man.

The original manager of the Kingston Trio and a successful restaurant and business owner, he had been living it up for several years by the time the Summer of Love rolled around. The bearded entrepreneur wore beads and a tweed coat with a flower in the lapel. There were sports cars, miniskirted young ladies, a penthouse office in San Francisco, sailboat cruises in Mexico and pot.

Lots of pot.

Narcotics agents said six sea bags full of marijuana were delivered to his swanky home overlooking Richardson Bay in 1968, leading to his arrest, two sensational trials and a six-month jail sentence in Marin County.

The charismatic hippy music agent died May 19 of heart failure in Silver City, N.M., where he had lived on a ranch since 1974.

Born in Cologne, Germany, in 1929, Mr. Werber spent time in a Nazi concentration camp during the Holocaust.

He told his family that he and his father were at one point lined up to be shot by a Nazi firing squad when an officer ordered the elder Werber pulled from the line. As the story goes, the officer didn't want to lose the camp's best cook. Because his father wouldn't leave without him, Mr. Werber, too, was saved. The father and son later escaped, although details about that are vague.

Mr. Werber learned to cook from his dad, and from then on, good food played a major role in his life.

He immigrated to the United States. After high school, he joined the Navy and served as an aviation photographer, midshipman and sharpshooter. He later attended the American Academy of Art in Chicago and the University of Colorado.

Family members said Mr. Werber worked as a commercial artist, gold miner, cabdriver, horse rancher, ski-lift operator, construction worker and press photographer.

He eventually landed in San Francisco, where he met Enrico Banducci, the renowned North Beach impresario who operated the hungry i nightclub. Mr. Werber impressed Banducci and was hired as manager.

He stayed at the nightclub for four years and then happened upon a group of young Stanford singers at a bar and signed them to a management contract. The Kingston Trio soon blossomed into a national sensation, ushering in a folk music movement that lasted through the 1960s.

Mr. Werber turned out to be a masterful promoter. He created a multimillion-dollar recording studio and promotional development and publishing company called Kingston Trio Inc., which took up two floors in the Columbus Tower office building.

He then established Sausalito's famous Trident Restaurant, which started out as a jazz hot spot in the 1960s. Mr. Werber later turned it into a psychedelic health food restaurant with hanging plants and handmade candles where rock musicians hung out and ogled braless waitresses.

The now-defunct restaurant, on Bridgeway, set aside a table for Janis Joplin, and a young Robin Williams worked there as a busboy, according to Mr. Werber's daughter, Chala Werber.

"Everyone who was anyone hung out at the Trident," she said. "He interviewed all the waitresses, and they had to be super hot. They weren't expected to wear a bra."

When Native Americans occupied Alcatraz from 1969 to 1971, the pier outside the Trident was used to ferry supplies to island dwellers. In 1974, the Rolling Stones held a private party at the Trident thrown by Mr. Werber's good friend Bill Graham. It was, according to several revelers, a mind-altering experience.

Erudite and witty, Mr. Werber had a financial interest in the hit show "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown." He was active in numerous sports, including sailing and scuba diving, which he practiced often in the tropical waters off Puerto Vallarta.

He was, by all accounts, on top of the world in 1968 when federal agents raided his Marin County home and seized 258 pounds of Mexican pot they accused him of conspiring to transport.

Mr. Werber admitted smoking pot, but said he never trafficked in it. He argued that he was set up by dealers who were trying to save their own skin. A federal court jury eventually found him not guilty after a widely publicized trial. He was then tried by Marin County authorities for possession and cultivation of marijuana.

Mr. Werber was defended by Terence Hallinan, who would later become San Francisco's district attorney. The trial was a circus. Sheriff's officers dragged sea bags full of pot into the courtroom, and Hallinan talked about Mr. Werber's spiritual connection to pot rooted in his experiences during the Holocaust. Celebrities marched in and out of the courtroom as a fan club of young women in miniskirts rooted for Mr. Werber, who, participants said, smoked pot a few times during the breaks.

Mr. Werber loved to recount how Tommy Smothers of the Smothers Brothers testified that he had known the defendant for years and "before he started smoking pot, he was a real — hole."

"It was a pretty interesting trial," said Smothers, 70, a longtime friend who got a big laugh when he testified. "It was very stressful for him at the time, but he just moved on."

Mr. Werber retired at age 43 to an old adobe lodge on 160 acres of wilderness in New Mexico once used by Teddy Roosevelt on his hunting expeditions.

"Everything my dad ever did, he did completely," his daughter said. "His philosophy was there is nothing worth doing that isn't worth overdoing. There was never any half-assing in anything in his life."

Smothers said: "He was a little slick, a little slippery and wonderfully funny and entertaining. He was a guy you would go out of your way to visit."

Besides his daughter Chala, he is survived by another daughter, Mishka Werber, sons Bodhi Werber and Aari Werber, stepson Daniel Benavidez and two granddaughters, all of Silver City.

A memorial is planned for the fall.

Letter to the Editor in response to the above article:

San Francisco Chronicle
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Saturday, June 16, 2007

Frank Werber

Editor — The June 8 obituary for Frank Werber seemed to damn with faint praise, suggesting that appreciation of a good doobie was the most significant achievement of this singular man's life. Nothing could be further from the truth. Werber was a pathfinder who wrought still-unacknowledged change within the entertainment industry in the late 1950s and '60s.

Werber took what were essentially three Peninsula frat boys — the Kingston Trio — and turned them into one of the biggest popular-music phenomena of the mid-20th century. However, it was in his supervision of the trio that Werber established guidelines on how a professional entertainer should be treated. He designed the basis of the "rider" that is used to this day whenever a performer appears, to guarantee an environment respectful of both artist and audience.

He took what had previously been the college lecture circuit and turned it into the college concert circuit. Most significant, Werber avoided the crass exploitation that was the overriding hallmark of artist representation in those days — i.e. the likes of Col. Tom Parker — preferring to take care of business in a classy, erudite manner.

No mention was made of his stewardship of We Five, whose Werber-produced 1965 smash hit, "You Were on My Mind," was the highest charting single to emerge from the Bay Area music scene until the rise of Creedence, almost five years later. Nor of the Trident Productions stable, an early and prescient breeding ground for many local rock stalwarts such as the Sons of Champlin.

Because, by late 1967, Werber had tired of wiping musicians' behinds and decided to dissolve his music interests, he is often written out of most histories of the 1960s San Francisco rock explosion. Frank had been out of the biz for many years by the time I got to know him, but he was still as smart and witty and hip — not "hippy" (sic) — as he had ever been. He deserves to be properly remembered for the pioneer he was.

ALEC PALAO
El Cerrito

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/06/16/EDGKOP3HFQ1.DTL

Alec also wrote:  http://www.acerecords.co.uk/content.php?page_id=1316

TridentRestaurant.com : How did it all begin?

Bob Shane: We bought the place in 1960. When we took over it was called the Yacht Dock. It was a jazz club. It was a very straight, conventional kind of place. It had a nice big dock so people could tie up and come in. I think we kept the name until around 1966 when we started changing it—painting the ceiling, putting in all the curved railings and woodwork—going for the hippie style. That was done by Frank with the architect, Roger Summers.

Frank closed the place, but we (the Trio) were on the road for most of that time so we didn't see it taking shape.

When did you guys start playing and how did Frank become your manager?

We started the Trio in '57, and we were playing at a place called The Cracked Pot in Redwood City. It was like a little beer garden—had a little stage, and Frank Werber came in and liked us. He drew up a contract for us right there on a paper napkin. So we started rehearsing with him, and played a couple of places around the Bay Area, and then he got us booked into the Purple Onion. It was a two week gig, and we ended up staying for sixteen weeks.

So how did you end up owning the Trident?

Well, when we started really making money in the '60's we decided we were going to have to have some things to invest in, so we bought the Columbus Towers in San Francisco, and then we bought some property in Mill Valley and San Rafael, and we leased the option for the Trident. Then in '76 I did a stock trade out—I traded my share of the property we owned including the Trident for the rights to the Kingston Trio name. From that point on everything got great for me but I'm not so sure it did for everybody else.

Tom Dooley was your biggest hit, but Scotch and Soda is perhaps the Trio's best and the best known. Tell us where that came from. The music has Dave Guard's name on it but I heard he didn't write write it. What's the story?

It was written back in the thirties by an anonomyous musician in Phoenix, and was given to the Seaver family. Tom Seaver, you know, the baseball pitcher, was about nine when Dave (Guard) was dating his older sister at Stanford. We were driving down to LA, and we had dinner with their parents, and afterwards they said, "We've got this great song for you guys." and they gave us the music. And then later, when we weren't paying attention he put his name on it. It caused a lot of bad feelings later on. But he actually did it in order to give the money to the Seaver family, and they used it to put Tom through college. Of course, he did pretty well for himself later on.

And there's a pretty funny story about Dave. We were on the road and he picked up this chick, and checked into a hotel as Mr and Mrs using his credit card, forgetting that his wife paid the bills. That marriage didn't last.

You have any favorite stories of the Trident?

Back in about 1970 Frank had this really scawny palm tree on the walkway to the front door, and I was coming in the place with Nick (Reynolds—founding member) and I looked at that pathetic tree, and said, "I gotta come out and take care of this." So we went in, had a drink, and I came back out, picked it up and threw it overboard into the bay.   Frank's pride and joy.  I went back in and the manager said to me, "You can't do that.  That belongs to Frank Werber."

I said, "Yes I can, because the Trident belongs to us."

He said, "And who are you?"

"The Kingston Trio."

(March 3, 2007)



Bob Shane's 1965 289 Cobra in the Trident parking lot
Bob, "It's my absolute favorite car that I've ever had!"

      On April 11th, 2007 an email was received from Norma Dale of San Rafael.  Norma wrote, " I was just a teenager in high school the first time I went to the Trident in Sausalito.  There were four of us and we found a handbill that said the Moby Grape and the Buffalo Springfield would be performing at the Trident on Sunday. When we got there we were the only customers!  This had to be early 1967.  The boys I went with were members of an East Bay/Hayward band ,and after a while the groups drummer got up and began messing with the drums.  Before the other musicians could pick up a guitar, members from Moby Grape and the Buffalo Springfield got up, and rather then let the boys touch their instruments said they would play together for us.  We ended up dancing to the "Buffalo Grape" and took away some great memories."
      April 12th, 2007 the Marin Independent Journal published an article called "Those were the days (and nights) where IJ readers shared their Marin nightclub memories through the decades.  IJ reporter Rick Polito reported that "Jazz and Folk shared the bill at the Sleeping Lady in Fairfax.  River City had all the bands right up the street.  In Sausalito, it was the Trident!"  The following quotes were taken from this article:
      Bill Rude wrote, "The Trident in Sausalito was one of the premier and most beautiful jazz clubs in the Bay Area during the sixties.  Owned by the Kingston Trio, it opened in the early 60s and closed for a major hip remodel in late 1968 for about a year (remodeling was slow as creative hip counterculture craftsman were hired) In the 70's, I believe it was a hangout for rock musicians ... while some little old ladies at lunch and tourist dined outside on the dock of the bay.  Don't think the music lasted too long into the 70's, but I was gone by that time.  It was a superb nightclub to work and listen to jazz."
     Terry Garthwaite wrote, "In the 60's, there was the Trident in Sausalito with great jazz groups like the Gary Burton Trio and Jon Hendricks.  Marin had great clubs with some of the world's greatest musicians. We're lucky!"  Wasn't Terry in the band Joy of Cooking?
    Bruce R. Elliot wrote, "Heading north along Bridgeway in Sausalito, one could start at Sally Stanford's Valhalla for some turn of the century architecture, food, and gifted  piano playing.  From there you could walk to the Trident and Ondine,  the old Pacific Yacht Club building, which stretches out over the Bay. In the mid 60's and 70's, the Bay Area music scene ballooned in Marin County, and venues like the Trident hosted many bands like the Jefferson Airplane, the Moody Blues, and the New Riders of the Purple Sage.  Many of Marin's hip older people will have fond memories of the Trident.   The interior of the existing restaurant, Horizon's, looks almost exactly the same as it did in 1976."
      If you have any similar stories you'd like to share...we'd love to hear them!
    

Woody Allen and Tony Roberts enter the Trident

Originally to be shot in Manhatten, "Play it again, Sam" was filmed in
San Francisco in 1971 when NY film workers went on strike.
















Images here are the property of Charles H Joffe/ Joffe Rollins

Eric, glad to see you are well and thanks for your detailed thoughts on the
Trident years.   I was working on the dishwashing shift when you
performed your streak dance.  I remember the 'buzz'  among the staff
whether it was going to happen or not.   I googled 'Trident Restaurant'
after telling a few co-workers of my three years working in this cool
restaurant where I trained Robin Williams on his first day as a
dishwasher.  Of course, the rookies were always initiated on the 'wet'
side. I was very surprised to see myself in the 'Cirque Du Soleil' photo
and remember the event and photo.  I always felt like the younger
sibling working at Trident since I was 19 when I started, living at home
and attending College of Marin. It seemed as though the majority of you
were 5 years older and  forging a living out on your own.  How did you
all support yourself working at the Trident and living in Marin, Sonoma
or the city?  My parents used to pick me up after work and we gave many
employees rides home or to the Bridgeway
101 North entrance if it was not too late.  After my dad bought another
car, I was able to drive the station wagon and work the later shifts
till 2am.  Dagny and Lou were my favorite shift managers to work for.
And the waitresses/hostesses were not only beautiful but very nice to
me. It was nice to see photos of Monica, Lisa and Susan - and the
Russian River outing.  Do you remember Summer Brown, Leigh, Sunny, Flip
and Josie?   I was known to give good shoulder and neck massages at work
for everyone and was invited for after-work massages by some of the
girls.  Nothing kinky or sleazy, only therapeutic massages, friendly
conversation and sometimes a home-cooked meal. The last time I saw
everyone was at Robin's farewell party in Mill Valley before he left for
Juilliard.  I left a few months before to attend school at UC Berkeley.
Visited the Trident just after it changed to Horizon and met a guy who I
used to wash dishes with. He was now a line or prep cook.  I think his
name was Hal. 
Anyhow, back to work.  Thanks again for the blast from the past.  I will
look through my photo collection to see if I have anything to
contribute.  Ciao.          Bryan Yim         

Not too many people know that Cirque Du Soleil began in the parking lot of the Trident
back in the mid 70's.  This also was thought to be a pyramid scheme but was simply multi-level
marketing.   Very clever in its day .....  Herta, Eric, and Robin ...top to bottom...

Second serving of great photos from Melvin and Lisa Sharp
Mel's email is:  melvinsharp@qwest.net




Frank Werber and Daughter in New Mexico
Frank was the General Manager for the Trident,
and 1/3 owner with the Kingston Trio
http://members.aol.com/clackclack/werber.htm 




Sue, Jerry, and Kathy ...  Jerry managed the Rolling Stones Tours for
 Bill Graham, and
provided many free tickets to shows for the Trident.



Carol and Garth



Richard and Marshall



Susan



Trident Women


Lou and Lisa
Excert from Lisa Sharp ... January 2007 email:
I loved Eric’s story; he is a great writer.  I still make Pierre’s cheesecake recipe which
later went on to be Uncle Otto’s Cheesecake.  I remember Pierre would not give anyone
 his recipes but we had a special bond, and I kept asking ,and asking that he give it to me. 
He finally did, with a big smile, and I have the original recipe, in his handwriting. 
I should have written a book back then because I can’t remember it all today! 
("if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there")



The Trident's Women Reunion



Gloria and Laverne

Trident Timeline by Mel Sharp
      The Trident closed for 10 months in 76-77 after Ron McKenna sued Frank Werber for eviction.  One night, after the  restaurant had closed Ron McKenna came in, and began tearing up the flooring for the bar. The manager called the police.   Ron lost and renewed Frank's lease until 1981.  While the Trident was closed Ron rebuilt the outer dining room and dock.  The Trident reopened towards the end of 1976 and rehired a whole new crew.  Only a few original members of the cast/employees returned.  Pierre was back in the kitchen which had been rebuilt.  The kitchen lost it's  colorful paint job so I told Pierre, " that he needed some color", and Pierre responded by saying, "I've got Big John!"
     Like they said Big John was a big man, and  truly one of the more colorfull Trident personalities!
     In 1978 Frank created the Trident lll  . Trident one being the Jazz Club which lasted up to 1969, and the Trident 2 that ran up until it's closure as mentioned above.
    

Susan and Susanne




Mystery Woman?



Cassandra and Lisa



Send in the .......



Peter Espresso Clown and Carol with Wings



ET after a couple of cocktails



Monica and Roberta



Brad and the beautiful Bumblebee



Lisa and Terry....on Halloween...which hopefully explains Terry's makeup



Ed...aka Eduardo



Yes, the chambermaid's pumps are distracting, but please notice the lettering that has somehow since
disappeared. A wonderful sentiment then ... and now.



The Three Caballero's all whipped up in a Terry Lawson concoction ... Terry wins the
best not so innocent smile award ... Marshall and Richard punked before it became
popularized by MTV...



Thank you Mel and Lisa Sharp!  Great Pics!



Lou Ganapoler in the office ...   Funny photo...



Lisa Sharp ...  wow!



Dagny, Manager extrodinaire, also worked for Bill Graham presents

Rodger and Mark Sterns   MarkSterns@earthlink.net
Rodger is now the owner of Milano's Restaurant in Tiburon, California   2006



Dennis Wright experiencing new insights through the magic of mixology and a subtle blend of herbology



Terry Lawson (we miss you) and Mark Sterns at the Trident Russian River Party



Robin and Herta         Playing is the Thing
Trident Russian River Party



 Trident Russian River Party



Eric in his guitar apparel ... later that afternoon the Russian River community enacted a dress code

"Sausalito's waterfront commands a dramatic view that sweeps through a spectacular panorama from Belvedere to San Francisco.  A fifteen minute drive over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco brings one to Ondine and to the Trident."

Note the Ceiling Mural (early seventies)               Photo: Flash



Arched window in front of tables for two/ dueces
Where Janis kept company sometimes with her friend S. Comfort
Which was provided, on the house.
Photo: Flash

Two redheads ...  Evan and Friend                           Photo and Pumpkin carving: Flash

September 2, 2006 (6:52pm)
Hey! I was at the reunion and yes Robin Williams was there and, it was a lot of fun. I can't think of the year, it was more than 20 years ago, but I will give it more thought and get back to you on it.  I remember the meetings before the "official" waitress meetings when we got together at the Alta Mira for a Ramos Fizz.  We worked hard, had fun, and the level of healthy irreverence was wonderful.
LuLu (Louise Wright)

   On February the 13th, 2007 Bruce Mushrush wrote:  "Coming across this web site was a pleasant surprise, a reminder of a very happy time in my life.  I worked at the Trident as a busser right up until it closed. It was all the fun I could handle, and decent money as well. It really seemed to me that getting paid to be there was just icing on the cake.
  Several of the Trident buddies are among my closest friends to this day.  I've also had the good fortune to be associated with the Kingston Trio for many years, working for them on a variety of web/multi-media projects such as:  www.kingstontrio.com
    Herb Gold wrote about "The Trident of Sainted Memory..." I don't think that is an overstatement for any of us!"
   
Photo of Frank Werber and John Stewart of the Kingston Trio
                         Photo from the collection of Bruce Mushrush  bruce85@mac.com 

                         (Link below provided by Lisa 4/4/2007) about Frank Werber
                         http://members.aol.com/clackclack/werber.htm

A link from the Kingston Trio's Website of when Bob and Bobbie Shane came
to the Trident/Horizon's restaurant March 27, 2007 before attending the Enrico Banducci's
Hungry i renunion in San Francisco: http://www.kingstontrio.com/html/san_francisco.html
Note the homes they lived in .... Sausalito and Tiburon!