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I like a challenge when it comes to records. One such challenge is collecting records on the Fillmore label, set up by Bill Graham in the late 60s to promote San Fanciscan bands. It made sense to use the Fillmore brand to launch a label but he never really tried hard enough to make it successful and it folded with only 25 releases on Discogs, which makes them good to collect because getting them all isn’t impossible.
However, It’s harder because not all releases came out in the UK and didn’t sell very many. The easiest to get are the Elvin Bishop Group records. There are two albums and six singles and the albums at least got a UK release. And a seventh single lifted from the Fillmore; Last Days box set which is one side Grateful Dead, Elvin Bishop Group on the other side. That album - a triple - is also quite easily obtained.
And that’s where it gets hard. The San Francisco psychedelic blues band Aum are your next best bet with one album and two singles. Their first record, available in the UK, wasn't on Fillmore.
Lamb were an experimental band who released 3 albums and a single, all but one were on CBS, just one on Fillmore. The hardest one to get and still evades me is the one single by Sunbear, a San Franciscan act, ‘(When Everybody In The World Is) Friends’ / ‘Anywhere’
There’s an impossible to get promo by Helen Wheels ‘Here Comes The Derby (Official Theme Song Of The Roller Derby)’ which isn’t valuable but is hard to get. Lastly, the most interesting release was by a band called Sawbuck, which counted Ronnie Montrose and Bill Church amongst their number, both later to surface in Montrose. They released one album and one single.
And that’s it. I have about half of them. If you are feeling ambitious, collect records on the San Francisco Records label, a sister of Fillmore and a similar logo. You’ll find superb records primarily Cold Blood’s debut releases and early Tower Of Power records, as well as records by Hammer and a few others but it was over by 1971.
I mean you can buy all these off the internet quite easily if that’s your thing, but finding them in junk stores and record shops will be more thrilling and much more difficult.
