Chet Helms

Chet Helms
Born	August 2, 1942
Died	June 25, 2005

Chester Leo "Chet" Helms (August 2, 1942 – June 25, 2005), often called the father of San Francisco's 1967 "Summer of Love", was a music promoter and a counterculture figure in San Francisco during its hippie period in the mid to late Sixties.

Helms was the founder and manager of Big Brother and the Holding Company and recruited Janis Joplin as its lead singer. He was a producer and organizer, helping to stage free concerts and other cultural events at Golden Gate Park, the backdrop of San Francisco's Summer of Love in 1967, as well as at other venues, including the Avalon Ballroom.

He was the first producer of psychedelic light-show concerts at the Fillmore and the Avalon Ballroom and was instrumental in helping to develop bands that had the distinctive San Francisco Sound. Helms died June 25, 2005 of complications from hepatitis C. He was 62.

Chester Leo Helms was born in Santa Maria, California, the eldest of three sons. His parents were Chester and Novella Helms. Helms' father, a manager at a local sugarbeet mill, died when he was 9. His mother took the boys to Missouri and then to Texas.

Helms spent the rest of his youth in Missouri and Texas, where he learned to organize events by helping to stage benefits for civil rights groups. He enrolled at the University of Texas and became part of the music scene there, a scene that included a very young and inexperienced Janis Joplin. Soon he dropped out of school and, inspired by the Beat Generation writers, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg to travel across America in search of freedom and inspiration, he set off wearing shoulder-length hair, beard and rimless glasses hitchhiking across the country. He ended up in San Francisco in 1962.

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