I found a previously unknown poster for Martha’s Laundry on Sunday, September 24, 1967. The venue was The Balloon at 1031 Kearny in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco.

The building still exists. When it opened as The Red Balloon on April 1, 1953, it was an indoor amusement center. By 1967, the name shortened to The Balloon,  and the entertainment had changed to “Topless Games” including “topless ping pong”. In April 1967 it had a short-lived name, La Carnaval, with “topless rassling”.  In December 1967 it advertised as a “Cellar Cabaret” with an underground theatre performance. In 1977 it started a long run as the Palladium Club.

I read the poster artist name as “Eli Lcon”, but I’ve been informed it’s Eli Leon.

There are images of posters and flyers for Martha’s Laundry shows in Concord, Berkeley and Santa Cruz, but I hadn’t seen this one before.

Members of Martha’s Laundry were:

Jim Lehman – lead guitar
Tom Peterain – rhythm guitar
David Kessner – keyboards
Richard Wilkins, then Michael Husser – bass
Randy Smith – drums

The only information on the group comes from an interview that Mike Dugo did with bassist Michael Husser circa 2008, which I’ll quote a section of because it is no longer on the web:

We played diverse locations such as Pauly Ballroom at U.C. Berkeley, The Straight Theatre on Height Street in San Francisco, The Family Dog at The Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco, and private parties. We even played for the ordination of an Episcopal Minister in Berkeley and were mentioned in and article in Time Magazine relating to the event (the issue dates from March 22, 1968 and the article was entitled, “Hippie Ordination”). I don’t remember playing teen clubs and we didn’t play any band battles; we only played places that guaranteed our fee. We did play some festivals with Creedence Clearwater Revival as the headliner.

We played blues and worked on jazz arrangements to blues tunes. Our influences were Gary Burton’s album Lofty Fake Anagram and the first Moby Grape album.

We didn’t play original material and didn’t think people would buy arrangements of known songs. We played primarily covers of somewhat obscure blues songs.

Randy, Jim and Dave started a music store in Berkeley called Prune Music. Jim left to move to Texas and start his own music store. Randy and Dave moved Prune Music to Mill Valley, California. Randy started working on guitar amplifiers and formed a company called Mesa Engineering … Randy then named his amps Mesa Boogie.

Jim’s music store in Austin, Texas is called Guitar Rez.

Dave Kessner had played with many bands including Cold Blood.

I later played with Little Richard, Elvin Bishop, Harvey Mandel and other artists in the Bay area and then started a band called Moon Rose Forest. We recorded a live album with Buffy Sainte-Marie in December of 1968 at the Troubadour in Los Angeles. In ’69 I returned to the Bay area and then moved to New Mexico where I lived on the Acoma Pueblo Reservation and recorded an album of music with tribal members. I then moved to Albuquerque and began a career in broadcast television as an audio and video engineer.

Thank you to Derek Taylor, John Pitts and Vance Pollock for help with background on the Balloon. Any info on the ’50s and ’60s incarnations of 1031 Kearny, the poster artist or Martha’s Laundry would be appreciated.