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"We came to divergent views about how it should be run," says Helms. "As it began to go down the tubes, I wanted to get more and more involved, because I thought he was changing the basic formula that people had appreciated and expected from the Family Dog."
But not everyone believed Hughston was the bad guy that Helms was making him out to be. Nick Gravenites, a musician and songwriter, says Hughston is hardheaded but honest. "If something is wrong or not fair, he will not budge. If the deal isn't right, he's a real levelheaded business man," Gravenites says.
After 25 shows in seven months, Hughston decided he'd had enough of Helms' demands and gave him a 30-day notice. Helms didn't waste a minute. He called a press conference on May 3 of last year to announce that he was leaving the Maritime, taking the Family Dog logo, and demanding $3,600 for three months of his guarantee he said Hughston still owed him.
At first, Hughston thought that losing the logo might hurt his still-young nightclub, but he says it actually helped business. "That logo brought a lot of stigma from the industry. People thought it was a bunch of hippies. There were agents who didn't want to be involved."
The split between Helms and Hughston trapped a few friends in the middle, but only temporarily. The Maritime had revitalized Jim Phillips' career. An artist who hadn't worked in rock 'n' roll in almost a decade, Phillips became the art director when the Maritime opened. Helms' departure was excruciating for him.
"It tore me in half," says Phillips, who quit the Maritime, but eventually returned. "I was Chet's art director, but Boots picked me to do the first poster. I've tried to be loyal to the people who have helped me, [but with Helms] there's not a real plan in place for the future."
"Chet was kind of going behind Boots' back and trying to pull people out of there," says Tony Urrea, Helms' old friend and former limo driver. "Chet maybe wanted me to leave the place -- he said 'I know you want to stay.' "
Urrea, who loved Helms like a brother, loved Hughston's ideas. He stayed.
In the wake of the Maritime split-up, two decades past Tribal Stomp, half a lifetime after the Avalon gave teen-agers a summer and a culture and a ballroom to call their own, no one wants to say anything very harsh about Chet Helms.
To have created and squandered opportunity, formed and crashed companies, turned looming victory to sudden business defeat on a heroic scale -- to have repeatedly sought the business success scorned by his generation's vision of virtue, and to have repeatedly failed to achieve that success, because of too strong a belief in the vision -- may be Helms' ambiguous legacy. It may be a legacy absolutely fitting of his enormously ambivalent generation.
But none of his contemporaries seems to blame him for any of the failures that pockmark his career in music promotion, perhaps because, on one level or another, all of those contemporaries, for some period of time, to a greater or lesser degree, believed in the people-first, business-second ethic that led Helms on his own trip.
The ultimate judgments of those who've known him best are, therefore, as gentle as evening fog on a windless night.
"Chet is really remarkable. He's very calming," says Queenie Taylor. "Whether that is good for business, who knows."
"I just think that Chet is a person that I like. Chet is still among us. He is a very capable keeper of the light. He is a person of very high integrity," says Herbie Herbert. "He could just make a buck instead of doing something for the Love Generation, but he's out there making love."
"If Chet had the money, I'd work for him," says Pete Slauson, the man who recorded Tribal Stomp to no eventual business purpose. "The situation would be unique. Only Chet can do it. The guy's sat there with George Harrison and the Beatles, and he knows them all. He created a great space. There was nothing to compare to the Avalon.
"No one else can create that kind of spirit.
