[Cover photo credit to Bill Brach]
High Moon Records has announced The Final Solution – Just Like Gold: Live At The Matrix, the first-ever anthology from San Francisco Psychedelic scene pioneers The Final Solution, available tomorrow, May 9, 2025 on CD, LP, and digitally.
Newly transferred from reels and mastered by 10x Grammy Award-nominated engineer Dan Hersch, the collection captures a July 1966 live performance at SF club The Matrix. Both the CD and LP come with a booklet containing photos from Herb Greene and Bill Brach, rare posters, and a detailed essay from Grammy Award-nominated compilation producer Alec Palao.
The CD further includes an additional live bonus track along with six tracks recorded in their rehearsal space in November 1966 with The Great! Society’s Jerry Slick on drums.
Just Like Gold: Live At The Matrix showcases the quartet that never even got to release a record, but whose sound and style conveys the air of early psychedelia. The Solution was formed in 1965 by bassist Bob Knickerbocker and guitarist Ernie Fosselius, friends at San Francisco State. Rounding out the band were John Chance on drums and John Yager on guitar and vocals.
The group began by playing Haight-Ashbury dives like Haight Levels, but they soon got a month-long residency at the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City, NV. In July of 1966, The Final Solution stepped in to perform when The Great! Society were forced to cancel a gig at San Francisco’s club, The Matrix.
Peter Abram was running his tape deck that night and captured a dynamic set that shows the band’s diversity and musical chops.
After Chance left the group in the fall of 1966 to return to his studies and was replaced by The Great! Society’s Jerry Slick on drums, The Final Solution moved into a more musically experimental phase. But when a hopeful recording contract never panned out, the band’s members eventually drifted apart.
The Final Solution – Just Like Gold: Live At the Matrix 1966 marks the first in a planned series from High Moon Records of authentic location recordings from The Matrix. From 1965 to 1971, this tiny club hosted not only Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the Grateful Dead, but also a host of lesser-known yet no less worthy acts in the Rock, Blues, Jazz and Folk fields.
