He was known as the father of the 1967 Summer of Love. And he was from Fort Worth.

In 1960, Chet Helms was a crew-cut kid who lived on Avenue D and attended Poly High School, where he was a member of Junior Classical League, Bio-Chem-Phy, ROTC.

After graduating, Chet enrolled at the University of Texas, where he became involved in Austin’s folk music scene and met a blues singer named Janis Joplin.

In 1963, Helms and Joplin hitchhiked from Fort Worth to San Francisco. Helms lived in a boardinghouse in the Haight-Ashbury district.

In 1963, America’s counterculture was morphing. The label “beatnik” would soon yield to “hippie.” The counterculture’s taste in music, too, was morphing from un-amplified folk music to amplified folk, folk-rock, rock, acid rock, etc.

As American counterculture and its music were morphing, so was Chet Helms. The crew cut was replaced by shoulder-length hair, the clean-shaven cheeks by whiskers, the black-rimmed glasses by rimless glasses. The Baptist-raised boy “from a tea-totaling family” who had drunk only “a few odd beers here and there” began experimenting with methamphetamine, LSD and peyote.

Helms also began to organize and host jam sessions for local bands in his boardinghouse.

In 1965, he became manager of a band: Big Brother and the Holding Company.

The next year Helms founded Family Dog Productions to promote concerts at the Fillmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom.

Soon Helms’ Big Brother and the Holding Company became the house band at the Avalon.

But the band needed a leader singer.

Helms convinced Joplin to audition.

She got the job.

Janis Joplin debuted with Big Brother at the Avalon on June 10, 1966.

Then came the Summer of Love in 1967, when as many as 100,000 “flower children” converged on Haight-Ashbury.

During that Summer of Love, Chet Helms got Big Brother and Janis Joplin the appearance that made them famous: the Monterey Pop Festival, a precursor of Woodstock two years later. Among the performers at the Monterey County Fairgrounds: the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, the Who, Jimi Hendrix, the Byrds and the Mamas and the Papas.

On June 17, 1967, Chet Helms stood on the Monterey stage and introduced the second act of the day: Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin.

Chet Helms, because of his concert promotions, has been called “the father of the Summer of Love.” Promotional posters created by Family Dog Productions have become collectible.

Over the years, Helms and his Family Dog Productions organized and promoted concerts by a veritable who’s who of 1960s music: Doors, Buffalo Springfield, Country Joe and the Fish, Moby Grape, Sopwith Camel, 13th Floor Elevators, Flying Burrito Brothers, Byrds, Kinks, Eric Burdon and the Animals, Mothers of Invention, Lovin’ Spoonful, Steve Miller, Carlos Santana Blues Band, Sir Douglas Quintet, Grass Roots, Captain Beefheart, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Association, Iron Butterfly, Steppenwolf, Poco, Joan Baez and, yes, Flatt and Scruggs.

Helms died in 2005 at age 62. He had outlived, for example, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan of the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison of the Doors, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, Al Wilson of Canned Heat. And, of course, Janis Joplin. All dead before age 30.

Today his remains reside in a columbarium 10 blocks from the intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets.

In the words of the Grateful Dead, for Chet Helms, a crew-cut kid from Avenue D, “what a long, strange trip” it had been.

Mike Nichols blogs about Fort Worth history at www.hometownbyhandlebar.com.