The Beans — The Phoenix Band That Became The Tubes

Origin

Out of the
Arizona desert.

Two Phoenix bands, one U-Haul to San Francisco, and the blueprint for American art rock.

In the late 1960s, a group of Phoenix high-school friends — Bill Spooner on guitar, Vince Welnick on keyboards, and future collaborators who'd eventually become core members of The Tubes — formed a band they called The Beans. It was the Arizona desert, the tail end of the 60s, and the band fed on a diet of psychedelia, hard rock, Zappa, and whatever was coming out of the California underground.

Like a lot of ambitious Phoenix bands of the era, The Beans figured out quickly that to be taken seriously, they had to get to the Bay Area. So they did. Around the turn of the decade, the whole operation loaded into a truck and relocated to San Francisco, settling into the cheap-rent communal-house circuit that powered so much early-70s SF rock.

The Beans — Phoenix, circa 1970. L-R: Rick Anderson, Bill Spooner, Vince Welnick, Bob McIntosh

The Sound

Weirder,
louder,
bigger.

Art Rock

Long-form, theatrical

Extended suites, complex arrangements, and a streak of absurdist humor that would later define The Tubes' songwriting DNA.

Live Spectacle

Props, costumes, chaos

Even in the bar-band days, The Beans were drawn to theatrical staging — the seeds of Quay Lewd were planted in smoky SF clubs.

Communal

One house, one kitchen

Members lived together, wrote together, and argued together. It was rehearsal as lifestyle.

The Beans — concert poster, Trinity Cathedral, June 1970

1972 · The Merger

Enter The
Red, White &
Blues Band.

San Francisco, 1972. Another Phoenix transplant outfit — The Red, White & Blues Band, featuring Roger Steen, Rick Anderson, and a young scene-maker named John "Fee" Waybill (then the band's roadie, soon its frontman) — had landed in the Bay Area with the same ambitions as The Beans.

The two bands knew each other from home. They shared rehearsal spaces, crashed at each other's houses, and eventually did the obvious thing: merged. What came out the other side wasn't The Beans and it wasn't The Red, White & Blues Band. It was a new beast entirely.

They called it The Tubes.

The Tubes →

Hear The Beans · Live

The only recording.

Open in YouTube

The Beans never cut a studio album — but this audio-only concert tape survives, posted to YouTube. It's the closest you can get to standing in a Bay Area club in 1971, watching the band that would become The Tubes.

Vince Welnick · Keyboards

From The Beans
to the Grateful Dead.

Vince Welnick played keyboards in The Beans alongside Bill Spooner. He was there from the Phoenix days — one of the original members of the band that would eventually become The Tubes. The communal house in San Francisco, the Bay Area club circuit, the rehearsal-as-lifestyle years — Vince was part of all of it.

After the Beans era and his time with The Tubes, Welnick went on to become the final full-time keyboardist of the Grateful Dead, joining the band in 1990 following the death of Brent Mydland. He performed with the Dead through the rest of Jerry Garcia's life, appearing on their final albums and tours before Garcia's death in 1995.

Welnick later fronted his own band, Missing Man Formation, and continued performing until his death in 2006. For Grateful Dead fans tracing the full arc of the band's history, the trail leads back here: to a Phoenix art-rock band in 1969, loading into a van for San Francisco, with a young keyboardist who would one day play Madison Square Garden with the most devoted fanbase in rock music.

The Tubes → About Bill →

The Beans · in frame.

The Beans with their hand-painted van in San Francisco — Bob McIntosh, Vince Welnick, Bill Spooner, Roger Steen

The Beans van · San Francisco

Phoenix · circa 1970

Archival article clipping — Bob McIntosh, Vince Welnick, Bill Spooner, Roger Steen with the Beans van. McIntosh was the inspiration for 'Golden Boy.'

Archive clipping · "Golden Boy"

Concert poster · June 1970

Out of theArizona desert.

Weirder, louder, bigger.