Scene: San Francisco 1966-69
The perfect storm creates an awe-inspiring rainbow. In the Summer of Love, that star-crossed solstice of the psychotropic year of 1967, all third eyes pointed toward San Francisco at the nexus of Haight and Ashbury, a sound-and-vision track of mind-genre expansion.
Set and setting, like the happenstance of tripping itself, enhanced the soupcon of musical expression that shot the Bay Area to the forefront of popular consciousness. The counter-cultural and political upheavals of the 1960s had revealed deep fault lines between generations, and in San Francisco — with its legacy of bohemian beatnik finding new definition in the tribal signifier of “hippie” — there was a pool of musicians who were far enough removed from mainstream pop to experiment with different modes of presentation. Helped along by a thriving ballroom scene — the Fillmore and the Avalon — which allowed these bands room to improvise and experiment, as well as placing them within the liquid light show of a “happening” that attempted to replicate the hallucinogenic effects of this newly liberated hedonistic and spiritual lifestyle, the core originators of what would be known as the San Francisco Sound created a magnetic locus for musicians around the globe.
It wasn’t just rock — though there was certainly an influence from the British Invasion and its consequential impact on the American garage. The blues was an important element, not only for guitaristics, but also for providing a ready songbook ripe for 12-bar extrapolation; there were also elements of the abstract expressionism of free jazz, country’s plaintive wail, and the influx of poetics and surreal imagery that had “gone electric” with the evolution of Bob Dylan. This stewpot allowed for an anything-goes attitude that allowed performers and audience to feel as if they’d been set free from known boundaries, and the sonic enhancements were many.
All too soon, the city was discovered and sensationalized (not unjustly), its freak-freely ethic subsumed by stereotype and the darkening portents that made the idealism of “Life is Love/Love Is Life” (in the words of Quicksilver Messenger Service) seem a utopian dream as the sixties came to their sobering finale in the yin and yang of Woodstock and Altamont. But by then, the San Francisco Sound had Quaked ’round the world.
