The following are articles I've scanned in from a copy of The History of Rock (Issue 46) published in 1982. The first part is an introduction to the Californian counter-culture and was written by John Platt. The second part is on the bands that made music in the Bay Area and was written by Steve Burgess. Lastly John Platt, again, explores how the ideals of the early Haight Ashbury hippies went sour as early as 1968.

All copyrights remain with the original owners. These articles are published on this site in the knowledge that it is for reference only and that this is a non-profit making site. Any reproduction of these articles for financial gain would have to be cleared with the copyright owners. If anyone has a problem with copyright issues then please email me and the offending item shall be removed.

Lastly, all opinions expressed are the writers' owns personal opinions and don't necessarily concur with mine.

Part I
SF Fantasies - Beach Parties gave way to San Francisco's counter culture in the summer of 1967
In the late fifties and early Sixties, California was the Mecca of the American Dream. It was the Golden Land of endless summers and surf-pounded beaches; and the city of Los Angeles stood for everything that was modern and go-ahead. By the late Sixties, however, the hippest city in California was undoubtedly San Francisco. This change in emphasis marked a definite shift in rock music. Popular music was part of established business in LA; but San Francisco represented something else - rock as counter-culture, as a lifestyle, and as music outside the corporate business structure.

Ever since Hollywood had become the entertainment centre of the world in the Twenties there had been people in Southern California with an awful lot of money and a lot of time in which to spend it. Leisure took on a whole new meaning. As Kenneth Anger's book Hollywood Babylon makes clear, the excesses of the Sixties were nothing new. Whatever you wanted drugs or sex, or booze during the Prohibition era - someone could provide it; and if it was legal someone would package it and serve it up to the masses.

The film industry expanded rapidly in the Thirties and Forties and moved into the newer areas of radio, records and TV. By the early Sixties all the major labels were centred on LA, some such as Columbia and Warner Bros being offshoots of film companies. Success, other than on a local level, meant a move to LA.

Beach party romps
A whole new lifestyle grew up around the beaches and was adopted by teenagers who had access to parental wealth, enjoyed long summer vacations and were seemingly blessed (particularly the girls) with almost supernatural beauty. To the outsider it all seemed very enviable, especially as portrayed by Hollywood exploitation movies that featured Annette Funicello in endless beach party romps. It wasn't just the beaches, either: the whole business of going to drive-ins and cruising for burgers in huge sports cars seemed a million miles away for most teenagers.

It was perhaps inevitable that a musical style should grow up alongside this pleasureable way of life. Dick Dale was the first to play music that reflected surfing, but when Dennis Wilson suggested to his brothers that they should write songs about it, a new musical genre came into being.

The traditional Hollywood role had been to market myths, and now they had found, on their own doorstep, one they could sell to the world. Teenagers, even if they were 1000 miles from the nearest beach, dreamed of surf as those beautiful harmonies washed over them. By late 1963 the surf-sound had swept the States and by the end of 1964 the Beach Boys were popular worldwide.

But fads fade, and by late 1964 America was in the grip of Beatlemania, which was followed by the British invasion. Suddenly, pallid, hairy British groups became far more appealing, both visually and musically, than sun-bronzed blond Californians. Anxious to be first with a new trend, LA welcomed the new styles with open arms. The British Mod look - or America's somewhat bizarre variant of it - was perfect for fun-loving LA.

New kicks
The other new musical style was folk-protest. Bob Dylan was starting to break out of the purist market, civil rights was becoming a burning issue and agitation over the Vietnam War was growing. With the Beatles showing that rock could be fun, a marriage of socially conscious lyrics and 'the English sound' proved irresistible.

Initially, the new movement was spontaneous - even as successful a group as the Byrds were nothing less than sincere. But by the end of 1965 the LA record industry was sucking in anybody that could be turned into a protest singer, provided they could make money: the 'message' was all. In the process some great records were made - Barry McGuire's 'Eve Of Destruction', many by the Turtles, even Sonny and Cher.

By mid 1966 the protest genre began to wane, however, splitting roughly two ways. On the one hand were the Mamas and the Papas, Spanky and Our Gang, and Harper's Bizarre who, with smooth harmonies, trod an uneasy path between beautifully-crafted soft-rock and mawkish MOR. The second strand were folk-oriented bands who moved further towards rock and pioneered the LA psychedelic scene that was to attract media attention.

Initially, the LA psychedelic scene was traditional Hollywood decadence with new trappings. The early clubs like Ciro's and the Whiskey were full of well-heeled young movie types looking for new kicks. The Peter Fonda film The Trip accurately portrays the period that produced some amazing music by bands of the calibre of Buffalo Springfield, Love and Kaleidoscope.

Although most of these bands were folk based, a few weren't - notably the Doors and the Mothers of Invention. Jim Morrison's persona and lifestyle are pure Hollywood and Zappa's music, on certain levels, portrayed perfectly LA trash culture.

LA has produced the ultimate pre-packaged disposable society. The flip-side of Dream City is that it is one of the ugliest, most polluted places on earth. Despite the fact that so much innovative music came out of it in the Sixties LA tended to follow trends, not make them. By 1967 the psychedelic scene in LA was largely copy of what was happening 400 miles up the coast in San Francisco. Previously LA had a ways managed to become the centre of trend even though it hadn't started them; but with the growth of the San Francisco sound and culture, it failed to do so. The big companies suddenly became aware that things were happening in San Francisco, and that the group there represented not just the local eccentric ties of a small community, but were making music that struck home to an audience on worldwide scale.

Rock turns acid
The San Francisco scene did not just appear overnight, of course. Like the Liverpool sour before it, this musical phenomenon had a particular history. Most of the San Francisco bands had been in existence for well over a year when the great surge of interest began in 1967 and the majority of the musicians had been involved in music (mainly folk) since the beginning of the decade.

Whether there was a genuine San Francisco sound is a moot point. Most groups played bastardised, but very electric, folk-rock with plenty of added ingredients gleaned from jazz blues, Eastern and even classical music. Unlike their LA counterparts who generally sounded better in the studio, live performance was more important to the San Francisco bands. Their music was spontaneous and free flowing, often featuring long improvisations was dubbed acid rock because most of the bands indulged in drugs. More important than the music itself was what it represented: a new set of relationships between performer and audience; a new idea of the possibilities of rock.

The great LA-SF meeting occurred at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967. Although it was organised almost entirely from LA, and despite the presence of the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield, San Francisco groups like the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Co (with Janis Joplin) showed themselves to be the real stars. Monterey was a watershed. A&R men swamped San Francisco in the subsequent months, attempting to sign up every long-haired band in sight. The Summer of Love in San Francisco had arrived and, for a while at least, the city was the musical centre of California and the world.

Part II
The bands that made music in the Bay Area
During the fifties and early Sixties, the United States was the breeding-ground for every genre and progression in popular music and the San Francisco Bay Area, as a hotbed of bohemianism, played a major part in this development. A singularly European city in terms of scale and atmosphere, San Francisco thrummed with bebop and beatnik jazz - based around the local independent Fantasy label - and, later, with the sound of young folkies preaching civil rights and nuclear disarmament in song. In 1964, the Beatles burst into the American media, ending Stateside pop dominance, and the young inhabitants of the Bay Area were immediately won over to the new sounds.

The British invasion had an immediate effect on the American pop scene as hordes of groups formed and attempted to emulate the musical feats of the Beatles, Stones et al. The Bay Area witnessed a particular flurry of such activity and by 1967, with flower power in full bloom, San Francisco had taken over as the rock capital of the world. 'Merseybeat' was long passé - it was now the age of the San Francisco sound.

Incense and peppermints
The first bull's-eye for San Franciscan rock had come from a group whose devotion to Merseybeat was total - the Beau Brummels; their first national hit, 'Laugh Laugh' in January 1965, was a direct copy of the Beatles' sound, while on later recordings, such as 'Don't Talk To Strangers', they aped the Searchers. Meanwhile, at upmarket clubs like Mother's and the Peppermint Tree, imports such as New York's Lovin' Spoonful and the Byrds from Los Angeles were wowing the hip vanguard. Rock was becoming more hedonistic, more erotic, more of a confrontation as technology and drugs (particularly LSD) were thrown into the melting pot. Although no distinct 'sound', as such, existed among the bands of San Francisco, there was a recipe of sorts, the ingredients of which included American rock'n'roll (as subverted by the energy of the British invasion), jazz, folk and country. And running through the diversity of the hundreds of bands that seethed through the area during the boom years of hippiedom was a shared spirit, an exultation in community.

Typical of the hippie bands were the Great Society - young, bedraggled, and intense; they were fronted by guitarist Darby Slick and his ex-model sister-in-law Grace who in 1966 wrote and sang a dervish hymn called 'White Rabbit' in praise of LSD. The Great Society galvanised the scene and Tom Donahue, pioneer of FM rock, took them under his wing and along to his own Autumn label, where they recorded under the canny eye of Sly Stewart - the Sly Stone of later years.

Suddenly there was spontaneous combustion, a breakout on several levels as musicians and street performers began to swarm around the intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets. LSD was readily available and still legal, and outright weirdness was de rigueur. New venues opened, hosting 'dance-concerts' with wildly eclectic bills and liquid and luminous 'psychedelic' lightshows. One such hall was the Avalon, where the Grateful Dead conducted their Acid Tests. Another was the Matrix where a polite folk-rock outfit, quaintly named Jefferson Airplane, seduced Grace Slick and her repertoire from the Great Society and became the first Bay band to achieve national stardom. Be-Ins in the park demonstrated that a new movement was being born, and the establishment was frankly baffled.

As the disgruntled young flotsam of affluent America began to make tracks for the celebrated Haight, with them came myriad bands, particularly from Texas and the South. Such diverse groupings as the flashy Steve Miller Blues Band, the downhome Sir Douglas Quintet, Mother Earth and the punky Other Half migrated to escape the redneck belt. Others, like Salvation, Mad River and Melting Pot, just showed up looking for receptive ears. By the end of 1966 there were hundreds of groups working in the area, from the spacey HP Lovecraft to the true originators of Bay Edwardian chic the Charlatans; from the poppy Sopwith Camel to drug-oriented heavies like Loading Zone, Little John, Second Coming and the brass augmented Sons of Champlin. Loose aggregations with exotic names like William Penn and His Pals, the Only Alternative and His Other Possibilities, and Walter Wart and the Pickledish swarmed fruitlessly. The radical intellectuals of the university district of Berkeley contributed the lilting feminism of Joy of Cooking and the psychedelic folk of Country Joe and the Fish. North of the city, Sausalito countered with the musclebound funk of Tower of Power.

Through 1966, the hippies - as they had, essentially sarcastically, come to be called never had it so good. But the dreams soon faded. Acid was legislated off the streets and would-be hippies began to litter the Haight as the glare of worldwide media attention focused on the lifestyle of the 'now generation'. And with the media came the record companies, who began signing SF acts with abandon. Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Steve Miller Band went to Capitol, the latter with an enormous advance, while Columbia picked up Moby Grape - potentially the greatest of them all - then proceeded to destroy them under a heap of hype and gimmick such as the simultaneous release of five singles, all culled from the group's debut album. Columbia also grabbed the loud and gutsy Big Brother and the Holding Company, fronted by Janis Joplin.

In their frenzy to cash in on the hippie boom, less astute companies continued to sign up any gaggle of longhairs with little regard for their musical qualities. The sublime and the ridiculous mingled as Vanguard signed the excellent Notes from the Underground and the pompous Serpent Power, Mercury snaffled Morning Glory, Savage Resurrection and Linn County, while Dot got the dubious Womb and the frightful Mount Rushmore. Yes, even total turkeys like the twee and silly Columbia signings Gale Garnett and the Gentle Reign got a look-in.

Woodstock withers
Like all constructs of fashion and media, the blooming fascination of the Bay Area had eventually to fade as the Haight became ugly with squalor and desperation and the nucleus of intellectual activity left town in resignation. The positive exhilaration of Country Joe, the Airplane and their contemporaries gave way to gloomy confrontation as Vietnam came to the forefront of public consciousness and a chain of sad circumstance led from the euphoric bravado of Monterey and Woodstock Nation, through the Kent State slayings to Altamont, where the Dead and the Airplane stood in the wings and watched the hippie dream sour in an orgy of violence. By the end of the decade, people were using their kaftans to wash the car and the Bay Area beat boom had withered and died.

In the appendix of his book The Jefferson Airplane And The San Francisco Sound the journalist devotee of SF rock, the late Ralph J. Gleason, listed the many hundreds of groups active in the Bay Area during the Sixties. Their stylistic diversity was astonishing and their abilities infinitely variable, but their Utopian fantasies were seductively consistent and drastically mobilised rock's potential as a vehicle for communication and social evolution. In the final analysis, the San Francisco sound existed in the spirit of the city and the political stance of its musicians.

'White Rabbit' was the anthem for a generation, and the legacy of San Francisco remains a loud, proud affirmation of love, life and laughter through electric music for mind and body.

Part III
Street Life: how love went sour on Haight Ashbury.
The Haight Ashbury community in San Francisco did not, as is somethimes believed, appear suddenly at the drop of an acid tab. Its roots went back a long way. San Francisco's long traditions of bohemianism stretched back to the founding of the modern city in the mid-nenteenth century. What made the tradition unique was its fusion of outrageous self-indulgence with serious, and often radical, intellectualism.

SF grew up as a goldrush town full of brothels, gambling halls and opium dens - particularly in an area known as the Barbary Coast, which was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake. There already existed communities in the Bay Area that catered for all persuasions - theosophists, world reform freaks, occult dabblers, et al. By the turn of the century the city had gained a reputation as a hven for anyone who felt out-of-step with society.

Breath of fresh air
By the mid Fifties, SF had its own Beat community, centred on North Beach, which was full of artists, poets, musicians and craftsmen. North Beach was awash with people living a completely new style of life. There were bars like the Place featuring a 'Blabbermouth Night', when people could sound off on whatever subject they wanted, and bookshops like City Lights, which was run by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who was busted for publishing Allen Ginsberg's Howl. Freedom was the key word and drugs became fashionable. Smoking marijuana had been accepted in the jazz world for years - now middle-class white kids were starting to indulge.

While preserving its very individual identity, the North Beach community attracted numerous outsiders; Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg both lived in the area, on and off, for years. After the conformist pressures of the McCarthy years and in the midst of America's booming consumer society, the Beats seemed like a breath of fresh air to many young people.

North Beach lasted as an entity until about 1960, when the community started to crack under the twin pressures of police activity- not even San Francisco was that liberal - and commercialisation. The area became SF's strip-club centre, although many of the old haunts survived by putting on folk music: places like the Coffee Gallery and the Fox and Hounds which, within a couple of years, provided a stage for Janis Joplin and Dino Valente.

Kids growing up in the suburbs and down the peninsula in towns like Palo Alto were discovering a Beatnik lifestyle for themselves- growing their hair, abandoning suits and ties and discovering marijuana. Many of them moved into folk music, and at places like the Tangent in Palo Alto and the Boar's Head in San Mateo in 1962 you could have heard people like Jerry Garcia and Pigpen (later of the Grateful Dead) and Peter Albin (later in Big Brother and the Holding Company).

Around the same time, writer Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, was taking part in Government investigations into the effects of LSD. Afterwards he started throwing parties with acid as the chief attraction. In 1965 these events evolved into the notorious Acid Tests, organised by his entourage, the Merry Pranksters, in hired bars and night clubs, sometimes beneath the gaze of the bemused proprietors. The Grateful Dead were the house band. and the music mingled freely with tape, slide and performance shows. Quite often, several things would be going on at once; ('there was this incredible cross interference and weirdness,' Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead recalled later.

A new community was simultaneously growing up in another part of the city-the old Haight Ashbury district, an area full of crumbling, but elegant, Victorian houses. For years it had been a working-class area, housing mainly Polish and other European immigrants. By the early Sixties its cheap rents were attracting new inhabitants, many from North Beach.

Links between the Beatnik days and Haight Ashbury were strong. One of the first new residents in the Haight was Beat poet Michael McClure, whose play The Beard won him notoriety in 1966 and who helped organise the first Human Be-In, along with Allen Ginsberg.

Although the hippies, as they were to be known, had attitudes similar to those of the Beatniks, times had changed. The McCarthy era had passed, civil rights and the Vietnam War were becoming contentious and there were different things to enjoy - in particular rock music and acid. Local rock music started to emerge as the folk musicians began to go electric. By the late summer of 1965 the pioneers of the new breed were getting together.

The Charlatans, in their Wild West gambling outfits, played probably the first real SF rock music that summer - ironically in Virginia City, Nevada. They were loosely associated with an outfit called the Family Dog who lived in a commune on Pine Street, a couple of blocks from the Haight. Later that year they hired the Longshoremen's Hall in downtown SF and put on three dances that are acknowledged as being the first rock dance-concerts in the city. Most of Haight Ashbury turned out in all manner of bizarre costumes as cowboys, Indians, riverboat gamblers.

The Family Dog helped organise a three-day Trips Festival in the New Year of 1967 at the Fillmore Auditorium in the black ghetto that bordered Haight Ashbury. Drawing on the experience of the Acid Tests, the Trips Festival attempted to re-create the aural and visual effects of LSD through music and light shows.

One man who recognised the money-making potential of these new ventures was Bill Graham, who began organising dances at the Fillmore Auditorium. But it was the Avalon Ballroom, run by the Family Dog, under the guidance of Chet Helms, that became the real music centre of the community, drawing in bands like the 13th Floor Elevators from Texas, Kaleidoscope from LA and the Youngbloods from New York, as well as local bands. Just down the road was Golden Gate Park, which became a venue for free rock concerts; its offshoot, the Panhandle, was used as a base from which the Diggers - a kind of underground Good Samaritans - could distribute free food.

One long carnival
Life in Haight Ashbury was, as far as possible, one long carnival. People worked - but mainly at things they enjoyed doing and which they considered to benefit the community. Places like the Psychedelic Shop at 1535 Haight Street, selling drugs paraphernalia and psychedelic posters, was also a meeting place and information centre. As the community began to attract more and more media attention, runaways from all over flocked to the Haight in the search for drugs and free love. The city fathers and the police were growing worried and the previously-flaunted freedoms of the hippies became threatened.

In many ways, 1967's Summer of Love was both the climax and the end of the Haight Ashbury community. Events like the Human Be-In, held in Golden Gate Park in January 1967, had been a big success and the music was getting better and better. But the intensity of the media coverage of Haight Ashbury caused such an influx of young hopefuls that the community - both the informal networks like the Diggers, and the official social services - could no longer support them. The influx also brought with it a commercialisation of the drug scene and, according to Jerry Garcia, an injection of old, hard-nosed East Coast values which were antipathetic to the hippie lifestyle and philosophy: 'The inability of not being able to say, "Get out, go away" . . . tells us something about what innocence is. It's that which allows itself to become no longer innocent.'

Sensing the change, the original freaks moved out. Behind them they left the casualties of the heavily adulterated acid that had become widespread. Murder, rape, prostitution reached alarming proportions. The public health authorities could not cope, and disease became widespread; there were even rumours of bubonic plague. By mid 1968, Haight Ashbury had become a ghetto for speed freaks and muggers.