Like an old drunk telling war stories at the bar, rock n’ roll has a tendency to regurgitate its own history. Different locales at different moments in time are fetishized as high watermarks of artistic achievement and stylistic cool. San Francisco in the 1960s, New York in the 1970s, Seattle in the 1990s. The problem isn’t the veracity of the tale but rather the mundanity of its repetition and the insinuation that if you were born too late, or lived too far away, or just plain didn’t know enough to witness it firsthand, you’re somehow inferior to those that did.
The new docu-series San Francisco Sounds: A Place in Time finds a new way to tell the same old story, examining the Bay Area rock scene before and after the “Summer of Love.” It was created by the same team that produced 2020’s Laurel Canyon series, including director Alison Ellwood, who also directed 2013’s History of the Eagles and 2020’s The Go-Go’s. Like the Laurel Canyon documentary, which chronicled the singer-songwriters who honed their craft in the hills above Los Angeles, it’s broken into two-hour-plus episodes and is streaming on MGM+, formerly known as Epix.
A gateway for immigrants from Asia and Latin America, San Francisco had always been a hub for multiculturalism and as a port town harbored free thinkers, adventurers, and outlaws. In the 1950s it was a hotbed of jazz and was one of the home bases of the Beat writers who laid the foundation for all counterculture to come. It attracted transplants from the South, such as Janis Joplin, and East Coast, like Jefferson Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen, who calls it “The edge of the Earth” and “A magical place.” Local coffee houses offered open mic nights where young musicians played folk, country, and blues simply for pleasure.
Former Rolling Stone magazine writer Ben Fong-Torres says forgotten local legends The Charlatans were the first rock ‘n’ roll band of the new scene. The Haight-Ashbury was then a Russian neighborhood where you could live cheap, stuffing yourself on perogies and splitting the rent on an old Victorian house with your bandmates. Local DJ Dusty Street notes how the music coming out of the respective bedrooms at the Grateful Dead’s communal home was indicative of the diversity of influences that shaped the San Francisco sound, bassist Phil Lesh listening to classical music, keyboardist Pigpen playing the blues and guitarist Jerry Garcia practicing bluegrass.
The Dead is one of the usual suspects mentioned in any discussion of the San Francisco scene, along with the Airplane and Big Brother & The Holding Company. Equal time, however, is given to lesser -known groups like Moby Grape, whose talent far surpassed their record sales. Rather than containing its coverage to the white rock bands that made up the hippie elite, ample coverage is also granted to Sly & The Family Stone, Santana, and Oakland’s Tower of Power, multiracial ensembles who broke down musical, social, and commercial barriers with their singular takes on soul, funk and Latin jazz.
Nearly as much time is spent discussing the city’s performance spaces and their booking agents. While Chet Helms at the Avalon Ballroom hired visionary graphic artists whose posters and light shows set the templates for rock art and presentation, Bill Graham at the Fillmore helped bands navigate the shark-infested waters of the music industry with steely business acumen. At the same time, the documentary explores how sympathetic radio support led to the advent of freeform radio as the San Francisco bands strayed from the conventional pop song format.
Musical festivals are the tent poles by which the documentary marks the life and death of the scene. 1967’s Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park and the Monterey International Pop Festival ushered in its heyday, but 1969’s Woodstock and the Altamont Speedway Free Festival provided triumph then calamity. Woodstock occurred in Upstate New York but heavily featured the San Francisco bands in career-making performances. Several bands also appeared at Altamont, organized by The Rolling Stones and held in Northern California’s San Joaquin Valley, which was plagued by violence, much of it meted out by the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club who were enlisted to provide security.
While the early scene was fueled by the mind-expanding possibilities of LSD, by decade’s end heroin flooded the streets. “We were a drug society, and unfortunately the drugs took a lot of people,” says Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick. Now affluent rock stars, many musicians moved over the Golden Gate Bridge to bucolic Marin County. The Fillmore closed. Bands broke apart. Some found Jesus. Some sold out. The Doobie Brothers embodied the next generation, hardly a good sign. What really killed the San Francisco scene? Lame music. I was hoping episode two would end with Starship’s “We Built This City,” voted “Worst Song of The ‘80s” by onetime local rag Rolling Stone. Instead, it ends with “Lights” by Journey. Same diff.
Few eras in rock history have been as over-examined as the late ‘60s hippie epoch. Cliches abound and the smug self-satisfaction of Boomer nostalgia knows no depths, making every mocking meme well deserved. That said, San Francisco Sounds entertains and informs on every level and finds something new to say by expanding its scope beyond the music to include the visual artists, concert promoters, and the venues that made up the scene. It should serve as the ultimate authority on the subject and hopefully the final say.
Benjamin H. Smith is a New York based writer, producer and musician.
