A Cultural History of Popular Music in San Francisco (1965-69)

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San Francisco and the Long 60s is a cultural study of popular music in the San Francisco Bay Area between the years 1965 and 1969. Those years mark the period of psychedelic experimentation, countercultural revolt, and musical revolution, which I am calling 'the short 60s'. San Francisco and the Long 60s is also a reflection on the dissemination of the contemporary local community to geographically disparate pockets of countercultural activity, and the perpetuation of the local ideology beyond the confines of geographical and temporal space - what I am calling 'the long 60s'. By 1965 the focus of San Francisco's alternative artistic community had shifted from beatnik North Beach to the hippie centre of Haight-Ashbury. Just outside of the city, author Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters started to hold what they called Acid Tests - multi-media parties, anarchic theatre, an attempt to find, in Kesey's words, a 'new reality'. The Acid Tests, and the ensuing multi-media events that followed in its wake, shaped the production and consumption of popular music in San Francisco, and ultimately provided a template for the live musical experience in cities across the United States and Europe. At the time of the Acid Tests the 'sound of San Francisco' was yet to be codified; in the short 60s the Bay Area was home to a popular music that fused folk, country and rock with philosophy, anarchy and acid. The music emerged organically from, and served the needs of, the Haight community. The concerts held at venues such as the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore Auditorium satisfied the community's appetite for contemporary popular music, both local and international, and enshrined a particular musical-environmental ethos which is still palpable locally today.The shift from the 'short' to 'long' 60s was not seamless, however, and the point of rupture was 1967, the moment publicized to the outside world as 'the Summer of Love'. By 1967 San Francisco had become the destination for seekers of psychedelic enlightenment; but the Haight-based counterculture, shaped by the simple desire to care for the people in its immediate environment, could not sustain the influx of people. In October 1967 members of the original community staged a symbolic 'Death of the Hippie' funeral march down Haight Street; many other members of the community had already left the city to live simple lives elsewhere in the Bay Area. The music of the long 60s reflects that shift. It became less about the psychedelic journey and more about a particular spiritual and political ethos. It bore little evidence of mind-altering chemicals, and was characterized above all else by acoustic instruments and tight vocal harmonies. San Francisco bands such as Moby Grape and the Grateful Dead embraced this musical style, and their musical output, from 1967 onward, allowed a more direct address, often crystallizing in their lyrics the simple truths gleaned from the short 60s. San Francisco and the Long 60s is both an historical account of the 'short 60s' and an oral history of the 'long 60s'. During the Fellowship period I will write the first half of my monograph, an historical narrative of the short 60s, analyzing certain key musical texts that provide examples of contemporary articulations of the hippie ideology. I will also complete my fieldwork, capturing on digital video the reminiscences of members of the original Haight community. Many of these agents of the short 60s are now in their sixties and seventies, and while their experiences form the basis of a 'living memory', that will not be the case for much longer.