San Francisco Sound

The San Francisco Sound is a style of rock music that emerged from the San Francisco Bay Area in the mid-1960s and remained a dominant cultural force until the early 1970s. It was associated with the counterculture community in San Francisco, particularly the Haight-Ashbury district. The San Francisco Sound was characterised less by a specific musical signature than by an eagerness to experiment with different styles and instruments. Its key bands included Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Moby Grape. The sound is closely intertwined with the Summer of Love (1967), the broader American counterculture, and the widespread use of psychedelic drugs — particularly LSD — as an artistic and social catalyst.

Origins and precursors

San Francisco's live music scene originated in the 1940s with the Beat Generation. The Beatnik era was also bustling in SF coffeehouses like Hungry i and Vesuvio Cafe. Poets and musicians from around the state, country, and beyond gathered in the city and formed a core part of its identity.

The Beau Brummels were the first Top 40 pop group in San Francisco in the 1960s, with a Merseybeat-meets-folk style, heralding the new sound of the second half of the decade. Marty Balin of Jefferson Airplane has cited the We Five — a folk group managed by Frank Werber of the Kingston Trio's organisation — as a direct inspiration for the Airplane's early vocal and musical style.

The psychedelic rock band the Charlatans are considered early pioneers of the style, and a poster advertising their 1965 June residency in Virginia City, Nevada — a mash-up of Victorian and Wild West typography — is regarded as the first psychedelic rock poster. By the mid-1960s the focus shifted to the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood of San Francisco, which became a haven for the new hippie movement. The psychedelic experience inspired a great deal of improvisational music, or jamming, that gave rock an entirely new dimension of expression. The lyrics drifted to new subjects beyond boy-meets-girl, tending toward absurdist descriptions of the inward journey of the mind or the counterculture lifestyle.

Musical characteristics

Each San Francisco band had its characteristic sound, but enough commonalities existed that there was a recognisable regional identity. By 1967, fresh and adventurous improvisation during live performance — widely held to be epitomised by the Grateful Dead and the "cross-talk" guitar work of Moby Grape — was one defining characteristic of the sound.

The conventions of live performance were radically redefined: guitarists played solos lasting for several minutes, light shows provided visual accompaniment, and members of the audience dressed as spectacularly as the performers. Psychedelic experiences encouraged the use of feedback and distortion, and in some cases more orchestration. Some bands were committed to the lifestyle as well as to playing while stoned.

The ballrooms provided a backdrop for the San Francisco Sound, housing "dance concerts" headlined by bands like Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Big Brother and the Holding Company. The music, with its free-flowing guitar interludes and acid-infused lyrics, sounded best in a live setting, feeding off the energy from the audience.

Key venues

The development of the San Francisco Sound was inseparable from a network of ballrooms and clubs that served as its primary stages. The early band venues, while the new SF scene was emerging from folk and folk-rock beginnings, were often places like The Matrix nightclub. As audiences grew, and audience dancing became customary, performances moved into venues with more floor space, such as the Longshoreman's Hall, the Fillmore Auditorium, the Avalon Ballroom, Winterland, and the Carousel Ballroom — later renamed the Fillmore West.

From April 1966 to November 1968, the Avalon Ballroom came alive nightly with psychedelic light projections and an ever-growing rotation of San Francisco rock bands. From the stage up to the balcony, the old ballroom proved to have exceptional acoustics.

Music critic Ralph Gleason captured the scale of the scene in the San Francisco Chronicle in March 1967: "Nowhere else in the country has a whole community of rock music developed to the degree it has here. At dances at the Fillmore and the Avalon…thousands upon thousands of people support several dozen rock 'n' roll bands that play all over the area for dancing each week."

With support from deejays like Tom Donahue — first on the Top 40 station KYA and later on the new album-oriented FM stations KMPX and KSAN — and from San Francisco-based Rolling Stone magazine, founded in late 1967, the city became a centre of the world's popular music, with the Fillmore West emerging as an internationally renowned venue.

The Summer of Love

The movement reached its cultural apex in the summer of 1967. In the mid-1960s, the powerful psychedelic drug LSD was still legal, and in the summer of 1967 artists, activists, writers, and musicians converged on Haight-Ashbury with hopes of creating a new social paradigm, attracting as many as 100,000 young people from all over the nation.

At the June 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, Bay Area groups performed alongside established acts from the US, the UK, and India, bringing the San Francisco Sound to a national and international audience for the first time. Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow — released in February 1967 and featuring Grace Slick's "White Rabbit" and "Somebody to Love" — became the first blockbuster psychedelic album to emerge from San Francisco, announcing to the world the active bohemian scene that had developed there starting with the Beats during the 1950s and extending through the 1960s into the Haight-Ashbury counterculture.

Women enjoyed an equal status with men as stars in the San Francisco rock scene in a few key cases — a shift that has continued in the US music scene. Both Grace Slick singing with Jefferson Airplane, and Janis Joplin singing initially with Big Brother and the Holding Company, gained a substantial following locally and, before long, across the country.

Key artists

Artist	Notes
Jefferson Airplane	One of the scene's defining bands; Surrealistic Pillow (1967) and Crown of Creation (1968) are landmark releases
Grateful Dead	Widely regarded as the epitome of the scene's improvisational aesthetic; evolved from The Warlocks
Big Brother and the Holding Company	Best known as the band fronted by Janis Joplin; Cheap Thrills (1968) reached no. 1
Quicksilver Messenger Service	Known for extended live jams; among the most beloved bands in the local scene
Moby Grape	Praised for their interlocking "cross-talk" guitar work; released five singles simultaneously in 1967
The Charlatans	Considered the scene's earliest pioneers, preceding the Haight-Ashbury explosion
Santana	Combined rock, blues, jazz, and Latin music into a distinct strain of psychedelic rock
Sly & the Family Stone	A racially integrated band that fused soul and funk with the psychedelic scene
Creedence Clearwater Revival	From El Cerrito; brought a roots rock approach to the Bay Area scene

Decline

Most of the new local bands signed for large advances with major out-of-town labels, and the creative impetus was gradually lost. By 1968, the national media attention generated by the Airplane and others had precipitated a very different San Francisco scene than had existed in 1966. The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and the escalating Vietnam War darkened the optimism of the Summer of Love era, and the Haight-Ashbury district itself became overwhelmed by runaways and harder drug use. Jefferson Airplane's response to this shift can be heard on the more politicised Crown of Creation (1968) and Volunteers (1969).

By 1971, Chet Helms's Family Dog Productions had gone bankrupt, and Bill Graham was busy running a record label and organising large-scale outdoor concerts. The original members of the Airplane and the Dead splintered into side projects — Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady into Hot Tuna, Paul Kantner into a series of science fiction-themed solo records — as the cohesive communal scene that had defined the late 1960s dissolved.

Legacy

The San Francisco Sound's influence on rock music has been far-reaching and enduring. San Francisco was once called "the Liverpool of the United States", and after the 1960s and 1970s, punk rock and new wave became further staple genres in the city, carrying forward its tradition of countercultural music-making.

Soon after the Monterey Pop Festival, Ralph J. Gleason and Jann Wenner, based in San Francisco, established Rolling Stone magazine (first issue dated November 1967), which became the defining publication of the rock era and carried the values and aesthetics of the San Francisco scene into the wider culture.

Coming of age in the San Francisco Bay Area, singer-songwriter Stevie Nicks gained her first performing experience there in the 1960s, before going on to bring that San Francisco sound to Fleetwood Mac when she and Lindsey Buckingham both joined in 1975.