Editing San Francisco Sound (section)

=== 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.