Editing San Francisco Sound (section)

=== 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.