Key San Francisco bands

The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, and Country Joe and the Fish were among the important musicians of the San Francisco psychedelic scene.

We turn now to San Francisco’s musicians, subculture, and key bands. You may already know some of the artists I will discuss: the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, and also Country Joe and the Fish. First: why these musicians belong to the psychedelic scene, and what music counts as psychedelic.

The Grateful Dead formed in 1965, first as the Warlocks, playing Rolling Stones songs and Chicago electric blues. Their roots were American traditional folk and jug-band music. (Note: a jug band uses jugs and homemade instruments—ordinary objects adapted for sound: washboard, spoons, bones, comb and paper, etc.) Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, and Bob Weir were already in the band; some of them began doing Acid Tests for Ken Kesey. As the San Francisco scene grew, they played. Look at posters for San Francisco events and it is hard to find one without the Grateful Dead—they were always on. They invented a highly improvisational method. As Jerry Garcia used to say: whatever tune we try to play, however short the original, we start and it slowly gets longer. Not always totally free improvisation—though sometimes they did that—but they liked stretching tunes into long freeform pieces. Around them, people on psychedelics under colorful lights did not dance as on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand; they danced freeform in all kinds of ways. That fit what the Grateful Dead were playing.

An important fact: because of that improvisation, they were mainly a live band. You want to hear them live; hearing the same song many times is fine, because each time is different. Fixing one authoritative album version of a song was foreign to them. Think of how Sgt. Pepper’s tunes were recorded—everything done that way in the studio. Or Pet Sounds: it has to be that way, right? So if you hear the Beatles or a tribute band, you want them to play as on the record. Not so for the Grateful Dead.

For years their records were only so-so. They cut a March 1967 album called The Grateful Dead; most fans say it is not a good representation. 1968’s Anthem of the Sun is not either—but “That’s It for the Other One” was built by Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh in the studio by splicing earlier live tapes, fading sections in and out almost at random. It sounds very avant-garde; if you edit it the right way and play it for music students as unknown Stockhausen, they would believe it. They would be shocked it was the Grateful Dead—experimental, avant-garde, noisy, no clear chord progression. Much improvisation is like “Dark Star” on 1970’s Live/Dead, stretching solos and so on. The Grateful Dead were ambitious and well aware of modern and avant-garde music. Phil Lesh had studied electronic composition and knew that world; he was also involved with San Francisco’s tape center, dedicated to electronic music and technology—close to what the Dead did. That is mainly what they did as a live band.

By contrast, Jefferson Airplane also had hip live shows and lots of improvisation, but they also wrote singles. The Grateful Dead did not have many radio-friendly singles; they offered a whole concept. Jefferson Airplane did well on AM. Marty Balin and Paul Kantner formed them in 1965; in 1966 they made Jefferson Airplane Takes Off. But they really took off after Grace Slick joined as singer. She came from the Great Society and brought songs—“Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit,” both on 1967’s Surrealistic Pillow, both AM hits. In 1967 America, “Somebody to Love” hit No. 5 and “White Rabbit” No. 8. They were happy to play them live, but shows also had much improvisation. Jefferson Airplane had pop songs in the arsenal; the Grateful Dead did not—and that did not bother the Dead.

Another artist with hit potential was Janis Joplin. Born in Port Arthur, Texas, she went to San Francisco and debuted with Big Brother and the Holding Company. Like the Grateful Dead, Big Brother did wild things live. They had their own “Hall of the Mountain King,” from Grieg’s Peer Gynt—famous classical music. (Note: Peer Gynt is a major play by Norwegian dramatist Ibsen; Edvard Grieg wrote the score.) They also had a piece called “Bacon,” a bit like John Cage in spirit: someone brought a portable stove and frying pan onstage, put bacon in, and the band improvised until the bacon was done—song length equaled cooking time. Though Janis had hits with Big Brother and as a solo artist, know that this improvisational avant-garde style was very common in San Francisco psychedelia. Her best Big Brother album is 1968’s Cheap Thrills, No. 1. Recorded at Fillmore in San Francisco; you can feel what was happening. “Piece of My Heart” you have heard many times—an FM rock staple. A side note: she covered Gershwin’s “Summertime”—why? They all covered classical songs, so why not? It is a beautiful song and she sings it well. Covering Big Mama Thornton’s “Ball and Chain” showed she really could sing blues—a gift. She may have been one of the best blues singers of the 1960s, at least among women.

Anyway she left the band for a solo career. Her best album is probably Pearl, No. 1 in early 1971, with the No. 1 hit “Me and Bobby McGee” by Kris Kristofferson. Success was bittersweet—it came after her death. Janis Joplin died of a drug overdose on 4 October 1970. Pearl was released posthumously and, with that single, hit No. 1.

So far in this course we have mentioned many women artists—girl groups, Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, and so on—but they are white women in rock. When we talk African American artists, most of those figures are Black men. Keep that in mind: as we move through rock history, things do change. Women gain more control, not only as highlights; we will cover that later. For now mark Grace Slick and Janis Joplin as early figures.

Last band: Country Joe and the Fish. Around San Francisco, note two scenes. One is San Francisco hippies, mostly nonpolitical—they did not want politics. They wanted government to leave them alone so they could enjoy LSD trips; they did not deliberately enter politics. In a sense, a utopia. That frustrated another group around UC Berkeley, usually called Berkeley radicals, who wanted real political change. So the strong push for political and social change from Berkeley radicals gradually mixed with the San Francisco hippies’ leave-us-alone playfulness. In fact they were very different communities with some hostility.

One band bridging them was Country Joe and the Fish—hippie music and music tied to social change. On the hippie side, 1967’s Electric Music for the Mind and Body was, according to singer Joe McDonald, written to accompany an LSD trip. Everything on the album was meant as a soundtrack for the trip; when it was done they took LSD to see how it worked. On the political side, “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag”—you may know it—is a Vietnam War protest song, an important part of the counterculture. That movement opposed the war and also joined the civil-rights struggle. (Note: the 1960s counterculture was anti-establishment first in Britain and the U.S., then across the West from the early 1960s into the mid-1970s. London, New York, and San Francisco were early beds. As the civil-rights movement grew and U.S. intervention in Vietnam expanded, it became more revolutionary.) Many hippies, though, were not that interested; they sought their own highs. Another famous Joe McDonald song is “The Fish Cheer”: “Give me an F, Give me an I, Give me an S, Give me an H”—spelling Fish. At Woodstock he changed it to another four-letter F-word; that famous version many have heard, though radio did not play it much.

As we close, name other San Francisco bands: Moby Grape, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Steve Miller. Looking at these years, mark for later courses that Santana came out of this scene, and Journey from Santana’s orbit. Steve Miller was more successful in the 1970s than the 1960s. Sly and the Family Stone also came from San Francisco. Even bands that succeeded in the late 1960s kept putting out a San Francisco sound in the 1970s under other names.

But as I said, before 1967 most of these bands were known only in the San Francisco subculture. When the Summer of Love hit, national media focused there; suddenly San Francisco music went nationwide and into the mainstream. The Grateful Dead, Moby Grape, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Steve Miller may not have been that huge. But Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin really became stars, from subculture to mainstream. That is what happened in San Francisco; next time, the London psychedelic scene in the same years.