San Francisco Sound

San Francisco Sound
San Francisco pictured in 2009.
Stylistic origins	Rock
Cultural origins	Mid 1960s, San Francisco, California, U.S.
Other topics
Acid rock California Sound Haight-Ashbury Psychedelic rock

The San Francisco Sound refers to rock music performed live and recorded by San Francisco-based rock groups of the mid-1960s to early 1970s. It was associated with the counterculture community in San Francisco during these years. San Francisco is a westward-looking port city, a city that at the time was 'big enough' but not manic like New York City or spread out like Los Angeles. Hence, it could support a 'scene'. According to journalist Ed Vulliamy, "A core of Haight Ashbury bands played with each other, for each other, for free and at Chet Helms's Avalon Ballroom and Bill Graham's Fillmore."

The Bay-Area-based jazz critic and columnist Ralph J. Gleason had established the first journal (Jazz Information) devoted to jazz, in 1939. Gleason was open to new pathways. He admired San Francisco's new music scene in the mid-1960s, and wanted to draw attention to it. According to an announcer for a TV show that Gleason hosted: "In his syndicated newspaper column, Mr. Gleason has been the foremost interpreter of the sounds coming out of what he calls 'the Liverpool of the United States.' Mr. Gleason believes the San Francisco rock groups are making a serious contribution to musical history." Gleason shortly became one of the founders of the U.S. national rock-scene fan journal Rolling Stone.

The new sound, which melded many musical influences, was perhaps heralded in the live performances of the Jefferson Airplane (from 1965 on), who put out an LP record earlier than nearly all the other new bands (September 1966). According to writer Douglas Brinkley, celebrated author Hunter S. Thompson, one of the Bay Area cultural-scene boosters, was a big early fan of the group: "Thompson extolled the sonic energy of the Jefferson Airplane as it pulsed around the California locales that nursed the psychedelic era..."

The bohemian predecessor of the hippie culture in San Francisco was the "Beat Generation" style of coffee houses and bars, whose clientele appreciated literature, a game of chess, music (in the forms of jazz and folk style), modern dance, and traditional crafts and arts like pottery and painting. Acoustic music had had an avid following far and wide, but it was "a fading world of traditional folk and Brechtian art songs." The entire tone of the new subculture was different. According to biography author Robert Greenfield, "Jon McIntire [manager of the Grateful Dead from the late sixties to the mid-eighties] points out that the great contribution of the hippie culture was this projection of joy. The beatnik thing was black, cynical, and cold." The new music was loud and community-connected: bands sometimes presented free concerts in Golden Gate Park and "happenings" at the city's several psychedelic clubs and ballrooms. The many bands that formed signalled a shift from one subculture to the next.