Richard Goldstein "San Francisco Bray"

San Francisco Bray  Richard Goldstein 1965  The new music from San Francisco, most of it unrecorded at this writing, is the most  potentially vital in the pop world. It shoots a cleansing wave over the rigid  studiousness of rock. It brings driving spontaneity to a music that is becoming  increasingly conscious of form and influence rather than effort. It is a resurgence  which could drown the castrati who make easy listening and devour all those one‐shot  wonders floating above stagnant water ....     Talent scouts from a dozen major record companies are now grooving with the tribes  at the Fillmore and the Avalon. Hip San Francisco is being carved into bits of business  turf. The Jefferson Airplane belong to RCA. The Grateful Dead has signed with Warner  Brothers in an extraordinary deal which gives them complete control over material  and production. Moby Grape is tinkering with Columbia. And a fistful of local talent is  being wined and dined like the last available shikse in the promised land.     All because San Francisco is the Liverpool of the West. Not many breadmen  understand the electronic rumblings from beneath the Golden Gate. But youth power  still makes the pop industry move, and record executives know a fad sometimes needs  no justification for success except its presence in a void. There is the feeling now, as  pop shepherds watch the stars over their grazing flock, that if the San Francisco sound  isn't the next Messiah, it will at least give the profits a run for their money.     "The important thing about San Francisco rock & roll," says Ralph Gleason, "is that the  bands here all sing and play live, and not for recordings. You get a different sound at a  dance, it's harder and more direct." ...     San Francisco is far and away the most turned‐on city in the Western world. "The cops  are aware of the number of heads here," says Bill Graham who owns the Fillmore and  manages the Jefferson Airplane. "The law thinks it will fade out, like North Beach:  What can they do? To see a cop in the Haight ... it's like the English invading China.  Once they own it, how are they going to police it?"     With safety in numbers, the drug and rock undergrounds swim up the same stream.  The psychedelic ethic–still germinating and still unspoken–runs through the musical  mainstream in a still current. When Bob Weir, rhythm guitarist with the Grateful  Dead, says "the whole scene is like a contact high," he is not talking metaphor. Musical  ideas are passed from group to group like a joint. There is an almost visible cohesion  about San Francisco rock. With a scene that is small enough to navigate and big  enough to make waves, with an establishment that all but provides the electric  current, no wonder San Francisco is Athens. This acropolis has been carefully, sturdily  built, and it is not going to crumble because nobody wants to see ruins messing up the  skyline.  

  Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead insists: "We're not singing psychedelic drugs, we're  singing music. We're musicians, not dope fiends." He sits in the dining‐room of the  three‐story house he shares with the group, their women, and their community. The  house is one of those masterpieces of creaking, curving spaciousness the Haight is  filled with. Partially because of limited funds, but mostly because of the common  consciousness which almost every group here adapts as its ethos, the Grateful Dead  live and work together. They are acknowledged as the best group in the Bay Area.  Leader Jerry Garcia is a patron saint of the scene. Ken Kesey calls him "Captain Trips."     Together, the Grateful Dead sound like live thunder. There are no recordings of their  music yet, which is probably just as well because no album could duplicate the feeling  they generate in a dancehall. I have never seen them live, but I spent an evening at the  Fillmore listening to tapes. The music hits hard and stays hard, like early Rolling  Stones, but distilled and concentrated. When their new album comes out, I will whip it  on to my record‐player and if they have left that boulder sound at some palatial studio  and come out with a polished pebble, I will know they don't live together in the Haight  anymore.     But right now a group called the Grateful Dead is playing live and living for an  audience of anybody's kids in San Francisco. Theirs is the Bay Area sound. Nothing  convoluted in the lyrics, just rock lingua franca. Not a trace of preciousness in the  music; just raunchy funky chords. The big surprise about the San Francisco sound has  nothing to do with electronics or some zany new camp. Musicians in this city have  knocked all the civility away. They revel in the dark, grainy sound of roots ....     What really matters about San Francisco is what mattered about Liverpool three years  ago. The underground occupies a pivotal place in the city's life. The Fillmore and the  Avalon are jammed every weekend with beaded, painted faces and flowered shirts.  The kids don't come from any mere bohemian quarter. Hip has passed the point  where it signifies a commitment to rebellion. It has become the style of youth in the  Bay Area, just as long hair and beat music were the Liverpool Look.     San Francisco is a lot like the grimy English seaport these days. In 1964, Liverpool  rang with a sound that was authentically expressive and the city never tried to bury it.  This is what is happening in San Francisco today ....     The underground is open, unencumbered and radiating. The rest of the country will  get the vibrations, and they will pay for them.     Which everyone thinks is groovy. The Grateful Dead are willing to sing their twenty‐ minute extravaganza, "Midnight Hour," for anyone who will listen, and if people pay,  so much the better. But Bob Weir insists: "If the Industry is gonna want us, they're  gonna take us the way we are. Then, if the money comes in, it'll be a stone gas."    