On San Fransisco’s Psychedelic Bands of 1967

When one randomly encounters any so-called psychedelic recording by a San Fransisco area band originally released in 1967, he most likely thinks of ”roots” or ”americana.” Those concepts appeared within the musical-style context in the eighties and hence didn’t exist back in the latter half of the sixties. Roots and americana are in a contradiction with the public image attached to those music performers then and now. Still, they in most cases are most appropriate.

The majority of the recorded output by bands such as Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Country Joe & The Fish, especially in this pivotal year of 1967, are collection of either traditional or just old-fashioned American music forms: country, hillbilly (bluegrass), blues, dixieland jazz, different branches of folk. Their image would have let to expect things related to space travel and most outrageous surf or free jazz music. But to most part they were collectors of American music – it is Americana – who slightly melted those influences together but most often just played and sang that music.

The San Fransisco psychedelic groups who had found their founding fanbase in hippies, maintained a celebrational attitude on American culture and history, but not the very closest history. Their sympathies mainly seem to point at times prior to WWI. They were revivalist and archivist of nature. Again, on and on, in a heavy contradiction with their publicly marketed image.

One could say that the genres or style definitions of roots and americana were actually founded by the SF psychedelic ”renegades.” What they actually invented was a way of celebrating and honouring a set of traditions that the country who went to fight the Vietnamese actually consisted of. The Frisco bands were both traditionalist and intellectual, daresay academic in their approach and evident purpose.

Cultural and style historically seen, the San Fransisco psychedelic scene bands’ output in 1967 mainly reflects an attitude of rejection to modernism. Some of their influences may have been born in the industrialised era or originally distributed as gramophone records, but are deeply rooted in something not at all ”functionalistic,” or formalistic. Their sympathies seem to be directed towards similar issues as those of the later steampunk scene, or original English teddy boys! In visual design, the SF psychedelic scene contained strikingly many hints of art nouveau.

This is a picture not only of traditionalism but pluralism and hence maximalism, too. Later on, nearly all of the Frisco psych bands that were active already in 1967, expanded their musical material into a maximalist setting also in a more genuine sense, perhaps utilising a systematic approach that bears some relation to modernism (contemporary jazz), but this wasn’t evident yet in 1967.

Basis in the Folk Movement

The Beatles released their fourth album Beatles for Sale in November 1964. It was the first folk rock album in the usual sense of the word. Half of the songs were original folky rock songs, the other half being nostalgic covers and one original hit tune. Dylan and The Byrds came a few months later with an obviously similar concept. This was the starting point for the Frisco bands in question, as well as Ken Kesey and his Pranksters -driven Acid Test happenings, that were events organised by the purpose of spreading around the LSD drug.

Folk within the context of music had several meanings: 1) traditional folk music i.e. people’s music prior to the industrialised era and the advent of popular music; 2) music of the post-WWII folk movement that often was politically affiliated to the peace movement and/or the left-wing; 3) stylistically altering contemporary arrangements of traditional folk music pieces. Rock musicians had an easy task to market themselves as folk rock (or ”folk pop”) as the definition of folk had already been that wide.

Academic and upper-middle class youth had already been keen on folk and now they were sold to rock and roll which they formerly had resisted. On the American West Coast, folk rock was connected to spreading of the LSD and the hippie movement. Some Frisco bands identified as hippies but most did not; some were more of political activists still mentally connected to the folk movement, and some were just playing the intellectual like Jefferson Airplane – and actually were a bunch of intellectuals only vaguely connected to the whirlwind surrounding them and to an essential part caused by them.

Airplane gigged very little during 1967 although they had two Billboard Top Ten hits in that year. Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady even had the time for a holiday trip to Central Finland in the summer – that particular summer during which ”everything” was supposed to happen. Well, maybe in Central Finland it did?

Folky rock performed by electric guitars and drums suddenly was ”psychedelic.” This sliding of terms in 1965-1966 is peculiar as the genuinely psychedelic rock bands back then were a small minority of all bands put under that definition.

Becoming Simply Rock

The maximalist and traditionalist mixture of Frisco bands, especially Grateful Dead, was served at an ever louder volume to ever larger audiences who were more and more drugged. At the end of 1967, what at first had been an upper class and academic extension of leisure, had become a movement of the masses and hence part of industry-driven popular culture. Louder volumes caused the need for more efficient and delicate amplification systems and sound engineers who ”dosed” the bands’ output to people. This is rock. If there is some distinction between rock and roll and rock, this must be it. Soundmen became politicians who served the ”mix” to people who had become a mass. Combine one mass with another and you still get a mass.

So there is no difference between rock and stadium rock because rock in general is supposed to be served to people in the scale of mass.

Considerations

San Fransisco’s electric bands of the late sixties created the traditions of roots and americana music, and stepped in the more avant-garde expression after others had done it first. As roots and americana are traditionalistic of nature, they could also be called ”meta-traditionalistic” art forms. They are as far as it gets from anything modernist, and still their creators in the sixties were in their times considered marketers of a new ethos. Perhaps the new ethos, in all its return back to nature, is in fact anti-new and akin to some branches inside the political green movement.

In their celebratory attitude to especially American tradition, the Frisco bands were also patriotic and somehow nationalistic. Their attitude even seems like an attempt of updating the content of conservatism, in both apolitical and political sense.

Still today, a lot of what is considered folk, country, blues and older forms of jazz, is to some extent looked through the eyes of 1967’s San Fransisco. In other words, the Frisco bands took part in a folk revival movement, took up electric guitars, served their output to masses as ”rock” and changed their agenda.

 

(Pahoittelen että kirjoitus on vain englanniksi, minulla ei juuri nyt ole aikaa haeskella sille julkaisijaa englanninkielisestä nettiavaruudesta)

velipesonen

Olen syntynyt vuonna 1968. Olen insinööri, isä, poika ja muusikko.

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