Rock Star by David R. Shumway

Author:David R. Shumway
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2014-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

The San Francisco Sound and the Counterculture

To the casual observer, or even many ardent fans, “the San Francisco sound” is doubtless understood to describe a musical style, an auditory phenomenon. While it may be that other scenes associated with particular rock cultures—for example, Liverpool in the early sixties—were defined by distinctive musical characteristics, San Francisco in the mid- to late 1960s was not. The best Ralph Gleason could do—in his 1969 book The Jefferson Airplane and the San Francisco Sound—is to assert that music produced in San Francisco, even if it originated in Chicago or Texas, seems “to have a slightly different sound.”8 In fact, what the San Francisco bands who emerged in the mid-1960s—the Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Country Joe and the Fish—share is not a musical commonality but the counterculture that to some extent preexisted the music and that developed in conjunction with it. The music was made possible by the counterculture even as the music was essential to it. If, in the end, the music was the counterculture’s longest-lived product, that should not lead us to neglect the fact of an actually existing counterculture that gave rise to it.

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