We turn now to San Francisco and the idea of Haight Ashbury being the heart and
center of the psychedelic movement in the late 1960's.
One topic that we can engage that I've, I've mentioned before is this idea of sub
cultures and how they work in popular music.
A lot of scholars are really interested in sub cultures because it's interesting.
To be able to get into a culture that's small enough that you can really tell how
music is used as ways of forming identity, and various kinds [INAUDIBLE]
how people use the music to affirm values and this kind of thing.
So subcultures are something that a lot scholars talk a lot about.
So when we talk about psychedelia. with regard to Haight Ashbury we are for
first while, first couple years of it anyways talking about a subculture
because in many ways you didn't really know about what was going on in Haight
Ashbury. Maybe, early 1967 with the human being
which we'll take about in just a minute. But certainly by the summer of 67.
The summer of love. Scott McKenzie.
You come to San Francisco with flowers in your hair, this kind of thing.
That's when San Francisco really starts to hit the mainstream.
But we can trace the history of psychedelia in San Francisco all the way
back to 1965 easily two years before it hit the mainstream.
So for those two years it was kind of a sub-culture scene.
So as I said before psychedelia in San Francisco developed around the Haight
Ashbury district which is the district of fantastic sort of little neighborhood of
nineteenth century homes with a street down the center of it, the Haight.
with shops and Ashbury as one of the cross streets there goes right up against
Golden Gate Park. As you get to the end of the Haight
Ashbury district you can. Cross the street and you're in Golden
Gate Park, which if you've never been there is a fantastic park in San
Fransisco. I don't know how people who live in San
Francisco can ever get out of that park. it's a fantastic place to hang around.
The first stirrings of psychedelia, that is the use of LSD, trips and you know,
parties where people got together with LSD and listened to music can actually be
seen out. In Virginia City, Nevada in the summer of
1965. So just a couple months after The Beatles
had first had their first dental experience as George Harrison called it.
we see a lot of students going out to a place called the Red Dog Saloon.
In Virginia city, not a very long car ride to get out there.
And dropping acid while they listen to music of artists like the Charlatans,
right. These are the first real sort of acid
parties, that become the kind of prototype for what's going to make it's
way. back to to San Francisco.
By the fall of 1965 so that summer ends. So that summer ends we get in the fall of
1965 you start see the first psychedelic events occurring.
A group that helped organized a lot of them was a group called The Family Dog.
That's what they called themselves. They would organize these evenings and
have a couple of bands on, there would be a light show, I mean everything we've
come to associate with the San Francisco psychedelic event.
They would get, you know, Longshoreman's halls, you know, anything they could rent
out fairly cheap and inexpensively, and then call the evening a couple of the
evenings that the Family Dog put on were A Tribute to Dr Strange and what I like
this one a lot, A Tribute to Sparkle Plenty.
You start to see the posters for these, it starts to have all that kind of
psychedelic San Francisco poster art that we're used to.
And remembering that we're talking about the fall of 1965, so no, if you're not
there. You don't even know this is happening.
This is not happening nationally, internationally, it's only happening in
this neighborhood, Haight Ashbury, you gotta be there to know that it's
happening. now the, the important person on this
scene is a guy by the name of Ken Kesey, an author, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's
Nest, one of his classic novels and the idea of the acid test written about by
Tom Wolfe as the Kool Aid acid test. The acid tests were basically Ken Kesey
and his bunch of followers, the Merry Pranksters or his buddies or whatever
you, whatever they may have been. going around and, from town to town on a
bus, a psychedelically painted bus, that where the destination would be on most
buses like Detroit, Chicago, you know. Boston.
Instead, it says further, right? Because they're going to take people
further. They're going to go to a town.
They hand out flyers. They tell 'em there's going to be an acid
test out past the city limits where the, they can't get into trouble with the law
and, for a dollar, you come in, you buy your tab of acid and you hang out all
night and you trip. They were sort of the Johnny Appleseeds
of acid in the, in the sort of drivable area around San Francisco.
Now, as I said before, there're two ways maybe that you, you want to think about.
LSD one is the more idealistic way. A guy like Timothy Leary, for example, a
psy, a, a guy trained in psychology, psychiatry wrote act, actually wrote a
book, called the, the a psychedelic experience,
Influenced by part maybe by the Aldous Huxley book "The Doors of Perception",
but Timothy Leary writes a kind of a clinical book about the psychedelic
experience. And when he's sayig to kids is, you know,
they need to turn on tune in and drop out, but what he really tried to do was
to raise their consciousness. So is Ken Kesey and Merry Pranksters,
they're just looking for a good time. They're a little bit sort of like
Dadaist, you know anti-conformist kind of crazoids, and that's sort of what that's
about. Well people start to get in [UNKNOWN]
start to get real turned on to LSD and this sort of counterculture and
experience that they're trying to develop.
Mostly young people we're talking about but college age.
We're not talking about teenagers, here, we're talking about kids who are old
enough to be in college or older than that.
living at homes there in the, in the area.
And in January of 1967, they put together something called, The Human Be-In, right?
Sort of playing on the idea of human being, human be-in.
Well this idea of be-in. It start to get, once it starts to hit
the culture people start to do all kinds ins.
There's sit-ins, love-ins, Rowen and Martin's laugh-in.
Everything becomes a kind of an in but the first one was this human be-in.
So called Gathering of the Tribes where they got music together and beat poets
like Allen Gensberg. The guy who developed a lot of this acid,
a fellow named Owsley Stanley. Timothy Leary was there and they got all
these, guys together in Golden Gate Park and had this big free festival that was
sort of the beginning of the whole counter-cultural thing.
It actually got national press col, coverage and people couldn't believe the
crazy people showing up. Doing crazy things in San Francisco and
of course, they attributed it to those doggone drugs that were making them lose
their mind. Anyway that's the first moment that we
see that the subculture is starting to sort of make an appearance on the
national radar. What's starts to happen in San Francisco
is. And Bill Graham opens up a placed called
The Fillmore which becomes a key venue for these psychedelic events and concerts
and Chet Helms opens up the Avalon Ballroom.
So now there are two two concerts halls that are pretty much devoted and
outfitted for sound and for lights to create these kinds of psychedelic
evenings and so now it's starting to become more organized.
Actually the Fillmore and the Avalon start to become the kind of model for
what will become venues all across the country in a couple years, that will
become the places that groups play. At this time, if you're The Beatles, or
something, going around, you're playing stadiums.
You're playing places that were never really designed for rock concerts.
But now, with the Fillmore, with the Avalon, you could play places that were
design, that are primarily designed to be places where rock concerts will, will
take place. Also in San Francisco at this time a
fellow by the name of Tom Donahue who had been involved with the development of AM
radio, gets the idea that it would be nice to have a radio station.
That just played the music the DJ wanted to play, which is something you could not
do on top 40 radio. And so, as the story goes, he wanted to
get a station he could get cheap, FM radio was largely unused at that time.
It was mostly used by religious groups for evangelical purposes or by
universities for correspondence courses, maybe played classical music.
so FM then was really, a lot of people didn't even have FM on their radio.
If you got a car you only had an AM radio.
and so Tom Donahue, as the story goes, called around FM stations in the area
until he found one that had had its phone disconnected, figuring that things must
really be bad at an FM station if you can't even pay the phone bill.
I'll go talk to them. I'll bet they won't have any problem with
me going on the air. So, he goes on the air and starts to play
all kinds of things he couldn't play on AM out of his own album collection.
And it turns out, people in the Haight-Ashbury were tuning in and
listening. And this whole idea of developing FM
radio based around a kind of free form, format based around album oriented kind
of tracks. I mean, you, a DJ could have said you
know, I want to talk about. we're, we're going to do a set of tunes
that have to do with flying. And then like, try to drag out of his
record collection, different tunes that he thought had to do with flying or
something like that. And then it could be any topic or it
didn't have to be a topic at all, who knows.
Great guitar solos, whatever it took, you can do whatever you wanted.
And was kind of trippy, right? And it people in Haight Ashbury started
to tune in. Well, the FM radio format really start to
catch on with them. And, like anything that catches on,
somebody comes in and figure out there's going to be way to make money and before
you know it. We get in the 70's, there's FM radio all
across the country but really starts right here in San Fransisco.
There were other FM free form stations that arise at about the same time.
So we shouldn't say it was only happening in San Fransisco, but it was certainly is
important it was happening there at this time via Tom Donniehue.
Also we get for the first time. magazines that are specifically devoted
to rock culture. There have always been teen magazines.
Teen Beat. Pictures of you know Paul McCartney and
Peter Noon and people like that on the cover, but now we're talking about
newspapers like The Oracle first. And then Rolling Stone which came out of
San Francisco during these years. Which were really devoted to the music
itself and the culture around it. The first head shops opened in San
Francisco. The most important of those.
Being the psychedelic shop where you could go and get music and beaded
curtains and incense and incense burners and drug paraphernalia, rolling papers,
bongs, water pipes, whatever you might need.
And it was all there really catering specifically to this kind of hippy
culture kind of thing. It didn't take too much longer, we get
into the late, the very late 60's, the early 1970's when you could find head
shops. All around the country.
Where this kind of thing went on. And they became kind of HQ in that town.
Headquarters in that town for what was going on in the counter culuture in that
town. But a lot of it starts right there in San
Fransisco. Well that gives you an idea of what was
happening in the San Francisco subculture.
In the next video, we'll talk about some of the groups who were important in this
San Francisco culture.