If You’re Going To San Francisco, Be Sure To Wear Lots of Fentanyl In Your Hair

San Francisco Sounds: A Place in Time, the new two-part documentary streaming on MGM+ about the city’s music scene in the late 60s and 70s, arrives at a dark and challenging moment for the City by the Bay. From front-page articles to cable talk shows to social media videos, San Francisco’s struggles with population loss, property crime, homelessness, and its half-empty downtown, have become an obsession for the media and armchair urban theorists of all kinds. Yet what better way to block out thoughts—if only for a couple of hours—-of a potential “doom loop” in San Francisco’s future than diving back one more time into the era some five decades ago when the city similarly dominated the media: the psychedelic 60s and the musical revolution it launched.

This era and San Francisco’s central role in it is, of course, very well-traveled terrain, from books, to PBS documentaries, to films, to, recently, a growing body of academic work on the period as it slides into semi-official “history.” Thus, this new documentary doesn’t really break any ground. How could it, given its focus? But with new interviews of key musicians and others, rare images, as well as never-before-seen video of the likes of Janis Joplin among others, the documentary is fun to watch…in a dark room with purple light, lava lamp, and, well, you get the picture.

Like any good history of the era, San Francisco Sounds traces the development of the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood and the psychedelic sounds that radiated out from its small hilly streets and the old, cheap Victorian homes that made the neighborhood so inviting to young people in the mid-60s. Across more than two hours of content, the documentary showcases the incredible concentration of musical talent and counterculture energy in San Francisco at the time, from Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, to Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane and The Great Society.

We also see and hear Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Moby Grape, The Charlatans, and even a quick image of the all-female band, Ace of Cups. It’s a who’s who of the glory days of the Haight era, and the new interviews with many of the (living) musicians of the period while historic imagery plays on the screen helps shape the documentary’s narrative in a brisk and engaging manner.

In addition to the musicians, the documentary introduces poster artists and entrepreneurial promoter Bill Graham whose racially and musically diverse shows at the Fillmore Auditorium—jazz and rock one night; Chicago blues and rock the next—provided creative rocket fuel for the musical revolution. Again, none of this is really new to those familiar with the era, but one can’t help but dream once again what it would have been like to gather with the hippies when Graham paired Jefferson Airplane with Muddy Waters, or when the Butterfield Blues Band played on the same bill as Jefferson Airplane and the Dead one night in 1967.

Thankfully, the documentary doesn’t stop in 1968 when the Haight began its well-chronicled descent into dystopian, drug-fueled chaos. The original local bands, with record contracts in hand, began to move out to Marin County and elsewhere, and started to gain national relevance at Woodstock and beyond. Meanwhile, bands like Santana, Steve Miller, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and integrated bands like Sly and Family Stone and Oakland’s Tower of Power began to expand on the psychedelic sound with Latin rhythms, horns, funk, soul and more.

Unlike other documentaries of the period, San Francisco Sounds also covers the rise of the Doobie Brothers (even though it is from San Jose) and, a bit later, even the early days of commercial rock ballad machine, Journey.  As former Rolling Stone writer and pioneering journalist, Ben Fong-Torres, notes in the first episode, there was not one San Francisco sound, there were many sounds in the city that made their mark.

In its own way, the documentary is an implicit, though certainly unplanned, rebuke to the recent remarks made in an interview by Rolling Stone magazine co-founder Jann Wenner (who famously founded the magazine in San Francisco in 1967) about who the true “masters” of rock and roll are: select white male musicians who also happened to be his friends (Wenner later apologized for his statements). Portions of the documentary focus on Joplin and Slick and their impact on the era. Meanwhile, Santana, a Mexican immigrant, and Sly Stone, an African- American originally from Texas, were both raised in San Francisco and played critical roles in expanding the audience and impact of the music coming out of the city.

As with any look back at this era, even if just focused on the music, you can’t ignore the larger context of the times. What happened in San Francisco starting in the mid-60s obviously didn’t happen in a vacuum, and San Francisco Sounds rightly, though only lightly. touches upon the impact of the Vietnam War and the civil rights and women’s rights movements on the young people in the city. This was a true counterculture at the time and, thus, it gathered and lived in ways against what it viewed as the conformity and limitations of broader American society. ‘Endless possibilities,” they quote the Dead’s Jerry Garcia as saying in episode two.

This counterculture stood for change, and you could describe that change in hundreds of different ways, even if, at times, you couldn’t describe it any clearer than wearing tie-dye, smoking pot, and doing LSD (sometimes simultaneously). And this yearning for change was for far things far more tangible than electrified American roots music, longer improvised guitar solos, free concerts in Golden Gate Park and songs on radio that lasted longer than three minutes, as important and symbolic as these changes were, as San Francisco Sounds chronicles.

This San Francisco-focused documentary is the second in a series of looks at “Places in Time,” distinct geographical areas that nurtured creative music scenes for a defined period. The first in the series, streamed in 2020, focused on the Laurel Canyon area deep in the Hollywood Hills above Los Angeles during, yes, the 60s and early 70s. That “place” cultivated its own sounds and bands, from The Doors to Crosby Stills, Nash and Young to the Eagles. That documentary was equally engaging in its look at a time-defined California subculture, and like the Haight, Laurel Canyon was filled with lots of sex, drugs and rock and roll. Yet that Southern California era fits a bit neater within the “Place in Time” framing a bit better than what happened four hundred miles north in San Francisco.

What happened in San Francisco during this period was nothing less than the start of a great American cycle of revolution and counterrevolution, a didactic political and cultural battle that continues to shape our lives today. The battle lines drawn around race, gender, and urbanism during that time provide a frame for our politics today, to say nothing about the ubiquity of yoga, and the mainstreaming of environmentalism and localism. Today the revolutions unleashed during the psychedelic era and the counterrevolutions it inspired informs much of our civic life, starting most prominently with the election of Ronald Reagan as Governor of California in 1966. Now, more than 50 years later, digital conservatives  claim the mantle of a counterculture seeking to scale back what they view as the rights excesses born, in part, out of 1960s San Francisco.

In short, it is getting harder to view and understand what happened in San Francisco during the 60s and early 70s as a distinct period when so much of what happened during that period continues to impact our current lives. Thus, the documentary’s subtitle “A Place in Time,” seems a bit too limiting when one takes the longer historical view of that era. To be sure, the focus of this documentary and the one on Laurel Canyon is on music, but that is kind of the point. The music, particularly in San Francisco, was an essential part of the counterculture. We lose a little bit of our understanding of the overall era and its impacts when you carve out the music and its adjacent cultural elements. More specifically, It’s more than past time for deeper historical analysis of the period that connect then and now.

Reagan took office 90 miles north of San Francisco just days before the famous Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in January 1967, a gathering which in many ways marked the end of the original Haight Ashbury era, as opposed to the media-generated one that followed. News coverage of the Human Be-In launched a cottage industry of coverage of San Francisco that painted what was happening in the Haight-Asbury area as strange, scary, and un-American. However, instead of deterring people from coming to San Francisco, it inspired youth to come, drawing upwards of 100,000 young people into a neighborhood that couldn’t handle the influx in such a short period. The “Summer” of Love was more or less over before Spring even began. Significant youth homelessness followed, along with widespread heroin use, as the Haight collapsed from the onslaught. It took decades for the neighborhood to recover.

Today, the homeless aren’t primarily in the Haight, whose old Victorians now sell for millions. The homeless are in the city’s Tenderloin and SoMa neighborhoods. The drugs are no longer pot and LSD, but fentanyl and tranq. And, again, the nation’s media, particularly the newer conservative media machine, is obsessed with what is happening in San Francisco, a symbol for all of liberal governance. But this time, the coverage is producing a different result. Many, particularly older tourists, fear the city and are staying away. And while some young people are coming to San Francisco now, it’s mostly those interested in careers in AI. The city is hoping to build part of its rebound around these new workers, quite a change from how San Francisco City Hall treated young people during the 60s..

Towards the end of San Francisco Sounds, the documentary quotes former Digger and now actor and author Peter Coyote as saying, “we lost all the political battles, but on the cultural front, we won everything.” Did they? And are those battles over? It doesn’t seem so. Any look at the coverage of San Francisco now indicates those battles continue to rage. Meanwhile, the divides on the left itself, first displayed as tensions between the “Berkeley crowd” and the Haight’s hippie denizens, continue to fester between progressives and mainstream Democrats. Perhaps we just need a few good San Francisco bands, or East Bay trap rappers, to write songs about the current battles about San Francisco and maybe we will finally get the documentaries the city and its powerful history truly deserve.