The San Francisco sound refers to rock music performed live and recorded by San Francisco-based rock groups of the mid-1960s to early 1970s. It was associated with the counterculture community in San Francisco, particularly the Haight-Ashbury district, during these years. San Francisco is a westward-looking port city, a city that at the time was 'big enough' but not manic like New York City or spread out like Los Angeles. Hence, it could support a 'scene'. According to journalist Ed Vulliamy, "A core of Haight Ashbury bands played with each other, for each other"
According to an announcer for a TV show that Ralph J. Gleason hosted: "In his syndicated newspaper column, Mr. Gleason has been the foremost interpreter of the sounds coming out of what he calls 'the Liverpool of the United States.' Mr. Gleason believes the San Francisco rock groups are making a serious contribution to musical history." Ralph Gleason became one of the founders of what would become the rock-scene fan journal, Rolling Stone.
Characteristics
The new sound, which melded many musical influences, was perhaps heralded in the live performances of Jefferson Airplane (from 1965 on), who put out an LP record earlier than nearly all the other new bands (August 1966). According to writer Douglas Brinkley, celebrated author Hunter S. Thompson, one of the Bay Area cultural-scene boosters, was a big early fan of the group: "Thompson extolled the sonic energy of the Jefferson Airplane as it pulsed around the California locales that nursed the psychedelic era..."
The bohemian predecessor of the hippie culture in San Francisco was the "Beat Generation" style of coffee houses and bars, whose clientele appreciated literature, a game of chess, music (in the forms of jazz and folk style), modern dance, and traditional crafts and arts like pottery and painting. Acoustic music had had an avid following far and wide, but it was "a fading world of traditional folk and Brechtian art songs." The entire tone of the new subculture was different. According to biography author Robert Greenfield, "Jon McIntire [manager of the Grateful Dead from the late sixties to the mid-eighties] points out that the great contribution of the hippie culture was this projection of joy. The beatnik thing was black, cynical, and cold." The Beats tended to be cagey, keeping their lives discreet (save for the few who published, in literary bursts, about their perceptions, enthusiasms, and activities); in a word, they generally “kept cool.” The young hippies were far more numerous, less wary, and had scarcely any inclination to keep their lifestyles concealed.
The new music was loud and community-connected: bands sometimes presented free concerts in Golden Gate Park and "happenings" at the city's several psychedelic clubs and ballrooms. The many bands that formed signalled a shift from one subculture to the next.
Monterey, California is about 120 road miles south of San Francisco. At the June 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, Bay Area groups performed from the same stage as established and fast-rising musical groups and well-known individual artists from the U.S., the UK, and even India. Soon after, Ralph J. Gleason and Jann Wenner, based in San Francisco, established Rolling Stone magazine (first issue's date: November 1967).
Each San Francisco band had its characteristic sound, but enough commonalities existed that there was a regional identity. By 1967, fresh and adventurous improvisation during live performance (which many heard as being epitomized by the Grateful Dead and by the "cross-talk" guitar work of Moby Grape) was one characteristic of the San Francisco sound. A louder, more prominent role for the electric bass—typically with a melodic or semi-melodic approach, and using a plush, pervasive tone—was another feature. This questing bass quality has been wryly characterized as a "roving" (rather than the conventional "stay-at-home") style. In jazz it had been exuberantly pioneered by numerous musicians. A musician who was a leading example of this, Jack Casady of Jefferson Airplane (and the offshoot Hot Tuna) pioneered the approach, perhaps best represented on the album Bless Its Pointed Little Head. Phil Lesh, bassist with the Grateful Dead, furthered this sound. Lesh had developed his style on the foundation of having studied classical, brass-band, jazz, and modernist music on the violin and later the trumpet.