San Francisco and the Long 60s

Sarah Hill

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781628924237
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

San Francisco and the Long 60s tells the fascinating story of the legacy of popular music in San Francisco between the years 1965-69. It is also a chronicle of the impact this brief cultural flowering has continued to have in the city – and more widely in American culture – right up to the present day. The aim of San Francisco and the Long 60s is to question the standard historical narrative of the time, situating the local popular music of the 1960s in the city's contemporary artistic and literary cultures: at once visionary and hallucinatory, experimental and traditional, singular and universal. These qualities defined the aesthetic experience of the local culture in the 1960s, and continue to inform the cultural and social life of the Bay Area even fifty years later. The brief period 1965-69 marks the emergence of the psychedelic counterculture in the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood, the development of a local musical 'sound' into a mainstream international 'style', the mythologizing of the Haight-Ashbury as the destination for 'seekers' in the Summer of Love, and the ultimate dispersal of the original hippie community to outlying counties in the greater Bay Area and beyond. San Francisco and the Long 60s charts this period with the references to received historical accounts of the time, the musical, visual and literary communications from the counterculture, and retrospective glances from members of the 1960s Haight community via extensive first-hand interviews. For more information, read Sarah Hill's blog posts here: http://blogs.cardiff.ac.uk/musicresearch/2014/05/15/san-francisco-and-the-long-60s
http://blogs.cardiff.ac.uk/musicresearch/2014/08/22/city-scale/
http://blogs.cardiff.ac.uk/musicresearch/2015/07/21/fare-thee-well/

1. INTRODUCTION: RIPPLES

There used to be a store in north Berkeley, California, called Black Oak Books. In an industry overrun with corporate predators, for many years Black Oak was part of the empowered minority of independent booksellers in the Bay Area. Historically, the ethos of this network was embodied by one shop: Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore in North Beach, San Francisco, which opened in 1953. In 1955 Ferlinghetti established City Lights Publishers and the Pocket Poets Series; their publication the following year of Allen Ginsberg’s epic Howl led Ferlinghetti through an ultimately vindicated ordeal of obscenity charges and censorship. Black Oak never boasted the biggest or best selection of books in the Bay Area, but it did offer local color, which, for residents of Berkeley anyway, was a far more important thing.

For most of Black Oak’s existence, there hung on the few patches of wall not otherwise covered by bookshelves a series of framed prints celebrating what seemed to be the essence of the place.¹ Among others—a poem by Gary Snyder and one by Richard Wright, an excerpt from Salman Rushdie’s The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey—was the following, by Robert Hunter:²

If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine

And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung

Would you hear my voice come through the music

Would you hold it near as it were your own?

It’s a hand-me-down, the thoughts are broken

Perhaps they’re better left unsung

I don’t know, don’t really care

Let there be songs to fill the air

Ripple in still water

When there is no pebble tossed

Nor wind to blow

Reach out your hand if your cup be empty

If your cup is full may it be again

Let it be known there is a fountain

That was not made by the hands of men

There is a road, no simple highway

Between the dawn and the dark of night

And if you go no one may follow

That path is for your steps alone

Ripple in still water

When there is no pebble tossed

Nor wind to blow

You who choose to lead must follow

But if you fall you fall alone

If you should stand then who’s to guide you?

If I knew the way I would take you home

To one browser, this poem would have been a delicate message of hard-earned wisdom, or simply a supportive word from poet to reader. To another browser, this poem would have been a lyric of spiritual enlightenment, and of community ethos, profoundly resonant with the voice of Jerry Garcia, who set the poem to music and sang it with the Grateful Dead. Poet Robert Hunter wrote “Ripple” in London in the early summer of 1970. The Dead first performed “Ripple” live at the Fillmore West in San Francisco that August, and then recorded it for release on their 1970 studio album American Beauty.

There are three levels to “Ripple” worth exploring here. The first is “Ripple” as poetry. Unlike some other songs written around 1970,³ these lyrics actually work as a separate entity, as that disembodied poem hanging on the wall in Black Oak Books. There is no obvious meter or established rhyming scheme to the lyric. The poet addresses the reader directly, optimistically, almost conversationally. There is a refrain—a quasi haiku, consisting of seventeen syllables, 6+7+4 (rather than the traditional 5+7+5)—that grounds the poem in a mystical sort of spirituality. The refrain brings a stillness to the lyric, encouraging the reader to reflect on the wisdom in the verses. The verses themselves adhere to a rough syllabic pattern, with the occasional alliterative link between lines or verses (own/broken; care/air; follow/alone; follow/alone) but no predictable scansion. The lyric’s symbolism suggests a wide frame of reference, from Psalm 23 (“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want . . . /He leadeth me beside the still waters/ . . . /Thou annointest my head with oil, my cup runneth over”) to the Tao Te Ching (“And, desiring to lead the people, One must, in one’s person, follow behind them”) and Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” (“Not I—not anyone else, can travel that road for you,/You must travel it for yourself”);⁴ yet is not so oblique as to obscure the underlying message. There are conceptual similarities between the first and final, and penultimate and final verses, but otherwise, the musical references in the first two verses—“and my tunes were played on the harp unstrung,” “let there be songs to fill the air”—are the only obvious acknowledgment of its ultimate context. The lyrics, in other words, may be divorced from the music and read, as an autonomous work, without any obvious or subconscious sense of pulse or melody.

The second level to “Ripple” is musical. As often happened in the Robert Hunter/Grateful Dead partnership, the lyrics and music for “Ripple” were not composed collaboratively. In this case Robert Hunter’s lyric fit perfectly to a tune that Jerry Garcia had already been forming.⁵ With this tune Garcia had tapped into the continuum of an American musical vernacular and channeled something as familiar and comforting as a folk song. There is an unfussiness about the song: melodically, each halting musical phrase covers rarely more than five syllables of text, and harmonically the song never strays from a solid G Major tonality. It is restrained, thoughtful music, the understated, loping shuffle evoking Saturday morning cowboy films and long evenings rocking on the front porch. The melody is simple; it weaves in and out of itself, potentially infinitely. It is uncluttered enough to allow for Hunter’s shifting syllables, with spaces wide open for the graceful interplay between Garcia’s guitar and David Grisman’s mandolin.⁶ Yet without Hunter’s lyrics, Garcia’s melody would suit another text, or work purely as an instrumental, with enough room for improvisatory exploration.

The third level to “Ripple” is its performance. According to one searchable Grateful Dead setlist archive,⁷ “Ripple” was only performed forty times between 1970 and 1995, so a performance of “Ripple” would have been something of an event. Although the band’s audience faithful generally maintain that the live Dead was the “authentic” Dead, for reasons of brevity I need to stress here the primacy of the band’s studio recording of “Ripple,” for it lays bare a basic truth about the group. Garcia’s voice was unique, though never the most forceful of instruments, so he generally relied on his guitar to do most of his singing for him. In “Ripple,” where his voice is tentative in the first verse, he is joined in the second by band members Phil Lesh and Bob Weir, by David Grisman’s mandolin in the refrain, and so on until the end of the final verse, when the voices of various friends and passersby carry on the wordless melody in a kind of campfire singalong. The performance then becomes the embodiment of the lyrical message itself. Despite the individual strengths of the words and music, the message of “Ripple” really comes across in this performance, and it goes beyond a simple “this is a difficult road you have to travel through life, but support is where you need it.” It is about the Grateful Dead as an extended family—musicians, lyricists, crew members, partners, children, audience—and the values upon which their community was based.

To understand the Dead phenomenon it is important to note a few things about their evolution. From their beginnings in 1965, the Grateful Dead were known locally in San Francisco as a live band. They lived communally in a house at 710 Ashbury Street, in the Haight district of San Francisco, and played innumerable free concerts for neighbors and friends in nearby Golden Gate Park and elsewhere. Like other contemporary Bay Area bands in the mid-60s—Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish—in their formative years the Dead did not have a contract with a major record label, and enjoyed a certain freedom to do whatever they pleased.⁸ The Dead and their contemporaries grew organically out of the student and dropout populations in the Bay Area, were integral members of the Haight community, served that community and others through performances at the major dance halls—the Fillmore, the Avalon, Carousel, Winterland—and helped to define the mid-60s San Francisco popular music “scene.”

When eventually the Dead ventured beyond the Bay Area, their reputation as psychedelically enlightened messengers from the Left Coast attracted increasingly larger audiences across the United States. The reason that this reputation preceded them is by now the stuff of legend, but bears summarizing briefly here.⁹ In 1965, the members of the Grateful Dead fell into company with author Ken Kesey and Neal Cassady, immortalized by Jack Kerouac as Dean Moriarty in On the Road. Along with their larger group of friends and Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, their excursions into the underground world of LSD grew into the Acid Tests, a kind of open call to freaks in the Bay Area and beyond to converge on a given location and share in a total, communal, sensory experience.¹⁰

The writer Tom Wolfe shadowed Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and in 1968 published The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, an account of their exploits.¹¹ In the following extended excerpt, Wolfe attempts to recreate the atmosphere and the pulse of December 4, 1965, the night that the Grateful Dead performed at the second Acid Test, in San Jose:

The Dead had an organist called Pig Pen, who had a Hammond electric organ, and they move the electric organ into Big Nig’s ancient house, plus all of the Grateful Dead’s electrified guitars and basses and the Pranksters’ electrified guitars and basses and flutes and horns and the light machines and the movie projectors and the tapes and mikes and hi-fis, all of which pile up in insane coils of wires and gleams of stainless steel and winking amplifier dials before Big Nig’s unbelieving eyes. His house is old and has wiring that would hardly hold a toaster. . . .

They come piling into Big Nig’s, and suddenly acid and the worldcraze were everywhere, the electric organ vibrating through every belly in the place, kids dancing not rock dances, not the frug and the—what?—swim, mother, but dancing ecstasy, leaping, dervishing, throwing their hands over their heads like Daddy Grace’s own stroked-out inner courtiers—yes!—Roy Seburn’s lights washing past every head, Cassady rapping, Paul Foster handing people weird little things out of his Eccentric Bag, old whistles, tin crickets, burnt keys, spectral plastick handles. Everybody’s eyes turn on like lightbulbs, fuses blow, blackness—wowwww!—the things that shake and vibrate and funnel and freak out in this blackness—and then somebody slaps new fuses in and the old hulk of a house shudders back, the wiring writhing and fragmenting like molting sn...