San Francisco and the Psychedelic Rock Movement

San Francisco and the Psychedelic Rock Movement

“Turn on, tune in, drop out.” These are famous words spoken by Timothy Leary, a man that was the largest influence on the counter-culture psychedelic phase of America. Due to people such as Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey, San Francisco quickly became the scene for trying psychedelic drugs and tuning in and jamming to rock and roll. There are many great bands that are associated with this counter-culture and area. As well, many historic events happened that would change the course of rock and roll forever.

        So how exactly did this movement start happening? What made people decide to try radical new drugs to enlighten their inner being? Well you can thank Ken Kesey and his “Acid Test” parties for that. Kesey would invite all of his friends and guests over to his farm and everyone would engage in taking psychedelic drugs such as LSD. While said people were tripping on acid, Kesey would have his house band, The Grateful Dead, perform. These parties started out fairly small and soon grew exponentially.

The Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco was the birthplace of the psychedelic counterculture. The hippie neighborhood soon became the hotspot for a concentrated social experiment, which included a lot of drug intake. The spots fame only grew further when bands such as Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead hit the big time as the members were from around the area. This new hippie scene brought teenagers and college students from all around the country to “The Summer of Love” in San Francisco. The hippie counterculture was growing in the same manner and the first large meeting of this eclectic group was the Monterey Pop Festival.

        In 1967, the city of Monterey California hosted a pop festival. The crowd is estimated to have been as big as 25,000 to 90,000 people. This festival saw the early beginnings of many famous groups including, the legendary, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin as the lead singer of Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Who, and Jefferson Airplane. The Monterey Pop Festival included some iconic performances. A young Jimi Hendrix kneeled over his guitar and poured lighter fluid onto it and lit it on fire then proceeded to smash it to a pulp. The festival could have been even larger had a couple of bands chose to accept their invitation. Bands as huge as the Beatles and Bob Dylan would have made huge headliners decided it wouldn’t be in their best interest to perform. Monterey was the first large music festival and it became the model for future festivals including Woodstock.

        One of the headliners at the festival was Jefferson Airplane. By this time, 1967, they had become one of the more popular psych-rock bands in the country. They spread the ideas of doing drugs through their performances and lyrics. The song “White Rabbit” is almost explicatively about acid and is supposedly inspired by Alice in Wonderland. The band was so synonymous with the psychedelic counter-culture because their songs instilled the ideas of freeing one’s mind as well as anarchistic political views and served as a force for social change. One analogy describes San Francisco to be the American version of Liverpool and that Jefferson Airplane is the American version of the Beatles in that sense.