Well we now turn to the musicians that were part of this San Francisco, sub culture and some of the important groups that that go with that. Of course, you, you already probably know, some of the artists I'm going to talk about, the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin. We'll also talk about Country Joe and the Fish. But let's talk about how these groups fit into the scene and some of this idea of, of what psychedelic music is and, and how, how music can be psychedelic. The Grateful Dead were formed as, as a group called The Warlocks, and by 1965. They were playin' around doing Rolling Stones tunes. They were doing, Chicago Electric Blues. They were, had roots in traditional American folk and jug band music. Already, at that time Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, and Bob Weir, were in the group. And they started to play these acid tests, for Ken Kesey. At least some of them, as the Warlocks. Then later, as the Grateful Dead. As the scene began to develop in San Francisco, they, they ended up playing. Gosh, when you look at the posters for the various events that are happening in San Francisco, it's hard to find one that doesn't have The Grateful Dead on it. They were, they were playing all the time. They developed a highly improvisational approach, so they could get into a tune and as Jerry Garcia used to say, it kind of just didn't matter what tune we tried to play, how short the original version of it was, we just started to play, and it just started to get long, you know? Because what they liked to do was sort of do not exactly a free form improvisation, although sometimes they would do that, but they just liked to stretch the tunes out. And so this idea of creating this lengthy improvisatory freeform kind of music. An environment where people were dropping acid. And there were multicolored lights and people were maybe not dancing the way they would have danced on Dick Clark's American Bandstand but sort of almost sort of like, you know, doing this sort of freeform kind of dance and movement really really in a lot of kinds of ways. This fit really, really well what the, where the Grateful Dead were going, and what was happening at these events. The important thing about the Dead I think for us to realize, is the Dead were primarily a live band, because of this improvisational thing. You know, you wanted to, you wanted to hear the Dead play. And it really didn't matter how many times you heard them play the same song, it really wasn't going to be the same. And so it didn't, the, the idea of fixing one particular version of that song onto an album and having one version of it that should be the authoritative one, that's kind of foreign to the whole Grateful Dead idea. You think about Sergeant Pepper, for example,. You know, those tunes, the way they're recorded, exactly that way, with all they were doing in the recording studio or pet sounds from the Beach Boys, they had to be just that way, right? So if you, if you heard if, the Beatles had performed or if you heard a tribute band perform, you expect them to play it just the way it is on the record. But with the Dead,. Not that way at all. So, many ways they, they didn't really get, that, what the Grateful Dead were didn't get really captured very well on recording for a couple years, although they did record an album in March of 1967 called the Grateful Dead, and most fans will say it's not a very good representation of what the Grateful Dead really were, but, there, there it is. The album Anthem of The Sun, is an interesting one. It's still not a very good representation of what a Dead show was like, this one is from 1968. But, the actual track, That's It For The Other One, was assembled from with Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh in the studio with various tapes of live performances that they had done actually in real time, fading performances in and fading performances out of various things almost in a kind of aleatoric or chance kind of way and I can tell you that there is, there are a, there is a place in that, in that track, That's It For the Other One. It sounds so avant-garde that if you edited it in just the right way and played it for a school of music students and told them that it was a piece they never heard before from Karlheinz Stockhausen, they would almost certainly believe you. They would be quite surprised to hear that this was actually The Grateful Dead and something that they did like. Very experimental, very sort of avant-garde, noises, no defined chord progressions, very sort of, but a lot of their improvisation was more like the kind of thing you'll find on Dark Star. From the 1970 album Live/Dead that is stretching out with solos and this kind of thing. So the Grateful Dead ambitious, very aware of what was happening in modern and avant-garde music. Phil Lesh had had studied had, had studied composition, electronic composition or knew something about that. And of course he was also involved with the tape center, which was a, which was a place in San Francisco, that was devoted to electronic music and technology as it had to do with music, so, This is a little bit how The Grateful Dead sort of fit into that thing, but again, being primarily a live band. Contrast that with The Jefferson Airplane, who also did a pretty hip live show, and there were a lot of sort of improvisation that went on. But they were really a group that was able to bring together singles. I mean, The Grateful Dead did, weren't really a band that sort of would have a radio-friendly single there, there aren't that many of those. The, the whole purpose is to, is to experience the whole concept. But the Grate but the Jefferson Airplane, on the other hand, really did quite well with, with singles getting even AM air play. They were formed initially by Marty Balin and Paul Kantner in 1965. Did an album called the Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, in 1996, but it wasn't until they added Grace Slick on lead vocals that things really began to take off for that group. She came from another San Francisco group called The Great Society. She brought with her a couple of tracks: Somebody to Love and White Rabbit. Both of which on the album Surrealistic, Surrealistic Pillow from 1967, both of those tracks were hits, AM hits. In this country in 1967, Somebody to Love, was a number five hit and White Rabbit, was a number eight hit. And they would, of course, be happy to play those tunes live as part of their show. But then there was a lot of other sort of jammy improvisational stuff, that happened in their shows as well. But much more, in many ways, sort of they, they, they st, they had the pop song arrow in their quiver, where as for example, The Grateful Dead didn't so much, and that didn't bother them. Another artist that, that had real sort of hit making potential from that point of view was Janis Joplin. Having been born in Port Arthur, Texas and have, having made her way, to hit San Francisco, she begins with a group called Big Brother and the Holding Company. Now, like the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company live would do a lot of, sort of, crazy stuff, they had, for example, their own version of Hall of the Mountain King, from Grieg's Peer Gynt, a very famous classical piece. They also had another piece that they called Bacon, and the premise of this piece, very sort of John Cage in this certain sense, was that somebody would get a portable stove and skillet onstage, and they would take a couple of pieces of bacon and they would put it in the skillet, and the band would improvise, and when the bacon was done, the song was over, right. And the whole premise was [INAUDIBLE] her premise, the song should be as long as it takes to to to cook bacon and so that's what it was called. So there was, even though we had these hit singles that Janis Joplin does coming out of Big Brother and the Holding Company, and then as a solo artist we should also keep in mind that there was this improvisational avant garde kind of aspect to what they were doing, which crowds at these, these psychedelic events in San Francisco really kind of ate up. The big, probably the big album for them, when she, when Janis was with Big Brother, is an album called Cheap Thrills, released in 1968 and going to number one in the charts, was recorded live at Fillmore, so you really get an evening of what things were like, going on there. The big song of that album, Piece of my Heart, I'm sure you've heard, an awful lot. It's a real staple of FM rock radio. But, others, that are kind of interesting, She does Janis does a version of George Gershwin's Summertime, which, you may wonder, why would she do Summertime? But, you know? If they were already doing classical pieces, Peter Gent, stuff, why not? And, of course, Summertime is a fantastic tune and she sings the heck out of it. Ball and Chain, from Big Momma Thornton, showing that she really had roots in, in blues singing. That's really really sort of, where she came from stylistically. Maybe one of the best blue's voices in Rock and Roll from the 1960's. At least of female voices, anyway, she left the group and went solo. Probably the biggest album being an album called Pearl, which went to number one in early 1971, featuring the number one hit, Me and Bobby McGee, a song that was written by Chris Christopherson. But that success of course was bittersweet. And in fact, posthumous because Janis Joplin died of a drug overdose on October 4th, 1970. And so Pearl was released after her death, and went to number one, along with the single, Me and Bobby McGee. So an important voice and you know, one of the, one of the infrequent times during so far in the course, we've really talked very much about female artist. We've talked about girl groups, we can talk about Grace Slick in, in Jefferson Airplane, and Janis Joplin, but you know this is mostly, mostly we've been talking about white male artists in Rock and Roll. When we're talking about African American artists it's mostly black artists. And so, I think it's important to keep that in mind. The sit, the situation does change as we, we move on in the history of Rock and Roll. There's much bigger place for, for women in control and not, not only sort of in the spotlight, but in control. We will talk about that in part two of the course. For now, we'll, we'll mark people like Grace Slick and Janis Joplin as, as early figures in that. One last group we should talk about is Country Joe and the Fish. It's important when we talk about San Francisco to note, that there were really two kinds of scenes around San Francisco. There were the San Francisco hippies, who were mostly, a-political. They didn't want to get involved in political events. They just wanted the government to leave them alone so they could drop acid and trip. They were not particularly involved in politics. They were kind of utopian in that kind of way. They were a very frustrating to a group around Berkeley, the University of California Berkeley, who are usually thought of as the Berkeley radicals, who really wanted to see real political change in this country. And so often the pol, the sort of the strong push for political and social change. That comes out of the Berkeley Radicals and the kind of far out, added groovy attitude of the San Francisco hippies is melted together into one thing. But, actually, they were very different kinds of communities that had a certain amount of animosity for each other. One group that kind of bridged the gap between those was Country Joe and the Fish. Country Joe did both the kind of hippie kind of music and the, the music that, that spoke to, to social change. On the hippie side, his album from 1967, the band's album from 1967 called Electric Music for Mind and Body, according to Joe, Joe MacDonald was actually written to be an album to accompany the LSD trip. Everything they did on the album side one and side two was meant to be a kind of a soundtrack to follow the LSD trip, and after the album was finished, they dropped LSD to see if it worked, right? So there's an instance of music being written specifically as accompaniment, or maybe even secondarily, to the LSD experience. On the political side, there's a, a track you may have heard called, I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag, which is a kind of a political protest song having to do with the Vietnam War. Political protests in the Vietnam War, a very important part of the counterculture. The counterculture got very involved, not only with the protest against the war, but also joined forces with the the movement, the civil rights movement at the time. But again a lot of hippies not so much interested in all that. They were just sort of looking for their own sort of personal high. there, there's another song by Joe McDonald that's become quite famous it's called, The Fish Cheer, in which he would say, Give me an I, give me an F, give me an I, give me an S, give me an H, Fish, for Country Joe and the Fish, but at Woodstock, he changed that to another four-letter word that begins with F, and that's the famous version that I think a lot of people hear, although that one doesn't get played on the radio very much. So some other San Francisco bands that we might think about as we conclude our discussion to this are groups like Moby Grape, The Quicksilver Messenger Service and Steve Miller. As we look at San Francisco during these years we should make a mental note for our self for part two of this course that Santana actually arose out of this San Francisco scene and the group that arose out of Santana, Journey, arose out of this scene. Of course Steve Miller will have, much more success in the 70s than he had in the 60s and, Sly and the Family Stone, arose out of the San Francisco scene. So even of the groups that we've talked about that had their success or their hayday here. In the the 9, the late 1960s, there were still other groups that would continue the San Francisco sound into the 1970s. But as I say, at the beginning, before 1967, most of these groups were only known within the San Francisco subculture. When the, Summer of Love, occurs and the national press gets on the scene,. Then all of a sudden, the San Francisco music is taken out to the rest of the country, and it start, they start to become mainstream acts. The Grateful Dead, maybe not so much, Moby Grape, Quicksilver, Steve Miller, not so much. But groups like The Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin really became stars, and now we sort of, they move from the subculture into the main stream. Well, that's how the, that's what was going on in San Francisco. In the next video, let's figure out what was happening in the psychedelic scene in London at about the same time [BLANK_AUDIO]
