This course, part 1 of a 2-course sequence, examines the history of rock, primarily as it unfolded in the United States, from the days before rock (pre-1955) to the end of the 1960s. This course covers the music of Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Phil Spector, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Cream, and many more artists, with an emphasis both on cultural context and on the music itself. We will also explore how developments in the music business and in technology helped shape the ways in which styles developed. Rock emerged in the mid 1950s as a blending of mainstream pop, rhythm and blues, and country and western--styles that previously had remained relatively separate. This new style became the music of the emerging youth culture and was often associated with teen rebellion. We will follow the story of how this rowdy first wave of rock and roll (1955-59) was tamed in the early 60s but came roaring back with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and then went psychedelic by the end of the decade.
Psychedelia in San Francisco – Important Groups
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From the course by University of Rochester
History of Rock, Part One
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From the lesson
Psychedelia (1966-69)
How can music be psychedelic? Underground psychedelic scenes in San Francisco and London. Psychedelia in LA. The Summer of Love and the rise of hippie culture. The birth of FM rock and rock magazines. Woodstock and Altamont.
Meet the Instructors
John CovachProfessor of Music and Director
Institute for Popular Music
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
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