San Francisco - Alison Bing [23]
And to think that before you arrived, you thought San Francisco’s rock scene had ODed long ago, along with Jerry Garcia, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, various Doors and most of Jefferson Airplane. Fair enough. San Francisco has the ignominious distinction of being a world capital of rocker drug overdoses, ranking right up there with Rome. You could do a macabre tour of the Haight to see all the places Janis nearly met her maker, passing by 32 Delmar St, where Sid Vicious went on the heroin bender that finally broke up the Sex Pistols.
But no drug was powerful enough to kill Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia, who survived decades beyond any medically explicable life expectancy, only to die in rehab in 1995. Memorials left the Haight awash in homemade candle wax and tears scented vaguely of patchouli, and flowers are still often left near the former home of the Grateful Dead on Ashbury St. The Grateful Dead refused to die though, and the song remains the same on now-digitized mix tapes traded among Deadheads like currency. The band continues to gain new fans as jam bands like Phish keep their signature rambling, shambling rock sound going, and Jerry’s former band mates still periodically tour under the name the Dead.
Baby boomers have kept the sound of San Francisco in the ’60s alive and profitable for decades, as they replaced their worn-out records with 8-tracks, then cassettes, then CDs, and now MP3s. Give it a good listen, and you’ll concede the hippies were onto something (as opposed to merely on something). After Joan Baez and Bob Dylan had their Northern California fling, folk turned into folk rock, and Jimi Hendrix turned the American anthem into a tune suitable for an acid trip. When Janis Joplin and Big Brother & the Holding Company applied their rough musical stylings to ‘Me and Bobby McGee,’ it was like applying that last necessary pass of sandpaper to the sometimes clunky, wooden verses of folk. Jefferson Airplane held court at the Fillmore, turning Lewis Caroll’s opium-inspired children’s classic into the psychedelic anthem ‘White Rabbit’ with singer Grace Slick’s piercing wail.
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SAN FRANCISCO’S TOP THREE MUSICAL CRIMES
Many egregious offenses were perpetrated by the Bay Area on unsuspecting listeners, particularly during the 1970s and ’80s (though really, where isn’t that true?), but these three top any local list:
‘She’s a Beauty’ (1983) – the Tubes were headquartered in SF in the ‘70s during their ‘White Punks on Dope’ heyday, when they opened for Iggy Pop and Led Zeppelin, but then they had to go and spoil their indie track record with the inane and infernally catchy hit. Talk about going down the Tubes…
‘Hip to Be Square’ (1986) – so declared Marin County’s Huey Lewis & the News, but actually, it wasn’t. Not even in Marin.
‘When the Lights Go Down in the City’ (1978) – power balladeers Journey unleashed mulleted, high-pitched anthems on an unsuspecting world in the ‘70s, and to this day no other ode to San Francisco lodges itself as distressingly in the brain as Steve Perry’s screechy vocals: ‘When the lights go down in the city/And the sun shines on the Bay/Oh I wanna be they-eee-yah in my city…’ You know you’ve gone soft on SF when you start to sing along (ahem).
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The ’60s were quite a trip, but the ’70s weren’t a let-down either, at least musically speaking. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young splintered, but Neil Young keeps ‘rockin’ in the free world’ from his ranch just south of San Francisco with his earnest, bluesy whine. Through Young’s continued advocacy, the annual Bridge School Benefit (www.bridgeschool.org/events.html) for physically impaired youth in Mountain View attracts folkie greats like Simon & Garfunkel and Bonnie Raitt, as well as marquee names like Dave Matthews Band, Pearl Jam and Beck. Since the