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.
