I watched this two-part series about a month ago, and didn't write about it then because no one would know what I was talking about. Kind of like when I wrote about "Hamilton" before the mania hit. There's a delay. Even worse, this two-part series premieres tonight on MGM+, the streaming service formerly known as Epix, and how many people have a subscription to that? Ultimately, it will be available elsewhere, but the buzz will be gone, and sans buzz will it ever be seen?
So what you've got here is a maybe to be forgotten production about a fading era.
This is very strange for those of us who lived through it. Kind of like the Deadheads of today, whose knowledge seems to start with 1970's "Workingman's Dead." But before that there was a journey into the universe, an exploration, yet what about the rest of the San Francisco bands? Like the Charlatans?
Completely forgotten.
The Charlatans were fronted by Dan Hicks, who ultimately had success in the early seventies with his band the Hot Licks. There was "Canned Music" and "I'm an Old Cowhand (From the Rio Grande)." But even more there was "I Scare Myself," with Sid Page's violin.
Here, check it out, and you should:
Spotify: tinyurl.com/7zcu2chp
YouTube: tinyurl.com/yc6u9b79
Listening today you'll hear a roughness we didn't experience back in 1972, when it was released. You see back then it wasn't about perfection, but a feeling, an essence. The music was not bulletproof, it connected on a soulful level, it lived and breathed, which is why we embraced it.
Like the Grateful Dead themselves. Who might have been the roughest of them all, even into the seventies. "Workingman's Dead" and "American Beauty" were anomalies. Mostly the band was one of experimentation, trying to find a groove that would hook the audience and lift the assembled multitude.
Now the funny thing is the pre-1970 San Francisco music scene is being forgotten. Back then there was almost no information. And there were few hits. The Dead had none. Nor Dan Hicks. The Jefferson Airplane broke through on "Surrealistic Pillow" with "Somebody to Love" and "White Rabbit," but Quicksilver Messenger Service never had a hit. And it wasn't until the seventies that Steve Miller became ubiquitous.
Now by time you hit the seventies, there's music on TV, and tons of press, and that era remains alive. So the second episode of this production is less enticing, but the first...
There were no influencers, there was no social media, everything was positively local. And Grace Slick was two-dimensional, all you knew about her was her songs. Which made her even more iconic. Because you filled in the blanks yourself.
And Janis Joplin... Her backstory has faded, but even creepier, her music has faded. At this point, Joplin is mostly remembered for her rendition of "Me and Bobby McGhee," if she's remembered at all. But that first Big Brother album, "Cheap Thrills"... That was not background music. You listened to that record and wanted to get closer. Which is why you went to San Francisco, you wanted more of this.
Now this experimental ethos in music was superseded by the experimental ethos in tech, ironically also from the Bay Area. Used to be California was a different country, three hours behind. Cut loose from the east coast. A place where anything went. Today they say that's Florida, but nothing could be further from the truth. Florida is about retro hedonism. Sure, there are a lot of loose nuts and bolts, but California has always been about moving forward, pushing the envelope, this is where Chuck Yeager made his sound-barrier breaking flights.
Yeager was made famous by Tom Wolfe, by his inclusion in "The Right Stuff," which they even made into a movie. But the piece-de-resistance of Wolfe's nonfiction output came earlier, in 1968, with "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," the story of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. This was required reading for the college student of the seventies. This was inspirational. Here were a bunch of people rejecting conventional society, making fun of people who rarely got the joke.
So, Jerry Garcia is dead. Tom Wolfe too. When I talked to Dan Hicks in the nineties he was burned out, still singing for his supper, after all these were not people with IRAs, but living in the now.
And not only are so many of the musicians gone, now their audience is disappearing too. And their stories with them. This won't happen to the modern era, everything is digitized, at your fingertips, but before that...
I highly recommend the first episode of this series. And if you're younger than forty, stick around for the second too, it will be new to you.
But mostly the series bummed me out. Because I'd been there and done that and seemingly everybody has moved on from there. Warmongers employ the peace sign. Groupthink is prevalent.
But once upon a time it was all about being an individual, on your own trip. That was what the sixties in San Francisco were all about.
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