Enough time has passed for the scene in 60s San Francisco to turn from memory to history, now understood predominantly as a set of ideas and signifiers: flower power, free love, fringe vests, infrequent showers, idealistic good vibes giving way to an inevitable comedown. If this pivotal moment in time threatens to become self-parody, reduced to a tie-dyed Halloween costume, it’s due in part to the hyperbolic terms used by the Boomers who lived through it. The Haight-Ashbury neighborhood was a paradise too edenic to last, as the record goes, where “the streets were paved with LSD”.
In the new two-part MGM+ documentary San Francisco Sounds, poster designer Victor Moscoso – a pioneer of the far-out psychedelic aesthetic synonymous with this cultural moment – intends that description as firmly tongue-in-cheek. He shares an approximate viewpoint and goal with directors Alison Ellwood and Anoosh Tertzakian, who aim to recapture the magic of this fleeting, fertile heyday while focusing on the details of assorted lives over romanticized fantasy.
“We wanted to take this as an origin story, to find the links to how all these bands that we do know came from places we might not have heard of,” Ellwood tells the Guardian via Zoom. “We wanted the untold stories.”
“So much of this is lumped together under the Summer of Love,” Tertzakian adds. “And we wanted to go back just a little bit further, take a look under the hood, see what was there before all of that.”
Getting first-hand accounts from colorful characters like Moscoso immersed the film-makers in a period they’d always appreciated from something of a distance; a born California girl, Tertzakian came closer to understanding the ethos of her parents’ golden days, where Ellwood was “a little hippie at six years old, wearing bell bottoms, refusing to salute the flag in protest of the Vietnam war. And I was listening to the music as well, of course. So many of our collaborators, the lingo, the discussions we were having, it felt close to home.”
The course of their research acquainted both women with new favorite acts off the beaten path, Ellwood falling hard for Moby Grape while Tertzakian got deep into the Quicksilver Messenger Service catalogue. But many of the key figures of this zeitgeist have remained in heavy rotation for Americans of all generations: Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company with their dynamo lead singer Janis Joplin. As opposed to the creative boom flourishing down in Laurel Canyon around this time, the subject of Ellwood and Tertzakian’s last joint project, the San Francisco sound oriented itself around bands rather than individuals. “The band was the essential unit, and it was about being communal – communal living, communal values, and that really defines that era in San Francisco,” Tertzakian explains.
“The LA artists were becoming singer-songwriters, hitmakers, whereas the San Francisco crew was not only not about that, they were against it,” Ellwood continues. “They rejected celebrity, though Monterey Pop ironically put them on the map, and they couldn’t help becoming that.”
Though the scene took shape through what Tertzakian calls a geographic kismet, the simple phenomenon of running into people you know that now transpires largely online, the movers and shakers were fiercely committed to their philosophy. The thrift store wardrobes, the folk and country influences in the bands’ sonic makeup, the reluctance to ink fat contracts – it was all informed by “living your values, being authentic, things seen as really important principles”, as Ellwood says.
“They wanted to make music, to play, to eat, to do shows and get paid so they could make rent,” Tertzakian sighs. “It’s not completely outside of the system, it’s just that the balance gets out of whack.”
“And then money changes your perception of your role in the world,” Ellwood adds. “That’s true of anyone. But they did have an ethos, they really did believe they had a sustainable model for society. It might’ve worked, had it not been inundated by outside forces, but like anything else, it could’ve just as easily imploded on itself.”
The doc’s two installments logically follow a rise-and-fall structure, peaking with the euphoria of the Monterey international pop festival and crashing with its equal and opposite reaction in the Altamont Free Concert’s outbreak of violence. The heady talk about revolution fizzled as some icons sold out and others flamed out, the darkest pall cast by Joplin’s untimely death due to overdose. Jefferson Airplane splintered into competing groups, the Grateful Dead took to the road, and farther down the line, a mixture of drugs and egotistical tensions would get the better of Sly and the Family Stone. The counterculture that once stood for a sincere and personal craftsmanship was mass-produced, boxed up, and sold by the ton. As Tertzakian says: “Tie-dye just keeps coming back, and it’s now manufactured instead of hand-made.”
“You can’t separate the time from the tragedy of it all,” Ellwood says. “That sort of self-destructive nature would be more tempered now, people being more aware of the dangers in this lifestyle. At the time, everyone was young. They thought it was mind-expanding. Like a lot of young people, they thought they were immortal. A sort of naïveté played a big role.”
The eventual fate of San Francisco hangs over the archival footage without explicit address, an unspoken coda to the arc of decline. The sidewalks once trodden by artists with dreams of a better world have been overrun by tech startups peddling a grotesque perversion of that concept, exacerbating what Tertzakian calls “an inequality that’s grown to an extreme scale”. A gulf has opened up to separate the extractive one-percenters with zero cultural contributions from the lower class pushed beneath the poverty line and into homelessness. The film-makers share a deep sense of lament for the city they’ve studied over the past three years and loved as long as they can remember, reluctant to watch it carved up by capital and crime. They’d like to see a return to the San Franciscan ethic of decent, mindful existence, and even though that radiant positivity feels remote from the present day, it might be the only chance we’ve got.
The words of Michael Shrieve, the Santana drummer who holds the distinction of second-youngest performer at Woodstock, still ring in Ellwood’s ears: “As he says at the end of the film, with how divisive things have become now, we’re going to need another hippie movement.”
San Francisco Sounds: A Place in Time starts on MGM+ on 20 August with a UK and Australian airdate to be announced
