Roush Review: Groove to ‘San Francisco Sounds’ of the ’60 & ’70s
Review
San Francisco Sounds: A Place In Time
What a wild and wonderful trip it was.
That’s the vibe shimmering from the evocative two-part music documentary San Francisco Sounds: A Place in Time (airing Sunday, August 20 and August 27 on MGM+) from the director and producers of 2020’s Emmy-nominated Laurel Canyon. As in that film, key members of legendary bands — Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Big Brother & the Holding Company, Santana, to name a few — are heard but not seen as they speak over archival images and footage from the psychedelic rock scene that defined a peace-and-love era from the mid-1960s to the mid-’70s.
“There was this nice little nexus of music and strange people,” recalls Airplane’s Paul Kantner. He’s among those fondly remembering an insular community inhabiting the now-iconic Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, with music of all kinds pouring out of the Victorian homes in which they jammed and experimented with styles — and drugs. Among the few shown on camera in interviews are pioneering female radio DJ Dusty Street and several celebrated poster artists whose album covers both advertised the scene and became emblems of the time.
“It was the romantic height of the young revolutionary artist,” explains actor Peter Coyote, at the time a member of the countercultural San Francisco Mime Troupe. The scene is remembered as “a social phenomenon more than a music phenomenon” by Steve Miller, with the Vietnam War and protests on the Berkeley campus as political backdrops.
San Francisco Sounds also touches on tensions between the iconoclastic Northern California community and their counterparts in the more star-driven Southern California music market. But once the media latched on to the “hippie” trend, creating an influx of groupies described by Rolling Stone‘s Ben Fong-Torres as “like New York City rush hour with longer hair,” and record labels began signing San Francisco artists to lucrative contracts, the fabled days of the Fillmore Auditorium were numbered. For DJ Dusty Street, what we now think of as the “summer of love” was “more like the summer of the death of an ideal.”
Still, as the Dead’s Jerry Garcia puts it, “Everybody got a glimpse of something…. To me, it might have been something like limitless possibilities.”
San Francisco Sounds: A Place in Time, Series Premiere, Sunday, August 20, 10/9c, MGM+
