Where the art and music met
The social story of 1967 gets most of the attention, but the scene produced a body of work that outlasted the crowds. In San Francisco, music and visual art grew up together in a handful of rooms: the Fillmore Auditorium, run by the promoter Bill Graham, and the Avalon Ballroom, run by Chet Helms and the Family Dog collective. The Trips Festival of January 1966, organised around Ken Kesey and his circle, is often treated as the moment these ingredients first combined: bands, projected images, strobes and a crowd that danced rather than sat.
By 1967 the pattern was established. A night at the Fillmore or Avalon meant a bill of several bands, no fixed seating, a floor for dancing and walls and ceilings covered with moving colour.
The bands
The San Francisco groups of the period shared a few traits. They were often rooted in folk, blues and country as much as in rock and roll, they favoured long improvised passages over radio-length songs, and they played mainly for dancers. The best-known names were:
- The Grateful Dead, whose self-titled debut album appeared in early 1967 and who were known for open-ended live playing.
- Jefferson Airplane, who reached a national audience with the album Surrealistic Pillow, which included “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit”.
- Big Brother and the Holding Company, with Janis Joplin as singer.
- Quicksilver Messenger Service, Country Joe and the Fish, and Moby Grape, whose debut album came out in the summer.
Several of these acts were seen by a wider public at the Monterey Pop Festival in June, which helped record companies decide that the San Francisco sound might sell. The studio recordings made that year often capture less of the bands than their ballroom sets did, a frustration musicians themselves sometimes voiced.
Light shows
Light shows were a central part of the ballroom experience. The common technique was to place coloured oils and water between glass dishes on overhead projectors and move them by hand so that blobs of colour swelled and merged on a screen behind the band. Operators added slide projectors, film loops, colour wheels and strobes. Groups of artists formed to do this work, and some became known by name, although credit for the earliest examples is disputed and historians often hedge on who did it first. In New York a similar approach was used at venues linked to Andy Warhol’s multimedia events, which used the Velvet Underground as their house band.
The idea was not to illustrate the music but to create an environment, a kind of visual accompaniment to improvisation. Many people who attended recalled the effect more than the specific songs.
The poster art
Dance concerts were advertised with posters, and the posters became an art form of their own. Artists associated with the genre include Wes Wilson, Rick Griffin, Victor Moscoso, Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley, and Bonnie MacLean, who worked for Bill Graham. Their designs typically featured:
- lettering that bent, swelled and interlocked until it was hard to read at a glance
- saturated, clashing colour combinations that seemed to vibrate
- borrowings from Art Nouveau, Victorian engravings, comic books and Native American and Eastern imagery
Wilson’s style, with letters moulded to fit the shapes of the page, is widely seen as a template, and he was influenced by earlier European graphic design. Others pushed toward more elaborate illustration. The posters were printed in modest runs and often pinned up or taken down within days, but collectors soon began preserving them, and they now appear in museum collections. The resulting psychedelic rock posters remain the visual shorthand for the whole era.
Alongside posters there were album covers, the hand-drawn pages of the Oracle, and the colourful, hand-painted look of shop windows in the Haight. Peter Blake and Jann Haworth’s collage cover for the Sgt. Pepper album, issued in Britain on 1 June 1967, suggests how quickly the idea of the album as a piece of art spread across the Atlantic.
What the art meant
For many participants the aim was to expand perception, partly through psychedelic experimentation, and partly through shared experience in a crowded room. Critics at the time and since have pointed out that the imagery could also be commercial: posters were promotional material for businesses, and record labels were quick to copy the style. Both views are fair. The look and the sound were sincere creative work, and they were also products that sold.
The influence was lasting. The aesthetic shaped graphic design, advertising and concert culture for years. And the music still stands apart from the social story: it can be enjoyed without any reference to the Haight at all.