A scene before a summer
The music most associated with the Summer of Love was not made for it. The Bay Area bands had been playing in ballrooms and halls since 1965 and 1966, and by the summer of 1967 several were already signing recording contracts. What the season added was an audience and a national spotlight. Visitors who arrived expecting a “San Francisco Sound” found something looser and more varied than the name suggests: long improvisations, folk and blues roots, amplified guitars, and a lot of ordinary musicianship.
The ballrooms
Two venues gave the scene its shape. The Fillmore Auditorium, on Fillmore Street, was promoted by Bill Graham from 1966. The Avalon Ballroom, on Sutter Street, was run by Chet Helms and the Family Dog collective. The two rivals booked many of the same bands, often on adjoining weekends, and both used light shows and hand-lettered posters. Dancing was free-form rather than choreographed, and audiences sat, stood or wandered. The Trips Festival of January 1966 is often treated as an early landmark of this style, mixing live bands, projections and a crowd that was part of the show.
Because the ballrooms made little distinction between stage and floor, bands had room to stretch songs far beyond the three-minute single. That habit made the live shows quite different from the records the bands then released.
The bands
Grateful Dead. Formed in Palo Alto and then based in the Haight, the Dead lived at 710 Ashbury Street and played free in the Panhandle and the park as well as in the ballrooms. Their first album appeared in early 1967. Their reputation rested on live improvisation more than on studio work.
Jefferson Airplane. The most commercially successful of the group in 1967. Grace Slick joined late in 1966, and the album Surrealistic Pillow, released in early 1967, produced “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit”. The band was among the first from the scene to reach the national pop charts.
Big Brother and the Holding Company. A blues-rock band whose singer Janis Joplin joined in 1966. They drew attention at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, which brought the Bay Area bands in front of national press for the first time.
Quicksilver Messenger Service. Known for twin-guitar jamming and a more instrumental style, the band built a strong following in the ballrooms and recorded its first album later, in 1968.
Country Joe and the Fish. The most openly political of the main bands. Their 1967 album Electric Music for the Mind and Body set psychedelic sounds beside satirical songs, and they were associated with Berkeley as much as the Haight.
Other groups, such as Moby Grape, the Charlatans and Santana in later years, filled out the picture, and a list this short leaves out many.
What “peace and love” meant in the songs
It is easy to assume that the music was one long hymn to peace and love. Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)”, written by John Phillips and released in the spring of 1967, certainly sold the image to a wide audience, and it is sometimes credited with bringing visitors to the city. But the bands themselves were more mixed. Some of their songs celebrated community and open-mindedness. Others were about confusion, drugs or distrust of authority. “White Rabbit” borrows from Lewis Carroll to describe the pull of psychedelic experience, and “Somebody to Love” is a demand rather than a blessing.
The phrase “peace and love” sat more comfortably in slogans and posters than in lyrics, and several of the musicians were notably wary of the media image. For them the music was work and community, and the label of a movement came from outside.
Radio, records and the wider audience
The summer coincided with a change in how rock was heard. Records such as the Sgt. Pepper album, released at the start of June, treated an LP as a single artistic statement, and Bay Area bands moved in the same direction. Freeform programming on FM radio began to appear at San Francisco stations around this time, giving album tracks airtime that commercial Top 40 radio typically did not. Los Angeles produced its own sound, as the Doors debut album showed, and many listeners compared the two scenes.
After the summer
By autumn the ballroom scene was changing. Crowds were bigger, the Haight was under strain, and some bands moved out of the city to rural Marin County or elsewhere. Recording contracts brought pressure to produce albums and tour. The sound did not disappear, but the sense that a local scene was making music mainly for itself faded. What the San Francisco Sound left was an idea of rock as a long-form art, one built around the album and the live jam, that influenced bands for years.