My friend and colleague Steve Silberman – we hang out together in The Well, a seminal online community that still chugs along in a plain-text meeting of the minds, sheltered from the roar of the broadband universe – just posted the first piece of journalism he ever published. It was a review of the Jefferson Airplane reunion in Golden Gate Park, published October 15, 1989 in the San Francisco Chronicle.
This statement jumped out at me. It describes one aspect of the special magic that animated the San Francisco Sound, and as Steve went on to say in his piece, it also characterizes other cultural movements we’ve witnessed and/or joined in the intervening years.
It wasn’t only what they were saying, but how they sounded, their soaring alloy of less-than-perfect voices a metaphor for a community that welcomed anyone courageous enough to want to be part of it.
Jerry Garcia, Paul Kantner and others have talked about this: the ’60s San Francisco ballroom scene was a neighborhood phenomenon, and the bands were playing for their peers. It was a DIY movement, the same sort of thing we later saw w/ punk, hiphop, etc.
Here’s what Kantner told Steve Silberman in a September 2005 interview that I broadcast on KPFA:
We werenÕt spokesmen for a generation; we were just reflecting the people who came to the Fillmore. Often in the Fillmore in those days the audience was much more interesting, I always say, than the people on stage. And the reason I went to the Fillmore was because of the people in the audience. Now and again there would be some really good shit on stage too, and that was a plus.
That neighbhood became world-famous, and the bands went on the road to spread their message of love and brotherhood and a sustainable way of life (Phil Lesh talks about this in his surprisingly excellent autobiography, Searching for the Sound). And the ballrooms brought in musicians from other worlds to enrich the local scene. Kantner again:
B.B. King had a great elevating moment Ð he cried when he went on stage at the Fillmore because people were so respectful of the beauty that he produced…. The great fact here is that the na•ve San Mateo white children found that they could be moved. And coming out of the Ô50sÉit was not a very moving decade, and people were very tight-assed. And if you got moved, there must be something wrong with you. So for us to come into the Ô60s – God bless the Ô60s – and to be moved by such things as B.B. King and any number of other players who came there and showed us things that we did not have a clue about, Bill Graham, and Chet Helms as well, have to be lauded for bringing this kind of shit to the basic populace.