Various Artists: Love Is The Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets 1965-1970 : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

The reckless joy of the acid-garage tumult and utopian dreaming on these four CDs proves once and for all that San Francisco, in the second half of the Sixties, was the most exciting rock & roll city in America. That would be true even if there had never been a Summer of Love. Only a handful of these seventy-seven tracks were actually cut in Bay Area studios during that mad season in 1967, and two of them went unreleased for decades: the Mystery Trend's pop-art bang "Carl Street" and the Charlatans' jangling arrangement of the traditional "Alabama Bound." Many of the pivotal performances -- Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit," the ultraviolet instrumental "Section 43" by Country Joe and the Fish, Quicksilver Messenger Service's twin-guitar expansion of Bo Diddley's "Who Do You Love?" -- date from the local idyll of '65 and '66, before see-the-hippie bus tours started clogging the Haight.

There is another vital revelation in this set: San Francisco was the first modern indie-rock scene, an eclectic collision of big ideas and small-town-style entrepreneurial energies. Proto-metal and psycho-Yardbirds-frenzy singles by the Oxford Circle and the Mourning Reign were originally released on minor regional labels. The bands Country Weather and Frumious Bandersnatch issued their great respective freakouts, "Fly to New York" and "Hearts to Cry," on self-financed EPs. Sly Stone honed the Day-Glo soul and Fillmore-dance gait of "Underdog," his 1967 Epic Records debut with the Family Stone, by producing earlier local sessions here by the Mojo Men, the Great! Society -- with the pre-Airplane Grace Slick -- and the Warlocks, soon to be the Grateful Dead.

Love Is the Song We Sing (the title comes from the era's anthem "Let's Get Together," heard in versions by author Dino Valenti and the Youngbloods) also celebrates the later, national triumphs of Moby Grape, the Steve Miller Band and It's a Beautiful Day, among others. But the greater love here is for the quality and prophecy of the rock & roll made in San Francisco by and for friends and neighbors, before anyone else was looking.