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>>This is an excerpt from the latest issue of Rolling Stone, on stands until July 27th.
Two key developments--both born outside San Francisco--had decisive bearing on how Haight-Ashbury developed its character. The first took shape in the South Bay area, where in 1965 author Ken Kesey was conducting psychedelic events known as the Acid Tests. Years before, Kesey had taken part in an experimental program studying the effects of psychomimetic drugs--substances believed to induce brief and harmless bouts of psychosis. The experiments familiarized Kesey with LSD, a drug that delivered what he believed to be radical ways of looking at life with a new hallucinatory and ecstatic perspective. For the next few years, Kesey made himself a pioneer for LSD, and with his crew of cohorts, the Merry Pranksters, he began staging large parties--first in the South Bay, later in San Francisco ballrooms--to see what would happen when people took the drug in a situation where there were no rules or preconceived situations (LSD use was not yet illegal). At Kesey?s invitation, the Warlocks--later called the Grateful Dead--became the house band for these collective drug experiments. The other development that helped form the Haight?s early temperament took place at a Western-style dance hall, the Red Dog Saloon, in the ghost town of Virginia City, Nevada. In June 1965, a San Francisco band, the Charlatans, took up residency at the saloon. Their easygoing attitude and meandering performances--as they played sometimes under LSD?s influence for an audience also sometimes under LSD?s influence--set another model for psychedelic gatherings, one less tense and sardonic than Kesey?s.In San Francisco in October 1965, some Red Dog veterans, now calling themselves the Family Dog, staged an evening of bands and dancing at the Longshoremen?s Hall; billed as ?A Tribute to Dr. Strange,? it featured the Charlatans, Jefferson Airplane and the Great Society. The event spontaneously fused the lenient spirit of the Acid Tests with the Red Dog?s focus on dancing and proved a pivotal occasion in the psychedelic scene?s history. Over the next two years, San Francisco dance ballrooms--primarily the Avalon and the Fillmore--became not merely a central metaphor for Haight-Ashbury?s reinvention of community but also a fundamental enactment of it.
The bands that emerged in this setting were made up largely of musicians who had come up playing in the Bay Area?s folk-music venues. The folk crowd had been notoriously dismissive of rock & roll; they saw it as unserious and decadent, not at all committed to social or political concerns. But after the arrival of the Beatles in 1964 and Bob Dylan?s transition to electric music in 1965, Bay Area folk musicians began to see how electric music could incorporate substantive themes and poetic language. ?Rather than being some drug-induced thing,? said Country Joe and the Fish guitarist Barry Melton in Barney Hoskyns? Beneath the Diamond Sky ? Haight-Ashbury 1965-1970, ?it was really a bunch of serious folkie musicologists who played blues and bluegrass joining forces with guys who played at the edge of town, chewed gum and couldn?t put two sentences together--the rock & roll players.? And many of them took acid. LSD couldn?t help but change musicians? sense of continuity: A player could follow a melody wherever it might lead, altering the shape and function of the music?s harmonic structure, transforming it into a background for extended improvisations--a process that the Grateful Dead?s Jerry Garcia once described as ?something like ordered chaos.?
>>This is an excerpt from the latest issue of Rolling Stone, on stands until July 27th.