Speaker: Listener supported, WNYC studios.

[MUSIC - Jefferson Airplane: Somebody to Love]

When the truth is found to be lies

And all the joy within you dies

Don't you want somebody to love

Brigid Bergin: That's not the All of It theme music, that's Jefferson Airplane, Somebody to Love. They were performing at the 1967 Monterey Pop Fest in California at arguably the turning point of the psychedelic '60s. Jefferson Airplane, of course, being one of the iconic bands to come out of San Francisco's iconic hippie hotbed at the time, the Haight Ashbury District. There were also acts like the Grateful Dead, Moby Grape, Janis Joplin and The Holding Company, and the Steve Miller Band, just to name a few. That scene, that subculture, and all the sounds that comprised it are the subject of a new docuseries from MGM. It's called San Francisco Sounds: A Place In Time, and I'm joined now with the documentary filmmakers, Alison Ellwood and Anoosh Tertzakian. Alison, Anoosh, thanks for joining us today.

Alison Ellwood: Thanks so much for having us.

Anoosh Tertzakian: Thanks for having us.

Brigid Bergin: Listeners, if you were part of this moment, we're talking about San Francisco in the '60s, the Hippie Movement around Haight Ashbury. We want to hear from you, 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. Tell us what you remember from that era. What drew you to the subculture? Anything else you want to share about your firsthand experiences in San Francisco's hippie movement? That's 212-433-9692. Call or text that number, or you can reach us on social media @allofitwnyc. The first voice we hear in that film is of Victor Moscoso, who designed some of the iconic posters to come out of this era. Alison, why start with him?

Alison Ellwood: That was actually Anoosh's brilliant move. The hardest thing was to figure out how to begin this film. We tried many, many, many different things. Anoosh finally said, let's just cold start with Victor. Anoosh, you can take that one.

Brigid Bergin: Pick it up, Anoosh. How did you track him down? What I loved about the film so much was the interplay between the narrative and the live interviews, and then all of the amazing archival footage that you had, recordings, interviews, which we'll talk about a little bit later.

Anoosh Tertzakian: Basically, we really wanted to flip the star system on its head, and that's why we really had these portal characters, people who weren't famous musicians, necessarily, leading us through the story. Victor was just one of those people that we knew on screen was just going to have this incredible magnetism, and he really pulled through.

Brigid Bergin: Absolutely. This documentary is really a about place. It's about San Francisco and what made it such a fertile ground for this cultural scene to take root. Why is understanding the city of San Francisco at that time so critical to understanding the history of the moment and this movement?

Alison Ellwood: San Francisco's almost a character in and of itself in this, and we wanted to-- These moments seemed to come out of thin air, but there was actually a very rich tradition of cultural connections and social connections in San Francisco that made the ground very ripe for something this fertile to happen. That's why it happened there at that time. These things do pop up in places, and there's always little magical fairy dust that comes together to make something happen.

Brigid Bergin: We hear the voice of Steve Miller explaining that there had already been a beatnik presence in San Francisco in that the equation went beatniks plus LSD equals the hippie scene. Let's actually listen to a clip of radio DJ Dusty Street talking about the eclectic influences, including the beats that went into the subcultural influences.

DJ Dusty Street: San Francisco has always been, and always will be a great source for an incredible diversity of music. I remember walking down the street past the Grateful Dead House on Ashbury, and you could hear music of different kinds coming from different rooms. Phil Lesh would have classical music going on. Pig Pen would have blues coming out of his. There would be bluegrass from the Living Room with Jerry Garcia. San Francisco was always such a cultural hub. You're having influences from all different places. The beatniks had been in San Francisco, and the Allen Ginsburg's, and the City Lights Bookstore, and the jazz musicians.

Brigid Bergin: Anoosh, how did the hippies grow out of the Beat movement and these other musical and cultural traditions?

Anoosh Tertzakian: That's a good question. To a certain degree, San Francisco is just on the edge of the earth. I think once the beatniks-- from our research as we were reading, once the beatniks were waning, there was this new generation that was in between things, and they had grown up in the boring '50s. So many of our characters were talking about how they just couldn't find themselves. They couldn't live an authentic life in the homes that they had grown up in. San Francisco, they had read Jack Kerouac, so many of them just took speed and drove across country just to get to San Francisco and see what was there. It was that experimentation that just allowed them to open up.

Brigid Bergin: Part of the story is introducing us to characters who, as you said before, from the poster maker to the radio DJ Dusty Street, big Daddy Tom Donahue, who founded Autumn Records, Billy Graham, and Chad Helms, who owned the scenes, prominent venues. What did the infrastructure look like before the psychedelic movement took off? How is this new sound connected to their changing business model?

Anoosh Tertzakian: That's a great question. There were little clubs. It was different genres of music that were being played. I think that a lot of our characters found themselves because there were no rules with the genres that they were playing with because they weren't trying to fit a model. They didn't really have places to play their kinds of music. That's when Jefferson Airplane opened the Matrix, and that's when the Fillmore and the Avalon, once they saw that there was actually-- this music that could pull together so many people who wanted to just dance and be together, that really started to shift the magnet of where people were going to hear music.

Brigid Bergin: We also hear the voices of one of the members of an early psych-rock band called The Charlatans. They describe the city of San Francisco is Edwardian and Victorian. Alison, can you talk more about what that means, how that aesthetic worked into the scene?

Alison Ellwood: What's funny is that George Hunter, who formed the band was his idea. He was not musical at all, knew nothing about it. He was blown away by the Beatles and said, "Let's be an American band." They fancied themselves a band before they even knew how to play together. They just adopted this very Edwardian Victorian look that was cowboy-ish too.

They actually got their start at Red Saloon, which is actually a little bit North of San Francisco. They auditioned on Acid and were hired to do a show up there. They caught on. People found out what was going on, so when they got back to San Francisco, they were like, "Okay, we've got to make this thing happen here now." They were really the spark that got it going even though they didn't last that long. Dan Hicks, of course, went off to do Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks. He had some success, but most people have forgotten about the charlatans.

Brigid Bergin: A few different voices, I think, describe this moment when Billy Graham's party started to get bigger and more regular, where the scene coalesces. I think it's the voice of Jerry Garcia that is explaining that all of a sudden you look around and you see that this movement was bigger than in his words, "Me and my freak friends." Anoosh, what were the first indications that people get that this is actually a movement taking place?

Anoosh Tertzakian: It's interesting because I feel like that happens from the beginning, but it just seems to grow little by little by little. The charlatans come back from the Red Dog Saloon and they play at the Longshoreman's Hall, which was like the first big venue where a lot of these people who were living life differently were able to come together. Then the Fillmore and the Avalon, they grow it a little bit further. After that, The Human Being, which is this-- It happening in the park where you can actually have 20,000 people, whatever Paul Canner says. It's so many people all coming together. we have to remember that that was before Woodstock. A lot of people talk about Woodstock as that moment, and that was much more of a national moment, but before that, The Human Being really gave that sense of oneness and togetherness that hadn't existed before.

Brigid Bergin: I want to talk a little bit about, as I referenced before, all of what you put into this, the film, and the amazing archival photographs and recordings. What were some of the primary source materials that you got access to that allowed you to really deepen your understanding of this moment in our cultural history?

Anoosh Tertzakian: So many.

[laughter]

Brigid Bergin: Truly, there were pages and pages of credits of all the different archives. Was there one in particular that was most important to telling this story?

Alison Ellwood: Jim Marshall's photographs maybe were absolutely key. It's such a shame that he's no longer with us because he would've been a great portal character like Henry and Nurit were in Laurel Canyon for us, because he's in a lot of the photographs and the musicians really respected him. He was there all the way through, and those photographs are amazing, but there literally are hundreds of sources.

Anoosh Tertzakian: There's so many. We had such great producers who are helping us procure all of this material, and without which, you're not able to work at the same time as finding everything.

Brigid Bergin: In that same vein, how important was it to involve people like Ben Fong-Torres, a journalist for Rolling Stone, who chronicled this time and really helps advance the narrative as you are telling the story? Anoosh, you want to take it?

Anoosh Tertzakian: Yes. Can you repeat that question?

Brigid Bergin: How important was it to involve in some of the storytelling portal characters, I think, Allison mentioned, someone like Ben Fong-Torres, the Rolling Stone journalist, who provides some context and helps put these moments that we're talking about in history.

Anoosh Tertzakian: I think to a certain degree, we were trying to tell a new history. There are so many people who have looked at this time, and we needed to focus on characters that had not necessarily had the spotlight as brightly put on them. Basically, the conversations that we had with all of our characters and all of the people including Dusty Street and Ben Fong-Torres and Victor Moscoso and all of the musicians. The interviews that we had were actual conversations, not just a series of question and answer.

I think there was so much that wasn't necessarily like soundbite material that just infused our vision and our goal to try to tell this story as authentically as possible using their voices, because so many people had felt that their story had not been told properly or that there were so many myths out there. We feel like we've really been able to undo some of those myths and give you a different sense of the source of this beautiful time.

Alison Ellwood: I just wanted to add one thing to that, too, is that all of these characters were presenting something new. Ben was bringing a new form of journalism, telling the stories from the inside, and mainstream journalism was suspect by these artists prior to this. He was telling it from the inside. Dusty, they were inventing FM radio.

Brigid Bergin: I am speaking with Alison Ellwood, documentary filmmaker, and Anoosh Tertzakian, also documentary filmmaker. They made the film San Francisco Songs: A Place in Time. We are taking your calls and your texts. We got a text from a listener who wrote, "Don't forget cheap rent. Poet historian, Ed Sanders of The Fugs, quip, 'The '60s happened because of rent control. We so often discuss ideas and trends in art, but economics are always a factor. People make art where they can afford leisure time,'" and I suppose afford to live would be the end of that thought. Anoosh, I see you nodding. Talk about how the economics of the time made it even possible for this art to be created.

Anoosh Tertzakian: You could rent a Victorian and put your whole band in there, as Jerry Miller says. I think that just the fact that you could live together as young people, you could live together and spend all your time together in the middle of the city that's really small comparatively, where you could randomly run into people and hear music playing outside of another house as you're walking down the street, I think it's a wonderful pertinent and absolutely true point.

Alison Ellwood: They were trying to create a self-sustaining society. They had a free clinic. They gave away free food. Some of the free food was stolen from trucks, but nonetheless, it was given out for free. They were trying to create a society that could sustain itself, and they might've succeeded had it not been discovered.

Brigid Bergin: Bill Graham started out as the manager of a mime troop that had this renaissance fair vibe. One member that we hear in the film says that with their performances, they became "darlings of the left." How did politics and performance art come to shape this subculture as well?

Alison Ellwood: That was Peter Coyote who said that, and he's such a wonderful presence in the film. There was always the undercurrent of the politics going on. The Vietnam War was raging, and being drafted and dying in a foreign place was very much on the mind of the young people at the time, and they were rejecting that and combining politics and art. Now, the music was a little bit different. Some of the musicians wanted to be, at least initially, other than Country Joe, they were more about just experimenting, but then they coalesced and all came together, and the politics and the music merged.

Brigid Bergin: Your film has sounds right there in the title, San Francisco Sounds, but so much of what you cover is also visual, the mime troop, the poster artists, the guy that pioneered those trippy visual projections, the fashion of it all. Anoosh, how do the visual sensibilities of the time dovetail with the musical impulses and aesthetics?

Anoosh Tertzakian: That's a great question. As Bill Ham says, there's a compositional coherence. To a certain degree, the music was the audible incarnation of these people's lives and what they wanted to express, and how they wanted to live, but the visuals, they, too, were breaking ground, and it was all about cohesion and community. The light shows, for instance, you'd go into a venue into the Fillmore, the Avalon, and you would be part of the event. The band was not the focal point. You were one of the pieces of this huge puzzle, and I think the visuals in and of themselves broke rules that had been set for so long. Now, we don't even see those rules anymore because they're ubiquitously used now. Alison?

Alison Ellwood: I just want to say that the fashion also addresses the earlier question about the economics of it because they were buying clothes at thrift stores where they could afford to buy things, so it was a fashion that developed out of necessity.

Brigid Bergin: It was also so interesting how everyone talked about how this was something that could only happen in San Francisco, that this was something that grew out of this city, this place, and even though the music might have traveled, that what we're talking about here is something that was unique to this place. I want to bring in one of our listeners who called in, who has a lot of experience with this music. Sandy in Rye Brooke, New York, thanks for calling All Of It.

Sandy: Hi, can you hear me?

Brigid Bergin: We can hear you.

Sandy: In 1968, I was an investor and I was an operator of a club called The Kaleidoscope on Sunset Boulevard right off Vine. Mama Cass opened the doors, so it turned on the music when we first opened. We had the house band, which was Canned Heat. Jefferson Airplane was our first band along with Canned Heat. We had every band in Woodstock with us, Springfield. We had The Doors. We had Strawberry Alarm Clock. I can't even name everybody, but you name it, we had it. We even had-- Anyway, she died. She drank too much. [chuckles] Anyway, it was a 360 stage that revolved. We did not sell liquor because the drinking age was 21 at that time in LA where it was 18 years. I invested money in this club, and of course, I lost every cent, but I called that that was my MBA.

Brigid Bergin: Sandy, thank you so much for that call and for that very vivid image of this club that had a lot of the same music that this film covers. Anoosh, this is part of what makes this film unique is, you looked at how these musicians when they were in San Francisco had a totally different experience than probably when they were on stage in that club in LA. Is that right?

Anoosh Tertzakian: It's possible. Also, from that description, it feels like a little bit of San Francisco had seeped down to LA already. I think that that's what's so interesting about this San Francisco is that it's a kernel and it definitely had an impact.

Brigid Bergin: We see in the summer of 1967, the Monterey Pop Festival, and a lot of what we hear in the film and the event is really drawing this distinction between places San Francisco, LA, and New York's Greenwich Village, and some of the psych-rock coming out of Europe, including Jimi Hendrix. How was the vibe just different? What made San Francisco so unique in this context?

Anoosh Tertzakian: Couldn't drive anywhere. I thought it was much less about. It's a city that you can walk through, as Victor Moscoso has wonderfully said. There's a kismet that's involved in that. It's all of these elements put together. There's not one thing, and I think it's a question that we will continue to ask. Even though we offer some answers to it, I think it's a question that is, what is that magic formula?

Alison Ellwood: There was also a lot of cross-pollination happening, too, and Dylan was going from the East Coast to Los Angeles and San Francisco and the doors were going back and forth. There was a bit of rivalry between San Francisco and LA, but there was also a lot of cross-pollination.

Anoosh Tertzakian: Exactly.

Brigid Bergin: That last line before the credits roll, and I think it's Steve Miller reflecting on where we are socially and culturally today, and he says, "We need another hippie movement. I think everybody could use a good hit of acid." Is there anything from this scene, the subculture that either of you think could help with some of the issues that face us today just very briefly?

Alison Ellwood: I just think that it was Michael Shrieve who said that and those ending comments that Steve and Michael and several others said is just what they-- It was a moment of an opening and of an awakening of what things could be like. I think we've lost that now, and I think that-- Anoosh [unintelligible 00:22:24].

Anoosh Tertzakian: Yes, it's one of those. That's the reason why we made this film, is to look back and remind ourselves a little bit about how magical things can be. Those are at that dream, is as important as looking forward.

Brigid Bergin: I want to thank you both so much. I've been speaking with documentary filmmakers, Alison Ellwood, and Anoosh Tertzakian. The two-part Docu-series is called San Francisco Sounds: A Place In Time. Alison and Anoosh, thanks for joining us today.

Anoosh Tertzakian: Thank you so much.

Alison Ellwood: Thank you.

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