The San Francisco Music Scene

The San Francisco music scene, unlike many of the scenes we've looked at so far in this series, had rather a limited impact on the wider world of music. Bands like Jeff as an airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Big Brother and the Holding Company were all massively commercially successful. But their music was so specifically of the place and time that to attempt to copy it outside of that context would appear ridiculous. So over the next few months, we're going to take several trips to the Bay Area, and look at the bands which, for a brief time, defined the counterculture in America.