Almost every one of the major players kept going long after that first ascent to prominence, but in most cases they did it by retreating to the places that first brought them to prominence, the clubs and ballrooms of the Bay area.
Looking at it from outside it’s probably easy to miss the significance of the contribution that the local venues made to the overall scene. Sure, Bill Graham went on to become a major player on the American, if not the world stage when you’re talking concert promotions but it’s fairly obvious that the existence of an active live music scene was a significant factor in what happened in San Francisco in the late sixties.
Of course there were active music scenes in other major cities, but there were a couple of factors that seem to have combined to create a unique scene in San Francisco.
For a start, unlike other centres like Los Angeles, New York or London there wasn’t a substantial music industry infrastructure in place, so you’d suspect that a burgeoning live scene would be able to develop along its own lines without being excessively affected by commercial considerations.
Equally important was San Francisco’s location at the end of the beatnik trail across the United States, along with the presence of run-down low rent neighbourhoods like the Haight-Ashbury where the travellers could find temporary (or permanent) refuge.
Those factors meant that there were plenty of people passing through the coffee shops and dance halls who’d come from somewhere else and brought their experiences from elsewhere with them. It’s hard to imagine Bill Graham’s subsequent career shaping the way it did without his earlier stint working in the Catskill resorts in upstate New York, for example.
The visitors didn’t just bring their experiences with them. They also brought contacts and once they’d settled gave friends and acquaintances somewhere to crash at the end of the beatnik trail. Chet Helms from the Family Dog collective could draw on his experiences running benefits for civil rights groups back in Austin Texas, persuaded Janis Joplin to relocate to the West Coast, and matched her up with the rest of Big Brother & The Holding Company.
At the same time, the same combination of factors that created the scene meant that it wasn’t going to survive once the glare of the spotlight focussed on it during the fabled Summer of Love.
Predictably, by the end of 1968 the media were looking elsewhere in the wake of the student activism that almost toppled the government of France and was echoed on campuses around the world. Not much peace, love, flowers or understanding in that scenario.
So that’s a sort of perspective on the next three Rear Views - Mother Earth’s Living With The Animals, Quicksilver Messenger Service’s Happy Trails and the first batch of albums by the Steve Miller Band