West Coast vs. West Coast

not to mention how much better the Dead and the Airplane were than the Byrds

ugh puke argh

ccr are not really sf

Where were they living?

"There was no San Francisco sound when we started playing. There weren't any bands in the high school district we were in. We were the only rock and roll band practically on the East Bay," Clifford said. "We played what we liked, and that was blues. The real blues. The raw blues ... and country, the real country, Hank Williams and the like."

http://www.wiscnews.com/news/local/article_59ccc37e-46b5-11e0-8025-001cc4c03286.html

That isn't the same as saying they weren't from San Francisco, just that they predated a particular sound that supposedly emerged from there. From the same article: "Living in the Bay area in the early 1960s there were a lot of diverse cultural styles in the music world and no real sound."

the airplane in particular are easily one of the worst bands of the '60s.

Ouch--I must present counter-evidence and flee.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCVMWx08Nmk

San Francisco and El Cerrito are very, very different places

thousands of teenagers didn't flock to SF because of bill graham.

actually in part they did. Bill Graham as a promoter was so far ahead of everybody else's game it can't even be calculated. He understood what people wanted in terms of shows: what they wanted, how the shows had to feel, how what was going on was different from what had gone on in the fifties. Bill Graham was the guy who packaged it, and thousands of teenagers flocked to SF because the sense they were getting from the media was that that was a package they wanted to buy into it. Thousands of teenagers didn't flock to SF because of a miraculous grassroots groundswell. There was a shit-ton of marketing involved and a lot of money to be made, and Bill Graham knew how to play the angles on that without too too many people getting cynical or suspicious.

I mean I guess you can argue "the Fillmore wasn't that big a part of the whole SF music scene from '65 onward" if you want but you will be talking utter nonsense

bill graham should write a letter to morrissey, maybe help him out

Aren't you splitting hairs, iatee? From the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame bio:

The origins of the group date back to 1959, when guitarist Fogerty, bassist Stu Cook and drummer Doug “Cosmo” Clifford formed the Blue Velvets, an instrumental cover band, while attending junior high in the San Francisco suburb of El Cerrito.

If three-quarters of the band, including Fogerty, first met as junior high students in a San Francisco suburb, that seems more San Francisco to me than some of these bands where the personnel came from other parts of the country altogether.

it's not really a san francisco suburb. it's a small town in the east bay that's, if anything, a suburb of oakland. someone growing up in el cerrito at that time is fairly isolated from the city of san francisco.

oh sweet the thread is about suburbs now

and thousands of teenagers flocked to SF because the sense they were getting from the media was that that was a package they wanted to buy into it. Thousands of teenagers didn't flock to SF because of a miraculous grassroots groundswell. There was a shit-ton of marketing involved and a lot of money to be made, and Bill Graham knew how to play the angles on that without too too many people getting cynical or suspicious.

yeah, I was being tongue in cheek obv about giving LA credit for inventing the SF scene. But you are leaving out some important factors like the Red Dog Saloon, the Human Be-In, Family Dog, and outside factors like the teenage scene on the sunset strip getting shut down in late '66 that all set the stage for Graham to become a multimillionaire. and certainly thousands of kids across the country specifically went to SF because of the stupid song, or because people heard about Monterey.

btw, I highly recommend the Domenic Priore book Riot on Sunset Strip to anyone interested in the subject

I live in the Bay Area but gotta vote with the Byrds, Beach Boys and Buffalo Springfield.

could not in good conscience vote for any list which contains the Dead

i'm including the Bay Area, voting for the San Francisco. it was just more impactful, objectively.

the San Francisco scene.

born and bread in Los Angeles ect...

i grew up on KROQ

wait, how many californians here are voting the opposite of where they're from? I'm a bay area kid voting LA.

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3116/3486805440_c741bdf2cf.jpg

Worlds colliding.

(Bee OK and wk: should I count CCR as San Francisco or not? That probably decides my vote one way or the other.)

If so, you should not count any band that lived outside of LA proper then (Zappa, Beefheart, and I'm sure many others).

Is Topanga part of L.A.?

Sly is from Vallejo fwiw

I love that this poll coming down to whether or not we give LA County more credit for absorbing all these shitty suburbs.

If so, you should not count any band that lived outside of LA proper then

That's really my point: L.A. and San Francisco should be interpreted in a general sense here. Anything to do with Vallejo should be adjudicated by this guy:

http://i1059.photobucket.com/albums/t427/sayhey1/mulanax_zps0e6effa9.jpg

Other soul people? Brenton Wood was from L.A.

Bee OK and wk should I count CCR as San Francisco or not?

i did because without them my vote would have went down south.

come on guys, no need to get picky about stupid municipal boundaries. this is just bay area vs. southern california. the dividing line should be Delano, same as the nortenos and surenos use.

zappa lived in laurel canyon though and the trout mask replica house is in woodland hills, both within LA city limits. didn't the grateful dead form in palo alto or something? take a look at where all of the first acid tests were http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_Tests Santa Cruz, San Jose, Muir Beach, Palo Alto.

right this isn't about city limits its about scenes and ccr weren't a part of the scene

were sly and the family stone a part of the scene?

produced beau brummels, grace slick's first band. so, yes.

from wikipedia article on Santana:

"The group's first audition with this line up was at the Avalon Ballroom in the late summer of 1967. After the audition, Chet Helms the promoter, in concert with The Family Dogg, told the band that they would never make it in the San Francisco Music Scene playing Latin fusion and suggested Carlos keep his day job washing dishes at Tick Tock's Drive-In on 3rd St."

there's also just more sf-in-1969 in sly's music whereas like ccr's whole thing is that there really isn't and people to this day think it's a southern band

Closing night at the Fillmore West in '71 was Santana, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Grateful Dead, and Quicksilver Messenger Service. CCR must have been viewed by Bill Graham and by the audience as being in the general orbit of those bands. (If the argument is that they were radically different in terms of style and attitude, sure; but the Mothers and Mamas & Papas seem worlds apart too.)

http://www.wou.edu/las/creativearts/music/209guideFinal.pdf

33. Were the lyrics and the sound of Creedence Clearwater Revival typical of the San Francisco scene? If not, what were the differences?

obviously the answer to this FINAL EXAM is no, they were not

dude iatee, the seminal band of the whole scene was the Charlatans FFS! they played old timey music and dressed up like cowboys in victorian suits! CCR's whole style fit perfectly into the SF scene at the time. have you listened to early Grateful Dead? ever heard moby grape or quicksilver messenger service?

ccr don't even have a hint of psychedelic in their sound

again do you really think the answer for that FINAL EXAM is yes, of course it's not, so I have a western oregon university professor on my side now

Your answer is right in the question, iatee: "of the San Francisco scene." It's like asking if X-Ray Spex's sound was typical of the British punk scene circa 1977. It wasn't. Which doesn't mean X-Ray Spex wasn't part of that scene.

I would have loved to have been at any of Fifty Foot Hose's SF gigs in '67-'68. They're sort in the same camp as United States Of America, but plugged into that particular ley line of Bay Area Bummer Psychosis that The Residents, Negativland, etc. also mined.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cq-A8BouRg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WRd-MP30MY

a billboard article from nov 14, 1970 has convinced me I am wrong

I will not quote the parts that show why I am wrong and quote this part instead, because it is more interesting:

"Gleason feels like one of the most overlooked aspects of the San Francisco scene is the fact that urban renewal hadn't destroyed old buildings, so that ballrooms and clubs still existed.

The physical elements were present in Los Angeles, Chicago, but not in Boston, New York. I mean the old ballrooms, clubs, the possibility of communicating to the youth-hippie-university audience quickly and in an open way." Gleason points out. "What has happened in San Francisco hasn't happened in any other city. I don't think it could happen anywhere else. The Bay Area has a particularly homogenous nature and the radio is open."

I thought iatee was kidding at first, but he's not--the article starts on page 6.

I think I'll have to do a Markov Chain Analysis or something to figure out my vote. I'd forgotten I had this, which has some great stuff out of L.A. (half of it too early for this poll).

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51YoMBmOQnL.jpg

Trini Lopez tips this to LA for me.

(half of it too early for this poll).

it's funny though the timeframe of the question isn't really defined beyond just '60s in general, so we really should be including Phil Spector, surf music, etc. on LA's side too.

shout out to it's a beautiful day, stoneground, sons of champlain

i'm always meaning to check out more country joe.

cold blood!

L.A. just comes at this from too many directions imo. Apart from the mega-huge rock groups, it was EASILY the biggest garage rock scene in the whole country (Standells, Love, Music Machine, Seeds, Leaves, etc.) and a major pop hub.

I don't expect much agreement, but I think the Nuggets bands as a whole are overrated. Not their most famous songs--those are great. (You can get a lot of them in one place: Nuggets.) I've collected a fair amount of music from the Standells, Music Machine, Seeds, etc. over the years, and once you get past the "Moulty"s and "Pushin' Too Hard"s, there's not a lot. There's not a garage album I've ever heard that's nearly as good as the first Moby Grape LP.

I know, I know--the ghost of Lester Bangs just gave me the finger.

There are certainly garage band greatest hits albums that are as good or better than the first Moby Grape LP. The Music Machine had an incredible run of singles, the first three of which were big-time double A-sides:

"Talk Talk" / "Come On In" (1966)
"The People in Me" / "Masculine Intuition" (1967)
"Double Yellow Line" / "Absolutely Positively" (1967)

I've got this one:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41GMBEJY7KL.jpg

They do a great "Cherry, Cherry," I'll give you that.

are albums the point?

Who knows? Whoever came up with this poll didn't set the parameters very clearly.

knew LA would take this but damn

don't think I even voted :-/

this is relevant:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq19haZ0w7s

haha wow, I missed these results! groovy.