Some San Fran Sounds

Friday is fun because it’s music. This is a Tour Edition. Talking about the music I’m experiencing while in San Francisco. But there’s still the regular weekly playlist for y’all!

Hello, from San Francisco. I am on holiday. As I’ve mentioned. And so the tone and structure of my newsletters (and delivery) is going to change a little. I’ll possibly make some of them a bit more rambling and off-the-cuff, which might be a shock to the many of you already sure that they’re pretty rambling and off-the-cuff.

We are here for a few days in San Fran, it’s my third visit to this great city. I like it a lot here. It’s a bit more chill than some other places I’ve been in the States and yet it still has plenty of excitement, and not too many political-far-right crazies either. It lines up well with the Wellington I’m used to, but has more of the Auckland/Melbourne/Sydney big city vibes.

Last night I saw Tangerine Dream live. Pretty much on a whim! I mean, I knew they were playing here, but it certainly wasn’t the reason for the trip. It was a bonus. So much so, that I only bought a ticket a couple of hours before the gig. I was pretty stoked to see that it aligned with my time here - I’ve probably listened to Tangerine Dream more than any other band over the last year or so. I imagine my Spotify end of year lists will reflect that this time around for sure. I was a bit late to the party with Tangerine Dream, I got into them largely for their soundtrack work, but a couple of years ago I worked through almost every album (100 or more) as the perfect re-introduction to working in an office. That was my daily dose of music - it kept me calm, it kept me focussed. I have been using Tangerine Dream like one might a dose of Rescue Remedy, or an online Yoga course; I’ve been listening to Tangerine Dream to ease me to sleep, to accompany me driving or walking, and as the soundtrack for a working day. It’s my little musical En Ra Ha!

So to tick them off the list, to see them live, was certainly a treat. And it was wonderful - I’ll likely write a full review here at some stage soon.

Tangerine Dream is now a trio that features no original members, but it’s largely a faceless type of music anyhow, instrumental, and with accompanying visuals that are part of the journey and story. The gig was in the Regency Ballroom, which I went to back in 2012 when I saw The Roots on my first trip here.

The Regency is a bit like the Wellington Town Hall - and makes me miss the Town Hall so much.

I love seeing gigs in America. The encore just casually happened to feature Robert Rich - a legend of New Age/Ambient music, who is a resident Californian. So he was trotted out as a special guest, no announcement until the time. Very cool. When I was last here I saw Sting and Peter Gabriel, and Eddie Vedder popped up for a couple of songs!

Yesterday, we drove around on The Big Bus - a San Fran tour bus (photo at top). And we listened to some of the history in and round hopping on and off to visit various spots - including going HOG-WILD at the famous City Lights bookstore (again!)

At one point, as we were nearing the Haight-Ashbury, the commentary track told us about the famous San Francisco bands, even mentioning Train and Third Eye Blind (lol). But the Bay Area’s big names in music are of course Metallica and its whole thrash scene from the 1980s, and way before that, in the birth of hippie-dom, it was Janis with Big Brother and The Holding Company, Grateful Dead, Santana, Sly & The Family Stone, Journey and Jefferson Airplane. That sort of thing.

I’ve long been fascinated with the San Francisco bands - not all of them of course, but that 60s era for sure. When I went back to university to finish my degree as a mature student, I was able to do a Media Studies paper. And I even got to write an essay about the San Fran sound and movement.

I loved the Woodstock movie as a young kid, cos I was into all that music - and the history around it. But I preferred the Monterey Festival concert film. That had better performances. And from there I got into reading about the bands, and listening to a whole heap from my favourites. Sly & The Family Stone is one of the greatest bands I’ve ever heard - still. Any day of the week I can put a Sly record on and I’m hooked, instantly. It is the key antecedent for Prince and his music. And it is some amazing journey to go on, there’s the (separate) Sly Stone story (his memoir is due in a month or two - CANNOT WAIT!) and there’s the fact that this beautiful band was mixed-race and mixed-gender in the 1960s. That just didn’t happen really. They were a funk band, and a pop group, and a rock band all in one, and sometimes all at once.

I love Santana - though only the first four or five studio records and that banging big live record. After that they lost me, and Carlos has been making bad music and bad statements for years now. But you cannot deny the fire of that early stuff.

I like the things you are supposed to like by Jefferson Airplane, and Big Brother, but I’m not big fanatic there. I sometimes think that Jefferson Airplane becoming Starship, releasing We Built This City (even I’m not cruel enough to link to it) is the ultimate statement of and for America.

But the San Fran band I’m most curious about - and by no means an expert - is The Grateful Dead. In fact, I have been planning to write a piece for a while about them, as I might be the world’s Biggest Fairweather Fan of the Dead. By which, I mean I’m no Deadhead. And never could be. But I really do like them. By far my favourite thing about this band though, is just knowing they existed. Reading about them, watching docos about them, that’s better to me than actually listening to them. And that feels like a bigger backhander than calling myself a Big Fairweather Fan.

I first got curious about the Dead when I saw Jerry Garcia talking on a history or rock doc. He was so funny and warm and gentle, I couldn’t reconcile this with what I thought The Grateful Dead was; my dad had warned me away from them as if they were the most satanic of metal bands. He and I both judged them by the iconography. We had no knowledge of the music. When I finally went in, it was for an allegedly mediocre live album from the 1990s. But I absolutely adore it. To this day, it’s my favourite Dead album - the nostalgia of it, the discovery…

There’s a 900-page book about the Dead, written by their tour manager, it is one of the best books about music I’ve ever read. The Amazon Prime 6-part doco-series is a gem too; it kinda follows up nicely on the book.

When I was first in San Francisco, we spend some time up in Stinson Beach. It was rumoured our immediate neighbour was Phil Lesh - the Dead’s bassist. I kept trying to poke my head over the fence at times, I couldn’t pluck up the courage to just knock on the door. He was probably on tour anyway, I was told that he was hardly around - but that was his hang-spot for when he was. But what was fascinating around Stinson Beach was that the Dead was everywhere. Every home we visited had four or five Grateful Dead albums - tiny CD collections dominated by the Dead. The gift shops all had Grateful Dead CDs in them, like how Te Papa’s gift shop might have Hollie Smith or, nowadays, L.A.B. The Dead was/is the band of the area - and having their CD in your beach house (or home) was like flying a flag.

Again, I liked this, as much as I liked listening to them.

The Music Magazine Wisdom is that Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty are the essential Dead albums; they’re also not typical of the band’s sound. They are these beautiful forays into an Americana music, amalgams of country and folk. And they really are great, both have recently celebrated their 50th Anniversaries and are available now in giant deluxe box-set editions, but all you really need is the original album. I was glad to hear these a while back, but I was still really glad they weren’t my introduction to the band, if this is all you hear, you’ll likely be put off by the hippie-jam stuff. But I really like that too. Even some of their terrible albums are fun.

I’ve been playing all of the Grateful Dead albums this year, there’s a few I’d never heard. Some aren’t anything special, but there’s some magic there, especially early on. Recently, when my folks were visiting I played Workingman’s simply because that was the album I was up to in the discography. My dad even inquired, wanted to know what this great music was. And I told him it was the Grateful Dead. He was genuinely shocked. He had held fast to this ignorant view that they were some Satanic Panic pack of stoner wastrels. Hilarious really. And then in an instant, that was changed. He heard the music and was into it.

I don’t know where I’m going with this - and maybe this is that piece I wanted to write about the Grateful Dead. But the tour bus yesterday reminded me of that very simple travel principle: When in Rome…

Woke up late today (which is yesterday if you’re in New Zealand) to get this newsletter to you. And realised I should resume my Dead odyssey. I’m up to Built to Last - a 1989 album, which is one of the last of the studio records by the original members. It’s unremarkable of course, though I was pleased to hear the song Victim or the Crime (because I know that from the aforementioned live album favourite, Without A Net - and I guess I thought it was a 70s/80s song that didn’t have a studio version).

There’s more to say about the Dead as an industry; their brilliance in making bootlegging a thing - giving fans the chance to make their own tapes of the live experience meant they kept coming back and paying for the live experience. They were ahead of the game.

But mostly I just wanted to connect up to that cool thing of listening to the music of a place when you’re in that place. I listen to Australian bands far more when I’m visiting Aussie. I love walking around the streets of someone else’s town listening to The Go-Betweens. I can burn the Midnight Oil when I’m up late in Sydney. Etc.

And so it is with San Francisco. I might like Sly and Santana more. There are bands like Faith No More and Metallica that have connections to the wider area, and I certainly have spent more time listening to them, but my Fairweather Fandom of the Grateful Dead kicks into overdrive when I’m here. In their home.

Oh, and hey, tomorrow night I’m seeing Dinosaur Jr at the Fillmore!

Happy weekend to you and yours.

And here’s your regular weekly / weekend playlist from me to you.