Various Artists - San Franciscan Nights (discs 1-4)
San Franciscan Nights is an (unofficial)Â 8 CD collection that captures the San Francisco Bay Area scene of the late 60s, not only the bands that defined the Summer of Love, but those who were influential and interdepedent with these groups, usually due to the Fillmore West and Bill Graham. There’s absolutely no question that for the fan that this is an astonishing collecting, in most cases capturing a particular band at its best. To help me in remembering what I’ve heard, I’ve got a list of what’s on this collection after the break (below). I hope to get to the second part in the next week.
Unsurprisingly it’s the longer shows that make the most impression with the singles tracks sometimes going by in a flash. The early February 67 Jefferson Airplance perfomance is about as good as they got during this era, with powerful and inspired performances that even if they weren’t quite up to the experimental stage of Baxters capture the era in motion. If anything the intro of the disc given by then Governor Ronald Reagan demonstrates a little humor on the part of the compilers.
The second CD is about half of an excellent Big Brother and the Holding Company performance, perhaps better than any other I’ve heard outside of this collection. Other than a weak Country Joe & the Fish piece (”Thought Dream”), the rest of this disc is comprised of visitors to the area with a quick and fun Captain Beefheart bit (”Woe-Is-Uh-Me-Bop”), a rather tedious “Suzie Q” from CCR demonstrating they were always better at the songs than jamming, and a piece from the 13th Floor Elevators (”Roller Coaster”) that helps to remind one of the British sound that influenced many of the bands from this era.
Disc 3 gets rarer with a performance by the Great Society, Grace Slick’s original group and here you get to hear “Somebody to Love” before it became an Airplane standard. Listening to this, I was thinking it wouldn’t have been a terrible shame to see where the band might have gone had Slick not gone on to Airplane. While the Mother Earth performance is interesting, the Oxford Circle and Sons of Adam clips seem deservedly rare, however in a format like this where you hear a great performance and then a, perhaps, lesser 3 or minute clip, one isn’t given enough to time to feel that the overall set is being dragged down. In many ways, these pieces just fill in the color and give one a better feel for what was happening outside the big groups and as an enthusiast of the era, I even enjoyed the duffer tracks.
If disc 4 starts out with one of the weaker outfits here, the Charlatans, once you’re through half an hour of live music and outtakes, it empties into a somewhat disappointing and short slab of Grateful Dead, although at the 66-67 point, they were still growing. I suppose with that band’s unparalleled live legacy it’s not much to complain about (you could easily give them a disc) and the grievance is easily forgiven when you’re given as a coda to the disc possibly the greatest version of Cream’s “N.S.U.” ever recorded, demonstrating there was no better live band of trio playing out in 1967.