Explosion of Deferred Dreams: Musical Renaissance and Social Revolution in San Francisco, 1965–1975 - Softcover

Callahan, Mat

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1629632317 ISBN 13: 9781629632315

Verlag: PM Press, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

As the fiftieth anniversary of the Summer of Love floods the media with debates and celebrations of music, political movements, “flower power,” “acid rock,” and “hippies,”The Explosion of Deferred Dreams offers a critical reexamination of the interwoven political and musical happenings in San Francisco in the Sixties. Author, musician, and native San Franciscan Mat Callahan explores the dynamic links between the Black Panthers and Sly and the Family Stone, the United Farm Workers and Santana, the Indian Occupation of Alcatraz and the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and the New Left and the counterculture.

Callahan’s meticulous, impassioned arguments both expose and reframe the political and social context for the San Francisco Sound and the vibrant subcultural uprisings with which it is associated. Using dozens of original interviews, primary sources, and personal experiences, the author shows how the intense interplay of artistic and political movements put San Francisco, briefly, in the forefront of a worldwide revolutionary upsurge.

A must-read for any musician, historian, or person who “was there” (or longed to have been), The Explosion of Deferred Dreams is substantive and provocative, inviting us to reinvigorate our historical sense-making of an era that assumes a mythic role in the contemporary American zeitgeist.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mat Callahan is a musician and author originally from San Francisco, where he founded Komotion International. He is the author ofSex, Death & the Angry Young Man; Testimony; and The Trouble with Music as well as the editor of Songs of Freedom: The James Connolly Songbook. He currently resides in Bern, Switzerland.

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The Explosion of Deferred Dreams

Musical Renaissance and Social Revolution in San Francisco, 1965-1975

By Mat Callahan

PM Press

Copyright © 2017 PM Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-62963-231-5

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, 
PERSONAL INTRODUCTION, 
FOREWORD, 
CHAPTER 1 Portals of the Past, or "Why San Francisco?", 
CHAPTER 2 Children of the Future, 
CHAPTER 3 Making Music to Change the World: Diversity, Unity, and Liberation, 
CHAPTER 4 Making Music to Change the World: Authority and Authenticity, 
CHAPTER 5 If You're Going to San Francisco: What One Song Tried to Usurp, 
CHAPTER 6 Songs of Innocence and Experience: Music's Rivalry with the State, 
CHAPTER 7 The Underground Is on the Air: Radio, Recording, Innovation, and Co-ptation, 
CHAPTER 8 1968 and Beyond: Culture, Counterculture, and Revolution, 
CHAPTER 9 Power to the People: Nations, Classes, and Listening to the People, 
CHAPTER 10 Humanhood Is the Ultimate: Women, Music, and Liberation, 
CHAPTER 11 The Future Foreclosed: Counterrevolution and Defeat, 
APPENDICES, 
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 
NOTES, 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR, 
INDEX, 

CHAPTER 1

Portals of the Past, or "Why San Francisco?"

While it is always desirable to separate the fabulous from the factual, it is indispensable to do so in the case of San Francisco and the worldwide notoriety it acquired during the tumultuous Sixties. It is certainly not the case that good weather, low rents, and tolerant authorities were what attracted youthful adventurers to Haight Street. For one thing, as we shall see, the authorities were never so tolerant as they have often been portrayed. For another, there were other cities on the West Coast that offered good weather and low rent (Los Angeles being a prime example). Key to San Francisco's reputation was that local residents coalesced there around artistic and political movements that were both disproportionately large in comparison to their counterparts in other cities and were often more radical. Running battles waged in the courts, workplaces, schools, and streets all attest to the size and influence of an aroused populace. An underlying continuity connected people and movements over the span of three generations and included as many people born or raised in the region as those coming to it from other places.

Prevailing notions of white middle-class dropouts from elsewhere suddenly appearing en masse to create a utopia in Golden Gate Park are misleading on several counts. First and most significantly, they ignore the powerful civil rights movement in the Bay Area, which mobilized a large number of people of all ethnicities in the battle to end discrimination in employment and housing. This movement quickly linked with the farmworkers organizing in the Central Valley of California and established bases of popular opposition in the Fillmore, Hunters Point, and Mission districts of San Francisco. This connection led to the April 1965 launch of The Movement newspaper in San Francisco by "Friends of SNCC" (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), a forerunner of what came to be known as the underground press. Second, the corresponding artistic movements, especially music, theater, and graphic art (posters and murals), were never confined to any single constituency or neighborhood. One has only to recall Santana, Teatro Campesino, and the murals that still grace the walls of the Mission District to realize that any account of the period that fails to acknowledge these developments is at best incomplete. Finally, it is important to distinguish between the image of tolerant liberality cultivated by San Francisco's elites from the city's inception and the creative expression and radical resistance that formed the real basis of San Francisco's attraction for poets, artists, intellectuals, and revolutionaries. The City Fathers were never enlightened champions of social progress. Indeed, the rulers of the Golden West were robber barons and purveyors of "yellow journalism," bent on Empire. William Randolph Hearst, who started his newspaper chain in San Francisco, was an arch-reactionary, a champion of U.S. imperialism, and a determined enemy of labor.

What we will explore, therefore, are key figures, organizations, and struggles that were responsible for the attention paid to San Francisco long before the Sixties. None of this had been forgotten in San Francisco; in some cases, it directly influenced the course events took after 1964.

The Port

The heart of San Francisco was its port. From the Gold Rush of 1849 to the 1960s, everything revolved around one of the world's great natural harbors. Though, by 1965, a slow, almost imperceptible decline had begun, the waterfront and maritime trade remained the foundation of social life. This included more than the immediate area around the docks. Extending inland to occupy almost a quarter of the area within the city's boundaries were warehouses, coffee roasters, breweries, slaughterhouses, and tanneries. An industrial zone occupied by American Can, Best Foods, Planters Peanuts, Armour Meats, and the Lucky, Hamm's, and Burgermeister breweries, as well as the Hunters Point shipyards and Schlage Lock, stretched from the Embarcadero south to Daly City. Closer to the waterfront itself were the Hills Brothers and MJB coffee roasters, as well as innumerable ice houses (cold storage facilities for fish and other perishable goods), ship chandlers, and stevedoring companies. North Beach, well known as the center of the city's nightlife and home to its bohemian subculture, was surrounded by and dotted with warehouses and small factories. The residents of North Beach included a large number of longshoremen, warehousemen, sailors, and teamsters. Until very recently, the area had numerous hotels that provided single rooms on a weekly, monthly, or ongoing basis, catering mainly to single men. Just across Broadway, Chinatown was far from the quaint tourist attraction it is today. Hidden in its narrow alleys, in basements and back rooms, were the sweatshops where hundreds of Chinese women worked in illegal or semilegal conditions. Companies like Esprit were founded in San Francisco largely on the basis of this labor. Other parts of the city, from South of Market and Potrero Hill to Dogpatch and the Mission District, were populated by people employed in the city's various industries, all of which directly or indirectly depended on the port.

This was not simply the bequest of nature but rested on the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the discovery of gold nine days before its signing on February 2, 1848. The annexation of half of Mexico by the United States and the Gold Rush of 1849 transformed a small agricultural, Catholic, and Spanish-speaking community into a roaring port based on the export of gold and the import of manufactured goods. Within less than a decade, the city's population had expanded from two thousand to thirty-four thousand; its name had been changed from Yerba Buena to San Francisco; and it had already delivered an extraordinary percentage of the world's gold reserves into the vaults of U.S. and British banks.

Corresponding to this sudden economic clout of global importance were attempts by San Francisco's elites to extend their reach to political and cultural affairs as well. The robber barons whose names still grace Nob Hill hotels and Stanford University therefore invested in great promotional efforts that included financing the arts and sciences while reaping unprecedented profits from logging, railroads, and the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: PM Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1629632317
• ISBN 13: 9781629632315
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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