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"frndthdevl" <frndthd...@aol.com> wrote in message 
news:1181441083.036258.164580@i38g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
Op-Ed Contributor
(Don't Go Back to) San Francisco
By MICHAEL WALKER
Published: June 9, 2007
Los Angeles

SHAKE the stems and seeds out of the Persian rug and put some flowers
in
your hair: the Summer of Love is 40 years old. The patchouli-scented
commemoration has fixated on San Francisco, the Summer of Love's
blissful
nexus. What wretched Midwestern longhair-in-waiting in the summer of
'67
could resist the siren of Scott McKenzie's Top 5 hit, "San Francisco
(Be
Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)"? Untold VW microbuses from Ann
Arbor to
Amherst chugged west on little more than the song's purple-hazy
promise: the
tribes were gathering, and they were gathering in San Francisco.


But as a lasting cultural artifact, San Francisco's Summer of Love
can't
hold a stick of incense to the rafter-shaking sounds coming out that
same
year from a Los Angeles neighborhood 370 miles south, above the
Sunset
Strip. If we measure '60s pop-cultural landmarks by the epoch-
producing
music they generate - and, from Liverpool to Woodstock, we do - then
Laurel
Canyon was the more evolved and influential destination that summer.


Laurel Canyon had been filling up with the baby boom's brightest
musical
lights since 1965, when members of the Byrds, Los Angeles's seminal
folk-rockers, moved in, just as their version of Bob Dylan's "Mr.
Tambourine
Man" was a triumphant, worldwide smash. Soon, it seemed, every
musician of
note in Los Angeles had moved next door: members of the Mamas and the
Papas,
the Doors, the Seeds, the Turtles and Love were later joined by Joni
Mitchell, Graham Nash, Frank Zappa, Carole King and untold transient
rock
royalty from the Beatles to the Rolling Stones.


By the summer of '67, the Laurel Canyon mafia had defined the budding
West
Coast counterculture with an avalanche of generation-unifying songs
that
blended the last vestiges of the folk-music revival with the impudent
exuberance of the British Invasion.


Laurel Canyon and Los Angeles were home to the murderers' row of
rock:
alongside the Byrds - "America's Beatles" according to the not
entirely
undeserved hype - lived Buffalo Springfield, from whose ranks would
come
Stephen Stills, Neil Young and Richie Furay. The Mamas and the Papas,
Laurel
Canyon's house band, had already recorded a string of landmark hits
starting
with "California Dreamin'." The revolutionary flower-punk of Love
produced
the blistering "Seven and Seven Is," a slap to the face masquerading
as a
hit single. The Turtles bounced the Beatles' "Penny Lane" from No. 1
with
"Happy Together," and a couple of months later, The Doors' "Light My
Fire,"
with brooding couplets that juxtaposed sexual longing and funeral
pyres,
rode the charts for weeks during the putatively flower-strewn summer.


San Francisco's music scene developed under conditions vastly
different from
those in Los Angeles. Unstructured gigs at the city's acid-drenched
ballrooms encouraged epic jams of the sort perfected by the Grateful
Dead,
Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the Jefferson Airplane, along
with
a naïve anticommercialism - hit singles were for the hacks in Laurel
Canyon.
The irony is that San Francisco's bands are remembered today chiefly
for the
few times they made commercially successful music, as with Jefferson
Airplane's 1967 "Surrealistic Pillow" album and its Top 10 singles
"Somebody
to Love" and "White Rabbit."


Where San Francisco's music scene was administered by a handful of
show-business novices, Los Angeles was home to Capitol Records, the
Beatles'
label, as well as the world's finest recording studios, producers and
engineers. Laurel Canyon's proximity to this infrastructure - the
unsparing
proving ground of the Sunset Strip's clubs was a five-minute
hitchhike
away - instilled in the musicians a professionalism that stiffened the
spine
of the material they wrote and performed.


In the end, 1967's most prescient generational temperature-taking can
be
found in yet another Los Angeles song that hit the Top 10 just before
the
Summer of Love took off. Buffalo Springfield's chilling "For What
It's
Worth," inspired by Stephen Stills's eyewitness account of police
officers
brutalizing longhairs on the Sunset Strip, questioned the motives of
both
the establishment and the self-congratulating counterculture. Given
the
turmoil that lay just around the corner in 1968, the paranoia of "For
What
It's Worth" strikes deep and true: "there's a man with a gun over
there," it
turned out, would have as much to do with the baby boom generation as
would
wearing flowers in your hair.


The Summer of Love will forever be entwined with San Francisco. But
the rock
critic Robert Christgau predicted in 1967 that "the real music would
come
from Los Angeles." And he was right. The songs that came out of the
Haight
that summer now seem fixed in amber, as temporal as a Fillmore poster,
while
the music from Los Angeles and Laurel Canyon soldiers on, impervious
to age
and ridicule.


Even the Summer of Love's anthem, Scott McKenzie's "San Francisco,"
was
written and recorded in Los Angeles. The song was conceived by John
Phillips
of the Mamas and the Papas expressly as a come-on for the Monterey
International Pop Music Festival, which Mr. Phillips and Lou Adler,
the Los
Angeles record producer, were organizing. The lyrics vividly imagine
a
hippie-sanctified San Francisco, but the flowers in the title are
literally
from Los Angeles: Mr. McKenzie recorded the song while wearing
garlands of
wildflowers plucked in Laurel Canyon.


Michael Walker is the author of "Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of
Rock 'n'
Roll's Legendary Neighborhood."


--
Blasphemy!

Seems the difference is Establishment (LA) vs. Anti-establishment (SF). I'd 
say the author completely misses the point with "The irony is that San 
Francisco's bands are remembered today chiefly for the few times they made 
commercially successful music".  There are a couple million concertgoers who 
weren't around Back When who might have an argument against this.

I read this this morning in the NY Times (just to give proper attribution)