ABSTRACT
The new music from San Francisco, most of it unrecorded at this writing, is the most potentially vital in the pop world. It shoots a cleansing wave over the rigid studiousness of rock. It brings driving spontaneity to a music that is becoming increasingly conscious of form and influence rather than effect. Talent scouts from a dozen major record companies are grooving with the gathered tribes at the Fillmore and the Avalon. Hip San Francisco is being carved into bits of business territory. San Francisco has the vanguard because it works hard to keep it. Native culture is cherished as though the city’s consuming passion were to produce a statement that could not possibly be duplicated in New York. San Francisco musicians associate Los Angeles with the evils of studio music. This is probably because almost every group has made the trek south to record.
