The Peak, The Come-Down, The Change

Acid Rock was the heaviest, loudest variation of psychedelic rock. Drawing from the overblown blues improvisations of Jimi Hendrix, acid rock bands relied on distorted guitars, trippy lyrics, and long jams. It evolved and imploded within the life span of psychedelia. In an attempt to create a more intense form of psychedelic rock music bands like Country Joe & The Fish, Grateful Dead and other up in coming artist began an inspiring branch of the Progressive Rock world.  With the longer solos, improvisations and a darker atmosphere than the average psychedelic rock music, Acid Rock was a new LSD experience. The tone of the guitar in acid rock is very distorted and fuzzy, creating a thicker and sort of sludge-like sound, which is one of the few main characteristics of this rock sub-genre. It grips the ears of listeners in a new way, “where no human had ever gone before”.  At the nucleus of it all was Haight-Ashbury a district in San Francisco that eventually became known as the center for hippies, acid, and acid rock music.  In the years between 1964 to 1968, there swelled a gigantic wave of cultural and political change that swept first San Francisco, then the whole United States, which was surrounded by the chaos of the world. Fermenting in the Haight-Ashbury was a powerful brew that would ultimately stop a war. The Haight's popularity grew as the Beat Generation in San Francisco was dying out. Many of the Beats, such as Allen Ginsberg, crossed over ‘to the other side’, but a younger generation gravitated to the Haight-Ashbury district. Rents were cheap and many accommodations and small shops housed for free and supplied for free as depicted in the film, History of Rock and Roll: San Francisco and Hendrix. Many were students at nearby University of San Francisco, UCSF, and S.F. State University. Many musicians such as the Grateful Dead, philosophers, artists such as Alton Kelley, poets such as Allen Cohen, apartment-dwellers, panhandlers, and even future CEOs of companies such as Pepsi, the Gap, Smith-Hawken, Lotus, and Rolling Stone magazine. "The Summer of Love [1967] was the peak of the Haight Ashbury experience," wrote founding editor Allen Cohen in his essay on the Summer of Love. "Over 100,000 youth came to the Haight. Hoards of reporters, movie makers, FBI agents, undercover police, drug addicts, provocateurs, Mafioso and about 100,000 more tourists to watch them all followed in their wake." Music reached an artistic high point from 1964-66, the efforts of the pioneers in the Haight-Ashbury to create an enlightened community took about two years to reach the flashpoint. The world of psychedelics was at its peak. As Chenoweth states in, The Rhetoric of Hope and Despair: A Study of the Jimi Hendrix Experience and the Jefferson Airplane, “Jefferson Airplane asked their listeners to reject reason and tradition and manipulate their minds through drugs that truth and transcendence could be found”.  Two years before Woodstock and Altamont, overcrowding and the negative reaction of police and the San Francisco city government combined to make life in the Haight miserable for everyone. “Many of the youths who retain hippie symbols and continue to use Haight-Ashbury rhetoric have exhibited asocial exultant-despondent modes of behavior which occasionally baffle traditional hippies…”, as explained by Chenoweth illustrates the tensions surrounding the counterculture and the transformation of music at that time. Acid rock was the center of the sex, drugs and rock and roll era.  Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and up in coming stars like the waling Janis Joplin were fundamental pieces to the age of progression that had taken over.  The experience of enlightenment had left a lasting impression on the minds and hearts of those who participated in the counterculture revolution. Like acid, the experience, reached a peak, then subsided, leaving everyone bewildered and changed for life.