San Francisco's Music Scene in the 1960s

Rolling Stone : San Francisco: The Start of the Revolution: "In San Francisco in October 1965, some Red Dog veterans, now calling themselves the Family Dog, staged an evening of bands and dancing at the Longshoremen's Hall; billed as 'A Tribute to Dr. Strange,' it featured the Charlatans, Jefferson Airplane and the Great Society. The event spontaneously fused the lenient spirit of the Acid Tests with the Red Dog's focus on dancing and proved a pivotal occasion in the psychedelic scene's history. Over the next two years, San Francisco dance ballrooms--primarily the Avalon and the Fillmore--became not merely a central metaphor for Haight-Ashbury's reinvention of community but also a fundamental enactment of it.

The bands that emerged in this setting were made up largely of musicians who had come up playing in the Bay Area's folk-music venues. The folk crowd had been notoriously dismissive of rock & roll; they saw it as unserious and decadent, not at all committed to social or political concerns. But after the arrival of the Beatles in 1964 and Bob Dylan's transition to electric music in 1965, Bay Area folk musicians began to see how electric music could incorporate substantive themes and poetic language."