OLD SCHOOL #26 The Streets of San Francisco

Professor Mikey's Old School

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OLD SCHOOL #26 The Streets of San Francisco

Peace, love, dope tunes. Feel more West. The Dead, Airplane, Fish, Big Brother, Charlatans, Sly, Quicksilver…plus a guest appearance from Suzy Creamcheese.

Professor Mikey

Jun 24, 2022

“I thought that, with an incredible amount of media blitzing and books and knowledge, you could change people. But you can’t. The only person I can change is me.”

—Grace Slick, to Ben Fong-Torres, The San Francisco Sound (Actually There Wasn’t One…)

San Francisco, 1967. What a fabulous destination for our educational pirate radio podcast boat to dock. We can hitch a ride on the Merry Prankster’s magic bus, Further, driven by Neal Cassady and coast on over to the Haight-Ashbury district where some righteous dude and his old lady will let us crash on their water bed under the stars of Aquarius. All they will want in return is some spare change and maybe a little love grass.

And maybe some tunes. We definitely have brought some tunes.

Whether you sing these songs in your sleep, or are hearing them for the first time, pretend you are hearing them for the first time. No one on this list, save perhaps for Eric Burdon, had any clue about the amount of fame that might come their way. Some got there. For others it was a major surprise how their bands could be riding on such a comet and then zip away from the solar system of public interest as quickly as they had arrived. 3/5 of a Mile in Ten Seconds into oblivion. Dead and hardly grateful. Here and gone before Woodstock.

For the past few days I have been listening to nothing but hippie music, mostly from the 1967 Summer of Love, all from the city by the bay, where Tony Bennett left his heart and Janis Joplin took a piece of it.

The first disorganized Amerikan resistance to the British Invasion sparked up innocently enough here, as the culture moved toward incense and love beads. Here was a time of free love and flower power, orchestrated within a primal urge to make love not war. The soundtrack was ragtag, fascinating, original, and somewhat other-wordly, helped along by mind expanding substances.

For this podcast I wanted to pick famous as well as obscure bands and hear them at early points in their diverse journeys. There is a national hit here and there, but hopefully even the most hardcore flower child will find a local surprise or at least a lightshow flashback.

And now it’s time to hit the Streets of San Francisco!

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