Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)This book is an engaging, densely detailed history of San Francisco rock-'n'-roll from 1965 to 1971. It opens with the Charlatans giving birth to San Francisco rock and ends with the death of poor ol' Pigpen.
Selvin writes in great detail about how bands formed, learned (or didn't learn) how to deal with the music business, and broke up. It's a tell-all about who slept with who, the types of drugs each musician used and where and when they OD'ed, and the details of their recording contracts. To hear Selvin tell it, Janis Joplin bedded just about every male rocker in the business-- except for Jerry Lee Lewis: she got into a fistfight with him! Bill Graham's monstrous ego gets full play, until you get sick of reading about his temper tantrums and underhanded dealing.
But the book's title is misleading, for a couple reasons. For one thing, the summer of 1967 is completely absent from the book! The chronology jumps from spring to fall and ignores the summer altogether. Perhaps this was Selvin trying to emphasize his stark assertion in the book's first sentence: "The Summer of Love never really happened." But why he would deliberately omit the central scene of the whole saga is incomprehensible.
The other thing lacking in this book is a sense of the whole Zeitgeist of the Haight-Ashbury hippie scene. The book has a focus on nothing but rock-'n'-roll music. Any mention of any other cultural aspects of hippie life, like folk music, the Human Be-In, the flower children, the communal Diggers, the arts and crafts, the antiwar movement, the Eastern mysticism, the wider scope of everything that went into the Haight scene, gets no mention except insofar as it directly relates to the story of the rock-'n'-roll bands. This is a book specifically about music, not about all the many things that went into making San Francisco the hippie mecca.
Rock-'n'-roll was of course a central feature of the scene, and deserves a book all its own like this one. It just isn't the last word on it, as the title seems to promise. It doesn't give the reader a feel for the complete Haight-Ashbury experience. An accurate title would be "Rock Music in San Francisco, 1965-1971", or more accurately, "Rock Music in the Bay Area, 1965-1971."
But it does give plenty of information about the unique personalities that made all that amazing music, how they developed their sound, the personal and professional pitfalls they encountered. It shows their development from naive groups of young people beginning by playing in cafes and garages and eventually hitting the big time, bringing their local little music scene, where everyone knew everyone else, onto the world stage.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Summer of Love: Ths Inside Story of LSD, Rock & Roll, Free Love and High Time in the Wild West
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