Various: Love Is The Song We Sing - San Francisco Nuggets 1965 - 1970 (4 CD Compilation) 2007

 

Love Is the Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets 1965–1970 is the fourth Nuggets box set released by Rhino Records. It was released in 2007 and packaged as an 8 1/2 x 11" 120 page hardcover book, the first 73 pages of which were made up mostly of vintage photographs. The compilation focuses on San Francisco Sound bands. Its title is derived from the first line of "Get Together," two versions of which open (Dino Valenti) and close (The Youngbloods) the four-disc set.
                                                               

Rhino's fourth 4xCD Nuggets compilation steps laterally away from the focus of previous volumes-- on two-to-three-minute blasts of fuzzy pop and obscure singles-- to build a panoramic picture of what was happening in Bay Area rock music between 1965 and 1970. The set's own lavishly illustrated and beautifully printed liner notes take pains to emphasize that this isn't a genre excavation so much as it is a musical examination of a particularly volatile point in space-time.
                                                                      

The tracklisting includes transplants like Steve Miller and bands from around the Bay, showcasing bubblegum, folk-rock, proto-metal, Latin funk-rock, garage fuzz, and acid-damaged novelties alongside San Fran staples the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, the Charlatans, Moby Grape, and Quicksilver Messenger Service.
                                                                

Not all of the music exactly qualifies as obscure, either-- I'd guess nearly everyone reading this has

heard Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit", Santana's "Soul Sacrifice" and "Evil Ways", Janis Joplin's "Mercedes Benz" and Blue Cheer's cover of "Summertime Blues". Context seems to be a leading motive for including these, but they could as easily have been swapped for other rarities. Each disc has a theme: Seismic Rumbles, Suburbia, Summer of Love, and The Man Can't Bust Our Music, and each tackles a slightly different aspect of what made the Bay Area music scene so special.
                                                     

Seismic Rumbles chronicles the transition from the folk scene to the first flashes of psychedelia, which largely began when Dylan went electric at Newport and convinced guys who'd been playing in old-time jug bands that electric guitars were okay. Six of the disc's 21 songs were produced for Autumn Records by Sly Stewart, who was honing his craft while harboring dreams of a multi-racial, multi-gender band that could pull together the strands of r&b and rock'n'roll and make something new from them.
                                                                 

Among his productions is "Can't Come Down", an early track by the Warlocks, soon to become the

Grateful Dead, and still very much in a blues-rock mode-- it sounds more like John Mayall than "Uncle John's Band". Sly shows up later on disc three with the Family Stone, railing against racial inequality on the funky "Underdog", which quotes "Frere Jacques" in its horn chart as a tribute to brotherhood. The Dead appear two more times, including the rarely heard single version of concert staple "Dark Star", a jazzy wisp of a song that sounds like it was composed as the band played it in the studio.
                                                          

Many of the bands featured were inter-related. For instance, Grace Slick lent her powerful vocals to

both the Great! Society and Jefferson Airplane, both of which are featured multiple times. The Society's 1965 original version of the massive Airplane hit "Somebody to Love" unfortunately turns out to be a leaden relic, but their other track, the pounding, raga-inspired "Free Advice", was ahead of its time and is easily as thrilling in its dissonance as Slick belting, "Feed your head!" two years later on Surrealistic Pillow.
                                                              

The compilers have elevated Country Joe & the Fish to a surprisingly exalted position by including three of their songs, including the sound-effects-laden EP version of "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag", which became an iconic anti-war song years later when the band performed it at Woodstock. Perhaps more intriguing is the inclusion of "Section 43", a fluid, mysterious instrumental that features an early dose of the open-ended improvisation that became so important to the San Francisco scene later on.
                                                                         

There was surprisingly little overlap between the scenes in San Francisco proper and its many surrounding communities, and as such the Suburbia disc is the only one that features no bands found on other discs in the set. It's also one of the most solid discs, with its emphasis on tight songs and rough-and-tumble garage rock.
                                                                     

Count Five's "Psychotic Reaction" is fantastic, but feels a bit redundant given that it was on the first

Nuggets box. Marin County's Front Line back vocal harmonies with wild fuzz and organ, while the Sacramento area's Oxford Circle check in with the roiling psych-punk nugget "Foolish Woman", with drummer Paul Whaley slamming away on his toms in preparation for his future work with Blue Cheer. The weirdest inclusion is Teddy & His Patches' "Suzy Creamcheese", a blistering freak-out complete with psychedelic studio effects and a cheeseball monologue about "opening your closed mind" that was reportedly recorded by a bunch of straight-arrow coattail-riders from San Jose.
                                                                 

The Summer of Love disc zeros in on 1967, the year everything came to a head in San Francisco. It was the year hippiedom went national, but it was also the year that largely destroyed the idealistic collectivism that permeated San Francisco in the mid-60s. The Human Be-In, which attracted 30,000 people to Golden Gate Park in January, stoked optimism that at least a portion of society might be on the brink of a truly new way of living.
                                                               

In a lot of ways, the dream peaked in June at the Monterey International Pop Festival, the first successful outdoor rock festival. But as the summer wore on and wannabe hippies from all over the country crowded into the Haight-Ashbury, the situation became untenable. By the end of the year, many of the original hippies, disgusted by the dilution of what they believed in, had left San Francisco for the hills of Northern California.
                                                                       

Still, plenty of good music poured out of the city amid all the chaos. The Charlatans' "Alabama Bound"

features almost the whole band on vocals, and Dan Hicks' drums play in a unique pocket that doesn't rely on any kind of conventional beat. The Beau Brummels, once cast as America's answer to the Beatles, turn in a sublime bit of pop drama on "Two Days 'Til Tomorrow", Moby Grape's "Omaha" is a small masterpiece of barreling American psych, and Quicksilver Messenger Service's cover of Buffy Sainte-Marie's "Codine" gives you the other side of the drug experience, with David Freiberg's tortured vocal slogging through the song's bluesy downer haze.
                                                               

Nothing was ever quite the same after 1967 in San Francisco, and it's interesting to note that while music continued to grow in excess and ornamentation in many other scenes (for instance in much of

Europe, where psychedelia gave way to prog), much of the music coming out of San Francisco as the 60s wound down was markedly pastoral and unadorned. Improvisation remained a central feature, but there's far less open experimentation on the final disc, whose title refers to the numerous run-ins with the law members of San Francisco's rock royalty had incurred by that point. Among the best finds on the disc is Mother Earth's psych-jazz waltz "Revolution", which features an excellent, loose horn arrangement.
                                                             

The set is bookended by two versions of the same song. At the beginning, Dino Valenti's original solo

acoustic version of "Let's Get Together" comes off like a limp Dylan retread with muddled phrasing, but at the end, the Youngbloods turn it into a free-flowing anthem for a dying era, a mix of weary melancholy and wistful optimism (I learned it growing up from TV ads for Time-Life anthologies). By 1970, psychedelia was just about dead in San Francisco, though the city has continued to attract people drawn by the allure of the ideas that fueled the original Summer of Love.
                                                                                  

What happened in San Francisco in the late 60s was a key piece of the development of music as we know it today. The social experiments of the hippies largely failed, but the musical experimentation of

the period has kept many of these songs fresh to this day. The San Francisco sound was an important step toward the realization that popular music was true art, and for a fleeting moment, arcane concepts such as John Cage and Allan Kaprow's "happenings" gained real macrocultural currency. It's something that will never happen again, and while this boxed set isn't definitive, it's incredibly well-designed, full of detailed information and vintage photos, and does a good job of providing a highly enjoyable starting point for listeners who'd like to explore further.
                                                      

Love Is the Song We Sing is divided into four roughly chronological and vaguely thematic discs. The first, “Seismic Rumbles”, covers the origins of the scene in ‘65 and ’66 (barely dipping into ’64 and ’67). The second, “Suburbia”, documents the outlying areas of San Francisco between ‘65 and ’69. The third and fourth, “Summer of Love” (what else?) and “The Man Can’t Bust Our Music”, feature most of the major players and big songs from ‘66 to ’70.
                                                  

One of the defining traits of Rhino’s Nuggets series is that it achieves a balance between the classic, the forgotten, and the never-known-to-begin-with. Lest you think that Love Is the Song We Song does

nothing but wallow in the depths of one-shots and curios, rest assured there are some bona fide hit singles here, and roughly a fifth of the set will likely be familiar to casual fans of Bay Area rock. In fact, the box does a fantastic job of easing the nervous listener into the proceedings. We get a sloppy but historically important demo of “Let’s Get Together” from Dino Valenti, the original EP version of “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” from Country Joe & The Fish, and then our first example of one of the great services a Nuggets set provides, namely the recontextualization of a notable pop hit.

VARIOUS – Love Is The Song We Sing (San Francisco Nuggets 1965-1970)
Label: Rhino Records – R2 165564
Format: 4 x CD, Box Set, Compilation, Remastered
Country: US
Released: 2007
Genre: Rock
Style: Garage Rock, Psychedelic Rock, Folk Rock

DISC ONE: SEISMIC RUMBLES

                                                                                     

01. Dino Valenti – Let's Get Together
02. Country Joe & The Fish – I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag
03. We Five – You Were on My Mind
04. The Charlatans – Number One
05. The Warlocks – Can't Come Down
06. The Beau Brummels – Don't Talk to Strangers
07. The Vejtables - Anything
08. Jefferson Airplane – It's No Secret
09. The Mystery Trend – Johnny Was a Good Boy
10. The Great Society – Free Advice
11. The Grass Roots – Mr. Jones (Ballad of a Thin Man)
12. Blackburn & Snow – Stranger in a Strange Land
13. Quicksilver Messenger Service – Who Do You Love?
14. The Mojo Men – She's My Baby
15. Wildflower – Coffee Cup
16. Family Tree –  Live Your Own Life
17. Sons of Champlin – Fat City
18. Frantics – Human Monkey
19. The Tikis – Bye Bye Bye
20. Country Joe & the Fish –Section 43
21. Sopwith Camel – Hello Hello

MP3 @ 320 Size: 151 MB (1.2 GB with PDF)
Flac  Size: 260 MB (1.3 GB with PDF)

DISC TWO: SUBURBIA

                                                                               

01. Count Five - Psychotic Reaction
02. The Front Line -  Got Love  
03. The Mourning Reign - Satisfaction Guaranteed  
04. The Oxford Circle - Foolish Woman  
05. The Stained Glass - My Buddy Sin  
06. The Otherside - Streetcar  
07. Teddy & His Patches - Suzy Creamcheese  
08. The Immediate Family - Rubiyat  
09. Syndicate of Sound - Rumors  
10. Harbinger Complex - Sometimes I Wonder  
11. The New Breed - Want Ad Reader  
12. The Generation - I'm a Good Woman  
13. The Chocolate Watch Band - No Way Out  
14. Butch Engle & The Styx - Hey I'm Lost  
15. People! - I Love You  
16. Public Nuisance - America  
17. Country Weather - Fly To New York  
18. The Savage Resurrection - Thing In 'E'  
19. Frumious Bandersnatch - Hearts to Cry  

MP3 @ 320 Size: 140 MB 

Flac  Size: 263 MB

DISC THREE: SUMMER OF LOVE

                                                                                 

01. The Charlatans - Alabama Bound  
02. The Mystery Trend - Carl Street  
03. The Great Society - Somebody to Love
04. Country Joe and the Fish - Superbird
05. The Beau Brummels - Two Days 'Til Tomorrow  
06. Moby Grape - Omaha
07. The Serpent Power - Up & Down
08. Grateful Dead - The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion)  
09. Quicksilver Messenger Service - Codine  
10. Big Brother and the Holding Company - Down On Me  
11. Salvation - Think Twice  
12. Jefferson Airplane - White Rabbit  
13. Steve Miller Band - Roll With It  
14. Notes From The Underground - Why Did You Put Me On  
15. Sly & The Family Stone - Underdog  
16. Blue Cheer - Summertime Blues  
17. The Ace of Cups - Glue
18. Santana - Soul Sacrifice  
19. The Loading Zone - The Bells

MP3 @ 320 Size: 174 MB
Flac  Size: 466 MB

 

DISC FOUR: THE MAN CAN'T BUST OUR MUSIC

                                                                            

01. Santana - Evil Ways  
02. Fifty Foot Hose - Red the Sign Post
03. Kak - Lemonaide Kid  
04. Sons of Champlin - 1982-A  
05. Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks - How Can I Miss You When You Won't Go Away?  
06. Mad River - Amphetamine Gazelle  
07. Steve Miller Band - Quicksilver Girl  
08. Mother Earth - Revolution  
09. Moby Grape - Murder in My Heart for the Judge  
10. Quicksilver Messenger Service - Light Your Windows  
11. The Flamin' Groovies - I'm Drowning  
12. Seatrain - Portrait of the Artist as a Young Lady  
13. It's a Beautiful Day - White Bird  
14. Grateful Dead - Dark Star  
15. Blue Cheer - Fool  
16. Jefferson Airplane - Mexico  
17. Janis Joplin - Mercedes Benz  
18. The Youngbloods - Get Together  

MP3 @ 320 Size: 141 MB
Flac  Size: 366 MB

Disc One Flac & MP3 file contains a PDF with the book of the compilation