‘They thought they were immortal’: the rise and fall of San Francisco’s 60s music scene
Enough time has passed for the scene in 60s San Francisco to turn from memory to history, now understood predominantly as a set of ideas and signifiers: flower power, free love, fringe vests, infrequent showers, idealistic good vibes giving way to an inevitable comedown. If this pivotal moment in time threatens to become self-parody, reduced to a tie-dyed Halloween costume, it’s due in part to the hyperbolic terms used by the Boomers who lived through it. The Haight-Ashbury neighborhood was a paradise too edenic to last, as the record goes, where “the streets were paved with LSD”.
In the new two-part MGM+ documentary San Francisco Sounds, poster designer Victor Moscoso – a pioneer of the far-out psychedelic aesthetic synonymous with this cultural moment – intends that description as firmly tongue-in-cheek. He shares an approximate viewpoint and goal with directors Alison Ellwood and Anoosh Tertzakian, who aim to recapture the magic of this fleeting, fertile heyday while focusing on the details of assorted lives over romanticized fantasy.
“We wanted to take this as an origin story, to find the links to how all these bands that we do know came from places we might not have heard of,” Ellwood tells the Guardian via Zoom. “We wanted the untold stories.”
“So much of this is lumped together under the Summer of Love,” Tertzakian adds. “And we wanted to go back just a little bit further, take a look under the hood, see what was there before all of that.”
Getting first-hand accounts from colorful characters like Moscoso immersed the film-makers in a period they’d always appreciated from something of a distance; a born California girl, Tertzakian came closer to understanding the ethos of her parents’ golden days, where Ellwood was “a little hippie at six years old, wearing bell bottoms, refusing to salute the flag in protest of the Vietnam war. And I was listening to the music as well, of course. So many of our collaborators, the lingo, the discussions we were having, it felt close to home.”
The course of their research acquainted both women with new favorite acts off the beaten path, Ellwood falling hard for Moby Grape while Tertzakian got deep into the Quicksilver Messenger Service catalogue. But many of the key figures of this zeitgeist have remained in heavy rotation for Americans of all generations: Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company with their dynamo lead singer Janis Joplin. As opposed to the creative boom flourishing down in Laurel Canyon around this time, the subject of Ellwood and Tertzakian’s last joint project, the San Francisco sound oriented itself around bands rather than individuals. “The band was the essential unit, and it was about being communal – communal living, communal values, and that really defines that era in San Francisco,” Tertzakian explains.
“The LA artists were becoming singer-songwriters, hitmakers, whereas the San Francisco crew was not only not about that, they were against it,” Ellwood continues. “They rejected celebrity, though Monterey Pop ironically put them on the map, and they couldn’t help becoming that.”
Though the scene took shape through what Tertzakian calls a geographic kismet, the simple phenomenon of running into people you know that now transpires largely online, the movers and shakers were fiercely committed to their philosophy. The thrift store wardrobes, the folk and country influences in the bands’ sonic makeup, the reluctance to ink fat contracts – it was all informed by “living your values, being authentic, things seen as really important principles”, as Ellwood says.
“They wanted to make music, to play, to eat, to do shows and get paid so they could make rent,” Tertzakian sighs. “It’s not completely outside of the system, it’s just that the balance gets out of whack.”
“And then money changes your perception of your role in the world,” Ellwood adds. “That’s true of anyone. But they did have an ethos, they really did believe they had a sustainable model for society. It might’ve worked, had it not been inundated by outside forces, but like anything else, it could’ve just as easily imploded on itself.”
The doc’s two installments logically follow a rise-and-fall structure, peaking with the euphoria of the Monterey international pop festival and crashing with its equal and opposite reaction in the Altamont Free Concert’s outbreak of violence. The heady talk about revolution fizzled as some icons sold out and others flamed out, the darkest pall cast by Joplin’s untimely death due to overdose. Jefferson Airplane splintered into competing groups, the Grateful Dead took to the road, and farther down the line, a mixture of drugs and egotistical tensions would get the better of Sly and the Family Stone. The counterculture that once stood for a sincere and personal craftsmanship was mass-produced, boxed up, and sold by the ton. As Tertzakian says: “Tie-dye just keeps coming back, and it’s now manufactured instead of hand-made.”
“You can’t separate the time from the tragedy of it all,” Ellwood says. “That sort of self-destructive nature would be more tempered now, people being more aware of the dangers in this lifestyle. At the time, everyone was young. They thought it was mind-expanding. Like a lot of young people, they thought they were immortal. A sort of naïveté played a big role.”
The eventual fate of San Francisco hangs over the archival footage without explicit address, an unspoken coda to the arc of decline. The sidewalks once trodden by artists with dreams of a better world have been overrun by tech startups peddling a grotesque perversion of that concept, exacerbating what Tertzakian calls “an inequality that’s grown to an extreme scale”. A gulf has opened up to separate the extractive one-percenters with zero cultural contributions from the lower class pushed beneath the poverty line and into homelessness. The filmmakers share a deep sense of lament for the city they’ve studied over the past three years and loved as long as they can remember, reluctant to watch it carved up by capital and crime. They’d like to see a return to the San Franciscan ethic of decent, mindful existence, and even though that radiant positivity feels remote from the present day, it might be the only chance we’ve got.
The words of Michael Shrieve, the Santana drummer who holds the distinction of second-youngest performer at Woodstock, still ring in Ellwood’s ears: “As he says at the end of the film, with how divisive things have become now, we’re going to need another hippie movement.”
San Francisco Sounds: A Place in Time starts on MGM+ on 20 August with a UK and Australian airdate to be announced
most notorious websites and becoming a popular conspiracy theory. The figure of “Q” first appeared on the message board 4chan – a website where anonymous users posted hardcore pornography and racial slurs – claiming to be a high-level intelligence officer. (Later Q would move to the equally vile site 8kun.)
In October of 2017, the first Q “drop” (as Q’s missives became known) claimed that Hillary Clinton’s extradition was “already in motion”. A few hours later, a second post claimed Clinton had been “detained but not arrested”, while asking a series of cryptic questions (“Why does Potus surround himself with generals?”, “What is military intelligence?” and so forth). Users were hooked by the story that Q began to unfold over the next few months.
The narrative of QAnon that developed from these early messages claimed that there was a conspiracy by the so-called deep state to undermine the presidency of Donald Trump – but Q also let his readers know that this conspiracy was countered by wellplaced patriotic individuals, like Q, who supported Trump.
Trump was, Q said, always fully in charge, and always seemingly just a few moves away from winning a vague 11dimensional chess game against the deep state and the Democrats. The narrative also incorporated another conspiracy theory, known as Pizzagate, which claimed that these same highranking Democrats (along with various Hollywood celebrities) were engaged in a secret child trafficking ring involving sexual abuse and ritual murder, claiming they used children to harvest a chemical compound and elixir of youth, adrenochrome.
This, in itself, was nothing new: Americans have circulated fantastic stories of ritual human sacrifice for centuries. A rumor in 1834 that a convent outside of Boston was home to an illicit cabal of Catholics kidnapping and enslaving women led to a riot in which the convent was burned to the ground, displacing the women who lived there. More recently, the 1980s saw the rise of the satanic ritual abuse panic, in which daycares and suburban homes were thought by many to be the sites of secret groups of satanists subjecting children to impossible and terrifying ordeals. Though no evidence of such groups ever emerged, these accusations appeared regularly on daytime talkshows and led to numerous convictions of parents and childcare workers, some of whom spent years in prison.
The other element that QAnon borrowed heavily from in those early days was the rhetoric that, in Q’s words, “the storm was coming”: that it was only a matter of days or weeks before a sudden, revelatory shift occurred, where the guilty would be punished and the righteous made whole. It was a secularized version of a time-honored tradition: an End Times rhetoric that has captivated America for centuries, from the Great Disappointment (when thousands of followers of William Miller prepared themselves for the Second Coming of Christ on 22 October 1844) to the popularity of Tim LaHaye and Jerry B Jenkins’ Left Behindseries of apocalyptic fiction in the 1990s and early 2000s.
QAnon gamified these strands. The cryptic missives invited decoding and translation, and were purposefully vague enough that they could be interpreted in any number of ways. Like astrology or tarot cards, Q drops seemed freighted with meaning while lacking any specificity. One could log on, read the latest tea leaves and connect the latest dots, all the while binding oneself further to the web of paranoia. The phenomenon spread widely, roping in not just paranoid conspiracy theorists but puzzle solvers and people looking for community. And because there was so much cryptic messaging embedded in the discourse, it hardly mattered that those few things that might have been verifiable (such as Hillary Clinton being “detained” in October of 2017) were demonstrably false.
It turned out to be a remarkably successful formula; in the days before the 2020 election, a Yahoo News/ YouGov poll found that fully half of Trump’s supporters believed that top Democrats were “involved in an elite child sex trafficking ring” and that Trump was working to “dismantle” that same Democrat-led conspiracy. And despite the ludicrous and defamatory nature of the conspiracy theory, Trump seemed to embrace it; during a town hall event in October of 2020, NBC’s Savannah Guthrie repeatedly offered him a chance to denounce the movement and Trump refused.
And then, in December of 2020, the Q drops abruptly ceased, and the movement seemed to falter. It helped that by then many tech companies – perhaps belatedly – had begun to filter out QAnon content: Twitter and TikTok in July of 2020 and Facebook and Instagram that October, along with YouTube around the same time. These filters drove conspiracists to fringe platforms like Gab and Rumble, reducing the movement’s reach with the general public.
But the decline of QAnon after the election was more existential. The central narrative, that Donald Trump and select insiders were working behind the scenes to defeat the deep state and its child sex-trafficking ring, could not be sustained once Trump was removed from office. As Mike Rothschild, author of The Storm Is Upon Us, told me: “The QAnon as we knew it from October 2017 up until Biden’s inauguration is over, because it had to be over: the storyline of President Trump unleashing the purge of the deep state over Twitter doesn’t really work when he’s not the president any more, and he’s not on Twitter any more.”
But by that point the damage was done. The January 6 riot at the Capitol, an attempt to overturn the peaceful transfer of power and reinstate Donald Trump as president, was not only populated by QAnon believers – its central purpose was motivated by QAnon. If Q and his well-placed insiders could not defeat the deep state and keep Trump in power, then his followers would have to do the job themselves. (An analysis by 60 Minutes found that one in 10 of the rioters had connections to QAnon.)
Even as many conspiracists shifted the narrative to stolen elections and the Covid-19 pandemic, the belief persisted. A February 2022 poll found that even though it had been over a year since Q had communicated, the number of believers in the conspiracy was holding steady at 16% of Americans – which is over 40 million people. The poll found that the best predictor of QAnon beliefs came from which news source an individual trusted most – those who trusted far-right sources, including One America News and Newsmax (and, to a lesser extent, Fox News) were far more likely to believe in QAnon than others. Two sitting members of the House of Representatives – Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert – posted QAnon content to their social media accounts before being elected.
Though Q (or someone posing as Q) finally made a reappearance in July of 2022, by then much of the landscape of American conspiracy theories had changed drastically. As Rothschild explains, even as the original storyline “came to a natural end”, there was immediately “the emergence of the stolen election movement, and they found their next thing. It really went really seamlessly from one thing to another.” The movement no longer needed “the codes and the drops and the props and the cryptic stuff”. And without the mystic clues and portents, many of the ideas that first gained strength through Q drops have gone mainstream. They have percolated into the public discourse, embraced by many in the Republican party, and no longer need to involve any actual reference to Q or 4chan.
The surprise success of the film Sound of Freedom is just one more example. Ostensibly just a thriller about a special agent rescuing children from a trafficking ring, the movie’s box office takings – so far over $173m in the US and Canada – have not been dampened by widespread assertions that it is a QAnon parable. Though the movie makes no mention of QAnon and does not require the viewer to believe in any conspiracy theories in order to make sense of the narrative, its star, Jim Caviezel – who attended a private screening hosted by Donald Trump in July – has openly promoted it in QAnon context. On Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, Caviezel talked about the “whole adrenochrome empire”, referring to the anodyne chemical compound which he claimed to be “an elite drug that they’ve used for many years: it’s 10 times more potent than heroin, and it has some mystical qualities as far as making you look younger.”
This week, the film’s writer-director, Alejandro Monteverde, described links with QAnon as “ridiculous” and “heartbreaking” and pointed out that he started writing the film in 2015, two years before QAnon surfaced. Though he distanced himself from Caviezel’s views (“There’s people that are too close to the film that are in politics,” he said), the film’s success has legitimized QAnon theories, regardless of its creator’s intentions. In the eyes of QAnon followers, what was once a conspiracy theory discussed only on fringe websites can now be seen at your local multiplex. “Most people don’t want to be digging through 4chan looking for clues about what this Q drop really means,” Rothschild says. “They want to see results. And with something like Sound of Freedom, you’ve got the results. Not in terms of saved kids but in terms of awareness and box office success.”
The things that drove QAnon originally have now seeped into general thought; freed from the ridiculous premise, they’ve been accepted as mainstream rightwing talking points. Last week, the Florida governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis told supporters at a barbecue in New Hampshire: “We’re going to have all of these deep state people, you know, we are going to start slitting throats on day one.”
While such violent rhetoric is primarily directed at Democrats, Rothschild also points out that QAnon, like many other conspiracy theories, traffics heavily in antisemitism: tropes about “puppet masters” controlling everything proliferate, along with constant references to George Soros and the Rothschild family.
It’s been one of the many insidious ways antisemitism has spread: a constant barrage of vague accusations while playing up people’s sense of paranoia and unease. And it’s had disastrous consequences: Robert Bowers, the white nationalist convicted of carrying out a mass shooting against the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, complained in online messages that QAnon hadn’t gone far enough to root out Jews in America.
And QAnon itself hasn’t gone away entirely. In the wake of Tafari Campbell’s death, conspiracists on Gab.com leapt at the chance to prove that this somehow proved Q drops from years ago. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, now X, and his reinstating of previously banned accounts devoted to QAnon, has helped fuel a resurgence as well.
The important thing, it seems, is to keep alive the potency of the original narrative, and keep it connected to the day’s events. Conspiracists now use old Q posts like Nostradamus’s prophecies, reinterpreting gibberish in light of new events to retroactively claim there’s been a plan all along. The YouTube videos and podcasters who accrue social capital around QAnon these days do so by interpreting the evidence of the day as proof that the plan is working.
Such belief allows them to maintain a sense that for all the appearance of chaos and randomness in today’s world, there is order behind it. One recent QAnon video wound up an hour-long recap of the day’s events with the rallying cry: “Nothing’s gonna stop what is coming. And what is coming? The storm is coming,” before referencing a previous Q post: “2019 – the year of the boomerang.” This, the host argued, was “starting to make sense now … why would you give the deep state the exact moment this was going to happen?”
When the philosopher Karl Popper coined the term “conspiracy theory” in the 1940s, he explained it as a quasitheological outlook on life: “The conspiracy theory of society,” Popper wrote, “comes from abandoning God and then asking: what is in his place?” While a shadowy cabal controlling your every action from behind the scenes may seem terrifying, it offers a narrative and an explanation for the way the world works. And this is what QAnon was and continues to be to its believers: proof that there’s a plan (even if not entirely divine), which in turn gives them hope, and meaning.
That’s a far more powerful drug than adrenochrome, and weaning adherents off of it will take real work.
Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy by Colin Dickey is out now
Without the mystic clues and portents, many of the ideas that first gained strength through Q drops have gone mainstream