Literature - S

San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury - Katherine Powell Cohen (ISBN-13 : 978-1531638757)

At the turn of the 20th century, the Haight-Ashbury first gained prominence as the gateway to Golden Gate Park; six decades later, it would anchor the worldwide cultural revolution that blossomed in the 1960s. Though synonymous with peace, love, and living outside the mainstream, its history goes back long before the Summer of Love.

Starting as a dairy farm in San Francisco's Outlands, the area saw a building boom of Queen Anne country homes for well-heeled San Franciscans and served as a refuge for victims of the 1906 earthquake and fire. Through world wars, industrial and cultural revolutions, the dot-com boom, and beyond, the Haight-Ashbury has one of the most fascinating histories of any place, anywhere. Here is the story of a vibrant neighborhood that attracts throngs of visitors, while maintaining a core community of families, young people, and long-timers.

San Francisco Nights: The Psychedelic Music Trip 1965-1968 - Gene Sculatti (ISBN-13 : 978-0283992773)

Traces the history of the psychedelic sound, offers profiles of the most popular San Francisco bands of the sixties, and explains how this music changed the industry

Scatological Alchemy: A Gnostic Biography of the Butthole Surfers - Ben Graham (ISBN-13 : 978-1909494169)

The Butthole Surfers were one of the most exciting, adventurous and dangerous rock bands to ever exist. Principally active in the 1980s, they emerged from the American post-punk underground but drew on the visceral energy of psychedelia and the intellectual provocation of Dadaism and other 20th century art movements. Their live shows were the stuff of legend, deranged and cathartic multi-media experiences that at times came close to being genuinely life-threatening. Where other bands cultivated a myth of being outlaws and renegades, The Butthole Surfers were the real deal. For years this unhinged Texan collective lived from hand to mouth on the road, existing in and suffering for their art 24/7. The music they made was unhinged and chaotic, but also contained many moments of real beauty and meaning amid the passages of proto-industrial noise, heavy metal parodies, experiments with technology, found sounds and auto-destructive improvisations.

Eventually The Butthole Surfers would come to be a major influence on bands like Nirvana and The Flaming Lips and on signing to a major label even had hit singles of their own. But commercial success and The Buttholes were not happy bedfellows, and the pressures of operating within the mainstream music industry tore them apart in a way that the years of poverty, drugs, chaos and madness never could. Scatological Alchemy is an attempt to pull the true significance of The Butthole Surfers legacy from the wreckage. As well as telling the story of their epic adventures on the fringes of culture it looks in-depth at their recorded body of work, extracting possible meanings and resonances from music often dismissed as disposable and absurd (not least by the band themselves) but which has stood the test of time and still stands head and shoulders above their contemporaries in sound-tracking the dreams and nightmares of a generation.

Scented Gardens of the Mind: A Comprehensive Guide to the Golden Era of Progressive Rock (1968-1980) - Dag Erik Asbjornsen
(ISBN-13 : 978-1899855124)

1968 - 1980 in more than 20 European Countries Provides a comprehensive guide to progressive rock and related music forms in more than 20 European Countries. The entries contain personnel details, discographies and a description of the music.

There is currently no similar English language encyclopaedic guide to the music of these countries. A perfect companion to the earlier publication Cosmic Dreams At Play.

Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead - by Phil Lesh
(ISBN-13 : 978-0316154499)

The legendary bass player tells the full, true story of his years with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead in this insightful and entertaining (Austin Chronicle) memoir of life in the greatest improvisational band in American history.

In a book as graceful and sublime as a box of rain (New York Times Book Review), the beloved bassist tells the stories behind the songs, tours, and jams in the Grateful Dead's long, strange trip from the 1960s to the death of Jerry Garcia in 1995 and beyond. From Ken Kesey's acid tests to the Summer of Love to bestselling albums and worldwide tours, the Dead's story has never been told as honestly or as memorably as in this remarkable memoir.

Seasons They Change: The Story of Acid and Psychedelic Folk - Jeanette Leech
(ISBN-13 : 978-1906002329)

In the late 60s and early 70s the inherent weirdness of folk met switched-on psychedelic rock and gave birth to new, strange forms of acoustic-based avant garde music. Artists on both sides of the Atlantic, including The Incredible String Band, Vashti Bunyan, Pearls Before Swine and Comus, combined sweet melancholy and modal melody with shape-shifting experimentation to create sounds of unsettling oddness that sometimes go under the name acid or psych folk. A few of these artists - notably the String Band, who actually made it to Woodstock - achieved mainstream success, while others remained resolutely entrenched underground. But by the mid-70s even the bigger artists found sales dwindling, and this peculiar hybrid musical genre fell profoundly out of favour. For 30 years it languished in obscurity, apparently beyond the reaches of cultural reassessment, until, in the mid-2000s a new generation of artists collectively tagged 'New Weird America' and spearheaded by Devendra Banhart, Espers and Joanna Newsom rediscovered acid and psych folk, revered it and from it, created something new. Thanks partly to this new movement, many original acid and psych folk artists have re-emerged, and original copies of rare albums command high prices. Meanwhile, both Britain and America are home to intensely innovative artists continuing the tradition of delving simultaneously into contemporary and traditional styles to create something unique. "Seasons They Change" tells the story of the birth, death and resurrection of acid and psych folk. It explores the careers of the original wave of artists and their contemporary equivalents, finding connections between both periods, and uncovering a previously hidden narrative of musical adventure.

The Second Ring of Power - Carlos Castaneda
(ISBN-13 : 978-0671732479)

Transformed by Don Juan from a bent, gray-haired old woman into a sensual sorceress whose mission is to test Castaneda, Dona Soledad turns her mysterious and awesome powers against Castaneda in a struggle that nearly consumes him.

Selected Poems: 1947-1995 - Allen Ginsberg
(ISBN-13 : 978-0141184760)

Chosen by Ginsberg himself from nearly fifty years of experimental, groundbreaking verse, this selection, in his words, ‘summarizes what I deem most honest, most penetrant of my writing’, and includes lesser known and later works which go beyond his iconic Beat Generation image. Presented chronologically, and ranging from early works such as ‘Paterson’ (1949) to selections from White Shroud (1980–85) and Cosmopolitan Greetings (1986–92), and including the classic poems Howl (1955–56) and Kaddish (1959–60) as well as songs, recent uncollected poems and notes by the author, this volume brings together the most intensely personal verse of a great American poet – incandescent explorations that expand the consciousness with their breadth of vision and depth of humanity.

Sixties Rock: Garage, Psychedelic, and Other Satisfactions (Music in American Life) - Michael Hicks (ISBN-13 : 978-0252069154)

Unlike their rock 'n' roll predecessors, many rock musicians of the mid-sixties came to consider themselves as artists, as self-conscious makers of a new sonic medium. Sixties Rock offers a provocative look at these artists and their innovations in two pivotal rock genres: garage rock and psychedelic music. Delving into everything from harmony to hardware, Michael Hicks shows what makes this music tick and what made it unique in its time. Now available for the first time in paperback, this "angular portrait" of an essentially experimental music illuminates the art of rock in the 1960s. 

Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle - Peter Coyote
(ISBN 13: 9781887178679)

In his energetic, funny, and intelligent memoir, Peter Coyote relives his fifteen-year ride through the heart of the counterculture—a journey that took him from the quiet rooms of privilege as the son of an East Coast stockbroker to the riotous life of political street theater and the self-imposed poverty of the West Coast communal movement known as The Diggers. With this innovative collective of artist-anarchists who had assumed as their task nothing less than the re-creation of the nation’s political and social soul, Coyote and his companions soon became power players.

In prose both graphic and unsentimental, Coyote reveals the corrosive side of love that was once called “free”; the anxieties and occasional terrors of late-night, drug-fueled visits of biker gangs looking to party; and his own quest for the next high. His road through revolution brought him to adulthood and to his major role as a political strategist: from radical communard to the chairman of the California Arts Council, from a street theater apprentice to a motion-picture star.

Smiling Men With Bad Reputations: The Story of the Incredible String Band, Robin Williamson and Mike Heron and a Consumer's Guide to Their Music - Paul Norbury (ISBN-13 : 978-1786239242)

The Incredible String Band lit up the late 1960s music scene with their groundbreaking LPs The 5000 Spirits…, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter and Wee Tam and the Big Huge, and were one of only five British acts at Woodstock. Their core duo Robin Williamson and Mike Heron then created further significant work both together and apart that was fêted by Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger and Robert Plant, amongst many others, and this book uncovers the story and comprehensively examines all of the just short of one hundred original recorded works of what is the great lost band of the 1960s. 

Split Fountain Hieroglyphics - Scott McDougall
(ISBN 978-1-68222-140-2)

At last! The 60’s Seattle area poster scene has been chronicled in this new, hardcover, 150 page volume titled: Split Fountain Hieroglyphics: Psychedelic Concert Posters from the Seattle Area, 1966-1969. With help from Glen Beebe (design/production), Ben Marks (editor) and a foreword by Art Chantry,

With almost 200, full color illustrations of concert art, artist interviews and essays covering topics such as the Piano Drop and Sky River, Split Fountain Hieroglyphics delivers!

The Strawberry Bricks Guide to Progressive Rock: Third Edition - Charles Snider
(ISBN-13 : 978-0578489803)

The definitive record guide to the progressive era of rock music, Strawberry Bricks presents a comprehensive discography with reviews of 500+ albums, with band histories, musical synopses, key tracks and critical commentary, all presented in the historical context of a timeline. Beginning in 1967 and continuing through 1982, a generation of musicians took rock music in directions unforeseen as they charted what would become known as progressive rock. From art rock to krautrock, from England to Germany to Italy and all across Europe, Strawberry Bricks offers a candid reappraisal of rock’s most cerebral genre.

Summer of Love and Haight: 50th Anniversary of the Summer of Love - William Schnabel
(ISBN-13 : 978-1539806844)

Time seemed to stand still in the Haight-Ashbury, the epicenter of a revolutionary, avant-garde community in the mid-sixties, where young people were exploring communal living and new ways of being alive. The Haight-Ashbury spelled hope for a generation that rejected war and America’s affluent wasteland, and that believed LSD was going to save humanity by bringing peace and love into the hearts of millions. The psychedelic counterculture was swept away by the euphoria of the zeitgeist, with its new way of looking at oneself and the world. Yet no sooner had a generation begun expressing its newfound freedom and spreading its utopian vision, than the community in the Haight-Ashbury began to disintegrate and fall apart.

By the time the Summer of Love arrived, the dream was all but over and soon a parade would celebrate the Death of Hippie. In Summer of Love and Haight, William Schnabel draws on his first-hand knowledge of San Francisco and the Haight-Ashbury in the sixties to discuss the events leading up to the Summer of Love, outline its social and historical context, and review its cultural and political significance. His informative narrative helps to understand the psychedelic movement in the Haight-Ashbury and its place in American history.

Summer of Love: Haight-Ashbury at its Highest - Gene Anthony
(ISBN 13: 9780867194210)

30th anniversary edition tells, through photos and words exactly what the psychedelic world of the Haight-Ashbury was like.

Summer of Love: The Making of Sgt. Pepper - George Martin (ISBN-10 : 9780330342100)

On 1 June 1967, at the height of the Summer of Love, the Beatles made "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band".

In this book the band's producer George Martin tells his story of the nine months it took to make the recording, featuring songs such as "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" to "A Day in the Life" and "She's Leaving Home". 1966 had seen a crossroads in the Beatles career, with the band under strain from the pressures of live performances.

They decided to make an album that was like a show.

Martin follows through the creation of the album's songs and offers an insight into the recording process itself.

Syd Barrett: A Very Irregular Head - Rob Chapman
(ISBN-13 : 978-0571238552)

Syd Barrett was the lead guitarist, vocalist, and principle songwriter in the original line up of Pink Floyd. During his brief time with the band (1966-68) he was the driving force behind the unit. After he left the band he made just two further solo albums which were both released in 1970, before withdrawing from public view to lead a quiet, and occasionally troubled life in Cambridge, the town of his birth.

Rob Chapman's book is the first authoritative and exhaustively researched biography of Syd Barrett that fully celebrates his life and legacy as a musician, lyricist and artist, and which highlights the influence that he continues to have over contemporary bands and music fans alike.

Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd: Dark Globe - Julian Palacios (ISBN-13 : 978-0859654319)

Syd Barrett was an art-school student when he founded Pink Floyd. Famous before his twentieth birthday, Barrett led the charge of psychedelia onstage at London's famed UFO club, and his acid-inspired lyrics became a hallmark of the city's 1967 Summer of Love. By turns improvisatory and whimsical, Zen-like and hard-living, Barrett pushed the boundaries of music into new realms of artistic expression while fighting inner demons. This probing study and comprehensive biography, ten years in the writing, features a wealth of interviews with Syd's family, intimates, friends, and band members, giving us an unvarnished look at Barrett's life and work. Author Julian Palacios authoritatively traces Barrett's swift evolution from precocious youth to psychedelic rock star, examining both his wide-ranging inspirations and his influence on generations of musicians, and presenting a comprehensive overview of his musical, artistic and literary influences. A never-to-be-forgotten casualty of the excess, innovation, and idealism of the 1960s, Syd Barrett channelled the gestalt of the era, and is one of the most heavily mythologized men in rock. Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd: Dark Globe offers a rare portrayal of this unique spirit in flight and freefall.