There’s always a clamor on Haight Street, even now at night: neon lights, blinking lights, colored lights, and people standing outside yakety-yaking their current affairs on cell phones. Music spills out of doorways and thumps through walls, with shouts and laughs added in to concoct the sound of good times. White homeless kids look for a place to squat and some food or dope. There are no parades or street lamp banners trumpeting the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love. A few shops have window displays with fading Avalon posters, but what’s new? Every day here is a time warp of sorts, a more joyous Daly Plaza. You have to head off the main strip in order to find what really separates this place from the rest of the world.

Things get weird around this city after the sun goes down. Where the mornings and afternoons hum with history and promise, along with the fog rolling in from the Pacific comes the stench of danger and broken dreams. Leaving behind the Haight racket, you can plunge headfirst into the quiet of the side streets—a goldmine of lost stories and forgotten names spinning around in the wind like loose trash. And what about all those wayward kids who heard the media’s call 40 years ago and left Anywhere, USA to flood these very streets with nothing but the clothes on their backs? Kids disappeared. Swallowed up by open doorways, swallowed up into Golden Gate Park, and swallowed up into the night—if they were ever heard or seen again, the light was gone from their eyes.

As you wander around at night there’s always a feeling of someone watching you, but the feeling is more melancholic than dangerous. It’s a faint whisper in your ear, a tug on your sleeve from spooked corners with odd figures in the dark. The glow of street lamps dots the sidewalks, their blurry light a halo in the fog. Everything enveloped in a faint scent of eucalyptus. An odd place, really, for gloom to rest here amongst the ornate Victorians.

Up on top of Buena Vista Park one can view the entire area from above. This is the perfect spot to watch the fog roll in just behind an advancing army of low-flying clouds, dark shapes moving against the fading red sky. The rattle of Haight Street is gone; gusts of wind bring in the old world. Not the gold rush-era San Francisco, but the New Old World, 50 or 60 years back. A time when rock ‘n’ roll still had numerous boundaries to push, and break. There are thousands of untold stories swimming in these nights. Look up, around, and behind you: there they are.

***

Over in the distance is Pine Street. There was a photo taken on the steps of 2139 that sums up a lot about the early San Francisco acid rock scene, long before it became news, a cartoon. One afternoon in 1966 the five members of a little rock ‘n’ roll combo called the Charlatans (originally: the Amazing Charlatans) gathered in front of their friend Herb Greene’s camera and sealed their destiny. At the time they were the cutting edge, the crux of what the whole scene was about to be about. The photos captured them dressed in topnotch Victorian gun-slinging-hepcat-outlaw-dandy threads. Typically, they will be remembered for how good they looked more than how good they sounded. The band was definitely good, but not everyone remembers that part. The Charlatans’ image, their overall package, spearheaded by George Hunter and Mike Wilhelm, set the standard for the rest of the scene to follow and elaborate on.

Over to the west is Downey Street, where the band spent their early months banging together material. Soon it became obvious they weren’t the usual rock group. Their songbook matched their image—vaudeville, dusty cowboy songs, blues, ragtime—all of it strained through some of the finest LSD available, giving this old-timey music a clumsy modernity.

Part of their charm was their ragged precision. Wilhelm was the main motivator in how songs were arranged. His ringing Byrds-like guitar and Mike Ferguson’s rolling piano seemed to be the center of the music. Surrounding them were Hunter’s autoharp, Richie Olsen’s bass, and Dan Hick’s drumming, and most of them pulling off better-than-average harmonies.

Right off the bat the Charlatans were a hit, with a coup in the spring of 1965 when they were offered a summer-long residency at the Red Dog Saloon up in the semi-ghost town of Virginia City, Nevada. Fate had stepped in with perhaps the most complimentary combination of ingredients at the best possible time. Not only was the setting right for the band, but the people running the saloon were just as historically modified as they were. About 20 artists and musicians dressed to the hilt in period clothes (including sidearms) came together to throw them a private and rather elaborate little party up in the Comstock. Sure there was a small burgeoning scene back in San Francisco, but this… this was unmitigated genius. For two months it was heaven on earth—a Victorian/cowboy smorgasbord of rock ‘n’ roll, drugs, guns, garter belts, attitude, whiskey, light shows, and art. They were miles ahead of “Satisfaction”, and they knew it.

Word spread quickly, and local San Francisco bigwig, Tom Donahue, wanted to get in on it. In the middle of the Red Dog party, the band dragged their weary asses back to the city to record demos for Donahue’s small label, Autumn Records. It was an awkward performance as they tried to bring their good time, old-fashioned sound into the quasi-futuristic world of Coast Recorders. Donahue suggested they play a Dylan cover but the band declined, choosing to pick their own songs—a strong-willed attitude they’d stick throughout their career. They settled on two covers and two Wilhelm originals, “The Blues Ain’t Nothin’”, and the acid influenced “Number One.”

A silly, bumbling drug bust ended the Red Dog party but history was already in motion. The Charlatans didn’t invent rock ‘n’ roll for San Francisco. They helped invent acid rock, ironically with a very standardized brand of music. They returned to the Bay Area as THE band. Trouble was the scene had grown. Friends who had driven up to see them bash it out in Virginia City on the weekends drove home with heads a’swimming and came up with their own variations of what they had just witnessed.

A friend of the band passed the demos to Erik Jacobsen who was working for Kama Sutra Records. He liked their sound and drove up to meet them. They were a bit leery of this new guy with fancy contracts but signed anyway without even a lawyer looking over their shoulder. The deal turned out to be worse than the one the Fugs signed with Folkways, although certainly not as bad as Leadbelly’s deal with John Lomax… but close.