San Francisco Psychedelia

You're after the records made by bands who played to dancers, not listeners. The defining trait isn't fuzz or phasing — it's duration: songs built to go where the room went, then squeezed onto an LP side afterwards.

Half of what you want was a live act first and a studio product second, and the pressings carry that.

It starts in summer 1965 at the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City, Nevada, where the Charlatans played in Victorian dress to a crowd on LSD — still legal in California until October 1966.

The Family Dog ran the first dances at Longshoreman's Hall that October. Ken Kesey's Acid Tests, late 1965 into 1966, used the Grateful Dead as house band.

Bill Graham took the Fillmore Auditorium, Chet Helms took the Avalon Ballroom, and Rick Griffin, Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelley and Victor Moscoso made the posters. Major labels arrived fast: RCA signed Jefferson Airplane, Columbia took Big Brother and Moby Grape, Warner Bros.

took the Dead, Capitol took Quicksilver. By 1969 the ballrooms were slipping and the bands were touring arenas.

Who: the Dead, Airplane, Quicksilver, Big Brother, Moby Grape, Country Joe; the Fillmore, the Avalon, the Matrix, Winterland; Owsley Stanley building the PA and the chemistry both. What: long modal jams off blues and jug-band bones, two guitars trading rather than one soloing, close male-female harmony, very little studio trickery compared to London.

Rules were loose — tempo could drift, endings were optional. How a record gets in: it has to sound like a room.

Either cut live, cut fast, or arranged so a side runs unbroken.