From Robyn on Patreon in 2023
It was great to arrive in San Francisco almost 20 years after it peaked. Haight-Ashbury when I finally got to stay there in 1985 reminded me of Camden Lock in London: another Groover’s Strip selling much the same things. Like St Mark’s Place in New York, West Queen Street in Toronto and other hipster parades around the free-but-expensive world, the old counter-cultural zones became Groovers Strips - for tourists like me to pad up and down, counting the telegraph poles between tattoo parlours and record shops.

A few years later, I briefly had a girlfriend with her own pad just off the Haight. I sat in the coffee shops with my notebook, even busked (for attention, not money) a couple of times on the corner of Haight & Cole. As I had come of musical age in 1967, that long scuzzy street and Golden Gate Park that opens at the end of it were lodestones that magnetised me once I became a touring musician.

Soon San Francisco developed its own mythology for me. Romance and heartbreak sang in the trolleybus wires. I recorded an album at Hyde Street Studios - apparently the 2” multitracks are still there - and over the years have played some epic shows in town, from the I-Beam to the Fillmore to the Chapel. Watching the Jefferson Airplane reunion in the Park in 1989 with my girlfriend Cynthia is one of many memories I cherish of SF. What I’ve really done is grow my own story out of the existing legend, being the tourist I am. A great place will do that for you - you can graft your narrative onto it.

“San Francisco (Flowers In Your Hair)” was written by the Wolf King of LA, AKA John Phillips, the songwriting motor of the Mamas & Papas. It always sounded wistful, right from when it appeared in mid-1967, sung by Scott McKenzie. As that time recedes into the amber, the overtones of the lyrics grow ever darker, encrusted with irony. This is a warm-up take for a version I’ve recorded for my “1967” album, mixed in stereo by Charlie Francis at Stwdio Penty.

Turn on, tune in, and, er…