{"id":490433,"date":"2026-03-23T05:47:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-23T05:47:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/490433\/"},"modified":"2026-03-23T05:47:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-23T05:47:08","slug":"the-songs-that-defined-san-francisco-according-to-joan-didion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/490433\/","title":{"rendered":"The songs that defined San Francisco, according to Joan Didion"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Joan<\/p>\n

(Credits: Far Out \/ YouTube Still)<\/p>\n

Mon 23 March 2026 1:30, UK <\/p>\n

Joan Didion<\/a>\u2019s 1967 essay \u2018Slouching Towards Bethlehem\u2019 reads like walking through a daze, as she encounters a most eccentric cast of wayward characters that, as suspected, indicate a darker, less discussed side of the hippie idealism that defined the counterculture. <\/p>\n

For Didion, San Francisco<\/a> was the epicentre of a cultural shift that she suspected had done more harm than good, particularly for the youth culture in America. \u201cSan Francisco was where the social haemorrhaging was showing up,\u201d she wrote, \u201cSan Francisco was where the missing children were gathering and calling themselves \u2018hippies\u2019. When I first went to San Francisco, I did not even know what I wanted to find out, and so I just stayed around a while and made a few friends.\u201d<\/p>\n

During her wandering through the city, she met \u2018Deadeye\u2019, a former Hell\u2019s Angel-turned-wannabe religious guru, and the Grateful Dead, when she showed up in Sausalito at one of their rehearsals. She describes the \u201clittle girls\u201d that follow the band, \u201cThe same little girls who used to hang around saxophone players, girls who live on the celebrity and power and sex a band projects when it plays\u201d.\u00a0More than anyone else, Didion encountered<\/a> a number of teenage runaways, who had recently fled their homes across America to chase some unknown spiritual quest towards enlightenment, of which they believed the culture of San Francisco possessed. <\/p>\n

After one fraught encounter, in which the writer was trying to locate Chester Anderson, a printer associated with the Beat Generation circuit, she is met with apprehension by her source, who tells her where he lives but emphasises that she wants no involvement in her pursuit. In writing, Didion quotes the Buffalo Springfield<\/a> song \u2018For What It\u2019s Worth\u2019, a sign of the times: \u201cParanoia strikes deep \/ In your life it will creep\u201d. <\/p>\n

The Stephen Stills-written song was released a year prior, in 1966, in the midst of the Sunset Strip curfew riots in Los Angeles, when Buffalo Springfield was the house band at the Whisky a Go-Go on the Strip at the time, and witnessed firsthand the rallies that occurred, with Stills chronicling how thousands (including Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda) showed up to protest the enforcement of a curfew. The song captures an early shift in tensions between young people and the police and, as a result, it foretold the building tensions that Didion saw mirrored in San Francisco. <\/p>\n

Didion also quotes a Krishna song, \u2018Naradi Muni\u2019, as she travels to speak with disciples of the Swami AC Bhaktivedanta. \u201cDo you know who is the first eternal spaceman of this universe?\u201d the song asks, \u201cThe first to send his wild wild vibrations \/ To all those cosmic superstations?\u201d Another song permeated her consciousness as she continued to search through San Francisco: Herman\u2019s Hermits\u2019 1966 tune \u2018No Milk Today,\u2019<\/a> \u201ca song I heard on many mornings in 1967 on KFRC, the Flower Power Station, San Francisco\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo milk today \/ My love has gone away\u2026 The end of my hopes \/ The end of all my dreams,\u201d she quotes from the sombre song, which tells the story of a milkman noticing that the protagonist has lost his lover, therefore no longer requiring his deliveries, \u201cThe bottle stands forlorn, a symbol of the dawn,\u201d the Hermits sing. For Didion, the song echoes the disillusion of San Francisco\u2019s romanticised ideals. Arriving in the city with little knowledge of what she would find, hopes and dreams pale in comparison to the grim realities she found herself at the centre of, and above all, she is fixated on the children she finds, all very evidently lost in their pursuit of a sense of self, \u201cLess in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it\u201d.<\/p>\n

In the people she meets, Didion confronts \u201cthe reality which still eluded the press: We were seeing something important,\u201d as she wrote, continuing, \u201cWe were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society\u2019s atomisation could be reversed. At some point between 1945 and 1967, we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Originally published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1967, \u2018Slouching Towards Bethlehem\u2019 stands as a central criticism of the era, foreshadowing the increasing violence and disarray that would permeate California later in the decade. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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