Saturday, October 1, 2016

The 2015/1967 Countdown - 10/01/2016 Update

Today, we turn again to our 1967's Super "Sensational" Summer Of Love mix and take a listen to one of the songs most purely and directly inspired by that cultural moment.

San Franciscan Nights, the humorous (the opening is a riff on a play on Dragnet's theme song) but ultimately sincere appreciation of the San Francisco scene, was written by Eric Burdon right on the heels of the Animal's Monterey Pop Festival appearance, and was the first and biggest (though far from only) hit for the fully revamped second major line-up of the group (now technically renamed Eric Burdon And The Animals).

Burdon himself has claimed that he felt San Franciscan Nights was one of the more impactful protest songs of the decade - that it got soldiers overseas to wonder what the hell they were doing fighting in a foreign land when all that groovy stuff was happening back home - but regardless of its sociological impact, the song ushered in a new, less blues-oriented, more psychedelic style for the band that would sustain them as a steady presence on the charts for the duration of the 1960s.

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