See a First Look at ‘San Francisco Sounds: A Place in Time’ Documentary

San Francisco from 1965 to 1975 provided an extraordinarily fertile environment for the birth of such music acts as the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Sly and the Family Stone, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin, Steve Miller, Santana and many more. Additionally, seminal festivals such as Monterey Pop, Altamont and Woodstock brought Bay Area musicians into the national forefront during that time. 

The rich scene is examined in San Francisco Sounds: A Place in Time, a two-part docuseries that airs Aug. 20 and Aug. 27 on MGM+.

The documentary comes from the same team that produced the three-time Emmy-nominated doc Laurel Canyon: A Place in Time of directors Alison Ellwood and Anoosh Tertzakian of Alex Gibney’s Jigsaw Productions, the Kennedy/Marshall Company, Amblin Television and Jeff Pollack. 

“Just like with Laurel Canyon, I personally lived through this extraordinary musical period of time and visited the San Francisco scene on a regular basis, so I’m very excited to be working again with the same amazing team we assembled to create the Laurel Canyon doc series,” said executive producer Frank Marshall in a previous statement.

“We are thrilled to reveal a new perspective on this explosively creative and musical place in time through never-before-seen archival material and the personal stories of those who lived and breathed the San Francisco scene. People think they know what the ‘Summer of Love’ was all about, but the two-part film sheds both light and darkness on what really happened during the psychedelic renaissance,” co-directors Ellwood and Tertzakian said in a joint statement to Billboard.

In the premiere of the documentary’s trailer above, even a young Bob Dylan praises the Northern California scene, declaring that “Jefferson Airplane are playing at Fillmore Auditorium, and I would like to go if I could.” The Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia chimes in on the scene as well, declaring it a peaceful one, even in the face of the Vietnam War: “We’re not thinking about any kind of power, revolution or war.”