...excerpt from the forward, written by Alec Palao--
The San Francisco Bay Area is an incredibly diverse region, encompassing within its borders a wealth of differing political, social and cultural ideas. From a popular music perspective, it was indeed the city of San Francisco itself that came to embody the intellectualization and maturation of rock in the late 1960s, but the upper echelon of SF groups like the Airplane and Dead did not speak for the entire youth of the region. The East Bay is only a half hour drive across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco, but back in the 1960s, it might as well have been a thousand miles away. The burgeoning ‘adult’ rock scene that centered around the Fillmore, Avalon and Matrix may have caught the attention of the record industry and media, but teens from Berkeley to Fremont raved at a myriad of teen dances and clubs, oblivious to the hippy rumbling across the Bay. The East Bay lacked the self-conscious sophistication of San Francisco, instead reflecting its own blue collar landscape of factories and warehouses with an amazing grass roots music scene. True rock and roll is necessarily a suburban phenomenon, and the East Bay was crawling with garage bands, the de facto building blocks of any rock scene...