When the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots square off on Sunday in Super Bowl LX, it will mark the third time the big game has come to the Bay Area. The San Francisco 49ers and the team formerly known as the Oakland Raiders have made a dozen combined appearances, but the game itself has only been held in the area twice before. In 1985, Super Bowl XIX took place in Stanford Stadium.
But until the new Levi’s Stadium opened in 2014, the NFL did not seem all that interested in staging its biggest event in either Candlestick Park or Oakland Coliseum.
Fortunately, for Bay Area music fans, there is no shortage of venues where the best of the best have been eager to play during the entire Super Bowl era.
From Club Fugazi to the Warfield to the granddaddy of them all, the Fillmore, San Francisco has hosted major national tours and fostered a thriving local music scene. In the late 1960s and through the 1970s, there simply was not a more vibrant music culture.
The Bay Area’s greatest 1960 and 1970s rock bands
Artists flocked to San Fran at the height of the counterculture explosion. It became a destination, like New York and Nashville. As in those two iconic music cities, the influx lent diversity. And if anything, the Bay proved more willing to let those incoming artists grow and change the local culture, rather than imprinting a “San Francisco” sound on the newcomers.
So maybe there was a San Francisco sound – psychedelic, folk-rock tinged with hallucinogens – but there was a lot more going on than acid-fueled jam sessions.
Here then are a dozen sensational bands that got their launch in the Bay Area in the ‘60s and ‘70s, at the same time the Super Bowl was becoming the dominant sporting event in the USA.
We’ll go alphabetically
Credence Clearwater Revival
Let’s put that monolithic psychedelic rep to bed early. CCR was swamp rock. In a vacuum, you would have sworn they grew up in Bayou country, as their 1969 song “Born on the Bayou” might lead you to believe.
But the Fogerty brothers grew up in El Cerrito, just north of Berkeley, and brought a low-down and dirty rockabilly stomp to the Bay. In 1969 and 1970 alone, they released five straight top ten albums before breaking up in 1972.
They scored their final top ten single in 1972 with “Sweet Hitch-Hiker” before John Fogerty launched his successful solo career.
Dead Kennedys
And now we jump to the other end of the decade and the other end of the musical spectrum. In the late ‘70s, as punk was taking off in NYC and assorted other regional outposts, San Fran contributed one of the most incendiary, politically charged acts in American music history.
Led by East Bay Ray on guitar and frontman Jello Biafra, the Dead Kennedys blasted onto the scene with the seminal album Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables in 1980.
Tracks like “California Uber Alles” and “Kill the Poor” showed it wasn’t all free love and hippie dope smoke floating out of the Bay anymore.
The Flamin’ Groovies
The Groovies were hard rockers. Their original lineup, featuring Roy Loney on vocals, leaned heavily into the blues. After Loney departed early in the decade, the Groovies tilted more toward power pop/ But whether they were down on the street with “Teenage Head” or cranking out big and bright power pop like “Shake Some Action,” the Groovies were one of San Fran’s treasures.
They broke up in the early 1980s, but surviving members got back together in 2012 to put out some new music.
The Grateful Dead
I don’t really need to tell you, do I? The band is most associated with the musical traditions of the Bay. They were a true melting pot – blending bluegrass and the blues with classical notes and constant experimentation.
After a few years of trying to figure out standard recording practices, they burst out at the end of the ‘60s with Live/Dead, then obviously figured out how to get it right in the studio with Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, both released in 1970.
By the end of the decade, their live shows and loyal fans were already legendary, and they continued experimenting and growing on albums like Terrapin Station and Shakedown Street.
Jefferson Airplane
The psychedelic powerhouse of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Their classic lineup featured the exquisite guitar of Jorma Kaukonen and the double-edged lead vocals of Marty Balin and Grace Slick. Slick was carrying on the tradition of iconic female vocalists that had given the Bay a large part of its sound.
The Stone Poneys and Big Brother and the Holding Company were long gone by 1970, but their singers – Linda Ronstadt and Janis Joplin - would still leave massive footprints. Slick didn’t have the solo career that they would have, but her work with Airplane – be it singing lead on “White Rabbit” or alongside Balin on “Volunteers” – was a big part of the revolution.
In 1974, the Airplane evolved into the Starship with much of the band intact. They remained very successful, but some of the edge was gone.
Journey
Journey began in 1973 as a jazz-influenced rock band. Then, in 1977, they stumbled upon a young vocalist who had been bouncing around the Bay for several years with limited success. Adding Steve Perry to the mix was pure alchemy.
Almost overnight, Journey became the Bay Area’s latest sensation. 1978’s Inifinity, with lead single “Wheel in the Sky,” fit perfectly into the arena rock format that was coming to define rock and roll in the late ‘70s.
Pretty soon, Journey was among the most successful bands in the world, releasing a string of top ten albums and singles throughout the 1980s.
Steve Miller Band
His dad was a recording engineer. His godfather was Les Paul. He spent his formative years learning the blues in Texas and Chicago. Before he ever settled in San Francisco to found the band that bore his name, Steve Miller was at home in virtually every genre of American music.
He experimented with all those sounds through several albums in the late ‘60s before achieving massive pop success in the early ‘70s, beginning with “The Joker,” and following up with singles like “Take the Money and Run” and “Jet Airliner.”
No one really knows what “pompatus” means, but it does sound like a word that derived from the Summer of Love and the heart of San Fran.
Moby Grape
No San Fran band was better than Moby Grape. At their peak in the late ‘60s, they had Jerry Miller, Peter Lewis, and Skip Spence providing an unstoppable guitar attack. They had a potent rhythm section that could move from psychedelia to blues with ease. They could all sing. The mercurial Spence left early but returned to play koto on the final album of their original run, 1971’s 20 Granite Creek.
They would try sporadic returns over the next several decades, but Moby Grape remains one of the cautionary tales of a band being screwed over by unsavory management.
New Riders of the Purple Sage
For a few years early on, the New Riders featured a pedal steel guitarist named Jerry Garcia, along with Phil Lesh on bass and Mickey Hart on drums. When they all left to devote their full attention to the Grateful Dead, the New Riders didn’t have too much trouble moving on, releasing highly acclaimed albums in the nascent field of country rock.
Though they clearly identified as country rockers, New Riders would continue dabbling in many other genres, as with the R&B gospel-tinged “I Don’t Need No Doctor” or the Crazy Horse sound-alike “Death and Destruction.”
Santana
For decades, Latin rock in the USA was defined by Carlos Santana and his self-titled band. They were big in the Bay in the mid-60s, but exploded onto the national scene at Woodstock in 1969. Then, the potent trio of studio albums – Santana, Abraxas, and Santana III - cemented their status as the kings of Latin rock fusion.
Carlos is 78 now and he remains one of the genuinely iconic guitar maestros of the last half century.
Sly and the Family Stone
Sly Stone (Sylvester Stewart) was a visionary musical genius. As a producer and promoter, as a band leader, and as one of the most gifted composers and instrumentalists of the rock era, it is difficult to top the string of albums he created with his band in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.
From Dance to the Music (1968) to 1971’s wellspring of funk, There’s a Riot Going On (a response to Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On), Sly changed American popular music. His final triumph, Fresh, from 1973, was sadly poignant in the way a man who prized family – actual or found – had essentially turned into a one-man band.
Questlove’s documentary Sly Lives! (2025) offers a superb look into the life and mind of a genius.
The Tubes
Alphabetically last on this list, the Tubes are also the least-known of the great Bay bands today, despite the fact that they continued touring well into the 21st century. They were protopunk, or actual punk, depending on how you choose to define things. It doesn’t matter. “White Punks on Dope” (1975), from their debut album, and their propulsive, satiric follow-up, Young and Rich, remain landmarks of San Fran in the 1970s.
The seeds sown in those years have led to continued diversity from Green Day to Train, Counting Crows to H.E.R. The Bay Area keeps pumping out sensational sounds.