The Grateful Dead and their San Francisco neighborhood, the Haight-Ashbury, soon became the focal point for a psychedelic revolution, attracting young "hippies" from all across the country. Up the street from the Dead lived Big Brother and the Holding Company, a band whose enthusiastic structurelessness allowed its lead singer, Janis Joplin, to render the blues in mind-blowing technicolor.

The Beatles, whose last live gig took place in San Francisco in 1966, were also in an exploratory phase. LSD, Eastern religion and the sound of the sitar, an Indian string instrument, suffused their 1967 Strawberry Fields. The Beatles' and the Byrds' interpretation of Indian music awoke interest in the real thing and made a counter-culture star of 47-year-old Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar.

When a massive 1967 "Be In" in Golden Gate Park made national news, record companies, scenting cash, descended on San Francisco. As the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company put out their debut albums, a new wave of Bay Area bands rolled in, with Country Joe and the Fish and Jefferson Airplane leading the way.

In England, a home-grown psychedelic scene sprang up - accompanied by the strange noises of Pink Floyd's Roger Waters, who had found highly unconventional ways of coaxing sounds from his guitar. In June 1967, the Beatles emerged from Abbey Road studios with the seminal album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and an anthem for the "Summer of Love" happening half-a-world away, "All You Need Is Love."

Although psychedelia was already peaking that summer as the charts filled up with sycophantic odes to San Francisco and police cracked down on drug use, the defining moment of the era was yet to come. The psychedelic revolution climaxed in August 1969 as half-a-million fans took part in "three days of peace and music" at the Woodstock Festival - the upstate New York rock concert heard around the world.

But the revolution was short-lived. Another massive outdoor performance later that year became the "anti-Woodstock," signaling the end of the decade and of the heady days of the hippie movement. In December 1969, the Rolling Stones headlined a concert at the Altamont Speedway in California. With security in the hands of the Hell's Angels and long delays between performances, the crowd became violent and the event descended into nightmare when a spectator was stabbed to death yards from the stage as the Rolling Stones performed.