Best Bay Area Music Groups

By Raymond Lockley

Like most American kids who grew up in the 1960s, I like good rock-and-roll music. Having grown up in San Jose (the first capitol of California) around family to whom history is important, local contributions to history have always been important to me. (We helped give the world the Silicon Valley, Apple, Intel, Lockheed and FMC--not to mention Eggo, the world's first toaster waffle, and Oral-B toothbrushes.) So combining these interests to create a list about great music groups of the San Francisco Bay Area seems right up my alley. Certainly, there is great rock history here, and even a significant stream within early rock known as the San Francisco Sound.

There are a lot of ways that I could have gone with this list, including many possibility for the superlative of the theme: best, greatest, most important, most influential, best selling, favorite. I chose "best" because everybody thinks they know what that means, and because I want to encourage people to argue with me. These are not strictly ranked, but organized within decades. One other note on content: having selected the groups, I did not pick their "best" album or song; but rather I've listed what seemed to be the album that established them as an important group for audiences beyond the Bay Area (some people might call it their "breakthrough" album), and then selected a representative great song off of that album.

Let the vegetables be hurled...


# Group Origin Establishing Album Year Representative Song
1 Jefferson Airplane San Francisco Jefferson Airplane 1966 Somebody to Love
2 The Grateful Dead Palo Alto Grateful Dead 1967 The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion)
3 Creedence Clearwater Revival El Cerrito Bayou Country 1969 Proud Mary
4 Santana San Francisco Santana 1969 Soul Sacrifice
5 Sly and the Family Stone San Francisco Dance to the Music 1968 Dance to the Music
6 Syndicate of Sound San Jose Little Girl 19 Little Girl
1 The Doobie Brothers San Jose The Doobie Brothers 1971 Nobody
2 Steve Miller Band San Francisco The Joker 1973 The Joker
3 Huey Lewis and the News San Francisco Huey Lewis and the News 1980 Trouble in Paradise
4 Tower of Power Oakland Bump City 1972 You're Still a Young Man
5 The Pointer Sisters Oakland The Pointer Sisters 1973 Yes We Can Can
6 Syndicate of Sound San Jose Little Girl 1966 Little Girl
1 Smashmouth San Jose Fush Yu Mang 1997 Walkin' on the Sun
2 Third Eye Blind San Francisco Third Eye Blind 1997 Semi-Charmed Life
3 Green Day Berkeley Dookie 1994 When I Come Around
4 Counting Crows Berkeley August and Everything After 1993 Mr. Jones


To index of lists