San Francisco Renaissance - Legacy

Legacy

The Bay Area-based philosopher and writer Alan Watts, in his autobiography, mentioned that by around 1960 or so "… something else was on the way, in religion, in music, in ethics and sexuality, in our attitudes to nature, and in our whole style of life" (from Watts, In My Own Way).

Some of the songwriters of the upcoming rock-music generation of the mid-1960s and later read and appreciated writers like Kerouac, Snyder, McClure, Ferlinghetti, and Ginsberg (e.g., Bob Dylan, for one, has talked about this). Hence, given that much of the late-'60s wave of groundbreaking rock music developed within rock's famous "San Francisco Sound," it seems very likely that the writers of the San Francisco Renaissance had an influence on the lyrics, both artistically and in terms of attitudes to living.

The "underground press" that developed in America and elsewhere in the 1960s had one of its most interesting and colorful examples in the San Francisco Oracle which reflected the hippie culture and other aspects of the counterculture. The Oracle gave much space to writings by Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, and other Beat writers, along with emerging younger writers.

Both Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Michael McClure were featured on-stage in the rock-star jammed The Last Waltz, a documentary and concert film made by Martin Scorsese about The Band (who had an immense following in the late '60s to mid '70s) and a large number of their musical friends.