An A for Oakland
May 08, 2021
4 minutes
JEFF TAMARKIN
n the late 1960s, the San Francisco sound was all the rage. Local rock bands like Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Sly and the Family Stone, Santana, and Big Brother & the Holding Company (with Janis Joplin) were already famous or about to be. But one new band, Tower of Power, found themselves on the outside looking in. For one thing, they were from Oakland; although located directly across the bay from San Francisco, it might as well have been a suburb of Chattanooga as far as the rock audience was concerned. And second, Tower of Power didn’t play psychedelic rock—from the
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