Get the real skinny on the Bay Area's most illustrious rock and-roll, jazz, and blues musicians and their favorite digs from the one cat who should know—the San Francisco Chronicle's longtime music critic Joel Selvin. Here are the stories, legends, and secrets behind the clubs, recording studios, famous homes, and final resting places of dozens of music greats, from Jimi Hendrix to Linda Ronstadt. With rare archival photographs of pivotal events and places, this lively compendium will captivate both resident and visiting music fans.

San Francisco’s rich and unique cultural history since its time as a gold rush frontier town has long made it a bastion of forward thinking and freedom of expression. It makes perfect sense, then, that both it and the surrounding Bay Area should prove to be a crucible for some of the most enduring and influential music of the rock and roll era. From the heady days of Haight-Ashbury in the ’60s to today, San Francisco and the Bay Area have provided a distinctive soundtrack to the American experience that has often been confrontational, controversial, enlightening, and always entertaining. Perhaps best known for the '60s psychedelic scene which included the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Santana, the Steve Miller Band, Sly & the Family Stone, and Janis Joplin, the Bay Area's rock and roll history twists and turns like Lombard Street itself. The first wave San Francisco punks wrought the Avengers and Dead Kennedys; punk later gripped the East Bay, giving us Green Day and Rancid. From the folk and blues eras through the chart-topping sounds of Journey and Huey Lewis & the News. The rock equivalent of Manifest Destiny carried wave upon wave of young musicians in search of fame, fortune and the great lost chord to Golden Gate City. San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area have collectively produced countless key figures in rock and roll, from musicians to journalists to entrepreneurs. The modern concept of the vast outdoor rock festival took root in and around San Francisco. The Bay Area is also where music history happened to artists from almost everywhere else: San Francisco is where the Beatles played their final concert and the Sex Pistols fell apart; where the Clash recorded much of their second album; where a drug-addled Keith Moon passed out during a concert by the Who only to be replaced behind the drum kit by an eager fan. Rock and roll is baked into the Bay Area’s culture and story to this day. A guide to the places that shaped the local scene and world-famous sound, the Rock and Roll Explorer Guide to San Francisco and the Bay Area will take you to where music makers lived, rocked, performed, recorded, met, broke up, and much, much more.

If These Halls Could Talk: A Historical Tour Through San Francisco Recording Studios takes an in-depth look at San Francisco's colorful and diverse music and music recording history, covering both the recordings and recording studios that housed the jazz and blues of the '50s and psychedelic rock of the '60s, to the rock and funk of the '70s, punk and new wave of the '80s, and the alternative rock, R&B and hip-hop of the '90s through today. Leading Bay Area artists, producers, engineers, and studio owners take readers on a guided tour through some of San Francisco's top recording studios, venturing behind the scenes of some of popular music's hottest albums. Readers will learn about the recording techniques, the magic, and often unusual experiences that went into a wide range of recordings, including works by Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Santana, the Pointer Sisters, Herbie Hancock, Journey, Huey Lewis and the News, Chris Isaak, Faith No More, Green Day, and many more. In addition, If These Halls COuld Talk chronicles the history of the studios themselves. The book discusses the arrival, growth, and departure of studios in and around San Francisco, the myriad advancements in technology through the years and its effect on the recording industry, and how the San Francisco Bay Area's recording facilities have endured through economic ups and downs, increased competition, decreased demand, and the ever-changing, unpredictable music industry.

If These Halls Could Talk: A Historical Tour through San Francisco Recording Studios takes an in-depth look at San Francisco's diverse music and music recording studio history. Filled with rare photos and behind-the-scenes stories, this book steps inside the recording studios where '50s jazz and blues, '60s psychedelic rock, '70s funk, '80s punk and early 21st Century everything came to life.

DVD, entitled Wow and flutter, contains recordings of concerts at the festival, held Oct. 1-2. 2004, RPI Playhouse, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, N.Y.

“Leta Miller’s long-awaited study is a tightly woven, fast-paced, and luminous chronicle of San Francisco’s musical coming of age. Her keen insights into Chinese opera, night club jazz, and two international expositions go far to rekindle the era’s spirited mix of talent, taste, patronage, and politics. The groundbreaking work of an accomplished music and social historian, Music and Politics in San Francisco is a most welcome companion to Catherine Parsons Smith’s Making Music in Los Angeles.” —Jonathan Elkus, Lecturer in Music Emeritus, UC Davis “From three disastrous days in April 1906 through the onset of an even greater disaster in 1941, from the San Francisco Conservatory through the performances of the Chinese Opera, Leta Miller traces the musico-political history of ‘the Paris of the West’ in meticulous detail. This important book adds immeasurably to our knowledge of West Coast American music, whilst simultaneously challenging a number of historiographical shibboleths.” —David Nicholls, contributing editor of The Cambridge History of American Music "Leta Miller’s San Francisco’s Musical Life is a pure pleasure to read. Miller manages that rare feat of digesting what must have been many years of digging through newspapers and archives into a fun, lively, highly readable narrative. Each chapter strikes a comfortable balance among factual exposition, colorful anecdote, and historical analysis. Miller brings equal depth and insight to each of her disparate subjects, she writes with charm and clarity throughout, and the whole is arranged in a way that is clear and logical, never monotonous." —Mary Ann Smart, author of Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera