San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)
"San Francisco" is a psychedelic pop song, written by John Phillips, and sung by Scott McKenzie. The song was produced and released in May 1967 by Phillips and Lou Adler, who used it to promote their Monterey International Pop Music Festival held in June of that year. John Phillips played guitar on the recording and session musician Gary L. Coleman played orchestra bells and chimes. The bass guitar of the song was supplied by session musician Joe Osborn. Hal Blaine played drums. The song became one of the best-selling singles of the 1960s in the world, reaching the fourth position on the US charts and the number one spot on the UK charts. In Ireland, the song was number one for one week, in New Zealand the song spent five weeks at number one, and in Germany it was six weeks at number one. McKenzie's version of the song has been called "the unofficial anthem of the counterculture movement of the 1960s, including the Hippie, Anti-Vietnam War and Flower power movements." The song's title was used in , wherein two successive storyline missions have been named after parts of the title.
Composition
According to Paul Ingles of NPR, "...local authorities in Monterey were starting to get cold feet over the prospect of their town being overrun by hippies. To smooth things over, Phillips wrote a song, "San Francisco." Phillips reported writing the song in about 20 minutes. It is one of the very first songs in popular music industry to use vi–IV–I–V chord progression, a variant of I–V–vi–IV progression, which has seen enormous popularity in recent years, in pop music as well as in orchestral music. The song, which tells the listeners, "If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair", is credited with bringing thousands of young people to San Francisco, California, during the late 1960s. Different issues of the recording use slightly different titles, including: "San Francisco "; "San Francisco "; and "San Francisco 'Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair'".
Reception
Released on May 13, 1967, the song was an instant hit. By the week ending July 1, 1967, it reached the number four spot on the BillboardHot 100 in the US, where it remained for four consecutive weeks. Meanwhile, the song rose to number one in the UK Singles Chart, and most of Europe. In July 1967, McKenzie's previous record label, Capitol, claimed that the "follow-up" to this song was their re-release of his earlier single, "Look in Your Eyes." The single is purported to have sold over seven million copies worldwide. In Central Europe, young people adopted "San Francisco" as an anthem, leading the song to be widely played during Czechoslovakia's 1968 Prague Spring uprising. The song has been featured in several films, including Frantic, The Rock, and Forrest Gump. It was also played occasionally by Led Zeppelin as part of the improvised section in the middle of "Dazed and Confused". U2's Bono also led the audience in singing this song during their PopMart performances in the San Francisco Bay Area on June 18 and 19, 1997. New Order covered the song on July 11, 2014, at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. A cover of the song by Michael Marshall appears in the 2019 film The Last Black Man in San Francisco.
