Glad to be of service, HF, even if the material isn't new to you. I hadn't heard it previously, so it was almost like a window in time, for me.
I spent 1967-1970 living various places around the SF Bay area during my late teens. I see "Baxter's" as the pinnacle of JA's achievement as a band and the album that sums up the mood of that point in time. To this day, it represents a nostalgic marker and the anthem of a state of mind now rendered alien by time and subsequent experience. There was a sea change in the wind then: what had been characterized as "free" and "beautiful" was taking on a somewhat more sinister cast as an often hopeful, if naive and deluded time was drawing to a close The signs were already there on the streets (not to mention on the other side of the world). The "groovie" Haight was filling up with meth users and junkies. The Altamont concert and its pervasive aura of evil pretty much put an unavoidable, undeniable exclamation point on it for many (myself included). The party was over...
Hunter Thompson expressed it better than I can in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:
“It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant...
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...
And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark — that place where the wave finally broke, and rolled back.”