By Kimberly Chun

GOOGLE THE PHRASE "San Francisco sound," and apart from references to the Art Hickman Orchestra and certain house mavens, one definition dominates, like a boomer legacy blotting out the sun for all latecomers, claim jumpers, and junior Girl Scouts, and it includes the Summer of Love, psychedelia, the 1960s, the Haight-Ashbury, and of course the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, Santana, Country Joe and Fish, Moby Grape, and so forth.

Even bloated '70s and '80s hit makers like Journey and Huey Lewis and the News, or punky hipsters like the Flaming Groovies and the Dead Kennedys, can't wiggle onto that jam-packed, patchouli-scented, limited-breathing-room-only list. So now might be a good time to close off that old "San Francisco sound" room, a lifetime away from the '60s, and stash it away like righteous doobage, precious amber, or some macramé atrocity, for safekeeping. We'll always know it's there in case we need it, but meanwhile, there are plenty of other types of mind-altering, life-changing music out in ole S.F. to generate the kicks we crave in this new century.

And so much has happened since those lazy, hazy, crazy daze of summer that it's hard to know where to start. For instance, why hasn't the definition attached to the "San Francisco sound" ever budged – is it because there hasn't been a movement as commercially powerful as that associated with the '60s? Will everyone ever agree on anything like they once agreed on, uh, Marty Balin, in a decentered, Net-based, freely downloadable culture? Can the San Francisco sound adequately encompass the brainy, shambling psych-punk of Camper Van Beethoven; the brainy, concept thug-rock of Faith No More; the brainy alt-rock of Linda Perry; the brainy, politicized Gilman pop-punk of Green Day; and the brainy, dirty West of Too $hort? See any trends emerging? Don't $hortchange S.F. when it comes to self-assuredness and, at times, smugitude.

Reared by already stubbornly retro-minded parents who caught Lester Young and Billie Holiday at the Blackhawk and the Purple Onion back in the day and warned me of the dangers of "acid rock," I settled into S.F. in the early '90s, hooked by mind-blowing shows like that of the Ex and Beat Happening at Komotion, though I came to loathe the wink-wink, nudge-nudge, aren't-we-so-ironic superiority complex of the local bands of the day.

But then I don't buy into that West Coast-East Coast paradigm, that old battle, which I suspect those groups did. Maybe it's myopia, and maybe I'm just a Pacific Rim baby, loving and hating Island California, allergic to tie-dye, apart from the Chun metal-grunge years, and admiring the always resurgent curiosity, the passion for the new in this green world. I may be an Anglophile, but I'm just as much an Asiaphile, and when I look for guidance or validation, I don't turn to the East, Europe, or the Far East, for that matter, but instead check a complicated compass that's both internal and communal. And in that sense maybe I'm a lot like the folks who make up the current incarnation of the San Francisco sound.

A friend who prides herself on her hard-boiled New Yorker outlook once swore to me that New Yorkers only moved to San Francisco when they had given up, thrown their high-powered careers, and decided to simply relax. Translation: they chose to settle down in Loserdom. But she can keep the self-hatred built into that belief because the Bay Area music scene is still roiling with life and includes, but isn't limited to, our three cover models: the everything-old-is-new rustic reverence of Jolie Holland, the rising R&B star power of Goapele, and the wreckless punkitudinal imagination of Vice Cooler. Its insanity, restlessness, and attractions persist in spite of – and because of – the revolving door, the unfurling highways between coasts and cities.

Is today's San Francisco sound colored by the high-flying freak flags of Comets on Fire and Burmese, the outsider folk art of Devendra Banhart and Kelley Stoltz, the hometown shout-outs and conscious call-outs of the Federation and Paris, the mutable art-punk of Erase Errata and the Flying Luttenbachers, the nature-based noisemaking of Deerhoof and Caroliner, or the garage-punk squall of Coachwhips and the Husbands? Is it all those things and then some, something palpable between the isolated, spectral flickers of upheld lighters or uplifted camera phones at Bill Graham Civic? As enticing as it is to cook down the San Francisco sound to a flavor of the week – which, at this moment, might be a pure-hearted, consciously corrupted kind of psychedelic blues that covers both Banhart and Comets and that even OGs like Mike Bloomfield and Skip Spence might dig – it's somewhat of a relief that the music produced here still resists easy definition.

All of which may sound like a cop-out, but the sounds here are richer and more interesting than that, especially when one can experience something like the handful of amazing shows I caught in just one recent week. That's what I thought as I sat cross-legged on the floor of the Edinburgh Castle Pub's poky back room watching Yellow Swans member and Bay Guardian staffer Gabe Mindel, 7-Year Rabbit Cycle's Rob Fisk, and Bay Guardian contributor George Chen fling themselves into the backwoods guitar noise of Tree Hugger. I braved a packed Cafe du Nord to catch the Court and Spark as they backed a sunburned, windswept Tim Bluhm, looking like a homeless spy who'd just come in from the cold in his flapping sheepskin jacket, as he leaned into a heartrending reading of Scott Walker's "Dutchess," and I ended the week with the terse, tough deconstructo-rock of No Doctors, spilling out of the Hemlock live room into a scene straight out of some kid's indie fantasy as members of Coachwhips, Comets, Numbers, and Erase Errata clustered around the bar.

And somewhere in between all those great performances – like so many that make me damn glad I haven't moved to NYC – was the consummate S.F. moment when the microgenres and music scenes converge and prove we're all sort of in it together, as they did when I noticed Comets on Fire vocalist-guitarist Ethan Miller standing in front of me at, of all places, the Green Day show, transfixed by the band's comic-book antics, the rendition of "We Are the Champions," and some very sincerely upheld lighters.

"Fancy seeing you here," he said with a grin.

"Checking out a local band?" I asked.

"Yeaaah."

Kimberly Chun's mostly soft and sweet top 10

 Ghost, Hypnotic Underworld (Drag City)

 Brian Wilson, Smile (Nonesuch)

 Iron and Wine, Our Endless Numbered Days (Sub Pop)

 Vetiver, Vetiver (Di Christina)

 Sensitive: the Hidden Cameras, Mississauga Goddam(Rough Trade); the Moore Brothers, Now Is the Time for Love (Plain)

 Hear, kitty: Neko Case, "The Tigers Have Spoken," The Tigers Have Spoken (Anti); Le Tigre, This Island (Strummer/Universal)

 Noisy: the Fall, The Real New Fall LP (Formerly 'Country on the Click') (Narnack); Wives, Erect the Youth Problem (Cold Sweat)

 Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (Simon and Schuster)

 Comets on Fire, July 16, Mile High Club

 Bedside listening: Apostle of Hustle, Folkloric Feel (Arts and Crafts); Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Abbatoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus (Anti)