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I began noticing the signs soon after moving to the Bay Area: Arthur Magazine, revivals of Alejandro Jodorowsky's movies, and print dresses and feathers all pointed to a vogue for the psychedelic aesthetic extending beyond the tie-dyed Haight. Psychedelic rock is the 800-pound gorilla of San Francisco music, though subsequent punk scenes clustering around Mabuhay Gardens and 924 Gilman defined themselves in direct opposition to its flower-power. I was surprised, even a little put off, by what seemed like a fundamentally conservative revival.

That was before I saw Comets on Fire. The group reclaimed the mad, exploratory spirit of '60s psychedelia precisely by not being overly dogmatic in their interpretation of the original sound. Just as vintage outfits like Quicksilver Messenger Service and Blue Cheer — to name two local bands often championed by the current crop — deconstructed bluegrass and R&B, so too do the artists following in Comets on Fire's wake reconstitute old school psychedelia into freshly disorienting supernovas.

In the case of Comets, the game-changer lay with showing how you could collapse the distance between the Grateful Dead and the Stooges. The set I saw at the Hemlock Tavern was as much a piece of music criticism as it was an explosive performance. They made psych-rock seem a realm of possibility instead of the tattered rump of a dancing bear.

Five of 10 ensembles playing the first Frisco Freakout are based in the Bay Area, with all but Mythical Beast hailing from within the Golden State's borders. Each band dials in subtly different equations of texture and influences, though Sleepy Sun's MySpace message probably speaks for all involved parties: "Let's get weird." Inspired by the legendary bills at the Fillmore and Matrix in the '60s, Relix contributing editor Richard Simon and Wooden Shjips shredder Ripley Johnson collaborated on organizing the all-day showcase.

Music journalists use the word psychedelic to describe everything from Beach House's gauzy organ trip to My Bloody Valentine's overripe swan-dives — not to mention the adjacent freak-folk scene — so it's probably worth specifying that most of the Frisco Freakout groups are close to the original psych-rock article, as defined by the hard, face-melting electricity of the early Dead and their cohorts. Whether listening to the endless spirals of Earthless, the prog-laced kick of Crystal Antlers, or the smooth drip of Sleepy Sun, one is repeatedly tempted to describe the sounds in terms of metallurgy.

"These bands are going to play hard and fuck with your head," Simon bluntly jokes by phone in SF. "I've been interested in trying to shunt some of these bands into Relix, to reconnect branches in this family tree that originates here."

Correctives to the jam-band theory of psychedelic rock are always welcome, though one perhaps worries about flying the freak flag too high. "You're reluctant to identify a scene because once something is a scene it gets co-opted and commercialized," Simon confesses, but I'm in full agreement that it's better to take ...