Most of the city's blueblooded families would prefer to forget the wild origins of the civic phenomena, once the port of entry for thousands of Chinese coolies who were imported as virtual slaves to mine the precious minerals and build the rail networks of the booming west; the bloody Barbary Coast where the iron men from wooden ships buried their months of ocean-going loneliness in a variety of pleasures. But hundreds of thousands of World War II servicemen would forever remember that same Barbary Coast with its roaring attractions of booze, broads, and brawls.

Less than a decade later, this same cultural spawning ground had become the womb of another original American creation, the Beat Generation — and the beatniks had hardly faded from view when a successive subculture, the hippies, appeared on the scene and established their unofficial headquarters in the big bawdy city at the Gate. And just across the bay, in Berkeley, the political revolution of American youth was born, to be spilled out and amplified in shock waves reaching throughout the nation.

And there was more to San Francisco. It was the city where the toughest cops in the world had been forced to barricade themselves inside their own police stations. It was the city where the most active hotbeds of Communism outside the Iron Curtains tensely coexisted with the western U.S. seat of Capitalism; the city where students wore crash helmets into classrooms; it was the western capital of homosexuality as well as the cradle of emancipated female eroticism — and it was still a city where a cabbie's first question was never "where to?" but always "wanta get laid, buddy?"

Yeah, Bolan knew San Francisco.

It was a city of natural beauty, sure — what was it the moviemakers called it? — the most photogenic city in the world? The fabulous hills and vertical streets and spectacular bay views were a cinematographer's dream come true. But there were "underground" views of equal interest to another rapidly emerging variety of moviemaker — San Francisco was also the porno movie capital of the country.