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$10.00/book plus $10.00 for shipping and handling. All proceeds go to Palo Alto Stanford Heritage (PAST).

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The Ticket to Rock booklet chronicles the many remarkable musicians who had their start or performed in Palo Alto, focusing on their schools and neighborhoods, which form the backdrop to a counterculture that began musically in this area. The book is a ticket to the past and Palo Alto’s contribution to folk music followed by rock and roll, helping to shape Silicon Valley and the world in which we live.


“…the [Grateful] Dead were a product of another place about thirty miles to the south: Palo Alto, where an amalgam of cultural forces were coalescing just as the core founders of the band were entering adulthood. Stanford University, a major center for Cold War weapons research, filled the vicinity with parents allegiant to the hard sciences and Eisenhower-era values. When the kids started maturing, they began asserting their own generational identity by dressing like farmhands—in blue jeans—and listening to simply music played on wooden instruments and sung in plain vernacular. Folk music was suddenly voguish, replacing jazz in the coffeehouses that had sprouted up in the bohemian student areas of Palo Alto (and virtually every other college town in the United States) during the postwar years. The Kingston Trio, the boy band-avatars of the folk craze, started in Palo Alto. So did Joan Baez, the imperious folk queen of the early Sixties.”
— David Hadju, Rolling Stone magazine, 2005


Joan Baez
Jerry Garcia
Gregg Rolie
Cory Lerios
Angelo Rossi
Donny Baldwin
Akira Tana
Herschel Yatovitz
Doug Clifford
Lindsey Buckingham
Whit Crane
Allison Robertson
Maya Ford
Amy Cesari
Grateful Dead
Santana
Creedence Clearwater
Cold Blood
Secret Agent Band
The Donnas
The Kingston Trio
Philadelphia Orchestra

Grace Slick
Bob Weir
Phil Lesh
Bill Kreutzmann
Ron McKernan
Robert Hunter
Dave Guard
Richard Woodhams
Darby Slick
Jerry Slick
Klaus Eichstadt
Torry Castellano
Brett Anderson
Sara Ruppenthal
Jefferson Airplane
Pablo Cruise
Fleetwood Mac
Elvin Bishop
Chris Isaak
Ugly Kid Joe
AJ Crawdaddy
The Warlocks