“San Franciscan Nights”: Gábor Szabó, psychedelia, and the Hungarian diaspora in America
Note: I wrote this essay for a Hungarian history course at the University of Toronto. It remains one of my favourite writings from undergrad.
“The following song is dedicated to the city and people of San Francisco, who may not know it but they are beautiful and so is their city. This is a very personal song so if you cannot understand it, particularly my friends in Budapest, save up all your bread and fly Trans-Love Airways to San Francisco, USA. Then maybe you’ll understand the song. It will be worth it, if not for the sake of this song, but for the sake of your own peace of mind. So, I’ll meet you in San Francisco. Or for those of you in Budapest, San Franciscóban találkozunk.” — Gábor Szabó in the opening of “San Franciscan Nights” (1967)
I discovered Gábor Szabó entirely by algorithmic chance when the song “San Franciscan Nights” appeared on the ‘Discover Weekly’ playlist that Spotify automatically generates for me each Monday. I was walking down the street, in the middle of a bitter Toronto winter when Szábo’s calm Hungarian lilt and strumming filled my ears, inviting Hungarians and myself to a ‘warm San Franciscan night’. I was immediately enchanted by the song and set out to discover more about its origins.
Gábor Szábo was a Hungarian-American guitarist known for a unique style that blended jazz, pop, rock, and Hungarian folk music. He was born in Budapest on March 8, 1936, where he resided until moving to California with his family at the age of 20 in 1956. From there, Szábo, who had been playing the guitar self-taught since the age of 14, enrolled at Berklee College of Music in Boston. In 1961, he joined an avant-garde jazz quintet led by Chico Hamilton and including Charles Lloyd, which catalyzed his wider success as an artist. Between 1966 and 1981 he released about 25 albums in which he featured as the lead. Gábor Szabó passed away on February 26, 1982, in Budapest, where he had returned in July 1981 to produce albums before becoming ill. It was a week before his 46th birthday and he had been hospitalized in December 1981 with kidney and liver problems. Little is written about Gábor Szabó beyond some interviews, show advertisements, and his obituaries within music reviews which have been compiled in what is the most extensive online resource about Szabó’s life — a biographical website developed by a jazz fan, Doug Payne. This paper will draw on some of these sources to discuss Szabó’s life and work, particularly how the song “San Franciscan Nights” connects with his personal history and that of the 1960s in America.
“San Franciscan Nights”, quoted above, appears as the first song on Gábor Szabó and The California Dreamers’ 1967 album Wind, Sky and Diamonds. The song is a cover of Eric Burdon and the Animals’ song by the same name, also released in 1967 on the album Winds of Change, which became one of the band’s greatest hits. “San Franciscan Nights” is a particularly interesting song because of its ties to the anti-war and psychedelic music movements of the 1960s.
The heyday of psychedelic rock spanned 1965–1970 and began in San Francisco, with its secondary centre being London, England. Psychedelic music was fuelled by the popularity of hallucinogenic drugs, mainly LSD which was legal until 1966, in that it attempted to translate their effects into musical terms. Eric Burdon and the Animals emerged as popular artists of this genre in London, particularly after playing the re-opening of the UFO Club at the Roundhouse Club in August 1967, as the UFO Club was highly influential to the development of the psychedelic music scene in Britain. It was around that time that the band released “San Franciscan Nights” as a protest song against the Vietnam War. After settling in California in late 1967, Eric Burdon became known for belligerent statements such as “we the people have declared war against the people for the right to love each other”, which drew heavily on popular hippie rhetoric. The psychedelic music and anti-war movements are greatly intertwined with hippie subculture in that they all espoused a ‘make love not war’ philosophy. Songs like “San Franciscan Nights” and Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers In Your Hair)”, which idealized the city as a gentle, loving place, helped draw ‘the Love Generation’ to San Francisco, further establishing it as a locus for hippies and anti-war advocates. “San Franciscan Nights” belongs to the category of more benign protest music from this era which “disapproved of the war without disparaging or putting the blame on anyone”; in this way, its artists were genuine pacifists.
While it evident that Eric Burdon’s “San Franciscan Nights” has deep cultural and political roots, it is unclear to what extent Szabó’s cover shared in this. The original version by Eric Burdon and the Animals differs from that of Szabó in a few ways. First, the two songs vary lyrically. Within the spoken intro, Burdon begins with “this following program” and addresses you, the listener, as “the viewer”. This is in reference to the song opening being a parody of the theme for the popular radio, television, and movie franchise Dragnet which followed the story of a Los Angeles police detective and his partners. ‘Dragnet’ is also a police term referring to “a series of actions taken by the police that are intended to catch criminals”. In context, the creative choice to parody the Dragnet theme for the song’s opening can be interpreted as contributing to the anti-establishment ethos of the San Franciscan hippies or flower children who served as both its subject and audience. Interestingly, the opening theme for Dragnet was an excerpt from the Hungarian-American composer Miklós Rózsa’s score for The Killers (1946), a fact that might have inspired Szábo to keep and deliver the opening in his cover directly to Hungarians in Budapest. For example, Szabó specifically states “my friends in Budapest” in lieu “those of you who are European residents”, and closes the opening with the invitation “So, I’ll meet you in San Francisco” and its Hungarian translation, where Burdon does not. Burdon also concludes the original song with a political call, stating “The children are cool // They don’t raise fools // It’s an American dream // Includes Indians too” whereas Szabó closes before this verse by repeating “on a warm San Franciscan night”. In doing so, Burdon speaks more directly and aggressively to the American political context relative to Szabó, something which is also reflected in their stylistic differences as musicians.
Where the original “San Franciscan Nights” “features a raw quality provided by Burdon’s gruff voice, The California Dreamers’ version is polished and glistening”, aided by vocal harmonies which evoke the Californian sound and imagery of this era. Szabó’s delivery of the opening monologue is also markedly calmer than Burdon’s more agitated tone. Further, Szabó’s cover shares in the genre-fluid style of his other works which draws principally on jazz and Hungarian folk sounds, whereas the original has a more traditional rock sound native to Burdon’s origins in British rock and roll. It is possible that part of Szabó’s choice to cover a psychedelic song can be attributed to the compatibility of the genre with his artistic style. Psychedelia represented a “credo of freedom and rejection of authority” which enabled artists to experiment since it was “by nature an eclectic, [and] less restrictive or formulaic style than are many others”. Unorthodoxy and experimentation were fundamental to Szabó’s musical work and “made him the most original and compelling guitarist” of his time according to admiring colleagues.
Szabó’s choice to cover “San Franciscan Nights” is also interesting in light of the song’s association with Vietnam War protests and his own personal history fleeing communism in Hungary. Szabó fled Hungary during the Revolution in 1956, allegedly only taking his guitar with him. At the end of WWII, Hungary was occupied by the Soviet Union, and became a communist dictatorship in 1948, beginning another period of economic, political, and social hardship for the country. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 came in the form of a popular uprising after Nikita Kruschev’s famous speech criticizing Joseph Stalin signalled new freedom of debate and criticism. This led to an outbreak of fighting in October 1956, the success of which lead to Imre Nagy becoming premier and declaring Hungary’s neutrality on November 1, 1956. In the absence of requested protection by Western powers, this was swiftly followed by a brutal invasion of Hungary by the Soviet Union and the execution of Nagy. In December 1956, while the border was unsecured, about 200,000 Hungarians fled to Austria, 30,000 of which immigrated to the United States as refugees.
Throughout their integration in American society, many refugees embraced a dual national identity due to both the positive reception they enjoyed in the United States and the re-establishment of the communist regime in Hungary post-1956 which gave many the impression of having no hope to return to Hungary.
Given their experience, in some ways, one might expect members of the Hungarian-American diaspora to stand in favour of the Vietnam War, a conflict which was often characterized by the United States’ government as a fight against communist aggression. Several Hungarian-Americans did fight and were awarded high honours for their service during the Vietnam War. Szabó’s performance of a song associated with the anti-war movement was, therefore, unique but perhaps also informed by intricacies of his own experience. Szabó developed an interest in jazz on the radio program ‘Voice of America’ during his childhood in Budapest. After joining the Chico quintet, he played mainly along the West Coast and later moved to California. Therefore, not unlike hippies journeying to San Francisco, Szabó was drawn to the United States and to California in a large part by music. Understanding such details provides new insight as to what the song “San Franciscan Nights” and the associated anti-war movement might have meant to someone who, at a young age, idealized America and experienced life touched by conflict.
To conclude, this paper has sought to add to a greatly underdeveloped discussion of Gábor Szabó’s artistry through analysis of his contributions to 1960s psychedelic music via a cover of “San Franciscan Nights”. It is unknown and may never be known definitively whether Szabó’s cover had any personal or political motivation, especially because he excluded some of the original song’s more political lyrics and little published information exists regarding his personal life. The song, however, remains to be an interesting paradigm for viewing Szabó’s life and work as part of a broader historical dialogue with other artists, Hungarians, and a generation who found common ground in the idyllic imagery of San Francisco and the hope for a more peaceful world.
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