Music Release: Poor release of hippie-era music (AP)

Various Artists, "Go Ride The Music & West Pole" (Eagle Rock Entertainment)

Washed-out colors mixed with a swirl of faces and bodies, bad-sound production and off-key warblings. Maybe this is how many veterans of Summer of Love-era music remember the good old days in San Francisco.

But it's no way to present it for modern viewing. That is what prevents the double-DVD release "Go Ride The Music & West Pole" from being relevant as retrospect. It's impossible to get past the visual shortcomings of this presentation.

It's no fault of the folks that packaged this release. Eagle Rock Entertainment was only playing the hand they were dealt: a two-part made-for-TV miniseries recorded in 1969 and hosted by Rolling Stone co-founder Ralph J. Gleason, a fellow who should have stuck to the printed page.

The late Gleason hoped to create a psychedelic rock primer for the uninitiated. He got the right access to studio performances and interviews, but squandered it artistically and technically.

The best songs come quick and early on the first disc. Grace Slick roars through "We Can Be Together," though Marty Balin painfully tries to upstage her vocals here and there. As he slaps his tambourine standing off to the side, we are treated to a glimpse of envy in his eyes as he can only defer to Jefferson Airplane's stronger, more defining personality in Slick.

The 1969 film crew never seems to be tapped into the right mixing board, if they were tapped in at all. Much of the audio on performances like Quicksilver Messenger Service's "Warm Red Wine" sounds like it was recorded down the hall from where the band was playing in a room with the doors closed. It's nearly unlistenable.

An interview with Jerry Garcia sitting near a tire swing hanging from a tree is out of focus and shot too far from the charismatic Grateful Dead front man. Interviews with clean-scrubbed kids waiting in line to buy concert tickets reveal little insight on what made the Bay Area music scene so vital. Gleason should have asked the unwashed masses in Golden Gate Park instead. They lived and breathed it, and didn't simply buy the records and show tickets.

Disc two isn't much better. Dubbed "West Pole" for Gleason's notion that San Francisco was had become the magnetic north of the rock music scene, he elected to show the all-girl rock outfit Ace of Cups doing an understated a cappella number titled, ironically, "Music." Frankly, there's isn't much music from them and the number is ill-placed in this essay on the adult San Francisco rock scene.

There are few highlights here, and Gleason's resurrected rock essay gets a failing grade.