Fever Tree - San Francisco Girls

This band lived about a block away from me before they made it big. My sis used to watch them practice in their garage. They used to frequent the neighborhood swimming pool and allowed us to play chicken on their backs. I was all of 10 years old. Numerous times they referred to themselves as the band Fever Tree but I did not put it all together until after San Francisco Girls was released. The band hailed from Houston, Texas and started in 1966 as a folk rock outfit, The Bostwick Vines. They changed their name to Fever Tree a year later after the addition of keyboard player Rob Landes. Their fifteen minutes of fame arrived when their song "San Francisco Girls (Return of the Native)" reached #91 in the U.S. charts, sometime in late 1968. This four-minute track captured all the band's trademarks: Dennis Keller's incantation-like vocals, the quick shifting between slow parts with an almost sacral feeling and faster, more rock-oriented parts, and especially the searing guitar work by Michael Knust.