“Hated” might be a strong word for it. I just keep coming upon references to them, in articles and such, where they are cited as the type of band that authentic 60s hippies regarded with distrust or kept at arm’s length, although my personal awareness of them was that they were peers of CSNY, Three Dog Night and most other upper-tier bands of the late 60s-early 70s. Here’s a quote from another current thread, the one about “Why were Sha Na Na at Woodstock?”:
They’re clearly in the camp of what Ronnie Van Zandt called “the swampers.” They were also from San Francisco and had trendy hairstyles for the period. I’m just curious what it is about them that makes them from SF but not of it. Was it John Fogerty and Doug Clifford’s military service? Was it Bay area regional rivalry? Was it affecting a Southern Rock vibe in Psychedelia City? (The Grateful Dead, by comparison, was a former Jug band that affected lots of border town imagery, but they were pretty much the nucleus of the San Francisco scene.) What are the stylistic lines that kept them outside the SF scene’s good graces?