By Andrew Wallace Chamings
In 1967, over 100,000 kids arrived in Haight-Ashbury amid the biggest counterculture movement of the century. The Haight’s cultural moment was inaugurated by a wave of communal psychedelic rock bands moving into the neighborhood, among them Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Janis Joplin’s Big Brother and the Holding Company. Their sound spawned from previous influential music scenes in the city, including folk coming out of North Beach coffee shops and jazz from the Fillmore.
Since then, the city has been a breeding ground for other genres, among them soul, funk, ’80s hardcore and West Coast hip-hop. More than mere musical styles, many of these scenes rose alongside political movements, including the Beats, the hippies, the punks and the Black Panthers.
Time may tell whether the last San Francisco music scene was late-noughties garage rock, spearheaded by Ty Segall and the Thee Oh Sees. Although not as historically important as the Summer of Love, it may have the dubious honor of being the last real musical movement in San Francisco.
That’s because you can’t have garage rock without a garage. One recently sold in the Outer Mission for $408,000. Segall and John Dwyer from the Thee Oh Sees have since moved to LA, that city that everyone in San Francisco used to call soulless. You don’t hear that much anymore. So could another scene ever grow in a city that we’re repeatedly being told has lost its soul? Before moving south, Dwyer didn’t pull any punches in his parting press release:
Graveyard San Francisco has long been filling up with noobs, but now we face the most dangerous, the most egregious and blandest of them all … people with lots of money.
Is “graveyard” fair? In terms of live music venues, maybe — at least five small stages have closed their doors in the last five years, including Kimos, the Red Devil Lounge, Viracocha, the Retox Lounge and SUB/Mission. Cafe du Nord no longer books rock bands, and the Elbo Room and Bottom of the Hill are still open but seemingly always under threat from condo developers.
More integral than venues to any type of emerging music scene are the bands. Of the Bay Bridged’s “14 San Francisco Bands to Watch in 2015,” only four were actually based in the city. Most were from Oakland, which boasts the highest number of artists per capita in the country.
John Vanderslice, songwriter and founder of Tiny Telephone Recording, opened a new studio in Oakland last year. He half jokingly told SF Weekly that 80% of the people who record at his original San Francisco location are Google employees. That’s not a scene; it’s a hobby.
“We’re opening the studio because all art is going to Oakland. Oakland is the future of all art in San Francisco,” he said. I asked him what would have to happen for a new music scene to ever come out of the city. “To be honest, I can only see that happening if there was an earthquake. A big one. The only way a band would ever consider moving to San Francisco to make it now,” he said, “were if they were unhinged or insanely rich.”
Live music is not in decline — there are plenty of young people in the city with a lot of disposable income who like to go out. But it’s the expensive venues — like the new SF JAZZ Center, Outside Lands or private-members clubs — that flourish while small, cheap and dirty venues, under pressure from buyers to sell up, find it harder and harder to justify their existence. Every square foot of spilt beer or tossed plectrums is worth nearly $1,000 to a developer. But more than this, the bands, the creators — the lifeblood of any artistic scene — just don’t live here anymore.
A lot of musical movements in the city were rooted in progressive politics. While San Francisco has always been heavily left leaning, the politics of new Silicon Valley entrepreneurs is much closer to the middle or even the government-eschewing right. A corporatization is bleeding into the way San Franciscans are encouraged to enjoy music. The creator of celebrated indie fest Noise Pop now runs musical events at the Battery, the invitation-only members club, bringing live music to moneyed start-up founders and Internet entrepreneurs. Converse ran a promotion to “help” local bands by letting them play at their new Market Street store. Nothing interesting or culturally significant ever comes from this corporate middle; it comes from the angry edge.
The demise of San Francisco’s culture has taken up so many column inches because that culture was a unique, precious thing, and people miss it. For some, Oakland just isn’t San Francisco and never will be. A friend who moved to the city in 2007 refused to migrate to the East Bay as everyone else got priced out of the city. “I didn’t move to San Francisco to live in Oakland,” he used to say. He now lives in Chicago.
Meanwhile, many in Oakland resent the fact that their city is doomed to go the same way as rent skyrockets, largely due to an influx of San Franciscan transplants.
For 50 years, San Francisco was the place on the edge of America that young people would drift to to escape repression and express themselves. That’s simply no longer a reality, unless that creativity is owned by a tech company. Young inventive people in San Francisco now make apps, not art.
San Francisco bands have always split houses, shared stages and switched band members, from the Grateful Dead at the Fillmore in ’68 to Sonny & the Sunsets at the Eagle Tavern ’08. But that communal creativity is now found elsewhere. Jeff Knutson of the San Francisco band Your Cannons told me, “You hear more about coders coming together in communal spaces to collaborate on the next app that will push some technical boundary. But for bands and musicians? Not so much.”
While it’s hard to see where young musicians fit into San Francisco today, perhaps this is just another cycle in a city that is perpetually changing. In the ’50s the Latino population replaced the Irish population in the Mission. In the ’80s Chinatown expanded north as the Beatniks and Italians moved out. And now young, wealthy techies are moving into the spaces previously owned by artists and musicians.
Although forced out of the city, even Dwyer saw some potential for an artistic reaction in the current cultural tremor: “There goes the taqueria that used to kick ass, replaced by a deli with a line of assholes a mile long. ‘I wonder what the sandwiches are like, and do they make their own salsa?’ It’s enough to be the catalyst for a bad day or a great fucking song.”
If only there were still someone around to write it.
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Andrew Wallace Chamings is a British writer and screenwriter in Oakland. Find him on Twitter at @AndrewChamings.
