"Small Jean Genie snuck into the City..." (or, D.B. in S.F.)

All the recent hoohah about David Bowie's (not unenjoyable) return to the pop culture arena made me think of a chance remark a friend once made, pertaining to a Bowie song from his Ziggy Stardust '70s heyday.  Quite a primo example of a mondegreen, in fact. 

You all know what a mondegreen is, right?  'Excuse me while I kiss this guy.'  'There's a bathroom on the right.'  That sort of thing.  

This particular one, however, had more than a bit of perhaps unintentional local historical truth. It's from the Aladdin Sane track 'Cracked Actor'. 

Musically, it's one of those souped-up Yardbirds/British R&B knockoffs Bowie was fond of back then.  The lyric, however, with its seedy recounting of a liaison between an aging Hollywood film star and his male hustler/junkie booty call of the night, led it to being banned by my then favorite Washington DC 'free-form rock' radio station upon Aladdin Sane's release.

In any case, this friend misheard part of the lyric being "You've caught yourself a trick down on Sunset and Vine/but since he pinned you, baby, you're on Polk and Pine..." The actual lyric being ..."since he pinned you...you're a porcupine".

Unintentional or not, my friend - having lived in San Francisco since back when Bowie/Ziggy was making such a big noise -  can be forgiven for making such a mistake.   

Long before the neighborhood of The Castro - formerly known as Eureka Valley - became international shorthand for 'gay Mecca', the main energy center for San Francisco's homosexual demimonde was the area known as Polk Gulch.  Roughly the stretch of downtown's Polk Street between Geary Boulevard and Sacramento Street, there could be found any number of clubs, bars and restaurants catering to and frequented by a gay clientele during the 1970's.

The intersection of Polk and Pine alone was well known for three gay-specific businesses.   The Palms Cafe was a relatively classy restaurant and live music club, at one point hiring a young artist and aspiring musician named Michael Cotten to paint murals on its walls - he later became an original member of The Tubes.   

Kimo's (1351 Polk Street), which opened in 1978, consisted of a small downstairs dive bar and an equally intimate upstairs area which hosted drag shows.  Kimo's later became known as a showcase venue for countless fledgling Punk and Metal bands. Metallica  played a secret show there (under the name Spun) in 2002. 

Your blogger also witnessed a fantastic gig there in 2000 by The Triple Gang, performing the entire This Nation's Saving Grace album by Mark E. Smith and The (Mighty) Fall.  Strictly a one-off assemblage, Triple Gang included drummer Jon Weiss (then of local rockers Horsey, later with Ween) and Billy Gould, bassist of Faith No More (who more recently collaborated with This Heat drummer Charles Hayward, among others, to create a most stunning, potent instrumental disc, City of Quartz, under the name House of Hayduk.)

Kimo's unfortunately closed in 2012 after years of dealing with noise complaints from neighbors, and is now a more gentrified establishment known as Playland.  

Right around the corner and still going strong after all these years, though, is the Grubstake diner (1525 Pine Street), well entrenched as a favored after-hours destination for late night revelers, layabout street rats and tweakers to get their nosh on.

Bringing things back to Bowie, some significant events occurred for him here in San Francisco. Bowie and the Spiders from Mars debuted over two nights in October 1972, at the famed Winterland Ballroom/Arena (corner of Post and Steiner Streets, in the Fillmore/Japantown district). Also on the bill were Flo and Eddie, and local sensation Sylvester with his Hot Band.  

Despite the serious buzz Ziggy Stardust was creating, Bowie was only able to draw around 500 spectators to the 5,400-capacity Winterland.  He reportedly shrugged it off afterwards - telling confidants that "San Francisco doesn't need me when they've got Sylvester" - but was clearly stung by the low turnout, enough to exclude the Bay Area as a U.S. tour stop until his Station To Station tour in 1976. 

More successful in terms of furthering Ziggy's name was Bowie's decision to shoot a promotional film while in town for his upcoming single, 'The Jean Genie'.  Directed by iconic photographer Mick Rock and made in one day for allegedly $350, the clip featured performance footage of Bowie and the Spiders shot during both the Winterland engagement and in an actual photo studio.  

Of more local interest, however, were the brief bits Rock and Bowie also shot outside the South of Market flophouse known as the Mars Hotel.  Bowie, in full Ziggy finery, is seen lounging and smoking against a corner of the hotel building, as a young blonde chickadee struts and vamps along the sidewalk before him.  

The blonde in question was part of Bowie's Mainman entourage, one Cyrinda Foxe, soon to become notorious as the girlfriend of David Johansen and subsequently Steven Tyler.  'Jean Genie' was released as a single in November 1972, ultimately reaching #2 on the UK charts and #71 in America.

The Mars Hotel, located at 192 4th Street at the corner of 4th and Howard in the SOMA (South of Market) area of downtown San Francisco, is of course also legendary as having provided the cover and name for the Grateful Dead disc From The Mars Hotel, released in June of 1974.  The hotel was demolished in the 1980's, during the redevelopment that made possible the construction of such buildings as the George Moscone Convention Center, the Metreon Center shopping complex, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

In Memoriam..

Though this goes against the tenets of this blogsite, I could not let go the chance to represent for Scott McKenzie, who passed a few days ago.

This is a typically fine overview of his most famous song by one of the great music writers out there, Jon Savage, in the London Guardian. Godspeed.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2012/aug/20/scott-mckenzie-san-francisco-anthem?newsfeed=true

"San Francisco" (Van Dyke Parks/Brian Wilson)

“San Francisco, San Francisco/Her lovers' arms were open wide/With a gate so golden/Waits with charms unfoldin’/Hold that cable car up there with pride/I gotta ride; giddy-up down to…/San Francisco, San Francisco/Where love is true as time and tide/She was seventeen though/when I left from Reno/Like some Valentino with his bride/There by my side…/I panned gold from ‘Cisco down to Frisco/How I'm missin these days of yore…Eldorado/Miss those Irisky women and raw rye whiskey/With each kiss we would explore…Eldorado/For this desperado was gold in the dust/Like many a man in God do I trust/Gave up on Eldorado, so lost in my lust/Where love is not for sale/Out at the end of the trail…”


Been on a bit of a Beach Boys jag as of late. What with the improbable detente struck between Brian Wilson and Mike Love, resulting in their current and, from some reports, quite brilliantly performed 50th anniversary tour.


Then there’s that new LP. I’ve only heard the title track, which is, this far along, an equally improbable beaut: “That’s Why God Made The Radio” may carry tinges of everything from ‘Kiss Me Baby’ to doowop chestnut 'Silhouettes' (on the authority of current BW/BB cohort Probyn Gregory) and, jeez, even John Barry’s Midnight Cowboy theme, but it's still unmistakably as sweet as anything drawn from the fragile but fruitful creative mind of Brian Wilson.


So it felt like the time was right to unearth a song with BW involvement and a theme that strays for once well afar of those mythic Southern Cali shores. It actually comes from a ‘90s collaboration with one of Brian’s most compatibly imaginative musical partners, Van Dyke Parks: the album Orange Crate Art.


To be more specific, it’s an album of VDP’s songs with Brian as its featured vocalist. As with many songs in their respective CV’s, the album has its fans and deriders. As for me, at its best VDP’s richly genteel melodies, multilayered and playfully imagistic lyrics, and the topping of (thanks to studio magic) the BW Chorale make for fine listening indeed.


Many of the songs on OCA, as stated above, are inspired by Northern California of the past -  the world of Steinbeck, London and temporary resident Kerouac.  The title track even references the vineyards and agriculture of Sonoma.


As a recent transplant from the East Coast at the time of OCA's release - one who never traveled far without a little Brian Wilson, in addition to Big Star - the song ‘San Francisco’ became an immediate personal anthem to my new hometown.


Albeit one rather more fancifully articulated than Tony Bennett might (I didn’t quote a typically punny VDP allusion to Candlestick Park - by way of Stephen Crane - in a later part of the song).


In any case, for any faults one might dig for, OCA was Brian and Van Dyke together again, which perhaps therapeutically aided and encouraged Brian’s eventual, post-Millennial re-emergence…for which some of us in this sick old world are most thankful.

'Lazy' (The Nuns, featuring Jennifer Miro)

August 1977: Through a succession of events too boring and personal to explain here, Your Blogmaster found himself in Southern California during the last handful of weeks of summer, 1977. Over the last few years I’ve been cobbling together notes towards writing a memoir of that time, provisionally titled Midsummer Punk; for now, however, I’ll concentrate on one specific occurrence.

The L.A. Punk/Wave community was beginning to make itself known and heard at that time. Not being so clued in as a relative outsider to know about places like the Masque, I was content to check out the few groups I was aware of at that Sunset Strip mainstay, the Whisky A Go Go.

But what shows they were! Using my minimal leverage as an out of town fanzine writer, I managed to finagle a free ticket out of The Ramones’ record company to see them at the Whisky, my first time experiencing them live. I saw two sets in one night; my ears rang for the next thirty-six hours.

My first Whisky gig, though, was The Dictators, supported by a group from up North, San Francisco’s own Nuns. Handsome Dick and his mob were pimping their ‘comeback’ lp, Manifest Destiny, uneasily caught between the juvenile, ‘teengenerate’ in-crowd humor of their now-classic debut, and wholehearted courting of the Stadium-Rock consuming majority.

For me, the new Dictators songs - rockers like ‘Steppin’ Out’ and ‘Science Gone Too Far!’, the surprising ‘Hey Boys’ (a Power Ballad before the term existed!) – appealed, and yet...

Mostly, it seemed like they were trying way too hard; that they also cranked their amps far louder than the confines of the Whisky deserved only added to the alienation of Go Girl Crazy! fans like me.

The Nuns were another, far more intriguing ball game altogether. Their lineup was quite the mismatch at first glance. There was Jeff Olener, a loud, foul-mouthed, leather-jacketed post-teenage delinquent. He didn’t so much sing as bellow and bark: in other words, the perfect front man.

Actually, and unusually, there were two front men throwing the songs in the mugs of the assembled L.A. mooks, expectant if unfamiliar with them and their foggy urban spawning ground. Olener’s cohort was one Ritchie Detrick, who was from NYC and (according to the Punk jungle telegraph) had been a roommate of Dee Dee Ramone's.

But wait, there was a third presence vying for the punkers’ attention: this blonde, model-thin-and-gorgeous creature, wrapped in a black (silk? vinyl? rubber?) trench coat, a Veronica Lake sweep of hair cascading down her face. Her name was Jennifer Miro, and she sat at stage left, playing electric piano and regarding the audience with a glacial gaze that was equal parts contempt and obliviousness.

Not to say that the rest of the Nuns’ lineup wasn’t as formidable. There was baby-faced Alejandro (back then known just as 'Al') Escovedo on guitar, who has created quite the impressive solo career for himself since those days. There was also Mike Varney on bass: he never really fit in, and in the following decade went on to be a major player and promoter on the Bay Area’s Metal scene.

Anyway, the Nuns’ set came suitably hard, loud and confrontational, with songs like 'Decadent Jew' and 'Suicide Child' (all together now: ‘you shot my dog, you *effing* hog, you're a suicide child...’).

The opening song, though, provided a serious and most un-Punkish contrast. It was called ‘Lazy’, performed by Jennifer alone on stage; a languid, quarter-to-two saloon closer that one could romantically describe as ‘decadent’.

I am including a later recording of ‘Lazy’, from the Nuns’ only fitfully successful 1980 debut disc for BOMP. Besides obviously being from here, another San Francisco angle could be found in the song’s original lyrics, in which found Miro asserting that the reason for her romantic malaise was due to all the local guys being more interested in each other! (A demo of the original ‘Lazy’ was regularly played, back in the day, on a local FM radio show hosted by out gay DJ, rock writer - and future president of Sire Records - Howie Klein.)

Jennifer Miro, phone home if you overcame your laziness.

And a sad Postscript: Jennifer Miro passed a few weeks ago in New York, of cancer. Here is video of her with the Nuns, playing at Winterland in summer '77, doing 'Lazy' (solo) and 'Savage'. Remember her this way: that walk, that voice, that mien. Wow.

"Let's Go To San Francisco" (The Flowerpot Men)

‘Let’s go to San Francisco/where the flowers grow so very high/sunshine in San Francisco/makes your mind grow up to the sky/lots of sun-sun-sunny people/walking hand in hand/they’re not funny people/they have found their land…/let’s go to San Francisco/let the wind blow through your hair/go down to San Francisco/see the love grow on people there/let’s go, let’s go discover it/let‘s go, let‘s go discover it…’

When I started this blog, as advertised above, I was conscious about not picking obvious S.F.-related tunes…so, no blissed-out songs from olden days about wearing flowers in the hair, patchouli on your eyelids etc. However, the subject of this episode came out around the same time as Mr. McKenzie’s faded gem, yet has never achieved the ubiquity his paean to hippie-era S.F. did (at least on this side of the Atlantic). And so, since the ultimate purpose of this blog to bring to light locally themed songs that have escaped notice, we present UK one-hit wonders from 1967, The Flowerpot Men.

Basically the studio conception of Denmark Street denizens John Carter and Ken Lewis, the Flowerpot Men included future members of Deep Purple, while the lead vocalist was one Tony Burrows. Burrows would go on to a career of fronting other pre-fab Bubblegum pop hitmakers, most notably Edison Lighthouse and White Plains. Burrows also did the honors on a later Carter/Lewis creation, First Class’ similarly B. Wilsonesque “Beach Baby” from 1974.

To anyone in an unreceptive mood, the song’s Beach Boys-meets-Anglican-boys’-choir ambiance might come off as saccharine and dated. Certainly what Carter and Lewis were selling to British pop fans was as much a fantasy as McKenzie’s vision of West Coast runaway Eden (or any Spielberg or Lucas flick for that matter).

And yet: there’s a sense of joy and optimism in this song that speaks to what has drawn people of all stripes and levels of social isolation here for so many years. Such folks were coming here before Hippie, and continued to after that cultural vibe had dissolved. With any luck, similar minds always will.

'16th And Valencia Roxy Music' (Devendra Banhart)

"Riding six white horses/Wearing pressed blue jeans/Gonna behead the king/And give the queen everything/Cause tonight, we're gonna find our lover/Tonight, we're gonna find our man/We don't know where to go (We know where to go)/We don't know what to do (we know what to do)...I know I look high/But I'm just freak dancing/ I know I look hypnotized/But I'm just table-tapping/Cause tonight, we ain't gonna find our lover/Tonight, we ain't gonna find our man..."

The intersect of 16th and Valencia Streets in SF's Mission District has been jumping for far longer than I've lived here, perhaps even beyond that. The 16th Street end claims blocks comprising such watering holes as Delirium which, in its late 80's/early 90's life as The Albion, harbored a lively microscene of local performance artists and folk-tinted rockers within its backroom. Poetry performances still occasionally take place in adjacent bars like Dalva and Gestalt, and even joints like sidewalk luncheon spot Ti Couz.

Another venerable attraction is the comfortably musty Adobe Books, once host to an art project formed by organizing the shop's collected stock by the colors on their spines. And while Dr. Bombay's (infamous for its Pixie Piss house specialty) has departed the 'hood, the Roxie Theater - the City's premier repertory showcase - still packs in discerning movie fans and psychotronic trash hounds alike.

Meanwhile, the perpendicular Valencia side is somewhat tamer than it was in the days when the legendary Deaf Club punk dive rocked the block. Geegaw gifteries and boutiques better suited to a Melrose crowd have crept in, neighbored by older, more budget-conscious mainstays like the Muddy Waters Coffeehouse and longtime taqueria fave La Cumbre. Much like the daily stew of Latinos and Anglos, working class and loft dwellers, crackheads and greedheads that flows along its sidewalks, the businesses here maintain and reflect a sort of resigned coexistence.

I have yet to spot Devendra Banhart strolling 16th and Valencia, although I have seen him all the way across town and closer to GG Park, wandering amidst the Asian markets and dim sum houses found on Clement Street (as well as one of the City's best printed-word dealers, Green Apple Books), sometimes in the company of minstrel pal and Avenues resident Andy Cabic from the group Vetiver.

Banhart is very much a polarizing artist, and I can understand aspects of why people both like and loathe him and his music. The positive, neohippie outlook of his personality - as expressed in interviews and in performance - can be as offputting as the enthusiasm and restlessness with which he embraces a wide spectrum of musical influence is exciting and attractive.

Yet if one is open to it, there are gems scattered amongst Banhart's output thus far, of which '16th And Valencia Roxy Music' - from his 2009 major label debut What Will We Be - is a personal favorite.

For all the 'freak-folk', Old Weird arcane agrarian hoohah that's been kicked up in Banhart's wake, this song was a genuine surprise. A chugging, honest-to-goodness Pop Song, it fizzes in the way a properly constructed and executed, contemporary pop/rock nugget should. Banhart's feline purr, so often compared to Marc Bolan, for once does that comparison justice within this brightly shaded setting.

And if the cutesy, locally colored pun perhaps adds to the ammo of Banhart deriders, it's actually appropriate, given that the song inverts the scenario found on Ferry and cohorts' classic 'Love Is The Drug'.

For instead of charting the successful catching of that love buzz, this song's hero may start off optimistic about the potential pleasures of the Mission, but in Banhart's twist, ends up in that all too common date-night state: dissipated and empty-pocketed, with testicles the color of robin's eggs.

'Mission In The Rain' (Emory Joseph)

'Ten years ago I walked this street, my dreams were riding tall/Tonight I would be thankful Lord, for any dreams at all/Some folks would be happy just to have one dream come true/But everything you gather is just more that you can lose/All the things I planned to do, I only did half way/Tomorrow will be Sunday, born of rainy Saturday/There's some satisfaction in the San Francisco rain/No matter what comes down, the Mission always looks the same/walking along in the Mission in the rain..." (lyric by Robert Hunter)

It's a late October Sunday here, and the rain has been steadily pissing down for the past 24 or so hours. Which in certain parts of town that are home to sports bars, or any bar with a TV really, will help wash away whatever technicolor effluence collected in the curbs and sidewalks outside such estabs last night, commemorating the Giants' playoff win.

But today promises to be sobering and depressingly damp, which gives me the perfect excuse to put up this song. Not for its associations with a certain 'legendary' local group (and we promise our dear readers not to make a habit of it). More really for this particular version by a more contemporary local singer/songster.

Emory Joseph capably captures the mixed emotions, the mope and magic, about spending a day out in the rain, head full of insecure plans and dreams, with no special purpose but to absorb the vibe of the storefronts and enduring culture of the Mission District.

(listen to excerpt or dl)

http://ka2music.com/artist-emory-joseph/album-fennario-409375.html

Official website:

http://www.emoryjoseph.com

(And for a more detailed personal view of the Mission... a piece by yours truly, from the great UK ezine Tangents)
'Paradise Found In A Lost Weekend'
http://www.tangents.co.uk/tangents/main/2004/nov/sf.html