Both Grace Slick (singing with Jefferson Airplane) and Joplin (singing initially with Big Brother & the Holding Company) gained a substantial following locally and, before long, across the country.[17]. In the above account he notes how he was inspired by the alternative economic systems of various communal DIY houses, which he visited on his early music tours around the US. Located in the Fillmore District, Sheba Piano Lounge is an intimate bar and lounge where you can enjoy live music nightly to go with some of the areas best Ethiopian cuisine. For example, in her manual for booking DIY shows, Beck Levy (2013) an artist and musician who used to organise DIY shows in Washington, DC notes that among the bad reasons for organising shows is so that other bands will feel obligated to book your band in their cities. A whole society, with its own economic system even. 6 For further discussion of the practices and ideologies of audience participation within American DIY scenes, see Verbu Citation2018. They also reuse derelict and discarded capitalist products and in this way participate in transferring them from market to non-market value, consequently enabling their diversion from capitalist circulation. This work was supported by Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague, under grant SVV 26060702. This summer, the city, and region will host jazz and blues concerts, festivals, and numerous free outdoor events including: The award-winning SFJAZZ Center opened in Hayes Valley in 2013 and boasts the 700-seat Robert N. Miner Auditorium and the 100-seat Joe Henderson Lab, showcasing the biggest names in international music and the best of the Bay Areas local jazz scene. 10 Iconic San Francisco Eats & Drinks That Every Visitor Must Try, Trip Idea: Take a Jimi Hendrix-Inspired San Francisco Trip, Little Known Facts About The Golden Gate Bridge, Everything You Need to Know About the Castro Street Fair, San Francisco Music Venues Rich in Black History, Where to See Jazz and Blues in San Francisco, History of Angel Island: The Ellis Island of the West. In this article, I examine the alternative economics of reciprocity in American DIY (do-it-yourself) culture. Whether you're in a seat on the balcony or dancing on the main floor, you'll have a great concert experience. Even if participants endeavour to detach DIY music making from the capitalist motives of larger society, traces of the dominant economy persist within DIY scenes. Here, Scott describes the basic theory of reciprocity, as outlined by anthropologist Marcel Mauss in his classic study The Gift ([Citation1925] Citation1990). 2023 Hyderabad Media House Limited/The Hans India. These socio-economic relations, I argue, also shape DIY sounds and aesthetics, as well as contribute to distinct musical values, discourses and practices. San Francisco always honors its jazz and blues history while listening for what will push the music forward. DIY participant Ben Wiesel, for example, observes that the DIY approach to the show/touring economy, where anything above gas money [as a payment to performers] is immoral, constitutes a twisted DIY ethics (Wiesel, in Makagon Citation2015: 56). Learn the dynamic history of San Francisco's Angel Island, the gateway for approximately 175,000 Chinese immigrants in the 1900s. I therefore also employ both critical and constructive approaches to the alternative DIY economies in the US. They're smaller, more intimate, your gear is at stake because of this, but its worth it because were fucking punk [] Its louder, youre in the crowd, its in your face. 7 For more on DIY touring in the US, and the notion of translocal reciprocity, see Verbu Citation2021 (chapter 8). Jimi Hendrix lived in San Francisco in the 1960s and became one of the iconic musical talents of the Summer of Love. Permission will be required if your reuse is not covered by the terms of the License. For instance, group solidarity, as a socio-musical pattern, is also manifested in blues, 1960s psychedelic rock, heavy metal, and other popular music genres that are not necessarily rooted in the ideas and practices of American DIY communities.Footnote11 Thus, DIY notions and approaches to musical group solidarity might partially be understood in terms of residualFootnote12 practices from 1960s counterculture (folk, folk-rock, psychedelic rock, jam rock), to which punk and DIY culture, while discursively often rejecting it, owe many of their stylistic and socio-cultural traits.Footnote13. However, there are also other ways in which DIY people enter into the relationship with capitalist modes of production. San Francisco is and always has been a city of music. Experience the mark he left on the city. Hence, it could support a 'scene'. Local DIY scenes often work as collective efforts, achieved through reciprocal relations between the venues, houses and organisers that sustain them. Waffle house residents therefore engaged in collective gardening, and collective use of the various spaces of their compound (comprising a house and large separate garage) as a wood shop, art studio, welding area, bike shop, music rehearsal space, small greenhouse, and screen-printing area. Much has been written about the historic jazz clubs from the 1950s and 60s Jazz Workshop, The Blackhawk, Basin Street West, Todd Barkans Keystone Kornerand the classic jazz albums recorded in the city, including Thelonious Monks 1959 albumAlone in San Francisco,the 1961 Miles Davis albumIn Person Friday and Saturday Nights at the Blackhawk,Complete, and Duke EllingtonsConcert of Sacred Musicat Grace Cathedral from 1965. Further, DIY venues also foster reciprocal relation with their performers and audiences. No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. For example, participants funding of DIY shows and recordings is laterally supported by the larger capitalist framework, exemplified by their utilisation of consumer goods (computers, phones, music instruments, cars, gas), public infrastructure, and part-time jobs that help them cover the costs. This kind of diversion from the capitalist market economy and experience is vividly expressed by DIY participant James from Davis, California: [at DIY house shows] we are experiencing music outside of the [dominant] modes of exchange that we are used to, even if we still pay donation money [] For me, something that exists outside the normal form of exchange you go to a venue, bar making money, going buying drinks; this [DIY show] is much more visceral, conducive to real interchange between people. And on the other hand, practical efforts toward, but also failures and difficulties in, embracing the reciprocal social and economic relations, which include collective networks of mutual aid, active participation, and DIY methods. This article is about the alternative economic system that underscores American DIY (do-it-yourself) music scenes, and about how it relates to the American dominant capitalist economy. Numerous scholars have discussed the coexistence of different economic systems within particular cultures and societies, mainly juxtaposing capitalism against alternative economic systems, such as a sustenance economy or gift-economy.Footnote16 While these latter systems may emerge as alternatives or in opposition to the dominant capitalist mode, many analysts also highlight the co-dependent and co-constitutive dimensions of this relationship. Each San Francisco band had its characteristic sound, but enough commonalities existed that there was a regional identity. Figure 3. [19] An important departure in this new era of "album oriented radio" (AOR) was that show hosts felt free to play lengthy tracks or two or more tracks at a stretch from a good record album. When you see the Tony Bennett statue outside of theFairmont Hotel on Nob Hill, you will gain a better understanding of how San Francisco has embraced its jazz history. Hence, DIY participants often repair, reuse, and repurpose discarded music equipment (Flood Citation2016), or they utilise scrap materials for DIY production. 3099067 There are evidently numerous innovative practices existing within American DIY scenes that work persistently and continuously, on a daily basis, and in multiple interconnected locales, toward demystification and destabilisation of capitalist processes, both on discursive and material levels, but which they also simultaneously sustain the capitalist system in different ways. Reciprocally, these local participants (i.e. DIY shows and records, bartering, borrowing, and DIY production of goods). Participation between different houses was further emphasised by doing things collectively, such as traveling together to shows, festivals, swimming trips, and karaoke nights, or through collective listening to music, work activities, or music and social event organising (see Figure 2). In Jennings account and Figure 5 we see how commodities such as records are diverted from the path of capitalist exchange and voided of market value during DIY shows to be transformed into objects of personal and collective use value (cf. (Personal communication, 23 January 2011). He has lived in San Francisco for over 9 years and has worked in Travel & Tourism for over 7 of those. Finally, this study highlights the value of a dialectical scholarship that approaches social phenomena, such as music scenes, as constituted in contradictory and non-deterministic ways, which operate on multiple levels, and which are riven with socio-cultural difference. The long-term ethnographic research on which this article is based was conducted between 2010 and 2014, mainly on the West coast of the USA. 1511 Haight St. One of the city's live music gems, Club Deluxe, located at the famed corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets, presents a wide array of local jazz and blues bands, as well as monthly burlesque and comedy shows. "[8] The Beats tended to be cagey, keeping their lives discreet (save for the few who published, in literary bursts, about their perceptions, enthusiasms, and activities); in a word, they generally kept cool. The young hippies were far more numerous, less wary, and had scarcely any inclination to keep their lifestyles concealed. People from various N and NE Portland houses are folding cassette cases for the Goof Punx festival compilation, while a music jam session is happening at the same time. DIY zines, comic books, and blogs from the whole US).Footnote3 This particular DIY culture is an outgrowth of late 1970s British and US punk culture, which later expanded into more transnational and heterogeneous scenes that today also encompass aspects of indie rock, experimental music and certain singer-songwriters.Footnote4 It also has ties to other similar formations, most particularly 1960s counterculture, and various historical and contemporary anarchist, feminist, and sustainability movements (cf. This community defines itself through active participation (at shows, and otherwise), therefore distinguishing itself from passive, apathetic, consumerist society (personal communication with a DIY participant from Oakland, 14 September 2012), or from lazy hipsters within the scene (see above). autonomy]. In jazz it had been exuberantly pioneered by numerous musicians. A hideaway on Fell Street, Mr. Tipples presents live jazz nightly alongside inventive cocktails in a dark and sophisticated space. But well known stars of rock & roll "were being called fifties primitives" by this time. Thus, the music promoted or listened to in DIY spaces is often less about whether anybody likes it, as Scott put it earlier in this article, than about community-building, and mutual support. A louder, more prominent role for the electric basstypically with a melodic or semi-melodic approach, and using a plush, pervasive tonewas another feature. All Rights Reserved. When I asked what else they do communally, they mentioned collective chore charts, monthly cleaning days, and their communal craft supplies (sowing stations, craft materials, collage materials), which other DIY participants could borrow from them or use in Glitterdomes collective spaces (living room, kitchen, front porch, or backyard). But maybe they are that way, and they will remain that way, because we havent set examples for them to see, examples that we saw in others before us and followed. (Aaron Scott, personal communication, 11 April 2012). Fun and fascinating trivia about San Francisco's most indelible icon. Note the makeshift live-in spaces: one suspended from the ceiling on the left, and the small, pink mini-house on the right. Great American Music Hall opened in 1907 as a symbol of San Francisco's rebirth after the devastating 1906 earthquake. You can request songs from a library card catalog system. In early 1967, Tom Donahuea veteran disc jockey, rock concert producer, songwriter, and music-act managerwas inspired to revive a moribund radio station, KMPX, and inaugurate the first FM-radio rock station, in San Francisco, in order to showcase this type of music. Similar venue-performer, venue-audience, and performer-audience relations and forms of boundary-making have been present at most DIY shows I have attended. Working party at the Glitterdome house, in Portland, 2 April 2012. This kind of orientation toward egalitarian collective action and reciprocity is also discernible in the musical organisation, performance, and sound of many American DIY bands. The city also continues to celebrate jazz and blues as an art form that is best experienced live and in the moment. The people who opened their homes to me, honestly, I guarantee, some people [] didnt like the music we played, [] I mean it helps [], if they like the music you play, but [thats not the main reason]. We had a friend coming around named Peter [], he would come in and just do all of our dishes and leave, or hed come with a gallon jug of olive oil, he would just come and give us stuff. there is a diversity of possible causal factors that extend beyond the influence of the DIY system), as it is also implicated in the examples above. Jai Milx performing at her house, Glitterdome, in Portland, 4 February 2012. A modern take on the vintage supper club, Black Cat is located in the heart of San Franciscos Tenderloin neighborhood, the historic arts and entertainment district once home to fabled jazz venues such as The Blackhawk. The music regularly turns the bar into a dance party. Taylor Citation2016: 15476). Some of the most important black artists of the 20th century have played on this stage, including jazz legends Duke Ellington and Sarah Vaughan. You agree to our use of cookies by continuing to use our site. To be able to tour, bands rely on the help of local participants (who organise shows for them, in their houses, or elsewhere). At San Francisco's music venues, new-age artists share the same stages as some of music's most legendary black artists. [Chris's friend added:] You could be naked, and no one will arrest you [i.e. The tactics that shape this alternative economic model (reciprocity, collective action, DIY methods) permeate DIY scenes on all levels: cultural, economic, and political; from music organisation, music performance, and sound aesthetics, to everyday social practices and interaction. creativity], and could be one of the band [i.e. The early band venues, while the new SF scene was emerging from folk and folk-rock beginnings, were often places like the Matrix nightclub. The journalist Ed Vulliamy wrote: "The Summer of Love had an empress, and her name was Janis Joplin. Consequently, these communities keep their distinctive boundaries of belonging open and fluid.Footnote6 This liberal inclination is also related to the idea of general reciprocity as discussed in the beginning of this section. "Rock & roll" was the point of departure for the new music. 1 Free boxes are often found in DIY and punk houses, or on the sidewalks next to them. Marx Citation1887). I start with a quote by a well-known American DIY zine writer Aaron Cometbus, who articulates some of the main issues and concerns regarding the alternative economic practices of American DIY communities: Bands [] when they are successful, its because of how talented they are, how much they care, how hard theyve worked. Because San Francisco had an especially vibrant and attractive countercultural scene in the latter half of the 1960s, musicians from elsewhere (along with the famous hip multitude) came there. (Cometbus Citation2002). The San Francisco bands' music was everything that AM-radio pop music wasn't. A combination of commercial, second-hand, and scrap materials and tools were used in this DIY process. Furthermore, Cometbus also identifies contradictions within American DIY scenes regarding the coexistence of both alternative (reciprocal) and dominant (capitalist) systems within the same communities and scenes, where DIY individuals and bands often not only engage in collective and reciprocal relations, but also act as capitalist producers and consumers. He is usually exploring the Bay Area hunting for that new and unique experience and good food too! 2 See for example Gibson-Graham Citation2008; Eriksen Citation2010: 160, 161, 201, 202, 216; Whiteley Citation2011; Giles Citation2014; Tausig Citation2014; Dean Citation2015; Otten Citation2015; Graham Citation2016; Kirsch Citation2017. Culton and Holtzman Citation2010; Hannerz Citation2015: 128). Hesmondhalgh Citation1999; Rogers and Whiting Citation2020: 8, 9. According to Jai we have people over to eat all the time, we make a lot of food for people, we get a lot of free food too, people will come and donate (personal communication, 28 February 2012). For example, multiple north (N) and northeast (NE) Portland DIY houses joined together as a local DIY community to co-organise the second Gathering of Goof Punx festival in April 2012. Moreover, this inserted our tour to a wider reciprocal network of DIY houses and spaces across the US and beyond, run by a large and intimate assemblage of DIY participants who mutually exchanged places and favours.Footnote7 Nonetheless, there was a disparity between DIY ideology and practice in the scene. (Personal communication, 28 February 2012). Brasses and reeds, such as trumpets and saxophones were rarely used, unlike in contemporary R&B and soul bands and some of the white bands from the U.S. East Coast (e.g., Blood, Sweat & Tears or Chicago). 20 In addition to capitalism, state and city governments sometimes act as additional significant actors in shaping and interacting with DIY scenes, not only by imposing restrictions on the scene (e.g., in the form of laws and regulations), but also by supporting and/or co-funding various DIY endeavours (Chrysagis Citation2017; Threadgold Citation2017; Bennett Citation2018; Garland Citation2019; Holt Citation2020: chapters 4 and 5). Baumgarten Citation2012: v, 137). This tendency is highlighted in the liner notes to a 1987 compilation of Gilman bands entitled Turn it Around!, published in collaboration with Maximum Rockandroll, an internationally renowned DIY zine from San Francisco: These bands were chosen [to be on the compilation] because of their support of the [Gilman] Project [] The people in these bands can be found at Gilman at any given night [] They come to the meetings, work the shows, play the benefits and put just as much, if not more, into the club than they get out of it. We had this idea that it was a three-way tie [also the title of one of their albums] and not some hierarchy or aristocracy of guitar. Note the bands offer to exchange their records and merchandise either for money, or for a good conversation and a hug!!!!!!. Specialties: About the San Francisco Symphony: The San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas present more than 220 concerts each year from September through July in a variety of genres, with SFS musicians performing classical concerts, holiday favorites, summer pops events, free outdoor concerts, special series for families and children, plus presentations of visiting guest artists and . I am also thankful to both anonymous reviewers for their astute comments, as well as to Henry Stobart for his generous help with the editing process. To learn about our use of cookies and how you can manage your cookie settings, please see our Cookie Policy. Outdoor performances, often organized by the band members themselves and their friends, also played their part. Thereby, various goods and articles can, for example, be temporarily or permanently diverted from the capitalist market into enclaved non-capitalist zones, where they are often voided of market value while they simultaneously gain in symbolic value. Located in the Mission District, The Royal Cuckoo Organ Lounge is a kitschy bar that is both swanky and divey in just the right proportions. The Boom Boom Room hosts local and international blues, funk, jam bands, and everything in between. Through long term ethnographic study of local and translocal DIY scenes, including shows, spaces, and touring practices, I reveal a plethora of reciprocal musical and extra-musical activities that enable the creation of alternative DIY worlds. Real Estate Software Dubai > blog > san francisco music venues 1980's. san francisco music venues 1980's. Jun 12, 2022 . Since my research mostly covers years 20104, and therefore does not address any recent changes in the scene (e.g., due to COVID-19 or other factors), the ethnographic findings in this article will be discussed using the past tense. Jessica from Arcata, describing the local DIY scene there as reciprocal, assured me that when particular houses get busted [are forced to close down], different [other] people open their houses [for shows] (personal communication, 20 June 2012). Furthermore, I draw on Arjun Appadurais perspectives on the complex interrelationships between different economic systems and regimes of value, often connected through the movement of the same kinds of commodities between them (Citation1986). Cate Blanchett as Lydia Tr | Courtesy of Focus Features Films about classical music go back to at least the 1930s. This is exemplified below by Portland DIY participant Aaron Scott, who discusses the relations of reciprocity between performers and organisers of shows, and between the individual and the scene. Ralph Gleason became one of the founders of what would become the rock-scene fan journal, Rolling Stone. (Jennings Citation1998; emphasis added). SCRAP) that co-constitute late capitalist circulation of money and commodities (Whiteley Citation2011; Giles Citation2014). Oakes Citation2009: 88; emphasis added), I would book a lot ofwouldnt say bad shows, but bad bands, cause I just wanted to have a rule of, like, any kind of music is allowed to be played here, because, when I was a teen in high school [] it was so hard to get a show. San Francisco is and always has been a city of music. Nicks and Buckingham went on to bring that San Francisco sound to established British rock band Fleetwood Mac when they both joined in 1975. (Personal communication, 28 February 2012; see Figure 6; emphasis in original). Its funny how people put on house shows and they do it because theyre compelled to create that space. Merchandise sign at the Portlands Punx house show, 18 April 2012. However, since the simple fact of attending shows, or because still and quiet listening to music can also count as valid forms of audience participation at DIY shows (see Figure 2), I argue for an understanding of American DIY communities that is open to a variety of different approaches and interpretations of active audience participation. Phil Lesh, bassist with the Grateful Dead, furthered this sound. Music City San Francisco, home of the Music City Hotel and SF Music Hall of Fame, creates a guide of all guides of local music venues in SF. Appadurai terms these kinds of processes rituals of decomoditization (Citation1986: 26). Booking shows for this tour was greatly facilitated by the established DIY friendships of one band member who had previously made eight tours of the US. Its really, its hard for a lot of people to understand it, but these bands are really satisfied just by people hearing their music. He also gives advice about how to straddle both worlds, and how to pay up (reciprocally) for what bands owe to the community. And its time to show that creativity is still valued over money. Moreover, some venues and houses often collectively organised festivals and larger multi-venue events. DIY organisers who are often also musicians), may later seek out the return of the same favour when they, in turn, go on tour. American DIY participants therefore usually downplay or reject the notion of making it and strive toward community, collectivity, and intimate social cohesion.Footnote14 This is obvious, for instance, also in their willingness to play for small donations at shows, and in their rejection of major labels. In turn, this approach challenges the widespread assumption that DIY participants often contradict themselves in terms of what they do and what they say or, in other words, that their material realities contradict their ideological demands. Monterey, California is about 120 road miles south of San Francisco. For example, as I also experienced, not all DIY house members helped organise shows or other activities in their spaces. Thats what they think. I was able to study this phenomenon ethnographically through focusing on a variety of local American DIY scenes and touring practices, permitting me to encounter a plethora of reciprocal activities. 15 See Culton and Holtzman Citation2010, Citation2011; Taylor Citation2016: 165, 166; cf. The Dead Kennedys are often seen as one of the most influential hardcore punk bands of the 1980s, instrumental in the rebellion against the hippie movement of the preceding decades. Furthermore, there exists a tension between these diverse activities within the DIY sphere, since more ideologically oriented DIY participants often foster a resentment towards more pragmatic and market-oriented DIY musicians. In this way, they consciously acknowledge that DIY shows can exist both outside the capitalist system (as temporarily enclaved rituals of decomoditization), and at the same time, within the larger capitalist regime of value.Footnote19 DIY shows thus simultaneously counter as well as co-constitute a capitalist economic system.Footnote20. DIY shows in the US are underscored by a complex conjunction of two economic regimes overlapping in one space and time. For several years now, Teague and his wife Melissa have run a small grassroots local urban farm business from their house, named Winslow Food Forest. Appadurai uses the term tournaments of value to refer to those, often calculative, movements of paths and diversions that actors instigate in order to negotiate the value of circulating commodities (Citation1986: 20, 21). The new sound, which melded many musical influences, was perhaps heralded in the live performances of the Jefferson Airplane (from 1965 on), who put out an LP record earlier than nearly all the other new bands (August 1966). participation]. A number of key San Francisco rock musicians of the era cited John Coltrane and his circle of leading-edge jazz musicians as important influences. Nevertheless, the system of general reciprocity also keeps these DIY boundaries open, as it works in a seemingly non-obligatory way, in which DIY individuals themselves decide how and when these debts should be reciprocated. Other DIY participants I interviewed talked about similar approaches included in the roster of DIY reciprocal and collective activities. Among the oldest venues in San Francisco, The Warfield has hosted a number of great black artists, including Louis Armstrong and Prince. By closing this message, you are consenting to our use of cookies. Sly & the Family Stone, a San Francisco-based group that got its start in the late 1960s, was an exception, being a racially integrated hippie band with a hefty influence from soul music, hence making use of brass instrumentation. Furthermore, DIY participants often reject the implied individualism of the DIY label (do-it-yourself), and instead emphasise the collective nature of the DIY method, by relabelling it as DIT, i.e. This is how Teague from Waffle house in NE Portland explained DIY reciprocity and communal living: Its about applying that kind of attitude to your whole lifesome people dont, some people are just like yeah, we have shows here but we dont apply that attitude toward anything else in our lives [], and sometimes you will play somewhere and its like really far-out neo-hippy communitywe have lands, and we grow our own foods, and have a lot of other community projects going on in [our] housea lot of houses that we played at [with his band] were really inspiring [in that sense] [] There would be people canning and processing food, making kombucha, making their own alcohol, [and having] screen printing shops, photo labs, art studio spaces built in the houses[there] would just be a house in a neighbourhood but there would be like nine people living there, and people [living] in the backyardjust every inch of house is utilized in a productive waylike in New York, it was like just a community living to an extreme in a couple of places I went to. However, the present tense will be used when considering certain general specifics of the American DIY scenes. This DIY reciprocal cultural system endeavours to transcend the mainstream aesthetics of quality and individual competition, and instead fosters the idea of support aesthetics, based on reciprocal communal solidarity.Footnote9 Consider, in this regard, the following evaluative criteria offered by various DIY participants: OP [fanzine from Olympia] wasnt about loving a lot of weird kinds of music; it was about supporting the idea that you could put out lots of weird kinds of music.
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