by trans van santos
San Francisco’s well documented housing crisis has rocketed to the top of the Bay Area’s lengthy list of social issues. Rising like the rent in a Mission District flat, phoenixing like Icarus to the tip of our collective tongues. Everybody’s talking about Housing. I want to talk about Home.
Housing is an easily defined term. Four walls, a reasonably reliable roof, a little shelter from the storm. Often more, sometimes less, equals a House. Some bright minds will come together and concoct a way to stack up the boxes to the satisfaction of the city managers and the voting minority and the Housing Crisis will be declared solved, but San Francisco has existed in a perpetual Housing Crisis since 1849, it’s musical chairs by the Bay by way of New York of the West, and much like NYC, space has always been limited and demand is just getting higher. Which means that you probably don’t have a living room, you have an extra housemate where the living room used to be (and let’s be honest, you have never liked that housemate.) In San Francisco and New York, living with real friends and family, or, gasp, alone, are options available to the very few. San Franciscans don’t go home when the bar closes, they go to the house where they are renting a room and try to come in quietly so as not to piss off the new roommate who works at a start up downtown and has to wake up early. Or else they walk the streets, drink in the park, or sleep on a friendly couch.
For San Franciscans, home has always been San Francisco, in all her weird, open minded ways and BoHo diversity. The City herself as collective living room, a front porch to not just view of the parade, but to take part. Living in San Francisco is living on the streets of San Francisco. The city has seen a lot of changes since the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Fort gave birth to her new, cosmopoliton reality: Earthquakes, archetecture, attitudes, technology, psychedelic rock & roll. Until recently the one constant was the open arms in which San Francisco accepted the freaks and dreamers, rockers, weirdos, psychonauts,outcasts and misty eyed schemers that other, more “sophisticated” munincipalities had turned away. Or, from another angle, those fringe dwellers who other, less enlightened cities had allowed to slip away. Whatever the make up of the working stiff, whether sailor, miner, Folger’s factory cog, barista, techie, always shifting with the winds of time, the freak thinkers and art weirdos have remained the jewels on the tiara of the city animal. The color on the streets, the historical markers on a long and winding road.
San Francisco’s reputation as an outlaw haven and collective urban art project paved that road. A road that led straight to the birth of psychedelic rock & roll. The Beatles played their last official concert in San Francisco in 1966, a year after they were initiated into the new, weird west in a Southern California LSD experiment curtesy of The Byrds. They quit touring at the peak of their success and promptly went about the business of re-inventing the studio album and changing the world and redefining the word love. My guess is that they arrived in San Francisco, took a look around, caught a glimpse of the Further bus speeding by and decided to take a trip on their own Yellow Submarine. Where The Beatles took the art of the album, The Grateful Dead took the art of Touring. Over the next 30 plus years San Francisco’s favorite sons presided over a cosmic travelling ceremony, they were the high priests of a new American Outlaw Church, while psychedelic music and the actual psychededlics themselves, became the city’s grand contribution, her greatest cultural export.
In Memphis they have a statue of Elvis right across the way from the Sun Records building, where you can take a studio tour and learn the story of Sam Phillips and early American rock & roll. In San Francisco the only homage to native son Jerry Garcia is a small ampitheater at a little used and out of the way park that half of the current residents of San Francisco would have to use GPS to find. No Jerry mural in the Mission, no statue ala the showpiece Hendrix sculpture on Seattle’s Capital Hill, no sense of the city’s lofty place in the massively influential narrative of Rock & Roll Music. The legendary Hyde Street Studios, occupying Wally Heider’s original studio complex, is steeped in SF lore. The Grateful Dead’s American Beauty, CCR’s Green River, Santana’s Abraxas, and David Crosby’s wonderful If I Could Only Remember My Name were all recorded at Heider’s original Studio C while the Digital Underground hit Humpty Dance, and classic albums by Greenday, Dead Kennedy’s, and American Music Club were recorded at the current Hyde Street Studios incarnation. It’s all there in the midst of the Tenderloin, not that anyone would know it from the outside of the building, where an unmarked door, a splatter of graffitti, and the smell of piss give little indication of the important cultural artifacts produced within it’s walls.
Couldn’t there be a plaque or something? Maybe a reprieve from the threats of the marketplace vis a vis a city declaration stating that Hyde Street Studios and other Rock & Roll Holy Sights are cultural treasures worthy of preservation, part of a shared history connecting San Franciscans through the chapters of time, a throughline essential to the city’s narrative arc, it’s Story? The City could embrace psychedelic culture and rock & roll as it’s great cosmopolitan achievement and act accordingly, endowing musicians, providing housing for the city’s breathing cultural treasures, it’s “content creators”. Hell, just go back to the days of legal car camping, all night Ocean Beach campfires and RV’s parading through the Sunset and these adaptable, hard living animals will make do. Housing is the easy part but a Home is where the Heart is and a heart needs to keep beating to stay alive. We built this city on Rock & Roll, after all. If the drummer doesn’t have a place to sleep, who’s going to keep the beat?
the Starship Santos 