San Francisco Disco Revival Up on Beatportal

Hey kids, I just posted a new entry on Beatportal about "the San Francisco Disco Revival," and I'm super-pleased with it. I've been working on it for almost two weeks (doing the links today took an hour alone), it's the first thing where I've been able to "interview" people (though via email), and it's my best attempt so far, in my opinion, to develop a more polished voice (and attitude) while still trying to answer the question of what it all means (and the potential implications of that). If you check it out and have any comments, please make them there, as it will help keep the entry alive for a little while longer and might spark some discussions with the larger global community that reads Beatportal.

Event Review: The Rod at Deco

There aren't many parties that lead to the boyfriend and I having a passionate debate about the meaning of parties and the scene, but that's exactly what happened Friday night at The Rod at Deco: while everybody else was in the front room cheering on the wet jockstrap contest, there we were in the back room by the pool table, throwing around words like Gesamtkunstwerk and pondering the necessity of gay men connecting with their own history in a way that, while troublesome in its nostalgic aspects, also gives them a sense of their possibility in the present. On the boyfriend's side he thought I needed to lighten up a bit, since the evidence was all around us that people were there having a good time and connecting with something, and I had to concede that, at times, my contrarian nature, suspicious as it is of all things popular and fun in the tradition of Theodor Adorno, clouds my critical perspective. On the other hand, my position remains that the party scene is about creating culture, and if we are going to take a critical perspective upon it, it can't be from the perspective of whether or not people are simply having a good time - after all, people have great times at circuit parties, which are the target of numerous dismissive comments within the "alternative" gay community - but it must be from the perspective of the kind of culture that is being created and the meaning of that for those participating in it. And from that perspective I continue to have issues with the culture being created by The Rod, because, to me, it feels like a step backwards in the evolution of San Francisco's gay culture.

The Short Version of the Review - Is It Fun?

I am perfectly willing to accept that this point about the place of The Rod in San Francisco's gay culture probably doesn't really matter to anybody else but me, so here I'll give you the the standard nightlife magazine review of The Rod and you can continue on with the rest of your online reading without further ado. The Rod, on the 2nd Friday of the month at Deco Lounge, is among San Francisco's longest-running gay nights, having celebrated its 3rd Anniversary this past Friday. DJ Bus Station John, who has advanced leagues as a DJ since I first heard him spin a couple years ago at Aunt Charlie's place, where he continues with his very popular Tubesteak Connection, has one of the best collections of rare-groove disco, Hi-NRG, and original New York electro ever assembled. If you closed your eyes during one of his sets you could easily imagine yourself back in a San Francisco disco or bathhouse circa 1979, and if you opened your eyes the photocopies and projections of vintage porn, featuring pre-steroid swollen guys with feathered hair (many of whom look exactly like the guys who gave me boners when I was in high school) might convince you that you are really there. The Rod is an almost perfect emulation of a particular moment in gay history, and if the attendees were sporting more polyester and facial hair you might think that the door to Deco was really a time portal.

That The Rod has been going on for three years should be enough testament to its popularity, and on any given Friday night you can rest assured of a sizable crowd of guys and a few girls as well. Since it's a Tenderloin bar the crowd is definitely scruffier and more alternative than you would find at any given Castro bar, and I suspect that many of the guys competing for the $100 prize in the wet jockstrap contest might otherwise be trying to get that sum by walking the beat of Polk Street. To my eye the crowd skews a bit older, since the music attracts many guys who probably heard it when the grooves were fresh off the cutting press, but I also saw a few twenty-somethings of my acquaintance. Though I've usually seen a few guys boogieing in front of the DJ stand, The Rod doesn't really come across as a big dance party, but more of a mingling scene, and the music provides a great background for the naughtiness that people get up to later. We noticed that, after the patio closed and the wet jockstrap contest began the crowd seemed thinner, or perhaps just more concentrated in two rooms, one where they were watching the contest, and another where they were carrying through on the instincts it aroused. All in all, if you are looking for a laid-back, sexy (for a late-70s value of sexy) night out with a crowd that isn't too precious or grotesquely buffed, and your main goal is some sleazy fun, then The Rod is a great choice.

I Come Not to Bury Bus Station John, But to Praise Him

And what, you might ask, is wrong with a party simply being a good time? In the present moment of the event itself, nothing - people come and have a good time, connect with each other, and maybe leave with a feeling of satisfaction in whatever form they were seeking. But the success of The Rod is also, in my mind, what opens it up to a higher level of examination. I admire Bus Station John for having created a total aesthetic, for the way he combines sound and visuals to bring forth a vibe that others connect with. Despite the boyfriend's protestations that this is a pretentious way to put it, I think Bus Station John has created a work of art that is distinctive in the San Francisco gay scene, and that The Rod is an example of someone really creating culture. And this is where I believe that the critical perspective comes into play, where its legitimate to ask, what kind of culture is being created, what ideas are being put forth in this creation? As I pointed out before, many of my friends and acquaintances have no problems with negative criticism of the culture being created by other promoters, such as Gus Presents, when that culture is not part of their own aesthetic, when the ideas they see being put forth are in contrast to their own. Things get trickier when the object of critical perspective is within one's own cultural milieu. I will admit that in my previous review of The Rod, I was bitchier than I needed to be, since I thought that tone was necessary to make my voice be heard. But since then I have softened my stance a little bit - I have heard disco played under circumstances when it felt right and was enjoyable, and I have absolutely nothing against the man himself; though I don't know him personally, many other folks of my acquaintance do, and by all accounts he is a really great guy who's heart in the right place. In fact, I am quite sympathetic to the intention that I think is behind Bus Station John's nights, I just disagree with the way he is materializing that intention. I hope that a greater degree of respect for that intention is evident in this review; if I did not feel some respect for the ideas that someone was putting forth, believe me, I would not be spending my Saturday afternoon in front of this laptop, hoping that my perspective might, in some way, help further those ideas.

Disco of the Past, Disco of the Present

My main issue with The Rod is its nostalgic foundations. In an interview with the Bay Guardian, in which he was asked about his take on the current gay club scene, Bus Station John said " . . . I've retreated to the past, where I dwell happily with my pre-AIDS, pre-crack, pre-MTV, pre-PNP vinyl collection. Greetings from 1981! Visitors are welcome." Given the rather bland state of the gay club scene over the past few years, with its endless rotation of the same DJs playing the same music to the same crowd of guys over and over gain, I can't blame Bus Station John for wanting to recreate the vibe of an earlier time, when the scene was more about joy and sex and fun than meth and money (though it seems contradictory to be anti-PNP and have a giant cut-out of a bottle of poppers in the front window of the club). And I can even understand wanting to return to music that has, at its core, genuine warmth and emotion after listening to the hours of anthem tribal dreck that is spun at most circuit events. But, even with the best of intentions behind it, this approach is essentially reactionary and regressive, and says that the best solution to the "ennervating" (to use Bus Station John's term) state of current gay club culture is to retreat to the past.

I can't deny that there is a legitimate place for disco in current gay club culture, and I've found myself increasingly drawn to music from contemporary producers like Justus Koehnecke, Prinz Thomas, and Lindstrom that updates the disco sound with modern production. There is a looseness in its composition and upbeat hipness in its sonic palette that can't help but bring a twitch to my hips and a smile to my face. And, thanks to the recent Mineshaft party from Honey Sound System, as well as Bus Station John's set at the recent Paradise All-Night Disco Extravaganza, I've found a way to connect with it in the club experience. I think that, periodically, the gay club scene needs to re-connect with its roots as a means of rediscovering its values, and in this regard I have no problem with the occasional disco party (as long as nobody plays Donna Summer or Gloria Gaynor, that is). My problem is when the disco party is seen as the height of gay club culture, carrying with it the statement that there is nothing of value at all to be found in contemporary culture, when this plainly isn't so. I also worry that, in the context of creating culture, disco nostalgia keeps us from participating in the creation of a new cultural identity for ourselves. This is what I like most about parties like Lucky Pierre and those coming from the Honey Sound System; they are in touch with the past and recognize its importance, but are also actively engaged in using contemporary msuic and culture to create a new sense of gay identity. In fact, from things I see going on right now, I think 2008 might very well be a banner year for the San Francisco gay scene, one in which many groups come together to once again create a sense of excitment and joy about being a San Francisco queer. Looking back to the past will never really get us to that point, because once you step beyond the door of the time portal, your're right back where you started from.

Say No to Nostalgia, Say Yes Creating the New World

Nostalgia is a powerful impulse, and after the eight years of shit we've all lived through, it's no wonder that so many people, gay and straight, are looking back to the past, when things seemed easier, more fun, and certainly less dire (just think about all the 80s, disco, and "return to . . ." parties that have gone down over the past year). But, ultimately, what we have to deal with is the here and now, and nothing from the past will really solve our present problems. Looking back to the past may give us ideas about how to deal with the present, but it's up to us to put those ideas in a contemporary context. 1970s era disco might help us connect with a set of values, but that doesn't mean we need to precisely emulate that era, it means we need to create the disco of the 2000s. The Rod is a great place to go on every second Friday to have fun and reflect on the original disco era, but the moment you start thinking "yeah, it was all so really great back then, I wish we could go back" is the moment that you enter into bad faith with the present. Rather, you should be thinking "yeah, how do we bring this into the now, how do we create this feeling with contemporary music, images, fashion, and people?" Formulating the answers to that question should be the main task of the San Francisco gay scene over the next year, because when the elections happen in November, we need to be ready to make our contribution to the change that will ensue.

Listening to Bob Mould on City Arts and Lectures

This past Sunday I caught the Bob Mould interview on City Arts and Lectures on KQED, part of their Talking Music series. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a taped version of this on their website, but there were some cool stories about Bob's days with Husker Du and their crazy tours, including a long stopover here in SF while they crashed at Jello Biafra's place.

It was a thought-provoking experience to listen to this on an afternoon when I was intending to go to a disco night later in the evening, since, when Bob talked about wanting to get rid of "that music" on the radio, he was making an oblique reference to the disco and pop tunes of the late 70s and early 80s that dominated the charts. I really didn't get into punk music until about 1984, and discovered Husker Du following the release of Zen Arcade, but listening to Bob made me think about how we followed similar paths - angry small town boys who first found an outlet for our feelings in punk music, and who also came around to dealing with our sexuality through that same scene. I remember when Bob was outed by Spin, and then the sudden uptick in Queercore bands like Pansy Division and queer punk zines coming around at the same time.

It's interesting to think about the difference a few years would have made in the identifications I had with the gay world. I was still in high school in rural Virginia when AIDS was identified, and by the time I had gone through college and begun investigating the gay scene a whole generation of men who had experienced that first wave of gay liberation and danced in the discos had been wiped out. Those who survived and came after them brought with them a lot of anger, as I did, over everything from the political climate to the way AIDS patients were being treated. When I hung out with guys in ACT-UP in Baltimore, they didn't listen to disco, they listened to Fugazi and Husker Du and Minor Threat, Nirvana and Ministry. We had pretty typical second-generation attitudes toward the first generation of out gay men, in that we saw their culture as stifling and traditionalist, and wanted to make things for ourselves. When I wanted to scope boys I didn't go the gay bars, but to rock shows and goth/industrial clubs.

Bob Mould and I are pretty much products of the atmosphere in which we came out; while the mood of the 7os generation might be characterized as happy and liberated, our generation felt angry and oppressed. Then, by the mid-90s, all those queer punks found that the second movement we had mobilized had lost its teeth, settling now for issues like marriage and military service, things we vehemently opposed. I guess it makes sense that disco is now undergoing this tremendous revival both here in SF and, from what I've heard, in New York; it evokes happy memories for an older generation, and connects the most recent with a gay identity that seems to offer more radical opportunities for self-expression. It is somewhat galling to think that the gay culture that I and my friends rejected has now re-emerged as a dominant cultural force, while the main accomplishment of our anger and political motivation has been to create a class of gay bourgeoisie, and this, I must admit, accounts for at least some of my own attitude toward the disco aesthetic. And then there are the times when I look around at the current state of the gay scene and I just feel like a curmudgeon, much in the same way as that first generation of gay men must have felt when they encountered my generation and realized that there had been a tremendous shift in values and aesthetics that had taken place without their realizing it.

Bob Mould is still putting out albums, but it seems that he's changed a lot since I last saw him do a solo acoustic show at a small bar in Baltimore; he's now DJing are regular night in DC and New York called Blowoff, and I noticed that on his myspace page, one of his friends is the Service Members Legal Defense Fund. It also seems that Bob has traded in his punk identity for being a bear; I didn't even recognize his current physical incarnation from the husky, intense, geeky guy I watched with rapt attention. I'm glad that Bob has found a way to re-define himself as he starts creeping up on 50; it's pretty hard to maintain that angry energy your entire life without turning into a total crank. I'm a little disappointed in looking at their setlists; maybe I'd like it better if I was actually listening to it, but it seems a bit like a repudiation of the punk aesthetic for pretty mainstream stuff. But at least Bob has found a way to position himself in relation to contemporary gay culture, something that, for all of us, becomes much more difficult as the years pass.

Event Review: Honey Sound System's Mineshaft Disco at 1015 Folsom

OK kids, I gotta be up front here: when an event involves the words "disco," "Sunday night," and "1015," I'll usually take a pass. However, being that those words were also accompanied by "Honey Sound System," I was determined to check out this party. When I walked out the door on Sunday night, unaccompanied by friends or boyfriend, and felt the drizzle on my face, I almost turned back around, and when I arrived at 103 Harriet Street at about 9.15 and was unable to find any sign that a party was going on, I was ready to ditch it once again. But, I had already spent cab fare to get there, so I decided to take a walk around the block in the hope that the doors would be open when I returned. Even though it was 9.40 when I was finally let in, I was ultimately glad that I stuck it out to attend the best event of the weekend.

There were problems with the doorman (Ken Vulsion let me and a couple other guys in as he was going out to grab a bite to eat since no doorman had showed up) and a mixer transplant had to be performed about a half hour after I arrived, but the HSS team made the basement of 1015 feel like a special warm, cozy space that made enduring these issues worthwhile. After walking into the dark entrance I spotted curtains of red and silver mylar forming a hallway to a flight of stairs leading down, and from below I could hear the music - it was like walking into a small, secret, underground space, even though it was in the basement of the biggest club in SoMa. In the space itself (which has a very cool round dance floor surrounded by booths and pulsating lights in the ceiling) the kids had put up a central display of packing boxes and record sleeves, along with some informational posters about the old Mindshaft club, and 1015's former existence as the infamous Sutro bathhouse. In another corner there was a memorial to Sylvester, whose death date was Monday, and all the table tops were decorated with more record sleeves and big plastic happy face whistles. My god, I thought, these guys have put together an actual theme!

There were only a couple other people in the club for the first half hour I was there, but by 11, which I had originally estimated as my departure time, it had picked up so much that I reconsidered. I saw several people I knew, and the crowd was really quite diverse, friendly, and fun. There were straight kids and gay kids, young guys and older, trannies and maybe even a couple muscle queens (it was certainly warm enough for shirts to come off, but maybe a little early), all getting down and smiling at one another on the dancefloor. More than any other events I've been to lately, HSS events seem to bring together a community of people who are interested in new experiences, new music (even if it is vintage), and meeting new people. It's the kind of vibe that I associate much more with raves than I do clubs, and I think it's a sign that these kids have tapped into a desire that many of us have for a scene that is about something more than body types, designer clothes, and music for the lowest common denominator.

As for the music - I danced to disco. Did you ever think I would write those words? The difference was that, in this case, I wasn't having to deal with the cheezy or the overly-familiar. It was during Jason Kendig's set that I found myself really listening to the music, and in his selections I heard the early days of house and the foundations of electro. I was suprised by some of the synth lines I heard, and how infrequently the tracks relied on overused disco devices like strings, horn sections, and warbling diva vocals. It was a much different tour through disco than what I have heard in the past, and it was enough to make me think that I need to look into this further.

Over the course of the evening I kept texting the boyfriend that he should get off the couch and come down, that the party was shaping up to be quite awesome, but he was firmly rooted in place, and so, by the time midnight rolled around, I knew that I needed to take off. As soon as I got home, though, I sent Pee Play an email saying that I hoped they would consider making this a monthly or semi-regular event. We sure could use use a little happy disco action in the community right now, and next time, I'll be better prepared to stay until the last track plays.

Event Review: Paradise All-Night Disco Party at Mezzanine

After a quick couple drinks at The Cinch to celebrate Juanita Fajita's birthday, the boyfriend and I headed out to the Paradise All-Night Disco Party at Mezzanine to meet up with our friends Jovino and Mermaid, two dedicated disco junkie DJs. The party didn't convert me to actually liking disco, which I still consider to be, at best, nostalgia music, but it was a fun, light-hearted time that did showcase some of our local DJs like Robot Hustle and Bus Station John in their element and putting some forth of their best efforts that I have heard so far.

Judging from the line when we arrived, and the fact that the coat check "sold out," Paradise was obviously the party of choice for most of San Francisco's clubbers. It was definitely crowded at 12.30 when Escort came on to perform, but there was still plenty of room to dance, and the crowd was among the most easy-going I've run into in a while. They were also among the best-dressed; though there were some interpretations of classic disco with fros, shades, and leisure jackets that bordered on the tragic, there were plenty of other party-goers who decided that disco fashion could have its own contemporary interpretation, as long as it was bright and sparkely. I saw and talked to a fair number of gay scenesters, including Leo Herrera, Dee Jay Pee Play (who told me he had just been reading about the original New York disco scene that morning and was feeling completely high from this re-creation of it), and Marke B. of the Bay Guardian, but overall the crowd was pretty mixed; I would have liked to have seen a few more gay boys, but I enjoyed the diversity of the scene, consisting as it did of people who seemed much more focused on having a good time than about how they were going to pick up.

The music was better than I expected, but there were also moments when the campy kitsch aspect of tracks like "Funkytown" (as the boyfriend said later, "there's no excuse for Funkytown") had the effect of bringing me out of whatever un-selfconscious enjoyment I was having and making me think that I had wandered into Polly Esther's Culture Club. The DJs in the main room did a technically OK job of mixing it together; there were some glitches, but some consideration also needs to be made for the fact that these tracks weren't constructed for mixing, and there's often so much treble and just plain noise in their mastering that you practically need an audio engineering degree to figure out how to put them together. I realized that this is one of the things about classic disco that bothers me, and why I sometimes rather like the newer interpretations of it from artists like Lindstrom or Prinz Thomas - the old stuff just sounds sonically bad. I think this is also why I don't really like dancing to it; though you could argue that its "the original dance music," I have a lot harder time finding the beat that I like, since the bass component is often muddied up and buried under the high-end of horns and strings.

Escort, the 18-piece disco orchestra from Brooklyn, put on a great but seemingly short show - they started a half hour late, and I don't think they were on the stage for more than half an hour. All I can say is, any band that has both a string and horn section is worth checking out to see how they bring it all together, and Escort was super tight.

My big surprise for the evening was Bus Station John's set in the upper room. First, BSJ has really tightened up on his mixing since I heard him last; this time he was even wearing headphones. Rather than trying to deal with the multitude of issues around mixing disco, he took the simple approach of just making sure everything started and stopped on a beat at the beginning and end of it a measure, and it all went together very well with a sustained energy. His programming was also much better than in the main room; there's no question that the man really knows his stuff when it comes to the rare groove disco, and his selections on this night, in that space with that crowd, made it all sound very fresh. I realized that, taken out of the context of a gay club, where disco feels like regressive nostalgia for the pre-AIDS era, it was much easier for me to get into it, tired though I was, because I could just take it as fun dance music, rather than being thrown into critical reflections on what it means for that music to be played in that kind of scene. It's still not my first choice for dance music, and it will always rile up the punk in me, and the contarian Futurist who believes that the present should be about the future, not the past (wow, that's deep), but BSJ's set made me realize that there are ways in which I can enjoy this music as long as it's not coming with too much baggage or reactionary statements about contemporary dance culture attached to it. So, good job Bus Station John, you got this cranky critic to change his mind just a little bit on something.

We left around 2.30, having stayed rather longer than I thought we would. Though there were moments in which Paradise felt just a bit too campy for me to take it as anything more than a rather safe excuse for otherwise conservative San Franciscans to dress up and "party," there were also moments where I wished that the vibe engendered over the course of the night, one that was sexy, fun, and smiling, could be brought as easily to other parties that feature contemporary dance music.

Death to Disco

Death to Disco. If there is any trend in contemporary gay culture that I wish would dry up and blow away, it's the resurrection of the moldering corpse of disco. Look at the biggest alternative parties in the city, like Bus Station John's The Rod, and you'll see that shambling vampire sucking the life out of any spark of originality in the gay club scene. For the DJs who spin it, it's emblematic of a nostalgic age when being gay was fabulous and crazy and everybody was into the party-party lifestyle, or, in other words, t's emblematic of gay culture before AIDS, when you could go into any bath-house and get laid and not worry about the consequences - because we all know that's the height of gay club culture.

Death to disco; it makes the past seem like the only time when it was fun to be gay, when parties could be sexy, when we exercised some creative power in the world. Disco is existential bad faith.

Death to disco; it holds us back from being anything except caricatures, freezing our cultural identities in an era when most of us didn't even know we were gay yet. Is this the reason we so willingly embrace it, because it holds out a ghost to us as something real and substantial, a way to think about ourselves when we've become too lazy to create anything new?

Death to disco; it makes for lazy DJs, ones who don't have to think about what they're playing because it's all already been vetted for them, ones who think they can bypass essential skills because that's how they did it "back then," ones who are more focused on the rarities in their collections than trying to uncover something new and interesting. Show me a DJ who only plays disco, and I'll show you a DJ who really isn't trying.

Death to disco; dancers aren't reacting to the music, they're reacting to their own associations to it. Spin a track that no one's ever heard, that has no lyrics, and if they dance, it's because something in the music itself moves them. Spin a disco track and they're dancing because they've been conditioned to do so, dancing that becomes the embodiment of camp irony rather than real emotion.

Death to disco; the gay dance scene will never go anywhere until DJs start taking chances and playing contemporary music, engaging in the real work of digging through what's out there and finding ways to use it to bring a dancefloor together. The mission of the gay club DJ should be to find what exists in contemporary culture and dance music, think about how it can relate to a gay sensibility, and then put it all together in a coherent vision of a gay club experience. Which, when you think about it, is what gay DJs in the 1970s and 80s were doing, not rehashing something that had already been digested for them. Do we want pre-digested baby food, or do we want to cook for ourselves?

Death to Disco; we need a new, joyous, ecstatic, utopian vision for ourselves, not a threadworn hand-me-down. Drive the stake through the heart of the disco vampire, it only sucks away our psychic energy.

Death to disco, death to disco, death to disco.

Black Rock Roller Disco

I'm firmly of the opinion that the only time you should ever listen to disco is on roller skates. Fortunately, the Black Rock Roller Disco can provide both, and even throw in projections from such roller disco classics as Xanadu and Roller Boogie. At a recent fundraiser the BRRD held at CellSpace for SF Indiefest they ran out of skates by 10PM and there was a line of 20something hipster kids halfway down the block outside at 11. The BRRD will certainly be having more events as the Burning Man fundraiser season gets going, and there may even be a chance to check them out in Golden Gate Park or at the Embarcadero. Bring a bottle of the stuff you would have smuggled into the roller rink and relive the halcyon days of knee socks and feathered hair.
(An interesting Chronicle article on the BRRD from 2003.)