The history of San Francisco’s club scene

The history of San Francisco’s club scene

9 January, 2008 | 9.15AM

• Section: Music News
• Written by: PhilG

Howdy, Beatportal! I’m Phil G., the blogger behind the SFScene blog, and now I’ll be posting about the San Francisco scene here as well. 

Over my next several posts I’ll be giving you a look at the scenes I know best – psychedelic trance, techno, Burning Man, and the gay scene – but first I wanted to give you a sense of our overall vibe.

Fifteen years ago the scene here was pretty much what you see in the movie Groove, with underground parties in the derelict industrial zones in South of Market (SoMa), free day parties with hundreds of candy ravers thrown by record stores like F-8 or Skills at the Golden Gate Park bandshell, and collectives like the Consortium for Creative Consciousness, St. John’s Divine Rhythm Society and Koinonea looking at parties as ways of bringing like-minded creative souls together to change the world.

That scene is now largely gone; club nights have taken over from warehouse raves, bumpers are more common than pills and doses, and parties are more about the camera flash and being included in a MySpace gallery than they are about experiments in utopian imagination.

At big clubs like 1015 Folsom and The EndUp you have to endure being frisked at the door, and bottle service separates the plebes from the swells.

Some places are better than others, and there are still crews, mostly associated with Burning Man, who can bring that old-skool vibe, but the tenor of the party scene here has changed significantly in the eight years I’ve been associated with it.

There are two main reasons for this: first, the dot com boom and bust, and, second, the Great Club Crackdown of 2000, when anti-rave hysteria hit here just as hard as it did over the rest of the country.

In 1999 thousands of young people flooded the city looking for jobs in the emerging web industry, creating a city filled with young people who were rolling in dough and ready to party.

As a consequence rents shot through the roof, driving many of the artists and slackers out of the city, and developers decided to start turning those derelict industrial spaces in SoMa into “live-work lofts.”

Since SoMa is where the majority of the warehouse spaces and clubs were located – The Stud, The Eagle, The Hole in the Wall, 1015 Folsom, The EndUp, SoMarts, DNA Lounge, Club Six, Anu Bar, and Fat City are all still in SoMa – this brought inevitable conflict.

Several clubs were closed down during this period, and warehouse spaces disappeared.

This conflict is still playing through today – the How Weird Street Faire, for example, had its last incarnation in May, thanks to a group of condo owners who felt it was too much of an inconvenience for them to deal with one day out of the year.

All that partying also attracted the attention of the police.

Both 1015 Folsom and The EndUp were threatened with the loss of their licenses for being perceived as drug dens.

The cops got wise to websites like SFRaves and used them to bust undergrounds, and legitimate events were unable to get permits.

The San Francisco Late Night Coalition was formed in response to this (there’s a great history of all this on their website), and was successful in putting together the Entertainment Commission as an office of the City government to handle the regulation of clubs and the permitting of events.

But the damage had been done; the back of the underground scene had been broken, putting the focus of the scene back onto the clubs.

Then there was the dot com crash, followed by September 11 and the war in Iraq.

Times were hard then; everybody I knew was looking for work or just scraping by, and nobody was really thinking about partying beyond buying some bud and some beer and hanging out at an apartment.

There was a reaction, too, against “techno” music, which was associated with the worst aspects of the dot com boom, so parties were more likely to be about indie rock or 80s hits than anything you’d mix together.

In the past couple years there’s been an upswing in the party scene; breaks, minimal, and electro have emerged as the predominant sounds (though house still holds powerful sway here) and a few smaller clubs, where the vibe is a bit more intimate and the overall attitude is a bit chiller, have emerged as the best places to hear them.

Money is still a big factor, and some nights feel like nothing but a shakedown, but there are also plenty of nights with $5 covers and strong $4 drinks where you can get your groove on, and underground collectives are becoming more active again.

Utopian dreamers seem to be way outnumbered by Vice fashion wannabes, but then you’ll find out that the go-go boy is getting his PhD in botany and everybody seems potentially much more interesting.

In my posts here I’ll tell you about my experiences going out, what I’ve heard and what I’ve seen, and hopefully give you the flavor of the scene, some ideas for what you might want to check out when you’re in town, and some of the music that’s being produced locally. 

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