A New Substack About Bay Area Rock 'N' Roll, From 1997-2014
For free? Yesiree.
Once in a rare while, an identifiable musical moment happens in one place. First wave punk in London. Jamaica’s brief 1960s Rocksteady years. Mid-century New York jazz. The late-70s around CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City. Early ’90s Seattle during what got labeled Grunge. People call these moments “a scene.” To me, it’s a community having a collective, creative moment. My new Substack, Play It Strange, tells the story of the glorious noise that San Francisco’s rock ‘n’ roll community made between 1997 and 2014.
Sic Alps, Thee Oh Sess, Ty Segall, The Fresh & Onlys—these bands often get labeled “garage rock,” and this era the “garage revival.” Instead, I call it good guitar music. Beyond garage, this special, fleeting period of time also included Bay Area originals like The Mantles, The Mallard, The Sandwitches, Kelley Stoltz, Grass Widow, and, via Los Angeles, Tim Presley’s White Fence.
You can sign up to hear their stories over at Play It Strange, for free.
Inspired by oral histories like Legs McNeil’s Please Kill Me and Steve Miller’s Detroit Rock City, this story is a collage made from existing band interviews and articles, spliced together with narration, and mixed with some original interviews I did, too.
Play It Strange will initially publish as chapters, told chronologially, to function as an ebook, but you can skip around to the bands you love first, if you want.
If you read Alive in the Nineties, you might dig this, too.
It’s the story of wild house shows and evictions. It’s the story of people who can barely play drums playing moldy drums pulled from the sewage. It’s the story of super creative people spending their time making music while working low-paying jobs in one of the country’s most beautiful and busted up cities. It’s the story of scrappy Gen Xers and Millennials running their own record labels like Castle Face, Wizard Mountain, Dial Records, and Make a Mess, labels who embody the DIY ethos as much as Sub Pop or first wave punk bands ever did—possibly more. It’s the story of being young in California.
During every decade since the psychedelic ’60s, the Bay Area has produced popular and influential bands: The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Sly and the Family Stone, Dead Kennedy’s, The Dave Brubeck Quartet, Faith No More, Flipper, Blue Cheer, The Mummies, Flamin’ Groovies, Crime, the Vince Guarldi Trio, to name a few. By 2009, Bay bands were creating the most exciting guitar music in the world.
In 2009, Thee Oh Sees released their classic, genre-defining album Help alongside a weird, jangly recording called Dog Poison.
The Fresh & Onlys released their beautiful gothic Grey-Eyed Girl.
After playing as a one-man-band, 22-year old Ty Segall put out the catchy, stripped down Lemons, which functioned as the enduring statement of so-called 21st century garage rock, whether Segall related to the label or not.
Noise pop band Sic Alps were between albums, but the previous year they’d released their full-length U.S. EZ, which remains one of the community’s high-water marks.
Grass Widow released their propulsive self-titled debut on San Francisco’s Make A Mess Records.
The Sandwitches released their haunting, spare debut How To Make Ambient Sadcake on local Turn Up Records, and Oakland’s Shannon and the Clams fused surf, pop and ’60s girl group harmonies on their debut I Wanna Go Home.
From there, these Bay Area musicians kept topping themselves, year after year, until the second Tech Boom atomized the community and sent many, though not all of them, to make music elsewhere.
The Bay is a dynamic region defined by cataclysmic shifts, from earthquakes and fires to economics, so these musicians’ creative lives only lasted a brief time here. But before they moved on, they put another California decade on the map of international culture. Some were our Grateful Dead and Blue Cheer—maybe even our Chocolate Watchband.
The title Play It Strange comes from the title of The Fresh & Only’s album. It’s too perfect a phrase not to borrow. It’s also a perfect album.
This ebook-type-thing is meant to do for these bands what Mark Yarm did for Grunge in Everybody Loves Our Town, Jon Wiederhorn and Katherine Turman did for metal in Louder Than Hell, and Mike McGonigal did for Galaxie 500 in Temperature’s Rising. Photos, live footage, set lists, art and posters will energize the text.
What musicians did in SF is really special, and I think their stories are important enough to share. Ultimately, I hope my oral history-like love letter leads people back to what matters most and what cannot be explained: the music.
Did I mention it’s free?
XO,
AG
Very excited to read and follow this!