Book review #3: Alternative Voices
Missing Beats? When I came to review a new punk photography exhibition in San Francisco, I wondered where the verse had gone. Then a child of perfect pedigree turned up
Alternative Voices: 1980s Punk San Francisco – Photographs by Jeanne Hansen, Interviews by Jonah Raskin (JMH, 2021)
WHEN I laid my hands on a new and classy catalogue issued to accompany the premiere of a significant photographic exhibition called Alternative Voices: 1980s Punk San Francisco, I immediately wondered how far the earlier artistic explosions in the city had left their mark on this later expression of Bay Area cultural autonomy.
The physical show, which opens on October 9th in the Jewett Gallery of the city’s Main Library, is built on two components: principally the fine black-and-white photographic work of Jeanne Hansen and supported by interviews conducted with members of the scene by leading counterculture commentator Jonah Raskin. But the catalogue feels like a more than adequate distillation of the thrillingly edgy essence of this particular moment.
As I glared at these beautifully stark images of this pulsating punk milieu, as I consumed the conversations gathered, I found myself contemplating to what degree the poetry community of the 1950s – such an influence on the psychedelic crowd of the 1960s – had continued to touch the players in the psychodrama of the 1980s.
Had the Beat Generation cascade which had so impacted Garcia and Weir, Kantner and Slick, Country Joe and Barry Melton, Janis and Dino Valenti, run out of steam by the time these photographs were being taken? As importantly, to what extent had this later punk moment rejected the messages and manifesto of acid rock?
I found small traces of these various pasts: some of the voices Raskin has recorded for this venture mentioned verse and spoken word as part of the broader cultural canvas of this period but I think a strong sense of fresh starts, clean slates, starting anew, permeates this subsequent punk era.
I’d been in Manchester myself in the mid-1970s as punk’s white hot anti-technology had burnt brilliantly. By the start of the next decade, I was studying in Liverpool and the spider’s network of new wave acts – Echo the Bunnymen, the Teardrop Explodes, Big in Japan – were actually desperate to forget the earlier glories of Merseybeat. The Beatles and co were just too great a millstone to carry on those junior shoulders; to survive and thrive, they had to become amnesiacs about the Cavern and its stellar alumni.
It appears from the evidence in the catalogue that a similar mood hung over the new faces, the new activists, here in San Francisco. In the notes, there is barely a mention of a band from the classic Dead/Airplane/Quicksilver epoch. Only the Sons of Champlin seem to earn a passing namecheck in Raskin’s exchanges. Plus, the peace and love banners had been displaced with expressions of anger and calls for justice, as Technicolor pipedreams of utopia dissolved in a cry for anarchy and a resistance to capitalism.
Above…Political punks crash President Reagan’s dinner for the Queen of England, Golden Gate Park, 1983
But back to poetry: here in the city of ‘Howl’, of McClure and Snyder, of Ferlinghetti and Brautigan, of Kaufman and Meltzer, hadn’t the rhyme, the stanza, the haiku, sustained a place within vibrant street and club politics of the 1980s amid its inter-racial, inter-sexual, cross-cultural interchanges?
Raskin told me: ‘My impression is that City Lights [bookstore] did not have much of a connection with music in the Bay Area. [Shop owner] Ferlinghetti often dismissed the 1960s counterculture people as aliterate – able to read but didn't read, listened to music and watched movies instead. There is some truth to his POV. Short books – like Brautigan's and Vonnegut's – were popular.’ So, a little unpromising for my own esoteric enquiry.
There was, though, more of a glimmer of possibility when I spoke to poet Marc Zegans, who hung out with the punk crew in its heyday. He revealed: ‘I was there, slam dancing at the Mabuhay. I don't know about specific connections between the two cultures – literary and musical – beyond some simple facts: Ginsberg thought highly of the Dead Kennedys, City Lights was up the street, intersection of Broadway and Columbus from the Mab, which was the main punk club in the city. The Mab was further down Broadway. Punks used to drift in there, and some probably worked at the bookstore from time to time.’
And then, and then, what should I spot among Hansen’s photographic captions but a description of a backstreet portrait of a band called the Appliances. And who should be staring a little obliquely, a touch petulantly, to the camera but group member Dominique di Prima, a name that instantly sent recognition bells ringing.
It could be argued that no one quite carried the Beat bloodline forward more potently than this young woman, daughter of the great poet Diane di Prima and that awesome politico, playwright and critic Amiri Baraka, the lovechild, in the terms of the day, of a pair of the most important radical writing voices of the post-war age. Here was Dominique, later a noted radio personality broadcasting on African-American issues, transporting her parents’ remarkable spirits into a new time and place: 1982 and Mission Back Alley.
Above…The Appliances, Mission Back Alley, 1982. Dominique di Prima is on the left of the line-up
This was also the offbeat setting in which this exhibition’s talented camerawoman found her expressive oeuvre. Hansen comments: ‘As a young woman living and working in the Mission, where I explored my own artistic, social, political and sexual attitudes – and reframed my identity – the punk era was revolutionary. Looking back, it seems essential to me for every youth movement to push back the boundaries and aim to keep society honest. I hope this show, which provides voices and faces from the past, will help inspire others to find their own means of self-expression.’
Her images frame musicians, artists, groups, clubs, street scenes, demonstrations: a compelling monochrome collage of a decade in which San Francisco was dealing with a stream of political and social crises, from the very recent murder of gay city official Harvey Milk to the creeping terror of AIDS, from simmering racial issues and the challenges of drug use and abuse to fundamental questions of affordable housing in a modern metropolis.
These vérité snapshots, reminiscent of Robert Frank in their unremitting honesty but with a zappy air of instantaneous reportage, help to form a striking survey of the acts – the Looters, No Alternative, Big City, Arkansaw Man, Frightwig, the Mutants, Patsy Cline and the Memphis G-Strings, the Flamin’ Groovies, the Dead Kennedys – and venues – Tool and Die and the Offensive, Temple Beautiful, Sound of Music, the Farm, the Mabuhey and I-Beam – which brought the acerbic ideology of punk to the city’s ever-diverse population over a frenetic 10 year span.
Fascinatingly, one of the names which does crop up really quite often in the Raskin chats with punk scenesters is that of San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen. Among followers of the Beat Generation, Caen damaged his own reputation when, 1958, he adopted the word beatnik – a conflation of Beat and the Russian suffix ‘nik’ – linking the North Beach poets to the Soviet satellite Sputnik and demonising Ginsberg and his gang in the process. His lively and opinionated reporting of the city beat, specifically its popular cultural happenings, continued through the punk episode and on until his death in 1997.
Notes: Alternative Voices: 1980s Punk San Francisco can be seen in the Jewett Gallery of the city’s Main Library until January 23rd, 2022
Jonah Raskin’s novel Beat Blues: San Francisco, 1955 is published by Coolgrove Press next month. It was reviewed in Rock and the Beat Generation on September 27th, 2021. The writer was also the subject of an interview, ‘Blues and Beats, fact and fiction' on August 3rd, 2021
Marc Zegans is the subject of our latest 'Beat Soundtrack'. In the fourth episode in the series, published on October 4th, 2021, the California-based poet explores his own relationship to Beat writing and the music he associates with that literary idea