With its picturesque hills and quaint cable cars, its foggy bay and idyllic Golden Gate Park, San Francisco doesn’t immediately seem like an “industrial” city. Yet the downtown area south of Market Street was full of inexpensive lofts formerly used for light manufacturing, and the “industrial element” of repurposing these spaces for artistic activity was “a big part of San Francisco culture,” says Jacobs. San Francisco ranked alongside Sheffield and London as a bastion of industrial music, too. Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle performed to huge crowds in San Francisco. TG even played their last gig at Kezar Pavilion in 1981.
The city was home to the unofficial fifth member of TG, Monte Cazazza, a performance artist and renegade researcher of all things aberrant and unwholesome. He describes himself as an “outcast historian, a cultural mortician.” Cazazza, Factrix, and Mark Pauline from Survival Research Laboratories formed “a little scene,” according to Bergland. Together they staged a series of mixed-media extravaganzas that left audiences reeling. Instead of playing punk clubs like Mabuhay, Bergland says, “we wanted to make spectacles so people were aware this was an unusual event. The first one we did together was at the Kezar Pavilion. Monte made a big stainless-steel swastika spinning on an axis, handcuffed himself to it, and hung upside down.”
Mark Pauline wasn’t a musician but a sort of crackpot inventor who staged apocalyptic battles between robots he’d constructed. An alumnus of Eckerd College in Florida alongside DNA’s Arto Lindsay and Mars’ Mark Cunningham, Pauline participated in San Francisco’s first Punk Art Show in 1978 and made his debut solo performance with Machine Sex the following year. “When Survival Research Laboratories threw an event, it really was a spectacle,” says Jacobs. “It was like seeing a live movie. There was always this edgy element of danger because these machines were crude. Things would explode when they shouldn’t, or wouldn’t explode when they should!”
The most infamous multimedia shockfest staged by SRL, Cazazza, and Factrix—June 1981’s Night of the Succubus—involved Pauline making artificially animated animal corpses like the “rabot,” fashioned from metal, electrical wire, and rotting bunny. “We got all these meat parts and sewed them onto this robot,” Pauline recalled. “We used pig feet, pig hide, and a cow’s head and bolted it onto this little feller. It had a motor on it, and when you turned the motor on, it would just vibrate and shake like he was sick, like he maybe had a fever.” Christened Piggly Wiggly, the grotesque chimera could also turn its head and move its arms. “The last song of the night, we did a twenty-minute version of ‘Helter Skelter’ from The White Album, and it sounded like the soundtrack to World War Three,” recalls Bergland. “Mark had made these air guns out of eight-foot pipes, and he’d taken all these eighteen-inch steel bolts and sharpened them to a razor point. And they were shooting these darts at incredible velocity over the heads of the audience into Piggly Wiggly, who was being pulled over the audience’s head on a tether. After Piggly was full of darts, Joseph drilled out all his teeth, so the whole place was filled with cow-teeth dust. A few people got freaked out. For us it was just superdeep, darkest black humor.”
Factrix were engrossed by all things morbid and extreme. But there was also an otherwordly impulse in their music, a psychedelic yearning to jettison language and escape time, to “scramble thought patterns, break up the syntax,” as singer and lyricist Cole Palme put it. Bergland’s guitar was blatantly trippy, billowing up in gaseous arabesques that placed him in the tradition of West Coast acid rock and kosmische Krautrockers like Manuel Göttsching. “I don’t so much recall that we were tripping when we were making the music so much as we were tripping when we were performing,” chuckles Jacobs. Friends who “wanted to ensure an interesting musical experience for themselves” would ply the band with magic mushrooms. “Drugs weren’t really informing our sonic experiments on a daily basis, though,” says Bergland, citing both poverty and “a strong work ethic” as reasons. “The mystical part of Factrix was the same as Coltrane or any musician who’s trying to get to the place where the music is free. The sounds, they really did have a life of their own. We were really just following the sounds. We were disciples of feedback.”
“Disciples of feedback” would also be a good description of the band Chrome, who were tagged “industrial” but really were much closer to Throbbing Gristle’s original self-description as “post-psychedelic trash.” The band’s musical genius, Helios Creed—an LSD-gobbling Hendrix fiend who’d migrated from his native Hawaii to San Francisco just a little too late for psychedelia’s golden age—developed a guitar sound that was “acid” in both the corrosive and hallucinogenic senses of the word. It also sounded metallic, not in the sense of the heavy-metal genre so much as in the way that it conjured visions of twisted and torn car flesh.
The band was actually started by Damon Edge, who graduated from CalArts in Los Angeles, where he’d studied with Allen Kaprow, best known for pioneering “happenings” in the sixties. While at CalArts, Edge also dabbled in avant-garde composition, conducting tape experiments and making what he called “not quite right music,” some of which ended up on porn movie soundtracks. Chrome’s debut, The Visitation, was recorded in 1976, before Creed joined the band, and sounded like a belated West Coast trip band somewhere in the vicinity of Santana and Hot Tuna. When Creed arrived in 1977 to add his harshly treated guitar to Edge’s synth and science-fiction lyrics, Chrome made a quantum leap. They went from psychedelic Johnny-come-latelies to “making music for 1995,” as Edge put it.
A turning point in this process came when Creed heard Never Mind the Bollocks for the first time at Edge’s house. “I didn’t know what to think at first, but the more we listened to it, the more we got behind it. So we decided, ‘Wow, let’s be a punk band. Let’s cut our hair!’ Then Damon played me these whacked-out tape loops he’d made in art school and I was like, ‘Man, this is the best shit you’ve done. Let’s mix our punk shit with your weird acid shit. And let’s call ourselves ‘acid punk.’”
In punk DIY style, Chrome released their own records, but only out of necessity. After being rejected by local indie label Beserkley, Edge borrowed money from his wealthy parents and started his own label, Siren, in order to release 1978’s Alien Soundtracks (the first Chrome album with Creed). “All the early copies, the first three hundred or so, were pressed up by hand with a crank,” recalls Creed. “That was the cheapest way you could get records manufactured. And we glued the covers together ourselves.” Alien Soundtracks and its 1979 sequel, Half Machine Lip Moves, made Chrome cult figures, especially in Germany and the U.K.
Chrome called their sound “acid punk,” but “cyberpunk” would do just as nicely (indeed, one of the band members went by the name John L. Cyborg). It’s easy to imagine Chrome classics such as “Chromosome Damage,” “All Data Lost,” and “Abstract Nympho” as the cold-rush soundtrack for Neuromancer, the 1985 genre-defining cyberpunk novel by William Gibson, who a few years earlier actually wrote a short story entitled “Burning Chrome.” Edge and Creed were both science-fiction fanatics. But Creed says that the pair’s inspirations came more from movies than books, and leaned toward the space fantasy end of things, albeit with an apocalyptic slant. “When I was in Hawaii I saw a UFO hovering right over my head. That really influenced me. Me and Damon had all these theories about how you could be channeled by aliens. They could make music through you that wasn’t normal.”
Whether it was of extraterrestrial origin or not, Chrome’s music certainly sounded aberrant. “One of the first things people noticed was Chrome sounds like a paranoid acid trip,” says Creed. He explains that the punk edge to their reinvented acid rock came from grasping that “the reality of the psychedelic experience isn’t love and peace, it’s insanity. If you actually took LSD and listened to our records, the trip would get so whacked-out you’d start laughing. Funny-scary, we called it. The bad trip would turn into a good trip, because you’d already been to the most negative part of the universe.”
; The group Flipper set their controls for precisely this pitch-black void at the core of the cosmos. Surfing the music’s tidal wave of rubble and dregs, singers Bruce Lose and Will Shatter delivered lines such as “Ever wish the human race didn’t exist?” and “Feel so empty feel so old/Just waiting to feel the death like cold” with a strange exuberance. Flipper stared into the abyss only to hock a lugie into it.
Of all San Francisco’s postpunk groups, Flipper were the most punk, to the point of almost belonging to the hardcore scene. But their music was a little too dirgy to fit comfortably with that movement’s “loud fast rules” dogma. Musically, they had more in common with Public Image Ltd’s abstraction than the Dead Kennedys’ anthems. PiL and Flipper both aimed for a kind of visceral vanguard music, radical but not rarefied or pretentious. “We want to experiment with the music without being an art band,” Will Shatter told punk zine Maximumrocknroll. Like PiL, Flipper loved disco and funkateers like Rick James. “Sex Bomb,” Flipper’s big crowd-pleaser, was steeped in funk. In Flipper, the juggernaut basslines (played alternately by Lose and Shatter) served as melody-riffs, freeing up the guitarist to shower acid rain on the listener’s head. Like Keith Levene, guitarist Ted Falconi rarely played riffs or distinct power chords, just churned up distorted drone tones and writhing whorls of feedback.
Flipper actually secured the main support slot at PiL’s Bay Area show, a prestige gig given that Lydon’s band were at their absolute zenith as postpunk icons in May 1980. “I saw Bruce Lose at the PiL press conference in San Francisco that May,” says Joe Carducci, who coproduced the band’s debut single. “When they threw it open to questions from the audience, Bruce kept yelling, ‘What do you think of Flipper?’ The question was ignored! Bruce was just pranking it, but he was obsessed with Johnny Rotten.”
For all their sonic affinities with PiL, though, Flipper weren’t nearly as precious about what they did as Lydon’s lot. Their attitude is captured in the slogan “Flipper suffered for their art, now it’s your turn,” and in Falconi’s immortal quip “Flipper doesn’t want audiences with good taste, Flipper wants audiences that taste good.” Live, Flipper managed to combine frat party riotousness and audience confrontation. Lose remembers an occasion shortly after the birth of his son when he lugged three weeks’ worth of soiled diapers to a gig and pelted the audience. “The audience tended to throw them right back at the band. Our drummer, Steve DePace, got a dirty diaper in the face. The band thanked me a lot for that bright idea!”
“We tried to convey the irreverence and silliness Flipper projected onstage when we pulled together the live album Public Flipper Limited,” says Steve Tupper, who released the group’s records on his Frisco-based indie, Subterranean. Humor permeated even the most nihilistic Flipper songs such as “Nothing” and “Life Is Cheap.” “It was kind of extremely optimistic and extremely bleak at the same time,” says Tupper, pointing to the ambiguity of Will Shatter’s line “Life is the only thing worth living for,” which is delivered in a voice pitched exactly midway between cynical derision (at the sentiment’s fatuity) and desperate belief.
Flipper may have evolved into a sort of National Lampoon version of PiL, but originally they were founded by Ricky Williams, the singer of the Sleepers, a band some people regard as America’s own Joy Division. In his book Rock and the Pop Narcotic, Carducci described them as “what Joy Division might have developed into had they the balls.” Today he waxes fondly about the Sleepers’ “slow, minor-chord Gothic songs” and the “narcotic, spectral, jawdropping beauty” of guitarist Michael Belfer’s playing. Vocalist Williams was a mentally volatile, dysfunctional character, though. He gave Flipper its name, which was inspired by his finding a shark-ravaged dolphin on the beach while tripping on acid. But soon the rest of Flipper—hardly models of stability themselves—kicked him out and replaced him with Bruce Lose.
“In the early days, Flipper’s music was so abstract, a lot of people thought they were just improvising,” says Carducci. “Flipper’s the reason I bought a tape recorder. I taped all their early gigs because they were so evanescent at the start, you’d go, ‘Wow, that was a great gig but I can’t even remember any of it.’ And I don’t do any drugs!” This same impulse to document something vital but fleeting inspired Steve Tupper to found Subterranean. “There were all these bands in the San Francisco area and they weren’t getting recorded,” he recalls. “There was just one label really, 415, and they were doing New Wave pop stuff. The first Subterranean release was the SF Underground seven-inch EP with four different bands, including Flipper. The other three were all more conventional, straight-ahead punk. Flipper really stood out because they were totally different from anybody else in town.”
Tupper was an underground-culture veteran with a pedigree in late-sixties protest and community activism, including SDS campaigns against the Vietnam War, the Diggers, the People’s Park in Berkeley, organizing a 1970 citywide rent strike, and food co-ops. But he was never very involved in the musical side of the counterculture until punk took off in San Francisco. Tupper participated in New Youth—an “alternative nonprofit production company,” he says, designed to create places for bands to play that weren’t dependent on commercial club promoters—and helped to set up a local chapter of Rock Against Racism. Subterranean documented loads of local punk bands as well as San Francisco’s experimental fringe. Flipper, Factrix, Z’ev, and local synthpunk outfit Nervous Gender all appeared on Live at Target, a four-band live compilation that is the San Francisco counterpart to No New York.
Of all Subterranean’s groups, Flipper had the greatest impact. Released in 1981, Generic rocked like a wild party on the rim of the void, and 1984’s Gone Fishin’ pushed Flipper’s bass-grinding dirgepunk into more experimental zones. Stark and hypnotic, “The Lights, the Sound, the Rhythm, the Noise” is a kissing cousin to Joy Division’s “Transmission,” while the celestial maelstrom of “You Nought Me” swirls with Sun Ra keyboards, multitracked vocals, and pitch-bent sounds, like a demonic kaleidoscope where all the colors are shades of black. “When we were making Gone Fishin’, one evening nobody showed up but me,” recalls Lose. “So I laid down a huge number of extra tracks of sounds—fifty vocal tracks, piano work, percussion, clavinet, phasing effects. The next day, the guys flipped out and they were like, ‘We’ve got to take twenty-five of these voices out.’ But it was a lot of fun making that record.” By the closing track, “One by One,” Flipper sound like they’re smashing their way through the planet’s crust. “Will’s beating up his bass and trying to sound like the low rumbling surf, Ted is playing the psalm of the ocean, Steve’s drums are the waves crashing, and me, I’m singing the body of water,” says Lose, misty-eyed and mystical.
By 1985, though, the pace of Flipper’s hedonism was wearing the band down. Lose describes himself and Will Shatter as “polymorphic drug users, doing anything and everything.” Within a few years of Gone Fishin’, Shatter died from a heroin overdose and Flipper disintegrated. “Drugs did most of the San Francisco bands in quickly,” says Carducci. According to Helios Creed, drugs were also a factor in the breakup of Chrome. “Damon got introduced to heroin and I got introduced to speed. He became more introverted and agoraphobic, and I got the opposite. I was like, ‘This ain’t no good, I’ve got to put a band together and go tour.’”
San Francisco changed in the early eighties. The “belle epoque” Blaine L. Reininger wrote about began to fade. The dual assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk tolled the death knell for a whole era of liberalism. “Moscone was a Kennedy-like figure and Milk was the country’s first openly gay elected representative,” says Steve Brown. “It was a heavy blow. There was a very dark period after those killings. The energy was very heavy and negative. When the killer, this ex-cop Dan White, got off with such a light sentence based on his defense as being a family man under a lot of stress, there was an incredible outburst from the normally reserved gay community. A huge riot, dozens of burning police cars.” In
the eighties, under new mayor Dianne Feinstein, the city’s boho-friendly downtown was torn up for redevelopment. Speculators moved in and brand-new office buildings went up. By this point, Tuxedomoon were feeling the pull of Europe, where they found themselves treated like artists, playing professional theaters with proper dressing rooms. According to Brown, “We were touring Europe during the 1980 elections and Blaine joked to interviewers that if Reagan was elected we weren’t going back to America. And essentially this is what happened.”
Those who stayed in San Francisco found the music scene contracting and becoming less receptive to experimentation. Hardcore punk, based more in the suburbs, began to dominate. “San Francisco doesn’t really have an equivalent to Orange County or Long Beach, the strongholds of hardcore in Southern California,” says Tupper. “But as you go down the peninsula towards San Jose, or over the Berkeley hills to places like Walnut Creek, the sensibility does get more hardcore. And when hardcore took over, it was mostly a deterioration, less about people trying to do something different, more just trying to fit into a trend.” Says Lose, “In the early days, it wasn’t necessary for bands to play fast and loud. One night, you might see Factrix, Nervous Gender, and the Avengers on the same bill, three extremely different acts. But by the early eighties you’d go to a hardcore show and what you’d see is three hard-core bands.” According to Bond Bergland, “The really serious experimental people moved to New York.” After Factrix ground to a halt, Bergland quit San Francisco, eventually settling on the Lower East Side, where he formed the postindustrial cosmic rock outfit Saqqara Dogs.
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