Originally published in The Voice of San Francisco in August 2024
We Are The One: San Francisco Punk, 1970’s – 1980’s at the Haight Street Art Center
The Haight Street Art Center presents We are the One: San Francisco Punk, 1970’s – 1980’s, an exhibition of S.F. punk club posters and flyers, punk films, local punk music and 150 striking photographs of such bands/musicians as Crime, the Avengers, the Ramones, Devo, Mutants, Blondie, the Nuns, John Cale, Lou Reed, Nico, the Dead Kennedys, Sleepers, Flipper and may more. San Francisco Punk expert and former Rolling Stone West Coast music editor Michael Goldberg will be the curator for the city’s contributions to the punk rock scene.
A Radical Shift in Music Culture
The photographs, flyers and images from the punk rock era represent a moment in time when a match was lit to the past. Punk was an attempt at reinvention and an erasure of what came before, and that flavor of rebellion took on a unique form in the city of San Francisco where the 60’s psychedelic movement was such a large part of the local musical identity. The scene began at Mabuhay Gardens in North Beach, starting off as a Filipino restaurant and nightclub. As the owners worked with local music enthusiasts, punk bands were steadily booked in the mid-70’s. Word of mouth created a buzz and soon the club was packed with bands like The Dead Kennedys, The Contractions, Sid Terror’s Undead, the Tubes and Wall of Voodoo.
Artists United
Participants in We Are the One include Publisher V. Vale of Search & Destroy, Avengers singer/songwriter Penelope Houston, former Crime drummer/current filmmaker Henry Rosenthal, Target Video’s Joe Rees, filmmakers Liz Keim and Karen Merchant and many others. Rare punk club flyers and posters will be on display from Kareem Kaddah’s extensive collection.
“I was attracted (in the late ‘70s) to the performers’ DIY spirit, the explosion of talent, energy and creativity,” said the Search & Destroy magazine photographer who called herself Kamera Zie, and whose photos are in the exhibition. “It was urgent, raw, aggressively feminist, and anti-music biz.” Every night bands played in a spirit of camaraderie that was a celebration of alienation from the mainstream crashing into the in-the-moment immediacy and energy of punk music.
Among the many highlights of this exhibit are 22 stunning black-and-white photographs by Bruce Conner. Bruce Conner, one of the leading art figures in the bay area since the 1950’s, took photographs and documented the bay area scene beginning in late 1976. Conner’s avoidance of labels and unconventional appropriation of cultural fragments and media makes him hard to categorize in easy art historical terms, but the immediacy of his approach lended itself well to the punk scene. “In its own way, it (the Mabuhay scene) reminded me of the energy of the poets, artists, filmmakers, and dancers who had been characterized as the Beat generation in the 1950’s,” Conner said during a 2005 interview with journalist/publisher Mike Plante for his Cinemad magazine.
The Art Center, as a companion to the exhibition, will present a punk film night and panel on Friday September 6. “San Francisco’s First and Only Rock ‘n’ Roll Movie: Crime 1978” directed by Jon Bastian will be screened, along with the rarely seen unfinished “In the Red”, a documentary shot in 1977 and 1978 by Liz Keim and Karen Merchant. After the screening there will be a panel discussion of the films and the scene featuring V. Vale, Henry Rosenthal, Jon Bastian, Liz Keim, Karen Merchant, Michael Goldberg and Penelope Houston.
Additional Music Themed Galleries
Check out more punk photographs and fashion throughout the gallery spaces, including Erwan Illian’s punk photographs from the East Coast, Punk Majesty’s upcycled San Francisco-based fashion, and Abnormal Couture’s one-of-a-kind vintage deadstock 1980’s boots. Don’t miss Jukebox: The Music Photographs of Michael Goldberg, a selection of almost 40 photos drawn from Goldberg’s new book, Jukebox: Photographs 1967-2023 running concurrently with We Are the One.