Dylan from Glitterdome house, making a CD cover for their band Potsie (26 April 2012). 2 See for example Gibson-Graham Citation2008; Eriksen Citation2010: 160, 161, 201, 202, 216; Whiteley Citation2011; Giles Citation2014; Tausig Citation2014; Dean Citation2015; Otten Citation2015; Graham Citation2016; Kirsch Citation2017. The history of San Francisco is deep-rooted in its bond with the Black community. San Francisco is a westward-looking port city, a city that at the time was 'big enough' but not manic like New York City or . Specialties: About the San Francisco Symphony: The San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas present more than 220 concerts each year from September through July in a variety of genres, with SFS musicians performing classical concerts, holiday favorites, summer pops events, free outdoor concerts, special series for families and children, plus presentations of visiting guest artists and . From the greatest jazz clubs in California to stages that hosted the debut of today's rock icons, San Francisco is home to countless live music venues filled with memorable performances and artist legacies. Marx Citation1887). As regards music, these processes emerged somehow organically through social and economic relationships established between DIY musicians and organisers. Learn the dynamic history of San Francisco's Angel Island, the gateway for approximately 175,000 Chinese immigrants in the 1900s. Thats awesome! For example, the aesthetic and cultural notions of quality and individualism still remain present to some degree within American DIY scenes (i.e. To be able to tour, bands rely on the help of local participants (who organise shows for them, in their houses, or elsewhere). Appadurai uses the term tournaments of value to refer to those, often calculative, movements of paths and diversions that actors instigate in order to negotiate the value of circulating commodities (Citation1986: 20, 21). For example, in the Glitterdome house in NE Portland, these included sharing, borrowing, and exchanging items, goods and even spaces between houses and participants, be it food, free box items (clothes, shoes, books), tapes, or music equipment. First, engagement with DIY practices and worlds often results in value and status assertions that are employed by DIY participants to establish their cultural authenticity and social distinctions within their scenes and in relation to outsiders. 18 It is important to note that DIY economy in itself is not a homogeneous system, but consists of various alternative and non-market economies. A whole society, with its own economic . DIY economics of reciprocity, collective participation, and DIY practice, DIY tensions and transitions between reciprocal and capitalist economic systems, https://doi.org/10.1080/17411912.2023.2180050, https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/the-paradox-of-life-affirming-death-traps/, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gBcxR8NPUw, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf, Medicine, Dentistry, Nursing & Allied Health. Your guide to one of San Francisco's biggest LGBTQ community events outside of Pride. Moreover, some venues and houses often collectively organised festivals and larger multi-venue events. In jazz it had been exuberantly pioneered by numerous musicians. When I give you $5 for a record, I am exchanging something of value (my money/effort) for something else of value (your record). However, the poles of reciprocal vs capitalist economy (and use vs exchange value), as reflected also in the organisation of shows (egalitarian vs hierarchical), and in the DIY aesthetics (support vs quality), are not so much in opposition as they are in dialogue with each other within the American DIY scenes and communities (as a dialogue between the forms of emergent and residual practices, respectively). We had this idea that it was a three-way tie [also the title of one of their albums] and not some hierarchy or aristocracy of guitar. 5 Safe space policy, common within American DIY communities, usually refers to a spatial policy through which DIY participants endeavour to create spaces free of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, ableism, ageism, and any forms of violence or oppression. Reviews on 80'S Music Clubs in San Francisco, CA - Barracuda '80's Decade Dance Party, Cat Club, Monroe, Bootie Mashup: SF, Butter, New Wave City, Bimbo's 365 Club, Club Gossip, Raven Bar, Oasis Steve Miller (who formed the Steve Miller Band) was from Wisconsin, by way of Chicago and New York City while bandmate Boz Scaggs originally called Texas home. And I feel the same about house shows. When I asked what else they do communally, they mentioned collective chore charts, monthly cleaning days, and their communal craft supplies (sowing stations, craft materials, collage materials), which other DIY participants could borrow from them or use in Glitterdomes collective spaces (living room, kitchen, front porch, or backyard). Second, the meanings and goals of these practices are often contested and constantly negotiated by different DIY individuals and groups, as they oscillate between hierarchical and egalitarian, individualist and collectivist, and pragmatic and idealist orientations. do-it-together (seattle diy.com Citation2009: 1). American DIY shows similarly function as enclaved zones and rituals of decomoditization. Gibson-Graham (Citation2008) lists some of these diverse economies/markets. All these different kinds and degrees of reciprocity, as the examples above evidence, are interwoven areas of social, cultural, and economic activity that mutually engender each other, and thus also provide a material basis for the local and translocal DIY scenes across the US and internationally. It features a house Hammond B-3 organ, played by the areas best organists, along with a huge record collection. In Jennings account and Figure 5 we see how commodities such as records are diverted from the path of capitalist exchange and voided of market value during DIY shows to be transformed into objects of personal and collective use value (cf. The US DIY communities I encountered during my fieldwork, most of which at least partially identify as DIY communities and scenes, utilised a DIY approach partly for ideological purposes, as they strived for creative and social autonomy. ABSTRACT. Jimi Hendrix lived in San Francisco in the 1960s and became one of the iconic musical talents of the Summer of Love. Because there is no place for local bands to play, or what else [sic]. Both Grace Slick (singing with Jefferson Airplane) and Joplin (singing initially with Big Brother & the Holding Company) gained a substantial following locally and, before long, across the country.[17]. In this way, they consciously acknowledge that DIY shows can exist both outside the capitalist system (as temporarily enclaved rituals of decomoditization), and at the same time, within the larger capitalist regime of value.Footnote19 DIY shows thus simultaneously counter as well as co-constitute a capitalist economic system.Footnote20. A place known to have shows go late into the night, welcoming artists who have finished shows at other venues, the Boom Boom Room is a laid-back venue that attracts a younger crowd looking to dance the night away. there is a diversity of possible cultural and aesthetic effects existing within DIY scenes, which are not necessarily derived from DIY material relations) while not all bad, weird, and different sounds necessarily result from DIY practices of reciprocity (i.e. (Personal communication, 28 February 2012). Enjoy a show and a cocktail at B-Side, the lounge in the SFJAZZ Center. See international artists in state-of-the-art auditoriums or local artists in historic cocktail lounges, unique dive bars, iconic restaurants, modern art galleries, and off-the-beaten path record stores and bookstores. The various shows of the tour were put together by friends of the band, friends of their friends, and by people for whom the band had previously organised shows in Portland. Collective reciprocity is also manifested in the structure of shows, where DIY organisers and performers often reject the hierarchical notion of openers and headliners (Verbu Citation2021: 219). Jennings Citation1998), At a certain level if you are accepted into a community, you shouldnt make more than a liveable wage [through DIY-related small businesses]. 11 See, for example, Forns, Lindberg, and Sernhede Citation1995; Berger Citation1999: 67; Toynbee Citation2000: 111, 112; Moore Citation2014a. Permission will be required if your reuse is not covered by the terms of the License. Regarding the musical side, it is pertinent to examine the types of association between the three main actors in these DIY arrangements: venues/organisers, bands/performers, and audiences/participants. 14 See Baumgarten Citation2012: 169; Threadgold Citation2017; Benham Citation2019; Martin-Iverson Citation2019. While it is possible to see a connection in given examples between the DIY socio-economic relations of reciprocity and the DIY ideas and aesthetics of support that reject the dominant values of quality (good vs bad performers), it is also important to extend the analysis beyond the simplistic (homologic) interpretations of the cause-and-effect links between material (socio-economic) and cultural (aesthetic) levels (cf., Hesmondhalgh Citation1999: 36; Toynbee Citation2000: 1105). Additionally, there are numerous Jazz Festivalsthroughout the Bay Area during warmer months. 3099067 With a bar built in 1949, Club Deluxe harkens back to San Franciscos live music scene of the 1950s and 60s. DIY ethics entail making things oneself, and thus obviating the need for commercial and institutional channels of production. For instance, several scholars argue there is a tendency for alternative communities from 1960s countercultures to contemporary neo-bohemians to reject the capitalist system in symbolic terms while simultaneously depending upon it materially (Braunstein and Doyle Citation2002: 102; Lloyd Citation2005). Taylor Citation2016: 15476). DIY zines, comic books, and blogs from the whole US).Footnote3 This particular DIY culture is an outgrowth of late 1970s British and US punk culture, which later expanded into more transnational and heterogeneous scenes that today also encompass aspects of indie rock, experimental music and certain singer-songwriters.Footnote4 It also has ties to other similar formations, most particularly 1960s counterculture, and various historical and contemporary anarchist, feminist, and sustainability movements (cf. It would be make-shift [spaces]like, divide room in half, [] cubbies that people are living in, and so this house it supposed to be for a couple, like a small studio apartment, [but] divided into like eight or nine [liveable] spacesand just insane things like that. Moreover, some houses were more oriented towards drinking and partying than the needs of hosted performers, and sometimes the provision of meals, event promotion, or collection of donations were neglected (see also Makagon Citation2015: 13741). However, it is also possible to identify more hierarchical and individualist practices and outcomes in contemporary DIY music-making (Verbu Citation2021: 189; see below). February is Black History Month that celebrates the contributions and present-day existence of a community that remain unapparelled in the collective victory of humankind. And it might be to somebody else, but just to sort of keep the energy moving. Culton and Holtzman Citation2010; Hannerz Citation2015: 128). Nevertheless, the system of general reciprocity also keeps these DIY boundaries open, as it works in a seemingly non-obligatory way, in which DIY individuals themselves decide how and when these debts should be reciprocated. 16 See, for example, Hesmondhalgh Citation1997, Citation1999; Gibson-Graham Citation2008; Eriksen Citation2010: 160, 161, 201, 202, 216; Giles Citation2014; Tausig Citation2014; Dean Citation2015; Otten Citation2015; Graham Citation2016; Taylor Citation2016: 15476; Kirsch Citation2017; Simoni Citation2019; Rawitsch Citation2020. Oakes Citation2009: 88; emphasis added), I would book a lot ofwouldnt say bad shows, but bad bands, cause I just wanted to have a rule of, like, any kind of music is allowed to be played here, because, when I was a teen in high school [] it was so hard to get a show. I therefore also employ both critical and constructive approaches to the alternative DIY economies in the US. The light and charming One Hundred Men and a Girl, from 1937, starred Deanna Durbin as the daughter of an unemployed trombonist and the conductor Leopold Stokowski, whose character almost accidentally finds himself conducting an orchestra of the unemployed. It was associated with the counterculture community in San Francisco, particularly the Haight-Ashbury district, during these years. He refers to the circulation of commodities in the dominant regime as paths, and to divergences from such paths to the alternative regimes of value as diversions. The tactics that shape this alternative economic model (reciprocity, collective action, DIY methods) permeate DIY scenes on all levels: cultural, economic, and political; from music organisation, music performance, and sound aesthetics, to everyday social practices and interaction. autonomy]. Catch a show at one of San Francisco's legendary music venues, gems with a rich history and a lineup boasting fresh local artists and music's biggest names. When I asked Rick Ele, who used to be one of the most active DIY organisers in Davis and Sacramento between late 1990s, and early 2010s, about the perception of making it within the DIY scenes in the US, he replied: I mean, a lot of people that don't know about underground music, they just think that every band is trying to make it. In turn, these decomoditized objects come to symbolise values of DIY creativity, independence, and community, whilst constructing boundaries of cultural (DIY) distinction and authenticity. 1 Free boxes are often found in DIY and punk houses, or on the sidewalks next to them. While it is still a great spot to enjoy cheap beer in a low-key setting, the Saloon is now best known as an intimate venue to enjoy some of the best jazz and blues in the city. Furthermore, Cometbus also identifies contradictions within American DIY scenes regarding the coexistence of both alternative (reciprocal) and dominant (capitalist) systems within the same communities and scenes, where DIY individuals and bands often not only engage in collective and reciprocal relations, but also act as capitalist producers and consumers. 12 I am referring here to Raymond Williamss theories of residual, emergent, and dominant practices (Citation1977: 1217). Examples include the Sir Douglas Quintet, whose music took on more of the character of the San Francisco sound, while yet retaining some of its original Texas flavor, Mother Earth, fronted by female lead singer Tracy Nelson, who relocated to the Bay Area from Nashville, and the Electric Flag, bringing Chicago blues to the Bay Area care of former Paul Butterfield Blues Band guitarist Mike Bloomfield. At San Francisco's music venues, new-age artists share the same stages as some of music's most legendary black artists. Nicks and Buckingham went on to bring that San Francisco sound to established British rock band Fleetwood Mac when they both joined in 1975. Named in honor of cornetist Bix Beiderbecke and located off an alley near Jackson Square, BIX has been described as a civilized speakeasy, a supper club, and an elegant saloon, offering modern American cuisine served in a soaring two-story dining room to the strains of live jazz nightly. Live music performances and music records/cassettes as standardised commodities are in this way diverted from their regular paths in the market economy to an alternative economic regime of value, often through the incorporation of alternative exchange systems (cf. For Teague and many other DIY participants in the US, music and other forms of reciprocity go hand in hand, each one engendering the other. For example, as explained by their bass player, Mike Watt, South Californian 1980s punk/DIY band Minutemen in this way adapted the ideas of collaborative equality to their music practice and sound: D. Boon [Minutemen guitarist] played really heavily with trebly new power chords and left all this room for the bass guitar [], and then worked with Georgie [the drummer] to make sure he had all these fills and parts to jam to and add movement to the songs. (Cometbus Citation2002). 9 The idea of support aesthetics is similar to the notion of participatory aesthetics (Turino Citation2008: 335) or relational aesthetics (Bourriaud [1998] Citation2006), which find the value and quality of art not in art objects or music sounds themselves, but in the level of social participation/interaction that they generate. DIY shows and records, bartering, borrowing, and DIY production of goods). Acoustic music had had an avid following far and wide, but it was "a fading world of traditional folk and Brechtian art songs. 15 See Culton and Holtzman Citation2010, Citation2011; Taylor Citation2016: 165, 166; cf. "[8] The Beats tended to be cagey, keeping their lives discreet (save for the few who published, in literary bursts, about their perceptions, enthusiasms, and activities); in a word, they generally kept cool. The young hippies were far more numerous, less wary, and had scarcely any inclination to keep their lifestyles concealed. 8 Dumpsterdiving is a practice of salvaging edible food from the garbage dumpsters of large stores and supermarkets. In addition, I made multiple additional one-day trips to Oakland during my stay in Davis. American DIY venues and performers also form a translocal network of reciprocity, which is created through the reciprocal relation of playing and booking each others shows across the US (and beyond). To know more, see our. Secondly, I discuss the cultural and aesthetic levels of this phenomenon, before finally focusing on the complexities and contradictions surrounding the coexistence of both alternative and dominant economic systems within American DIY scenes (highlighting some of the co-dependencies involved with italics, for greater conceptual clarity). This kind of rejection of the capitalist system, on the one hand, and the embracing of the DIY production and autonomy, on the other, is also apparent in a further quote by Jennings: by selling you things I make, I can avoid getting a real job, or at least minimize the work I do for the system, and therefore how much money they make from my effort. Named for legendary saxophonist Charlie Bird Parker and Irish novelist Samuel Beckett, Bird & Beckett in Glen Park is a true neighborhood hotspot that features weekly jazz concerts, allowing you to hear and read about jazz at the same time. With a bar built in 1949, Club Deluxe harkens back to San Francisco's live music scene of the 1950s and 60s. Cate Blanchett as Lydia Tr | Courtesy of Focus Features Films about classical music go back to at least the 1930s. They are just consumers. For example, in her manual for booking DIY shows, Beck Levy (2013) an artist and musician who used to organise DIY shows in Washington, DC notes that among the bad reasons for organising shows is so that other bands will feel obligated to book your band in their cities. Music City San Francisco, home of the Music City Hotel and SF Music Hall of Fame, creates a guide of all guides of local music venues in SF. They explained that the area had a big enough pool [of houses] to be able to spread [the shows] out, so that no individual venue was made to feel overloaded (personal communication, 28 February 2012). According to biography author Robert Greenfield, "Jon McIntire [manager of the Grateful Dead from the late sixties to the mid-eighties] points out that the great contribution of the hippie culture was this projection of joy. I show in this article how American DIY participants establish a whole alternative and parallel society with its own economic model, but which also reveals itself as very heterogeneous and in different ways interconnected with the dominant capitalist one. Cited by lists all citing articles based on Crossref citations.Articles with the Crossref icon will open in a new tab. Both emphasise that gift-giving is not a free activity, but that it bonds an individual to reciprocate (returning the favour). Yet I also highlight how these alternative economic systems of reciprocity coexist with capitalist ones. The Dead Kennedys are often seen as one of the most influential hardcore punk bands of the 1980s, instrumental in the rebellion against the hippie movement of the preceding decades. Booking shows for this tour was greatly facilitated by the established DIY friendships of one band member who had previously made eight tours of the US. The early band venues, while the new SF scene was emerging from folk and folk-rock beginnings, were often places like the Matrix nightclub. An ever-changing art gallery, Madrone presents local funk, jazz, and brass bands that play everything from James Brown to Brazilian samba. How much would you pay to hop into a time machine and visit San Francisco's long-gone Winterland Ballroom on Jan. 14, 1978, the night . A DIY culture of reciprocity and collective action can be found in most places around the US. Moreover, they are also seen to engage in rituals of decomoditization by diverting capitalist products into enclaved zones of DIY spaces and shows. Moreover, while there is a tangible tendency within American DIY communities toward reciprocal interaction in multiple social and economic aspects of DIY sociability, it is also acknowledged within the DIY scenes that this kind of alternative economy has its own limits. San Francisco always honors its jazz and blues history while listening for what will push the music forward. Great American Music Hall opened in 1907 as a symbol of San Francisco's rebirth after the devastating 1906 earthquake. (Jennings Citation1998; see Figure 5)Footnote17, Figure 5. Here are a dozen things to experience at Fort Mason Center right now. However, there are also other ways in which DIY people enter into the relationship with capitalist modes of production. KCSM is one of the few 24-hour non-commercial jazz radio stations in the country. Therefore, in this article, I argue that on one level American DIY participants discursively reject capitalism and materially constitute alternative DIY economic systems of reciprocity, but on another they become entangled through their everyday lives with capitalist practices and worlds. Beyond preserving the history of this musical form so tied to the African-American experience, SFJAZZ now blazes a trail for the artists of the future in its permanent home on Franklin St. Few performance venues in the city have the sound quality of the SFJAZZ Center. American DIY participants often talk about their own economic system, support-system, or self-sustaining trade and barter economy (Cometbus Citation2002; Danielson Citation2004; Debies-Carl Citation2014: 81, 14461; Hannerz Citation2015: 127, 128; Farrow Citation2020: 246). This kind of orientation toward egalitarian collective action and reciprocity is also discernible in the musical organisation, performance, and sound of many American DIY bands. He has lived in San Francisco for over 9 years and has worked in Travel & Tourism for over 7 of those. SFJAZZ has been at the helm of the city's jazz scene since its founding in the 1980s. But in live performance, the bands would often share their improvisatory zest by playing a given song or sequence for as long as five or six minutes, and occasionally for as long as half an hour. Some stayed and became part of the scene. In turn, this approach challenges the widespread assumption that DIY participants often contradict themselves in terms of what they do and what they say or, in other words, that their material realities contradict their ideological demands. 10 Iconic San Francisco Eats & Drinks That Every Visitor Must Try, Trip Idea: Take a Jimi Hendrix-Inspired San Francisco Trip, Little Known Facts About The Golden Gate Bridge, Everything You Need to Know About the Castro Street Fair, San Francisco Music Venues Rich in Black History, Where to See Jazz and Blues in San Francisco, History of Angel Island: The Ellis Island of the West. A louder, more prominent role for the electric basstypically with a melodic or semi-melodic approach, and using a plush, pervasive tonewas another feature. Free box at the show at Grandmaz house, Olympia, 7 August 2012. Donations of money for live performances at DIY shows (a form of balanced gift economy) might be seen to function in a similar way, where a marketable exchange commodity (the live performance) is transformed into a DIY commodity with symbolic and material use value through a process of diversion and enclaving. 3 The research included several years of fieldwork in Davis, CA; nine months in Portland, OR; five days in Washington, DC; and 14 days each in Olympia, WA, Los Angeles, and Oakland, CA. Accordingly, my central question in this article is: how do American DIY participants manage the tensions and transitions between reciprocal and capitalist systems and worlds? But maybe they are that way, and they will remain that way, because we havent set examples for them to see, examples that we saw in others before us and followed. In North Beach, Comstock is a pre-Prohibition cocktail bar experience. Some of the most important black artists of the 20th century have played on this stage, including jazz legends Duke Ellington and Sarah Vaughan. Numerous scholars have discussed the coexistence of different economic systems within particular cultures and societies, mainly juxtaposing capitalism against alternative economic systems, such as a sustenance economy or gift-economy.Footnote16 While these latter systems may emerge as alternatives or in opposition to the dominant capitalist mode, many analysts also highlight the co-dependent and co-constitutive dimensions of this relationship. With their aggressive, politically charged style of music, the Dead Kennedys were a giant middle finger to the status quo that many young punks learned to despise. For instance, Johanna from the Box Candy Mountain house in Bellingham told me that when they lost a good venue [show house] in their town, it all fell back on us (personal communication, 14 April 2012). Exploration of chordal progressions previously uncommon in rock & roll, and a freer and more powerful use of all instruments (drums and other percussion, electric guitars, keyboards, as well as the bass) went along with this "psychedelic-era" music. Thats as much of an end goal to them, just as it is for fans. Powered by hocalwire.com, We use cookies for analytics, advertising and to improve our site. If you have an inclination towards music, you will be startled to visit these music venues which were formed on the foundation of African-American culture. Register to receive personalised research and resources by email. The people who opened their homes to me, honestly, I guarantee, some people [] didnt like the music we played, [] I mean it helps [], if they like the music you play, but [thats not the main reason].