By Lynn Rapoport

ONE DAY ABOUT a year and a half ago, some punks decided to take over an empty space down on Market Street and throw a big party. It didn't feel like there was much empty space left, not including all the posteviction apartments waiting to be renovated and rent-jacked. But the punks found one and worked their asses off getting it ready for guests, and one Friday night, they opened it up. By the time we got there, hundreds of kids were roaming through the rooms, checking out the artwork and the bands, which included Feelings on a Grid, Shotwell, and a band I'd never heard of called the Quails.

I've been in San Francisco for almost 10 years, but that night continues to stand out. It wasn't just the Quails, though in the months after that they became my favorite band in San Francisco. It was the murals on the walls and the dogs asleep on the grubby carpet, and some guy riding around on an art bike, swerving messily through the crowd. It was the fact that the place had been turned into a gallery for people whom it's hard to get together for massive gatherings because there's not that many places for them to go. "I think I feel elated," I told my friend as we walked home that night. It had been a while, and the feeling took a moment to identify.

The art party on Market Street came to mind last Saturday at Muddy Waters when guitarist Jen Smith, bassist Seth Lorinczi, and drummer Julianna Bright started talking about wanting their performances to be more than just rock shows, to make room for everything else they and their friends – painters, designers, photographers, cooks, and performers of all kinds – were doing with their artistic and political lives. They've been making music together for three years, and their favorite shows are the ones they've played at parties like that – or at warehouse art spaces or galleries like Balazo, where a party might also include photography, anticapitalist fashion, and a home-cooked meal by Lorinczi.

Just for the record, seeing the Quails has never felt quite like going to a rock show. They've all been playing in bands for years. Lorinczi and Smith came up in the D.C. punk scene of the '80s, where Lorinczi played bass in Circus Lupus, among many other bands. Bright was playing in a band with Sharon Cheslow called the Electrolettes when she met Smith on a tour. But Smith was performing in a multigenre revue called the Cha Cha Cabaret, and the Quails point to that as a primary influence when they talk about what they want out of their own performances. And they do come across more like radical cheerleaders, even when they're not dressed in matching athletic wear. And though I've heard their second album, Atmosphere (Inconvenient), about 30 times, their songs still feel like bombs going off. I've been to a lot of shows where I end up feeling like nobody's listening to how smart the guitarist's lyrics are, to the politics of the girl on the drums. It's not necessarily the band's fault – people in a club just sometimes let their brains go on vacation, even when they're seeing a band that's known for its political ideals and attitudes.

I can't imagine witnessing that at a Quails show, and I think that has a lot to do with how they connect themselves to San Francisco, where they've lived and worked for years. So often they're playing in places where the line between audience and performers tends to dissolve, where they can rant and tell jokes and pull friends and strangers onstage to dance with them. They sing and talk about what's going on around us, and they have a way of asking the audience to think about what they're saying that's both earnest and infectious.

This week the Quails are just passing through their hometown, though, about a third of the way into a six-week tour with Sleater-Kinney, and I'm wondering what that's been like for the Quails. There's a space that opens up between you and your community when you get on the freeway and head to Tempe, Ariz., to play for kids who don't necessarily have context for the songs you're singing. Add to that the one that opens up between you and the audience when you play at places like the Fillmore (as they did on Tuesday night and will again tonight). Every band on the rise goes through that, but not all of them worry about how that will affect their relationship to the people they're playing for.

The Quails say they're still figuring out ways to dissolve that disconnect, like bringing zines they've made and talking with people at the show about what's going on around them in their own towns. "I think that we usually play shows that are interactive," Lorinczi says. "We talk a lot – maybe to excess at times. That's fine if you're in an art space, or a place like the Eagle, but it feels a little different when there's 1,000-plus people who don't know you and don't have any window into your experience."

Outside my own window, across the street, is one of those billboards in support of Gavin Newsom's Care Not Cash ballot measure. An annoyed-looking guy in a suit looks up at me with a sign (a vicious mockery of signs other, less-satisfied people hold) that says, "I don't want to hold my breath past every alley." There are so many things to be unelated about right now, so many things to get sick to your stomach over. Yet I can't feel sick or unelated when I listen to the Quails singing on "Shine a Light," where Bright asks Smith what she's thinking about and provokes a landslide of answers about taking responsibility and the way to the future. Bright sing-shouts, "I want to shine a light into you, I want to breathe a light into you," and Lorinczi and Smith answer back the same. The energy I get off this one song feels like it's powerful enough to tear the billboard down and put up something in its place.

"We're lovers, red hot lovers, red hot lovers of the people," the three Quails sing. It's the last line of the last song on Atmosphere, and those words just about cover it. The Quails are a band who know how to make heartfelt, politicized folk music sexy, because the red hot heat covers everything from people without housing to the rights of genderqueers everywhere, with plenty of time for dancing in between.

I wrote "folk music," and I think I meant it, even though the Quails play experimental, frenetic, danceable, punk rock and roll that's often spiked with Smith's high-pitched screams. On "Soon the Rest Will Fall," Bright sings, "You thought if you played an acoustic guitar it meant you were a protest singer. I can laugh about it now but at the time it was terrible." But what if "folk" meant music you made because you were a lover of the people? Because that's what I hear when the Quails get onstage. They turn slogans into beautiful arrows. They sing about the people, and they make it sound like love.

"What do you think about what George Bush is doing in Iraq, or what about the fact that Mission Rock gets paved over for a ballpark and those beds are never replaced?" Smith says. "Those are the kinds of conversations that I want to be having with strangers. And then there's also stuff like, Hey, what do you think about freaky gender stuff? Because I think that's really sexy and cute, and I really want the world to be like that. Or I want my friends who live in a different way in terms of gender to be safe in this world, and I want to sing a song about that.' "

Lately I keep walking into that old debate about art and politics and the danger that lies in suffusing the former with the latter. I find this debate equal parts worrisome and annoying. Which makes it fun just listening to the Quails articulately trash the idea that it's either possible, advisable, or desirable to keep the two entities apart.

Smith says it's morally necessary for her to think about responsibility and privilege and activity. "It's actually what makes me feel alive and hopeful. And part of the way it works in these slightly danceable rock and roll songs is because we actually want to have a party, too. It's like, I'm so glad we get to know each other. I'm so glad that our ideas are actually normal. And I'm so glad we have a community. And that fills my heart with love practically every day. And so making music that both lyrically and musically encapsulates that is fucking fun. And attracting people who feel the same way, it's like, what better thing could I possibly be doing? I mean, there's other things I could be doing and hope to do with my life, but what better way to be in a band than to talk about those ideas and galvanize our fun, freaky, fierce feelings?"

"And I do really feel that without talking about it, I exist in a hopeless world," Bright adds. "I think a lot of us have had pretty intense bouts of depression just based on the state of affairs in the world and feeling like our leaders are crazy, but I do really feel that one of the things that makes me still feel invested and still feel that I love my life is that I am surrounded by people who feel that way too. And that's something about this band that I love. I've gotten to meet so many people and learn so much from people, and we get to have a party every time we play with our friends. And that we get to be even any part of the genesis or generator for that kind of fun is just fucking awesome."