By Josh Wilson

IT'S A FRIDAY night somewhere in the Mission, and the kids are on fire. The host has done up the garage in ribbons and streamers. There's a shaggy, hair-ball band on the makeshift stage grinding out some spastic punky blues and a sea of grinning fans jostling, shimmying, frugging, jumping, shouting, and carrying on with gleeful abandon.

Wait, is this another San Francisco flashback? Music in the Mission? Didn't all that get shut down?

The damage done by the cultural clear-cutting of the dot-com '90s is, by now, both an article of faith and a redundant cliché. It is true that many of the best, most innovative art and music venues of the '90s have given up music, gone out of business, or been evicted or otherwise shut down by the city, including underground spaces like Starcleaners, on Sycamore Street, Club Komotion, and the 17th and Capp and Shotwell warehouses, plus bars such as the Kilowatt, the Chameleon, and the Tip-Top Inn.

Local music stalwarts like Shana Falana, booker for the Make-Out Room and former member of the Gun and Doll Show, remember spaces such as Starcleaners as being vital to the scene. "Every weekend it was a great place to see what was really going on in the community and in the hearts of musicians, to be relaxed and perform for a supportive audience," she noted. "All-ages, offbeat, friendly, consistent, experimental, exciting – you could feel the vibes vibing in there. You didn't need any hallucinogens to see the colors and the personalities. They were all there and all the time."

Collectively, these scruffy and welcoming low-rent venues were some of the vital focal points of an explosion of grassroots creative culture that has defined a new, ongoing era of music and art in San Francisco. Though most of them have been closed – often under painfully difficult circumstances – their legacy has not only lived on but has also flourished. Something took root in the Mission in the last decade of the 20th century, thriving in the loam and decay of the Bay Area's preceding epochs of punk, psychedelia, and beatnik jazz. Whatever it was quickly grew tall, spread wide branches, and dropped a lot of seed-bearing fruit before heavy winds brought it all crashing down. Yeah, it was a mess. But the ground is more fertile than ever, and there's a lot of far-out shit sprouting in the sunshine of the postboom millennium.

First staged at Starcleaners and now in its seventh year, the Mission Creek Music Festival embodies the polyglot, do-it-yourself community and scene that inspired it. Appropriately named for a long-since-paved-over regional waterway, Mission Creek is a definitively underground, even quixotic happening – given little mainstream respect by its very nature as a multifaceted showcase for local, arty, and often explicitly noncommercial bands.

The festival attempts to capture the variety and "creative sincerity of the Bay Area music scene, much of it inspired and spawned from the Mission," explains Jeff Ray, MCMF organizer and member of art rock quintet Zmrzlina. "If you went to see a Hickey or even a Beth Custer show, you certainly set your own musical and performance bar higher. If you went to one of Grux's Caroliner Rainbow happenings, you certainly got influenced by the originality of it all. Not to mention the Latin music as you walk through the Mission. There is a frantic and fun quality of it that permeates your being."

Vital mess

Today, with the dust of the Internet blowout still settling, the Mission continues to be a cultural force, no matter how messy, organic, and ambiguously boundaried. Ray says it still provides a residence and meeting ground for musicians, artists, and their supporters. "You walk over to Adobe Books and run into a myriad of acquaintances, set up a show, ask an artist to do artwork for your album," he said. "The area is just sort of a stomping ground for creative sorts."

Condor keyboardist Kurt Keppeler confirmed that impression. "The Mission is exploding, no question," he said. "We have all lived exclusively in this borough for at least 10 years. The Mission is honestly a more powerful cultural influence than anything else I can think of."

Now local musicians and artists that came up in the Mission, or were inspired by what happened there in the mid '90s, are being recognized as creatively significant, getting mentions in Rolling Stone (Numbers and Coachwhips), playing with Sonic Youth (Deerhoof, Erase Errata), and landing reviews in the New York Times (Deerhoof and local visual artists such as Chris Johanson and the late Margaret Kilgallen, whose work is often referred to as being part of the Mission School).

The lines of connection between the past and the present are not only holding true; they're expanding and intertwining. "The real difference between the '90s scene and now is that the art and music scenes are bigger and more merged – lots of crossover – and people in both are starting to get a lot of attention now," said Wendy Farina, former drummer for superstar artfuck duo Towel and currently with mutant rocktronic three-piece Condor.

The boundaries of the Mission and its spirit also keep shifting. Though they live in the Haight or even the East Bay or peninsula, heaps of fabulous latter-day local bands and performers are spiritual inheritors of the Mission's glorious, desperate, idealistic, don't-give-a-fuck-if-it-hurts bravado: the Vanishing, the Quails, Total Shutdown, the Mass, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, the Court and Spark, Filthmilk, the Neighborhood Bass Coalition, the Japonize Elephants, Nate Denver's Neck, the Papercuts, Xiu Xiu, Li'l Pocketknife, Replicator, the Aislers Set, Caesura, Lower 48, Kelly Stoltz, and Sonny Smith, to name but a few.

Crossover electronic art-metal projects are getting their chocolate in the rock 'n' roll peanut butter via labels like Orthlorng Musork and the East Bay's Tigerbeat6, groups such as Blectum from Blechdom and Sagan, and obsessive mad scientists like Lesser, Twerk, and Sutekh. Somewhere along the way, between the tweaky DJ/producer-driven digitalia and the riotous slosh and mosh of Mission punk and metal, San Francisco hipsters stopped standing around with their arms folded and started dancing.

Back in the neighborhood where it began, venues and galleries are enjoying a renaissance and many have survived eviction efforts – so far. El Rio, the Odeon Bar, the Hush Hush Lounge, the Make-Out Room, and 26 Mix (plus crucial community centers like Adobe Books, Pond, CELLspace, Aquarius Records, and Balazo/Mission Badlands Gallery) are going strong. A new proliferation of underground and unpermitted spaces are filling in the gaps – everything from the basements of a few private homes to a stretch of grass in Dolores Park to the sidewalk outside the 16th and Mission BART station.

Shining Starcleaners

Things were not always so hopeful. The story of Jennifer Shagawat and her celebrated, albeit illegal, underground art space, Starcleaners, is a case study in the Mission's glorious heyday and painful, if temporary, decline.

In 1992, Shagawat moved to San Francisco from Ohio, where she'd gotten a film degree and proceeded directly to the dilemma of what the hell to do next. Opening a venue of some sort had always been on her mind, and a move out west with friends in the band the Knittles seemed opportune.

It took two years for the dream to finally come true, from the day Shagawat moved to the Lower Haight to the moment in 1994 when she saw an ad for a house with "bathrooms, bedrooms and a full-blown garage" for rent on Sycamore Street, an alley off Mission Street.

The place had a storied musical past, allegedly being a former hangout and performance venue for the Residents, Faith No More, Courtney Love, and local darlings the Icky Boyfriends – though Shagawat wouldn't find out till after the venue took root in '94 and the community took notice.

"When I moved into the Mission, I didn't know I was moving into the Mission," she recalled. "I didn't know about districts in the town. I didn't know I would meet all these amazing people."

Mass transit

At the end of the '80s and the start of the '90s, music in the Bay Area and around the country was in a funny period of transition. Some underground Mission venues were out of the picture, like the Vats (a former brewery full of vast fermentation vats that became art spaces) and the Deaf Club (where punk bands played without offending the members, who couldn't hear). Against a commercial backdrop of rapidly mainstreaming "alternative" rock, the Bay Area was awash with ebbing and flowing tides of loudness (Metallica), metal funk (Primus, Faith No More), post-Dead Kennedys punk (924 Gilman picking up the slack from the failed San Francisco venue the Farm), underground hip-hop (Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy), and high-spirited music school shenanigans (Club Foot Orchestra, the Thinking Fellers Union Local 282) – not to mention the burgeoning rave-electronic scene (Dubtribe, Come Unity) and the regrettably monikered but invigorating acid jazz phenomenon (Broun Fellinis, Alphabet Soup).

By the time Starcleaners was established, the Mission was entering the epochal mid '90s as a low-rent home and host for a new generation of bands.

"Mission music seems to be punk-based," Falana noted. "But there are a lot of different kinds of us, playing in our rooms. You can hear us if you walk around. On my deck I can hear an opera singer to my right, a Middle Eastern horn player from the hippie commune to my left, and the loud boom-boom rap music from every car ... not to mention all the Mexican mariachi music. It's all around us here."

This diverse and tolerant environment nurtured a host of far-out, raucous bands and musicians who either lived in the Mission or played there regularly. Some are still active in one form or another, but all made their mark: the Faggz, the Naked Cult of Hickey, Off da Pigs (a breakthrough metal-rap outfit that existed years before Rage Against the Machine or Limp Bizkit), Fuckface, the Idiots, Tina Age 13, Towel, Lost Goat, Static Faction, 50 Million, the Knittles, Fantasy, the Chantigs, the Barfeeders, Chotchke, Caroliner, Ralph Carney, Old Grandad, Thunderchimp, the Loudmouths, the Human Beans, Mensclub, Carlos, Three Day Stubble, the Icky Boyfriends, Rube Waddell, the Brian Jonestown Massacre, Ovarian Trolley, Dieselhed, the Buckets, Red Meat, Tarnation, and others.

Though the '90s-era Mission was home to a thriving community, it did not occur in a vacuum. Tangential happenings and institutions flourished, part of a confluence of and infrastructure for homegrown, urban, do-it-yourself creativity. KFJC, KALX, KZSU, and KUSF (where this writer DJs) delivered the emerging soundtrack of the era to Bay Area listeners starved for adventurous music. Burning Man was still a lawless punk-pyro and machine-art utopia, and San Francisco Art Institute superheroine Warrior Girl's 24-Hour Community Spacewalk orchestrated a colossal, simultaneous display of interactive, round-the-clock art, music, and performance on dozens of street corners in the Mission and South of Market for two years running.

Nowhere, however, were things as concentrated as in the Mission. During the course of its existence, Shagawat said, Starcleaners alone hosted more than 200 shows.

"We got letters from France and Belgium," she said. "We had bands from all over the place; we couldn't possibly book everybody."

"I'm glad that that time was really for us," Falana said. "It was like a pot of gold that only gave to the community, and then we planted those seeds somewhere inside of us and they grew.... We had a beautiful garden of folks, kids, punks, nerds, all hanging out together for a while."

Things fall apart

But even as the community gathered momentum, things began to disintegrate.

"I think it was a plan.... Slowly but surely you watched all the police and the officials align to 'clean up the Mission' by getting rid of the riff-raff" and making room for expensive real estate development, Shagawat said. "They started by closing the Komotion. The man who ran Komotion, Jeff Mann, was a genius and an awesome guy, and he was so devastated by it. He was very hip to the politics way before me and was warning me and telling me this was going down."

Whether it was a conspiracy or a simple combination of bad luck, bad timing, and bad relationships, the effect was the same. Those venues are just memories – bygone, lost to the ages and otherwise vanished in the rearview mirror.

Shagawat tried to give Starcleaners some permanence by borrowing a lot of money and buying the house – but that turned into its own nightmare, as licensing issues collided with deteriorating relationships and pathological scenester self-destruction. Drugs, paranoia, recrimination, squatters who refused to pay rent, and ongoing police problems took their toll.

"We couldn't do shows; the police eventually closed us," Shagawat said. "I was trying to save for a cabaret license, which they weren't gonna let me do. Now the dot-commers have moved in, and 17th and Capp's gone, Chameleon's closed, Kilowatt's gone, all my friendly neighbors."

So she decided to sell the house and skip town, back to New Jersey, where she "spent six months staring out the window," trying to figure out what was next. In April 2001 a surprise gig for her old band, Kung Fu USA – opening for Iggy Pop at the Fillmore – brought her back to California.

Now living in the Lower Haight, she ponders another attempt at opening a venue but is currently focusing on Kung Fu USA, the Starcleaners record label, and a documentary on the good old days. (Photographs, video, audio, and stories, good or bad, are welcome at www.starcleaner.com.)

The bands may have moved on or reconfigured, and the scene has morphed, but the vitality remains. "It has been hard to see the vitality and buzz in the Mission die out and change," Falana said. "But the support and love from the community is still here. It is. People are totally needing, craving, talking about the Starcleaner days and how we badly need a new space. I think one will open soon."

Shagawat is optimistic. Now that the dust has settled, she said, the art making is once again in full effect.