By Kimberly Chun

DIVISION STREET BISECTS the city with strings of SUVs, half-hearted panhandlers, and clouds of exhaust fumes. Its ragged asphalt and battered commercial ventures are familiar to San Franciscans – less so its underbelly, Mission Creek, the subterranean network of navigable streams and swampland that once coursed to the bay.

Jeff Ray, of the art rock band Zmrzlina, remembers a time when the secret watery byways intersected with the wilder reaches of the Mission District's music scene – literally and figuratively.

"Our band had a basement practice space we'd share with Hickey on Harrison Street. It was all moldy – our equipment would get moldy – because there was a creek running through the elevator shaft," Ray recalls, sitting high and dry in a Potrero Hill café.

Six years ago from this primordial ooze came the Mission Creek Music Festival.

It was a grassroots effort led by Ray, his band, and their Mission compadres. The first lineup included about eight bands at Starcleaners. Now – pardon the metaphor – it's a swollen river floating some 75 artists that fills up old crannies and floods the city, taking over nightclubs like the Great American Music Hall, Cafe du Nord, and the Hemlock Tavern, and augmenting the already ambitious festival with music videos and films.

"It was very Mission-based at first," Ray says. "Throughout the years often I'd run into a performer on the corner, and that's when I'd say, 'Oh, make sure you show up to the festival,' and, 'Can you share equipment?' It was very casual."

That approach still marks conversations with Ray, a self-described "flexible control freak." His thoughts meander easily from one thing to another like an unclogged creek, healthy and alive, before civilization and its discontents cemented its natural movement.

More than a little effort goes into the project: Ray devotes eight months each year to organizing the ragtag assortment of favorite musicians into a festival, a labor of love that means taking time off from his job as a handyman at Rainbow Grocery. The result is a lifestyle marked by deficit spending – only last year did the festival pay for itself – and other stress-inducing symptoms, like his nonworking cell phone and the anxiety attacks that keep him awake at night.

Next year Ray may try to obtain nonprofit status and aim for a reduced lineup, festival tour, and perhaps a compilation CD; in fact, the organizer may even "wean" himself from the event. But this year the overflowing Bay Area music scene just demands a large festival showcasing local groups.

He might not have been able to afford beloved bands like the Coup, but he had fun putting groups like Harold Ray Live in Concert and Crack: We Are Rock on the same bill. "But the thing is, to me, you can dance to almost all the bands that night," he says. "I love music, but I don't exactly like music scenes, and I don't like how a group of people will walk out once their friends are done onstage and not hear another band. I mean, I could see West African highlife one night and then go see Deerhoof the next night."