Barrio beats
Club Unicornio brings cultural crate diggers, luchadores, and Latino kitsch to the Casanova.

By Camille T. Taiara

THERE'S A PECULIAR aesthetic that develops at the place where two worlds collide. For Luis Eliades, growing up on the Tijuana-San Diego border, it manifested as a satirical yet somehow genuine appreciation for things tacky and oddball.

It's the kind of sensibility associated with watching Magnum PI reruns on German TV, Tom Selleck's normally sensitive-'70s-guy tone voiced over in barked-out Deutsch. Or dancing to the sounds of a live Japanese-language salsa band in a Tokyo nightclub during the late '90s. Or, in Eliades's case, listening to Mexican bands covering American pop hits.

"You'd go and visit your cousins further down [south] in Mexico, and they'd know the songs by the Mexican version," Eliades told me during a recent interview at 16th Street's Cafe Macondo. "But in Tijuana, you'd also get the San Diego radio stations.... You had more exposure to the American ideas before the co-opted Mexican ones. So if you were from a border town, it would seem silly instead of cool."

Eventually, though, these kinds of cross-cultural comedies of error tend to morph into a phenomenon all their own. They update local culture in a way that reflects contemporary influences. "It's co-opting this American sound but making it really Mexican," coconspirator Julio Morales says.

Eliades and Morales have been contributing to San Francisco's cultural scene since they arrived in the mid- and early '90s, respectively: Eliades as the drummer for Pansy Division, the Avengers, and the Plus Ones; Morales, also a Tijuana transplant, as a Mission District youth arts teacher. They'd run across each other a few times at various cultural events in the neighborhood, and eventually they got to talking.

"There's not really a cool night [at any Mission bar] that does Spanish-language music that's contemporary," Eliades says. "I knew a lot of people who'd be interested in it, but nobody knew each other."

It was time for an intervention.

. . .

"We wanted to reintroduce a club to the Latino community in the Mission District," Morales says. "At least try to mix up the crowds a bit." He and Eliades found an ideally subversive staging area for their project near the corner of 16th and Valencia Streets, at the Casanova Lounge.

Through ownership changes and dramatic neighborhood turnover, the Casanova has somehow managed to remain fairly true to its original character – despite being located at the nightlife hub of what real estate dealers, perhaps eager to disassociate their properties from certain less-marketable aspects of the neighborhood, ingeniously refer to these days as the "Valencia corridor."

Now, every second Monday of the month, the two maskless cultural luchadores take over the space with Club Unicornio, a night dedicated to an eccentric blend of underground music en español. Morales, a manipulator of images and an avid fan of old film and obscure TV shows, provides eye candy in the form of interesting visual miscellany.

Club Unicornio is named for a prohibition-era cabaret on Revolucíon Avenue, Tijuana's main tourist drag and possibly the most ironically named street on Earth. Converted into a transvestite strip joint in the mid-'80s, it survived another 20 years before closing its doors in September. Now the S.F. party that adopted its name is the only place in town where you can check out DJs spinning early-'60s, burlesque-style Mexican surf, boozy rancheras, hip mambo R&B, experimental electronica, Caribbean hip-hop, and contemporary Spanish-language covers of the Knack's "My Sharona" and the Cure's "10:15 Saturday Night," alongside AK-bron's "La cumbia del culo" (roughly, "booty cumbia").

Eliades and Morales describe the project as a more casual, musically diverse, street-level version of Tijuana's Nortec collective, a cooperative of underground techno DJs and visual artists that's gained recognition these past few years for launching a new, border-specific style.

The guiding principles for Unicornio: not too mainstream and sung in Spanish. "It's stuff you have to search out," Eliades says. But they'll make an occasional exception to the Spanish-language rule for songs like Plastilina Mosh's thick-accented cover of "Viva Las Vegas."

. . .

It's been several years since a San Francisco club featured Spanish-language underground music on a regular basis. Finding a welcoming space was a persistent headache in the scene. Some self-appointed promoter would finally manage to eke out a regular night for live rock en español bands and DJs – at the venerable, now-defunct underground warehouse Komotion or the old Club Cocodrie, to name a couple. Fans would come from as far away as Salinas and Fresno to check out hardcore punk, ska, metal, and all types of fusion rock bands from California, Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela, the Basque country, and beyond. The place would fill up. Trouble was rare. But it would only last a few glorious months before buckling under the weight of the cursed dot-com boom and the rent increases and licensing crackdowns that accompanied it.

Obviously, any attempt to resuscitate these earlier efforts was worth checking out. So one Monday this fall I headed down to Casanova for Club Unicornio's fourth outing, my friend Chiflas (a walking caricature of '80s punk) in tow.

We'd hardly settled onto our bar stools when Eliades launched into an excruciating spree of commercial bubblegum pop – a tacky homage to the cheap, mass-produced glitz of his hometown, I guess. Chiflas and I gulped our beer as if it were a liquid anesthetic against bad music. As it turned out, a gaggle of young Latino punks had fled in horror minutes earlier for the same reason. Then Eliades threw on a tune by Menudo. (Amazing how many otherwise sensible Latinos will actually cop to having been fans as kids.) Two white girls danced around campily.

Chiflas and I peered at each other uneasily over our pint glasses. "Tarjeta roja," we pronounced simultaneously, referring to the card soccer refs use to signal a foul. We'd skipped past yellow and gone straight to red.

Happily, though, other DJs' gusto for cheesy pop ballads wasn't quite as fine-tuned. Before long we were hovering around DJ Joe Franco, awestruck, sneaking peeks at his milk crates full of obscure OG salsa records, old-school Chicano big band hits, underground Peruvian rock from the '60s and '70s, and unheard-of quasi-psycho-punk compilations. Where the hell did he get that stuff?

I'm still not sure – but as for how he ended up spinning here, it turned out he'd approached Eliades and Morales at an earlier Club Unicornio and offered his services, a sequence of events that epitomizes what the club's all about: providing a space for fanatics of quirky Latino musical subculture.

"One time this guy who came a couple times showed up with a bunch of records and said, 'Do you mind if I play some?' " Eliades says. "We said, 'What the hell? Go ahead.' And that's kind of fun. Everyone can come and take some part."

Devoted bartender Margarita Lara – known for having enticed the cooks and dishwashers from Puerto Alegre across the street for one of Club Unicornio's earliest productions – is forever devising new alcoholic concoctions to fit the night's theme, like tequila con Squirt, tamarindo margaritas, and jamaica (hibiscus) and vodka.

Given it was a Monday night and all, I'd only anticipated hanging around a few hours, but we found ourselves staying until closing time. It was good to see a new crew give the Latino urban underground scene another go in San Pancho, a su manera.

And who knows? Maybe during another Club Unicornio sometime soon, patrons will walk in to see Chiflas, who recently reinvented himself as DJ Chaos, at the turntables with a couple milk crates of his own, full of old punk rock and rocksteady vinyls – en español.

Club Unicornio takes place second Mondays, 9 p.m., Casanova Lounge, 527 Valencia, S.F. Free. (415) 863-9328, clubunicornio@hotmail.com.