Is San Francisco’s Music Scene Dead?

By Andrew Wallace Chamings

In 1967, over 100,000 kids arrived in Haight-Ashbury amid the biggest counterculture movement of the century. The Haight’s cultural moment was inaugurated by a wave of communal psychedelic rock bands moving into the neighborhood, among them Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Janis Joplin’s Big Brother and the Holding Company. Their sound spawned from previous influential music scenes in the city, including folk coming out of North Beach coffee shops and jazz from the Fillmore.

Since then, the city has been a breeding ground for other genres, among them soul, funk, ’80s hardcore and West Coast hip-hop. More than mere musical styles, many of these scenes rose alongside political movements, including the Beats, the hippies, the punks and the Black Panthers.

Time may tell whether the last San Francisco music scene was late-noughties garage rock, spearheaded by Ty Segall and the Thee Oh Sees. Although not as historically important as the Summer of Love, it may have the dubious honor of being the last real musical movement in San Francisco.

That’s because you can’t have garage rock without a garage. One recently sold in the Outer Mission for $408,000. Segall and John Dwyer from the Thee Oh Sees have since moved to LA, that city that everyone in San Francisco used to call soulless. You don’t hear that much anymore. So could another scene ever grow in a city that we’re repeatedly being told has lost its soul? Before moving south, Dwyer didn’t pull any punches in his parting press release:

Graveyard San Francisco has long been filling up with noobs, but now we face the most dangerous, the most egregious and blandest of them all … people with lots of money.

Is “graveyard” fair? In terms of live music venues, maybe — at least five small stages have closed their doors in the last five years, including Kimos, the Red Devil Lounge, Viracocha, the Retox Lounge and SUB/Mission. Cafe du Nord no longer books rock bands, and the Elbo Room and Bottom of the Hill are still open but seemingly always under threat from condo developers.

More integral than venues to any type of emerging music scene are the bands. Of the Bay Bridged’s “14 San Francisco Bands to Watch in 2015,” only four were actually…