San Fran Voice

Venue: GREAT AMERICAN MUSIC HALL

Address: 859 O’Farrell Street @ Polk Street

Neighborhood: “Polk Gulch” area generally, although we all know that means different things for different people.

Types of bands that play here:  Like many San Francisco venues, the Great American Music Hall is happy to host a diverse group of performers including both local and non-local acts although it’s one of the better spots in the city for the non-local stuff.

How often there’s live music:  Almost every night baby!

Points given for:  History of the venue, size of the space and the fact that they’re calendar has links that let you listen to many bands’ music right on their site.  Oh, and they always participate in the SF music events that are multi-venue (like Noise Pop).

Points taken away because: I’m sure I can think of some if given enough time.  Less local stuff than other places, I suppose.  And pricier because of the types of shows.

Overall: The Bay Area’s Most Kissed Music Journalist thinks that if a date is good enough to take you to GAMH, you should reward him or her with some serious smooching.

2007 marks the one hundred year anniversary of the Great American Music Hall and that alone says something about the importance of this venue to the city.  Established just after the Great Earthquake as a restaurant and bordello designed to meet the scandalous needs of the Barbary Coast era, the Great American Music Hall has undergone changes that keep it modern even in the twenty-first century.  At the same time, that history is held there in the walls and gives a sense of importance to any show that you might see there.

And what might you see there?  Well, unlike many of the other spots in the city where people go to hear live music, Great American Music Hall is a music venue with a bar (as opposed to a bar that hosts live music).  So, you go here to hear the acts that are from other locations and are familiar with good spots to play in the city of San Francisco.  But it’s not so much where you would go to hear big name acts.  Instead, you get more off-the-wall-but-known characters, SF favorites and unique acts that you might not have thought to see if you didn’t think to yourself one night, “hey, I wonder what’s playing over at Great American Music Hall”.

As for the details of the venue itself … it’s a two-level venue with a balcony up top and a good-sized floor space down below.  The stage is big so multiple bands can get there stuff set up to avoid prolonged pauses between the night’s musical players.  You can get right up front if you want to or hang back by the bar and still hear well either way because the sound in the venue is better than good.  Tickets are usually somewhere between $15 and $30, more if you’re doing dinner-and-a-show which is the balcony seating special often offered at events.

 

 

 

There is a funny thing about neighborhoods in San Francisco.  On the one hand, they are very distinct from one another.  North Beach and Chinatown lie side by side but you can tell almost exactly when you’ve crossed from one to the other.  And even the new-to-SF can tell the subtle differences between a place like commercial North Beach and its more residential neighbor, Telegraph Hill.  But then there are all of these little pockets and smaller divisions within neighborhoods that kind of blend together and make it hard to tell what’s what and where is where.

It’s kind of like with music subgenres.  Let me digress for just a moment.  There was a time when the people who listened to “metal” all kinds of fell in to the same category.  But if you try to define a metal band today, you need to know if the band is hardcore or thrash, metalcore or progressive.  You need to know that thrash metal includes black metal and death metal which are distinct from one another and that doom metal came before goth metal which is NOT the same thing.  If you get more in-depth in your research, you’ll learn about mathcore and folk metal.  But if you know all of these things and you try to explain them to someone who doesn’t, you end up having to fall back on the general label of “metal” for your explanation.

This is what it’s like with some of the neighborhoods in San Francisco.  People who once lived in the “bad part” of Nob Hill have now long been living in “The Tenderloin”.  Between these two spots, which are only blocks apart, you’ve got Lower Nob Hill and The Tendernob.  And then there are various other names for certain streets depending on whether you’re talking to your skeezy friend who lives there or your real estate agent trying to get you to live there.  And so, you have certain streets that are parts of one or more neighborhoods but which become something of a neighborhood on their own.  And so you’ve got Polk Gulch.

Polk Gulch (controversially renamed Polk Village) is that section of San Francisco which is made up of Polk Street where it runs between approximately Geary Street and Union Street.  Oh, but get anyone to agree to that border!  Many sources will tell you that Polk Gulch doesn’t go as far as Geary but rather stops heading south at California Street, leaving off what is arguably the sketchier part of the Polk Street area locating in (or near, depending on your source) The Tenderloin.

But, Polk Street is undeniably slightly different from the rest of the area which it traverses.  Sure, you can see something a little seedier in the southern end of this stretch that what you’ll see as you head up towards the Russian Hill neighborhood, but there’s a semblance of similarity among the different spots all along the street that kind of serves to make it seem like its own little place.  Although plenty of people live here (and the streets are frequently filled with plenty of people who don’t live – specifically – anywhere), Polk Gulch is primarily a commercial area.  There are stores which range from the corner convenience stop to the lower end boutiques of the city, restaurants which go from grab-a-slice to dress-spicy-and-sit-down and bars which are mostly divey but have some college-esque feeling as well.

In all honesty, I tend to spend more time at the southern end of the stretch than the northern end myself.  Live music at Hemlock Tavern happens almost every night of the week.  Venues for dancing and drinking in the nearby area include the divey “gay saloon”, The Cinch, and the college-pick Vertigo.  And for nights when something different is on the menu, the tranny strip club at Polk and Post (Divas) always offers an eyeful of entertainment.  But heading further north, you do have Red Devil Lounge and you start getting in to the shopping so there’s no reason to avoid trekking up there either.

It may kind of blend in with some of the other neighborhoods that surround it, but Polk Street is a virtual neighborhood all its own so if you’re looking to see some San Francisco local flavor, it’s one of the spots to add to your list.

Venue: HEMLOCK TAVERN

Address: 1131 Polk Street between Sutter and Post

Neighborhood: “Polk Gulch” according to the website, although everyone I know agrees that it’s “that neighborhood between Russian Hill and The Tenderloin”

Types of bands that play here:  Alternative … not in the sense of the music genre “alternative” but in the sense of “hm, familiar to something I know but a bit different”; example: an upcoming show by a faux French band and a weekly “Punk Rock Sideshow”.

How often there’s live music:  Almost every night of the year, baby!

Points given for:  Really interesting mixture of people in the crowd as well as performers invited on stage; music every night means you can just stop in and see who is playing and you can hang in the bar for no cover if you don’t care to see them

Points taken away because: small, narrow venue so it’s hard to see the band unless you’re right up front so get there early

Overall: The Bay Area’s Most Kissed Music Journalist would be happy to take a date to any show here

There are a series of bars along San Francisco’s Polk Street which draw a really diverse crowd of people.  The bars themselves are quite different, from the Asian tranny bars to the college dance spots, but their proximity makes them prone to bar-hopping so you get an interesting mix every time you enter one.  As the night gets later and people end up at the bar at which they feel most comfortable, Hemlock Tavern draws in a crowd composed of two different basic types of people: late-college, early-young-professional types and edgy music lovers.  The crowds are separated between then no-cover bar / pool table area and the low-cover live music section of Hemlock, although they convene periodically in the enclosed smoking room adjacent to the main room of the bar.

You can tell the difference between the crowd of people who is just there to enjoy a drink and those who are there for the music.  If nothing else, you can see it in the way that the music fans stop off quickly to get a decently-priced drink at the bar before heading directly to the back where a neon arrow indicates the door to the live music part of the bar.  These folks get their hands stamped for the show and then head through the sound-proofing plastic gates of the doorway to enter a narrow room with a raised stage at one end.  A mirror lining one entire wall of the room helps to make it feel as though the place is bigger than it is and the line of booth seats and small tables which runs along it helps to give the place a cozy feel.  But really, when you enter the music room at Hemlock Tavern, you’re entering a small space which is rapidly going to become crowded with people.  For a concert space, this is good … music is all about experience and being crowded in with other music lovers helps to make that experience feel like a shared one.

The music coming from the stage is coming from a combination of local San Francisco bands and bands visiting the city from national and international locations.  I’ve only seen a few shows at Hemlock so far but what they seem to have in common is that they’re a little bit “different”.  These aren’t the “alternative” or “indie” bands that you would see at a place like The Warfield or Great American Music Hall but instead are the kind of bands who are made up of people who live a really self-directed alternative lifestyle.  The result is a music which tends to be fresh and new although not always perfected.  The shows are low cover ($5 - $10) and there are usually two or three bands playing each night so you get your money’s worth.

The best part about Hemlock is that you can count on it always having something going on.  You can stop in on any night of the week and ask around to find out who is playing and what their music sounds like.  If it sounds good to you, you can pay your cover and head in to the music room.  If not, you can mingle with people throughout the rest of the bar, paying nothing and enjoying that interesting neighborhood diversity that makes up this stretch of Polk Street.