I love iTunes shuffle. On those long, bumpy bus rides through pebbly Moroccan deserts, when you’ve decided you’re sick of all 8,000 songs on your iPod, you set that baby to shuffle and bam—some blast from the past you’d totally forgotten comes blaring outta little white earpieces. And during my last trip, that blast was Hickey.
If you weren’t a Bay Area punk in the 90s, you probably haven’t heard of Hickey. A melodic punk band that came moaning, howling and screaming distortion straight from the strung-out heart of the Mission, Hickey may or may not have been the last great San Francisco band. But what’s for sure is that they captured the sound and sentiment of a time and place—one that’s bitten the dust amid the rising rents and impossible cost of living, now the nation’s second highest. And the setting for such incensed genius, the city that inspired so much of killer American music and art, isn’t recovering.
Hickey had all the makings of the legendary punk band: powerful songs that defied the typical versus-chorus-versus progression; a smattering of hard-to-attain 7″s; live antics that bordered on poetic insanity; a run-in with the Voodoo Glow Skulls over commercialization and a stolen trumpet; a tattooable logo; catchy melodies and apocalyptic lyrics—all enough to inspire a cult following. A naked cult following. The Naked Cult of Hickey was the self-given name for the ethos and devoted “movement” that sprung up around the band, capturing so much of the 90s Mission punk experience.
Despite the song title “Hickey is About Long Hair and Getting High,” the music, lyrics and passionate self-destruction the band epitomized was about more than just partying—it had the depth and pull of quicksand.
Hickey wasn’t about the type of apathetic disenfranchisement generally associated with Gen-X rock. Hickey’s brand was pure guts, the kind of heart and soul that can never really make it in this world, gain material successes or live past 30. Their lyrics and song titles read like some post-modern anthem of addiction (“The Prettiest Junkie in Town”), poverty (“Why buy what can be begged for, borrowed or stolen?”), snark (“Everything I Know About Sex I Learned From KISS”), co-optation of radical subcultures (“Revolution, $19.95″), and ominous fore-shadowing (“Make Sure There Aren’t Any Squares at My Funeral”). And all of it was delivered with a heart-breaking sensitivity that came shattering through the drug-addled haze, piercingly pure, like the face of the boy you love in a blackout. It’s the latter that ultimately hooked you in, grabbed down at something tender and swollen inside, with the hooting harmonies and lyrics of songs like “Hey Cutie Pie”: “hey cutie pie, it’ll be allright / i’ll be your frankenstein / you can dress me up any way you like / shoot me up with formaldehyde.”
On a rumbling black bus ride thousands of miles and lifetimes away, Hickey’s songs brought back the damp nights of the 90s Mission: alleyways and brown bags, bicycles and narrow Victorian hallways—kaleidoscopic images as jagged and cutting as glass, potent as any uncut rock. The sick-sweet sounds brought me back to a place, a pale and alcohol-swollen underbelly, that’s all but evaporated—been boarded up, kicked out and coffin-shut.
I arrived late to the party. I started going to shows when I was 15, a year after Hickey’s 97 breakup. But the Bay Area punk scene was still reverberating with Hickey’s influence. The 7″s played in friends’ basements; the comps floated amid the wrappers and busted CD cases of friends’ cars. Bassist Chubby did the cover art for the bootleg release of Dory Tourette and the Skirthead’s Rock Immortal, a cult-worthy, tragic legend in its own right. As Interpunk wrote: “They were only here for a little less than three years but the mark they left on the San Francisco bay area and DIY punk in general can still be felt.” Many SPAM Records bands played off Hickey and extended their aesthetic; it was only natural that the now-defunct label released the most definitive Hickey collection in 2002, “Various States of Disrepair.”
The album played in my Walkman for months. It seemed to scream so much of what I’d come in on the tailend of: the SF punk scene (also captured in Michelle Tea’s Valencia), but also a time when San Francisco had more grit and guts, and was a musical force to be reckoned with.
It just so happened that I was at a Mission Records show the day after Hickey lead guitarist and singer Matty Luv died. I’d only ever met him in passing, so I couldn’t share the tears and malt-liquor-fueled grief of his friends, wandering around in that particular flush-faced haze death inspires. But it felt that day, inside the smoke-stained walls of a threadbare backroom, like something bigger than just one person had died.
I was right. Mission Records, one of the last strongholds of the Mission punk scene, closed down shortly thereafter. Balazo Gallery endured a bit longer, before being absorbed into Sub-Mission art space—still on the DIY side, but lacking the spirit I remember.
The Mission punk scene fell victim to the same thing that strangled out the last vestiges of the famous San Francisco spirit, the same phenomenon that set artists, working families and low-income residents across the racial spectrum to the outlying cities of the greater Bay Area: the Dot-Com Boom. Gentrification with a URL. And despite the crash, San Francisco has been indelibly altered, homogenized by high rents, condos and redevelopment. Taken in context of what’s gone down, the Hickey lyric “life is cheap but living is expensive” takes on an added weight. The free-loving, easy-living San Francisco of Tales of City has been served an eviction notice.
But the Mission punk scene isn’t the first San Francisco party to end tragically. Decades before the Haight Ashbury high came crashing down as paranoid and hallucinatory as any bad comedown, the African-American cultural heart of the city, the “Harlem of the West,” was literally bulldozed through under the guise of “urban renewal”; 50 years later, blacks are only 6.5% of the population. As a child I bore witness to another SF party ending, as I watched my pretty young uncle grow thin, sarcoma-spotted, snatched by the dark hand that swept through the city’s bathhouses and bars, stealing so many lives. The death of the SF punk scene, and the larger gentrification that encompassed it, was just another dying in a long series of cultural deaths. It feels more personal because I was there to witness its asthmatic last gasps, convulsive as a fish out of water.
We don’t often think of San Francisco in such bleak terms. The city itself retains an almost innocent sweetness; its valleys and hills and gingerbread Victorians hardly seem the setting for something as sinister as cultural genocide. But when you’ve grown up here and watched the city been bled of its vibrancy by everything from AIDS to questionable city planning, you can’t help but feel a bittersweet alienation. It’s not the San Francisco that my uncle fell in love with in 70s, that my parents moved from Milwaukee to be near in the 80s, or that I partied in so desperately and whole-heartedly during the 90s.
It can be difficult to have as much sympathy for the Mission punk scene as, say, the Fillmore. To be fair, the Mission was gnarly, urine-drenched and windshield-splattered, and walking down the street as a skinny white girl in Converse was not fun. Much of the demise of the scene can also be chalked up to the good old sex-drugs-and-rock-n-roll lifestyle that snuffs out so many. And that’s without getting into the bigger and more impacting displacement of the Mission’s original Hispanic population (the neighborhood is the fabled birthplace of the burrito), of which the punks were the first discernible crest in the gentrification wave.
But what’s true is that the neighborhood, and San Francisco as a whole, had more room in the 90s. The space required for underground cultures and art to grow was narrowing, but still present. You could still, say, highjack the electricity from a MUNI line, roll out your amps and have a guerilla show at 16th Mission. A band like Hickey could never happen in the post-Dot-Com San Francisco. The Bay Area’s most vibrant art scenes and best bands are no longer based in the City By The Bay. San Francisco’s artsy image endures, with remaining collectives and spaces fighting hard to survive. But the city so many envision is now only in tacky guidebooks and tourist pamphlets.
On the Valencia side of the Mission’s Clarion Alley (run by one of the enduring community-based art collectives), a tribute mural for Matty Luv remains: the Hickey logo, with the initials “ML” in place of the legendary “H.” If you weren’t around during the 90s, you wouldn’t have a clue as to the significance of that mural. You’d smile vaguely and trundle off to one of the innumerable trendy restaurants. You’d walk through the ghost-whispering fog, under the web of electric wires that sits atop the streets like a dreamcatcher and shoots sparks, images of lost friends and drunken nights. You’d be in the San Francisco of today, which only vaguely resembles the San Francisco you’d come to see. And the soundtrack, I’m sorry to say, would suck.
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