What are the sounds of San Francisco? Music of all sorts of course and especially rock ‘n’ roll in concert halls, under the stars and on street corners. As the Starship once sang, “we built this city on rock n’ roll,” though the city had already been built several times over before their arrival and the arrival of the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and Otis Redding at the dock of the bay. I heard the Starship rehearse at Paul Kantner’s house when Abbie Hoffman was hiding there in the 1980s, though he wasn’t really in hiding. He loved attention so much he couldn’t ever hide. I also met China Kantner, Paul’s and Grace Slick’s daughter at Paul’s house. Abbie wanted to connect China to his son America, though that never happened.
As great or near-great American cities go, SF is quite quiet and that’s the way citizens like me love it and want it. My neighborhood, Ocean Beach, can be as silent as a tomb. True, there’s the sound of vehicles on the Great Highway, but that’s only on weekdays. The Lower Great Highway and La Playa Street are largely noiseless every day of the week. The homeless, also known as the campers, were never loud and now most of them are gone.
Walkers and cyclists on the Great Highway on weekends hardly make a sound. Neither do I. I can hear the waves that crash and break on the shore and the rustle of leaves on the trees in Golden Gate Park—a soothing sound— where kids, teens and young girls and boys kick soccer balls and grunt and cry when they score a goal. The Mission, a 45 minute ride from me on public transportation, boasts noise in Spanish and English and music with a Latin beat and where murals feature Carlos Santana who was born in Mexico and who came to the US as a kid and learned to play the guitar as well if not better than anyone else in The City.
The skyscrapers in the Financial District, where I enjoyed a cubby hole for a few years, seemed to muffle the clamor of stocks and bonds. "Money doesn't talk, it swears," Dylan sang in 1965, but in my experience money neither talks nor swears but keeps its trap shut. Folks with money don’t advertise their wealth.
The libraries are quiet; that’s the way they're supposed to be. The fog horns in earshot of Golden Gate Bridge provide a lullaby that puts me to sleep, but the screech of the N-Judah streetcar can wake me earlier than I’d like to wake. City employees are trying to muffle that unpleasant sound by greasing the rails, a remedy, they tell me, that works when it’s dry but not in the fog and rain.
Perhaps my favorite city sound is the crack of a Giant’s baseball bat hitting the ball out of the stadium and splashing into McCovey Cove, which I can’t hear but I can imagine. I wish there were lots more sounds of homeruns. But that’s not gonna happen. The Giants don’t have an Aaron Judge; at Oracle Park this May he went 6-for-10 with three home runs and six RBI; the Yankees swept the series. Meanwhile, I’ll enjoy the silence in my backyard where the potatoes I planted in my raised beds are coming up in the cool weather and where the lavender sings a song of love and friendship. On most days of the week I can leave my apartment, take 30 or so steps and join the guys who gather at La Playa and Judah, and play and sing old rock ‘n’ roll songs.
(Jonah Raskin is the author of Beat Blues: San Francisco, 1955.)
Be First to Comment