We Were Here

WE WERE HERE: As a new documentary is released, a writer who was also there remembers San Francisco at the advent of AIDS

As a new documentary is released, a writer who was also there remembers San Francisco at the advent of AIDS

The advent of AIDS tore through San Francisco’s Castro district, the heart of the city’s gay community, with the same ferocity as Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans’s Ninth Ward. Obviously there were differences - buildings and infrastructure remained intact and this was a slow-motion disaster that unfolded over years as opposed to days - but a devastated community reeling from loss was similarly left abandoned by indifferent authorities and so forced to fall back on its own resources to cope and rebuild.

Darondo and Disco Gold: Unearthed Funk and the Birth of Disco

Winning comps of music neglected by the mainstream

By 1977, disco was a cliché to be mocked. But a few years earlier, before its ubiquity, disco was a liberating music uniting minorities on the dance floor. Funk, too, became a cliché, little more than a reductive musical cypher. Two new reissues celebrate these genres when both were still vital, still able to surprise. Disco Gold: Scepter Records & The Birth of Disco is exactly what its title says it is, while Darondo’s Listen to My Song: The Music City Sessions collects A-grade funk that had languished in the vaults until now.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

San Francisco is overrun by motion-capture monkeys in Apes revival

Ever since the first Planet of the Apes film in 1968, in which astronaut Charlton Heston landed on a futuristic Earth being run by super-evolved apes, the idea has become a sci-fi staple, breeding a string of sequels, spin-offs and TV series. Tim Burton remade the original flick in 2001, but despite enjoying commercial success, it was viewed with contempt by Apes cognoscenti.

CD: Vetiver - The Errant Charm

The glossy sheen of LA takes over former freak folkers

Early on, Vetiver were apparently a freak folk band. Associations and collaborations with Joanna Newsom and Devandra Banhardt helped that tag stick. But constraints don’t concern Vetiver main man Andy Cabac. Fifth album The Errant Charm is accessible and none too freaky. Although introspective and tinged with psychedelia, this is old-school West Coast pop.

theartsdesk Q&A: Donald Runnicles

Scotland's greatest conductor explains why he's returned home

Who's the greatest living British exponent of the late Romantic repertoire? Many would say Edinburgh-born conductor Donald Runnicles (b. 1954). Runnicles has spent the last 30 years quietly forging a formidable name for himself abroad, first, as a repetiteur in Mannheim, then as an assistant to Sir Georg Solti at Bayreuth, as guest conductor at the Vienna State Opera and, for the past two decades, musical director of San Francisco Opera. In 2007 the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra announced that Runnicles would return home to become their new chief conductor. This week he performs Strauss, Wagner and Mahler in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. He tells me how he came to work with Solti, how opera moulded his style and how a few remarks about how he was considering leaving America if Bush won another election got him into serious hot waters.

Brett Dennen, interview

Californian singer-songwriter brings new life to classic roots

Astonishingly tall and surmounted by a luxuriant clump of dramatic red hair, Brett Dennen couldn't be mistaken for any other singer-songwriter. It's possible to detect any number of musical echoes in his songs - Neil Young, Dylan, Paul Simon - but thanks to his huskily soulful voice and a gift for conveying complicated sentiments in a resonant phrase, he manages to stand apart from the crowd here too.
Subscribe to San Francisco