"Music was around before the music business was around." — J. Lewis
If for nothing other than the glorious adventure of opening BlueSix, his slightly underground 24th Street storefront music venue, Joe Lewis is emblematic of the folk-influenced indie rock scene here in San Francisco; that he has strong ties to the jazz world as well is just part of the connection. In addition he's a tireless booker, bass player, and not least, a fan.
We're outside at night, drinking beer under strings of lights, which is the perfect place to talk to Joe Lewis about music. He's in many ways the human version of an amber pint glass: Tall, reliable, everywhere, cool as well as warming. His deep love of the San Francisco music world is bedrocked in a genuine give-and-take between audiences and performers, and, overflowing with scene-pride and plans for the future, he's hard to shut up. I repeatedly have to interrupt, tell him it's time to move on to the next question. We both laugh. No worries, he says.
"I'm half Sicilian, dude, I will talk
all night. And I'm so passionate about all this stuff. I have opinions. I have stories."
In an attempt to define the term "booker," partly because I still don't fully understand precisely what's involved, I ask Lewis to describe the nuts and bolts of the role that's taken up so much of his time. I expect to hear about email tsunamis or unreliable musicians. Some kind of grousing, surely. I know he deals in nuts and bolts all right; here is a guy who guesses that the number of bands he's played in over the past five years alone is thirty-plus, "and that's not even counting the jazz."
That's a lot of planning, organizing, transportation, and conflict resolution, I speculate. But Lewis is a highly philosophical person, and I should have known better.
"I try to personally keep it really simple and sincere. The type of space [a venue] is completely dictates what type of show I'll pursue booking. Because I like all sorts of shows; big and loud, and small and intimate. There's a place for all of it. They all conjure different energy, which I think is all really healthy for the human spirit, the human condition."
Maybe I'm humbled. Part of my project is to shine a light on the work that goes into making live music, but people so often just want to talk about how awesome it is to be near it. Still, later, I'm back at it: How many emails per show? Tell me! Because seriously, as we all know by now, email is a) heinous and b) work.
"If I'm booking a club and we have 90 bands a month, because each show will have two or three bands, that's 90 people I have to email with at least three times, if I'm
lucky. And for somebody who was really not born to be on the computer, I do it because there's a standard of integrity — if I'm not going to do a good job, who is? So yeah, a lot of time that I could be looking at the ocean, I'm looking at a screen. And for someone who's not a techie making a lot of money — and good for them — but that's a lot of computer time."
Okay, but why do it then? I hear you. You love it. Why?
Surprisingly, Lewis traces his motivation to a single day — a six-hour-long, "life-altering, direction-changing" performance with the SF Jazz Festival.
"They had brought a Pygmy tribe from Central Africa. And I was very young at this point, I was a full-time musician gigging three to six times a week, three sets a night, you know, doin' my hustle, making my rent.
These Pygmies, their music was deeper and more beautiful and more cared-for than any artist could ever hope to get to in their own art. Their ... two of them had their teeth shaved in spikes! Their bodies were different, because their landscape had never changed. They had no concept of making a 'living' through their art. Their art had reached such a high level — it was completely built on how their community stayed connected to each other, and how they got by, and how they shared their language, and how they shared their culture and their history."
It was the seed, he says, of everything he's done (other than performing) since then. Opening BlueSix, booking venues large and small all over town, and especially, booking the Revolution Café's jaw-dropping six to twelve hours of free live music a day, every day, for four years. All of it without pay, and all on account of the Pygmies, "because of what I learned from them, about their relationship with art. How pure and beautiful it was, and how powerful it was."
It's different from the way people look at things currently, he laughs. Just a little. Ha ha. And money, to Lewis, is still totally antithetical to art, and fundamentally disrupts what music should be. Instead, "It's about the people. It's about respecting everybody involved, so much, because we need each other! That's the point of music!
If people write songs as part of their process, as part of the life that they're experiencing — that's what I'm drawn to. As opposed to other people who write songs that are kind of ... entertainment music? And that's great too, I have no judgment, it's just that really personal music is what makes the hairs on my arms raise."
To that end, Lewis is starting a production company with Scott McDowell of
Hyde Street Studio C, a recording room in which Graham Nash, Creedence Clearwater, Neil Young, the Grateful Dead, Stevie Wonder, and many others recorded in the 1960s. With McDowell as producer and Lewis as musical director, Awkward Anthem will aim to help locals make actual albums, against the now-normalized practice of producing singles.
He's interrupted me this time: "Can I talk about my local music heroes? Because in my Neanderthalic approach to the bands I play in is that I find my favorite people, the people who inspire me the most with their artistic pursuit, and then I figure out how to be their bass player. And it's workin' like a charm. My top three are Annie Lipetz, Sean Olmstead, and whoever I'm about to meet."
Contact the author at sfmusicheroes@gmail.com.