Everyone has a gig in ’90s SF. We work jobs but we really slave for an art form that we are still learning how to master. Musicians, painters, dancers, hairstylists, writers, actors, massage therapists, inventors. Everyone is outside and inside at the same time. Everyone works at, and spends a good deal of their day in, restaurants, bars, or cafés talking, working on art, waiting on tables. Friday and Saturday are for rookies and the bridge-and-tunnel crowd. But every other day is locals only, and we have a secret: We are in the middle of doing something important. Even if no one notices. It’s important because we say so. It is important because we are free. We are judgment free. We are free of George Bush’s America and its macho posturing. We are self-­appointed freaks. We are surviving and thriving in this environment that we have created through our unique expression—and it will last forever. So we think.

Inside the club, there is a loud crowd full of day drinkers and early concert goers. We’re here to see Film School, the top of the heap in SF shoegaze cool, and Track Star, an SF indie/post-­punk, angsty three piece that trades off vocals and sweats heavily into their instruments. I see Peter in the corner, a bass player I once played with in a band called Max Demian about a year ago. The whole scene is quite incestuous. I love that it is so easy to go out and see good bands and randomly find friends hanging out. The cover at Bottom of the Hill is never more than five or seven dollars and if you play in a band, you rarely pay a cover anywhere. Everyone in this scene is excited and happy to be in a place where the artists set the agenda (which is no agenda at all). There may be some other, darker forces at work on the other side of town, but we wouldn’t know it.

I see the Bottom of the Hill concert calendar on the wall. This week has not only Film School, but also the Dwarves and Oranger. Thursday is the PeeChees. On Friday there is a brand-­new band from Brooklyn called TV on the Radio. Over the weekend is Cat Power, the Brian Jonestown Massacre, the Dandy Warhols, and next week Grandaddy. We are in this bar in the middle of a Renaissance and we are totally unaware of it. No one assumes any of us will ever be famous and no one cares. No one inside the bar or outside expects the rest of the world to get it. We are all just here, in the middle of it. The overabundance of talent and innovation of this city in 1996 is lost on the world, yet we imagine this time, this revolution of sound and attitude, will go on forever.

San Francisco in 1996 was a city organized for artists. The city of the creative class, the nonconformists. A city for full-­hearted romantics. And the sad truth is there isn’t much room left for the artist in San Francisco today. It’s just too expensive. The San Francisco I love has become colorless and shallow due to an elusive race to becoming the richest, the freshest, the most disruptive in a self-­satisfying vacuum of cash and innovation. Yet, besides the never-­satisfied tech crowd and the obnoxiously rich, many artists who were lifers in SF in 1996 are still lifers in SF today. Lifers may be all that are left to define this city. Because some of us never left it.