5 Old SF Punk Venues (Other Than Mabuhay Gardens) We Wish Still Existed

San Francisco has birthed and lost a ridiculous number of punk rock venues over the years. There are recent favorites like The Pound and Club Cocodrie, both closed in the early 2000s. There are the short-lived little nightclubs of the 1980s, including Club Nine (which later turned into The Stud), The Offensive, Club Foot and Attitude. Most famously of all, there was the legendary Mabuhay Gardens, a home-away-from-home for the most popular punk bands of the ’80s.

That same time period also inspired the creation of a handful of venues that were particularly strange and magnificent. Here are five of the most fascinating that we wish still existed today.

The Deaf Club

530 Valencia St.

It may have only lasted 18 months, but the lore of the Mission District’s Deaf Club will live on forever. Its first show was the result of Daphne Hanrahan — then-manager of The Offs — confusing the San Francisco Club of the Deaf with a new punk venue. Soon, by renting out the space herself, she had turned it into one.

In February 1979, the San Francisco Examiner declared:

The latest club on the local punk scene is called the Deaf Club. The joke is that the name is no joke … Since December, Walking Dead Productions has sponsored two or three concerts at the club each week, featuring local punk outfits like Crime and the Dils, plus occasional imports from Los Angeles … At the shows, punk followers mingle with the deaf club members.

In Gimme Something Better, Jack Boulware and Silke Tudor’s 2009 tome on Bay Area punk, Penelope Houston of The Avengers recalled: “It was kind of amazing. I think [deaf attendees] were dancing to the vibrations. The deaf people were amused that all these punks wanted to come in and rent their room and have these shows.”

In 2004, Dead Kennedys reminded the world of the club’s existence with the release of Live at the Deaf Club, an album of live material recorded at the second floor venue in March 1979. Nothing, however, quite captures the worlds colliding and camaraderie inside the place quite like Richard Gaikowski’s 1980 film, Deaf/Punk:

The Farm

1499 Potrero Ave.

Long before it was Potrero del Sol Park, the green expanse around the intersection at Potrero and Cesar Chavez was The Farm — a community center, art space, active farm and, most bizarrely of all, a punk venue. The likes of Bad Brains, 7 Seconds, Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Descendents and DOA all came through here in the early ’80s, much to the delight of the San Francisco underground.

Though the aggressive music seemed totally out of step with the hippie commune vibes that had been cultivated at The Farm throughout the late 1970s, members of its board of directors expressed an openness towards — and fascination with — the bands and fans that came through.

“Even when the punks were there, I remember going,” noted artist and board member René Yañez in a documentary about The Farm, “and the toilets were broken and they were hanging this kid out the window and the police coming … But I found it interesting.”

At the time, fellow board member Gail Feldman said: “[Folks] see people with hair sticking straight up and they get a little worried. But actually there hasn’t been that much of a problem…”

The Farm’s “punk era” can be seen in this documentary about the space, starting from 26:40:

Valencia Tool & Die

974 Valencia St.

Today, it’s Loló: A restaurant with a noisy ambiance and carnival-inspired decor. This is fairly fitting once you realize that, between 1980 and 1983, 974 Valencia St. was a supremely weird gallery, indie movie theater, performance art space and, yes, excellent punk venue.

During its short tenure, the venue managed to host the likes of Minor Threat, Social Distortion, Hüsker Dü, Fang and even Allen Ginsberg performing with a New Wave band called The Job. Performances happened on the street level and in the cellar — a space that was soundproofed with sand, only accessible via trap door and entirely lacking in a stage. Sometimes shows happened on both floors simultaneously. Sometimes they happened on Sunday afternoons. And sometimes (fairly frequently, actually) they happened entirely out of hours, in the middle of the night.

In the end, the venue was shut down for a number of violations, including some that were fire code-related. But while it existed, Valencia Tool & Die was a space where musicians could experiment without filter, find community and share ideas. Consider the band in the video below, Faith. No Man. Here they are playing a perfectly good set in Tool & Die’s basement in 1983. A couple of months after this was filmed, however, the rhythm section — bassist Billy Gould and drummer Mike Bordin — decided they could do better. They struck out on their own and formed a little band called Faith No More. So that’s nice.

The Sound of Music

162 Turk St.

Today, it looks like any other nondescript, three-story building in the Tenderloin. But between 1980 and 1987, the Sound of Music was a punk rock venue and nightclub that hosted bands like Frightwig, Boy Trouble and, later on, Romeo Void. (Agnostic Front also once played the tiny club after their show at Mabuhay Gardens got canceled at the last minute.)

Owned by Celso Ruperto — a photographer best known for documenting the dancers of North Beach’s strip clubs — the club was only-partially-controlled chaos. It also had a reputation for being very lackadaisical when it came to checking IDs; Frightwig guitarist Mia d’Bruzzi started bartending there when she was only 17. “Everyone was broke, pissed off about everything and having the time of their lives,” d’Bruzzi told Central City Extra in 2015. “If I didn’t like a band, I would throw half-full beer cans at them from the bar.”

Ruperto decided to let the venue go in 1986. It was listed for sale in newspapers that year for $65,000. The final show happened there in 1987.

“The Sound of Music was a dump,” White Trash Debutantes singer Ginger Coyote recalled in 2015. “The sound system sucked, but it was a club where about anyone could play and most people could get in free or cheap.”

Looks like a good time to us…

Target Video

678 South Van Ness Ave.

In 1983, two years after it had closed, the Examiner described Target Video as “a black building on South Van Ness Ave.” and “a national flashpoint of new culture in the making.”

The man behind that cultural earthquake was Joe Rees, a sculptor, videographer and one-man punk archive. Rees videotaped over 500 bands, all over the country, starting in 1976, documenting the underground scene like no one else. And it wasn’t just the sheer volume of footage that made Rees stand out, it was what he did with it. Rees spliced his films of punk shows with news and documentary clips that often added a gravitas — and impending sense of doom — to already intense songs.

It made sense for Rees, then, to start his own venue in 1978. He could record bands at Target Video, turn those sets into short films, then hold screenings of those in the building too.

An article in Artforum once described Rees’ work as “art for TV fans, rather than TV for art fans.” For the punks who frequented Target Video shows, it was simply TV for them — disaffected, angry, with one hell of a soundtrack.