We all have our own San Franciscos. I first moved to the city in the mid-1970s and attended elementary school in Precita Park, where my first grade teacher, the gorgeous Ms. Soo Ying, had a pierced nose, several butterfly tattoos, and a boyfriend named Babatunde who taught us to count to 100 in Swahili. My mom worked at Emporium Capwell and hung out with a group of writers and underground comic artists whose apartments were filled with smoke, conversation, and strange music. All of this left a permanent impression on me of a city that was a funky home to bohemian weirdos of all stripes.
So even when I moved back to SF at the height of the dot-com phenomenon and tried to rent an apartment in the Mission while dot.commies pushed past me, offering the landlord double the asking price (remember those days?), I still clung to my first impression of the city as a haven for interesting oddballs. I suppose others who moved here to get rich in the late nineties just saw the place as a pricey exurb of San Jose with older housing stock. I feel sorry for them.
Which brings us to the Train show at the Greek next week. The rock band known as Train formed in San Francisco in 1994. This, and the fact that their song, “Free,” was featured on the San Francisco-based TV series Party of Five, apparently legitimizes them as a “San Francisco band.” Remember how realistic Party of Five was, with its passel of cute Salinger kids living in a gorgeous Victorian mansion and paying for it all with the proceeds from their neighborhood restaurant? Please. In this food-frenzied town, an ersatz bistro like Salinger’s would be gone faster than you can say “tell me the difference between a raw food restaurant and the bulk nut aisle at Rainbow Grocery.” And that’s about how well Train represents San Francisco — my San Francisco, at least.
Train does that kind of big-production, I-really-mean-it middlebrow rock that pads the playlists of WB shows everywhere. Let me say that I believe there is a place for big-production, I-really-mean-it music — if it’s done right (see: “Rocket Man,” “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” “We Will Rock You,” etc.). But when it’s done wrong…
If you’re going to sing your heart out, you probably want to avoid lyrics that are just plain silly. And Train is great at ridiculous, dumbass lyrics that are so inane, they pull you right out of the experience of listening to the song and make you think: “what the hell?” I’ll always remember the day when, approaching the Bay Bridge Toll Plaza at full speed, I heard the following phrase bellowing from lead singer Patrick Monahan’s lungs: