Surviving San Francisco: Absinthe, Haight-Ashbury, and D.J. Lebowitz

Wandering drunk around San Francisco can find one in situations more surreal than fiction, more absurd than socialist policy.

Within five seconds of boarding the train my wanders. Warped imagery, smouldering in the mental workshop of my mind, combusts in an orgiastic cluster of the taboo and downright sick. Absinthe has played a part.

Earlier today I read a particularly odd story about a man from Wyoming who had been caught by police with thirty bovine eyeballs up his arse. Claims it helps with his erectile dysfunction. The picture sits with me all day.

I sit down and contemplate my reflection in the window, attempting to shake the image. Staring at my own eyeballs doesn’t help. I think about the corned beef hash and malted shake I had crammed down my gullet earlier this afternoon. Beef? Milk? Nope. Not gonna do it. Then my eye catches a discarded half-full bottle of water on the carriage floor. Yep. That’ll do.

I fixate on the bottle, smirking and nodding as it nonchalantly shifts its weight with each roll and lurch of the train. It’s both charming and hypnotic. Like some sort of beguiling, liquid pendulum. Could be the absinthe talking.

Now, if anyone’s familiar with the stretch of BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit — San Francisco’s somewhat lame answer to NYC’s subway system) line between Glen Park and 16th Street Mission, you’ll know that at certain stages of this short two stop journey that the train gathers some serious momentum. It’s ear-poppingly fast, blurry, disorienting, and sways like a hurricane. It’s during this stretch that the water bottle impresses me the most.

I grow obsessed with the physics of the situation. As the 60mph descending phallus jolts from side to side, passengers lunge for the nearest handrail, and the water bottle, like a casual metronome, eases back and forth on the floor in the most flowing spirit one can imagine. Nothing is deterring this thing. Back and forth. Back and forth. Gently rocking in a combined state of precision and harmony. Sexy, sexy stuff.

Seeking to impress only myself, I scribble a frantic equation on a snotty serviette crumpled in my jeans pocket. I conclude that the volume of the vessel cubed multiplied by the liquid amount applied to the vessel (assuming that the dead liquid weight equals one gram per millilitre at an atmospheric temperature of 21 degrees celsius and an average speed of 60mph) divided by the motion of consistent acceleration, times the frictional resistance and geometric angle of the surface, must be the sole reason for this most symmetrical performance.

i.e. v x ve3 x l (h2O=1g/1mm@21c) / xy x (x x y) = harmony.

Off to Haight-Ashbury.

Haight-Ashbury isn’t harmonious. It’s shit. Oh, the hippies are still there, what with their faux-revolutionary spirit and tourist-derived cattle-call of “peace man”, but let’s face it, it’s not real and the whole area should be quarantined.

The Haight embodies the hippy spirit in much the same way as Jeffery Dahmer embodies tolerance. Don’t get me wrong, the portrayal of hippy spirit still exists—tie-dye waistcoats, Kombi vans (remember kids, paraplegia is just a mild altercation with a stationary object away) and manky toenails have all played their part here since 67’s summer of love. But it’s the 21st century, and love is now an illusion. The Haight has adapted accordingly, by not only moving with the times, but, by morphing individual hippies into one malicious robotic Super-Being symbol of a lazy and immoral present day. Under the bloodshot guise of a mythical hippy ethos, the Haight has become the epicentre of stench-hole socialism and decriminalised thievery. Come back in ten years and every dreadlocked grifter will be wearing a fucking uniform.

“Oh, but isn’t the tolerance ever so groovy.”

Yes, it’s fucking fantastic. So nauseatingly progressive. Such freedom of expression and a true display of love for your fellow man. I particularly love the mass display of poorly made identical $150 tie-dyed baggy pants with Jimi Hendrix’s face on the ass that were mass produced in a Bangladeshi sweat shop for 75 cents, which, by the way, is the average monthly wage of the very worker that made them, should he survive the attempted suicides. Well done, socialists. We must all own a pair.

Sheesh.

I avoid the guy with the two-ringed binder loaded with pre-rolled joints organised alphabetically by strain and get the hell outta dodge.

Two styles of pedestrianism exist in San Francisco—uphill and downhill. As the day enters the no man’s land of no-longer-afternoon, not-quite-evening, I decide it would much easier to head downhill. Besides, the cushion effect provided by my wormwood intake has worn off; if I run downhill, I’ll get to a bar quicker.

So I do.

Where the Haight lacks in authenticity, style, charisma… the Madrone Art Bar on Divisadero picks up the slack. So much so, that upon entering, I immediately dub the discovery of this establishment as the King of Happy Accidents.

I feel like that weird Scottish guy that starred opposite Gwyneth Paltrow in that horrible movie from the late 90s. Such a Sliding Doors moment. If I’d been looking the other direction as I passed the nondescript street corner, or if I’d slowed to scratch myself at the precise moment of passing the front entrance, I may never have seen the minuscule flyer at the bottom left corner of the noticeboard.

D.J. Lebowitz, it reads.

D.J. Lebowitz!

Every so often you hear a name you haven’t thought of in years, and it takes you back to an irrelevant but fun nanosecond of your life (in this case, 1991) and you nod your head and smile and think, Yeah. That dude was really fucking cool. This is one of those moments.

Legendary punk rock pianist. D.J. Lebowitz. Live. At the piano. Tonight. Free. 6-9pm. A small note scrawls across the bottom saying, Don’t worry, D.J. will not sing.

I sit at the bar, order a Green Fairy, and grapple with my increasing surge of anticipation.

To some, the name D.J. Lebowitz may suggest rabbi turntablist. Thankfully (or regrettably) he is neither. What he is is a punk piano player. An NYC expat who has remained a stalwart of the Bay Area music scene for the best part of three decades.

*NB: Some guy at the bar told me that D.J. Lebowitz went missing for the best part of the 1990s and early 2000s. This has not been substantiated as I felt somewhat awkward trying to slot the subject into my discussion with D.J., nor can I find (or can be bothered finding) any information on said disappearance. So for the purpose of this piece, we’ll continue to use the term “stalwart”.

The stalwart first made his name in 1988 when he recorded a truly magnificent piano instrumental of the Dead Kennedys Holiday In Cambodia for a compilation album called Beautiful Happiness.

“I never got paid for that! Didn’t like the album artwork either. I would never have agreed to appear had I known what was going on the cover.”

I suppose it is one of the more graphic album sleeves, not quite up there with the Appetite For Destruction original banned concept, but nonetheless, it treads the tightrope with the best of them.

I’m not sure if it’s the lobotomised maniac in a Black Flag No Values t-shirt clutching a bloodied chainsaw in one hand, a screwdriver in the other, stethoscope around his clenched, bulbous neck that D.J. has the problem with, or, if it’s the deformed, blindfolded, screaming prisoner chained inside a metal cube with arms snapped in unnatural positions, a skeletal arm for a left leg, and a right leg broken at right angles. Maybe it was both. Who can say? I guess we’ll never know.

Psychotic artwork or not, the contents of the compilation (jointly released by Sounds, and Shigaku Limited) pack a mighty punch. Lebowitz is in excellent company; tracks by Naked Raygun (Vanilla Blue) Bullet Lavolta (Birth of Death) and Live Skull (Paul Revere’s Bush) launched those bands into solid mainstays. Minneapolis’ Halo of Flies also makes an appearance with the seminal Richie’s Dog, along with some quirky novelty such as Art Phag’s Golf (an angry, whiny, yet hilarious listen) and of course Lebowitz’s punk piano.

Whether Lebowitz got paid or not is a story for another day, suffice to say, his appearance on the compilation did expose him to a larger audience. As a result, his previously unknown 1986 LP Beware of the Piano was coaxed out of obscurity and launched into semi-obscurity. Another punk staple, the Ramones’ Judy is a Punk makes an appearance on Beware of the Piano, as well as a swag of originals, the standouts being Lousy Personality, Because of my Haemorrhoids, and the tone-setting feature of this evening’s debauchery, The Barking Song.

A middle-aged, balding gentleman with a beer gut and food stains on his faded t-shirt walks into the Madrone Art bar. He makes a derogatorily comment at the expense of my fabulous purple shirt, pats a raggedy Cairn Terrier on the head, sits down at a beat-up piano and proceeds playing Bruce Springsteen’s Dancing in the Dark. “Who the fuck is this?” I ask the guy sitting next to me at the bar. He replies, “That’s D.J. motherfucking Lebowitz, my man.”

That’s D.J. Lebowitz?!

“My most requested songs are Sweet Caroline and Piano Man. I hate those songs so much but I play them anyway. It’s what they want.”

There is a cheeky, child-like quality to Lebowitz that can seem both innocent and unsettling. Fidgeting in his seat, he’s able to reel off precise dates and locations at will.

“I first met Jello Biafra on January 23rd, 1982, on 3rd Street in Oakland. He knows who I am.”

Lebowitz blinks like each may be his last, each blink as swift as a guillotine blade, eyes snapping so hard that you can’t help but flinch a little each time. He continues to bark angry nothings while whispering demure inquisitions in the same breath.

“People think I’m a DJ. I’m not a DJ! Have you been to Perth?”

Coldplay’s God Put a Smile On Your Face is next. This could be a long evening. Better get another Green Fairy. “Barkeep!”

A slight disturbance surrounds D.J.’s aura; a man who’s led a difficult, frustrating life, a once precocious talent gone unrecognised, now beyond any form of a substantial, self-sufficient career. He knows it too. In a self-deprecating manner, he continues our banter between songs:

“I usually play here and a couple of other places around the Bay Area. I have a Thursday residency at another bar and on weekends I sometimes play at a deli in North Beach. It’s really cool because I can eat what I want.”

D.J.’s precocious talent shines through in the following tune, a rousing rendition of Judy Is A Punk. The set is hotting up, and D.J. clearly feeds off the small crowd’s energy. Think I’ll just sit on this absinthe for a while.

Did I just witness a small dog in a tutu hop by on its hind legs?

The wonderful thing about absinthe is that it’s an excellent leveller. Toulouse Lautrec, Vincent Van Gogh, Chuck Hagen, Arthur Rimbaud… the green torment has fucked with all of our heads at some stage, and for that, we are one and the same. In small doses, absinthe can enhance any experience, immeasurably inspiring and oh so pleasurable. In large doses, absinthe is fucked up. Also, this current experience requires zero enhancement.

Yes I did just see a small dog in a tutu hop by on its hind legs.

Things have gone up a notch. As Lebowitz ploughs through an eclectic soup of piano instrumentals including, Stairway to Heaven, Because of My Haemorrhoids, Sweet Caroline and Holiday in Cambodia, the human to dog ratio equalises dramatically. Each dog enters the bar via the rear door, in various stages of dress, evenly spaced, and one by one with owners in tow. The first dog, a Chihuahua in a bow tie. Next, a small Poodle in a tutu, followed by a Jack Russell in a vest, an Italian Greyhound in a party hat, a Kelpie with a bandana, a Golden Retriever with an umbrella?!. A Pitbull in a masquerade mask strolls past, and me, I feel both elated and sick at the same time. A sock-wearing Great Dane. Not only are these dogs increasing in size, they’re also increasing in absurdity. I shoot a questioning look at the bartender. He just laughs. A Newfoundland in sunglasses walks in, and like Sylvester throwing away his catnip, I push away my jar of absinthe.

With tip jar overflowing, a semi-circle of floorspace is cleared as repeated crowd shouts of “Pol Pot! Pol Pot! Pol Pot!” signifies the climax to Holiday in Cambodia. Cue The Barking Song. Several dogs sit at Lebowitz’s feet, all either looking up at him or their owners in anticipation, as if to say, “Just play the fucking song!” They know it’s their time to shine.

The song itself is quite short, maybe two minutes, and consists mostly of a noodling piano with several significant pauses that allow enough space for the dogs to bark. The piano kicks in again and the dogs go silent. Forget ridiculous equations and phoney tourist traps; this is pure harmony.

“All this dog stuff started at a club in North Beach called The Square. I was playing the Barking Song and the club owner’s St. Bernard all of a sudden started barking whenever I would pause. It’s been a favourite ever since. Pays the bills too.”

I want to ask someone, anyone, how do the dogs know when to bark and when not to bark, but I don’t want to look stupid. So, I just ask the guy sitting next to me, “What’s going on?”

“Ain’t it obvious? It’s D.J. fucking Lebowitz, man.”

Yes. Yes it is.