Perhaps no time in San Francisco history is as mythic as the 1960s and 1970s. The age of hippies and peace gave way to a rock, and later a punk, scene that grew up on the West Coast. This month’s California Book Club author, Jessica Hagedorn, locates her cast of characters in the city. Early in The Gangster of Love, readers meet protagonist Raquel “Rocky” Rivera, a San Francisco teenager growing up with distant admiration for the 1970s music scene before she catapults into it, then packs up and moves to Los Angeles and New York. Hagedorn’s vivid descriptions of San Francisco at that time build with Rocky’s music consciousness.
To immerse yourself even deeper into this iconic time and place as you read or after you finish, check out these five documentaries that provide real glances at the life and music of San Francisco in the ’70s.
The 2023 two-part San Francisco Sounds: A Place in Time, an MGM+ series, traces the development of the city’s music scene for about a decade, through the mid-’70s. It features never-before-seen footage of the scene’s core artists, including Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, Sly and the Family Stone, Steve Miller, and Carlos Santana. Like The Gangster of Love, this series does not shy away from the edgier side of San Francisco and its dark underbelly, including the drugs and death that haunted many of the artists at the center of attention.
Some of the performance spaces that hosted these artists’ concerts still exist and thrive in the city, like the famous Fillmore, but others have been lost to the passage of time. The 1972 documentary Fillmore pays tribute to the final concerts at Fillmore West, another Bill Graham concert hall that occupied a building in downtown San Francisco, before closing in 1971. Allowing viewers into the venue for last performances at the beloved music hall, the movie features Santana and the Grateful Dead.
To gain an understanding of the cultural climate in which Rocky grows up, readers must consider the social-protest environment of the time, which left a permanent impact on Bay Area consciousness. Black Panther/San Francisco State: On Strike, a short docuseries shot in two parts, includes footage from 1969 featuring the development of the Black Panther Party and the San Francisco State University student strike, which disrupted campus for six months. This event was an immediate precursor to Rocky’s move to San Francisco and her dabbles with radical politics on both a national and an international scale.
Rocky, in her early years, experiments with queerness, psychedelics, and self-expression; the world is hers to witness. An up-close look at the culture of revolutionary self-expression in 1970s San Francisco, 2002’s The Cockettes shines a spotlight on a group whose bold, outrageous gender-bending and drag performances embraced sexuality and chaos. Like Rocky, the Cockettes headed to New York seeking fame—but they found that San Francisco better suited them.
By the end of The Gangster of Love, which features Rocky living in 1980s New York, the AIDS crisis has begun to creep into view. Back in real-life San Francisco at the same time, the crisis had arrived as well, but because of community building in the ’60s and ’70s in San Francisco’s queer neighborhoods, the city was equipped to handle the epidemic in a way that other cities were not, even though it was also uniquely devastated by it. The 2012 PBS documentary We Were Here investigates those specific conditions by following the AIDS crisis and its aftermath, as well as the development of the Castro and queer spaces like those visited by Hagedorn’s characters.
To understand San Francisco and the fiction made by Hagedorn from the city’s vitality, take a closer look at its past developments, both painful and exciting.•
Join us on April 18 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Hagedorn will appear in conversation with California Book Club host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss The Gangster of Love. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
VOCAL ENSEMBLE
Author Sarah Stone (Hungry Ghost Theater) writes evocatively about the multiplicity and richness of perspectives as they evolve in The Gangster of Love. —Alta
WHY READ THIS
Alta Journal books editor David L. Ulin recommends this month’s pick, describing its power: “rock ’n’ roll as a narrative of liberation, which we, in turn, vicariously fulfill.” —Alta
WHY I WRITE
Jessica Hagedorn writes an astounding experimental essay on what memories drive her to put words on the page. —Alta
GREEN THUMB
CBC editor Anita Felicelli reviews Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s erotic and essential novel The Tree Doctor, set during the COVID-19 pandemic in Carmel and Carmel Valley. —Alta
APRIL RELEASES
Join us in our excitement about these 14 new books by authors of the West, including prior CBC author Maggie Nelson’s Like Love, CBC special guest José Vadi’s Chipped, and Rachel Khong’s Real Americans. —Alta
PACIFIC JOURNEY
Read Māori author and poet Tayi Tibble’s beautiful piece about visiting Los Angeles, which is also featured in this quarter’s print magazine. —Alta
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Jessica Blough is an associate editor at Alta Journal. She is a graduate of Tufts University and former editor in chief of the Tufts Daily.
