#Country music bar san francisco movie#

After more than two decades of playing intimate clubs such as the Make Out Room and Thee Parkside for the same set of bolo tie-wearing devotees, the group suddenly noticed lots of fresh faces at its shows, curious teenagers mixing it up with the old rockabilly dudes and onetime punks. Last year, Red Meat was tapped to serve as the backing band for Wanda Jackson, the rock 'n' roll queen (and Elvis Presley's onetime girlfriend) as she was staging a Jack White-assisted comeback. 'But what about Ryan Adams or Johnny Cash? Wilco sells out the Greek in a minute. 'When you think of country music, at best you think of Taylor Swift,' Wolf says. These days it feels as if more artists are forsaking distortion pedals and flannel shirts for steel guitars and cowboy hats, sometimes even without even realizing it.

It's not exactly a scene, but a slight shift toward acceptance of an underground genre that has been kicking around since the time when it really wasn't a good idea to walk down Valencia Street. It started in bars such as Amnesia and the Elbo Room and slowly spread - into the back corner of the antiques emporium Viracocha, neon-lit lounges such as Blondie's, even onto the sidewalks where guys set up their gear in front of vintage clothing stores. Take a walk down Valencia Street, the bustling retail stretch in the heart of San Francisco, where new artisan coffee shops and hip housewares boutiques seem to pop up every day, and you'll notice that the soundtrack has changed. 'When people ask what I do, it's easier for me to tell them I genetically alter corn,' says singer-songwriter and yes, local country musician 'Misisipi' Mike Wolf. They are former punks and metal heads from the Midwest who moved here long ago and eventually got tired of the racket, grew nostalgic for the old George Jones and Tammy Wynette records their parents used to spin on Sunday mornings, and settled in for a life of cult stardom, knowing the Bay Area's deep-rooted aversion to anything served under a cowboy hat. This isn't Nashville, and the people making music with a twang here have little time for that kind of pretense. 'What we do is more of an old-school thing. The property is currently entitled for a six-story building, with a mix of 12 one-bedroom units, six two-bedroom units, and two three-bedroom units, with a retail or restaurant space on the ground floor.'One of the most common things we hear at a Red Meat show is, 'Are you sure that's country? Because I don't like country music,' ' says Smelley Kelley, the singer of the long-running Mission District honky-tonk group. Those plans were scrapped and they sold the building the current owner in 2016. At that point it was being called Club Hide.Īs Socketsite previously reported, the owners of The Cafe in the Castro bought the property in 2012 and drew up plans for a new four-story building that would include a nightclub on the lower floors, and two condos up above. Rawhide 2 lived in the space from 1982 to the early 2000s, when it was sometimes used as a venue for LGBTQ nightclub events and was less popular for its country music.

Protests continued at various filming sites throughout San Francisco - some ending in arrests - until the 'Basic Instinct' film crew left for Los Angeles.'

#Country music bar san francisco movie#

The place was infamously used by director Paul Verhoeven in 1991 as a shooting location for the movie Basic Instinct, standing in for one of the San Francisco LGBTQ bars where protagonist Michael Douglas was investigating bisexual murder suspect Sharon Stone.Īs the Facebook group Preserving LGBT Historic Sites In Northern California writes, 'Many LGBTQ groups objected to the movie's homophobic and misogynistic themes,' and, 'On April 10, 1991, dozens of members of the Queer Nation sister group Labia picketed in front of Rawhide II because the bar's owner, Ray Chalker, allowed the first scenes of the movie to be filmed there. The SoMa building was once home to a country-western gay bar called Rawhide 2 - the '2' was because there was already a bar called Rawhide in Los Angeles when it opened. They're selling the fully entitled property for a loss, listing it at $3.25 million. Plans were drawn up and approved for a 20-unit condo development in 2019, but it appears the owners now want to cash out. Socketsite caught the new listing for the building at 280 7th Street, which was last purchased in 2016 for $4.125 million. A building that housed a longtime gay bar devoted to country music in SF's SoMa District, which was proposed for redevelopment as both a nightclub and a condo building going back a decade, has hit the market again at a reduced price.