It was only Jules Bautista’s fourth time at Bottom of the Hill.
Around 8 p.m. on a Wednesday in late February, the club was filled with Hot Flash Heat Wave (opens in new tab) fans. The dreamy surf-rock band was headlining a show programmed by Noise Pop (opens in new tab), the winter festival that, after three decades, remains a beloved showcase for up-and-coming talent.
As people ordered beers at the bar and vaped on the patio, the mood was pointedly nostalgic. This was the storied Potrero Hill venue’s final go-round as a staple of Noise Pop. Bottom of the Hill’s owners announced in January that after 35 years, rising costs and demographic changes meant they would shutter (opens in new tab) by the end of 2026.
To Bautista, a therapist, the club is simply irreplaceable. “It’s really sad to me that we’re losing the lore,” she said.
It’s a devastating blow. Bottom of the Hill’s small stage is essentially an index of turn-of-the-millennium music history, as its meticulous archives (opens in new tab) reveal. In March 1997 (opens in new tab) alone, alt-rockers Bloodhound Gang, ska punk band Less Than Jake, and sadcore darling Cat Power performed within weeks of one another. (The cover for Cat Power: $7.)
While January is typically a slow month for live shows, several venues report that this year started off strong. | Source: Courtesy Noise Pop Fest
Bottom of the Hill’s owners teased the possibility that another promoter could take it over. But within weeks of the announcement, nearby punk-and-hardcore dive Thee Parkside announced (opens in new tab) that it too would close. Owner Malia Spagnol — who also operates the Mission bar Mother — said the landlord wants to erect a residential building on the site. So Thee Parkside will cease booking shows in March and will hang on as a bar for as long as it can. “We don’t have a date yet,” Spagnol said.
After this double whammy, a glib narrative of cultural decline immediately wrote itself. San Francisco has lost venue after venue over the last quarter-century, including Mezzanine, Vessel, 12 Galaxies, Hemlock Tavern, Elbo Room, and Slim’s. But the loss of two beloved independent spaces, only three blocks apart, in a neighborhood increasingly surrounded by condos and AI offices, felt as though the boom loop had birthed another doom loop.
A wall in Thee Parkside’s patio foretells the future. | Source: Astrid Kane/The Standard
In reality, the picture is more complex — and live music is enjoying an unlikely, if precarious, renaissance. From North Beach to Hayes Valley to the Mission, independently owned clubs continue to host punk, metal, indie rock, and unclassifiably weird performances every night of the week. These spaces exist in a middle tier — not quite the underground, but smaller and more community-driven than the newly renovated Regency Ballroom and Castro Theatre, or other venues run by corporate promoters Goldnvoice and Another Planet Entertainment. As barometers of San Francisco’s cultural health, they seem to be pointed in the right direction.
“The scene,” Spagnol said, “is growing.”
‘The kids are still making unique, fun music’
Naysayers have written off San Francisco’s music scene for years. One 2016 elegy (opens in new tab) foreshadowed that Bottom of the Hill, under constant threat from condo developers, would close. But industry vets report that business is, well, pretty good.
Kilowatt has been booking live music and DJ nights since a trio of new owners took over in 2023. | Source: Justin Katigbak for The Standard
“I get nervous saying it, because the last time we had such a promising start to the year was 2020, but this year has started off really well,” said Dan Strachota, talent buyer for Hayes Valley club Rickshaw Stop. “It felt like we were scratching an itch that maybe felt like it hadn’t been scratched the past few years.”
January is typically a slack season for live music. But Strachota said the club booked an above-average number of shows this year, almost all local bands or DJs, in part by letting staffers take the lead on programming. “Almost all of them did smashingly,” he said, singling out “slop rock” duo Buzzed Lightbeer (opens in new tab) and indie emo trio Spa (opens in new tab).
Instagram remains the dominant avenue for promotion, but even bands that don’t have massive online followings can pack the house. Strachota likens the current energy to the late-aughts period when prolific local oddballs like Ty Segall, Mikal Cronin, and John Vanderslice benefited from coverage in SF Weekly and the SF Bay Guardian. The alt-weeklies may be gone, but the indie scene is now more diverse, as are the audiences. In February alone, Rickshaw Stop hosted Pakistani R&B, an electro-sleaze dance party, and a Broadway rave.
“It was like, ‘Wow, this hasn’t gone away,’” Strachota said. “The kids are still into making unique, fun music.”
Bottom of the Hill will close at the end of 2026. | Source: Jason Henry for The Standard
Rickshaw Stop is humming along, but the more remarkable story may be the revival of Mabuhay Gardens (opens in new tab), a North Beach venue that originally operated from 1976 to 1987. Dozens of punk and New Wave acts, from the Dead Kennedys to Blondie, came through the doors of the “Fab Mab,” and after almost four decades, a group of musicians resurrected it last year in its original home on Broadway. In early March, the club threw a packed coming-out party (opens in new tab) with performances and talks to commemorate punk’s 50th anniversary. The headliner was none other than Flipper, a band that formed in San Francisco in 1979.
“If it was a house party, you’d call it the best house party of the year,” said manager John Karr, who worked at Bottom of the Hill for seven years. At present, the Mab’s calendar is fairly light on shows, but to Karr, the important thing is that musicians are who control the programming. “It’s not what Live Nation puts on,” he said. “It’s what we grow here.”
‘So much more effort goes into being a band’
Sometimes you have to pivot to meet the moment. After new owners took over Kilowatt several years ago, the 16th Street dive began hosting live shows again in 2023. It has since branched out into DJ nights, a somewhat unconventional move for a punk bar. Austin Waz, Kilowatt’s talent buyer — as well as the lead vocalist, guitarist, pianist, and songwriter for the band Analog Dog (opens in new tab) — said this was a business decision. DJ shows help subsidize the live acts, which have higher overhead, appeal to niche crowds, and may require more of an audience than simply tapping into the urge to dance.
“I can pay a DJ $200 to fill a room, and they don’t even need to be that good at what they do. “People just vibe,” he said. “So much more effort goes into being a band.”
P.E.E., or Potentially Egregious Error, headlined what might be Bottom of the Hill’s last-ever Noise Pop show. | Source: Courtesy Noise Pop Fest
Waz compares the city’s music scene to a baseball farm system, with divisions from single-A up to the majors. Scrappy clubs function as proving grounds where local talent is nurtured and developed before graduating to AAA- and Big League-level venues such as the Fillmore, Warfield, and Bill Graham.
He frowns on San Francisco’s embrace of large-scale electronic dance music performances at Union Square, the Embarcadero, and Civic Center — the kind that eternal civic booster Mayor Daniel Lurie hypes regularly on Instagram. These ad hoc productions stand in contrast to the city’s grassroots clubs, which serve to nurture and cultivate talent. “People conflate these public events with sustainable infrastructure to grow good art,” Waz said. “And it’s not.”
For the small venues, the positive start to the year, while welcome, feels fleeting and conditional: Yes, attendance is up, and the music is diversifying, but alcohol sales continue to decline. Booze has long been a crucial source of revenue, but younger audiences are drinking less than previous generations. The simplest solution is to charge more at the door — but that’s a tricky proposition for venue owners, and an existential dilemma besides. “It’s like, ‘Sell beer to make your church run,’” Waz said.
Perversely, the impending loss of Thee Parkside and Bottom of the Hill may be to the remaining venues’ advantage. Strachota, Karr, and Waz all agreed that their bottom lines stand to benefit. And there’s always hope that new venues will pop up to take their predecessors’ place. That’s what happened in the 1990s and early 2000s, when many punk and rock clubs were born.
One way or another, the city will replenish itself, the operators said, with musicians making cool, weird music for cool, weird people. “To be an artist in San Francisco is an uphill battle, but once you get over the hill, it’s an amazing experience,” Waz said. “If you’re doing it here, you’re doing it for the right reasons.”