图片:旧金山,1994年。湾Area revelers of all colors dancing, smiling and vibing together on a makeshift dance floor. A woman threads together a series of dance music records made by different producers, but seemingly united by the same deep and throbbing bass lines. Psychedelic mandala and floral images from a slide projector bounce off disco balls, walls, altars or whatever they encounter — even people.
是否在一个秘密阁楼或unp市中心mitted waterfront location, the event series Your Sister’s House showed the San Francisco rave scene that there were female DJs who could rock a party.
In 2022, two years into a pandemic that trained people to socially distance and made the sight of a barefaced smile a rare treat, the idea of a conscious and free-spirited renegade party scene in San Francisco may feel like a fever dream. Fortunately, modern music lovers can experience ’90s rave and radio moments that might otherwise be lost to time by listening to mixes on the Nineties DJ Archive, where the party continues online thanks to a extensive recent addition to theSan Francisco Disco Preservation Society.
The Society, founded in 2013 by professional DJ and producer Jim Hopkins, is accessible worldwide via the DJ music-orientedHearthisapp. It contains almost 2,000 recordings from the 1970s to the early aughts that span not only disco but later dance music styles such as house, techno and breaks. Though a few major U.S. cities are in the mix, most were recorded in the Bay Area.
As the largest subdivision in the Society, the Nineties DJ Archive is also the most significant virtual presence of that era, with more than 900 enhanced digital versions of mostly cassette recordings of DJ sets from a peak era in rave culture. For local scenesters, it also functions as an exhilarating time capsule.
The Your Sister’s House mixes almost stayed hidden away forever. But at the end of 2021, event co-founder Shana Hardy scrolled through a Facebook group called “We actually did rave in the SF Bay Area in the 90s” and saw some DJ mixes posted by Hopkins.
Hardy’s co-founder, Liz Roberts, had moved back to the East Coast. She had a box full of cassette tapes of Your Sister’s House sets but couldn’t find the engineer who had recorded them at the events to remaster and upload them online. She was afraid to mail them back to California, and she didn’t trust anyone else with them — until Hardy came across Hopkins.
“Because Jim is a part of the scene and had shown a legitimate history of transferring other tapes, it was much easier to trust him and know he’d have appreciation for the material he was handling, and therefore take the most care we could hope for,” said Hardy, currently a product manager and developer for web and mobile apps in Los Angeles.
The Your Sister’s House tapes are now a significant addition to Hopkins’ Nineties DJ Archive, and they beautifully capture the 1993-94 San Francisco rave scene. Press play on a set from DJ Jan Cooley, a leading name in ’90s nightlife in San Francisco, and pretend you’re dancing to her mix live as the sun rises over a renegade outdoor location in what’s now called Dogpatch.
Hopkins, who currently plays three times per week at the bar 440 Castro, often receives tapes that are older than the Your Sister’s House collection. He also restores audio recorded on more delicate formats that require creative solutions.
For example: A food dehydrator generally used to make snacks like meat jerky and fruit leather is, in Hopkins’ hands, used to dry out sticky tape in his San Francisco recording studio. He then uses digital software to dramatically improve the sound quality of the work, though some of it just wouldn’t be the same — or even usable — without the kitchen gadget.
To wit, around the same time he started on the Your Sister’s House mixes, Hopkins acquired several boxes of reel-to-reel tape recordings of DJ mixes from Steve Masters, an on-air personality and the former music director of the now defunct San Francisco radio station Live 105. His “Modern Mix” sets aired at night on Live 105 throughout the ’90s. Masters kept boxes containing the taped shows inside an outdoor storage unit, which exposed them to elements like Bay Area fog. Once Hopkins saw the reels, he knew he’d have to plug in his dehydrator.
“A lot of the tape he recorded on was Ampex tape, and it’s notorious for ‘sticky shed syndrome,’ which is where the layers of tape stick together,” Hopkins explained. “The tapes will soak up moisture, so you have to dry them out.”
Listening to Hopkins’ restorations of Masters’ recordings, recently posted on the Nineties DJ Archive, opens a window into a time when San Francisco was alive with vinyl record stores stocking the latest experimental dance music from all over the world. As Live 105 music director, Masters could play whatever he wanted at night on commercial FM radio.
Masters made a weekly record store circuit: Butch Wax and Record Rack in the Castro, Star Records in Hayes Valley, and Rough Trade in the South of Market neighborhood.
“On Thursdays, I would drive around when all the new music was being delivered to the stores,” said Masters, now owner of the gaming portal GotGame. He would support the stores by telling listeners where he got the records, and he was rewarded with the chance to be the first to buy and play the new releases of his choice.
While DJing kept him busy Thursday through Saturday nights, on other nights Masters would go to local clubs like DNA Lounge or The I-Beam, a Haight Street staple from 1977 to 1994, to listen to DJs. He’d then invite the DJs who impressed him the most to come on the station and play their favorite new song of the week.
“The basic person in my mind that I was DJing to was your typical Live 105 listener, but it was also those people that go to those clubs Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday that are more eclectic and looking for something that they hadn’t heard before,” Masters said. “I wanted to blend those two people in my mind in order to do what I presented.”
His mixes skillfully highlight what were emerging global club styles, including the industrial sounds of Belgian new beat and the influential compositions of Black producers making techno in Detroit and acid house music in Chicago. In an era before streaming, these sets were pretty much the only way a local dance music fan could daydream about what dance floors around the world were like and hear songs from Africa, Europe and the Bay Area all blended together.
“We were playing songs that nobody knew, songs that weren’t pushed by the American record companies,” Masters said. “We played some of those, like R.E.M. and the Cure and stuff like that, but the sound of our station wasn’t just based on the music. It was based on what happened in between the records.”
Hopkins’ archive at the San Francisco Disco Preservation Society has thrived thanks in large part to community donations of money and music collections, he said. But he now offers to return all tapes once he has digitized them, so his workspace doesn’t get completely overtaken by them — especially since he seems to receive more hidden slices of local dance music history when he’s least expecting them.
“我有自己的邮政信箱的卡斯特罗,我得到一个文本message whenever I get a package, and my phone will blow up!” Hopkins said. “I go down there and it’s, ‘Surprise!’ It’s like Christmas.”
Jim Hopkins:spins 4-9 p.m. Fridays and Sundays. Free. 440 Castro, 440 Castro St., S.F. 415-621-8732.www.the440.com.