A Jack in the Box restaurant in San Francisco’s Union Square neighborhood has been ordered by a San Francisco Superior Court judge to fix its faulty plumbing, which for several months last year leaked water and feces onto Biscuits and Blues, the old-school music venue below it that has remained closed for almost a year.

The order is part of a temporary injunction issued by the court on Monday. It comes roughly 10 months after the building at Geary and Mason streets began to have plumbing issues. According to the filing, Jack in the Box “must stop any leaks from the refrigerators and freezers up to and including unplugging the appliances.” It goes on to say Biscuits and Blues “continues to suffer irreparable harm” while the 24-hour burger joint operates.

The order does not specifically state which repairs need to be made or whether Jack in the Box will be forced to temporarily close.

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“I’m more excited now about what’s happening than I have been in a while,” said Steven Suen, owner of Biscuits and Blues. “I feel like this could be the official start of our countdown to when we’re finally back in business.”

Biscuits and Blues, which closed last April, opened in 1995 and is one of the oldest blues bar and restaurants in San Francisco, where the number of similar venues has been shrinking. What first drove the Jack in the Box location and Biscuits and Blues to court was a disagreement about who would pay to fix the plumbing. Biscuits and Blues said it was Jack in the Box’s responsibility. The fast-food restaurant owner said it was the duty of the landlord, and the landlord said the Jack in the Box operator should pay for the work.

Jack in the Box Inc., which does not own the restaurant but was later added to the lawsuit as a defendant, and the legal representatives for the San Francisco franchisee did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

As the court battle raged, Suen said Biscuits and Blues teetered on the brink of a permanent closure. Over nine months, Suen said he has canceled more than 100 shows. He said all 16 of his employees have left to find other work. In late 2019, Suen said he was losing as much as $250,000 each month.

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Biscuits and Blues owner Steven Suen inspects the damage to his ceiling and nightclub in San Francisco, Calif. on Friday, Aug. 2, 2019 caused by flooding from the restaurant above. The Biscuit and Blues nightclub has remained closed since April 4 when a sewage line from the Jack in the Box restaurant on the floor above cracked, sending waste water raining down from the ceiling of the club.Paul Chinn / The Chronicle 2019

But simply fixing the plumbing and changing appliances as the injunction orders won’t address all of the building’s issues, according to Gordon J. Calhoun, who represents the franchisee of Union Square’s Jack in the Box, Saeed Khan. During a Jan. 29 court hearing, Calhoun said the plumbing in the building was more than 20 years old and repairing it would require structural work on the building’s foundation, which would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and take roughly two years to complete.

But according to a Jan. 28 letter from Tony Sanchez-Corea, a local building inspector who reviewed the property at the request of Biscuits and Blues, the damage at the location “is fairly minor in nature and could not reach a level requiring a seismic or foundation upgrade.”

Alexander Hamilton of the Versant Law Group, a representative for Meiyan Enterprises Inc., the landlord of the property that houses both Jack in the Box and Biscuits and Blues, said during the Jan. 29 hearing that he wanted to see “both tenants able to operate and remain in place.”

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Despite the doors being closed to Biscuits and Blues, Suen said he spends his time functioning as though the business were to reopen tomorrow. He was scouting blues talent in Memphis during Super Bowl weekend. Later this year, he plans to attend a blues music awards show for the same reason. He’s also working on upgrading the payment system at the bar and restaurant.

Since music venue mainstays in the city like Bissap Baobab, Elbo Room and Hemlock Tavern are either closing, moving or being sold, the local blues community has rallied to support Biscuit and Blues. Roughly 20 people have attended each court hearing for the business over the past nine months.

Chris Siebert, a piano player and bandleader for Lavay Smith and Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers, performed regularly at Biscuits and Blues for 25 years until it closed. Both Siebert and Smith sat in the audience at the Jan. 29 hearing.

“It’s just incredibly frustrating to see what has been happening. There’s just so many people that care about this place,” Siebert said while leaving the hearing. “You’ve been seeing honest, hardworking people being stonewalled by a big corporation.”

Biscuits and Blues owner Steven Suen views the damage to his nightclub in San Francisco, Calif. on Friday, Aug. 2, 2019 caused by flooding from the restaurant above. The Biscuit and Blues nightclub has remained closed since April 4 when a sewage line from the Jack in the Box restaurant on the floor above cracked, sending waste water raining down from the ceiling of the club.Paul Chinn / The Chronicle

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The post As SF blues venue Biscuits and Blues’ closure drags on, court docket steps in appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

Club Ebony, a famous Indianola, Miss. blues venue that was part of the Chitlin circuit — a loose network of black-owned clubs and venues in segregated American cities — has hosted hundreds of memorable moments. Bobby Rush, the 89-year-old blues singer, recalled one of his favorites in a recent interview: a scene from BB King’s 2014 homecoming concert.

As King weaved through a lengthy version of Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine,” he noticed that Rush had nodded off. “‘Ladies and gentlemen,'” he began, according to Rush. “‘I have my best friend in the house. i play this music And he’s lying over there sleeping on top of me.’”

The audience giggled, and Rush joined King on stage with his harmonica to cap off his friend’s last performance, ending a tradition of annual concerts that began in 1980. King died a year later.

Club Ebony was more than King’s home club. Upon opening in 1948, it provided Indianola’s black community with a gathering place for dining, dancing, and socializing, and provided generations of blues, rock ‘n’ roll, and soul artists with the enthusiastic crowd they needed to make a living.

King purchased the venue from its third and longest-serving owner, Mary Shepard, in 2008 and donated it to the BB King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center. But after his death, it slowly deteriorated due to the effects of time and disuse. The bill of keeping the 6,400-square-foot club in a city of 9,000 people open four nights a week proved too high in the midst of the vast delta.

“The traditional format wasn’t financially viable — times had changed,” said Malika Polk-Lee, the museum’s executive director. The organization turned Club Ebony into an events venue, but when the tourism industry began to reopen after the pandemic-related closures in 2021, museum staff found that the condition of the timber-frame building was poor.

“We found that there was structural damage. The roof and walls deteriorated and water got inside,” she said. “The senior year was tough on the building.”

The museum had no choice but to keep the club closed while it sought support for its rescue, which it secured through public and private funds, including a grant from regional National Endowment for the Arts-affiliated organization South Arts and a City of Indianola, received city tax. Its dormant period ends Thursday, when the venue is scheduled to reopen its historic doors after spending $800,000 on repairs.

Before mainstream America first saw Ike and Tina Turner when they brought the 1960 rave-up “A Fool in Love” to “American Bandstand,” and before Ray Charles’ four Grammys that same year with “Georgia on My Mind.” won — and long before King stunned a crowd of white hippies and sealed his mainstream success at San Francisco’s Fillmore West in 1967 — they were all regulars at Club Ebony.

Indianola entrepreneur Johnny Jones opened it in 1948 when the post-war economy was in full swing. New industries like the Ludlow Textile Mill had brought money to the city, and workers plonked much of their wages in the jukerooms on Church Street, the city’s notorious home of gambling and vice.

But Club Ebony offered a different experience. Jones’ new club was large and designed to house the big bands of the 1940s, including the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra and the Count Basie Orchestra. Revelers in khakis and pinstriped suits could buy bonded whiskey and bootleg corn whiskey, and men and women danced to jump blues and mingled on the ballroom floor.

“There wasn’t much socializing in the houses,” said Sue Evans, who was married to King from 1958 to 1966 and lived in the back of the club after her mother, Ruby Edwards, bought it in 1958. The houses were small, she remarked: “Families were big, so nobody was going to anyone’s house at that time to sit down and be entertained.” The club became a social outlet.”

Venues on the national chitlin circuit have included glittering palaces in major cities like Indianapolis and Houston, and lavish juke restaurants in smaller towns. If a club was not available, promoters rented halls; Some shows took place in private homes. Live performances lasting just one night bolstered the music scene’s ecosystem, while clubs, recording studios and record labels sprung up to capitalize on and fuel the celebrations.

The cycle arose from the need for self-sufficiency. Black musicians, promoters and audiences needed places where they were welcome and could be themselves. Even the musicians in King’s band would travel around with cookware and canned goods if they couldn’t find a restaurant that could serve them.

Although some black musicians, as Rush said, “crossed over” to white audiences and had “crossed out” black clubs, artists could make a living in those venues when they weren’t welcome elsewhere. The closure and decay of Club Ebony posed a bigger problem, Evans says: the loss of the black common spaces that once held it together.

“There isn’t a club left in the Delta that could offer music like this,” she said. “So to speak, a large part of our culture goes south; it is no longer there. And this is a continuation of that culture.”

As of December 2021, the museum has raised and invested nearly $1 million in electrical, plumbing, kitchen appliances, furniture, and painting to help bring the club up to date with modern regulations and compliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act. Some elements, such as the sheet metal ceiling panels, are original.

The exterior sports a new pea green livery, color-matched to the historic record at least since it was acquired by Shepard. On a warm afternoon in early May, a team installed information boards inside to give visitors the background story of the club. Museum staff compared their work to old photographs to ensure historical accuracy.

In the 15 years since the museum acquired Club Ebony, music tourism has given Delta towns like Indianola hope for a future, based in part on an interest in their past. In front of the club is a historic marker for the Mississippi Blues Trail, a network established in 2006 of more than 200 sites important to the development of music and its culture.

“It’s important that Black-run clubs are supported,” said Dr. William Ferris, a blues historian and author who spent summers touring the Delta in the 1960s. “Just as black people own their land and farms, it gives business people and families the independence and stability that is very important, and music is a way to achieve that.”

For today’s young black blues musicians, like 24-year-old Christone “Kingfish” Ingram of Clarksdale, Miss., who is widely credited as the heir to the King’s Delta blues crown, historic venues like Club Ebony are still places to celebrate be able to relax away from the pressure of top-class performances at festivals and theatres.

Like King before him, Ingram occasionally frequents his hometown clubs, such as Red’s Lounge in Clarksdale, where he plays three or four sets, often finishing in the wee hours of the morning. Club Ebony, where he performed at the beginning of his career, will certainly be back on his schedule.

“Every time I’ve been there, I’ve always hung out with the OGs of the blues, guys like Mr. Rush and Kenny Neal, and absorbed some history,” Ingram said. “It takes me back to when I started and I feel like it keeps me humble.”

The post Membership Ebony, a Historic Blues Venue Tied to B.B. King, Rises Once more appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

This story originally appeared in the March/April 2013 issue of Guitar Aficionado magazine.

Albert King was a giant among bluesmen, and not only for his immense talents on the guitar. A 250-pound giant of considerable bulk, King stood between six-four and six-seven and made any guitar he held in his massive hands look like a child’s plaything.

But the notes and tones he tore from the instrument were anything but small. In the middle years of the 20th century, King grabbed hold of a Gibson Flying V and boldly went where no blues guitar player had gone before, or has gone since.

A left-hander, he flipped a right-handed guitar upside down, put it in an unorthodox tuning, and forged a style steeped in steely drama and epic note-bends that evoke the vertiginous blood rush of powerful emotions.

King’s impact on the blues and rock guitar legacy is prodigious. Eric Clapton, Mike Bloomfield, Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan have been among his greatest admirers. Each drafted huge chunks of King’s fiercely original style into his own playing. Clapton famously nicked the solo from King’s Oh, Pretty Woman and inserted it in Strange Brew from Cream’s wildly influential 1967 album, Disraeli Gears.

Jimi Hendrix cited King’s Crosscut Saw as one of his favorite tunes. Mike Bloomfield covered King’s Don’t Throw Your Love on Me So Strong, and Cream recorded their own version of King’s signature tune, Born Under a Bad Sign. As for Stevie Ray Vaughan, he outdid his King-crazed predecessors by recording an In Session television special with his hero in 1983.

His influence on many of the world’s most revered guitarists is sufficient to make him a national treasure of American music. But in many ways, his own achievements outshine those of his acolytes. After all, he did it first. And he certainly did it his way.

True to his name, King is arguably the monarch of upside-down-lefty guitarists, a distinguished company that includes Otis Rush, Doyle Bramhall II, Elizabeth Cotten, and Coco Montoya in the blues-folk realm, and everyone from Babyface to Bob Geldof in other genres.

The barbed-wire minimalism of King’s searing leads makes an ideal counterpoint to his husky, gospel-inflected vocal style. It’s a true call-and-response passion play. King was nicknamed the Velvet Bulldozer, a name that resonates once you realize that he once made his living driving a bulldozer. Albert King lived the blues. That’s why he played and sang them so beautifully.

He had a remarkably wide perspective on the blues as well, crossbreeding more traditional 12-bar forms with everything from sweet Stax soul to big-band balladry.

Like a lot of left-hand/right-brain creatives, Albert King didn’t play by any rulebook but his own, nor would he suffer fools gladly. Possessed of a notoriously bad temper, he would lay into band members onstage if things weren’t going his way. In one famous public display of anger, he chewed out John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, who were backing him, for playing too loud.

(Image credit: David Warner Ellis/Redferns)

Luthier Dan Erlewine, who made King one of the Flying V guitars that he played throughout his career, had a few occasions to witness the Velvet Bulldozer in high dudgeon.

“The first time Albert was playing at the Grande Ballroom, I was backstage after the show,” Erlewine says, referring to Detroit’s legendary Sixties rock venue, just a few miles from the bridge to Windsor, Ontario. “And Albert was pissed at the promoters, who were trying to pay him with Canadian bills. He wouldn’t take them. ‘I don’t want none of that funny money,’ he said. And they got him what he wanted.”

King was known to pack a gun, so people were reluctant to cross him. But his hot temper was only one aspect of a complex and gifted artist. Erlewine puts the anger down to a combination of impatience and competitiveness. 

“I’d say Albert was more competitive than some, certainly more so than the older folks out there, like [his blues contemporaries] Mance Lipscomb and Johnny Shines. As a person, though, Albert had a softness and kindness inside. But he kept it hidden a lot.”

Along with B.B. and Freddie, Albert King is one of the three kings of the blues, although the man born Albert Nelson was related to neither of those great bluesmen by blood. He was, however, born in B.B. King’s hometown – Indianola, Mississippi – on April 25, 1923. 

While he may not have literally been born under a bad sign, his birth date does put Albert King in the contentious and creative zodiacal house of Taurus. Later in life, he would assume the regal surname King as a stage name, some say in homage to B.B. King.

King’s family moved to Forrest City, Arkansas, when he was eight. He spent some time as an agricultural laborer, picking cotton, but set his sights on making a life for himself in music early on. He once joked that he didn’t learn from studying any other guitarists, saying, “Everything I do is wrong.” But that isn’t strictly accurate. King also spoke often of being influenced by Lonnie Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Elmore James.

“I listened to the slide guitar of Elmore James and a couple of more people I knew way back there,” he told one interviewer. “Then along came T-Bone Walker, and that did it. So I just mixed it all together, and I couldn’t get it exactly like they had it, but I just put my own thing to it.”

It may have been the open slide-guitar tunings of players like Jefferson and James that inspired King’s own use of alternate tunings. He is mainly associated with an E minor tuning (low to high, C B E G B E). But he also tuned to the same intervals in both C# and D. He was known to use open F (low to high, C F C D A D) as well.

For guitarists accustomed to playing in standard, none of these tunings are as intuitive as, say, open G or E. But remember that Albert King was holding a right-handed electric guitar the “wrong” way around. This yields a different perspective on the instrument, one that is, in a way, more in tune with nature, with the low strings closer to the ground and the high strings nearer to the sky. But even upside down, some of King’s open tunings are mighty strange, which also accounts for the unique beauty embodied in some of his phrasing.

“I knew I was going to have to create my own style,” he told guitar journalist Dan Forte, “because I couldn’t make the changes and chords the same as a right-handed man could. I play a few chords, but not many. I always concentrated on my singing guitar sound – more of a sustained note.”

(Image credit: David Redfern/Redferns)

King also enjoyed what’s known as the “lefty advantage” when it comes to bending notes. With the strings’ vertical arrangement flipped, you bend notes on the critical higher-pitched strings by pulling the string downward, which is much easier than pushing upward to execute a bend. 

King exploited this capacity to particularly dramatic effect, sometimes bending notes as much as four tones up. His huge hands were another factor in this aspect of his style, as was the slackness of the strings in the low-slung tunings King favored.

As if all this weren’t unconventional enough, King didn’t use a pick. He mainly used his thumb to pluck the notes. But his first finger would also sometimes come into play in helping shape the steely pinched tones that are another hallmark of his style.

“I never could hold a pick in my hand,” King explained to Forte. “I had started out playing with one, but I’d be really gettin’ into it, and after a while the pick would sail across the room. I said, ‘To hell with this.’ So I just play with the meat of the thumb.”

The core elements of King’s riveting style are all evident, albeit embryonically, on his first recording, Bad Luck Blues, recorded in Chicago in 1953 for Parrot Records. 

By the time he cut this disc, King had paid plenty of dues, singing lead tenor with gospel quartet the Harmony Kings, fronting his own group – the Groove Boys – in Osceola, Arkansas, and playing drums for seminal blues guitarist and singer Jimmy Reed. But Bad Luck Blues lived up to its name by not providing King with the hit he might have been hoping for.

King didn’t score big until eight years later, when he released Don’t Throw Your Love on Me So Strong in 1961. The record climbed to Number 14 on the R&B charts and put him on the map. It also became a featured track on his very first album, The Big Blues, in 1962.  

A study in pinched, plucked passion, the lead guitar intro to Don’t Throw Your Love on Me So Strong makes it clear from the start that Albert King ain’t about to do things in a small way. 

This is the lowdown slow blues at its finest, and the guitar-and-vocal interplay is exquisite. King’s biting leads alternate with a vocal performance that scales the full emotional range, from a mournful croon to a high-pitched gospel wail. The symbiotic relationship between King’s guitar and voice is one of the blues’ greatest treasures.

By the time the disc was released, King had found his instrument: a 1958 korina wood Gibson Flying V. There has been much speculation as to why he favored this particular guitar, but upside-down lefties tend to seek out instruments with symmetrically shaped bodies and headstocks, as they look much less awkward when flipped. And among symmetrically shaped guitars, a Flying V certainly has far more flash and panache than, say, an SG or 335. 

Along with Lonnie Mack, King was one of the earliest guitarists to popularize Gibson’s angular, V-shaped masterpiece.

(Image credit: Jordi Vidal/Redferns)

Like many archetypal bluesmen, King was often on the move, particularly in the early phases of his career. By 1966, he was down in Memphis and had been signed to Stax, the premier mid-Sixties R&B label, then riding high with hits by Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Rufus Thomas, Carla Thomas, Eddie Floyd, and Wilson Pickett. 

The marriage of King’s 12-bar blues with the funky Stax backbeat is a true revelation on his 1967 hit, Born Under a Bad Sign. On it, he is supported solidly by Booker T. & the MGs and the Memphis Horns as well as Isaac Hayes, whose piano vamp sets the groove strutting at a pimp-crawlin’ pace. 

The deep, dark Memphis Horns reinforce the driving bass line, and funky off-beats walk up to the V chord. King’s guitar sounds crisper and more incisive than ever, his voice plumbing the desperate depths of this ultimate hard-luck narrative.

Stax had one of the greatest-sounding recording rooms of the period as well as a brilliant pool of staff musicians, producers and tunesmiths, including Hayes and Booker T. & the MGs – consisting of organist Booker T. Jones, guitarist Steve Cropper, bassist Duck Dunn, and drummer Al Jackson Jr. 

It was at Stax that King’s maverick talent found an ideal home. His Stax years yielded the lion’s share of his signature recordings, including Laundromat Blues, Crosscut Saw, Personal Manager, and As the Years Go Passing By, all of which were collected on King’s first album for Stax, also titled Born Under a Bad Sign.

This was a new sound in the blues – urgently contemporary, no mere exercise in the kind of purist reconstructionism that had come into vogue at the time. The Stax tracks helped King cross over to a wider audience than he’d ever reached before.

By this point, his original 1958 Flying V had gone missing, allegedly lost by the guitarist in a game of craps. It was replaced by a 1966 Flying V presented to King by Gibson. This instrument accompanied the guitarist onto the stage for his many appearances at Bill Graham’s legendary Fillmore venues in San Francisco and New York City. 

These shows found King sharing bills with rock and blues titans like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Byrds, the Allman Brothers Band, Van Morrison and B.B. King. After years of hard work, Albert King found an appreciative audience among the era’s blues-crazed rock fans.

One of these incendiary Fillmore nights was captured on King’s seminal live album Live Wire/Blues Power. In many ways, King is best understood through his live recordings. The spontaneity and uninhibited abandon of live performance, as compared with studio recordings, seemed particularly suited to the man’s blues muse.

But one aspect of King’s work that typically drew a puzzled response from his new young fans was his love of schmaltzy balladry. His cover of the American songbook standard The Very Thought of You that closes Born Under a Bad Sign was easily the disc’s most frequently skipped-over track. It probably still is, for that matter. But King refused to conform to anyone’s notion of what he, or the blues, should be. 

(Image credit: David Redfern/Redferns)

In 1969, he performed with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. Why shouldn’t a bluesman have full symphonic backing? Albert King was the first to go there. And why shouldn’t a bluesman record an album of Elvis Presley covers, should the mood take him? King went there too with 1970’s Blues for Elvis: King Does the King’s Things.

In the early Seventies, King acquired his third iconic Flying V, the instrument custom-built by Dan Erlewine. This was his only truly left-handed guitar, with the tone controls and output jack on what would be the lower bout for King. With his previous, flipped-over right-handed Vs, the volume tone controls were awkwardly located on the upper bout. 

Erlewine recalls King mentioning that it was annoying for him to reach up to adjust his tone or volume. “That was one of the reasons he wanted a lefty,” he explains. “He also wanted his name on the fretboard in pearl and abalone, so it would flash under the lights.”

Fashioned from a 125-year-old piece of black walnut, this guitar would be King’s main ax from 1972 until his passing, 20 years later. ’72 was an especially good year for King, witnessing the release of another landmark recording, I’ll Play the Blues for You, a soulful minor-key outing much in the vein of B.B. King’s The Thrill Is Gone. 

On I’ll Play the Blues for You – both the song and entire album of the same name – King is backed by members of two other great Stax outfits, the Bar-Kays and Isaac Hayes’ backing group, the Movement.

King stuck with Stax throughout the company’s decline in the early Seventies, moving on to several other labels after the company went bankrupt in 1975. 

His Seventies recordings didn’t have quite the same impact as his Sixties work, although there are some fine tracks to be discovered among the 10 or so albums that King released between 1970 and 1978. And while King remained active as a recording and touring artist throughout the Seventies, he began to slow down in the Eighties, moving into semiretirement from the studio but continuing to play select festivals and other live dates. 

Constant touring under far less than five-star circumstances was one of the things said to exacerbate the guitarist’s irritability and bad temper. But one very important gig he was able to perform – and which seemed to put him in quite a good mood – was a 1983 date with Stevie Ray Vaughan for the Canadian music television series In Session. 

It is a true passing-the-torch moment, two guitar legends from very different generations seated comfortably side by side and trading licks on blues standards and some of their own most-loved tracks. Vaughan’s admiration for his six-string idol is palpable, and King really shines in this welcoming environment. The DVD document of the performance is highly recommended.

Fortunately, and unlike many of his peers, King lived to see his work embraced by several generations of blues and rock guitarists. How much this meant to the irascible bluesman is hard to say. 

At times he seemed more interested in going fishing and smoking his pipe, two of his favorite leisure-time pursuits. But he was a road warrior to the last: Albert King died of a heart attack on December 21, 1992, at age 69. He’d played his last show two days earlier, in Los Angeles.

Albert (left) and B.B. King, seated together backstage in Cleveland, Ohio on February 20, 1991 (Image credit: Paul Natkin/Getty Images)

It was fitting that the Memphis Horns, who had backed King on some of his greatest musical triumphs, accompanied his body on its journey down Beale Street and across the Mississippi River to King’s final resting place in Edmondson, Arkansas.

They played When the Saints Go Marching In. One likes to think that SRV, Hendrix, Bloomfield and many of King’s other gone-beyond acolytes were lined up to greet him at the Pearly Gates – or whatever serves as the musicians’ entrance to heaven.

The post Customized Flying Vs, unusual open tunings and large bends: how Albert King created his personal pressure of the blues – and impressed Hendrix, Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

SAN FRANCISCO — Downtown shops and businesses play a vital role in boosting San Francisco’s economy, but they’ve been slow to recover from the pandemic blues.

It’s not a scenario shared by many inner cities across the country.

dr Karen Chapple is Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley and Director of the School of Cities at the University of Toronto. She and a team of researchers run the Urban Displacement Project, which tracks how much activity takes place in inner cities. They analyze cell phone data, not just office vacancy rates, to compare current population patterns with pre-pandemic numbers.

“We look at everyone who comes downtown,” she said. “If you have the right mix of industries, you’re doing pretty well right now. But if you were too specialized, you could suffer.”

Of the 62 cities they tracked, San Francisco consistently ranks at the bottom of the list when it comes to recreation.

“San Francisco was at 30% of its pre-pandemic activity as of March 16, 2020. March 2022, November 2022 still at 30% of its pre-pandemic activity,” she said.

One reason Chapple points to is San Francisco’s heavy reliance on the tech industry, whose workers largely left home early in the pandemic and have not made a robust return.

Jeffrey Woo, who owns Il Canto Cafe in San Francisco’s Financial District, had to change his business model to adapt.

He took over the breakfast and lunch spot a few months before the pandemic, with plans to cater to the office mass at FiDi

“That was the plan,” he said. “It was pretty crowded then. Now it’s a different crowd.”

Woo gets some face-to-face business but says he’s focused on a lot of online and delivery app orders.

“It’s gotten a lot better, but it’s taking a long time,” he said.

According to a CBS News analysis of San Francisco job trend data from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis from 2019 to 2021:

— Jobs in the lodging and hospitality industry fell 41%
— Wholesale jobs fell 25%
— Utilities jobs up 11%
— Information industry jobs up 9%

Looking at a chart showing the project’s data, Chapple described San Francisco as “stuck.”

CBS News Bay Area asked the Mayor of London Breed if she agreed with that assessment.

“San Francisco is not stuck. San Francisco is just different,” she said.

Breed recently announced their “Roadmap to Downtown San Francisco’s Future” which consists of 9 strategies and nearly 50 initiatives.

These are the strategies according to the plan:

1. Make sure downtown is clean, safe, and welcoming.
2. Attracting and retaining a wide range of industries and employers
3. Enable new uses and flexibility in buildings
4. Make it easier to start and grow a business
5. Grow and prepare our workforce
6. Transform Downtown into a premier destination for arts, culture and nightlife
7. Enhance public spaces to showcase downtown
8. Invest in transport links
9. Tell our story

“I think it’s important to make sure there’s a layered approach. There’s not one thing that’s going to bring our downtown back, it’s going to be a number of things,” Breed said. “And of course we need our legislature, the board of directors, as a partner in this effort. So we worked with members of the board of directors, worked with business people and developed solutions and strategies. ”

Measures include tax breaks and initiatives aimed at creating incentives for companies to stay here and come here.

“Part of what I’m pushing for in some of my tax initiatives is that some of the existing companies delay changing the gross receipts tax so people’s taxes don’t double by June of this year,” Breed said. “We’re deferring that for another two years to try and encourage companies to stay with us, work with us, and continue in San Francisco.”

“But for these new companies, we’re saying, look, you’re coming to San Francisco — three years. Three years you don’t have to pay city taxes to get started and get started and grow your business. This is a way to generate interest in new businesses and help with many new startups and the diverse businesses looking to grow and thrive in our city.”

Another part of their plan involves a change in downtown zoning to facilitate the conversion of office space into apartments.

“So we rezoned the entire downtown area so now we have the ability to convert without having to go through a lengthy year- or even two-year process to change a space’s use,” Breed said. “You can do this automatically through a simpler process that takes less time. That doesn’t mean it happens automatically, but it’s just an easier adjustment that takes less time.”

The biggest challenge right now, Breed said, is public safety.

“We know this is a struggle and we know we need more officers because we are short of just over 500 police officers, not to mention the people who are leaving the department to go to other places as well as the people who are retiring,” she said. “So we need to do something aggressive in terms of public safety to put things in a better place.”

Another major challenge that she acknowledged?

“The other thing that’s obviously very challenging is the cleanliness and road conditions in certain parts of the city where people are just frustrated,” she said. “We are dedicating a lot of resources to cleaning up these areas. You can clean up the entire tenderloin in the morning where these teams are out there and then before 12:00 it looks like nothing ever happened.”

“So we not only have to deal with the people that we have out there cleaning the streets, but also with the behavior and challenges of the people that are causing the problem in the first place.”

We asked Breed what obstacles she expects to encounter as she tries to fulfill her roadmap.

“Well, I mean, the board of directors is — some of them can be quite challenging, and that’s going to be a really heavy overhaul,” she said. “For example, I presented the board with an additional budget of $27.6 million for the police, for overtime, but overtime to cover the bases.”

“We have stations that are underutilized. To ensure we still turn in these shifts, we have to work overtime to cover the basic needs of our city. We have some board members who may or may not vote to support something like this.”

Despite the challenges, Breed is optimistic about the future of San Francisco.

“We’re moving forward, we’re aggressive and we’re going to make the city even better than ever,” she said.

Back at Il Canto Café, Woo says unless things really improve downtown, he’s not sure he can stay in business there.

“If I start hearing that the occupancy rate goes down to 10% or 5%, we’re going to get pretty worried and have to move somewhere else,” he said.

However, he has no plans to leave San Francisco.

“I grew up here since I was four years old,” he said. “This is the right place.”

Max Darrow

Max Darrow is an Emmy Award-winning reporter/MMJ for KPIX 5. He joined the KPIX 5 news team in July 2021.

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“A lot of the blues legends were living here around that time,” Davies said. “Etta James, Charlie Musselwhite and Elvin Bishop were here. Bonnie Raitt was in Marin, and she did so much to help revive Charles Brown’s career.

“But it wasn’t just the scene here. Traveling was easier. When I started touring with Charles, we did a lot of concerts and festivals, and it seemed like there were three tiers. There were the stars who got paid the most. The middle tier — Charles was in that group. And the local artists. That middle tier is gone,” she said, along with the post-World War II generation of innovators. (Now 86, guitar legend Buddy Guy recently announced a farewell tour in 2023.)

A shifting center of gravity

The infrastructure that sustained the scene has also all but disappeared, with nothing arising to fill the void left by the end of the San Francisco Blues Festival, a major annual event that ran from 1973-2008. The city’s dwindling Black population is another challenge, but the story is similar all over the region. Oakland long boasted a more vital and influential blues scene than San Francisco, anchoring an East Bay soul archipelago that stretched from Richmond and Berkeley out to Camp Stoneman in Pittsburg, and almost all of the clubs and joints that once hosted the blues are gone.

Still, the music’s inextricable roots in Black culture continue to manifest in various guises. The Dynamic Miss Faye Carol provides an essential link to the glory days of the East Bay scenes wherever she performs (like her Black Women’s Roots Festival, Nov. 27 at Freight & Salvage). Oakland blues vocalist Terrie Odabi has carved out an international career over the past decade, and some of the Bay Area’s best jazz vocalists, like Kim Nalley and Tiffany Austin, make a point of including blues as an essential thread in jazz’s elastic fabric. The Little Village Foundation label, created by veteran blues keyboardist and John Lee Hooker sideman Jim Pugh, has boosted the careers of several Bay Area blues artists, like Mumbai-born harmonica player Aki Kumar.

Meanwhile, the music’s center of gravity continues to shift away from San Francisco. Yoshi’s keeps blues in the musical mix, with shows like the Nov. 21 Bay Area Harmonica Convergence. Norwegian-born San Jose guitarist and recording engineer Kid Andersen has turned his Greaseland Studios into the top spot for Bay Area blues acts to document their music (while working hand-in-hand with Little Village). San Jose’s Poor House Bistro just relocated — literally the entire building — to Little Italy, to make way for Google’s massive new downtown development. Blues great Angela Strehli’s Rancho Nicasio is an important outpost in the North Bay, while the biggest blues bills tend to take place at Vallejo’s Empress Theatre.

“It’s the same thing in Seattle,” Cray said. “There used to be a bunch of clubs in town. Now we always hit the outskirts, where there might be the theaters and some of the clubs. We’re not downtown in places where it used it happen.”

In San Francisco, Myron Mu has kept The Saloon in North Beach, the city’s oldest venue, in business presenting blues seven nights a week. The city’s premiere club, Biscuits & Blues, still hasn’t reopened since it was forced to shutter in 2019 by a persistent plumbing problem and an ensuing legal struggle with the neighboring Jack In the Box — but that might finally be coming to an end, said owner Steven Suen said. More than optimistic, he sounded downright philosophic about a musical tradition born out of a need to find solace and communal release in hard times.

“The blues as a form of music will never die,” said Suen, who was born in Hong Kong and ended up buying the club after he started managing the venue in 2006. “People keep going back to the roots, figuring out how that music comes about. It will always have a place. It’s not a popular thing, but once people experience it they’ll find something special.”

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The Jack in the Box restaurant in San Francisco’s Union Square neighborhood, which earlier this week was told by a San Francisco Superior Court judge to fix its faulty plumbing, has temporarily closed.

A note on the restaurant’s door Thursday morning said the location was “closed due to maintenance until further notice.”

The closure comes one day after The Chronicle reported an injunction had been ordered to make Jack in the Box “stop any leaks from the refrigerators and freezers up to and including unplugging the appliances” at the restaurant. The owner of the fast food restaurant did not respond to The Chronicle’s initial requests for comment.

Jack in the Box shares a building at Geary and Mason streets with Biscuits and Blues, which opened in 1995 and is one of the oldest blues venues in the city. For several months last year, the burger joint’s plumbing leaked water and feces into Biscuits and Blues, forcing the blues business to shut down. It remains closed.

The order does not specifically state which repairs need to be made at Jack in the Box. During a Jan. 29 court hearing, Gordon J. Calhoun, who represents the franchisee of Union Square’s Jack in the Box, Saeed Khan, said fixing the plumbing could require structural work on the building’s foundation, which would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The two businesses have spent the last 10 months in court trying to decide who should pay to fix the plumbing. Over the course of several hearings, Biscuits and Blues claimed it was Jack in the Box’s responsibility. The fast-food restaurant owner said it was the duty of the landlord. The landlord said the operator should pay for the work.

Justin Phillips is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jphillips@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @JustMrPhillips

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The Jack in the Box restaurant in the Union Square neighborhood of San Francisco, which was ordered by a San Francisco Supreme Court judge earlier this week to fix its malfunctioning lines, has been temporarily closed.

A notice on the door of the restaurant on Thursday morning stated that the location was “closed for maintenance until further notice”.

The closure comes a day after The Chronicle reported that an injunction had been issued to Jack in the Box in the restaurant to “prevent leaks from refrigerators and freezers, including pulling out the power cord.” The owner of the fast food restaurant didn’t respond to The Chronicle’s initial comments.

Jack in the Box shares a building on Geary and Mason Streets with Biscuits and Blues, which opened in 1995 and is one of the oldest blues venues in town. Last year, the burger joint in Biscuits and Blues leaked water and feces for several months, forcing the blues business to a standstill. It stays closed.

The order does not explicitly state which repairs must be carried out by Jack in the Box. During a January 29 court hearing, Gordon J. Calhoun, who represents Union Square’s Jack in the Box franchisee Saeed Khan, said repairing the plumbing could require structural work on the building’s foundation that would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars .

The two companies have spent the past 10 months in court deciding who should pay to repair the plumbing. During multiple hearings, Biscuits and Blues claimed it was Jack in the Box’s responsibility. The fast food restaurant owner said it was the landlord’s duty. The landlord said the operator should pay for the work.

Justin Phillips is a contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: jphillips@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @JustMrPhillips

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