San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Finding his voice in a pandemic
San Francisco indie publisher V. Vale shares how he copes, creates while sheltering in place.
V. Vale has seen some wild stuff.
The writer, publisher and selfdescribed amateur anthropologist lived in the HaightAshbury neighborhood during the 1960s, after all. In the ’70s, he documented the city’s punk scene in Search and Destroy, a zine he launched with $200 from Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg. Vale has witnessed protests and performance art pieces involving all manner of bodily fluids. He’s interviewed Iggy Pop, Patti Smith and Debbie Harry. He once threw knives with William S. Burroughs.
But Vale has never seen anything quite like the coronavirus.
“I’m around futuristtype people. I read (cyberpunk science fiction author) William Gibson. But no one predicted this. No one!” says the writer during a recent phone interview with The Chronicle.
“Although, if anything could have prepared you for it, I think early punk would have. Most of us were trying to live with no money, so that’s good training,” he adds thoughtfully. “And punk was about trying to see what was really happening, and not going along with the sugarcoated stuff on TV.”
Vale — who’s in his 70s, though he demurs on specifics — is calling from his place in North Beach, just around the corner from his former employer, City Lights Bookstore. He’s lived in this apartment since 1970, surrounded by an abundance of photographs, vinyl records and at least 1,000 books on surrealism.
The apartment doubles as headquarters for RE/Search, a 40yearold publisher of books on underground music, film and culture, of which Vale serves as editor and sole proprietor. In the indie publishing world, he’s a founding father; in weird art and punk circles, he’s a legend.
One title he hasn’t held in a few decades: recording artist. Vale was a keyboardist with the protometal band Blue Cheer in the ’60s but left before the group saw any success. Now, with the help of a Yamaha spinet piano — and his wife, filmmaker Marian Wallace, as producer — Vale has written, recorded and released 12 songs inspired by the pandemic. Collectively, he’s calling them “Lockdown Lullabies.”
“The songs are all emotiondriven, and they just show up. I call it channeling,” Vale says.
He admits he’s “obsessed by” news about the coronavirus, and many tracks on “Lockdown Lullabies” are inspired by newspaper articles: He reads The Chronicle, the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal and marks up interesting stories with a red pen. “When I read the news on my phone,” he says, “I can’t remember it as well.”
The result is a scrappy, engaging collection of songs shot through with dry, observational humor. It kicks off with “Corona,” a Velvet Underground and Nicoesque ballad written from the perspective of the virus itself. The first song Vale wrote, it’s one of two tracks on which Wallace provides vocals, because Vale didn’t feel confident in his own voice. But then Wallace was too busy to sing any more (she’s still teaching a film class for the San Francisco Art Institute over Zoom, in addition to helping run RE/Search), so Vale’s vocals can be heard on the remaining 10 songs.
“It’s a way of processing,” says Wallace, who worked as a mixer and sound designer throughout the ’90s, on movies like “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” before focusing on her own experimental films. (The couple’s early courting period involved daylong marathons at the movie theater.) “We’re dealing with such a strange and unexpected world, where information is being fed to us in real time, and a lot of it is about how much is not known.” Wallace notes that there’s been “a lot of insomnia” in the household.
Still, a few songs find positive notes: “Let’s All Stay Home” tells the listener that “It’s time to scheme, to write out what we’re hoping for/ It’s time to make a plan to make a better world.” Songs like “If Gaia,” meanwhile, offer social commentary: “The Economy — it never really existed/ It’s here because no humans resisted/ Real Estate’s a scam, just like stocks and bonds/ They’ve always been Just One Big Con.”
And then there’s “Costco,” which is, yes, a sincere love letter to Costco. Before quarantine, Vale says he didn’t go out much anyway. But one of his favor
ite outings was to take a big roller suitcase on the 12FolsomPacific line straight to Costco, where he’d load up on deals and free samples.
“It’s like some fantasy parallel economy,” he says. “Instead of paying $200 for a Patagonia down jacket, you get one for $29.99! And you can’t beat the $3.99 Caesar salad.”
Costco is also how the couple came to have an unintentionally vast supply of paper products, well before other people started hoarding them. When punk icon Lydia Lunch was visiting a week before the shelterinplace order took effect, she noted: “At least you have toilet paper.”
Indeed, Vale insists sheltering in place hasn’t meant a huge change of pace for him — though he does find it disturbing to read the news, and then “you look outside and the sky is blue, the sun is shining.”
The couple have a projector and have been watching documentaries. They hang out with their aging cat, Abby. They’ve ordered delivery ice cream twice. (“I never realized eating ice cream can be like taking speed,” says Vale.) Wallace, a decade younger than her husband, coordinates deliveries and runs errands so he doesn’t have to leave the house, including trips to her own separate apartment, which doubles as her art studio. None of their precautions stop their daughter Valentine, who’s in her 20s and lives in New York, from worrying about them.
But Vale sounds mostly worried about his city. He knows too many people who can’t pay their rent. And he’s concerned that San Francisco doesn’t have enough legislation to protect the institutions he loves, like the Roxie Theater, the Beat Museum and the nonprofit, experimental arts space Gray Area.
“I don’t want those buildings to be turned into condos,” he says. “They’re what San Francisco was supposed to be, dammit: an avantgarde place to move to.”
“The songs are all emotiondriven, and they just show up. I call it channeling.”
V. Vale, punk publisher and musician
Of course, many artists would tell you the cost of housing has made the city, well, not that for some time. It’d be easy to think of Vale and Wallace as relics of a different San Francisco, a place that won’t exist again.
Except that they’re still here, and they’re not done yet.
RE/Search — with a little help from one parttime employee, assistant editor Andrew Bishop — remains busy with online orders, a regular newsletter, and new projects: the week of this interview, Vale was set to release an essay collection and at work on a book of favorite quotations. Prepandemic, he spoke regularly to college classes and book fair audiences about counterculture history, his legendary interviews and the evolution of indie publishing, including a tour of Europe that featured Wallace’s films in 2017.
And then there’s this: Vale certainly isn’t happy about the destruction the coronavirus has wrought, but it doesn’t take too close a read of his lyrics to sense his excitement at the possibilities that come with the world starting over, with empires crumbling and having to rebuild.
As he sits at home, he has started keeping a list of “no,” documenting which aspects of modern life — notably, so many of the capitalist institutions he railed against throughout his punk rock youth — have ceased to function seemingly overnight.
“No one’s going to work in an insurance office. No one’s buying a car. I think highrise office buildings are worthless right now,” he says. “It feels like the civilization we spent decades building up is more fragile than we knew.”
“They’re what San Francisco was supposed to be, dammit: an avantgarde place to move to.”
V. Vale