*Photos by Aaron Leitko; above illustration by Michael Renaud

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San Francisco's Amoeba Music is located a few blocks from Haight-Ashbury, the summer of love's ground zero, but it's the Altamont of record stores. The racks are lined with awesome records, but the aisles are jammed with tragic, itinerant hippies. The headphones at the listening station are slick with the grease of unkempt dreadlocks. A lot of the clerks play in bands; Greg Gardner, who works in the store's rock section, put them on a record. When the shy and clean-shaven staffer compiled In a Cloud: New Sounds From San Francisco, he basically pressed a 12" vinyl mixtape of his friends' music. (About 700 copies are drifting around, and a CD version will be available this month.)

From the 1960s Fillmore scene led by the Grateful Dead to 80s punks Flipper to current jagged rockers Erase Eratta and indie poppers Girls, San Francisco has never suffered for musical talent. But in the last few years, the city has been on a tear. And the bands that Gardner selected for In a Cloud-- The Fresh & Onlys, Thee Oh Sees, Ty Segall, Kelley Stoltz, the Sandwitches, and Sonny and the Sunsets among them-- have a particularly close kinship.

Part of it's a shared sound-- all draw some inspiration from the well of early-60s garage rock and psychedelic pop. And part of it's a shared history-- most have spent the better part of a decade living and making art in San Francisco. They split group houses. They buy the same recording gear. They share bills at the Eagle Tavern, a heavy-duty leather bar that doubles as a rock venue.

But it's also a complex web of relationships. Shayde Sartin, bassist of the Fresh & Onlys, used to room with Kelley Stoltz. Stoltz is Sonny Smith's drummer. Smith recorded some songs with the Fresh & Only's Tim Cohen, who used to date Heidi Alexander, of the Sandwitches, who booked everyone's bands at Amnesia, a club in the city's Mission district. It's a scene in the classic, non-digital sense, one that's gradually gained notice through a steady stream of 7" singles, small-run LPs, cassette tapes, and ceaseless touring.

Kelley Stoltz's Big Brown Machine

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Sic Alps' Tascam 388*

In the heyday of David Lee Roth and Q*bert back in 1985, the Tascam 388 was the the cutting-edge of home recording technology-- a 1/4" multi-track tape machine with a built-in mixing desk and eight channels of DBX noise reduction. By today's standards, it's a dinosaur, an 80-lb., faux-wood-paneled behemoth with dirty-orange faders. It has character, but not much else.

But, in San Francisco, the bulky brown desk is still the pinnacle of mid-fi cool. John Dwyer, of Thee Oh Sees, has one. Sic Alps have two. Ty Segall borrowed one off and on for years before recently scoring his own. Sonny Smith used his to record most of the songs for his 100 Records project.

"They're so ugly and beautiful at the same time," explains Kelley Stoltz, who purchased his Tascam back in 1999. "Today, no one would design a piece of musical furniture with shit-brown everywhere and some orange buttons. It looks like a video game. It's very of its time." Depending on whom you ask, Stoltz is the father of the 388 in the Bay Area.

Raised in Detroit, Stoltz stumbled into San Francisco during the mid-90s after a quick stint in New York City working as an intern for alt-rock crooner Jeff Buckley. Nonplussed by the business side of the music industry, he decided he'd rather start a band. Preferably somewhere warm. "We were going to go somewhere out West," says Stoltz. "I think the money ran out here. That was '95."

In the intervening years, Stoltz has become a bit of a psych-pop Svengali-- a mildly hermetic home-studio geek with a golden ear for classic rock-era song craft. His home studio, located in San Francisco's Mission, is cluttered with junky keyboards, dusty guitars, and new-age do-dads. Every third book on his shelf is a Beatles bio.

Though he recently upgraded to an early-60s Ampex 351 eight-track, Stoltz is a long-time 388 devotee, using it to record just about every song he's ever released. He bought it because, well, he didn't know any better. "I went on eBay. I just knew that I wanted an eight-track tape machine," Stoltz admits. "I could have bought any other one, but I just lucked into buying that machine."

"I had one microphone, and I didn't even have a mic stand-- I'd just pull my dresser out, wedge the mic in, and push the drawer closed. Then I'd kind of stand up next to it," he explains, angling his neck and contorting his arms to recreate the posture. It looks uncomfortable. "Even with the crappy mics and that technique, it still sounded like real music." Best of all, a reel of 1/4" tape only cost $10.

Kelley Stoltz at his home studio in the Mission*

And it had a sound. Antique Glow, Stoltz's first 388 effort, is shot through with faded grandeur-- the guitars rattle, hazy drones drift across the stereo field, and the vocals tiptoe into the red. His studio chops have improved dramatically over the years, but even Stoltz's most finely tuned productions retain a distinct made-after-midnight feel.

"To the best of my knowledge, he was the first guy in our community of musicians that had one," says Shayde Sartin, Stoltz's former roommate and ex-bass player. "He did Antique Glow on it, and everybody was like, 'How the hell did you make that record?' From there, everyone else got one." Sartin threw in with his friend, guitarist/songwriter Tim Cohen, and bought a 388 in 2005. The machine would play a prominent role in their band, the Fresh & Onlys.

The 388 is hard to move, but easy to use. Once it's set up, you can pick a track, push the red [REC] button, and let it rip. Sartin and Cohen used it to put down demos on-the-fly, jamming out chord changes and improvising melodies before the inspiration faded. "I think that's one of the joys of those machines-- it's not stressful or intimidating," explains Sartin. "It's like a giant four-track."

It's also very flexible. A few knob tweaks can take a song from crisp to grotty. "You can do shit really straight on it or you can really fuck with it, mess with the EQs, and get them into some extreme zones," explains Sic Alps multi-instrumentalist Matt Hartman. (Note: according to a recent post on his Facebook page, Hartman is no longer in Sic Alps -Ed.).

"I'm toying with the idea of doing a comp just called 388 with all the bands that use them," says Thee Oh Sees' John Dwyer, maybe half-seriously. "And then doing a die-cut record cover in the shape of a 388, with it flying through space or something rad, because it's such a hilarious machine." For Dwyer, the appeal is clear: "It's a pretty easy machine to learn. And it's brown."

The Fresh & Onlys' Attic Rock

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The Fresh & Onlys'* Shayde Sartin (L) and Tim Cohen (R) in Cohen's kitchen in Lower Haight

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In 2008, Tim Cohen got a guitar amp for Christmas. "A Magnatone from the 60s," he explains. "My girlfriend at the time, Heidi [Alexander, of the Sandwitches], bought it for me." At that point, Cohen was still performing in Black Fiction-- a quintet that played brainy, percussion-driven psych-folk. There wasn't a lot of shredding involved. But the Magnatone had a distinctive fuzzy tone that clicked with him. He started using it to write songs. "I was listening to tons of 13th Floor Elevators," says Cohen, who is tall, soft-spoken, and a little spaced-out. "I was trying to make those kinds of songs."

Fuzz riffs, retro gear, and a Roky Erickson fetish aside, the Fresh & Onlys are not a garage band. In fact, the quartet-- which also includes Sartin, guitarist Wymond Miles, and drummer Kyle Gibson-- resides at the opposite end of the practice-space spectrum. They're an attic band. Cohen has tracked the majority of the quartet's output in his bedroom, a tiny tower that pokes out above the roof of his Lower Haight apartment.

There's definitely a throwback appeal to the Fresh & Onlys. The group's best songs-- "Endless Love", "Waterfall", and "Clowns (Took My Baby Away)"-- conjure the dazed and distorted feel of Nuggets- and Pebbles-worthy 45s. When it comes to songwriting, they're traditionalists, using tight verse-chorus-verse structures and simple harmonies. But the retro feel is blotted over with eccentric flourishes-- wonky, surrealist lyrics, reverb-drenched vocals, and heaps of noise; they get a little touchy about being tagged as garage rock.

"Garage bands are not arty to me. You're not allowed to be arty and be garage," Sartin insists. In his mind, Personal & the Pizzas-- raging Bay Area greasers who affect New Jersey accents to play songs that are, most of the time, about pizza-- exemplify contemporary garage rock. "Garage bands have always been about primitivism, teenage angst, and ugly, gritty rhythms played on busted equipment. It's a complete dumbing down."

The Fresh & Onlys only dumb down when it's convenient for them. Garage is a world that they're informed by, but not of. "There's something really uncool about garage that I like," says Sartin. "You can write a stupid lyric." He offers up a song from the band's most recent record, Play It Strange. "For us, 'Be My Hooker' is a good example," he says. In the song, Cohen laments the loneliness of the open road over a few chugging power chords. "It may be right, it may be wrong, be my hooker," he sings. "It's referencing that sort of romanticism that you get out of garage music," says Sartin, decoding the lyric. "Something straddling conceptualism and complete stupidity."

The band's San Francisco peers are also increasingly expert at hovering over that line-- whether it's Sonny and the Sunsets singing about squeezing out a tube of death cream or Thee Oh Sees placing a smiling cartoon bat and a rainbow on their record cover. Still, these are not aesthetic calls that would have been made by, say, the Monks. In the end, the records Cohen and Sartin are more inclined to cop to for inspiration are those made by their friends.

"Whenever you read a review of Kelley Stoltz's stuff, the first thing they always talk about is how he's the sum of his influences," says Cohen. "To me, that's the most unfair thing." Sitting at the kitchen table, listening to Arthur Russell's World of Echo, Cohen pecks away at a page in his sketchbook. It's a wiggle-vision drawing of a googly-eyed woman in a wheelchair drinking a 40 oz. beer. Next to her is a toddler holding a lit cigarette. "Kelley Stoltz stands alone. He's probably one of the biggest musical influences that's ever been in my life throughout all of history," he says, setting down his pen. "I'm talking about Kelley Stoltz, not Kelley Stoltz as influenced by Brian Wilson."

Sic Alps' Exquisite Damage

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Sic Alps' Matt Hartman*

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Sic Alps think scuzz is cool, but only when they're wringing it out of an amplifier. The band's studio-- two dimly lit rooms in the basement of a Warehouse District group-house-- is surprisingly tidy. And they aren't into sharing it with rodents.

While rooting through the garage looking for an amplifier, Matt Hartman, the band's multi-instrumentalist and resident gear-head, has uncovered a smattering of mouse-droppings. He's mortified. They never have mice, he insists, and politely excuses himself to vacuum up the mess.

By their own admission, Sic Alps play bad drugs music. The trio's latest record, Napa Asylum, pops and fizzles with distortion. The rhythm section quakes and wobbles. Lead songwriter Mike Donovan has an ear for 60s-era bubblegum melodies, but his vibe is more Abbie Hoffman than Wavy Gravy. "They're the kings of the mellow, lose-your-mind-at-the-show bands," explains friend and fellow Bay Area resident, Ty Segall.

Donovan founded Sic Alps alongside Adam Stonehouse, drummer of the Hospitals, in 2004. Hartman, then playing in Coachwhips, was a fan early on. "I just liked how drastically stoned it was," he says. "It had been a while since somebody had been that balls-out, 'we're fucked uuuuuup.'"

But the clumsiness is deceptive. Napa Asylum sounds like an album of first takes, but it's actually the result of heavy deliberation. Sic Alps write each warbling and cacophonous rave-up one piece at a time. "Mike will come in and track an acoustic guitar track, then we'll rewind, start over, and track the vocal track," explains guitarist/drummer Noel Von Harmonson. "Then somebody tries to play drums to that with no click-track or anything." Other components like squelching guitars and ghostly backing vocals are layered on one-by-one in a sort of artistic free-for-all. "It's almost like a weird creative race," says Hartman. "But everyone is the turtle."

By 2005, Hartman decided to wedge his way into the fold. "I think I sent [Donovan] an email that said, 'I'm in your band.'" Over the next several years the duo released a series of cassettes, 7" singles, and three full-length records on a jumble of different labels. Von Harmonson, a long-time friend and former Echoplex manipulator for Comets on Fire, joined up in 2009, in time to record Napa.

Though they appear regularly on bills with their Bay Area brethren, there isn't much talk of shared ideas or friendly competition. "For me, the way Sic Alps evolved and turned out was a bit more insular," says Hartman. "I wasn't paying attention to what was going on with other groups as far as what I wanted to do with the band."

That's a little difficult to believe since the riffier moments on Napa mirror many of the blown-out-pop moves favored by the band's local peers, like Ty Segall and Thee Oh Sees. But it's possible that it's all unconscious-- shared affinities randomly streaming between former bandmates (Dwyer and Hartman performed together in Coachwhips). Or they just don't remember. Sic Alps is not an entirely sober-minded endeavor.

"I was about half of a bottle of scotch in and a little baked and just going 'la-la-la' and thinking, 'That sounds kind of cool,'" says Hartman, holding a tiny microphone and explaining one of Napa Asylum's more foggy-headed moments. "It's basically the sound of me being badly inebriated." Blazed mumblings aside, Hartman and Von Harmonson stop short of calling Sic Alps' music psychedelic.

"I've always thought of [psych] as something deeply connected with transcendence," says Von Harmonson. He points to Sufism-quoting stoner-metal duo Om. "Your experience at an Om show is a lot more psych than the show that we just played with Ty [Segall] or Thee Oh Sees." A moment later, he reconsiders. "That's not to say that a snappy, damaged pop tune can't be psychedelic, but maybe there needs to be a qualifier of some sort," he says. "Brown-psychedelic."

"Perhaps the word should just be retired from the lexicon," says Hartman. "It's just good music to trip to, whatever that means." And Sic Alps-- whose music is a flower-power photo-negative, practically reeking of scorched hippie-hair-- is not good music to trip to. There's one term that Hartman seems to like better: damaged. "There was a little bit of a manifesto: keep it damaged," he says. "Keep it wobbly. Keep it not-straight."

"For me and Mike, too, a big flag-post influence would have to be solo Syd Barrett. There's something really compelling about the musical reflection of severe mental illness or just being out of it in some way," Hartman says. "Just something that's not normal." Sic Alps will never be normal, but the group has gotten a little more hook-conscious over the years. "As we've gone on there's definitely been a desire to focus on the songcraft," admits Hartman. "In our own perhaps-substandard way, we're always trying to hit the high water marks of Ray Davies, Lennon-McCartney, and Pretty Things."

That may seem a bit off coming from three guys who labor devotedly over ear-scorching noise. "I don't think it's that weird-- I love the Kinks and the Beatles, but I fucking love RTX and the Dead C, too," adds Von Harmonson. "They don't have to be exclusive to each other. Let's roll the dice and see what works."

Later, I make a clumsy attempt at photographing their studio. Hartman hands me a box of ¼" tape to help block out the camera's harsh flash bulb. The box is labeled "Cambridge Vagina." Hartman grins. "That's some of the new stuff."

San Francisco's Now Loud

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Ty Segall at the laundromat*

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Ty Segall came to San Francisco looking to rock out, but he was too late. "I moved here in 2005 and was like, 'Oh man, I really like Coachwhips,' and they're not playing anymore," says the 23-year-old, an affable Orange County-bred surfer-type, who is much more sedate in person than on record. "I really like Numbers, and they're not playing anymore. Does Deerhoof still play? They don't really play anymore, either."

As a high school student, Segall bought up high-energy post-punk records released by Southern California indie labels like GSL and Three One G. He frequented DIY house shows and drummed for a thrashy garage-punk band called the Epsilons. But as a student at University of San Francisco, he had a hard time finding an analogous scene. "There just weren't too many rock'n'roll shows going on," he says.

"The San Francisco [freak folk] thing kind of started with Skygreen Leopards, Joanna Newsom, and Devendra Banhart, who was here for a little while," says Kelley Stoltz, recalling the years where whispy-voiced acoustic-guitar-picking balladeers ruled the day. "That was such a scene. And then it got kind of ridiculous-- you started going to shows, and you weren't allowed to talk. You had to sit down. The 'shush' army took over.

"Those guys have written some awesome songs, and they're special musicians, but I think the baggage that came with that scene and how people thought they had to behave around it turned off a lot of people," says Stoltz. "Maybe a lot of the bands playing loud now are a refutation of that."

But the culture of soft-spoken strumming was, possibly, already a refutation of the Bay Area's noisier punk bands-- among them art-punk acts like Pink and Brown and Coachwhips, both fronted by troublemaker-savant and current Thee Oh See John Dwyer. It was loud, jittery music, deeply indebted to Lightning Bolt and the Providence, Rhode Island, scene where Dwyer was bred. "I went to see Coachwhips and the Hospitals in Sacramento, and it was the most violent show I've ever seen, even thought there were only 10 people there," says Matt Roberts, bassist of locals the Mantles. "Adam [Stonehouse] from the Hospitals threw his whole kit into the audience, and the cymbal cut my face open."

But when you weren't getting socked in the jaw, it was pretty thrilling stuff. Stoltz, at least, has fond memories. "I remember going to see Pink and Brown. Afterward, my girlfriend and I raced back to our rehearsal space, and we were so inspired that we played loud, and I destroyed an amplifier," he recalls.

Busted gear aside, it was a profound moment for the songwriter. "It was an interesting inspiration that made us want to play, but also destroy something. It was that kind of music-- a positive destruction," muses Stoltz. "That's a key to the music that's made here now. It can be strange and dark and twisted, but there's this positive energy to it that I think is really infectious."

In a sense, the genius of this subset of San Francisco psych-pop bands is that they split this divide so effectively-- accepting stickiness of bubblegum hooks, but fully embracing out-crowd mischief. Frequently, it's equal parts scare and swoon. Stoltz isn't smashing amps on the regular, but his songs have picked up speed. Segall skews heavier, writing vocal-chord-shredding fuzz-rock with Beatle-worthy melodies. And Dwyer's Thee Oh Sees is probably the fullest realization of Stoltz's ideal. The band started soft and spacey, but has been gradually re-jiggered into a jammed-out take on the Cramps-- perfectly splicing stone-age riffs, melody, and hallucinogenic weirdness. "We're a well-oiled machine these days," says Dwyer, proudly.

Stoltz thinks so, too. "You go to an Oh Sees show and you're exhilarated," he says. "John can do some weird duck-walk dances and they're having fun and the people are having fun even if the song's about the cops fucking with you when you're on a weird acid trip." The Fresh & Onlys frontman Cohen concurs. “When I was in Black Fiction all I wanted to do was be different form everybody,” he says, describing his pre-Fresh & Onlys output. “I wanted to make songs that were in 11/7 time and had 20 different parts and never had anything repeat." But when he saw Stolz and the Oh Sees perform, he got jealous. "I felt like, 'Damn there's really good bands in San Francisco and I need to start paying attention,'" he says.. "Everyone should be proud to be influenced by their friends and peers-- that's the coolest influence."

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Recommended Listening

Kelley Stoltz

"Ever Thought of Coming Back"

A vintage sunshine-soaked psych-pop gem from the Bay Area's original Tascam 388 guru. There's more than a hint of the Beach Boys flowing through the falsetto vocals, but Stoltz's lightly melancholy lyrics tip things away from homage. "The thing they never say about Kelley-- he's almost on a savant-like level as an interpreter," says friend and former bandmate Shayde Sartin.

Thee Oh Sees

Help: "Ruby Go Home"

Thee Oh Sees have no trouble cracking out grimy riffs, but it's their ability to stretch out that sets them apart from the garage-rock hordes. Here the rhythm section locks into a two-note vamp while John Dwyer lets art-school riffage fly. If jam bands had never discovered slap bass, they might still sound this cool.

The Fresh & Onlys

The Fresh & Onlys: "Peacock & Wing"

The boy-girl vocals imply tenderness, but the lyrics on "Peacock & Wing", a three-chord freak-out from the band's first LP, offers a trippier take on love and happiness. "Your smile won't lie, it will always be straight," sing Tim Cohen and Heidi Alexander. "I refuse to believe that I could not see these things when my eyes were not open."

Ty Segall

Melted: "Imaginary Person"

Ty Segall's got a great voice-- one part grunge wail and one part backwoods weirdo. On "Imaginary Person", he really belts it out. But when he was a teen, during the early 00s, his tastes skewed funkier, toward then-ubiquitous dance-punk. He only came to heaviness gradually. "I was like, 'No moshing, just dancing.' Then, when I was 17 or 18, I was like, 'The roof man, jump off the roof and climb up the walls. Freak out," he recalls. "Now it's just like, 'Everybody should watch, bang their head a little bit.'"

Sic Alps

A Long Way Around to a Shortcut: "Bells"

For Sic Alps, pop hooks and blown-out sounds are not mutually exclusive. On "Bells (w/ Tremolo and Distortion)", from the comp A Long Way Round to a Shortcut, they're at the top of their game on both counts.

Sonny and the Sunsets

Tomorrow Is Alright: "Death Cream"

Sonny Smith has a knack for spinning nonsense into narrative that's well displayed in this shambling slow-jam: man finds tube, squeezes tube, and brings death to those he loves. He's got some riffs now, but it hasn't always been that way. "You do have bad music phases. At least, I have," admits Smith. He looks back at his mid-twentysomething record collection with a mixture of pride and dread. "I'll be like wow, I was into Muddy Waters, the Velvet Underground, and the Harry Smith anthology. I'm proud of myself. But I had some Digable Planets and Arrested Development and G-Love, too. What happened there? I don't stand by that as much."

The Mantles

"Don't Lie"

The Mantles don't tear it up on stage, but it took a while to come to grips with that. "We thought we needed to be this super-live rock band," recalls bassist Matt Roberts. He recalls a few shows where the quartet, which specializes in melancholy indie pop, tried to go all Ted Nugent. "I was trying to rock out, play super loud. At the end I was, like, 'I think we did it!'" It wasn't a good look. "My best friend, who was watching, just said, 'What are you guys doing?'" On "Don't Lie", the Mantles do what they do best: jangle.

Royal Baths

Litanies: "Needle and Thread"

In terms of bad vibes, Royal Baths give Sic Alps a run for their money. They keep a frowny-face fixed at all times. "Needle and Thread" is lined with droning guitars and grim decadence. "It's not all psychedelic trips to Golden Gate Park and tambourines," explains guitarist Jigmae Baer, who doesn't buy into the Bay Area's mellow rep. "It's really hard to live here, hard to get a job, hard to get a practice space."

The Sandwitches

Mrs. Jones' Cookies: "Lightfoot"

The Sandwitches write sweet tunes-- country-pop with gentle hooks and vibrato-heavy vocals-- but there's mischief in the band's wiggly rhythms and off-kilter strumming. They've smeared on some on sad-clown makeup, before, but no, they are not juggalos. "We played a show with drone metal bands on Halloween at this chick Tina's house party," recalls Alexander. The band wanted to dress up, but it was hard to settle on a theme. "Clown makeup was only thing we could agree on. We got so incredibly drunk-- it got pretty scary looking over the course of the night."