Pansy Division has been charming us with songs like “Fem in a Black Leather Jacket,” “James Bondage” and “That’s So Gay” since 1991. The former San Francisco band was last in the Bay Area last July playing the Mosswood Meltdown. The band has planned a homecoming for their thousandth concert for a while now and they’re happy to be coming home to where it all started in San Francisco. I spoke with Jon Ginoli about the upcoming April 19 concert.
Michael Flanagan: This will be your thousandth show. What are your thoughts about achieving this milestone?
Jon Ginoli: When we began it was hard to believe that something like this would be possible. We had modest goals when we began. In 1991 I had lived in San Francisco less than two years and I had this idea to have a gay rock band, San Francisco seemed the place where I could fulfill that idea. I figured that it would be popular in San Francisco, but I had no idea that it would have such longevity. It’s pretty exciting!
Are there surprises in store for the show?
A few, yeah. We are going to be unearthing some songs that we have not played in years, since the ’90s. And we’ll play a longer show than we normally do, so that we can play the songs that we’ve been playing along with a bunch that we have not played in a long time.
Are there going to be any surprise guests?
There might be…there might be one, but I can’t disclose [who it is.]
Why Bottom of the Hill for the 1000th show? Can you talk a little bit about the resonance that the club has for you?
I think we first played there in 1993, before our first album came out. It seemed like the obvious place to go and it’s still run by the same people, so that’s a nice continuity. What’s interesting about Bottom of the Hill is that when it first opened, before there was any kind of development there was just acres of parking. It’s a little different now, but there’s still parking.
That was part of its appeal. If you had a car and you were going to be out later in the evening you could be assured that you would have a place to park. It’s also on the 22 Fillmore and I took that bus to the club many times just to watch shows by other bands. It’s nicely out of the way compared to where a lot of the other venues are in the city.
Since band members live in different cities now, does it change what kind of planning goes into a show?
It requires that we plan more because we’re all going to come to San Francisco and rehearse before the show. We have to plan well in advance when we’re going to have shows, and what we’re going to do at those shows. All of us are rehearsing individually and then we’ll get together and rehearse together before the show.
We’ve known for months which songs we’re going to rehearse, which ones we’ve decided to pull from our backlog of songs and kind of relearn, since it had been so long since we’ve played them. Chris and I formed the band in 1991, but Luis (our drummer) has been in the band since ’96 and Joel, our guitar player, since 2004; but we’re playing songs that we stopped doing before either of them joined the band. In some cases it will be learning these songs with this lineup of the group for the first time.
Have you gone so far as to think where show 1001 is going to be?
(laughs) No, we’re just focused on 1000 right now. The thousandth show has been a goal we’ve been working towards for about a decade, when we realized we were over 900 shows. Our modus operandi has been in recent years instead of going on tour for six weeks or two months (like we used to), we go on tour and have a four-day weekend, where we play three shows.
Some of us have to fly to the gigs; depending on where they are, sometimes we all have to. We want to do tours, but we all have jobs. So how can we do it? We have these long weekends. That’s how we’ve gotten up to the point we’re at in terms of having a thousand shows.
We’ve done more than what we set out to do at the beginning. In the beginning there was nobody out in rock and roll. Even people who seemed obvious weren’t out. We thought, “It’s not going to be a commercial proposition being a gay band,” which is why no one had come out at that point.
We had unlimited opportunities for putting gay content into a song. That’s what we started out doing, and it was really needed. A lot of that came from my experience being part of ACT-UP between 1989 and 1991. I remember seeing how ACT-UP would take these positions and they would be too far out for any politician to propose, even friendly ones. But if ACT-UP or another activist group took a position that pushed the envelope that gave space for politicians to not look as extreme and to take bolder stands.
I thought, “I want to use our lyrics to push the envelope of what you can sing about in a song and have it come from a gay perspective.” That turned out to be a really good approach in San Francisco and then we were able to take it outside of San Francisco. When we first began, I figured we would be popular in about six cities with big gay populations, but it’s really distributed evenly across the country. We never became a hugely popular band, but we’ve had a cult following and that is what has sustained us for more than three decades.
Particularly within rock and roll you filled a need, because there were people like Boy George and Andy Bell (of Erasure) out there, but they were pop.
There’s a difference between pop music and rock and roll. Rock and roll used to be something that seemed more authentic and grass roots than pop musicians. It’s great that people like Boy George could come out and open in the mid-’80s, though his career suffered from it.
But it seemed like there was a line where you just couldn’t be a rock musician and do that. I kept waiting for a gay band to come along, an open one. And the fact that it didn’t is why I started. I didn’t really have any musical ambitions at the time I formed Pansy Division. I had already had a band that made three albums called the Outnumbered.
After getting to San Francisco I realized that there was this other thing I kept waiting for other people to do that I needed to do myself. One of the reasons I wanted to do it was that the perceptions of what it meant to be gay seemed to be kind of narrow musically. You were supposed to like these things and not these other things, and I always chafed against that.
I had a typical Midwestern upbringing where rock and roll was really important. For me to just throw that out just because I was gay was way too conformist. Similar people have done that since in other genres like country music and hip-hop. But that was what motivated me, was to establish some sort of alternative for guys that just sick of hearing the more dance-oriented music.
How do you think that musicians can speak to the current political moment?
I think our music has always been political with a small “p”, not a capital “P.” We didn’t really speak about politics directly in our songs because those are the things that make your songs age poorly.
But our songs have a context and the fact that we’re speaking openly about gay lives, proudly, is something that stands the test of time and still makes us relevant. We’re singing about gay joy, we’re singing about queer joy. At the time we started the band I was very angry about a lot of things, because it was the AIDS crisis.
But I wanted to give something that people enjoyed and that uplifted them without it being shallow. I wanted it to have content that people appreciated, but I also wanted to do something that in the end was joyful and to that extent I think the music we make is still relevant now.
Anything in closing you would like to add?
Talking about sad things, the conditions that allowed Pansy Division to form and thrive in San Francisco in the early ’90s are gone. Those things were cheap rent, availability of apartments, and availability of inexpensive practice spaces. We really were a product of our time in terms of the dream of coming to a gay bohemia.
That’s what really drew me to San Francisco and I was able to find that and create my own place in it. It’s so much harder to be a musician now than it was then, especially in San Francisco. Which is very sad considering San Francisco is very welcoming to someone like me.
San Francisco can still continue to be a draw to a lot of people, but it’s not realistic. Back then it was. Over the years our band members drifted away from San Francisco one by one, and I was the last one to leave. I left three years ago. I was the holdout. But now I’m in Palm Springs. All of the people who formed Pansy Division are gone. We miss the place, but there’s no way we could have the things we now have in our lives if we stayed.
Pansy Division plays its 1000th show April 19, 8pm at Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St. Bev Rage & The Drinks opens. $25-$30.
https://pansydivision.com/
http://www.bottomofthehill.com
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