Sylvester waited until the combination of Quaaludes and LSD had equalized enough in his system to go onstage at War Memorial Opera House and perform the sold-out concert of his dreams. It was March 11, 1979, a Sunday night. He was joined by 26 players from the San Francisco Symphony, his band (including Patrick Cowley on synthesizers), and Izora Rhodes and Martha Wash, then known as Two Tons O’ Fun and later as The Weather Girls.
The show was immortalized on the late star’s Living Proof album, which came out later that year. But after editing and adding a handful of new songs that weren’t performed during the concert, over an hour of the set was left on the cutting room floor. Until now!
Thanks to the discovery of the original recording of the show, fans will soon be able to hear more songs, extended versions, and even the moment when Sylvester received the key to the city on a new album called Live at the Opera House (Craft Recordings, out September 6). The concert was a major event in San Francisco (and gay history) history—thousands lined up in all their disco finery for the show. For listeners who may know that release by heart, it’s extra heartening to hear the concert in a fuller context, with more banter, including shouting out good friends in the audience by their first names.
At one point, Supervisor Harry Britt, who stepped into Harvey Milk’s shoes on the Board of Supervisors after he was assassinated and made major strides towards legalizing domestic partnerships, takes the stage and talks about how fabulous it is to be an out politician who has watched Sylvester perform at the Stud. Britt was there to present the key to the city, awarded by Mayor Dianne Feinstein. After Britt read the official proclamation from the Mayor’s Office, Sylvester in turn thanked him as “Dianne.” It’s a super-cute moment.
Living Proof closes with “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” but the actual concert didn’t stop there. On Live at the Opera, we learn that the show’s final song was actually the oft-covered standard, “Never Can Say Goodbye.” We also learn about the pills and the acid, thanks to the riveting liner notes by Joshua Gamson, author of the 2005 book The Fabulous Sylvester: The Legend, The Music, The Seventies in San Francisco.
Gamson intoxicatingly describes the scene backstage and in the audience, including dog collars, leather tuxes, and forbidden glitter. Both limousines and garbage trucks pulled up to the front of the venue. “They were coming in helicopters and dropping their asses down on Market Street,” Gamson cites Rhodes as saying some time after the event. “Everything came to that show. You had sissies, you had gay, you had purple, green, white, Black, whatever.”
Sylvester mentions during the show that he knows that the audience wasn’t permitted to get up and dance, and asks, “But you can move side to side, can’t you?” He’s momentarily frustrated when the lighting crew isn’t able to spotlight one side of the crowd when he wants to see them better, but it adds to the unstuffy vibe.
In a June story announcing the fall release of Live at the Opera House, 48 Hills’ trusted music voice John-Paul Shiver reported that it joins a surprisingly robust canon of concert albums recorded in the ‘60s and ‘70s in San Francisco. With superb symphonics, instrumentation, and unwaveringly strong singers, it’s an album that could withstand infinite plays at home while imagining what it was like to be there.
Live at the Opera House received a daylong world premiere on Sunday, playing back to back all day at SFMOMA. Museum-goers heard it on the seventh floor in the Devon Turnbull installation called HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 2 as part of the museum’s robust Art of Noise exhibit, which runs through Aug. 18. Since Art of Noise opened in May, local DJs and international recording artists alike have lugged in vessels filled with vinyl to play for whomever wandered in on a whim or intentionally. (You can see a schedule of upcoming events here.)
I got to SFMOMA 15 minutes before it opened at 10am in order to hear the first play, and it appeared that three other people did the same. Two of them later got on the same elevator as myself, and one said that it was really nice to hear more of this concert than is on Living Proof, but the system needed more bass—ironic for a system that looks like it’ll blow the back out of anything emitting a low end. It was played at a relatively low volume.
Throughout the day, the album had different effects on different kids in attendance. Some babies were lulled back to their dreams, tweens who looked like they may not care to focus sat surprisingly riveted for a while, and others expressed dismay when they came back after an hour and heard the same album being played.
The Art of Noise exhibit has been a hit from the start. Over 12,000 people showed up on opening day despite extra heavy rain. It’s well worth catching during its closing moments. The sheer volume of OG Sixties Fillmore posters is worth admission alone, and you can get lost in lysergic typography and design for hours.
One glass table shows off a shockingly modest collection of rave flyers that could have been much more robust, though it’s fun to see a flyer from the seminal UK acid house party Shoom alongside a nondescript one advertising two East Bay raves called Intoxication and Intoxication II. The rest of the room features both standard and novel physical music players from the past, which look positively Martian now even if that’s what you grew up with and still use. There’s even a combo record, cassette, and CD player that is a new obsession.
The exhibit coincides with a resurgence of popularity in physical music and culture. Collectors have long treated albums, cassettes, and other recordings as objects of art. The subject is vast enough to fill a museum of its own, and the interest is there.
Tamara is a DJ and the founder of Music Book Club.
