mission records part I

adam white and buzz


buzz will probably be mad at me for this one


melissa with the beers from across the street. these count as one beer each.




band room during quiet time


You remember Mission Records. It was the last all-ages show space in San Francisco and it closed in October of 2003. I lived there for almost two years, which was pretty much the end of Mission Records as it once was, or at least it was during the time when Mission Records was no longer Mission Records anymore, as owner Adam White would have said. We had shows there pretty much every weekend, and sold a few records during the week. Mostly Mission Records was a beacon in the neighborhood. At all and any hour you could walk in and see a friend hanging out listening to records and drinking 40oz. Miller High Lifes we'd buy from across the street. The record store basically kept that place in business.

The record store was located in the middle of the Mission, between 18th and 19th streets. This was the only area where the southside kids hung out, meaning La Emé, which makes sense seeing as how Mission Records used to be a Mexican Mafia bar in the 90s called El Siete de Oros. When Adam and others first moved into the space they found the bar dusty and cobwebbed, fully stocked with drinks still on the bar as the owners had just up and closed one day, leaving everything behind. They found bullets in the walls when they pulled out the drywall to put in soundproofing in the band room. They found handscales and baggies in the ceiling, and in the back corner of one upstairs room they found a square window with a rope and bucket hanging out of it to the alley below. They told me the place was haunted.

I wrote a piece on Mission Records and all of the rest of the hauntings and significance of the space for Maximum RocknRoll #258, November 2004. I don't think there's an online version of it anywhere, but I suppose if you really wanted to read it you could backorder an issue from them. I shot these photos mostly while living at the record store and they were all taken with my Nikon F4. I got a little crazy with the 15mm fisheye lens I had, which is kind of annoying to me years later, but you'll see as I add more photos later this week. For now these photos are set up shots to give a sense of place to something pretty much everyone I knew in SF had a connection.