Revealing Tommy Tompkins

San Francisco alternative newspapers were amazing, and the Princeton rebel midwifed much of its best work

At the Chico News & Review, where I was the weekly’s 25-year-old City Hall reporter and 1992 election coverage coordinator, we had in the newsroom’s corner copies of the great alternative newspapers. These tabloids would arrive through the US Postal service and inspire News & Review story ideas and, for me, original concepts of how a journalist might might be.

That stack of issues taught me the aesthetic differences between the unimaginably chic and hip LA Weekly and San Francisco’s scrappy Bay Guardian. The Bible had not gotten a better going-over by young Christian me than would issues of the Village Voice. I dreamed of knowing these pages’ iconic nightclubs and laying actual eyes on the important and or pretty people in these papers’ pictures and buying CDs and tapes at the record stores that advertised.

Would I prefer a life inside of editorial like a Michael Ventura column—one Southern Cali hippie exploration—or a scene more akin to a Tim Redmond investigation, with a Mission District feel? The reveal is that I ended up reporting and critiquing for all of these papers that I studied up in Chico. Today’s guest got me started writing in these big-city cool scenes. (Along with long-forgotten Sacramento News & Review hero A. Lin Neumann).

Teaching something more crucial than technique, JH “Tommy” Tompkins helped me adjust to the environment. In that early 90s milieu, I’d been a San Franciscan for a hot minute, but only after getting into the Guardian office space did I understand the meaning of not being in Chico.

The 1994 San Francisco Bay Guardian arts department was stocked with critically-astute editors. And you’d have a brawny, punk-haired Johnny Angel Wendell popping in and overwhelming you with stories and theories and what not. The acerbic critic Chuck Stephens would seemingly always be seated at some computer, sneering noises of disapproval whenever anyone made a questionable assertion. (Especially where the then-exploding Korean cinema is concerned) I was competing with Cheo Coker, among others, for limited newsprint real estate to cover the period’s blindingly vibrant Bay Area hip hop. Tough gig, fantastically difficult.

Once, a reader wrote a letter attacking my abilities as a writer and and thinker, and my music editor immediately began giving that guy work.

That idyllic world that I’d fantasized about turned out to be an intellectual battlefield, and I was more than fortunate to be in good with peak Tommy Tompkins, who happens also to have originated and help popularize the term “world music.”

In the following lightly-edited version of my spring conversation with Tompkins, some of the most famous music journalists of our century will be mentioned. Hua Hsu, Danyel Smith, Josh Kun and more. In that slow, pre-Internet hipster media reality, Tommy helped shape them all. Us all.

Fun fact: The column Scene-N-Herd, which I originated with Sylvia Tan, moved on to Davey D after I jumped from the Bay Guardian to LA Weekly. Finally, Scene-N-Herd landed in the hands of a struggling young writer and musician named Boots Riley.

Donnell Alexander: You do root for the Lakers, but you’re a Warriors fan at the end of the day. How did you make that transition?

Tommy Tompkins: I moved down to LA, and it’s hard to live in LA and not sort of pick up the vibe of the professional teams.

You gotta remember that when I moved down to LA, the Warriors were the joke of the league. I remember once they had drafted a guy named Vonteego Cummings, out of Pittsburgh. He was a point guard—I don’t know how they finished out of the playoffs so many times and had no draft choices. But in any case, Garry St. Jean, the GM of the Warriors, famously got on 680 Sports Talk—the one where John Madden worked—and he said, “Oh, we think we got a pretty good little player in Vonteego.” He’d replace the names and he said it so many times over the years.

They were just a bad team for a long time, after the Run TMC era. So, I came down here, and it wasn’t like that really had a personality. They managed to draft Chris Webber and then give him away at the end of the first season. That was the Warriors experience in a nutshell.

DA: I worked with you during “The Chris Webber Era.” Jason Kidd was at Cal when I was working with you at the Bay Guardian. All of this old-time stuff, especially the stuff about alternative newspapers, has come back to me because it’s being talked about with Tricia Romano’s book The Freaks Came Out to Write—the oral history about The Village Voice.

I’m always interested in how people, in that book in particular, came to the alternative press. What was your journey? How did you get into that Bay Guardian situation in particular?

TT: After I got out of Princeton, I came out to Berkeley, because I wanted to join the revolution. I was so drawn by The Black Panther Party and what they were doing, so me and my sister moved out West. We got here in 69. It was just a really terrific time to be there. For the next 10 years I tried hard to overthrow the government. It wasn’t working out. Let’s put it that way.

So, I was brought into a little songwriting group. There were three of us. We started a band called Big City, up in the Bay Area.

We became famous all over town—We got to the cover of the Guardian. (Laughs) I did that for three years, but I was getting a little worried because I was driving a cab. I realized I loved driving a cab. It was a fun job. The early eighties had an upsurge in the punk scene. We were a so-called “world beat” band. And I was gassing up the cab at the end one night. I had a volume of Hamlet on the dashboard and—as it was intended I got a ton of people asking me, Ah you’re reading Shakespeare?

There was this one woman who was going to work downtown and she was like, “Oh, I wish I could read Shakespeare and be a cab driver like you.” I was kinda thinking, I hope the tip is big. And I realized that if I didn’t watch out someday I was going to be a 40 year-old cab driver. So, I had to go in and quit.

I was doing some writing, but not professionally. [There was] a guy named Mat Callahan, who was in a band called The Looters. They were like our brother-sister band: Big City and The Looters. He basically strong-armed a woman named Melissa Milton into giving me a job as an editor, to get me a job at the Daily Cal. That was my first step into a professional career.

I went from there to Calendar magazine, which became the SF Weekly. I then started to write for the East Bay Express a lot. Then I was offered a full-time job, first at the East Bay Guardian, which was a short-lived spinoff of the Guardian. Then I became arts editor of the Guardian, where I stayed for 15 years. I loved it a lot. It was a really unique situation.

DA: If you were to explain to a 30-year-old what the Bay Guardian was to The City at that time, how would you do it?

TT: It was a real freewheeling place where a lot of good writers wrote, and we had a lot of fun doing it. But the democracy of the Internet was seriously not a part of what it took to put out those papers. In the Bay Area there were four of them, East Bay Express, SF Weekly, the Guardian, and one up in Marin County… I can’t remember it's name offhand, but you had a small handful of jobs. Even though we were paying 10 cents a word, people wanted to write for us, because that was where you could really write. I looked for writers, I didn’t look for journalists. Some of my writers were trained as journalists, but the point was just to find those people who had that je’ne c’est quoi—the writer’s thing.

So, I had my way of sizing up writers, and I found some really good ones over the years, editing that section the way that I did. It became a really successful newspaper. It was always a successful-but-slightly-eccentric local newspaper, but the money came from the arts section, because that’s where everything from the classified ads to the record company ads to the movie studio ads [ran]. We were really good at producing a newspaper that was respected by the readers and by the people who bought ads.

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DA: Talk about some the writers who came through—what they brought to the table, your experience with them.

TT: The guy I was closest with in those days was Josh Kun. He’s now a professor at USC in their Ahmanson arts department. He won a MacArthur Award. He’s quite prominent.

The one I really enjoyed the most was Danyel Smith, who went on from The Guardian to the New York Times, I think it was. She was the editor of Vibe for a couple of years. We ran into each other when she was just starting out, and what I was really good at had little to do with putting a pen to paper and making editorial marks. I was good at meeting people and seeing that they had something inside of them that they didn’t even realize. I allowed them to—I don’t want to get too highfalutin—to speak their own truth.

If somebody had something inside of them and they ran into me, I was going to get that out of them. It was fun, because I was getting to know people deeply. I liked it a lot. I can’t tell you what a great period of time it was.

DA: I caught something from the Tricia Romano book. She said that the alternative weeklies were what was really going on.

TT: Yeah.

DA: That is was where you looked when you wanted to know what’s really going on. How do you achieve that? It’s a curated experience—I know, because I did calendar listings for a minute—and it made a difference. The back of the book for the Guardian and the Weekly. What was the trick?

TT: It was just having a sense of knowing where you were. People wanted to be in there, and you could tell—even when people pitched you stuff—if they had a half-assed idea of what was going on. The most difficult trick was moving when hip hop was really poppin’, late 80s, first four or five years of the 90s.

And then in terms of coverage we moved into noise rock with Deerhoof and just a whole bunch of crazy bands. Pink and Purple or whatever that band was. A guy named Mike McGurk brought that band into our editorial offices. He told this great story about how the guy was playing a gig and it involved fire somehow. He ended up getting a ring of fire stuck around the neck, and he continued to play the song. His flesh was burning. That was commitment. So, we brought Mike in and he brought a lot to the newspaper.

You had people, and if you had fun with them that was a great start to a working relationship. Sometimes you’d misfire and people couldn’t really write that well. We’d try as much as we could to work with them.

By the mid-90s I’d done a pretty good job of diversifying the freelance pool. We had a whole handful of Asian American writers.

DA: It didn’t look like any other place where I wrote, that’s for sure. A lot of white men, a lot of white people, period, at the places where I was writing music—with the exception of The Source. Especially the alternative papers. They were the white-est. You definitely checking for them, or was it just this process that you’re speaking about?

TT: It was both. I deliberately checked for em. We had Jeff (Chang), Oliver Wang, Hua Hsu. It was a whole bunch of great writers. You came in, but I knew shortly that you were going to get hired away from us. It didn’t take long. What was it? About nine months and you were down at the LA Weekly.

DA: No, I was not on staff for even seven months.

TT: But that was sorta life at the alt-weeklies. There was always something new you could do. When I got there, they hadn’t had a good run of editors in that department. People were sour, and I finally fired a couple of people because they just couldn’t get over being spoiled kids and saying bad things about the publisher. But the fact is that if you wanted to enjoy life, begin a career as a writer, you wanted to be in the alt-weeklies. And it ended up being a pretty good product, too. The quality of the newspaper was erratic, but nobody would ever say it wasn’t fun.

DA: What was it to San Francisco at its peak?

TT: At times, for most of the city, it was really erratic, because our publisher was a well known… some people call him eccentric. A driven journalist. He managed to keep this paper floating since the early 70s to, I guess, the mid 2010s. Twenty, 30 years for a paper like that is pretty damn good. He himself had his eccentricities, but he let us do what we wanted. I never had Bruce Brugmann tell me one thing—do this or do that. Imagine. Many editors had that kind of license in those days.

DA: I used to read the Guardian in Chico. I worked at the Chico News & Review. That was my entrance into alternative newspapers, and we would get a stack of all the papers from LA Weekly to the Village Voice and the Guardian. I would imagine what the lives were like inside of them. Those places seemed like the coolest places in town. The coolest place in San Francisco? Well that’s a cool place, indeed.

Can you give people a peek of what it was like inside of the Guardian?

TT: I can remember the day that the guy from Nirvana, Kurt Cobain, got shot. He wasn’t my generation, but I admired this guy. He changed the face of pop music. The younger people in our department were genuinely distressed. I definitely remember those few days around that.

Alvin Lu wrote a novel. He was one of our staffers and also one of the best writers I’ve ever met. He wrote a novel called City Ghost, which is also the name of the column he wrote for us. I picked up the Sunday (New York) Times and there was a picture of the cover of his book. “First novelist Alvin Lu’s City Ghost” I felt so fabulously happy for him. There’s always moments like that, but mostly it was just trying to keep up with stuff.

I tried to keep in the office people you could get along with. You spent a lot of time at that place. If you had somebody that was sour you didn’t want em around. You ‘d find a way to move em out.

One time there was a writer who was writing theater for us. He was a good writer, but he had a problem with methamphetamine. He owed me a review on Friday afternoon and I didn’t want to stick around past six o’clock to say things so I told him, When you’re finished leave it on my desk. I also told him the burglar alarms go off at 9 o’clock. “This is what you gotta do with with the alarm.”

LoopNet

So, I came through on Monday morning, and he was sitting there at my desk, in my chair. I said, Did you finish the review? He went (shakes head) “no.”

“Is it done now?”

(Shakes head)

“Did you stay here all weekend?”

He bursts into tears. I spent the next hour like, trying to keep him from… the drastic. Just stuff like that, but it was hilarious. It was annoying at the time. I gave the space to the news section. But how can you beat a moment like that? The guy stayed doing speed all weekend, waiting for God to come down and write his article.

DA: You have to tell me what it was like competing with other papers. Was there much competition? The feeling when I was there that the SF Weekly and Guardian had distinct readerships—a certain kind of San Francisco Bay Area person is picking up one paper, a certain person was picking up the other.

Maybe the distinction was in my head, I don’t know. But can you speak to any rivalry?

TT: In my section of the paper, we just didn’t worry about it much. We were gonna do what we were going to do.

I know that at one point this guy Bill Wyman, who was a writer with the Chicago Reader, was brought in whip the Guardian in our competition for ad dollars and stuff. I’d known the guy a little, though we weren’t really friends. We went out to lunch one day and he said, If I can’t beat Bruce Brugmann in a PR war or whatever, then I ought to jump off a bridge.

I was really insulted. I didn’t say anything, but he didn’t beat us. It was a job that you had to know what you were doing and what you wanted. The people who were looking at it inside, who were at stuff, as competition didn’t get it. You had to do what you had to do and do it well. And you’d be alright.

DA: Are you talking about the New Times-era Mike Lacey SF papers?

TT: Yeah, they bought in pretty early. Something like mid90s? When Scott [Price] was owner and publisher, they were always cramped for money, but they had good people over there, too. Ann Powers, although she did work for me first. Ann and Andrew O’Hehir, a few others, but I liked our paper better.

DA: I did too. Talk to me about when Craigslist came to town. I didn’t have to read The Freaks Came Out to Write to know that. She talks about when Anil Dash, the tech writer—

TT: From San Francisco.

DA: Shows up at the Village Voice. He had come from San Francisco and he told them—

TT: Dude.

DA: This is gonna be a thing. And they were like, What? Was the (Guardian) reaction a little less… idiotic?

TT: Yeah. We had a parking next to the Guardian building when I started working there in 1990, I think it was. About 95 or six they put up about 20 of these work condos. All of this tech money was coming in before the first tech crash. It was full of busy people with money to burn, a lot of people were investing in them. You’d have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to understand what was going on.

The Guardian tried its best early on. I think a lot of it was Tim Redmond’s doing, the executive editor. We hired people to put us online, but we were trying to deal with (Craigslist) on a local basis. That didn’t capture the essence of what we were threatened by.

One day, it must have been 99, Craig Newark came in. We always had people coming in to introduce themselves. That was kind of fun. He had walked into the arts department and was talking with a couple of us. I asked him what he did and he said “I’m trying to start a free classifieds service, where people can go to my website and post all of their ads for nothing.”

I said, “Where’s the money going to come from?”

He said, “Oh, eventually we’ll talk to advertisers and people who’ll want a piece of that.” Inside I went, Umm, this isn’t good—for us!

DA: Can you explain why it was such a threat?

TT: We made a good portion of our weekly income from classified ads. Personal ads, all that kind of stuff. I think we had one of the first well-regarded dating sites in our back pages. People would write and try to find partners for sex or whatever.

It was a good piece of change. What did (Tricia Romano) say, that 30 percent of Voice’s income was from classifieds. Pretty healthy chunk of change, so it was pretty obvious that the Internet was taking off and we were going to lose all of our advertisers. Not only could their classified ads be read by somebody who just up picked a newspaper at a kiosk, but sitting in their living room they could find whatever they wanted. That really hurt us. By 2001 or so were trying to figure out how to stay afloat without messing with the people on the staff.

DA: I want to go back to that issue of what’s been lost. Those editors—you guys, Tim—were curating an experience, an identity. People took their personalities in San Francisco, I think, from one paper to the other. Is this a reason we have less community, we don’t have a place where we all kinda read the same stuff?

TT: Compared to the Internet, it was primitive, but because it was local and defined as local, people would know who you were writing about, so maybe you could write about their band next time. There was definitely that kind of community.

I’ve talked with (veteran LA Weekly and Village Voice editor) RJ (Smith) about this quite a bit. On one hand, we had an enormous amount of influence in the cities because, here were a handful of us sitting in an office. Sometimes it was, Oh I’ve got to get a piece and you’d pull something out of a hat, and it wasn’t curated so wonderfully. But we were trying to create taste. I got interested in theater. A good play was just gorgeous, and I did my level best to put the stuff that I liked out there, so that people could sample it.

With a number of us, these papers were in good hands. A few of us had a lot of influence, and if we fumbled… I’m sure we overlooked a lot of good art during my tenure there, and I feel bad about that. It wasn’t a snotty thing, like we didn’t want to have anybody we didn’t like. It was just hard to know everything, you know? As I was the editor in chief of the art department, I was supposed to know dance, the classical artist, opera and stuff, what’s bubbling beneath the surface of music, theater, gallery stuff. I always felt, Oh man, how did I wind up with this kind of responsibility? Because I knew what it felt like to make not-so-good art.

DA: Do you remember any of my stories?

TT: The stuff I remember reading was when you got to ESPN. I followed you. I was pissed—not pissed at you—I was annoyed when you went down to the LA Weekly. I can’t remember the particulars of what you wrote, but I did read it all. And I also knew that bigger things were in store.

DA: Let me interrupt you, because this is like a trick question.

Michael Franti.

TT: Oh God. I’m sorry about that shit. I blocked it out. I was just thinking about him yesterday. He’s got a commercial on the TV. It’s like, if you want to be happy clap your hands or something like that. It’s not the Michael that I love, but I’m really glad that he’s making a living.

Michael Franti was sort of a hip hop folk artist who I admired deeply, a lot because he managed to make decent political art. He started with a group called The Beatnigs, which was experimental noise rap. And they were so absolutely unique. When I found out that he’d had a full-ride for USF basketball, I made it my business to find the guy.

He was so inventive. He went from (The Beatnigs) to (Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy).

DA: It’s important to point out that this is an artist who came up through Alternative Tentacles. So there was a real specific San Francisco somthin’ going on there. But please continue.

TT: He went from there to, what was it, Spearhead? I admired the guy deeply and he came out with an album, so I put my best writer on it. That happened to be you.

We hadn’t seen each other in a couple of years and I asked if you ever ran into Michael, and you said that you made peace with him. I was kinda happy. I still felt terrible. I felt… I wasn’t putting thoughts into your head, but I definitely had frustrations with him because he was so talented and I loved his early stuff so much. You wrote a really good article that was honest in a way that most writers—and I think most editors—would have felt uncomfortable writing and publishing.

DA: What’s most interesting about it is that I’d taken that job at [LA Weekly]. I was a lame duck. I could have phoned it in, but I didn’t phone it in. I actually have a conversation with a friend, another artist, who doesn’t approve of Michael’s career direction and that tension over that has kind of become an issue. But that’s an off-camera conversation.

Tommy Tompkins, you gave me everything I wanted. You nailed it, you did the hoops stuff. You gave me the cultural content from the Bay Guardian. Thanks a lot, man. Anything you want to say on the way out the door?

TT: The Michael thing is a good way to end the conversation. That was a good moment for us, but it was a hard moment. And we were never scared of those hard moments.