Mark Rennie: The Batman of S.F. Nightlife

Artist, attorney, restaurateur, bar owner, landlord, and the ultimate Fixer of Fun

Mark Rennie has been a licensed attorney in San Francisco since 1974, and boasts a decades-long history of creative collaborations in art and business. He’s opened many nightclubs and restaurants, from the legendary Club Nine, with Chris Isaak as house band and Courtney Love as coat check girl, to the Billboard Cafe, which featured a billboard on the rooftop as a rotating canvas for visual artists. He founded the Eyes and Ears Foundation in 1977, promoting the work of dozens of artists from Ed Ruscha to DJ Hall, Rick Griffin and Karen Carson. He was a founding partner of Best Beverage Catering, which runs the bars for Outside Lands and Coachella. He was also founder of the SoMa restaurant Fly Trap, where the house rules include “1. Don’t steal our shit;” and “4. No spandex (unless it's head to toe).” And he was at the forefront of the 1990s Smart Drinks/Drugs phenomenon. He always keeps moving, and it’s fun to see what he does next. Lots of history here, plenty of links and photos included.

Mark, I have a zillion things to ask you. We’ve known each other for years, and I know you’ve got great stories and what you do is really interesting. So let’s dig in. I know you spent your childhood in Ohio. 

Columbus, Ohio. My mom went to Stanford, grew up in Los Angeles and Arizona. And she said, whatever you do, escape Ohio. So I took her to heart. She had worked at the CIA, had her own column with the Washington Post. And she didn’t quite fit in Columbus, because she was the only Democrat in the town. I was literally babysat by Eleanor Roosevelt. 

So you got to San Francisco in 1971 and went to Hastings College of Law. 

I had long hair, I was a hipster. I was a really good photographer, and was doing all the photography contracts for Hastings and the Supreme Court of California. Portraits of Supreme Court justices, Leon Jaworski, all the rich people. To just give them out as free gifts. I hated it. 

About ’75, I was running with an interesting art crowd in San Francisco, also a lot of healers. My friend had started Yoga Journal. I met Ida Rolf, who invented Rolfing. I was one of those kind of people. 

By ’76, I had met this guy, Paul Whitehead, an art director, he had done the original album covers for Genesis and a bunch of bands. So we became friends and we started this thing called Eyes and Ears Foundation. We fiscally sponsored a bunch of people, including Artists Television Access gallery down on Valencia Street. 

My friend in L.A. said, man, you know what the most crazy thing in America is? These hand-painted billboards on the Sunset Strip. He said, I want to do one in Los Angeles. And so he talked Foster & Kleiser into giving him eight of these very expensive billboards, the most prime billboards in the country, besides Times Square. So in 1977 we did eight canvases, 14 by 48. That show had people like Ed Ruscha, the hottest painter in L.A. Young people like DJ Hall and Karen Parsons, they were just little 28-year-old hotshots. 

Jerry Brown put his buddy, the poet Gary Snyder, as head of the California Arts Council. We got the first grant ever from them. And we were in Art Week, Artforum, on the front page of the L.A. Times. We were little art stars. We did a big show in S.F. with Ruth Asawa, William Wiley, Victor Moscoso and Stanley Mouse, we had like 20-some pieces. We did shows at the S.F. Museum of Modern Art, and Hansen Fuller Gallery, the number one gallery in town. Boom, we were going off in the art world.

This architect firm out of SoHo in New York called SITE, they were building crazy buildings. One of their guys said, well, we got the coolest buildings. Let’s have the coolest trucks. So they called us up and said, will you guys do some trucks for us? And we said, sure. 

So we did 240 truck sides at $2,000 a side, over two summers. That was the fattest we ever were. We were getting about 95% gross margins on these trucks. And then journalist Bill Moyers was doing this series called Creativity. He had Maya Angelou, all these people. And so he had us on. We were having a ball. And again, we were just crazy art guys. I was always tagged as a lawyer, but I was a whole lot more artist than I was lawyer. 

So I saw what happened in SoHo. I went to New York for a week, and went to the 15 or 20 coolest restaurants in Manhattan at that moment. And I said, what’s cool about this? A load of candles, and those little Libby glasses that are clear as a bell? That’s cool. What else do they got? Sound system. What are they playing on the radio? 

Because I watched what happened in Soho, I ended up with four or five buildings on master lease in SoMa. By 1977 I had 9th and Folsom, I had another block where the San Francisco Herb Company was. I had 1209 Howard. I had another one down on Howard Street. We started busting up buildings, and building bootleg art spaces and charging 15% under market, and we had waiting lists. I get a lot of credit for being fresh, but really, I’ve got a good eye. And most art is like copy art in a way. 

The Billboard Cafe was on the corner of Ninth and Folsom. It was a real hub for arty people in the neighborhood. You could grab a coffee, you could get a drink, lunch, dinner. Inside, it was just ablaze with visuals. A billboard was on top of the building. and it would change constantly with different art messaging. So how did that begin?

I had a tenant in the building, the Casa de Kebab, who didn’t pay the rent, so I evicted them. My buddy Saeed worked there, he said I know we got evicted, but we should start a restaurant. I thought about it, I said okay. I had $2,000 to my name. So I called my friend who was an architect, Lee Porter Butler, and I said, hey, I need some help doing this and this and this. And he said, what’s your budget? I said, I have no budget, I’ll give you credit. It was already there. All the equipment was in. 

This was ’84 or ’85. The Billboard became the hottest thing around. And it was really good food. Herb Caen was always putting me in his Sunday column. We were making a little money, but we decided this restaurant business sucks because it’s really hard. And we were doing 400 covers a day. I had no idea what 400 covers a day meant. That’s a lot. 

So a few years later, in 1989, David Latimer and I started The Nose magazine. And our first office was right above the Billboard Cafe on Ninth and Folsom. This tiny room overlooking the street.

I’m the one who built that. That was Gilbert Baker. He designed the Rainbow Flag in that building, in that space. He was my tenant. I miss Gilbert. His obit ended up on the front pages of 140 countries’ newspapers. 

Backing up a bit, when I moved to S.F. in the ’80s, the nightlife had been centered in North Beach, but it was moving around. We would hear things about this South of Market place called Club Nine. I remember going once. It was really striking. The energy in the room was insane. There were 16-millimeter projectors projecting Busby Berkeley musicals backwards. Art all over the walls. Chris Isaak and Silvertone were playing onstage. A woman was dressed as a Jagermeister bondage nurse, shot-gunning Jager to people sitting in a dentist’s chair. 

We were doing crazy shit. It was always like that. It was a three-ring circus. And everybody thought I was a cokehead, but I never did coke because I had a deviated septum. But it was the energy of cocaine, for sure. I had all the young artists, all the people who moved to town. It was a scene. It was very much like the East Village in New York. 

There was a small hotel attached, and I remember every room had a completely different performance or installation going on. So you could go up a flight of stairs, walk down the hallway and look in every door or window and it would be this totally different experience. Did the bar open first and then the motel later? 

No, it was all at the same time. Tony Labatt was a professor at the Art Institute, an artist friend of ours, and for the opening of Club Nine, he did this Shipwreck Kelly stunt where he sat on a flagpole way up. We had really good art. All the time. It was very, very vibrant. Crazy, crazy, crazy. 

But the fire department and all those guys were gonna shut us down, so I just sold out. Because we had bootlegged that whole performance space. I had architect’s plans and I had building permits, but I didn’t have the money to do the deal. I needed another 100 grand. So when they figured it out, they shut us down. 

Also, there was a shooting outside. My door guy, Tommy Vision, who had also been the door guy for everywhere in town, decided to go out and play hero. Some guy had a gun, and he got shot. And then everybody quit going because the mothers of all these people wouldn’t let you go there. So that was not great. In 1987, when they had the 50th anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge, and everybody walked out onto the bridge and got trampled? That was the last night of Club Nine. 

According to Wikipedia, the queer bar called The Stud then moved into the Club Nine space. The Stud’s former location then opened as the Holy Cow bar, with a beautifully weird giant plastic cow for a sign.

Yeah, The Holy Cow. One of the owners had been Alexis Muir, John Muir’s grandson, who was then the granddaughter. One of the first sex changes in the world [Wikipedia says John Muir was her great-uncle.] Did you ever know Alexis? Muir was part of the South of Market scene. It was a trip. Yeah, there were some characters. 

People don’t remember that the SoMa scene, especially around Folsom & 11th, was packed with nightclubs and restaurants. Was Paradise Lounge going at this time? I remember seeing the newscaster Sylvia Chase, in her coiffed-up hairdo, cozying up to the bar, having a belt after the evening news.

The Paradise had been a leather bar called Febe’s until maybe ’86, when Robin Reichert took it over. Robin would always stand at the door, and he’d be high on acid one night and ecstasy the next. He was always at the door. Biggest Budweiser account in Northern California, by far.

So Dennis Ring I remember vividly. He had the Elbo Room in the Mission, and the SoMa restaurant called Rings, which was on Folsom. And then he or his sister bought the space next door, which opened as Julie’s Supper Club.

Julie’s Supper Club, right on the alley. Before it was Julie’s, on the first floor it was a restaurant called Communion. Which sold basically vegetarian Indian food with killer naan. And I’m such a cheap Scotsman. I was always there because it was only a buck. Vegetarian Indian food for a buck. But you couldn’t talk at Communion. No talking. I don’t know why you couldn’t talk. But we found out later, the loft upstairs was a safe house for the Symbionese Liberation Army. Cinque was upstairs with Patty Hearst, tied up. They were up there for a while.

Wow. Maybe that was one of the reasons you couldn’t talk. So The Stud is apparently moving into the Julie’s/Communion space on 1123 Folsom, and they’re raising funds right now, and will re-open later this year. Let’s talk about the Covered Wagon Saloon, also on Folsom St. A legendary SoMa bar and music club. You were a part of this place also?

It was called the Covered Wagon before we had it, but it was Yosemite Sam’s before that. And it was kind of leathery. And Shirley, my buddy, I loved Shirley, she had 30 bars in the Tenderloin, which were all kinds of tranny bars, and crazy stuff. And you could put a bartender in one of those bars at six in the morning, run the whole thing all day, and it would mint money. Because it’d be full of hookers and trannies and crazy Tenderloin people, and it was all cash. She said her biggest problem was that she didn’t have enough safes to put her cash. 

So she was renting the Covered Wagon from my buddy Jack Fox. And Shirley was tired. We became fast friends, and it ended up Shirley was 25 percent, and I was 25 percent. We brought in a few others, and we killed it at the Covered Wagon. The bike messengers got there at four o’clock, and even on a Sunday or a Saturday, we were the highest grossing bar in town until about 11. The Covered Wagon was the first date of the West Coast tour for Nirvana, and the first date on their national tour. Gwar and a bunch of people were in there. 

Oh yeah. I saw a fair amount of live music there. I remember somebody dragged me to a night called Stinky’s Peep Show, with these “large and lovely” go-go dancers gyrating on the pool tables to Lynyrd Skynyrd tunes. 

Oh, and Club Jesus. Yeah. It was a super fun time. Club Jesus. And then it all fell off and the big guys took over. But we were killing it down there. 

So you must have given some thought to why all of this disappeared? You go down South of Market now, and so many of these places are closed, boarded up, or turned into a dumb “bottle club” or something. The Oasis and DNA Lounge are still open. But these hotspots are all gone: Paradise Lounge, Slim’s, Transmission Theater, 20 Tank Brewery, Holy Cow, Ace Cafe, Covered Wagon, Don Ramon’s Mexican restaurant. Or Hamburger Mary’s, where the cream for your coffee came in baby bottles, and the Bowie was blasting through the speakers, and the fry cook was working topless. It feels really deserted. Why has the nightlife left that neighborhood?

San Francisco can’t get out of its own way. It’s always stuck stepping on its dick. It’s like The Gavin Report. Were you around when the Gavin Report was going? 

I do remember that. It was a radio/music trade publication that hosted a huge music convention, with concerts all over the city, panel discussions, record labels launching their acts. People came from all over the U.S.

The Gavin Report was getting treated like shit in San Francisco. So South by Southwest in Austin became the major thing. I remember. And I said, you stupid people. They kicked out Burning Man, they kicked out the Gavin Report. All these things, they just treat you like shit. 

But throughout it all, you’ve also developed this reputation as the Batman of nightlife in San Francisco. If anyone in the restaurant or entertainment industry gets into a legal bind, they call you. You’re like the Fixer of Fun, right?

Baobab, that’s what’s going on my tombstone. Bissap Baobab, that’s the coolest place in the Mission right now. Baobab was down for the count. Noise complaints from neighbors. You know, they have African drumming, and we don’t want those kind of people. Marco Senghor. I love Marco. Never has any money. He called me up, chasing me, because I’ve represented him forever.

So we had to button up the sound, had to do this and do that. I called in a bunch of favors. I’ll give most of the credit to Kevin Ortiz. Kevin was one of Nancy Pelosi’s 15 aides, he grew up in the Mission. Smart as a whip. He picked up the phone and called people in Sacramento. Scott Weiner, the state senator. We went to a nine-hour hearing at ABC, and there were 80 people in the audience on a Zoom call. And he banged his gavel and we won, man. I think I made about $10 an hour for that job! 

You were one of the masterminds behind the smart drinks phenomenon of the 1990s, with the company Smart Products, later Smart Basics. So when we first met, you and Jim English had started this kind of revolutionary “functional beverages” vitamin concept. So maybe describe briefly how that began. 

I had been a biohacker for a long time. I was a firm believer in better living through chemistry. And not just things like, oh, well, maybe we’ll take some mushrooms, or this or that. I was very anti-intellectual, but I read a lot. Before I got older, I could see pictures, and I could remember everything. It’s called eidetic imagery. So I was always into that sort of improvement. 

So sometime in the ’70s, Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw, who later became our buddies, wrote a book called Life Extension. After the Bible, that was the number-one seller for like ten years. Followed by a few other books. So I’d read all that stuff. And they’d talk about Hydergine. 

I used to have all these doctors who were right on the edge. I had the best doctor in L.A. She’s the one who prescribed me Hydergine and vasopressin. Oh my God. We got it all. We’d always get it out of Mexico because you could buy stuff there. Hydergine was from the Albert Hofman experiments that LSD-25 came out of, for Sandoz chemicals. And out of that same group of experiments, where they’re looking for new blood pressure meds, he had done something called Hydergine.

So what does Hydergine do? Wikipedia says it’s used to treat dementia, and help aid in recovery after a stroke. Why would you want to take it?

Okay, so you got a swimming pool, and you’re the paramedic. And you look at the bottom of the swimming pool, a guy’s hit the board and he’s been down there for 30 minutes. You hit him in the carotid artery with about 500cc of Hydergine, and guess what? Reanimation device. But what Durk and Sandy were talking about is regrowing dendrites. Hydergine grows dendrites in your brain. It makes you smarter. It’s listed in the PDR in France as a “reanimation device.” It also made you very psychic.

So you started dosing yourself with this?

Oh yeah, early in the ’80s. I was on a crazy high Hydergine buzz during that period. I was just a notorious biohacker. 

So before you ran nightclubs, this was sort of like part of your daily or weekly routine?

I’m trying to think if I was doing it by myself, or what I was doing. Where did I run into that doctor who had to run out of town? I met her at the Whole Life Expo. I knew all those people. The Whole Life Expo used to be at Fort Mason, and it was an amazing collection of booths and exhibits of New Age stuff, healing, and life extension. 

Wow, Fort Mason definitely doesn’t do that anymore. 

They certainly don’t do it in San Francisco. There is the New Living Expo up in Marin, I think it’s much smaller. I haven’t been in years. 

So you and Jim English launched Smart Products/Basics, and you came out with a line of products, beverages and vitamins and Hydergine and all this stuff. For a time in San Francisco, you couldn’t go into a nightclub without seeing a smart drinks stand, with a woman named “Earth Girl” pouring non-alcoholic cocktails like “Energy Elicksure” and “Psuper Psonic Psyber Tonic.” This whole phenomenon seemed to grow so quickly. 

Believe it or not, until 1995, to sell anything on the web, it was not done. It was still all these computer hackers who wanted to give it away. Exactly the same mythos of Burning Man, where you don’t sell anything, just ice and coffee, that’s it. And by 1995 it flipped. But by then, Jim and I had the largest nutrition site on the web, a thousand pages, which was a lot back then. And we were giving away information. 

The media hype around smart drinks and smart drugs was just insane. America did not know how they should view it. Should they regulate it? What is it for? It was another one of those “only in San Francisco” trends, poised to infect the minds of the world!

And they go, what’s that about? What does that do? What were you doing? I was on the cover of the L.A. Times Magazine, with a weird cocktail. I was on Larry King Live. I appeared in so much media. I was so overexposed that they put Jim on Nightline, with Barbara Walters, instead of me. 

Your partner, Jim English, continued to work in this field until he passed away recently. When I met him, before the Smart Drinks stuff, he was the guy who started the DNA Lounge nightclub in South of Market. 

Jim was this nerdy science kid. He used to be kind of fat and chubby. And when he got older, he went from fat nerdy kid to the head of the nightclub world. DNA Lounge. He was the coolest kid in town. We were really tight, right ’til he died. He was the art director of The Tubes. 

You’ve been in the Bay Area since 1971. Why not New York, or L.A.? What keeps you here, I guess is what I’m asking. 

Well, here’s the thing, everybody thinks I’m in New Mexico. I have a friend, Darryl Smith, he’s like 70 now, he started something called the Luggage Store Gallery, on Market Street in San Francisco. He was the most important African-American curator in the country for 20 years. The Luggage Store was major. People don’t get it. Mark Bradford, Barry McGee, all these people that are major painters now? He gave them their first show. 

Darryl and I had done this weird thing with Rigo (Ricardo Gouveia). He’s a major artist now. So Rigo had done this mural called “Truth” on the corner of Seventh and Market. On the Oddfellows Building. And if you were on the mayor’s balcony, you looked right at it. Big sign, “Truth,” right? I had co-sponsored that mural with the Luggage Store.

Fast forward like 20 years. Darryl and I became friends and he goes, man, you gotta come to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. It’s 20% artists. You’re gonna love it. All the artists got moved out of Santa Fe and Marfa, Texas, and they all moved to Truth or Consequences. 

About five years ago I went down there with my friend Gordon Edelheit, and we couldn’t believe it. Dude, this was exactly like South of Market 1980. It was super cheap. A vibrant arts community needs cheap space. This place is gonna go. Joshua Tree went during COVID. In Manhattan, San Francisco…they’re already two generations gone. 

So what is this town like?

Truth or Consequences. Sierra County, New Mexico. The Rio Grande is there, a big mountain, looks kind of like Ashland. The nunnery for the old Catholic hospital had a hot springs well and 22,000 square feet. It had 18 bedrooms and seven bathrooms built by the archbishop in 1932, when he had lots of money and things were cheap to build. The Catholic church always built beautiful buildings. 

I think my gut’s always right. So we bought the nunnery for $200,000. That was the first thing we did. And now we’ve got a restaurant, we’re working right now with director Ari Aster (Midsommar, Beau is Afraid). And he’s doing a movie there, with Joaquin Phoenix. They’re renting out our hot springs and nunnery, and using our restaurant as their kitchen. 

And so I’m trying to get out of Dodge. But in the meantime, we’ve been building this place out. We bought ten trailers, to be a retirement community for old hippie artists. A lot of people are moving in. It’s all healers and artists, and everybody’s 60, 65 years old. When I was down there, like six months in, I knew more people and had more fun than I did here. Because of what’s happened here. San Francisco got so weird when the techie boom hit, everybody’s running as fast as they can. 

So set aside the past 53 years. Today, if you were a young person, interested in art, would you move to San Francisco?

I wouldn’t come here. I wouldn’t come to California. California screwed up. I’d go to New Mexico. Or Texas. Wouldn’t go to Florida, it’s too damn humid.

But you did put a huge stamp on nightlife in San Francisco, especially the SoMa scene of the ’80s.

Gordon and I really did sort of start that South of Market scene. I got the credit, but it was really Gordon. He and Pablo had started the Haight-Ashbury Street Fair. We didn’t really discover SoMa, but we did open these bootleg art spaces. I had been in New York enough to know, if you see a parade coming down the street, grab a baton and get in front of it. You know?