I’ve made some pretty fun San Francisco art the past couple years, focusing on a few neighborhood favorites: Caffé Trieste and Vesuvio Café (both of North Beach) and good old Trad’r Sam way out on Geary Street in the Outer Richmond. Sam’s was one of the first-wave tiki bars to hit California back in 1937, and they still make a ridiculously potent Zombie today. Their happy hour damn near put me in the hospital back in 2012. After the second one (hey, I HAD to! It was happy hour!) I could not for the life of me see less than two of everything for about an hour and a half. That doesn’t happen often (maybe once every five years), but it means I’ve drunk something to reckon with. Margaritas earlier in the day at Tommy’s did not help one bit either.
The place is well past its heyday, but I’ve still spent many jolly, stupid hours at Sam’s, back when I lived in SF in the ’90s and on visits since. It’s a dive, but a good dive. The bar itself is a gem: a horseshoe-shaped deal that hearkens back to a time when bars were, well, different than now. Why the hell don’t they build horseshoe bars anymore? They’re the best for hanging out. At the bend, a party of four can converse, looking each other in the eyes without developing a bent spine or moving to a booth in Siberia. Every seat is a good seat, and you can see all the clientele (read: dames) with a casual Robert Mitchumish glance. Man, I love horseshoe bars. I cop to it.
Anyway, it was at that u-shaped mother that I watched the Giants play the second game of a double header back in September of 2012, and since I was seeing double, it was like the fourth game of a quad-header or something. But it was fun! And a TV at the bar showing the local team playing ball in the middle of the day? I love that, too. It’s real. It’s local. It’s democratic. And goddammit, it’s AMERICAN. It’s also like that scene in Oliver Stone’s The Doors where the camera pans through the Whisky, starting with a barfly watching the Dodgers on a little black & white portable at one end of the bar, and the Doors pounding out “Break on Through” at the other. Damn, that’s a good scene.
Inspiration for this San Francisco Art: the SIGN!
Sometimes the sign’s the thing. If neon were smack you could call me William S. Burroughs. I freakin’ love it. And Trad’r Sam has a doozy of a sign, day or night. At one point they changed it; rearranged the name, built it up, added an arrow and maybe almost pulled the whole building over when they hung the big bastard. But damned if it’s not one of the most audacious signs in Frisco (yes, goddammit, I said it). So I immortalized it. And it felt good. It felt good and right and true, and Hemingway would have been proud. Not just of the sentence structure there, but of the sign-drawing. It was honest and right and sign-y and big. Anyway. (Post continues after LO-O-O-O-O-O-ONG jump below all these sweet-ass pictures of THE SIGN.)
Original San Francisco Art of Trad’r Sam Is Up For Sale Now
Check out this ink on paper beauty at tebeau.com. It’s on 140-pound Fabriano cold press watercolor paper, made with India ink and love. Size is about 14″ by 18″ and it was the starting point of the three-color limited edition prints I made, also available on my site. But it’s the original San Francisco art piece that’s the thing. There’s only one, so once it’s sold, it’s sold.
