THE BEAT GOES ON
SAN FRANCISCO—It's another Saturday night at the Mabuhay Gardens for SVT. Outside on Broadway things are fairly sedate—just the usual live sex acts, bellydance clubs, and tourists lining up for the drag show as barkers and street evangelists shriek into the neon night.
THE BEAT GOES ON
SVT At The Mabuhay Gardens
SAN FRANCISCO—It's another Saturday night at the Mabuhay Gardens for SVT. Outside on Broadway things are fairly sedate—just the usual live sex acts, bellydance clubs, and tourists lining up for the drag show as barkers and street evangelists shriek into the neon night.
But inside the former Filipino supper club it's much more intense. On a low stage, SVT— drummer Paul Zahl, guitarist Brian Marnell and bassist Jack Casady—are invoking wild demons of music that dance in flames about them. In the audience before them—madness. The crowd is jumping, bumping, struggling with itself —teetering on a fine dangerous line between rollicking fun and real ^trouble. But the boiling frenzy inches from their faces only intensifies the band's performance. Hanging over their heads is a wave of sound which, jrather than crashing down upon them,'remains somehow under control.
\ Marnell is staggering, almost stumbling across the stage; pushed and kicked by the ferocity of his own music—singing with damp strands of hair hanging low over eyes now heavily lidded," now opened wide in passion.