March 26, 2003

By Josh Wilson

IT'S A BIRD , it's a band, it's a power trio ... and it's way more than even that. Condor, a screwy, heavy three-piece from the Mission District, is a point of convergence of musical epochs both regional and global.

A distinctly San Francisco band in a city full of unique musicians, Condor at first listen seems like a majestic, high-flying relic from an era we all thought was long gone. Wrong. This bird, in fact, has barely fledged, and it's a big world out there with plenty of sky and lots to eat.

Condor, carrion eater that it is, finds sustenance from the ripe cadavers of some of this world's greatest musical moments – from krautrock to Bay Area experi-metal, from space prog to synth-driven proto-electro, and any other irksome coinage you can conjure. The resulting sound is menacing but groovy, grinding but seductive, staccato and percussive, yet bound together by soaring keyboards and head-nodding, eyeball-rolling drone.

It's arresting stuff that seizes hold of the listener and provokes all sorts of difficult questions: Who the hell are these people? Why are they doing this weird shit? Exactly what are they trying to prove? Put those pieces together, and Condor starts to make a lot of sense.

Up with carrion

Keyboardist Kurt Keppeler had his first taste of musical glory as a high school kid in a song-and-dance cover band called Rare Moment, "an evil renegade 'Up with People' spin-off group," as he describes it. "They brainwashed me, and I learned to perform a killer Bee Gees medley. My dancing partner wore mint green chiffon."

Keppeler played around San Francisco in the chunky-guitars-with-harmony outfit Hank Stram, got an MFA in film from San Francisco State University, and appeared in Danny Plotnick's I'm Not Fascinating, an independent movie about notorious local band the Icky Boyfriends.

Also in that film was Wendy Farina, who would become his housemate and later still the drummer in Condor. Farina initially played bass in a band called Moist, and then in the noisy four-piece Tallow, which broke up in '92 and evolved into the truly fabulous and tragically dysfunctional Mission superstars Towel.

For an experimental duo, Towel was heavier than most of your tattooed satanic rockers of this or any other era. The dynamic, however, between Farina and her bandmate, John Michaels, was notoriously erratic, and the band splintered – though not without permanently changing Farina's musical methodology.

At first she and Michaels "switched off between drums and guitar," she says. "Eventually I muscled my way into being the drummer and have been pretty exclusively playing drums since then."

And so the 1990s moved forward, and hundreds of bands flourished and died off in San Francisco and, in particular, the Mission. So much of what is happening today in the Bay Area's underground heavy-hardcore-arty-experimental music scene exists thanks to the foundation laid by the diverse Mission community in the '90s. There were underground venues like Starcleaners, 17th and Capp, and Kommotion International; bars like the Chameleon, the Tip-Top, and, yes, the Kilowatt; bands like Fuckface, Hickey, Tina Age 13, the Barfeeders, Rube Waddell, Lost Goat, and the Faggz. That list of names barely does justice to it all, barely considers all of the influences and creative cross-pollination from around the Bay Area and beyond.

The art and music venue and rehearsal space shutdowns of the dot-com era took their toll, communities fragmented, people moved to Portland or, gulp, the East Bay, of all places. But the music of the Mission in the '90s is the next evolutionary step between the metal funk of the 1980s and the polymorphous perverse musical Bay Area mash-up of electronic, indie, rawk, metal, hardcore, pop, and what have you of today.

Incestuous union

Condor is one of the exemplars of that historical progression. Listen up now: It was in the depths of the '90s, and there was a fan of Towel and Hank Stram, who, in typically incestuous musician fashion, was also dating one of Farina and Keppeler's housemates. His name was – and still is – Joshua Richardson, a librarian, a lover of the Dewey decimal system, and an enthusiastic celebrant at house parties hosted at what would ultimately become the Condor's nest.

"It was a coming together of friends," Richardson says. "We'd be up late drinking and cavorting, dancing to Quiet Riot and Soft Cell's 'Sex Dwarf.' Kurt and Wendy figured they might as well put me in the band since I was over at their house so late and so often."

Richardson's musical credentials were strikingly out of step with the grim 'n' grimy Mission thang. He was a Morrissey impersonator in the now-famous Smiths cover band the Nguyens.

"Everyone has a gift," he says, "and for some reason mine is the ability to sing like Steven Morrissey. The intention behind the band, though, was not so much to cover the Smiths as it was to poke fun at the S.F. [cover band] scene.... As it turned out, audiences ate it up!... Whenever we played, people would go wild with dancing, shaking, moving. We'd play three-hour sets, and folks would be on the tables and screaming."

Regardless of his part in the social evolution of San Francisco music fans, Richardson didn't think he had much of a musical career ahead of him. He seemed destined to be "forever Morrissey lite," as he terms it. But fate had bigger plans for the lad.

It was a morning after in 1999 that Condor first began pecking at the inside of the egg. One day, recovering from a dance-party hangover, Keppeler says, he and Farina "decided to go into the crappy rehearsal space she had and jammed with her cute little broken-down drum set and this equally decrepit '80s Roland synth I had just salvaged from a closet at a former employer."

Enter Richardson, who inadvertently auditioned for the band by "playing some terrible medley of songs on guitar," Farina says. "He is somewhat of a human jukebox, as is Kurt thanks to Rare Moment. Up to that point I didn't even know he could play guitar, so Kurt and I brainwashed him, and here he is, years later, the perfect bass player."

"Josh was the dream addition," Keppeler says. "I had seen him in the Nguyens and remembered at the time thinking this guy had perverted star power.... It was like the final turn of the Rubik's Cube."

Fly girl – and guys

So Condor took wing, invoking Hawkwind with their name and space rock throb (though no one in the band claims to have ever heard any Hawkwind), recalling Rush with the tenor squawks and power-prog assault, and channeling Mark E. Smith via Keppeler's freaky Euro-deadpan vocals. Combine that with the "slabs of sound" laid down by Keppeler's keyboard stacks and Richardson's fuzzed-out bass leads, and the ferocious propulsive strength of Farina's heavyweight drumming (her role model is John Bonham, speaking of prehistoric creatures), and you have yourself a sublime band – in the great tradition of heavy, weird, boundary-erasing Mission bands, coming straight out of that long-lost era of the early/mid '90s, when that ethnically diverse, working-class neighborhood was rapidly progressing from a refuge for starving artists to the favorite fiefdom of yuppies.

In fact, the Mission is now all of those things, full of day laborers and young professionals and far-out creative personalities of every description. Despite the difficulties and changes of the dot-com era, the area – and the Bay Area – is erupting with music and art like never before.

"The Mission is exploding, no question," Keppeler says. "San Francisco has always been the locus of the weird, but now it seems to be developing an infrastructure. The infrastructure of the weird."