We recorded
this episode at Antia's art studio on Divisadero on a rainy day in
January 2024.
Feb 20, 2024
We begin Part 2 where we left
off in Part 1. Anita had been away from their Arkansas college town
and missed Lester. Upon her return, she went to see him and they
soon shared their first kiss.
Soon after that day, Anita had
a pregnancy scare, and so Lester asked her, "Would you marry me if you
are?" She said yes, but ended up not being pregnant. It didn't
matter. They got married anyway. It was 1990 and they were
both 22.
Lester had a semester to go in
college, which meant that the young couple couldn't live together
or he'd get kicked out of the Christian school.
He had started his first
serious band—Cosmic Giggle Factory. Anita worked at Captain D's, a
regional seafood chain fast-food joint, and then at a hotel. They
moved to Little Rock a few years later. Eventually, she landed a
job at Spectrum Weekly, an alternative paper in the Arkansas
capital. Looking back, they say that they really loved their
community there.
After four years in Little
Rock, and after Bill Clinton got elected, they decided to leave before they would begin to
hate it. Spectrum
Weekly closed and Lester's band broke up. They
took these as signs to
leave.
Neither of them had ever been
to San Francisco, but knew that they wanted to be in a city and many
people they knew and trusted had
good things to say about SF. Anita was working with an ESPN producer and
through them met a person who
lived here and offered them a place to live. So they
packed up their Geo Prism, sold a
lot of stuff, and maybe had $500 between them. It was
November 1994.
Upon arriving in the Bay,
Lester worked at Tower Records and Anita found work at a temp agency. She
had "toyed" with art while
living in Little Rock and picked that up again in SF. But she says
she didn't take it too
seriously until around 2015. She worked several
academic and corporate jobs
that she didn't like until around that time, when
Annie at Mini Bar gave her a show
there. She ended up being in a show at Mini Bar every year for
the next four years.
One day in 2018 or so, Anita
was at Fly Bar on Divisadero and learned that the owner needed
someone to do art shows there. "I wanna do that!" she told them. Her first show
at Fly was based on travel
photography. Anita ended up curating shows at Fly until the pandemic, and had become
involved in the
Divisadero Art Walk. When COVID hit, the other Fly curator left town and
Anita took over. She also did
shows at Alamo Square Cafe, which stayed open during the
pandemic. As other places
started to open, she expanded her venues.
When Annie left Mini Bar and
Erin Kehoe took over, Anita
reached out and they decided to alternate curating art shows at the
bar (where we worked with Erin to do Hungry Ghosts in summer 2023).
Anita has since added even
more venues, including Bean Bag Cafe, and says she
has moved around $50K of art
in five years.
This leads us to Anita's newest
thing: KnownSF, which will officially launch later this
year. For her shows, she likes
to have one artist whose first show it is and one artist
50 or older. She says she
wants to stick with the venues she's
already showing at. Stay tuned and follow KnownSF on Instagram.
Then we get to Lester's band,
The Pine Box Boys, who recently celebrated 20 years
of existence.
When he first moved to The
City, Lester had a hard time
getting music going. He was
dealing with confidence issues, which didn't make anything
easier.
He enrolled at SF State,
got a degree, went into a
teaching credential program, and started meeting people.
Through some of these new
teacher-to-be friends, he started playing with a band that was
already established. He says he was stoked to play a show in San Francisco, but
that band fizzled out and broke up.
But Lester and another member
kept playing together. It was a noisy, abstract band called Zag Men. As Lester tells us, the saying
went, "If the Zagmen are
playing, nobody's getting laid." He started creating soundtracks to silent films at ATA on
Valencia. He was teaching and
doing music on the side.
Pine Box Boys started in the
same studio space at Fulton and McAllister that we recorded this
podcast in. Lester showed his
buddies some blue grass stuff he'd picked up when he was younger.
And we learn that his mom
used to sing him to sleep with old British murder ballads when he
was a kid. So, Lester taught
these friends some of those darker songs.
At first the band was a side
project to his side project at ATA. But Lester points to the 2000
movie O Brother, Where
Art Thou? which sparked a general societal interest in
Americana and genres like blue grass. People began to want to hear Pine Box Boys more
than Zag Men, so Lester went with it.
They played Cafe du Nord a lot
and eventually started touring, both the US and Europe.
Lester
quit his teaching job and from 2006-2009, the band kept touring.
They started to put out records
(look for a new one, their sixth, soon). Eventually,
he started teaching again, and
when
he got into school admin work, it ate into his music, but not so
much that he had to quit.
During the pandemic, they did
some streaming shows and online festivals. Eventually, when it was safe, they played a
handful of parklet shows. He and Anita were regulars at
Madrone already. Anita had an idea and asked Spike, who owns
Madrone—what if Lester did a residency at the art bar? And
so, the first Sunday of the
month became "Apocalypse
Sunday." November 2023 marked the two-year anniversary for the
monthly show. Lester tries to
always bring different genre bands in to play with his own. Mark
your calendars! We've been to a few and they're a lot of
fun!
We end with Anita and Lester
responding to this season's theme on the podcast: "We're All in
It." Anita points to
wanting to see neighborhoods, which are thriving, mingle more and
get to know each other. Lester ends with a rather choice quote
about casseroles.
Photography by Jeff
Hunt