Punk fans watch The Dinettes at the Deaf Club on Valencia Street, SF, as documented by Vici MacDonald in 1979.
The Deaf Club was actually the San Francisco deaf people’s club that had turned into a punk venue during 1978-79 with the deaf staying in as audience, sensing the strong vibrations of the music and the pogoing and finally enjoying loud music the only way they could, while the whole place bounced up and down (you can read the whole story here).
“When the Dinettes played at the Western Front in San Francisco in the fall of 1979, we didn’t get a gig at Mabuhay Gardens like the Dead Kennedys or Black Flag or the Pens. We were booked at the Deaf Club which, as a young San Diego bumpkin, I hadn’t realized was more than just a cool name for a venue with really loud music, that since the Depression it was a social club for the deaf.
As we waited to play, people were making a big deal out of blowing up dime store balloons. I was just hoping we weren’t going to have to duck balloons in addition to the customary bottles, but all was clear when from the stage I saw people who’d earlier been signing that were now holding the fully blown balloons between their fingertips and against their chests. The nerd in me was jumping up and down because I knew what they were doing: they were using the balloons as mini-resonance chambers to experience the music. Double-bumpkined!
I later learned it’d been Alexander Graham Bell who’d figured out the whole bubble-vibrational-sympathetic-frequency angle. Bell gave balloons to his deaf students in 19th century Boston as a sort of early warning system for detecting the approach of horse drawn carriages from behind. Wow! And so the telephone was born.”
Doriot Negrette (later known as Doriot Lair)
(via)
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