We haven't been in San Francisco in quite a long time, even though we used to live here for ages.

What's new?

1.] A bakery/fish & chips.
2.] A small hut, attached to a liquor store, with a sign that reads "AA Driving School".
3.] The Happy Mondays.

We're at The Regency, which we've never been to before, but it's nice inside. Lots of chandeliers and gold trims. It's a hundred years old. We think shows are somewhat new here. Tonight are The Psychedelic Furs, except let's face it, even though they stand tall with songs like "Love My Way" and Richard Butler, the lead singer, looks like he was having an honestly great time with that characteristic elder-statesmen John Lydon-crossed-with-David-Bowie air and a voice that's always sounded both sad and sarcastic, the band is on the wrong side of the bill.

It's about the Happy Mondays. We're here for the first real U.S. tour in nearly twenty years from the most important Madchester acid-house hedonists of all-time. This is history.

The situation of frontman Shaun Ryder promised a wreck of a show. A lifestyle of rampant alcohol and narcotics, mostly ecstasy and heroin, has left the man shattered and scared. Or, in his own words, just "a scrambled head." Expectations? Low.

It's worse than we feared.

Brother Paul Ryder isn't here. Neither is Bez.

Let's repeat that.

Neither. Is. Bez.

Whoever is on the mixing desk must be goddamn mad about it, too. Tonight's Happy Mondays, no fault of their own, have some of the worst live sound we've ever heard in our lives. Cripes. Despite the handicaps, the band try to lurch out of it, starting with classics like "Kinky Afro," 2007's "Jellybean," and a haggard "Loose Fit," hoping for a semblance of a show but coming up with swamp gas. Ryder is shy, nervous, and barely moving. Worse, he keeps putting his finger in his ear to make sure he's in tune.

Traitor.

Somewhere, though, around a surprise addition of "Reverend Black Grape" by Ryder's spectacular off-shoot Black Grape, the mood spins up. Maybe it's the lyrics, hearing them live for the very first time.

There's nothing more sinister,
As ministers in dresses
Gather round some nice black people,
While I deliver this message
Kill the messsssssage!

You do nothing but socialise,
And become a menace
Put on your Reeboks, man,
And go play funky tennisssssss!

No Bez? Really?

Wait! Someone gets around to the boards. The new black female backing vocalist — who appears to have replaced the iconic Rowetta — is stealing the show. And the rest of the band locks on tight, improving with every song, including a new drummer who learned all the songs in six days, until everything peaks with the remix version of "Hallelujah," real mayhem and noise, until, dear lord, that sound. That piano riff.

That "Step On".

One of the most brilliant songs of the 20th century, it's insane tonight, in front of us, all around us, giving you a lump-in-your-throat glimpse, if you squint real hard, of a point in time when a whole generation could be defined by a cross-section of dance and guitar music, both black and white influences, only attitude and a couple of notes, that same piano looping over and over and over.

We don't know how they did it, but they did it.

History saved!

Bez, still at large.

Photo by alternapop.