Not long after a 2015 catastrophic fire at 22nd and Mission streets in San Francisco that killed one resident, displaced elders and families and shuttered businesses there for good, Tom Heyman wrote “The Mission Is on Fire.”
“The first place I ever played the song was at the Make Out Room, across the street from where it burned,” says Heyman, a local, longtime regular at the neighborhood bar and performance space.
A song that remembers the people and a corner of a neighborhood that has suffered disproportionately under the weight of over-gentrification, and has also survived it, “The Mission Is on Fire” is the central piece on Heyman’s most recent studio album, “24th Street Blues,” released in October 2023.
A collection of story songs rooted in the Mission, its tracks (including “Desperate,” “Barbara Jean” and “White Econoline”) are traditional, Americana style and speak to urgent times of economic disparity here and other hard-hit areas nationwide.
“Every single song on the album was played at the Make Out Room first,” says Heyman of the place where he hosts the monthly Sad Bastard Club, a free showcase for songwriters to trade songs and test drive new material, including his own.
“It felt like once the record was ready to come out, San Francisco was in the news so often as this sort of stand-in for everything that’s wrong in the world,” he says. “Everybody’s perception of it, even my own, is skewed and flawed. It’s not a liberal place—it hasn’t ever really been. It’s a boomtown. It’s dirty and lawless and it’s wide open, everything’s for sale. It’s the great thing about it and the awful thing about it.”
Heyman arrived in San Francisco in 1998, after leaving Philadelphia where he had written songs and played guitar and toured five albums with the rock ’n’ roll band, Go To Blazes.
“I was a songwriter but not a singer,” he said of the time he embarked on his cross-country journey with a plan. “I was plotting how I was going to do this as I was driving across the country with all of my belongings in an Econoline van, 800 vinyl LPs, some guitars and a bicycle.” He was also following his heart toward Deirdre White, a San Francisco painter.
He found community among the artists and musicians who congregated in the Mission and the bars of 22nd Street, the Latin American Club, the Make Out Room and the nearby Tip Top Inn. He toured as a guitarist with Chuck Prophet, Alejandro Escovedo and John Doe, and between gigs returned home to work on his solo act, developing the songs that would over time comprise five solo albums, including “24th Street Blues.”
“I knew I had this group of songs sort of shaping up to be about something,” he says.
The phrase “24th Street blues” had been kicking around in his mind since he used it in “Number 9,” a song about the 9 San Bruno bus route from his album “That Cool Blue Feeling.”
“In these shoes/in these shoes,/I’ve got the 24th Street blues,” he says. “I thought, ‘24th Street Blues’—that’s the title of the record. I guess I have to write the song now. I had to work on it quite a bit. It went through all sorts of musical permutations. It’s not alchemy, it’s sweat.”
Recording the album in Portland with Mike Coykendall producing and Rusty Miller on various instruments, Heyman did most of his writing at home, after work, late at night, tapping into the energy and stories of the city he’s come to know in 25 years.
“I don’t do abstract or impressionistic. There’s not a lot of magic realism in my songs, no truth in my songs, I’m a completely unreliable narrator,” he says, citing Warren Zevon, Gordon Lightfoot and Steve Young as personal favorites. “I gravitate to songs that tell a story…with a beginning, a middle and an end.”
The idea to accompany “24th Street Blues” with a companion songbook was in part practical, its potential sales a way to supplement the cost of touring, and, in other part, a dream. He was inspired by artifacts he remembers as an aspiring musician, songbooks once sold in record stores side by side with albums whose elaborate artwork complemented existing album art.
“I wanted Deirdre to do the artwork,” he said. “Though whether Deirdre wanted to do the artwork was another discussion. She’s not an illustrator, specifically she’s a fine art oil painter.”
“Oh, I definitely didn’t want to do it at first,” says White, who was busy in the early days of the pandemic adapting to remote teaching college and university-level studio art, and to keeping her own art practice alive.
“Eventually I got into a groove of working on the illustrations, little by little at first, and then ideas started to come. He was so determined in his conviction to make the book that I eventually got on board.”
Much like her paintings, White’s illustrations capture the bright sadness of a city and of a world struggling through dark times. She singles out the illustration for “Desperate” as a “successful pairing…in terms of it just jiving with the mood of the song for me. I feel like the drawing I did captures that sense of lonely, hungriness that the song evokes…”
Navigating the vagaries of city life, aging parents and their respective professions, the couple will celebrate 20 years of marriage later this year and even longer living together creatively.
“This is a hard place to do your thing,” says Heyman. “But if you can get people to listen, audiences are great. There are people here who still go out and people still love music here. The people who are still here are true believers. For better and worse, it’s where I live.”
Tom Heyman appears with Jill Rogers, Laura Benitez and Adam Diener at 7 p.m. Jan. 21 at Little Hill Lounge, 10753 San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito; visit littlehillelcerrito.com.
Sad Bastard Club is at 7:30 p.m. every fourth Tuesday at the Make Out Room, 3225 22nd St., San Francisco. Bob Hillman and Roger Kunkel appear on Jan. 23. For information, visit makeoutroom.com.