Storied: San Francisco

Listen in as I talk with Roberto Hernandez, founder of the SF Lowrider Council. The council is celebrating its 45th anniversary this year. And their Lowrider Parade and car-hopping contest will take place in the Mission this Saturday, Sept. 19.

We recorded this podcast at Roberto's home in the Mission in August 2026.

Photography by Tyrone Malow Diaz

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1, with Dave's time in Europe to get away from being drafted to fight in Vietnam. By that time, with a couple years at City College taking photo classes under his belt, Dave had built a portfolio. He took all his gear with him because he didn't know whether he was ever coming back. His French cousin had a friend whose mom worked at the US Embassy in Paris. Dave got about a dozen photos into a group show at the American Culture Center there, his first public showing. Through another connection, he was able to print photos for the show at the Sorbonne. The National Library of Paris ended up acquiring all of Dave's photos from that show, and they're still there today.

Lodgings with his French family were barely adequate, and definitely crowded. He had a friend, also a draft dodger, living in Scotland. And so Dave decided to move to the UK. He and his cousin had bought a car together, and he ended up taking that car to Leeds in northern England. Locals there took Dave in, and so he stayed there, rather than Scotland, for another half-year.

We go on a sidebar thanks to my out-of-left-field question about Dave smoking cigarettes when he lived in Europe. We also talk about partying as a young person over there.

At the end of 1971, Dave returned to The Bay. It was safe by then, he says, because there were so many other draft dodgers. He shares a tidbit about how, before he left, if you had gone to the intersection of 19th Avenue and Lincoln, you would see at least half a dozen young men holding hitchhiking signs that said, "Canada." A few years down the road after Dave's return, Jimmy Carter granted amnesty to all the draft dodgers.

At our live event, he next showed a photo from Mission and 18th Street that shows, among other things, Lakeside Liquors, Dave's family's business back then. His dad and a partner owned and ran the place, and Dave worked there. His dad also owned a laundromat on the block. His dad claimed that his was the first full-service, coin-op laundromat in The City. It was 1957, and we'll just go ahead and take his dad's word for it.

As a young man, Dave learned to fix those washing machines and dryers, which he says "were always breaking down." And that's how he got his first taste of appliance repair, a career he spent 25 years in. When his dad retired in the Eighties, Dave opened his own joint—Little Hollywood Launderette on Market near Laguna. But by the time he opened Little Hollywood, unattended laundromats were fading in popularity, for various reasons. So Dave included attendants and wash-and-fold service at his place, as well as a dry cleaner next door. He ran Little Hollywood from 1989 until 2007.

Dave shares the story of a music video that was shot mostly inside Little Hollywood. A then somewhat up-and-coming artist called Del the Funky Homosapien shot the video for his song "Made in America," directed by Michael Lucero, in a funky laundry spot on Market. Read all about that in this story from Hieroglyphics. Dave's behind-the-scenes story of that video shoot is fun.

Back in his repairman days, Dave would travel from the Mission to the Western Addition regularly, as well as trips out to the Sunset and Richmond districts. He got to know his city even better. He knew all the laundromats, including the spot that would eventually be his own.

In 2007, Dave decided to retire. That gave him more time with his cameras. Three years later, his parents really started aging and needed more and more care. To help out, Dave took over running his dad's businesses when he was no longer able to. He did continue taking photos during this time, though. In fact, he'd been taking photos since his return from Europe back in the early Seventies.

Photographers from Dave's era didn't commonly show their work. They had boxes full of negatives instead. Eventually, though, someone turned Dave on to a photo-sharing site, and he acquired a scanner and went to work. He enjoyed it, and leveled up on the scanner. He set out to scan all of his negatives. He spent the next roughly 10 years scanning (in fact, he adds, he's still scanning to this day).

Through those early photo-sharing websites, Dave started to make connections in the SF photo community. Eventually, Troy Holden reached out and asked Dave to be in a photo show at Cha Cha Cha, back when the Mission Street location was still open. A year later, he met Adrian Martinez at Michael Jang's open studio in the Richmond District. Adrian, Troy, and Dave formed the San Francisco Photography Club. He figured he could serve as a mentor to the many younger members of the group. But it turned out the other way around.

Dave points to the young photographers in the club that came from punk rock and skateboarding backgrounds (communities that are near and dear to my heart, as I spent countless years of my childhood and early adulthood in both). Dave considered their art to be edgy and good. It reminded him of work by Ken Hayman, who in the Eighties published Hip Shot. Those young photographers' style wore off on Dave, and point-and-shoot street photography is what he mostly does today.

At this point in the conversation, Dave points to the inspiration of Hamburger Eyes, a photo magazine founded by Ray Potes in San Francisco in 2001. There's an exhibit up at the SF Public Library's Main Branch through Sept. 24 celebrating a quarter-century of this amazing publication's work. Dave has one photo in that exhibition.

Dave talks about another of the photos he shared that evening, which is also available in the gallery on this page. It's a photo he took of the moving of a Victorian house out of the Western Addition during the so-called redevelopment (read: gentrification) of that neighborhood. The next photo he showed was from Candlestick Park in 1989. Next is an example of Dave's street photography—a photo from a Nineties Pride Parade, taken near City Hall.

I ask Dave whether he ever shoots color photos, because everything of his I see is black-and-white. He says that in the early days of digital cameras, he shot some color. He ended up shooting about 10 years of digital color, and he liked it. But the lure of film and black and white was too strong. Dave sold all his digital cameras. He says that, nowadays, smartphones do just as well as or better than cameras did back then. Today, he uses vintage cameras, vintages lenses, and black-and-white film, a combination that gives you a look and feel that you just cannot recreate with a digital camera.

The last photo Dave shared that night at Warfield Commons is the most recent one. It's of folks and their cars at Ocean Beach, near to where Dave lives today. He says that his love of cars and car culture dates back to the Sixties. Back then, there were no stoplights on the Great Highway. It was like a drag strip (something you'll also hear about in our bonus episode on SF lowrider culture tomorrow). He shares fun stories of taking his mom's car, picking up friends, and joining the racers out near the ocean. They'd stay until cops chased them away, at which point they would head to Daly City and go to Pip's, a drive-in that existed back in the day.

Please follow Dave on Instagram @daveglass_foto. Special thanks to Mel Baker and the team at SF Public Press for hosting and producing the live event where we recorded this episode. Look for Dave's exhibit at the San Francisco Historical Society next summer. It should stay up through the rest of 2027.

Photography by Nate Oliveira/Shoot First SF

Dave Glass's Polish parents met at a displaced persons camp in Europe after World War II.

In this Season 9 inaugural episode, meet and get to know Dave. A born-and-raised San Francisco, Dave joined me back in August in the SF Public Press office/studio at Warfield Commons to record the first-ever Storied: San Francisco live episode. Our talk that night comprises this episode.

Dave's mom and dad got married at that camp in Germany and had their first kid, Dave's sister, there. The young couple wanted to come to the US, but had to wait another five years in Europe for that to materialize.

Finally, they made it, via the port of New Orleans. Their American sponsor lived in Stockton, which they made their way to by trains and buses. Dave's dad later told him that when they arrived in California, Stockton looked to him like all cowboys and Mexicans.

The family's sponsor owned a ranch, and the arrangement was that Dave's mom and dad would work there. One day, his dad's boss sent him to San Francisco, an hour or so away, for supplies. One taste of The City, and his dad knew he had to move his family here.

It was early 1951 and Dave's mom was already pregnant with him. The family made the move to the big city regardless. They settled in the Western Addition on the corner of Webster and Fulton. This was before redevelopment, mind you. In addition to its sizable Black population, there were also a significant number of European refugees in the neighborhood, too. Dave fondly remembers being a little boy and going to the Ukrainian bakery at the corner of Webster and McAllister.

Other memories from Dave's early days include vague visions of the Acme beer brewery across from his house. Dave lets us know that today, there are remnants of that building still standing.

Around the time Dave started school, his family moved to the Sunset District. This is when his memories really get going. He went to Parkside Elementary, which is today known as Dianne Feinstein.

Dave rewinds a little to share the story of when Eisenhower visited SF as president. Dave's mom got him, his sister, and herself dressed up. They walked down to Van Ness, where the presidential motorcade was set to pass by. He recalls the president sitting, not in the car's seat, but above it, in open air, riding down the avenue waving at folks. So much about this would never happen today.

When he was 10, Dave got his first camera. At our live event, he shared a photo he took with that camera at his sister's birthday party, seen in a gallery on this page. It's one of the oldest photos he has that he took himself.

At that time, Dave was just a "kid with a camera," not serious about the art whatsoever. But his dad had a Leica camera and did take photography more seriously, at least when it came to family photos. He had bartered for the camera when he lived in the displaced persons camp in Europe, and had photos from that time. Dave still has some of those pictures.

We go on a bit of a sidebar here, thanks to my question about how folks got their camera film developed back in the day. We also chat about the nature of film vs. digital.

When he was in high school, Dave joined the photo club and developed in a darkroom for his first time. He says it was around this time that he started to have an affection for photography.

We have to mention that he went to Lowell, which came after time at Herbert Hoover Junior High School. Dave points out that, even back then, "smart" kids went to Lowell, including his sister. Dave says he more or less got in on legacy, not good grades. He brought that with him through high school, and chose to go to City College when he wasn't able to get into four-year schools.

In 1969, City College's photography program was a serious one. Dave considers it blue-collar, in fact, aimed at turning students into professional photographers. Dave ended up taking photos for the school paper, something he loved doing.

I ask Dave about the late-Sixties in SF, and he obliges. He was 16 when the Summer of Love happened, and living just a few neighborhoods away from the Haight/Ashbury, his eyes were opened. He and his friends would visit the Haight every couple of days. He says it got so crowded with tourist buses and people that The City made Haight a one-way street. Still, they saw bands like Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Country Joe and the Fish at small venues or outdoors in the park.

We go on a sidebar here to talk about The Fillmore back in the day.

Dave's first job, which he had while still in high school, was selling shoes at Kinny Shoes (IYKYK) at Serramonte, which had just opened. Dave shares a family photo and talks a little about it, also available here in the gallery.

Eventually, relatives moved to San Francisco and lived nearby Dave's family, so he grew up with cousins and aunts and uncles. Dave confirms that it was the case that he and his friends, like many folks I talk with who grew up back then, pretty much did whatever they wanted after school, with the understanding that you go home when it gets dark out. His stories include building skateboards out of wooden 2×4s and roller skates.

Then we talk about a significant turn in Dave's life. It was the late-Sixties and the war in Vietnam was heating up. The draft was in effect, and the number of units Dave was taking at City College had fallen below the threshold for deferment. That year, 1969, had seen more US casualties than any year prior. His parents, having escaped war-torn Europe earlier in their lives, did not want their son serving in the military in any capacity. Some of his dad's relatives had settled in Paris after WWII. They helped arrange for Dave to live there for about six months starting in the fall of 1970.

Check back tomorrow for Part 2 and the rest of Dave Glass's life story.

Follow Dave on Instagram @daveglass_foto.

We recorded this podcast in the SF Public Press studio at Warfield Commons in August 2026.

Photography by Nate Oliveira

Mani Niall is a chef, baker, author of Sweet! and other cookbooks, a food business advisor—and he was Michael Jackson's first private chef!

Mani's very SF love story takes place at Uncle John's Tree near Fell and Stanyan in 2002.

He writes on Substack at mjchefmani.substack.com—here's the oatmeal sour cherry chocolate chip cookie recipe he mentions in his episode.

Listen in as Jeff talks about the coming Season 9: This Is the Place. Then Jeff is joined by Intersections SF host Bowen Dwelle to talk Bowen's new show. Intersections will be part of the Storied universe beginning Sept. 9.

In Part 2, Aft joins us to chat about the band—Top Chefs.

We start with the story of how TJ met Aft. A mutual friend of his and Loveberry's, Lucas Hanson, put on a show at DNA Lounge called "Liam Berry and Friends." TJ was just getting out of high school at the time. They asked him to join them on stage, something he'd never really done before. TJ had been playing smaller sets in restaurants, but joining a band at a bona fide venue was new for him.

Loveberry (Liam) had met Aft at something called a "sound gig" for a set they would play as part of the effort to keep People's Park in Berkeley from being closed. They called Loveberry because he had a PA and they needed someone to run sound. Loveberry didn't really know what that meant at the time, and he might've been mistaken for a guy named Jeff whom they'd been expecting. Nevertheless, Aft was one of the few people who was nice to Loveberry that day in Berkeley. The band ended up needing a guitar player, and so a mutual friend told Aft that he should have this guy, Loveberry, play guitar with him. They agreed and ending up borrowing a guitar from a member of the crowd. Aft later invited Loveberry to a rehearsal back in SF.

Afterthough, aka Aft, joins the conversation at this point. He recounts his version of that day in Berkeley. It was still early pandemic enough that folks were wearing masks. He liked Loveberry's playing that day enough to ask him over. They played a couple of shows as "Aft and His Band" or "Aft … backed up by (various musicians.)" Aft was also asked to play with "Liam Berry and Friends." At that DNA Lounge show, Aft met TJ and the trombone player Will, who's also in Top Chefs now.

Aft had played in bands for years, including with a set of twins who played piano and bass. But those guys moved to New York around the time he connected with Loveberry. And soon after that, TJ and other members of today's Top Chefs. There's some collective fuzziness around when this all went down, but that doesn't matter. It was the beginning of coming out of a worldwide pandemic when time began to get totally skewed for everyone. But also, they were just busy playing music and making friends.

I ask the three of them who came up with the idea to play shows on the stoop of Aft's childhood home on Scott Street. Loveberry and TJ credit Aft with the idea. Liam talks about arrangements that Aft was putting together with complex horn sections. And in those sessions, one of the musicians started a habit of saying, "Yes, chef" to Aft when he was asked to do something. That came from watching cooking competition shows. The dude was messing with Aft, so at the end of a show one night, when Aft was introducing band members, he called this guy "the top chef" to get him back. The name stuck for the entire band after that.

There's a story about TJ's Filipina grandma, who lives near DNA Lounge, making Filipino BBQ on a stick and madeleine cookies for the band. TJ wasn't sure what to do with the food, so he set it out in the crowd while they played a song called, "Everybody Eats." It was a whole thing, and something Aft says he wants to bring back.

I ask the fellas whether anyone has ever compared their Stoop Sessions to NPR's Tiny Desk music series. There's a resounding "yes" from all three. Then Aft shares that Top Chefs actually shot a Tiny Desk audition video on the stoop. It was early 2024, and despite not making it onto the hit public media show, they realized that they had something in shows on the stoop. In 2025, thanks to a fundraiser show, the band went to South by Southwest in Austin. After that, they played in the Haight, Hunters Point, Bernal Heights, downtown.

Then Top Chefs started ramping up the quality of the videos. In late 2025, just before they planned to take a break from the band, Aft called a media day. The video of that performance went viral. Top Chefs' Stoop Sessions had arrived. It must've been around that time that my wife and I discovered them and immediately knew we'd found something special. And it was basically in our backyard.

This coming Sunday, Aug. 2, they'll be at Chapel of the Flowers in Berkeley. If you're in the South Bay next weekend, they're playing San Jose Jazz on Friday, Aug. 7. There's a show in Levi's Plaza in The City on Saturday, Sept. 12. And for more shows and info, and to lose yourself in videos of past Stoop Sessions, follow @stoopsessionslive. The band account is @topchefsband. Their website is topchefsband.com. Sign up for their email list to learn about upcoming Stoop Sessions. That's the only space they share that info with folks.

That's a wrap on Season 8: Every Kinda People. Thank you for listening and supporting our effort to uplift and share the stories of artists, activists, and working people who make San Francisco what it is.

Photography by Marcella Sanchez

There's a band in San Francisco comprising musicians from The City and whom I discovered on social media playing shows on a stoop here in SF. I can't quite be sure when I discovered them, or whether it was me or my wife, but either way, right from the start, we knew we'd stumbled upon something special. Something truly unique. Something joyful, beautiful, free … something for the people. People could gather around with neighbors, some they know, some they might be meeting for the first time.

Community is something of a buzz word lately, especially in light of things like gentrification, neo-tech fascism, and just plain ol' fascism. But for good reason—it's one of the most powerful tools we have not only to resist all the nonsense being forced on us, but also to overcome that crap and move on toward creating a world of inclusion, equity, diversity … and good tunes.

The band's name is Top Chefs. This last episode of Season 8 of Storied: San Francisco is, not by accident, all about them and the magic they create.

We start things off with TJ Milan, lead arranger for Top Chefs and co-editor of what they call "Stoop Sessions." TJ was born and raised in San Francisco. His dad came out here from Connecticut, and his mom is from The Philippines. His parents lived in South of Market, and TJ lives in that neighborhood today.

TJ's mom came to The City with her parents when she was young. She later joined the Army, serving with a support group for the Green Berets. His dad had moved to New York first for work. Then he got offered a job in San Francisco in the late Eighties and took it. In the mid-Nineties, the two met at a law firm where they both worked. In 2002, they had TJ, the youngest of their three kids—he has an older sister and an older brother.

His dad is an amateur saxophone player. More on that in a bit. The family lore goes that his sax stylings played a part in his parents' union, because duh.

I give TJ the opportunity to rattle off his SF schools, something he's proud to do—Clarendon Elementary, Hoover Middle School, and School of the Arts (SOTA). He describes his time at SOTA as "very chaotic." There was beef between the SOTA kids and the Academy kids in his days. Academy is sort of a school-within-a-school for SOTA, a majority/minority arrangement. Despite that situation, though, TJ met the person who's still his significant other to this day.

The only time TJ left San Francisco for any significant time was to go to college at The New School in New York City, where he studied jazz. But he credits most of his education with Community Music Center in The Mission.

The entire time TJ spent in NYC, he felt in his heart that he would return to his hometown. He played out a lot while he lived in New York, but the market for saxophonists was saturated. He came back to SF around September 2024. It started off rough, as he puts it. He started busking to make ends meet.

Then we turn to Liam Berry, aka Loveberry, the head of audio production and guitar player in Top Chefs and co-editor of Stoop Sessions.

His mom came here from San Diego. Her mom came to the US from Ecuador, where she was raised. His mom's dad is from Illinois. Loveberry's grandfather was on a work trip in South America when he met his grandmother. That couple went to Philadelphia before landing in San Diego. Their daughter, Loveberry's mom, moved to The Bay to go to UC Berkeley to study biology.

I take us on a sidebar about how San Diego can be cool to visit for like two days, max. But there's only so much that good Mexican food and nice weather can do for me before I need to get back home.

His dad is from Cupertino. His dad's dad is from Philadelphia and his dad's mom is from Houston. They met when his grandfather worked for NASA and was stationed at the Johnson Space Center in Texas. His grandfather was transferred to the Ames facility on the Peninsula and brought his wife with him.

Loveberry's dad wanted to get out of the area where he grew up, but he didn't want to go too far. So he got into SF State for meteorology. He ended up working in the data science field after discovering that meteorologists don''t make great money.

His parents met at a party through mutual Cupertino friends who'd moved up to Berkeley and Oakland. They were still together until a couple years ago, when Loveberry's dad passed away.

He was almost raised in Oakland. His dad worked a low-paying job at a tech company and his mom, back then at least, worked different admin jobs (today, she's a librarian). They'd lived in the Inner Sunset and put bids in on a couple houses in Oakland, where they could afford to buy in the late Nineties/early 2000s. They also bid on one house here in The City, in The Castro. And that's the one they got.

That's the house Loveberry grew up in, and when his parents first bought it, the house needed a lot of work. There are family stories about moving in and a mysterious tub of some sort of toxic goo.

Schools he went to and music intertwine for Loveberry. He started at Rooftop K–8, where kids worked on a different art project every year. When he was in second grade there, Loveberry started to gravitate toward guitar and started taking lessons. He went to high school at Gateway, which didn't have a music program at the time. So he and some friends started the school's music club.

In the summer between his sophomore and junior years of high school, Loveberry smoked pot for the first time. He also did an internship at NASA over that same summer. Going back and forth between those two wildly different worlds, he preferred the community that came with smoking pot with friends. Music became more and more a thing, but so did partying. Shit got out of control. He got out of high school to get himself into rehab.

After rehab, he wanted to go to music school in Los Angeles, but his parents nixed that idea. Instead, he stayed in The City and worked at a few different local eateries. So he never left.

A guy he met playing open mics in SF offered Loveberry $1,000 a month to open a recording studio and music business. It didn't work out, but it showed him that he could persue music and art as a lifestyle. He worked at some nonprofits and did visual art as well as music. He met Afterthough (Aft) in 2021. Top Chefs formed soon after that.

Check back Thursday for Part 2 and the final podcast of Season 8.

We recorded this podcast on Scott Street near Alamo Square in June 2026.

Photography by Marcella Sanchez

In Part 2, we begin with Todd and me rapping about how much digital technology has changed just in our lifetimes.

Even when he was in school in Colorado, San Francisco had been a goal for Todd, a destination. He got his impression of The City from skateboarding magazines and TV shows. But before moving here, Todd went to Europe, as he puts it, "chasing a girl." He even tried living overseas. When that didn't work out, he moved back to Grand Rapids to save money. In 2001, he made the big move west.

When Todd arrived, he had a job already lined up for him. He just needed to find a place to live. He'd respond to Craigslist ads for apartments, but when he showed up to look at one of them, a roommate situation, it had turned into a party. He got the place, his first San Francisco apartment, at Waller and Masonic. Todd takes a moment to reminisce about living in that area, which he's continued to do in the many years since he moved to San Francisco. His walk down memory lane leads us to the Lower Haight.

Todd met a lot of cool people at that first SF job, a dotcom, naturally. One of those coworkers had a separate office space in the Lower Haight that served as an auxiliary pressing plant for a record-pressing company based in the Czech Republic. That coworker was bailing on their job and handed the space and the gig over to Todd. It put him face-to-face with musicians in need of vinyl to be pressed. He handled album art as well. His worlds of art and music were colliding in meaningful ways. He quit his dotcom job to do this new gig full-time under the name Circuit 73. More on that later.

In addition to the record-pressing gig, Todd was doing flyer art for a friend's monthly zine as well as other various flyer work. He also did album artwork. Two friends who were new at the time were looking for a space to open a music gear store. They ended up in the same space in the Lower Haight where Todd based himself. Todd's graphic design work really started to take off around this time, the early 2000s.

He'd only been in San Francisco a couple of years, but Todd felt like he was where he needed to be. I ask Todd whether, all those years ago, he had a plan for how long he would try his new city out. He says he didn't, but back then, he felt like he wouldn't be here the rest of his life. And yet, more than 20 years later, here we are.

Then we turn to one of Todd's alter egos/pseudonyms/whatever you wanna call its—Ink Letterman. That persona was born when Todd got his first Instagram account, around 2014 or so. He wanted an alias, and landed on that. It took off around 2020, when he started doing mural work in the early days of the pandemic.

Rewinding a bit, Todd started DJing under the name Circuit 73 (another alias) around 2005 or so. He eventually took a lot of time off from music, though. His growing collection of physical media started to make him anxious, so he stopped buying records. He also started a family in this time. Eventually, digital music platforms more or less solidified, so that helped. He also started listening to KUSF/90.3 FM.

Being in an office, sitting in front of a computer, it all led to burnout as well. His son was born in 2015 and he semi-retired from graphic design to focus on being a parent and leaning in more to his art (and away from design). Todd's art is part of a group show curated by Known SF and 415 Zine that's up now through August 24 at Mini Bar.

Eventually, DJing came back into Todd's life. He's quick to give credit to KEXP/92.7 FM for roping him back in. Another source of inspiration is his son, Oscar. He loves music as much as his dad does, and the two listen together quite a lot. Todd points to both the quantity and the quality of new music in the recent past. He's excited about a surge in old music being reissued as well. He's got a monthly gig, last Friday of every month, as DJ Circuit 73 at 540 Bar on Clement. And his radio show, Directions in Stereo, is on KXSF/102.5 FM every Monday from 10 p.m. to midnight.

We end the episode with Todd plugging himself. Follow him on Instagram @inkletterman. Find him on Soundcloud @circuit73.

Photography by Dan Hernandez

Todd Kurnat is everywhere.

In this episode, meet and get to know Todd. These days, he's also known as Ink Letterman for his art and DJ Circuit 73 for his musical stylings. We begin in Michigan.

Both sets of Todd's grandparents grew up in Greenville, Michigan, about an hour outside Grand Rapids. His parents met in high school in that small town. They eventually moved to Grand Rapids, the big city in that part of the world. His dad worked at a transportation company and his mom was a nurse at St. Mary's Hospital. It was the early Seventies—around 1972 or so.

Todd was born in 1973. His mom had done some college, and his dad had joined the US military to teach about weapons-grade rockets. He was never deployed to Vietnam. Todd says that engineering DNA in his dad runs through him, although Todd uses it for less destructive ends.

Sometime after Todd came around, the family moved to Johnston Street, still in the inner-city part of Grand Rapids. The neighborhood had access to downtown. Todd spent a lot of time riding his BMX bike around the area with friends. Eventually, bikes gave way to skateboards, which he took all over his city. But we'll get to that.

His earliest memories on Johnston Street involve playing in the front yard—baseball and football with kids from the hood. In the backyard, they had a basketball hoop. Eventually, Todd was joined by two younger sisters and a younger brother. He remembers spending a lot of time with his sisters before his brother was born when Todd was 13.

Another of Todd 's earliest memories involve listening to music. His dad had an 8-track player that Todd used a lot. Those tapes made him so happy that he'd run around the house doing laps. The radio was also on a lot in Todd's house.

Todd went to Catholic school until his early high school years. One day, his mom showed up at his private school, got him out, and said, "we're leaving." Both his parents worked to support themselves and their (at the time) three kids. But changes had to happen, and so they put their oldest kid in public high school. It proved to be a life-changing move for Todd.

Right away, he made new friends, a few of which have proved to be life-long buddies. The common thread for them was music and movies. Bikes and skateboards, too. Speaking of bikes …

Around age 12, Todd had a newspaper route. Because he already had a bike when the BMX craze really took off, around the mid-Eighties, he followed that. He and his friends eventually started riding their bikes on street ramps. They also built and rode on dirt tracks.

BMX gave way to skateboarding when Todd was 13 or 14. For a minute, he did both, but then someone stole his bike. Like me, skate videos got him hooked—videos from Powell Peralta featuring pro skaters like San Francisco's own Tommy Guerrero. And it wasn't just the skating in the videos that impressed Todd—he also dug the music enough to record it from VHS to cassette tape.

Toward the end of his high school days, Todd taught himself to play guitar. He bought a four-track Tascam recorder and started experimenting with it. He did stuff on his own, but also joined with some friends to form a band called Landis. They played for most of the rest of the Nineties.

Relevant to who Todd would become years later, a lot of the existence of Landis involved him screwing around with different configurations and recording locations. Think: experimental, but not necessarily falling into the so-called experimental genre.

After high school, Todd moved to Denver and kept playing music. He and two roommates called their Colorado group The Suspect. They played a couple shows. Todd and I go on a sidebar on playing live vs. recording vs. writing songs. Live was always my favorite, and Todd agrees.

Moving to Denver was all about escaping Grand Rapids, seeing a little bit of the world, and going to art school. He studied illustration and graphic design. He'd been drawing and doodling about as far back as he could remember. In high school, at the public school his mom put him in, there was a counselor who had steered Todd in the direction of graphic design, and he's grateful for that. Turns out he has spent the better part of the last 30 years doing graphic design.

We end Part 1 with Todd looking back on how much technology has advanced since he got started in the digital art world.

Check back this Thursday to hear all about Todd's move to San Francisco and what he's been up to since he got here. It's a lot, and it'll all be in Part 2 of this episode.

We recorded this podcast in Golden Gate Park in June 2026.

Photography by Dan Hernandez

Listen in as I chat with German Gonzalez, musical conductor and principal director of the Golden Gate Park Band, now in its 144th year.

We recorded this podcast in Golden Gate Park in June 2026.