I’ve mostly put the whole project of writing about The Loft in the rear view mirror at this point but I had a chunk of juicy information from my last long conversation with my primary source that is simply too good not to share. I’ve reached a point where writing new material has essentially become a form of procrastination for me so I can avoid editing my older stuff, pitching it to various publishers and banging my head against what I’ve been calling the “memoir problem”
In simplest terms that is the issue where what I’ve written most resembles a memoir but I’m exactly the kind of person who doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in a Finnish sauna of selling one to anybody – that is to say nobody in particular. I could almost even pitch it as a “recovery” memoir like that guy who lied to Oprah about how cracked out he had been except for the fact that I’m absolutely unwilling to pretend like drugs destroyed my life and would happily do more of them in a heartbeat if the good ones ever became available again.
One idea I have been playing with is restructuring my potential book as a document and celebration of the punk house, or artist’s collective living space, in its wide variety of shapes I’ve had the good fortune to experience. I always intended to make Fort Thunder, The Miss Rockaway Armada and The Bus the tent poles of whatever book I do end up going with and all of them fall under that particular banner. I’ve got plenty of stories from El Rancho, Apgar, Women House and a handful of spots where I never lived but spent some amount of time.
Assuming a pitch like that could sway a potential publisher The Loft would click in perfectly and of course I’d be doing a lot more interviews with former residents of the place including Branden Powers who I have yet to speak to but has expressed receptiveness to talking.
Anywho enough of the maybes – here comes all the good shit from my last talk with Rex Edhlund. First off I should address a claim I repeated in one of these earlier sections: that SIN magazine, later Hypno, was the first magazine in the world to be edited and laid out completely on computers. Besides not knowing what actual computer magazines at the time were doing Edhlund clearly recalled lots of SIN being done with good old fashioned pasteup.
Anyway I’m not bringing up SIN purely to chide them for what was most likely an innocent exaggeration. When I brought the claim up I had to rediscover where I read it and trawling my browser history brought me back to the impressive SIN digital archive:
https://www.think.cz/archives/sin-magazine-issue-01-index/
I didn’t really appreciate it when I first came across it but it really is an unprecedented resource. Every page of every issue of a counterculture magazine running from 1992 to 1993 is there for your perusal and enjoyment. You can look at that era’s local shows, reports on the growing rave scene and a really amazing collection of early digital art in one of the later issues.
I flicked around some at random and read about Pigface – an Industrial supergroup I’d somehow never heard of but have been blasting ever since. For anyone frustrated with my slowed down writing schedule and thirsty for content I guarantee this archive will leave you more than sated. Not much of 1992 internet is available anywhere anymore and this doesn’t even require The Wayback Machine – just click the link and dive down the rabbit hole.
A similar archive of Hypno is not available, not yet anyway, but could become a reality with enough renewed interest. As is so often the case with these things I was not the only person to suddenly hit up Edhlund about this era after decades of relative silence. One of the other ones had sent along images of posters and stickers created by Hypno magazine for use as background decoration in the movie Hackers.
I stuck those up top as the pull image for this particular entry. The point is the Hypno archives are probably bursting at the seams with those kind of surprises and with enough popular demand, or somebody around the High Desert willing to painstakingly scan everything, it could be just a click away as well.
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Let’s start picking up the story on how The Loft came together. In the mid-‘80s there was a big collective party house in San Diego called The Morgue on Texas Street between University and El Cajon Boulevard. The big claim to fame was that Christian Death once stayed over. Besides that there were a lot of after parties (I’m guessing mostly for Death Rock shows) and one of the housemates launched Black Market Fanzine which was Edhlund’s introduction to approaching the thriving subculture from a magazine angle.
After that he started and moved into The Store That Cannot Be Named – a screen printing studio and exotica shop. This has already come up in a previous piece but to recap it was directly next door to the famous Leather Bar Wolfs. It might be more accurate to say that it was in the same building as Wolfs and they were looking for any tenant that would be cool with the round the clock noise and everything else. Rent on the spot was 600 a month with all utilities included.
The deal included free beer at the bar which meant Edhlund was in there on more or less a nightly basis. The leather community also started working with him for all their shirt screen printing needs which both kept his business going and had him dropping off shirts in the middle of public floggings and similar events. Growing up in San Diego I heard a lot of stories about Wolfs and the leather or shirtless only room in the back but it was gone before I ever had the chance to check it out.
For a long time it wouldn’t have been an exaggeration to say that North Park was the center of San Diego Leather culture. There was Wolfs, The Eagle, Pecs and a spot off El Cajon Boulevard I forget the name of. Some of these are probably still open but my strongest memory is taking a late night bus up University Avenue and looking through the windows of Rigoberto’s to see leather daddies and vatos peacefully rubbing shoulders as they waited their turn on a Galaga arcade cabinet.
I haven’t been back to San Diego for a bit but everything I see about gentrification and new parking garages in North Park makes me think it’s not like that anymore.
Rex Edhlund started advertising his store in SIN, helped find other interested advertisers from his store connects and eventually climbed the ladder to a regular contributor. For a minute the magazine staff were holding meetings in his store but three separate occurrences spurred the move to new quarters. First off the magazine was offered distribution – presumably by Larry Flynt unless there was an earlier deal I don’t know the details on. Next the store was broken into and a bunch of stuff was stolen. Finally somebody offered to buy all of Edhlund’s screen printing equipment.
Together this meant he was ready to work on the magazine full time in a space that was both bigger and seemed to offer more security from break ins – this turned out to be The Loft.
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Some of this might be redundant but after going to check out the building at Sixth and Broadway Edhlund was able to negotiate a hell of a sweetheart deal. It wasn’t the first deal on offer – somebody else had worked one out that was far beyond what the young magazine could pay and Edhlund took the owners back to the bargaining table. He walked away with the unbelievable bargain of 600 bucks a month, a lot more space than the same 600 got by Wolfs, while the first six months were totally free.
The only thing I know about the owners at this time is that they were an architecture firm with ambitious plans to remodel the building that they could never actually pay for. I thought it might have been David Singer, my Sixth Grade Teacher’s husband, as we’d taken a field trip to a modern store rebuild of his on the same block but it wasn’t. Singer’s company was both well heeled and critically established – two things the mysterious young firm were not. [Note: a commenter has chimed in and the architecture firm was James Brown and Associates. No, not that James Brown…]
That 600 dollars included 10,000 square feet each on the second and third floors. If you’ve been paying attention to past chapters you already know the fourth floor was a boxing gym and the ground floor was mostly used for storage. The architecture firm did have offices on the second floor along with a stylist and photography studio but they must have just worked around each other. By the time the architecture firm moved out The Loft community was working with 20,000 square feet. The magazine offices were being built on the third floor anyway.
Edhlund has mentioned a couple of times that one of his magazine partners was being drawn into Murshid’s Circle of Friends cult from the moment they moved in and I haven’t pressed him for the guy’s specific name. Anyway it seemed like a reasonable assumption that this nameless person would have been the toe in the door that allowed the cult to move into The Loft. Interestingly enough it sounds like that wasn’t the case.
Circle of Friends first got all the computers and tech the way they got most things: a wealthy follower paid for it all who was no doubt feeling especially generous after Murshid convinced an attractive young female follower to use her body as motivation. The first incarnation of a computer lab was called The Liberated Technology Project at a retreat space Circle of Friends had in Rancho Santa Fe. If you don’t know where that is think inland from Cardiff. That didn’t work out.
It was Edhlund himself who saw the potential in the gear and convinced Circle of Friends to try their community computer lab dream again in The Loft. Of course this came with a lot of compromises: The Loft would now be the de facto home of Circle of Friends and a special room needed to be built for Murshid. He was moving in. Edhlund sounded fairly certain that one of the main reasons Murshid went for this was the hope that he could gain control of their magazine and turn it into a mouthpiece for Circle of Friends but he also felt confident he had the strength of will to ensure that never happened.
By this time a cease and desist had already changed the magazine’s name from SIN to HYPNO and the computers were a game changer for HYPNO. Now the only parts of the magazine not being laid out on computers were when advertisers who hadn’t caught on to the Digital Revolution yet sent their spots in on photographic slides. This was all around 93 and 94 – the salad days of the place.
I’ve got a few short anecdotes from this time I’ll throw in for color. His work on Hypno was earning Edhlund a reputation as somebody with a finger on the pulse of the underground and this was earning him a variety of consulting gigs. One day he got a call from a producer at the Leeza Gibbons talkshow because they were trying to do an episode on the archetype of the “slacker artist” inspired by the 1990 film Slackers and the general culture of grunge music.
The couches in The Loft were usually full of whoever had stuck around after the last party so Edhlund looked around and said he’d do a deal on a dozen. Along with his finder’s fee he’d negotiated to get everybody paid and picked up by a limo the show sent around. Predictably nobody cast to appear was awake when the limo driver arrived so Edhlund handled him a meter stick to go couch to couch gently poking everybody awake. Steve Pagan was the first to slowly open his eyes:
“Mister Pagan, your limo has arrived.”
The other story isn’t as cute and cuddly. I’ve written before about how important it is for collective spaces to have the person who vets newcomers and if necessary shows them the door. This task doesn’t always make this person the most popular but no space where nobody ever gets booted can truly be called “inclusive” because once the creeps, predators and racists start hanging out the most vulnerable within the scene can no longer feel safe there.
At The Loft this responsibility was one of Edhlund’s many “hats” – mostly because he didn’t want to live in a space full of dirtbags and shitheads and nobody else was stepping up. This story is about a guy named Shawn who was nicknamed GIC, or Gay Insane Contractor, because he constantly talked about being gay, was an insane meth-head and got his foot in the door by claiming to be a contractor.
It soon became clear that he couldn’t build shit, or effectively contract others to, which might have been fine if it wasn’t for the insane tweaker part. To illustrate his building skills he was attempting to construct a little shack for himself out of cardboard and blankets next to the yoga area on the day the shit hit the fan. Edhlund and others had been telling him to get the hell out for weeks but his attempt to build a slanty-shanty called for more direct action.
When politely reminded to get the fuck out of Dodge he produced a letter addressed to himself at that address and started yelling about how he could prove residency and evicting him would require going to court and a year plus of red tape. Whether this was completely accurate or not was beside the point – nobody felt like dealing with any of it. Rex noticed he was using a flathead screwdriver to stick his blankets to the wall.
In a mix of instinctual rage and inspiration Edhlund grabbed onto the screwdriver and stabbed himself in the forearm. He got it in good enough to draw blood and immediately called 911 while yelling loud enough for the whole house to hear that “GIC” had flipped out and stabbed him. The one witness was a dude named Shifty who also worked on the magazine – he wanted dude gone as much as Rex did and was happy to confirm his version of events. Surprisingly enough the tweaker stuck around until the law arrived.
He was probably on a good one and thought that if he explained everything to the cops they’d have to take his side. His sped up rambling did not have the desired effect and the cops removed him from the premises to book at the station. He was never prosecuted as they only wanted him gone but that was the last anybody saw of him.
One person who was not going to be gotten rid of so easily was Murshid. Everybody needed the computers and as long as they were there so was he. While I’m on the subject of Murshid I should mention that in the photo I used of him last time the blond woman on his right was his first wife and a cult leader in her own right named Maitreya. The photo was from a webpage I found for her obituary.
She lived in The Loft for a bit herself and had a reputation for never wearing any clothes. Most of the culties wore big white diaper things that I’m sure there’s a specific name for but she chose to go with the outfit she’d been born in. It became a minor issue when a few UPS delivery guys got freaked out when she came to the door like that.
Anyway that’s nothing compared to the issues with Murshid. After his special room was built he began a constant campaign of pushing for additional space. I’m sure the space was for “yoga classes” and other things than benefited the community at large but it’s hard not to look at it as a push for control. It’s like the Board Game Risk! – once you control more surface area than any other player who’s in charge? You are of course.
There were meetings and arguments and shouting matches but eventually an agreement was reached. Murshid and Circle of Friends would pay all of the rent, $600, and Hypno essentially had free office space. As this translated directly to Edhlund having to spend tons of time putting out fires and mediating and generally dealing with new forms of bullshit it’s hard to say if it was a good deal but it was about to change anyway.
Everything shifted the day Matthew Gorden showed up.
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Presumably the mysterious architecture firm was cutting their losses and putting the building up for sale. Gorden represented some invisible partners with money to spend – he had next to none of that but he did have feet on the ground and an eye for spaces with potential. Edhlund was on site for his first walk through which would become important in future court cases.
Gorden’s partners did not sign a deed the day he arrived so for a while he began paying the rent. The $600 monthly was coming out of his pocket. The more interesting bit is what went down with Murshid and Circle of Friends. Murshid could clearly smell money and while Gorden had little the smell was on him from somewhere.
Gorden became a member of Circle of Friends – some call it culty coupling, flirty fishing or simply “the power of pussy” but once a hot young thing who ordinarily wouldn’t have given him a second glance started talking about being “soulmates” he was all in. Would this young woman have experienced such attraction without Murshid in her ear? The obvious answer is abso-fucking-lutely not.
The building at Sixth and Broadway was now a “donation”. Like most gurus Murshid was used to high value gifts from his adherents and probably thought very little of it beyond the relief that the space he’d been calling home was finally his. Around this time Gorden’s young female companion turned down an offer to run away and see the world with him so he lost motivation to make the building a gift and retaliated with lawsuits.
The crux of these suits was simple enough – as Gorden never owned the building he had no power to offer it as a gift to anybody else. Around this time Edhlund testified that Gorden had been asking from the very first visit if the structure would be a “good investment” for his partners. Edhlund also attended a Circle of Friends yoga retreat around this time and seemed to succeed in convincing the members that a gift from someone who doesn’t own it means very little.
His lawsuits also talked about mind control through tantric sex and brainwashing techniques involving calorie restriction and sleep deprivation. When I ran this by Edhlund he called bullshit as these last two things are bog standard for more or less any yoga cleanse. The other bits do look like the cult was working hard to ensure he never had much time to think about what was happening but given his status as financial non-owner this all feels fairly academic.
Gorden and partners did purchase the building for one million dollars not long after. I’m sure Circle of Friends were able to negotiate something like free rent while they were there but that wouldn’t be too long of course. Gorden and partners were looking primarily at flipping for profit which meant not leaving freaky cults in the building.
I wish I could figure out the name of the architecture firm and how much they’d paid and that sort of thing. There’s probably records of this stuff for anyone in San Diego who feels like spending a day or so in the property records area. Actually there’s a favor I wanted to ask of anybody down to hit up the county clerk’s office down there – hit me up for details.
The articles I linked way back in the first chapter of this story will give you more information on the court case between Circle of Friends and Gorden and partners but I’ve mostly gone over the particulars. I want to talk instead about what was going on behind the scenes between Gorden and Edhlund. It wasn’t always the most cordial.
By the time the court case was over and Gorden was ready to flip the building Edhlund had moved on from HYPNO magazine and was no longer living there. I often write about how collectives fail because a toxic individual or group somehow move in and then puff themselves up like a chuckwalla in a rock crevice: impossible to extract. In this case this would be Murshid and Circle of Friends but it might not be accurate to pin Edhlund’s departure totally on them.
He talked about being busier with a variety of business and artistic pursuits and not having time for the “herding cats” that came with being house dad for the kind of artist’s community The Loft was. He had launched a newspaper around San Diego’s downtown revitalization called D-Town and was married to a real estate agent. He used the knowledge of the downtown ecosystem he had built up over the last decade to give profitable advice to both his wife and Matthew Gorden.
Gorden was a real estate speculator/flipper and would have had more pots on the stove than just the building at Sixth and Broadway. Three years after launching D-Town Edhlund sold the paper, was going through a divorce, and happened to notice that Gorden had listed the building with an entirely unrelated listing agent. Considering how much money Gorden had made from both Rex’s information and his soon-to-be ex wife’s realtor business Edhlund was understandably upset.
He twisted Gorden’s arm and was allowed to share the listing along with his former wife who would have been the one with the realtor’s license. He threw himself into showing the building as much as possible and was eventually the one who clinched the sale and got the commission on the three million dollar price tag. A one to three million flip already sounds like a huge payday but you also have to remember that this was in 2000.
I plugged it into an inflation calculator and it looks like 1.78 to 5.3 million. I don’t know enough about how commissions work to tell you what Edhlund walked away with.
The final irony, in his words, is that the new owner’s contracted him to tear down all the walls and return the building to large open spaces. These were walls that he had bought the materials for seven years earlier and paid workers to help him put up. He essentially got his money back.
Of course I have no way to know this for sure but I like to imagine the new owners wanted the walls down because they were hoping to rent or sell the space as the yuppy version of an artist’s loft – the live/work loft. If this were true it feels especially poignant that they would destroy what actually was an artist’s loft to create a more stereotypical version of one. Of course it might have been something as simple as the walls not being up to code – I really have no idea.
This is where this story ends for now. I know the upscale restaurant called The Owl that took over the ground floor of the space has gone out of business and a recent conversation with a friend told me that downtown San Diego is flooded with homeless camps and starting to look more like it did in the ‘90s. North Park and South Park sound like the big destinations for developers now.
Gentrification has been happening for long enough now that the early 2000s version almost seems quaint and retro. We artists have a complex relationship with it to begin with – we claim to hate it but we are the very plague rats who bring it with us everywhere we go. Nothing like a bunch of (usually white) artists leaving their mark on a low income neighborhood to get the city planners drooling to turn it into a place where those artists, and more importantly their working class neighbors, can no longer afford to live.
Rex Edhlund lives in the Joshua Tree area now where he crafts adobe bricks and runs a literacy program called Super Literate Project based on donated comic books for incarcerated individuals.
https://superliterateproject.org/
https://www.adobeinaction.org/mud-talks/2023/11/29/mud-talks-23-rex-edhlund
Steve Pagan lives in Las Vegas and continues to keep the nightlife alive as both a DJ and Promoter. Murshid and Murshida seemed to be living in North County around Encinitas when I looked at their YouTube show but I can’t say what made me think that. I haven’t gotten in touch with any of the big names in Crash Worship yet – I reached out to M. Wolff and his Facebook had clearly been hacked.
I know there are many important names and figures for The Loft and its history that I have yet to touch on or talk to. In one version of my imagined book I’ll likely be tracking down a lot more folks and doing a lot more interviews. In another version this is probably it. Either way I am walking away from writing about it for now. Most of my big questions have gotten satisfactory answers.
There were so many artists, yogis, promoters, performers, hustlers and other species of hipster passing through it seems doubtful that anyone could furnish a full list. I did just hear a rumor that Coffee-Shop-King Jason Mraz was crashing there when he first came to San Diego. Is it true? Who cares, it makes for a good story.
Clearly there are many more questions that I know too little about to even ask and interesting characters that have yet to reach my radar. If anybody who was actually there feels inspired by all this to write about it themselves I implore you to do so. As relatively small as this platform is (it’s like a noise show where twenty to fifty people show up but it happens every day) I’d be happy to share it.
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 