Welcome to the website of
Knox Bronson, accomplished roué & cat lover.
I’ll be famous when I’m dead.
Recent POSTS
{frisco} The Secret Life of Bob Patterson, Who Terrorized High Society With His Gossip Column, “Freddie Francisco Observes,” In The 1940s
Why Did You Have To Smile At Me? with French horns
{frisco} Episode 2 ~ The Hawaiian Princess Who Wanted To Sing
{wild bubble} Robbie Basho’s Esoteric Guitar Chord Color Chart
{wild bubble} John Lennon and Paul McCartney on the Tonight Show, May 1968
![[frisco] 1st Bonus Episode: Call It Frisco](https://knoxbronson.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/FRISCO-BONUS-EPISODE-1-GRAPHIC-copy-400x250.jpg)
[frisco] 1st Bonus Episode: Call It Frisco
This episode explores the long and often contentious history of the nickname “Frisco” for San Francisco. Despite the strong disapproval of many, including Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, the term has deep roots stretching back to the Gold Rush era.
We delve into the earliest documented uses of “Frisco” in the mid-19th century, finding it in letters from 1849 and newspapers like the Placer Times in 1850, suggesting it was once a common and respectable abbreviation, even appearing in genteel literature by 1868. The episode also touches on the theory of a Middle English origin for “Frisco” as a port term. We examine the contrasting perspective, highlighting how figures like Emperor Norton, the judiciary, and Herb Caen later vehemently campaigned against the nickname, viewing it as vulgar and disrespectful, particularly associating it with outsiders and the city’s more unruly past.
The discussion then shifts to the more nuanced and contemporary understanding of “Frisco.” We explore how, despite the traditional disdain, the term has persisted and even been reclaimed by certain communities, notably within Black San Francisco culture, as a sign of solidarity and identity. Even Herb Caen eventually softened his stance, acknowledging it as a “salty nickname.” Ultimately, the episode concludes by inviting listeners to reconsider their own use of “Frisco” as a way to connect with the city’s rich and complex history, particularly the “wide-open” era that this podcast aims to resurrect.
Links:
“San Francisco Sea Chanties of the Gold Rush Era” by Dick Holdstock & Co. (Find on Bandcamp as a download or as a CD)
The Secret History of Frisco website: www.thehistoryoffrisco.com
Patreon page: www.Patreon.com/Frisco
PODCASTS
Riding the Wild Bubble
The Secret History of FRISCO
BOOKS—Masterpieces All
FLAPPING
Chervil Orbane, a youngish man living alone in the San Francisco Bay area, has awakened flapping. And knows it.
Two agencies–one extra-dimensional, one a super-secret government entity – know it also. And they want Chervil, for the furtherance of very different agendas.
An allegory, Flapping hews to classic epic form (the call, the journey, the dying, and the rebirth) in bite-size chapters, with diagrams, charts, and graphs to assist the reader in grasping essential concepts underlying Flapping — Chervil Orbane’s saga, his moment of clarity, the great epiphany, the big ideas, the good guys, the bad guys, the gratuitous sex, the refreshing absence of name brand pop-culture icons, a predictably cinematic happy ending, the ipso and the facto, as it were, of nuevo-millennial metaphysical thought.
FLAPPING comes with its own cd soundtrack – Flight of the Atom Bee. This wonderful CD has been remastered for maximum fidelity. Flight of the Atom Bee is a haunting, beautiful, and otherworldly suite charting the erotic, tensile fields that bridge harmony, melody, and undiluted electronic sound.
PIXELS AT AN EXHIBITION
The emergence of a new art form for the twenty-first century, inspired by, shot with, and processed on the iPhone.
Pixels At An Exhibition documents the unexpected emergence of a new art form for the twenty-first century, one based on the technology of the iPhone, its limited camera and buggy apps, to create a new kind of magical realism. Combining camera and darkroom, canvas and paintbrush in one tiny device, the iPhone inspired the birth of a global art movement. Pixels At An Exhibition features the best of the pioneering artists and galleries culled from the 33,000 curated images on the Pixels website, many available nowhere else.
I finished, after three-and-a-half years of curation, writing, design, layout, and production, my history of the early years of iPhone photography and art, PIXELS AT AN EXHIBITION, 370 pp, 177 artists, 600+ images.
iBook for iPAD or Mac on the Apple Bookstore $14.95
Hardbound copy available at Lulu.com $99
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE HONEYBUN EMPIRE
Riding the Wild Bubble Berkeley To Frisco To Hollywood To Las Vegas & Back; Intimations Of Immortality On The Technicolor Lam, Sober.
In 1999, I wrote a semi-naughty, mostly humorous article for Salon.com entitled “The Gentlemanly Art of Spanking” under the nom-de-plume Carson Fitzgerald. It became one of the fifty most-read stories of the year, generating a huge reader response.
A couple years later, I had the idea to make spanking kits and sell them online. It used to be that if one was first to the web with a product, one was guaranteed success. The HoneyBun Spanking Kit was the exception that proved the rule. Nonetheless, it was a cute product and, just as I was finishing the HoneyBun website, I was forced to leave Oakland under threat of death as a witness to some drunks firing their guns up the street from his apartment—no one was injured—so the book began as a road story.
I packed up a carton of spanking kits, his guitar and clothes, and headed south to LA and Hollywood. He then began writing email updates to all my friends in the Bay Area and elsewhere.
After a time, some friends encouraged me to turn the emails and the ongoing story into a book. This is the book. The book is a kaleidoscopic memoir—coming of age in Berkeley in the 60s, San Francisco in the 70s, a brief chapter about the 80s, and one about early sobriety in 90s. A fair amount of spirituality, commentary on materialism, the JFK assassination. Enjoy the ride!
Albums
Flight of the Atom Bee
My first cd, Flight of the Atom Bee, is a collection of instrumental pieces, strange and beautiful, featuring a lot of early analogue synthesizer technology along with an Emu SP-12 drum machine, a Jupiter 8x-P digital/analogue hybrid, and all sorts of outboard processors. To say I didn’t know what I was doing as I plunged back into modern music production is an understatement. But I heard sounds in my head I had to bring forth. It was an exhilarating time as I made my way by trial and lots of error.
Inspired by the weird fiction of Cordwainer Smith, Flight of the Atom Bee is a technicolor romp through the, bold, bright, and beautiful realms of analog synthesis.
Also available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, etc.
Pop Down The Years
My first vocal cd, Pop Down The Years, garnered some good reviews. Eight original songs, one Donovan cover.
Also available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, etc.
Flapping, The Official Soundtrack
Flapping—The Official Soundtrack, when it was first published as a paperback, came with a cd, my album, “Flight of the Atom Bee.” When I decided to publish it again as an e-Book on Apple Books, I thought I would release a new official soundtrack to go with it.
It’s really the greatest hits from Flight of the Atom Bee and Deus Sex Machina.
Also available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, etc.
One Man's Opinion of Moonlight
On Valentine’s Day, 2020, I released my second vocal cd. One Man’s Opinion Of Moonlight.
It’s an album of cover songs, ballads from the sixties and seventies, with one jazz standard, Autumn Leaves, and one original, Pop Down The Years, which is a love song to all the songs and music with which I grew up. The album title is one line from Young Girl Blues, written by Donovan, from his 1967 classic album, Mellow Yellow.
The album includes some of the songs that shaped my romantic ideals in my youth, a collection of songs from the era when “love almost conquered.”
Also available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, etc.
the seasons | remixed/remastered
some distance, now, from the original composing of the seasons i must say that my understanding of the dire situation in which i found myself and the subsequent resolution and release through the act of creation abides, stronger than ever. i rightly intuited, as i neared its completion, that the arc of the seasons followed campbell’s archetypal hero’s journey in a most wonderful way. i would ascribe the elements of the story thusly:
summer of ‘68 ~ the call & crossing the threshold
autumnal sun ~ the road of trials, meeting with the goddess & diving into the abyss
winter blue ~ death, rebirth, transformation & atonement
the forever spring ~ the magic flight, the crossing of the return threshold & freedom to live
Buy it on Bandcamp! (It’s available for free download, leftover from the COVID lockdown era.)
Also available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, etc.
Deus Sex Machina
Deus Sex Machina is another collection of electronic/orchestral works. I consider them to be mid-period works. I finally had a grasp on the technology and had gained a fair amount of confidence in my arranging abilities. A couple of these pieces—Ubi Mel Ibi Apes (where there is honey, there are bees) and 3 Seconds Before Maia Smiled—are in the permanent collection of The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as a part of a multi-media installation that ran for six months in 1999, Glenn McKay’s Altered States.
Also available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, etc.
The Pierce Street Community Garden
I hit Coalinga hard in early August, 2016, drummed out of Oakland by a jealous landlady and skyrocketing rents.
Years before, tweakers had trashed the little house into which I was to move. It had been empty since then and it showed. I slept on a foam pad on the floor as I worked to make the place livable. My only furniture was a lawn chair. I lived on roast chicken from SavMart, Starbucks breakfast sandwiches, and burritos from Tres Agaves, the all-night taqueria which serves the best food in town. The temperature hovered around a hundred and five degrees every day and the swamp cooler attached to the house was non-functional. Truth be told, I had never seen a swamp cooler before and I didn’t know what it was.
Read the whole story of one of my proudest accomplishments here.
Videos
There are tons of videos on this site. Here’s a link to the “Music Videos page“. Here’s a link to the “Art Videos” page. Here’s link to the “Weirder Videos” page.
My cover of Marty Balin’s Coming Back To Me was on my album, One Man’s Opinion of Moonlight, just me and guitar. However, a year or two later I returned to the song and listened to the piano part my friend Rachel Efron had played for it during our late night session. Producer Rick Baretta and I had decided not to use it on the album release. I thought I would see what I could come up with in terms of a minimal arrangement, cello, strings and oboe. And Rachel’s piano, of course. What Rachel does as we go into the bridge kills me every time.