A San Francisco music legend’s very first recordings have been unearthed

A crowd of 50 Bay Area music fans sat in silence in the intimate Secret Alley event space in the Mission as the needle dropped on a vinyl record.

The listening party, hosted by internet radio station BFF.FM and reissue record label Dark Entries, began with a delicate piano melody filling the air, followed by the voice of one of the most recognizable singers in San Francisco music history: Sylvester.

But he wasn’t singing a classic disco cut like “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).” Instead, Sylvester’s falsetto was at its most delicate, belting out the Billie Holiday standard “God Bless the Child.”

Sylvester was the standard-bearer of San Francisco’s disco scene in the 1970s and ’80s. His songs, like “Over and Over,” still reverberate across Bay Area dance clubs. “Private Recordings: August 1970” is a collection of his very first musical output and shows a softer, more traditional side of the singer. As the name suggests, these songs weren’t intended for commercial distribution. They were recorded with just one microphone at a rehearsal in the Menlo Park home of piano player Peter Mintun, who performed with the Cockettes theater group. The pair met at the Palace Theater in North Beach and connected over their love of early 20th-century gospel and jazz standards like “Carioca” and “Big City Blues.” At the time, Sylvester was 22 years old and Mintun was 20.

“While noodling away at the piano one afternoon on stage, this Black fellow sat next to me — but I didn’t know this fellow was a fellow at the time, because the way people were dressing. He was kind of androgynous. … Of course a lot of that had to do with the fact he was singing in a higher register,” Mintun said. 

Once Sylvester went disco, his androgynous look and skilled falsetto made him an ideal opening act for David Bowie at the Winterland Ballroom just two years later, when Bowie would give him the ultimate endorsement: “[San Franciscans] don’t need me, they’ve got Sylvester.”

Mintun’s house in Menlo Park was something of a museum, filled with vintage films and movies, with cars from the ’20s and ’30s parked in the driveway. Sylvester came to visit, and they set up a reel-to-reel recorder next to the piano.

“We were just fooling around. You can even hear in one of those recordings that one of my roommates is off in the kitchen singing along,” said Mintun. Sylvester plays piano himself on several of the recordings, his wooden bracelets audibly clinking against the ivories.

For years, Mintun kept the tapes to himself, occasionally playing them for friends. He would stop playing alongside Sylvester shortly thereafter, but went on to have a long musical career, playing piano at the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill. In 2001, he moved to New York for a seven-year residency at Bemelmans Bar in the Carlyle Hotel.

Eventually, Mintun posted the songs on Soundcloud, where they were found by Josh Cheon, a local DJ who runs the reissue label and record shop Dark Entries. Cheon, co-founder of the DJ group Honey Soundsystem, moved to San Francisco from New York in 2006 and became enamored with the classic disco sounds of San Francisco.

“Just being the bay, there’s a magnetism to the past, the music that came before. You’re on the streets and you’re in the clubs and the spaces that were inhabited by Sylvester and [his producer] Patrick Cowley,” Cheon said. 

Cheon began reissuing Cowley’s music on his Dark Entries label, starting with a collection of soundtracks he wrote for pornographic films (“School Daze”), and followed by five more LPs, which range from futuristic funk to brooding ambient soundscapes. 

“Private Recordings” is an outlier for the label, which is known for unearthing forgotten goth classics, as well as newer local darkwave acts like Loveshadow. But these jazz and gospel standards struck a chord with Cheon, bringing him back to some of his favorite music from his teenage years, like “Stormy Weather.”

“I grew up listening to Billie Holiday all the time,” Cheon said. “I was a really moody teenager, my mom would always make me turn off the cassette in the car. My mom would be like, ‘Why are you listening to this depressing music?’”

The album is accompanied by a 16-page booklet of photos, which were taken by Mintun while driving around San Francisco in his father’s 1936 automobile with Sylvester. The singer wears a long gown, posing demurely outside of iconic buildings like the Pacific-Union Club on Nob Hill. The campy images serve as a loving complement to the music. There are some moments of ennui on the album, but the songs come across like a joyful celebration of a bygone era. Even though the songs couldn’t be further from his disco hits, Sylvester’s unique personality shines through, displaying the same flair for theatrics that he’d later bring to dance clubs.

“Sylvester used to see the old movies and think, ‘Wow, that would be so glamorous to be onstage with a microphone,’ maybe a gardenia in the hair, and sing a blues song like ‘Stormy Weather,’ Ethel Waters, Lena Horn, Ella Fitzgerald — with me playing the piano like in the old movies, wearing a tuxedo,” Mintun said. “We were kind of living this fantasy.”