KEYWORDS:
About SoundSafe
Learn about SoundSafe’s history here
Board of Directors
Executive Officers
Jean Spinosa
President
Co-Founder, Project Manager
Former Downtown Rehearsal Tenant
Bay Area native Jean Spinosa has worked her entire life promoting arts and entertainment as an actor, dancer, choreographer, theatre director, performance artist, theatre arts teacher, writer, musician, event producer, and club promoter.
She has trained with the American Conservatory Theatre, National Academy of Theatre, Film, Puppetry, and Mime, The Institute for Modern Art with Directors of the Moscow Art Theatre, The Groundlings, and received her B.A. in Theatre Arts with an emphasis in Acting/Performance Art from San Francisco State University. She has attained her music training through private lessons in the field of voice, drums, and violin.
Jean is the Club Promoter and Host of Wig Out! Get Your Wig On!, a monthly performance art wig cabaret entering it’s third successful year.
Most notable San Francisco performance credits include working in the band Surprise Party (vocalist), rock opera band Enrique (actor), Thunderbird Theatre Company (actor/director/choreographer), and The Punk Rock Ballet (co-founder/choreographer/dancer).
She was a Downtown Rehearsal Tenant for seven years (1993-2000), is a co-founder of SoundSafe, and has been serving as an active Board Member for seven years, Vice President 2001-2007/President 2007- ; working to ensure that arts and entertainment thrive in San Francisco.
Jean enlisted the web firm Highly Evolved, well known as a company directed and engineered by musicians and artists, to design the new site. She became the project manager, and has been steering this new vision towards realization. “I am very excited about its potential and the future of SoundSafe,” she said. “We’re an organization borne out of destruction and abandonment, and we fought and won to turn that loss into gain, and to create something healthy and productive. Though we no longer have a physical building, we do have a permanent and meaningful place in the heart and spirit of the San Francisco music community. This new website is not the end of this story, it’s a starting point. We’re not sure where it will lead, but we know it will open myriad avenues of communication and creativity through the city. It’s well suited to the lifestyle of the modern Bay Area musician — all of whom might live great distances from each other, but who come together every day on the web. This will be their home. And it’s called SoundSafe.org.”
Mark Gregory
Vice President
Co-Founder
Former Downtown Rehearsal Tenant
Mark Gregory has been a musician since he could barely press the colored buttons on his Grandma’s home organ. He grew up in the Bay Area, moved to the Sacramento area around high school, and immediately moved back to go to S.F. State to study film, marketing, and audio engineering. He has lived in San Francisco since 1991.
Mark interned and worked at the Plant Recording Studios in Sausalito, where in two years he saw all the local and national music “names” pass through. After the Plant, he started working with Metallica(Napster, baaad!) as the assistant to their band director/coordinator. Concurrently he worked as a studio manager of producer Walter Afanasieff’s Wallyworld- he produces all that stuff your mom likes.
He has been in four bands: The Soft (with Gabe from Cake and Matt from Tinfed), Concepts, Seventeen Evergreen, and currently, Hot Tub.
In 2000, he wrote and distributed a flyer and organized tenants to fight their eviction from Downtown Rehearsal in San Francisco. Some of the people from this group helped form the organization known as SoundSafe. In addition to his work with SoundSafe, he presently works at SeeqPod.com as a discovery curator (he helps people discover new artists). SeeqPod is a search engine with the largest index of music online. They are trying to support musicians through a merchandise model that gives artists revenue by linking directly to their songs.
Through SoundSafe, he is interested in creating a musical community. He it’s here to give support to musicians interested in trying to preserve and strengthen our Bay Area music culture.
Rob Schenk
Treasurer
Co-Founder
Former Downtown Rehearsal Tenant
Network Consultant and Musician.
Jocelyn Kane
Secretary
Jocelyn Kane is Deputy Director of San Francisco’s Entertainment
Commission, which is charged with ensuring the health and vitality of all indoor and outdoor entertainment venues in the City. Jocelyn is also an Entertainment Relations consultant with Gibson Musical Instruments.
In addition to serving on the board of SoundSafe,
Jocelyn currently also serves on the boards of ArtsFest, West Coast Songwriters Association, and on the Advisory Board for Musician National Service Initiative. Jocelyn is also working to ensure that health care isprovided for all musicians living in San Francisco.
Jocelyn is also the founder of Motogirl Productions, an SF-based artist development company which works with artists in various genres, to help them understand the “business” of music and how to reach individual goals effectively in one of the toughest industries around. Motogirl Productions co-produced Nadine’s Wild Weekend, a rock festival, was the talent buyer for a rock club in the Mission District of San Francisco, and booked & produced much larger events at music venues around the Bay Area.
Mark Rennie
Corporate Counsel
Co-Founder
Mark is a veteran of the San Francisco Arts and Entertainment world. Beginning in the 1980’s, Mark has done everything from own the trendiest club to defending just about everyone else.
His entertainment law and administrative law practice specialize in San Francisco entertainment permitting and California Alcoholic Beverage Control licensing issues. He has represented approximately forty nightclubs and lounges in San Francisco and New York City. He is a co-founder of SoundSafe and has worked as it’s legal counsel since it’s inception.
Board of Advisors:
Andrew Wood
Executive Director, SF International Arts Festival
Flower Frankenstein
Executive Director and Founder of The Sugar Valley Street Faire; (A Division of The Castro Street Faire), Large Scale Outdoor Sculpture/Installation Artist, Novelist.
Russell Roesner
Co-Founder,
Former Downtown Rehearsal Studios tenant, Real Estate Agent, Saxophonist & Clarinetist
SoundSafe Writers:
Paul Zollo
Resident SoundSafe Writer
Paul Zollo is a songwriter-author-journalist-photographer. Presently the Senior Editor of American Songwriter magazine and the editor of Bluerailroad.com, he’s the author of several books, including Songwriters On Songwriting, Conversations with Tom Petty, Hollywood Remembered, and Sunset & Cahuenga, a novel. He’s presently working on several new books, including a volume of photo-essays called Angeleno. Formerly the lead songwriter and singer of the band The Ghosters, he’s recorded one solo album called Orange Avenue, which features a duet with Art Garfunkel, and he’s recording a new album for Trough Records. He performs with his band The Zollo Orchestra, and has toured through Europe, Japan, Russia and throughout America. As a photographer, he’s had his work published in many magazines, including People, California, Los Angeles, Campus Circle, American Songwriter, Lesbian News and Vision, and has photographed many legendary people, including Ringo Starr, Al Pacino, James Taylor, Brian Wilson, Farley Granger and Jean Spinosa. He’s had photo exhibitions at Cannibal Flower, Infusion Gallery and Joe’s Diner in L.A. and at Dreamland and Carmina in San Diego. He’s the unofficial official photographer for the great monthly club Wig-Out, which is held every month in Los Angeles.
Contributing Writers:
Anthony Bonet
Co-Founder, Writer, Musician
Former Downtown Rehearsal Tenant
SoundSafe Co-Founder, President/Executive Director from 2001 to 2007.
Since 1990 he has worked as DJ “Sex for Teens” on KALX Berkeley where he also served as Music Director from 1993 to 1996. He was the booker at Bottom of the Hill night club in San Francisco from 1994 to 2002.
Anthony Bonet’s writing is used courtesy of The Bottom of The Hill
Jean Spinosa
Co-Founder, President and Project Manager (2007- )
Vice President(2001-2007)
See top of page for full bio
J. Jason Dollar – Attorney At Law
Joshua Ellingson
Artist/Designer
San Francisco based illustrator Joshua Ellingson contributes to various publications and exhibits his artwork nationwide. His work has been featured on everything from rock posters to custom vinyl toys. Joshua has created artwork for many Soundsafe events and enjoys working with local musicians. When not managing his studio in San Francisco, Josh likes to travel and sketch.
Lawrence Lewis
Musician
Lawrence Lewis is the founding member and songwriter of the band Skamper and the vocalist to the twisted electronic trio Better Be Theory. Skamper was born in 2001 and has headed up a number of mini-tours around the US as well as the UK. Lawrence has been cooking up songs under this moniker for the last few years, and Phillip Haut (The Centimeters, Listing Ship, Veronica Lipgloss and the Evil Eyes) did the recording honors for their current release Thunderbeast.
Special Thanks:
SoundSafe would like to extend special thanks to:
Ramona Downey and The Bottom of The Hill
Cory Marie Podielski
Highly Evolved
If you’ve got a problem, they’ll solve it. Highly Evolved, a creative think tank with offices in Los Angeles and Portland, continues to demonstrate their ability to launch products and platforms that disrupt the norms, change the game, or carve out new niches for their clients, including Viacom, MTV, VH1, Warner Bros., Revver and Stila Cosmetics, as well as several up-and-coming brands, including the world’s first organic energy juice and a large music industry non-profit. Their hybrid business model of part client services and part intellectual property development affords this idea incubator the ability to leverage their combined 50 years of creative, marketing and interactive experience into solutions custom created by the five founding partners in the disciplines of strategy, design, marketing and technology. Yet this tight knit hit squad of cultural provocateurs are all inventions of the internet generation, focusing on brands that uber-connected power users clamor for.
While working with clients such as Universal Music Publishing, Qantas Airways (North America), Carl’s Jr. and Hardees, Air Pacific (North America), Citibank and Gallo at a traditional interactive agency founded by two of the partners of Highly Evolved, these architects of innovation realized that they had unique intellectual property concepts that could only be fostered by a small, highly progressive core team. Thus, on August 15, 2006, Highly Evolved was born, with the very clear mission to produce the most talked about and valuable pieces of technology — products that transcend brand interactions and catalyze social movements. Currently Highly Evolved is developing a series of proprietary products and services, including a dashboard for democracy, an interactive personal trainer, a luxury shopping concept and a Twitter-inspired retail service, as well as experimenting with mobile and surround marketing strategies.
Virtually a Big Bang theory for the digital age, the Highly Evolved philosophy of breaking new ground and bringing their own ideas to market gives this team the freedom to think different, to be agile and to tame technology — all while having a damn good time. Likening themselves to a rock band, this four guys and a gal group has a range of diverse personal interests that ignite their ideas, such as music, mediation, Pilates and politics. Touching the categories of entertainment, lifestyle, consumer products and non-profits, Highly Evolved prides itself on staying true their roots and not taking themselves too seriously, embracing the underground and exacting change in an accessible and chimp simple way. To learn more and join in on the phenomena, check our their website, highlyevolved.com