San Francisco has a new anthem—a joyful, upbeat tune that premiered at the 115th anniversary party of John’s Grill Wednesday. “San Francisco City of Love” was written by Lawrence Beamen and Jeff Silbar, who performed it at the restaurant.
The saccharine song—which contains city references from cable cars to Tunnel Tops—is belied by the difficult moment that inspired it, when someone broke into Beamen’s car.
“It was not good,” Beamen said. “But it didn’t take away from the beauty of the city of San Francisco.”
The finalist in America’s Got Talent decided he needed to do something to buoy his city’s spirits. He thought about Tony Bennett’s “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”
“I didn’t want to replace it,” Beamen said, “but I wanted to give San Francisco a little face-lift.”
So he called up his friend Jeff Silbar—a Grammy Award-winning songwriter who penned the famous Bette Midler ballad “Wind Beneath My Wings”—and the two got to work in Silbar’s studio.
“We began three weeks ago and finished it at 7 a.m. this morning,” Silbar said Wednesday in a phone interview.
The song unabashedly embraces San Francisco’s best-known associations: the Golden Gate Bridge, fog, Union Square. But it also tries to modernize Bennett’s famous ballad by adding more up-to-date references such as the Golden State Warriors, Crissy Field and Dogpatch.
LISTEN to “San Francisco City of Love”:
The crowd assembled at John’s Grill Wednesday met the performance with some tepid nods and a few eye rolls as Beamen attempted to get listeners to sing along. But when he followed up with “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe,” the grooving began in earnest.
The reaction to the song on social media has been mostly harsh so far—with some commenting they feel it’s straight out of a 1980s sitcom (in not a good way) and others saying there’s no way it stands up to the Bennett tune that inspired it.
But whatever the reception of the song’s debut, Beaman and Silbar have grand visions for their new work. They imagine it as an anthem played in sports arenas, the subject of a music video directed by George Lucas and an inspiration for younger San Franciscans to learn about the city’s history.
The song holds particular appeal for the third-generation proprietor of John’s Grill, John Konstin Jr., because his business has a cameo in it—a reference he only learned about this week. In the song, after all those cable cars go up the hill, there are driverless cars “passing by John’s Grill.”
“I heard the line, and I was jumping around,” Kostin said. “I was ecstatic.”
The restaurant owner could see the tune as the opening of a sitcom, like the San Francisco-based hit TV show of the 1980s and ‘90s, Full House. Whether the tune is an overly sentimental earworm or an exuberant anthem at an apt moment, San Franciscans will have to judge. In the meantime, Silbar and Beamen are running high on the debut of a song they believe has a special destiny.
“We’re feeling golden,” Silbar said.