This website was one of the first I designed for someone else, and one of the first on my little webhosting company.
I just found out about Sean's death an hour ago. Not knowing what else to do, I'd like to leave this website here, for free, as a tribute to him - and for those old friends that might be searching for him in the future.
Though I have put Mike Mosher's tribute on the front page, I have left everything else on the website the way Sean requested it in 1998.
Sean Good
1952-2002
Sean Good groaned when I introduced him to the audience as a "major Mission songwriter" at the short-lived North Mission Artist Coalition's benefit concert in the summer of 1983. Now, with the news of his death, I realize he could be considered "Mister San Francisco" more than the long-lived newspaper columnist Herb Caen.
Sean lived on Fillmore Street when I first came to town in 1978, and worked in the "Country Gentleman" store near Hayes (which later became muralist Aaron Noble's studio). He stayed with a woman filmmaker on Church Street when his marriage to his muse Alene broke up, and for a while at 47 Clarion Alley. Other times he lived near City College when he was studying electronic music composition there, and for many years dwelt in a Tenderloin hotel. Off and on he worked as a Psych Tech at San Francisco General Hospital, an experience that inspired his public access television series "Mental Health" in the early 1990s.
In the apogee of the Punk era Sean impressed the hell out of his friends when he played at the Mabuhay Gardens, alone onstage and thrashing away forcefully on acoustic guitar, in no small part to prove to Alene she didn't need those punkers she hung around with. He played at the Mission's Motion Arts Dance Company, and at North Beach's Tattoo Rose Cafe as a part of the early-'80s "Acoustic New Wave" that included Vice Grip, Deborah Kay Burger's Transbay Relationship, the self-immolating satirist Ralph Eno, and--most famously--Mark Eitzel's American Music Club.
He was one troubled oyster, but from the grit of the city Sean created pearls. Among a hundred or more poignant songs, "Jesus in the Mission" described the exploitation of Latin American immigrants, Sean singing "Hey-zeus, you're livin' in a dream". He sang of cats, Tenderloin prostitutes, gay neighbors' gym routines, Toulouse-Lautrec, and many doomed love affairs. In "Albion My Way", his song about the 1987 whitewashing of my "Mission Reds at Woodwards' Gardens" mural on Albion Street, he reminisced "Stepping over fellow junkies, I saw your mural often" and urged any obliterated muralist to "Just be glad you got some color slides, and touched a few of us inside".
After his companion Helga's death in 1999, Sean moved to Bakersfield for its cheap rent, returning to San Francisco monthly for his medications. In 1998 Sean recorded a CD of twelve songs and instrumental works, available from CD Baby. He was recently talking about issuing a new edition of it, dedicated to Helga and featuring a cover painting by his daughter Teilor, a student at California College of Arts & Crafts. Teilor and Sean's old collaborator Richard Koerner are currently listening to the tapes in the archive of sad and soulful songs that Sean Good left behind, and plan to assemble another collection.
Former San Franciscan Mike Mosher teaches art and multimedia design at Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan.