Rock Musician Says He’ll Seek a Seat on La Mesa City Council : Politics: Steve Saint, a member of the Green Party, announced he will run for election during a concert at the Spirit.

Late Thursday night, several hours after presidential candidate Bill Clinton had delivered his acceptance speech to thousands of rabid partisans at the Democratic Convention in New York, San Diego rock musician Steve Saint made an announcement from the stage of the Spirit club.

Seated on a dilapidated sofa between fellow musician Buddy Blue and lounge-act-from-heck Jose Sinatra--who was hosting his weekly talk show, “Hosing Down,” as part of Blue’s “Throbbing Thursdays” series at the venue--Saint announced his candidacy for La Mesa City Council.

No balloons fell from the ceiling, no oompah band played “Happy Days Are Here Again,” no Fleetwood Mac tape was cued. At first, the handful of die-hards still on hand didn’t register a reaction, perhaps assuming that Saint’s declaration merely was another splash from the trio’s stream of gags. It wasn’t, and when finally Blue coaxed some congratulatory applause, Saint added: “We’re going to put a musician in a position of power!” The election is in November.

Considering the “Rock the Vote” movement, PETA’s and Amnesty International’s appropriation of rock celebs to further their respective causes, the social activism of such rock artists as Frank Zappa, Chrissie Hynde, Jackson Browne and Graham Nash, and even the visibility of musicians Stephen Stills and Bruce Hornsby at Clinton’s New York soiree, Saint’s candidacy in itself is not front-page news.

But inasmuch as he is the first relatively well-known figure from the local music scene to get knee-deep in politics, it is noteworthy. And, notwithstanding the officially nonpartisan nature of the race, Saint’s membership in the Green Party certainly would ripple the placid Republican uniformity of La Mesa’s five-member council. And that’s part of the plan.

“Everyone currently on the La Mesa City Council is a Republican, a homeowner and has an executive-level job,” Saint said in an interview Thursday afternoon. “Until Barry Jantz won a seat two years ago, there wasn’t anyone under 40 on the council. Barry’s relatively young, but he still fits the Republican, right-wing profile. In fact, I believe he was one of the honchos of the (ultra-conservative) Young Americans for Freedom group at San Diego State.

“Now, there are a lot of La Mesans who are renters, who don’t have a lot of money, who aren’t Republican, and therefore who don’t have anyone on the council like them,” Saint added. “The rest of us need some representation.”

Saint claims to have been inspired in his current undertaking by Peter Garrett, leader of the Australian rock band Midnight Oil and a seemingly tireless crusader against establishmentarian evils. Although his decision to run was not impulsive, Saint actually seems a bit surprised at his own chutzpah. And yet, a look at his other endeavors makes his candidacy almost inevitable.

Much of the original repertoire of his band, Club of Rome, is topical or directly political. Through his involvement in the local Musicians Who Care organization, which has staged benefits for a variety of causes, Saint has taken his social commitment public. As publisher of the 2 1/2-year-old San Diego Music Magazine, he has both editorialized against the Persian Gulf War and provided free advertising space for the Green Party’s recruitment efforts.

Saint’s background vitae offers still more clues to his eventual office-seeking. Born and raised in La Mesa, he attended Mount Miguel High School in the early and mid-’70s, where he got his first taste of government.

“I was on the (student council), and was elected to the position of commissioner of student affairs,” Saint recalled. “That meant I ran race-relation workshops, held canned-food drives for the needy, adopted a foster child in the Philippines with school money. Things like that.”

At the time, Saint was playing in various “garage” bands, one of whose drummer was Roger Friend, now with the local pop-jazz band, Reel to Real. Unwittingly, the guitarist was laying the groundwork for a future in which he would combine music and politics.

“I was in that adolescent, opening-up phase at a time when a lot of big things were happening,” Saint said. “Like Watergate, which taught me not to trust government. My political perspective was pretty much formed during high school.”

Saint earned a degree in journalism at Northwestern, then moved to San Francisco and Los Angeles, where he formed a band that played the local club circuit, with the goal of getting a recording contract. In 1987, Saint got a job with a Hollywood talent agency to learn the business from the inside, but when his newly acquired savvy and contacts didn’t help him land a record deal, he was ready to give up and return to San Diego to pursue journalism.

As Saint was packing to leave, he got a call from a guy he had sent a demo tape to six months earlier. The caller managed two recording acts, New Marines and Drop in the Gray, and wanted to help Saint get a deal. Saint and his band recorded several tunes for the guy to shop to record companies, but when nothing much transpired several months later, Saint returned to San Diego and released the songs as the Club of Rome album, “New World Coming.”

Club of Rome continues to perform at selected events around town, and, in addition to his work on San Diego Music Magazine, Saint has written as a free-lancer for the Reader, the Daily Californian and First Thursday.

To this point, his direct involvement in local politics--aside from making the occasional presentation to La Mesa’s current council--was as a volunteer on Susan Wolfe-Fleming’s unsuccessful bid for supervisor. But if he gets elected, Saint expects to devote the majority of his energy to the issues facing his hometown. And, although he has definite ideas about what needs to be done, Saint claims to have no set agenda.

“The Green agenda is something we always work out with the people in the community,” he said. “We’ll be having a series of public meetings in La Mesa to find out what’s on people’s minds, so that we can construct a platform based on integrating people’s input.

Another plank in Saint’s platform is a holdover from his days at Mount Miguel High.

“I was indoctrinated into the realities of race-relations while at Mount Miguel, because at the time the school was going through a transition from being mostly white to becoming integrated. I think it will be really important for a Green (party) officeholder in La Mesa to focus on race and human relations issues, because the city is undergoing a similar transition.”

Hours before he made his announcement at the Spirit, Saint had performed an acoustic set of songs, with two members of the band Burning Bridges accompanying on percussion. The first of these tunes, “Geneva,” included a line that could have been a summation of Saint’s latest motivation: “I’m gonna change my world,” he sang, “before my world changes me.”

Saint will host a kick-off to his campaign Aug. 5 at the Village Emporium in La Mesa. Tentative plans for entertainment include performances by local musicians Buddy Blue (also a La Mesa resident) and Sven-Erik Seaholm and the band Dark Globe. For information, call 462-8485.