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Culture
Fill Up the Tip Jar for Oscar Myers, Pillar of Bay Area Funk and Soul
Known for decades of shows at Madrone and the Boom Boom Room, the musician and mentor suffered a stroke last week, just before his 81st birthday. A fundraiser aims to get him back on his feet.
There are a few things you can always depend on in San Francisco — markers that situate you in time, in a year, in a neighborhood. Bacon-wrapped hot dogs in the Mission late on a Saturday night. Tourists, freezing in T-shirts, walking the Golden Gate Bridge in June.
Up until two weeks ago, you could stroll into Madrone Art Bar on Divisadero on Tuesday evenings and come face to face with a musical legend leading the best weeknight dance party you’d ever seen. Oscar Myers is a charmingly no-nonsense trumpet player, percussionist, singer, and bandleader who’s performed with James Brown, Charles Mingus, Ike Turner, and Ray Charles, among others. Now 81, Myers has held court at Madrone with his band Steppin’ nearly every Tuesday for the past 17 years. Before that, the musician — a Vietnam veteran with a Purple Heart — led the Tuesday night funk jam at the Boom Boom Room, beginning when John Lee Hooker first opened the club in 1997.
But Myers wasn’t at Madrone or the Boom Boom Room this past Tuesday, nor the Tuesday before that. The musician suffered a stroke on Oct. 7, the day before his 81st birthday — and four days before “Oscar Myers Day” on Oct. 11, as officially decreed by the city of San Francisco in 2024.