Summary:
In 2023, a request to contribute to a history of hip-hop exhibit in San Diego led to an unexpected journey into the author's past, resulting in a 104-page memoir. This project, initially intended as a simple flyer annotation, unveiled stories from the author's years running CHILI Productions, including encounters with crime bosses, imprisonment, and life-threatening situations. These experiences shaped his business acumen and artistic endeavors. The memoir, available for free download, offers a glimpse into the vibrant, tumultuous world of underground music and nightlife, with additional stories continuing on the blog.
In 2023, a friend curating an exhibit at the New Americans Museum in San Diego asked if I wanted to contribute to a show on the early history of hip-hop in the city.
I said yes without fully thinking through what that would involve.
The planning meeting had roughly a dozen of us, older promoters, and DJs, a few faces I hadn't seen in twenty years. We went around the table with flyer portfolios. Old photocopied show flyers, the kind printed on colored paper with whatever clip art and fonts were available at Kinko's in 1989. We passed them around, started telling stories, and something unlocked.
I drove home with a very specific plan: scan my flyers, add a few context notes to each one, maybe a paragraph per image. A small archive project. Something I could knock out in a weekend.
That was spring 2023.
By the time I looked up, I had written 104 pages.
Some context.
From 1985 to 2001, I operated CHILI Productions. Hundreds of nightclub events and underground music festivals across San Diego, Southern California, Mexico and beyond. I was sixteen when it started. I was thirty-one when it ended, for reasons I'll get to.
What I built during those years shaped everything that came after. How I think about business, how I operate, and eventually the artwork I make today under the name Rick Bliss. The through-line from a 1986 warehouse party flyer to a painting I finished last year is real, if not immediately obvious.
Most of those stories I've never told. I kept them to myself for thirty years, for reasons that will become clear when you read them.
The flyer annotation project finally broke the seal.
Here's a taste of what's in the book:
- How I became business partners with a significant Mexican crime boss. (This one takes some time to fully explain.)
- How I ended up in a Mexican prison.
- How I had a contract on my life and lived to write a blog post about it.
- How I ended up in a small room with two-way mirrors at the Secret Service office, which is a sentence I just typed with the same casual energy one uses to describe a dentist appointment. I want you to know that it was not like a dentist appointment.
- How I produced some of the largest underground music festivals in Southern California.
- How I got robbed at gunpoint at a nightclub event I produced on the Las Vegas Strip.
Plus a lot more: how it all started, the wild characters along the way, and how sixteen years in nightlife eventually led me to paint.
The book is free. Download it below.
[DOWNLOAD: CHILI Productions — A Memoir (PDF)]
Writing it, I kept trying to be brief. I was annotating scanned flyers. That was the job. But every image had a story attached to it. Every story had three more stories inside it. Somewhere in that process I realized I had been carrying around an unusual amount of unprocessed material for three decades.
This blog is where the rest of it goes. Everything that didn't fit in the book, told in full.
If you were there for any of it, you'll remember. Some of it you may have been trying to forget.
If you weren't there, you'll wish you had been.
Either way, welcome to the beginning.
— Gil
