Gilbert Klein — talk show host opened Rock & Bowl in S.F.
Gilbert Klein, a Bay Area music scene eccentric who was a talk show host on KFAT-FM before founding Rock & Bowl, one of the great cultural signposts of the 1980s, has died.
Klein suffered a fatal heart attack on Friday at his home in Rosarito Beach, Mexico. He was 71. His death was confirmed by his sister, Abbi Fox of Tiburon.
When Haight-Ashbury enjoyed its great Renaissance, no place on the strip was hipper than Rock & Bowl, which was presided over by Klein, a hilarious huckster if there ever was one.
“We don’t attract the pro circuit here,” Klein once said while showing a Chronicle reporter around his bowling alley. The lighting was dim and atmospheric in reds and blues, with only the pins brightly lit. The overhead monitors, which would normally project scores, flashed music videos and musical film clips dating back to the 1940s.
“It’s a nightclub that has bowling,” said Klein. “You throw things, and knock things down.”
It was a concept that drew everyone — from theater producer Carole Shorenstein Hays to Todd Rundgren, who closed a tour there, to Robin Williams, who held cast parties there.
At its peak, Rock & Bowl was so popular that Klein was approached to franchise it at bowling alleys across the country. The deal fell through because Klein had not properly trademarked anything, so it was essentially stolen out from under him. But Klein rolled with it. He’d stolen the concept himself from a club he’d visited in Manhattan.
“I said, ‘I can do this, and I can do it better,’ ” he said.
Gilbert Jay Klein was born Dec. 14, 1946, in Rockaway Beach, N.Y., and grew up in Roslyn, a suburb on Long Island. He was a student at Adelphi University when he first came to San Francisco for the Summer of Love, in 1967. He took to the lifestyle and stayed long past summer.
Finally, his father sent him a plane ticket and demanded he go back to school, said his sister.
After graduating from Adelphi in 1971, Klein returned west to earn his master’s degree in education at Sonoma State in 1975. He moved to Marin and taught high school before drifting back into the music scene that was his main interest.
His break came at KFAT, the underground radio station in Gilroy that was just honkytonk enough to be cool in the late 1970s. Klein, always a talker, was hired to host a daily interview show called “Chewing the Fat With Gilbert,” which was promoted on posters.
“He interviewed anybody, from Hells Angels to Wolfman Jack to a knight of the Ku Klux Klan,” said his brotherin-law, Rob Fox, a longtime director at KGO-TV.
Klein also played guitar in a bar band called Buzz and the System, which led to his first foray as a producer, with “Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp.” It lasted only a few years and it was forgotten on Jan. 27, 1983, the day Klein took the 22 redundant lanes known as Park Bowl and reopened it as Rock & Bowl, just as the west end of Haight Street caught fire as a nightlife destination.
Crooner Chris Isaak was dressing up in Hank Snow cowboy suits and playing four nights a week at the Nightbreak. Next to it was the IBeam, the city’s premiere live music club. Rock & Bowl had the right mix of hip and kitsch, and Klein would sell out two shifts, of 80 to 100 bowlers each, per night.
Rock & Bowl closed in 1996 when the building was sold. It re-opened as Amoeba Music. By then, Klein was south of the border, bringing a new concept to Baja.
“He heard that Rosarito Beach was going to be a casino capital,” Fox said. “So his plan was to open a bar with a stage for bands so he could be in place when the casinos came.” But neither happened, the casinos nor the bar.
With an inheritance from his father, he bought a house with a view of the ocean in a gated community, and there he stayed, living alone with his Akita, Ginger. To fill his time, he wrote a 650-page history of KFAT, “Fat Chance,” published in 2012.
Klein last visited San Francisco for the Summer of Love exhibition at the de Young Museum late last year.
“We were talking back and forth between ourselves,” said his sister.
“Suddenly there was a crowd around Gilbert, and he told stories about what the Summer of Love was really like for someone who lived it.”
In addition to his sister and brother-inlaw, Klein is survived by two nieces. A memorial service is pending.