Editor’s Note: ‘Backstage Heroes’ spotlights the many movers and shakers working behind the arts scenes to make magic happen in the Bay Area. Guiding us is Hiya Swanhuyser, a veteran fan and all-around culture vulture who for nearly a decade helmed calendar duties for the SF Weekly, giving her rare personal insight into those toiling in the wings, but rarely in the spotlight.
Room 416 is the opposite of a nightclub: well-lit, designed for work, no beer on tap. Yet in some ways this formal, wood-paneled place in San Francisco’s City Hall is the most important room in the city’s nightlife. Among its regulars is Entertainment Commission Executive Director Jocelyn Kane, and although the longtime San Franciscan is a hyper-competent administrator with an Ivy League degree in public policy, there’s only one reason she’s here, and that is to rock.
“My first concert was Van Halen, in 1980,” Kane says. “Or ’79?”
Kane loves loud music, then and now, and it’s fascinating to see how straightforwardly she brings that love into the otherwise quiet world of municipal government. “In the code sections, when people talk about the noise ordinances, what they’re really saying is they don’t like the sound they’re hearing,” she says. “So I don’t say ‘noise.’ I say ‘sound.’ Words matter, as you know. I don’t want to look under the code section and see ‘noise.’ I want to see ‘sound.’”

In addition to being a fan, Kane is very, very good at “the business side” of music, the side most musicians will tell you they’re bad at. It’s a rare combination, and to have such a person in charge of regulating music is a boon many San Franciscans may not have considered, considering the alternative. In the late 1990s, Kane says, “The city agreed [with proposing Supervisor Mark Leno] that the place for regulation of nightlife was not the police department.”