Bay of punks: remembering when punk rock invaded San Francisco | Music | The Guardian

n early 1979, photographer Jim Jocoy attended an auction at the Peoples Temple in San Francisco. More than 900 of its worshipers had died in a mass suicide-murder which came to be known as the Jonestown massacre, led to their deaths by activist-turned-doomsday cultist Jim Jones. When Jocoy saw some of the followers’ left-behind luggage, he saw a symbol of Jones’ “hollow, empty promise”, and took a picture. “Jonestown, the assassinations – they worked into the fabric of San Francisco, and unraveled its tapestry,” Jocoy says. “It was quite gloomy, that summer of hate, and punk was the soundtrack.”