V. Vale has forgotten that I am coming to interview him at his apartment-office in San Francisco’s North Beach, the book-filled warren where he has held residence since 1970. When I arrive, Marian Wallace, Vale’s wife and business partner, answers the door. I’m told to meet him four blocks away in Washington Square, where he has run into Matt “the Tube” Crowley of the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow by happenstance after attending a documentary about the sideshow the night before. Vale likes to keep room for lucky accidents: his life is orderly, but it can also be pleasingly random. When I finally spot him, he’s the least likely punk survivor you can imagine: a small, black-clad man with a bowl haircut carrying a wheelie suitcase filled with many of the books he’s published under the RE/Search imprint, an outgrowth of his late-’70s punk zine, Search & Destroy.
This essay was adapted from the Alta newsletter, delivered every Thursday.
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For a world-renowned counterculture figure, Vale keeps things intensely local. He’s sold books all over the planet (often in person), but these days, he can be found within a few blocks of his home, going to the post office to ship copies or setting up shop and hawking titles like Modern Primitives and Punk ’77 outside Vesuvio Cafe, when the weather permits. In keeping with punk’s DIY ethos and because he’s basically a one-man operation, he packs his own lunch and carts over his foldout table and his suitcase full of books and zines.
“It gets me out of the house, and I get to meet real people who actually buy my stuff and like my stuff,” Vale tells me. “And believe me, they’re in the minority. You can have a hundred people walk by and not stop, but then one person will say, ‘Oh I’m glad to meet you. You’re the founder of RE/Search. I read you in the ’80s and ’90s.’ That always makes my day.”
Though accessible, Vale is also private. For decades, few knew what the V. in his name stood for (Valhalla, but everyone calls him Vale). When I ask about the veracity of his age on Wikipedia, Vale says, “I think someone dug in. I think someone found my real birthday somehow.… I like to keep it secret. Because take my word for it—it is an ageist society.” He verifies that he was born in the Jerome Relocation Center, a Japanese American internment camp in Arkansas, which closed in 1944, which would put him around 80.
His parents were Japanese American celebrities in their own right: Conrad Yama, an actor who would later appear in The Godfather and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, met Mary Takaoka in the camp. It was a short-lived union. “I think going into the camps made her mentally ill because she was kind of the equivalent of a rock star,” opines Vale. “She had an act called the Three Taka Sisters, and they dressed them in kimonos, and they all played violin and piano and sang, and they actually toured.”
Takaoka, who joined the Seventh-day Adventists while in the camp, would eventually spend time in a psychiatric institution, and from the ages of three to eight, Vale was raised in a series of Adventist-affiliated foster homes. “My favorite foster home—where I had my fourth birthday, I guess—was Peoria, Illinois.… I remember I got as a present a huge top, and I was so disappointed. I said, ‘That’s for a baby.’”
He bounced between California, Colorado, and Illinois until his mother reclaimed him after third grade. “I loved being raised Seventh-day Adventist,” he says. “I think I still am, oddly enough—I’m mostly vegetarian.” Inklings of his anthropological observations began as he noticed the different foodways and habits in the Black and the white foster families. There was no Asian American community in any of these places, so he did not think of himself as part of the mainstream culture. “I knew the names of everyone,” he says. “I don’t think they noticed me, but I noticed them.”
Once back with his mother, who had been released from Norwalk State Hospital after undergoing shock treatments, they stayed in La Sierra in Riverside. “That was the greatest possible place I could have grown up in,” he says. “No crime. They didn’t have a police department. But my mom was crazy, and I got mad ’cause every year she’d insist on moving.”
Chaotic moves prevented the formation of lasting friendships, but there was also postwar racism to contend with. “If you’re the only Asian family in a small town and you’re on welfare, you’re kind of pariahs,” he says.
Vale found solace in books. “I was kind of smart, even way back then,” he says. “There were three libraries in the town, and it got to be 115 degrees every summer ’cause it was a desert. I spent as much time in the libraries just looking at every book I could.”
He started at Sierra College in Rocklin for two years before moving to Berkeley, where he attended UC Berkeley and joined the city’s budding folk music community. “I wrote some bad folk songs,” he admits.
“I remember taking a bus to Haight-Ashbury in the summer of ’65 and seeing all these men with long hair walking down the street, which was, like, crazy,” he recalls. Soon, he found a room to rent at 624 Ashbury; discovered the Tibetan Book of the Dead; heard “ear-opening” music from all over the world, like Indonesian gamelan; and threw himself into the scene.
He modestly refers to this time as “the hippie thing,” which massively undersells the fact that he was the keyboardist and a founding member of the proto-punk band Blue Cheer, best known for its rendition of “Summertime Blues.”
Living through the Beat and the hippie moments, Vale was keen on punk’s potential when it arrived in San Francisco. Search & Destroy prided itself on interviewing musicians about their whole lives, not merely participating in press junkets for current records. He also covered filmmakers Russ Meyer and David Lynch as well as literary figures like William S. Burroughs and J.G. Ballard.
In 1980, Vale met partner Andrea Juno, and in 1984, they started publishing books under the RE/Search imprint. Titles like Industrial Culture Handbook, Angry Women, Pranks!, Incredibly Strange Films, and Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition were eye-opening in their anthropological examination of extremes. By bringing subcultures to the masses, these books inspired a generation of outcasts and weirdos who’d found their guides and, for some, communities. (Vale and Juno would part ways by 1995.)
Now with the first punk cohort becoming senior citizens, I ask Vale about his massive collection of ephemera and archives. Where will Vale’s papers, a virtual history of underground culture, end up? “If I thought about it for one minute, I’d rather my stuff went to a university that’s gonna be there in a hundred years,” he says.
Legacy is a funny idea for people, like Vale, who made their bones in punk—a subculture whose adherents once proudly proclaimed that there was “no future.” But decades on, the legacy of punk can be found within prestigious institutions. In 2003, NYU’s Fales Library & Special Collections acquired Richard Hell’s papers, and this year, the New York Public Library bought a near-complete set of the East Village Eye. Vale’s papers are a valuable resource for anyone interested in radical cultures created before the internet popularized and commodified every form of dissent.
Even as he’s dabbled in email newsletters and podcasts, Vale believes in the power of print in a digital era. “I like zines and books because they migrate all over the world, and in theory, you can’t change a word after you did it,” he says. “It’s not like online, where it’s so easy to change anything. I don’t have faith in the eternal longevity of the internet, even though there’s so much stuff there. There’s also been so much stuff that’s already lost.”
As our interview winds down, Vale brings some leftovers from a nearby diner home to Wallace. The city has continued to change around him, but Vale remains the mayor of his small stretch of home turf. Strangers who stop by his street-corner pop-ups may not know the whole story, but they probably suspect that this charmingly low-key figure is more than meets the eye. Documentary filmmakers Sandi Tan (Shirkers) and Sam Green (The Weather Underground) recently posted footage of Vale, teasing a possible film about him.
He may have grown up without a sense of community, but all the weirdos inspired by RE/Search feel connected to his legacy and come to pay their tributes to a godfather of counterculture.•
