Cacophony Society History: San Francisco’s Pranksters, from the Suicide Club to SantaCon

Cacophony Society history begins on a stormy pier and ends, by its members’ own account, with no ending at all. In between, a loose network of San Franciscans walked sewers in evening dress, smashed television sets and sent crowds of identical Santas into the streets. Here is the story from 1977 to 2013, with the places where the members’ accounts disagree.

The Suicide Club: where Cacophony Society history begins

The Suicide Club of San Francisco was “started in 1977 by Gary Warne as a class at San Francisco State University’s free alternative school, Communiversity,” according to a 7×7 interview with John Law on the Cacophony years. Its name came from a Robert Louis Stevenson story.

The founding night is told two ways. A 2025 blog on Warne names four people at Fort Point on January 2, 1977, taking turns holding a chain as waves broke over them; the Society’s own page remembered “a dozen or so San Francisco troublemakers” there. Either way, the club grew from a stormy January night under the Golden Gate Bridge.

Members went in for “naked cable car rides and billboard hacking, plus death-defying stunts like climbing the Golden Gate Bridge.” The club disbanded around 1982, and Law later judged that it “died because it was too insular and paranoid.”

A society anyone could join

“In 1986, four years after the club disbanded, former members founded the Cacophony Society,” 7×7 records. “The big difference was Cacophony was wide open to the public,” Law said. The San Francisco Cacophony Society called itself a network “united in the pursuit of experiences beyond the pale of mainstream society through subversion, pranks, art, fringe explorations and meaningless madness.”

Its tagline, “You may already be a member!”, was literal: “Anybody could be a member,” Law explained. Michael Mikel joined after he “found a newsletter in a coffee shop about the group,” and later edited it. His rule of tone was “to not make fun of people, but to make fun of a certain way of thinking.”

Trips to the Zone

The Society called its outings trips to the Zone, which it defined as “a non-geographic realm of surprise, incongruity and wonder.” Members toured “quirky museums, desert-rat folk-art environments, the haunts of eccentric collectors, cryonics labs, saucer cults, and public sewers.” Readers who know psychogeography and the Situationist drift will recognise the urge.

Carrie Galbraith turned the idea into “basically a road trip to anywhere.” In 7×7’s telling, “The first Zone Trip was to LA. The fourth was the first Burning Man at Black Rock Desert in 1990.”

That story belongs to how the Man reached the desert and the art that followed. Law’s coda: “Many of us dropped out of Burning Man when it began to require rules and regulations.”

Sewers, televisions and Fantasia

“The first event I ever organized was a walking tour of the Oakland sewers,” Law said. Members staged plays on the street and posed as tour guides in Chinatown. When the Doggie Diner heads were threatened, Law asked, “where else but in San Francisco would you get a giant political movement to save a fiberglass dachshund head with a bow tie and chef’s hat?”

Event	What happened	Source
Sewer tours	Walks through the sewers in gowns and tuxedos	MEL Magazine
Fantasia protest	Invented groups against the film’s water-wasting mops; Law’s “most successful media prank”	7×7
Kill Your Television (1994)	About 500 working television sets smashed	7×7; Daily Northwestern
Urban Iditarod	Teams dressed as dogs running shopping carts through the city	Daily Northwestern

The Santa Rampage (1994)

MEL Magazine’s oral history dates SantaCon to 1994 and credits the Cacophony Society; accounts differ on which member had the idea. Law pointed to a precedent, a 1974 Christmas action by the Danish theatre collective Solvognen, whose Santas gave away department store goods.

“The original idea was that everyone would look exactly the same,” Law told The Monthly in a 2013 interview about the Society. It was also “completely non-commercial.” About 100 Santas came the second year.

The Santa Rampage in San Francisco went on to Portland, where in 1996 a Santa with a notepad turned out to be Chuck Palahniuk, who handed Law “a shiny new hardback copy of Fight Club.” Today’s commercial SantaCon bar crawls descend from that game.

Lodges, a book and a quiet ending

Lodges spread city by city; by 2005 the Daily Northwestern counted “30 national and international chapters.” Palahniuk “was a diesel mechanic when he joined Portland Cacophony and when he wrote Fight Club.” From 1998 a second wave was “instrumental in many of the proto-flash mobs” of the early 2000s, Brides of March among them, a thread picked up in our history of flash mobs and staged crowds.

In 2013 Last Gasp published Tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society by Kevin Evans, Carrie Galbraith and John Law, the members’ own account of Cacophony Society history. Law’s verdict on the end: “There was no official end to the group. It just faded away as it became outmoded in the age of immediate communication and the meme.”

When	What
January 1977	The Suicide Club begins at Fort Point
About 1982	The Suicide Club disbands
1986	Former members found the Cacophony Society
1990	The fourth Zone Trip goes to Black Rock
1994	Kill Your Television; the first Santa Rampage
1996	SantaCon in Portland; Fight Club
2005	About 30 chapters
2012 to 2013	A Zone Show, the film Into the Zone and the book

Free play and paid theatre: Antenna Theater

No source records any contact between the Cacophony Society and Antenna Theater. They worked the same Bay Area streets, beaches and, eventually, the same desert from opposite ends.

Law drew the line himself: “Cacophony was free. Stupid and dangerous sometimes. Liberating and even transcendent at its best. It was never a commodity.”

Antenna was a named company led by Chris Hardman, and much of its work was commissioned: the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and the Mark Taper Forum commissioned Adjusting the Idle for their CARPLAYS series. It used the region as a stage too, with plywood look-alikes on Marin sidewalks in 1982, a project the Pacific Sun said “follows this tradition of life interfacing with art”, and a whole town as a stage in 1993. It reached Black Rock by invitation, with Sands of Time at Burning Man in 1999 and Euphor!um in 2001. The full run is in the Antenna Theater chronology of productions.

Aspect	Cacophony Society	Antenna Theater
Who	Anyone could be a member	A named company led by Chris Hardman
Money	Free, never a commodity	Commissions, festivals and paying audiences
Black Rock	A Zone Trip, 1990	Invited artist, 1999 and 2001

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Read on with the Magic Theatre’s history, from a Berkeley bar to Fort Mason, or the story of the Diggers of San Francisco.