When I rang Moonalice leader Roger “Chubby Wombat Moonalice” McNamee, I was enjoying the just-posted video of his band’s Union Square performance. “You can’t enjoy it half as much as we did,” McNamee countered. It was an epic show, by his reckoning. Under towering retailers, the band lured all strata of passersby with their countercultural psychedelia, gathering more than 1,000 listeners within the city’s bustling commercial and communal crossroads.
The band is, at this point, a summertime mainstay in San Francisco’s Union Square — fittingly for McNamee, a man forged of a rare union between capital achievement and populist sentiment. A wildly successful tech investor by “dumb luck,” McNamee is a ’60s child at heart, his belief in creativity’s unifying powers unbroken, his enjoyment of altered states left unaltered. He and his band’s truest investment has been into the arts. Whether it’s in the commissioning of unique poster art for each show, the faithful archiving of every concert, or the fabling of the colorful characters and cannabinoids that compose Moonalice legend and lore, the band has used its lucky position to further the folkloric freedom and tribal togetherness McNamee and his friends grew up with.
“We all grew up as children of the 1960s, when music and poster art were not a business; they were forms of self-expression that were either free or really, really inexpensive,” he said. He fondly remembers days when one could see Pink Floyd for a dollar, or attend the massive Summer Jam at Watkins Glen for $10.50, and feels most would prefer music had remained so accessible.