Mabuhay Gardens

He booked them on Mondays and Tuesdays to begin with so he could showcase the bands that he featured in Psyclone magazine to existing record executives.

Among the local bands that performed regularly at the Mabuhay Gardens were Avengers, Dead Kennedys, The Contractions, The Nuns, Crime, Dils, Fear, Pearl Harbor and the Explosions, the Tubes and Wall of Voodoo, to name a few.

After Paulson left, Dirk Dirksen (the "pope of punk") booked The Dead Boys, Nico, The Runaways, Devo, X, The Police, SVT, The Go-Go's, Motörhead, Sun Ra and his Arkestra, Patti Smith, Primus, The Jim Carroll Band, and REM, and others.

In order to maintain the show's fast pace, he would move past an encore to get to the next band and tell the audience, "Eat it."

In a 2014 essay, artist Emma Hart reflected on the legacy of Conner's Mabuhay Gardens photographs writing, "Never holding back while photographing punk rock shows at the Mabuhay Gardens, Conner documents his immersion in the scene, breaking the boundary between spectator and performer and providing a lens into the punk world of late 1970s when Mabuhay Gardens, or Fab Mab, emerged as the center of the San Francisco punk club milieu.

The Mabuhay Gardens are referenced in the song "Looking for Lewis And Clark" by the Los Angeles band The Long Ryders on their 1985 album State of the Union.

The Mabuhay Gardens is also featured in Circus of the Sun (2019), J.Macon King's novel set in late Seventies' North Beach.

Jack, the main character in the novel, is in a band that plays its first major gig at the Mabuhay, along with the Dead Kennedys and Pearl Harbor and the Explosions.