Dannielle Spillman dressed like a rockstar, and acted like your best possible grandma. Her death at age 74, near the intersection of Mission and South Van Ness at the hands of a hit-and-run driver was a tragic one. Police arrested the driver, Valentino Cash Amil shortly after, and on Thursday, the District Attorney’s office announced it would charge him with muder.
But the six friends who spoke to Mission Local in the wake of Spillman’s death could only describe gratitude for having known her. She was kind, tall, sweet, generous, funny, bright, they said. She was elegant and deeply caring. She was present, calm and thoughtful.
She often wore black, and dressed in long trench coats and hats in the style of Mick Mars former lead guitarist for Mötley Crüe. Many saw her as a trans elder. She liked daily walks, thrift stores, Rainbow Grocery, bluegrass, ‘70s classic rock and singer songwriter music, hollowbody-type guitars, the Rolling Stones, Wilco, Jeff Tweedy and the Grateful Dead. She greatly enjoyed the recent Joe Satirani and Steve Vai concert at the Fox Theater. Recently, she’d taken up snacking on Japanese purple potatoes.
Spillman loved playing, buying, modifying and trading guitars. One of her regular hangouts was the Guitar Center, at 1645 Van Ness, between California and Sacramento. Connor McKeon, an employee, said that Spillman never showed up empty handed. She would bring sweets, cupcakes and most recently, she stopped by with strawberries.
“Dannielle Spillman was just one of the nicest, most personable people,” said McKeon. “She was someone that would come in to hang out. She knew everyone’s name and she knew all of our backstories.”
Recently, said McKeon, Spillman called the store asking if she had forgotten her ID. “I totally have it right here. It’ll be here for you when you get back,” McKeon remembers telling her over the phone.
But the conversation wasn’t over.
“Then she asked me ‘How are you doing, Connor’?,” McKeon recalled. “I don’t normally speak with customers on such a personal level, but I told Dannielle, ‘I’m actually not doing so good, Dannielle. My grandma passed away.”
Spillman’s response touched McKeon.
“She said ‘her light lives on through you.’ That meant a lot to me,” said an emotional Mckeon. “She felt a little bit like a grandma to me.”
Spillman was also a regular at Real Guitars at 15 Lafayette, near Mission, in South of Market. She would come most days of the week and hang out and talk shop with staff and customers. On one occasion, she brought a cake to celebrate one employee’s birthday, and health food and supplements for one of the shop’s owners during a health scare.
Ben Levin, co-owner of Real Guitars, first began seeing Spillman at the store nearly two decades ago. Though he didn’t know much about her past, Levin said that he’d heard that her dad was in the air force and that she had lived in Norway during her teenage years and later in a commune in Santa Barbara. In 1967, Levin said, Spillman told him that “an air force guy” brought her an LP of Electric Music for the Mind and Body, the first album by Country Joe and the Fish.
“It changed her life. She was like ‘Holy crap, the hell,’” said Levin. “It sort of told her that she could think for herself and that there was this whole world of free expression and this whole San Francisco hippie thing that she was unaware of.” She moved to San Francisco for good about 25 years ago.
“She was part of the family,” said Matt Stevens, an employee at Real Guitars.
Stevens recalled on one occasion playing a Fender Bass Six baritone guitar, sort of a hybrid between a bass and a guitar, that had just come into the shop. “They’re funky and not that many people care about them,” said Stevens. But Spillman noticed him playing the guitar, and the two geeked out over it.
The guitar disappeared off the shop floor, and Stevens didn’t think much of it. Then, this morning, Levin told him where the guitar had gone. Spillman had bought the guitar for Stevens, and was waiting for a special occasion to announce it.
“It’s really special that I get to kind of keep a little piece of her with me,” said Stevens. “It’s just one of those oddball guitars that some people don’t care about, but she and I had a fun little connection over it.”
On Thursday afternoon, a small memorial was set outside the store in Spillman’s memory.
Oswalt Cousins, another Real Guitars’ regular, met Spillman about four years ago. He remembered the last time he talked to her about two weeks ago she had gotten a “big powerful” Marshall amp head and she had just played a show.
“It was just her solo, doing her thing with her pedalboard and her amps,’ said Cousins. “I thought it was funny because the amp she was using just to me seemed like this massive amp for a solo.” She always, he added, had interesting stories.”
She also had more shows coming up, Cousins recalled. She was really excited about it.