California and the West : San Diego Has Hole in Its Soul: No City Song : Image: Mayor seeks an anthem worthy of the self-proclaimed ‘America’s Finest City.’ There are contenders, but a champion to rival other cities’ classics is hard to find.

SAN DIEGO — What do you give the city that thinks it has everything? A city song, of course.

San Diego, whose official motto is “America’s Finest City,” is now looking for America’s Finest City Song.

Official or unofficial, New York, Chicago and San Francisco have city songs. For singing out loud, even suburban Encinitas (“Unpretentious, genu-wine folks/Palms and pines and little live oaks”) has a city song.

“We want a song that is upbeat and positive,” said the press secretary to San Diego Mayor Susan Golding.

Like a low-level virus, the need to burnish the city’s image with a city song breaks out every few years in San Diego. In the 1960s, for example, the locally written “Lovely San Diego--Heaven on Earth” was under consideration by the City Council but got hooted down by the local newspaper editorial page.

This time, the mayor is determined not to be sidetracked by artistic, political or journalistic disagreement. Golding is down to her final year and a few months; it’s legacy time.

Ask for a song and everybody has a tune.

Jack Wheaton, pianist and president of the American Federation of Musicians Local 325 in San Diego, has submitted “San Diego,” with lyrics like:

I’d like to tell you ‘bout my hometown

Another city by the bay.

No cable cars, or Hollywood stars

Just beauty and sunshine every day.

Wheaton gives his song a kind of Sinatra-like insouciance; you can almost see the raincoat thrown rakishly across his shoulder.

In the name of artistic license, however, he must be forgiven for the line “Coronado is the island.” There would not be much singability in a line like: “Coronado is a peninsula connected to the mainland by a narrow strip of land called the Strand leading to Imperial Beach.”

The cowboy-hatted Leo J. Porter, who serenades passersby at Balboa Park with a blend of country-western and gospel, has submitted “San Diego, What a Town.” Think of it as a mix of Jose Feliciano and Charley Pride, done with a calypso beat.

You can be there at your leisure, at the mountains or the lighthouse at Cabrillo

Spend the day at Sea World or take a stroll along the beach with your amigo. . . .

San Diego, it will never let you down, it’s a lively kind of town.

San Diego, so many opportunities. Be what you want to be in San Diego. . . .”

If resumes count, Porter, 55, is the quintessential San Diegan: A Midwesterner by birth, he first came to San Diego when he was in the Navy. He’s trying to break into show business and works as a relief manager for a self-storage business.

“San Diego deserves a song it can be proud of,” said Porter, expressing a sentiment considered beyond question at City Hall.

He has edited out a line about how San Diego’s spirit “makes you high.” The phrase was innocent, but he does not want anyone to infer a sly reference to controlled substances.

Boosters of the song “San Diego,” written by the late composer-lyricist Robert Austin, are making a preexisting claim to the mantle of official civic song. The song is still sung at festivals and other special occasions by the Mission Basilica San Diego de Alcala Choir.

It was written for the play “My Cousin Josefa,” an original drama performed as part of the city’s bicentennial celebration in 1969. Set in San Diego’s Old Town in the early 1800s, the story involves the romance between a young Spanish girl and a dashing Army captain.

There is a mayoral proclamation issued in 1969 on behalf of the song, but the current City Hall thinking is that the song was the official bicentennial song, not the official forever song. As such, “San Diego” is under consideration but with no advantage.

It’s not as if big names have avoided using San Diego in their songs. But there are problems with some of them.

The breezy male chauvinism of Mel Torme’s “They Go to San Diego” was fine for its era but won’t pass political muster today with its lines about “little old ladies.”

The downbeat references to prostitution in Bruce Springsteen’s “Balboa Park” make it a loser for sure. The Boss seems to have soured on San Diego since his earlier “Rosalita,” with its upbeat reference to “a pretty little place in Southern California, down San Diego way/A little cafe. . . .”

The San Diego band Sprung Monkey has given the world “Get ‘Em Outta Here,” which is chockablock with San Diegoiana. Surely few at City Hall would quibble with “San Diego girls they drive me crazy,” but that stuff about crackheads, wannabe porn stars and (male) sailors in high heels is never going to fly with city officials.

Not that Sprung Monkey--which has two CDs out and is busy on the touring circuit--meant the song as a slam at San Diego. As the group sees it, the song is a paean to the beach lifestyle, with a plea for civic betterment.

“There’s a great scene down here: jazz, house, punk, ska, reggae, rock, everything,” said lead singer Steve Summers. “The chorus is all the things we don’t like.

“Aggro cops, violent, hate crime-type people, wannabe gangsters--get ‘em outta here.”

The song decision will be up to the City Council. The winnowing process, by a committee run by the mayor’s chief of protocol, is informal, and such ticklish problems as royalties are yet to be addressed.

Still, City Hall presses on, yes, with a song in its civic bosom.