The Blind Boys of Alabama, Victoria Williams, Creeper Lagoon, Zen Guerrilla, Lysa Flores, DJ Swift Rock, dancers and spoken word artists are helping spread the word about the loss of rehearsal and living space at Take Back San Francisco, a November 5 free concert.

Green Day is making an appearance, according to the band’s Web site. The concert is scheduled to start at 1 p.m., with the Berkeley-based band expected to take the stage around 4:30 p.m. It will mark their only Bay Area appearance this year.

The rally will culminate in a demonstration – dubbed The Million Band March – of musicians, homeless activists and others converging on City Hall. Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett is expected to address the crowd.

The event is to raise awareness of Bay Area gentrification issues in the wake of an invasion by Internet start-ups and the resulting explosion of once-modest rents for rehearsal and housing space in poorer neighborhoods, according to event organizer Ian Brennan.

With San Francisco suddenly awash in quick cash from dot-commers looking for large buildings, such as apartments and warehouses, landlords are reportedly raising the price of lease renewals by as much as three times, if not more. Tenants have been evicted so a building can be leased at top dollar to companies wanting to convert it into office space.

The longtime residents have taken the hardest hit. But another casualty of San Francisco’s meteoric gentrification are the local musicians who have made the warehouses of these neighborhoods their homes.

In the ‘60s, these rehearsal spaces housed bands like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. Metallica, Primus, Joe Satriani, Counting Crows, and Green Day are among the more recent acts that have populated the area.

Close to 1,500 musicians lost their rehearsal homes in one single but notable eviction in August, when the owner of Downtown Rehearsal (used by Chris Isaak, among others) sold the venerable building to a developer.

The timing of the march and concert – just two days prior to election day – is no coincidence. And the message isn’t just for music supporters, Brennan told Pollstar.

“We’re trying to raise awareness about the political stuff that’s on the ballot on Tuesday [November 7] and get them educated on the issues, so that instead of just bitching and moaning, they’re actually putting their energies towards something specific,” Brennan said.

A musician and activist himself, Brennan has successfully staged such events before. In June, he organized the 20th anniversary Food Not Bombs celebration in San Francisco featuring Fugazi, Sleater-Kinney, and Vic Chesnutt. That event attracted 15,000 people.

“A month later Downtown [Rehearsal] closed, and all of a sudden there was this flurry of activity that made me wish I’d never started this. It’s really been a strange, contentious, rivalrous environment to do this in,” Brennan said.

But he’s tried to keep his focus in perspective.

“The gentrification and the homelessness issues are really the broader ones. The musicians’ closures are important, but it’s just one small aspect. When you look at the homelessness in this city, so what if a bunch of musicians get evicted compared to that?”