Raging tempers, raving stupidity and a rampant virus—2021 was enough to make your head explode

Going viral used to be a good thing in Silicon Valley. As we head into the third year of spikes and shutdowns, the phrase that connoted the rapid spread of a popular item lost its cachet when its literal manifestation played out in such a clumsy and inconvenient way.

Gas, coffee and computer chip shortages—these were all part of the Great Supply Chain Disruption of 2021. On top of those woes, essential employees were in short supply. Teachers. Hospital workers. Truck drivers. It’s a situation partly COVID-related, but also driven by baby boomers hitting retirement, and a drop in immigration.

One thing that was not in short supply in 2021: Disasters, natural and otherwise.

The shitshow began on Jan. 6, when a crowd of boys who have little to be proud of assaulted Capitol Police officers with bear spray and flagpoles, entered the Capitol and terrorized elected representatives of Congress and their staffs. And January didn’t bring an end to attacks on elected officials. Members of city councils and school boards alike have heard from angry citizens who seem hell-bent on exposing themselves (and their children) to the coronavirus and its emerging variants, rejecting masks, vaccines and science in general.

Explosive anger was a top contender for emotion of the year in 2021. Toxic workplace frustration reached a zenith in the South Bay on May 26, when ten people were killed at a Valley Transportation Authority rail yard in San Jose—including the gunman, 57-year-old VTA employee Samuel James Cassidy.

In the summer, Mother Nature erupted, serving up multiple catastrophic fires, spreading haze throughout the state. The ferocity of the flames linked to climate change—also the culprit in the growing number of areas experiencing drought. Locally, the Santa Clara Valley Water District declared a water shortage emergency in June.

In between all the disasters, natural and human-made, life went on.

January

This Game ‘Stonks’

Protesters threw stinky substances at the Menlo Park headquarters of Robinhood, an online stock trading app, after it halted trading in old school video game retailer GameStop. The move came after Redditors pushed its market cap up from a little over $1 billion to more than $34 billion in less than a month. The runup, which of course involved Elon Musk and was foreshadowed by San Jose financial savant Michael Burry, required investment house Melvin Capital to undertake an emergency raise of $2.75 billion, more than the gross domestic product of 40 nations, to cover its short positions. Michael Jordan lost a half billion of his personal net worth, but he’ll make it up in overtime.

The Impeachment Queen

San Jose congressional representative Zoe Lofgren, the one member of Congress to work three presidential impeachments, got to notch four with the second impeachment of Donald Trump in 2021. As a congressional staffer to Rep. Don Edwards, she participated in the impeachment investigation of Richard Nixon, then served as a member on the House Judiciary Committee during the Bill Clinton impeachment.

February

Your Best Buys

Venerable San Jose-based retailer Fry’s Electronics shut its stores and website in a move that was not fully unexpected but still came as a surprise. For 36 years, the chain had been an icon of Silicon Valley and one of the biggest supporters of local sports teams, math institutes and arts organizations, but in the end, rising real estate values and continuing brick and mortar retail woes made it more financially interesting to make its properties available for development.

Birth of the Lost Weeknd Meme

For some folks who couldn’t care less about sportsball, Super Bowl memes have surpassed Super Bowl ads as the best thing about the big game—and 2021 produced a good one. The Weeknd’s halftime performance of “I Can’t Feel My Face”—2015’s number-one hit that may not actually be about cocaine (yeah…right) and has been memefied widely—resulted in a GIF that makes the Canadian singer appear, indeed, to be gacked on blow. Of course, it’s not as good as the ICFMF meme of the frozen-dead Jack Nicholson from The Shining.

March

Enter the NFT

For the average Joe, the evolution of caring about non-fungible tokens (NFTs) started and ended in 2021. But the hype of these collectible digital files took off in March, after artist Mike Winkelmann, better known online as Beeple, sold an NFT for $69 million—earning him the title of third-most expensive living artist. Underpinned by blockchain technology, folks in the worlds of fin-tech, crypto and Silicon Valley start-ups have been pining to be on the starting line of NFTs ever since, whether or not anyone else cares about owning these unique (yet arguably easily reproducible) digital files.

First Class Mouth

The Bay Area has its fair share of critics. But ignoring the usual ammo about housing prices, a foul-mouthed Southwest Airlines pilot’s tirade about the region’s propensity for electric cars was captured on hot mic over the Mineta San Jose International Airport’s air traffic control scanner:: “F—king weirdos, probably driving around in f—king Hyundais, f—king roads and s—t that go slow as f—k,” and, “You don’t have balls unless you’re f—king rolling coal, man, goddamn it.” Without any context given from the FAA, maybe it’s a good thing that this pilot heretofore sticks to the skies.

Learning the Alphabet

The Delta variant of the COVID-19 coronavirus—named after the fourth letter in the Greek alphabet—hit the United States in March. The first “variant of interest” to make the global rounds, it wouldn’t be the last in 2021. We’re already up to number 15.

April

Elon Musk: I Am Not Normal

If Elon Musk were truly “the id of tech,” as Kara Swisher claims, he would do anything to satisfy his companies’ appetites and never take no for an answer—in case you’ve misplaced your Freud. On an earnings call in April, he admitted (or bragged) that Tesla “literally raided every electronics store in the Bay Area” because its Fremont plant had run out of USB cables. Following that display, he hosted SNL, where he admitted (bragged) that he has Asperger’s, and offered this non-apology for his occasionally antisocial behavior: “I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars on a rocketship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?“

Not So Noble Nobel 

Stanford University computer science professor Jeffrey Ullman was awarded the industry’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize—given to achievements like the World Wide Web and Pixar’s CGI tech—for textbooks he authored. However, celebrations quickly turned sour after 78-year-old Ullman defended past blog posts questioning Iranian students’ loyalties, intentions and abilities amid the decades-long, oil-driven U.S.-Iran crisis, and rationalized land theft from Native Americans as par for the course in human history. More than 1,000 signatures were collected urging the Association for Computing Machinery to reconsider its ethics and diversity standards—especially following the reckoning over racial justice throughout 2020.

May

Housing Chaos, Cupertino Style

At a meeting on May 5, the Cupertino City Council made what looked and smelled like a cynical move to take advantage of state housing-density incentives without actually creating more affordable housing units. “We’re not in a dictatorship,” Mayor Darcy Paul said, citing “locality rights”—don’t bother looking for that term in a legal dictionary. Apparently, the mayor had not seen a letter that arrived the previous day from the California Department of Housing and Community Development specifically kiboshing the ordinance he championed. Three weeks later, City Manager Deb Feng resigned abruptly.

Tit for Tat

Months before any 2022 elections, political mudslinging started off with a bang in May. In an interview with Metro’s Fly column, Santa Clara County Assessor Larry Stone said his opponent “Gary Kremen is sucking the tit of the union.” The 80-year-old’s immediate regret proved accurate; the Silicon Valley Democratic Club censured Stone, calling for his resignation and an apology. At least 75% of members felt the quote was “offensive, sexist, misogynistic and anti-worker.” Stone jabbed back while apologizing, accusing Kremen of “toxic behavior” on the Valley Water District board and “[profiting] from the exploitation of women” by owning the URL sex.com. Who knew the race to assess property taxes could get so steamy?

June

Let It Flea

Vendors at the San Jose Flea Market began a 50-hour hunger strike to protest plans to replace their businesses with $2.5 billion worth of high-density, transit-friendly housing near the new Berryessa BART station. Council unanimously approved the development after the Bumb family doubled its relocation assistance to the 430 vendors to $5 million.

Was it the Pro or the Mini?

Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Eric Geffon dismissed bribery charges against Apple global security chief and gun permit seeker Thomas Moyer for an alleged offer to give 700 iPads to the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s department. The judge called the case “pure speculation…not supported by the evidence.”

Purse Snatchers

Pandemic-closed shopping centers reopened, but some uninvited guests appeared. In what turned out to be practice runs for the holiday season, thieves stole 36 handbags valued at more than $100,000 from Louis Vuitton at the Stanford Shopping Center. The previous month, a group of ten made off with 43 bags worth $150,000 at the same center’s Neiman Marcus store.

July

A Very Big Electrical Fire

Global climate change, a century of forest mismanagement and a stretch of uninsulated PG&E power lines conspired to create the Dixie Fire—the second-biggest wildfire in California history, which erupted in July and burned nearly a million acres. Only one of those causes could be held liable in a court of law: PG&E now predicts it will lose $1 billion due to lawsuits on this fire alone.

Scan to Read

If having a successful 2021 was a competition, the QR code might just come out on top. The barcode’s pixelated cousin—first introduced in 1994—replaced paper menus at restaurants, karaoke song lists at bars and eventually California’s oversized paper vaccination cards throughout the pandemic. Despite concerns of excluding poor, unhoused and technologically averse folks, the accelerated rollout of this mark across the country means it’s likely here to stay.

Terror to the Highest Bidder

The bizarre dust still hasn’t settled at eBay Inc., two years after (former) high-ranking executives waged an “aggressive cyberstalking campaign” to stifle two journalists running an online ecommerce newsletter—complete with live cockroaches, a bloody pig mask and a book about surviving the death of a spouse. Alongside ex-eBayers’ criminal charges, the victims outside of Boston, Massachusetts, filed a civil lawsuit against the Silicon Valley giant in July, for conspiring to “intimidate, threaten to kill, torture, terrorize, stalk and silence” the couple.

August

DA Disqualified

Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen’s entire office was disqualified from prosecuting attorney Christopher Schumb, and all charges were dropped against him. Schumb had been charged with bribery after he took meetings and made a phone call on behalf of a Facebook bodyguard who wanted a gun permit and made an overly generous political contribution to an independent expenditure committee in support of Sheriff Laurie Smith.

Email Me

Mayor Sam Liccardo’s reputation as a champion of transparency took a nosedive when a digital news site started by adversaries caught him using his personal email account to skirt public records disclosure requirements. Earlier in 2021, Liccardo had instructed a constituent—in writing and on a government server—to email his private account and noted that he would be deleting the thread. San Jose Spotlight gleefully reported the disclosure, with an assist by an attorney who’d previously represented labor machine think tank Working Partnerships.

Fly Over Like a Lead Balloon

A years-long debate about the future of Reid-Hillview Airport finally came to a head in August, after an airborne lead study found elevated blood lead levels within 17,000 samples from children under the age of 18 living in residential neighborhoods nearby. Despite ongoing tests and pushback from private aviation enthusiasts, the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors voted to ground operations as early as January 2022—contingent upon approval from the Federal Aviation Administration.

The Freedom to Infect

San Jose has been able to boast the highest percentage of vaccinated people among the ten biggest cities in the US since nurses started putting shots in arms. In August, a month after the city passed the 85 percent mark, Mayor Sam Liccardo proposed a way to encourage the holdouts by mandating proof-of-vax-status at city-owned venues including the Convention Center, California Theatre and Shark Tank. Proving the need for such a law, angry, unmasked protesters shut down the council meeting where the plan ultimately passed unanimously.

September

Magic the Gathering

Following a nod from the California Attorney General’s office, attention (and investment) in psychedelics such as psilocybin mushrooms picked up steam. The California Psilocybin Initiative was allowed to start gathering signatures for a 2022 ballot measure to either legalize or decriminalize the cultivation and sale of “magic mushrooms.” Since the government has never been known to make decisions speedily, this appeal directly to the Golden State’s voters may be the most promising progress, after several failed attempts at legislation over the years. Who knows if growing medical research and shifting public opinion will be enough to make psychedelics groovy in the eyes of the law.

Take This Job

Long a hotbed of contentment, civility and smooth jazz, Los Gatos became a front of the culture war this month when a handful of folks showed up at a series of city council meetings to voice their concerns about LGBTQ “terrorists,” “communist” Mayor Marico Sayoc, BLM, CRT, etc. During public comments, one angry mom complained that the youth-services organization Sayoc heads as her day job is trying to turn the mom’s “beautiful, beautiful daughter” into a boy. After a commenter got personal about Sayoc’s school-aged son, the mayor’s husband burst into Town Hall hurling F-bombs and demanding that the protesters cease harassing his family at their home. The mayor of Los Gatos receives a $570 monthly stipend for her thankless job.

In the Company of Friends

Downtown councilmember Raul Peralez saw his hopes of becoming San Jose’s mayor grow more distant when his mentor and political ally decided she wanted the job herself. Supervisor Cindy Chavez trotted out two residents of two San Jose suburbs—Monte Sereno and Gilroy—to endorse her bid, but the announcement lost some lustre when energy company lobbyist Carl Guardino’s meeting calendar surfaced and a shootout at a Halloween party at the family home of Gilroy Councilwoman Rebeca Armendariz left three young attendees wounded and one in the morgue. Chavez rebounded by announcing endorsements from 49ers co-owner Jed York and the team’s former safety, Ronnie Lott, neither of whom live in San Jose.

October

Never Meta Man

On Oct. 5, whistleblower Frances Haugen testified before the Senate Commerce Committee that Facebook knowingly hurts children and the rest of us because of its excessive interest in growth and profit. A month earlier, the company had to apologize because its algorithm identified black men as “primates.” On Oct. 28. it was reported that Facebook had decided to quit Facebook in one important way, and changed its name to Meta. That is, as we used to say, soooo meta.

TikTok Paved the Way Out of San Jose

It’s not every day a couple of San Jose high school students find themselves on stages at The Late Show and Lollapalooza. But it’s somewhat fitting that Peach Tree Rascals’ first song—produced in a backyard shed in the shadow of Silicon Valley—went viral (and gold) on social platforms like Spotify and TikTok. Thousands of fans online and at shows have since set Peach Tree Rascals on track to join San Jose’s long list of musical exports—from the Doobie Brothers and Los Tigres del Norte, to Shinobu and Smash Mouth.

November

Small Plate Special

A wave of smash and grab robberies hit San Jose’s Westfield Valley Fair, Oakridge and Eastridge malls. Hammer-wielding, hoodie-wearing thieves helped themselves to cologne, perfume, jewelry and other goodies. In response to the retail robberies, the San Jose City Council voted to spend $250,000 to expand the city’s automatic license plate reader program. The Electronic Frontier Foundation found that 1.6 million plates were scanned and stored in 2020 by SJPD.

Beautiful and Deadly

Highway 280 is touted (unironically) as California’s most beautiful freeway. This is largely due to the work of environmentalists and elected officials who together preserved land in the Santa Cruz Mountains and the foothills that the highway traverses—pretty, and excellent wildlife habitat. For that very reason, 280 is California’s deadliest freeway when it comes to wildlife—roadkill on the highway is estimated to cost the state almost $6 million a year. Enter the Roadkill app, built by Los Gatos resident Michael Schneider, who hopes to activate “citizen scientists” to digitally mark locations of unfortunate critters so their carcasses can be repurposed for food and taxidermy.

Fallon Finally Falling

The statue of Thomas Fallon raising the American flag in San Jose for the first time in 1846 was controversial from the minute it was proposed in 1988. Then-Mayor Tom McEnery, a historian and, like Fallon, a proud Irishman, intended the statue to commemorate the beginning of what he calls San Jose’s “American period.” Others, including local Chicano activists, saw the 16-foot-tall statue of a white man on a stallion as a celebration of American imperialism. While Fallon might not be guilty of crimes as heinous as those committed by other bronzed heroes who have been toppled in recent years, the San Jose City Council unanimously decided to end 33 years of controversy and vote him off the traffic island.

December

Zoom Bomb

Just days after getting a $750 million cash infusion, direct mortgage lender Better.com CEO Vishal Garg fired 900 people during the holiday season in a company-wide Zoom call. “If you’re on this call, you are part of the unlucky group that is being laid off,” CNN Business reported he said, after reviewing a transcript of the call.

Santa Clara Mission Impossible

December was an emotionally rough month for Santa Clara University. While the women’s soccer team managed to host and play in the NCAA’s College Cup, protests about mental health services (or lack thereof) erupted on the other side of campus, after three students died within weeks of each other—without much of a peep from administration as classes held finals.

When Politicians Select Their Voters

In 2008, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger upended California’s political landscape by spearheading a citizens’ initiative campaign that wrenched the power to draw political boundaries from politicians. The initiative created the California Citizens Redistricting Commission, which in the final days of 2021, released a map of new congressional and state legislative districts. The Santa Clara Board of Supervisors did things the old-fashioned way—redrawing districts that appear to benefit themselves and allied interest groups such as labor unions. Controversies erupted over splitting up the downtown district and separating Los Gatos from the South Valley to ensure that the board’s only historically conservative to moderate seat leans woke in future contests.

Entre Theranos

If you couldn’t get a Wifi signal over the last week, it was because everyone in Silicon Valley was sucking up bandwidth trying to find out if the Elizabeth Holmes jury had come back with a verdict. As the year wound to a close, they still hadn’t, and murmurs about the possibility of a mistrial ensued. Jurors have dropped like flies since the trial began on Sept. 8. One was dismissed for work hardship, another for anxiety and a third for—get this—playing Sudoku. At this point, though, prosecutors may not mind a second shot at Holmes, after what many thought was an open-and-shut case backed by a long trail of texts, doctored reports and secretly recorded investor meetings. Holmes’ lawyers threw out a lot of excuses for her multimillion-dollar fraud—including blaming journalists for not catching her (even though John Carreyrou actually did)—but in the end it may all hinge on whether the jury bought her doe-eyed, failing-memory “Who, me?” shtick.

2021, like 2020 before it, is a year that looks best in the rearview mirror. The last twelve months have been filled with all manner of, let’s say, bumps in the road—new COVID variants, pervasive supply chain issues, decreased unemployment benefits and the looming restart of student loan payments. There’s no shortage of reasons to celebrate the final calendar day of 2021.

Locally, the celebration will take many forms around the South Bay this New Year’s Eve, from dance nights to black tie affairs, Gatsby parties to historical light shows.

One of the more popular themes this year is the Bollywood party, an event style that promises to bring plenty of rhythm, romance and excitement to the last night of the year.

The wealth of Bollywood-themed options available this year speaks to the continued vibrancy of the region’s South Asian culture. Just 40 years ago, the Indian-American population of Santa Clara County consisted of little more than 5,000 people. As of 2015, Pew Research Center listed San Jose as the fourth largest Indian-American population in the US, totaling roughly 160,000 individuals.

Both Cupertino and Milpitas are now majority Asian cities, with South Asians making up a large part of the group. Many come to the area for work, or to be near family, or simply to plug into what has become a booming and fertile South Asian immigrant community. For years, Indian grocery stores have been a common sight among the South Bay’s strip malls; in 2014 the Towne Theatre on the Alameda became a dedicated Bollywood theatre. These days, cricket is also becoming popular in the South Bay, with clubs emerging and pick-up games bowled in local parks.

This New Year’s Eve, multiple event promoters around the South Bay are holding Bollywood-style parties for the area’s booming South Asian population—as well as everyone simply interested in having a good time. Mountain View, Milpitas, Sunnyvale, San Jose and Fremont all have Bollywood New Year’s Eve events planned, ranging from themed nights at established clubs—like San Jose’s Back Bar and Opal in Mountain View—to one-off parties at event spaces.

At My Royal Palace—a huge, 6,000-square-foot banquet hall off Calaveras in Milpitas—local promoter Vamsha Events is hosting a “Bollywood Bash” inspired by glitzy, one-stop parties in Vegas.

“We wanted to take it to an upper notch,” says Vamsha founder Rimpy Gill. “We’re creating a Las Vegas style club experience right here in the Bay. I’m really excited.”

Vamsha (which, in Hindi, means “lineage,” or “family”) came into existence during the pandemic when Gill, a 25-year veteran of supply chain management, took the opportunity to reassess her life’s path.

“We were all in that reflective mode of ‘one life to live,’ and [I decided to do] what I always wanted to do, which is creative events.”

Prior to starting Vamsha, Gill had plenty of experience attending events like these, and had planned several of her own large-scale parties for friends and family—including a few at My Royal Palace. Vamsha’s Halloween party (which would have been the event company’s first major ticketed event) was canceled in the planning phases due to the Delta variant. Now, however, they’re ready for the party to begin in earnest.

Included in the festivities for the Bollywood Bash are dinner and dancing, a DJ and live dholi (Indian drummers), a balloon drop at midnight and a cruise-ship-inspired wristband system for drinks.

“A Bollywood party has to have lots of dancing, music, food and alcohol. We are all about having fun,” Gill says. But for the party to really go off, one item in particular has to be right.

“Music is what’s going to rock the party, right?”

Musically, Bollywood Bash reflects the characteristic diversity of the South Bay, with hip hop and top 40 being mixed with desi and bhangra hits—a style of dance music popular among the Indian diaspora in the UK.

“It’s very upbeat and fast music,” Gill says.

To illustrate, she shares an experience she had on a cruise in the years before COVID. One night, after hours of music, the ship’s dancefloor had gone quiet.

“I gave my phone to the DJ and said, ‘would you mind playing a few songs for us?’ One of them was a bhangra song, and believe it or not, the moment he turned it on, everyone who was sitting down got up and started dancing. It’s so cool and so loud, it actually makes you get up and dance.”

Bolly Tadka—an event company run by promoter Anjali Sharma—has two separate Bollywood nights planned this New Year’s Eve: one in downtown San Jose at Back Bar, and another at the Urban Grill banquet hall in Sunnyvale.

“Ideal Bollywood style events will have the latest Bollywood songs, a live Bollywood DJ and attendees are encouraged to wear Indian outfits,” Sharma says over email, promising a lively night of music in Hindi, Punjabi, Telugu and English.

2022 will be Bolly Tadka’s fifth year as a Bay Area event promoter. Sharma says preparing for something like a New Year’s Eve event takes at least a month of effort: decorations and props must be secured, music and dinner prepared.

With the Omicron variant currently on the rise around the Bay Area, and predicted to cast a dark shadow over this winter, safety is also a primary concern.

“We’re checking vaccinations,” says Gill at the Bollywood Bash. “In the end, it’s about the community. We want to be sure everyone can go back home and hug their families.”

And after the uncertainty, pervasive sense of danger and general disruption of 2020-2021, more than anything, the organizers of this year’s Bollywood events want to relieve some of the community’s stress.

“It’s about getting the message out that it’s okay to have fun,” Gill says. “We are so hard on ourselves. We are very family oriented, taking care of kids and the elderly. It’s ok to take time for yourself. It’s okay to go out. In the end, when you get old and you’re on that rocking chair, you should have a lot of good memories that make you smile.”

If you’ve never considered how essential J&P Cosentino Family Farm is to the very identity of the South Bay, you’re not alone. In fact, the history of the farm—now just a tiny two acres surrounded on all sides by the sprawling metropolis that is Silicon Valley—is one of being underappreciated, unloved and counted out.

And yet, this oasis of some of the world’s most exquisite fruit, this orchard that provides one of the last remaining links to Santa Clara County’s history as the agricultural mecca dubbed the “Valley of the Heart’s Delight” by John Muir, continues to survive and thrive after three-quarters of a century.

It has outlasted the development-driven government officials who plowed Highway 85 through the plot in 1994, cutting it down to less than a quarter of its size. The farm has weathered decades of tech development that brought shiny high-rises to San Jose and ag-land-swallowing, condominium-building fever to the suburbs. And generation by generation, it’s won over each member of the Cosentino family that owns and stewards it—despite the fact that they all started out resenting and even flat-out rejecting the farm at the heart of their family’s legacy.

That includes 90-year-old Phil Cosentino, the man who would come to make the farm his life’s work. He was a teenager when his father first purchased the land in 1945—and back then, he wanted nothing to do with it.

“I hated, hated this place,” says Phil, sitting on a bench on the edge of the orchard, where the branches of the trees that produce local favorites like Babcock peaches and Santa Rosa plums are now bare, but others are bursting with pomegranates, persimmons and other post-summer fruits. “My father bought 10 acres, but he actually wanted to buy more. He wanted to buy 100 acres. And he had looked at other properties, but decided that wasn’t going to happen, because the four of us—me and my three brothers—we hated working here. We were arguing with him all the time. ‘We don’t want to work here, we don’t want to work here.’ So my mother told my father, ‘You know, you better find something for these kids to do, because they’re going to leave.’”

In other words, it’s no coincidence that the family opened the first Cosentino’s Market in 1948. Phil and his brothers did run the markets—which unsurprisingly specialized in top-of-the-line produce, and expanded into three stores around the South Bay—for 63 years; the last Cosentino’s, on South Bascom Avenue, closed in 2011.

But for Phil, something fundamental changed during that time. In the early ’70s, he and his wife Jean (the “J&P” in the farm’s name) built a home on the family’s 10 acres. Almost all of the fruit trees there had already been razed, and the land was slated for development. But Phil—who had always liked to grow things, but found himself too busy at the market—was beginning to have a change of heart. It came to a head after he read a story in the newspaper about a man who wanted to start a little farm, but was caught up in bureaucratic red tape.

“It was a real tearjerker of a story,” he says. “I told my wife, ‘You know, we have what this guy would die for, and we’re letting it go. I really like this place the way it is.’”

By that time, Phil and his brothers had split ownership of the land four ways, and when he told them he wanted to buy them out, they thought he was crazy. But buy them out he did, and that same year he began transforming the Cosentino land into a farm again.

“The first year I probably planted maybe 70 or 80 trees, and then every winter I’d plant more,” he says.

Today, there are 552 trees in all, and the urban farm that Phil made his passion project half a century ago is now changing hands again, as his daughters Kari Cosentino, Janine Cosentino and Mary Forman take over ownership of the J&P Cosentino Family Farm.

Among the many things the farm has survived are decades of general consumer indifference to where their fruit is grown and how it tastes, and to the fact that they are living on top of some of the most incredible fruit-producing soil in the world. Now that is shifting, as a new generation of foodies and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) fanatics spread word of Cosentino’s unique (and Instagram-ready) plums, pluots, apricots, apples and other fruits across social media and by word of mouth.

Kari says that although she and her sisters now have their own lives and careers, they have all come back to manage and work at the farm because the alternative would be to sell it—probably to developers—and “we could never let that happen.” She’s watched the last remaining orchards in other parts of the South Bay be sold off, one by one, and it disturbs her.

“What will we have left?” she asks. “Where’s this area’s charm and heart, without some connection to the past? I think that is where San Jose has lost so much of its identity.”

STAND IN THE PLACE WHERE YOU LIVE

With the stores long gone, locals now discover J&P Cosentino Family Farm through its fruit stand on Carter Avenue, at the edge of the orchard now squished between residential homes in the Cambrian neighborhood and Highway 85 near the Camden Avenue exit. It’s been there for decades, and Phil explains that it’s been added to and upgraded four times over the years.

“It started real little, and then got bigger and bigger—bigger this way, bigger that way,” he says. “I built this for Mary and Kari when they were in grammar school. It wasn’t for me, I was working full time. I grew the fruit, and we sold a lot of it at the store, but it gave them something to do. And this is what they did all through grammar school, high school.”

Like their father, Mary and Kari weren’t exactly thrilled by farm work when they were kids.

“I don’t remember a time when we weren’t working in the orchard,” says Mary. “Kari and I joke we were like complete slave child labor out there. I remember being out there in the summer, and as kids, we thought everything was the worst ever. You know, 150 degrees, out there for 18 hours—it wasn’t, and we weren’t, but that’s how it felt as a kid.”

“Summer was working at the fruit stand,” says Kari of growing up in the early ’80s. “My sister and I would sit on the lawn, play Monopoly and run out when there was a customer. And my parents let us buy all the ice cream we wanted from the ice cream man. Every day, we’d buy a ton of ice cream and gum—that was our payment for working. And that was every summer, besides doing tasks we didn’t like to do like cutting apricots and packing peaches. You know, very sticky and dirty, dirty work. Back then we had metal irrigation pipes that we would move through the orchard when we needed to irrigate. And so my sister and I—I mean, I remember being, like, eight and helping to move irrigation pipes. And we didn’t have any mulch down, so it was just dirt and mud up to your knees. Well, as a kid, it’s like mud up to your thighs. We would lose shoes and our parents would be like, ‘Where are your shoes?’ ‘Well, they’re somewhere in the orchard in the mud. They came off a long time ago.’”

But also like their father, their attitude about life on the farm has shifted dramatically over the years.

“I mean, we bitched about it all the time, but looking back on it, that was amazing stuff,” says Mary. “Kids didn’t get to do that. There was the work part, but it was also, like, our playground.”

For Janine, it’s different. She was the child of Phil’s previous marriage, and her parents divorced when she was three. By the time Phil replanted the orchard, Janine was a teenager, living with her mom in Los Gatos. She did work in the markets, and visited the orchard, but after high school, she got married and moved away, and didn’t return to the area until the 2000s. So her devotion to the farm now is not so much about the time she had there as the time she didn’t have.

“I love spending time with my dad that I didn’t get to spend with him growing up,” she says. “I could sit out there with him for hours. Like today, I will sit out probably on this bench in the garage or whatever, and chat for a good hour, because now I cherish that time. I just realized that, you know, I missed so much.”

All of these factors have fostered a fiercely protective attitude among the sisters. The passage of Proposition 19 last year made it clear to everyone involved that the land would have to be put in their names immediately—if they hadn’t gotten the transfer done, they would have had to sell the land when their parents passed, Kari says, because they could never have afforded the taxes. They were ready.

“I look at the orchard like a family member. It would be inconceivable to not keep it going, because we have this treasure that’s been given to us,” says Mary. “And my dad has cared for it and loved it, and put in more hours than we could possibly ever imagine. And if we can find the right path to keep it going, that’s an honor to do so.”

“The thought of that not being here, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself,” says Kari. “I think I’d have to move out of the country.”

“At first I said, ‘You girls are crazy!’” says Janine with a laugh. “Because I’m 15 years older, you know?” But she came around after remarrying and retiring. “That became the avenue for me to work more with my dad. Whatever makes him happy and makes life easier for him, I’m all for. I kid with the girls that I’m much older, and I will be retiring from all this hard work much earlier. But I want to see it go on.”

“You look around, and this doesn’t exist anywhere,” says Mary. “So it’s not just for our family, but for others to come and experience it. It never ceases to amaze me. Whenever I’m working [at the stand], there’s always at least one person who stops by and has never been there before, and it blows their mind. ‘I had no idea that this even existed.’ I tell them, ‘You’re welcome to walk through at your own risk,’ and they’re just like, ‘This is the most amazing thing, and you need to keep this going.’”

THE CHEMISTRY OF THE HEART’S DELIGHT

Certainly the J&P Cosentino farm is unique in the sheer number and diversity of the varieties of produce they grow in the South Bay—many are heritage fruits for this area, and quite a few are not available commercially. (The most recent of these to find a following locally is the Warren pear, which Phil started growing on a whim and now sells out as quickly as the family can pick them, just like the Baby Crawford peaches, the Santa Rosa plums and several other varieties).

But why is fruit from the Valley of the Heart’s Delight, even today, so delicious?

“The fruit from this region, you can’t beat the taste,” says Phil. “People ask, ‘How come your fruit tastes so good compared to the stores?’ And I tell them ‘It’s where they grow.’ It’s not that we have any magic wand, it’s the soil. I remember when I was a kid, my father would say, ‘This is the best dirt in the world.’ I’d say, ‘Yeah, right, pop, best dirt in the world.’ But he was right. He didn’t know why it was the best. But he was right.”

These days, we do know why. The soil here is not only nutrient-rich, it also retains water to a remarkable degree, which allows South Bay farmers to use a method known as “dry farming”—very little irrigation required. Much of the fruit you’ll find in supermarkets, Phil explains, comes from the Central Valley, which is basically a converted desert that requires a lot more irrigation. The fruit absorbs that extra water, diluting the taste.

“The very first oranges that were planted in the West, they were planted in the city of Campbell. Because when the settlers came here, they recognized what it was here, the soil. This is what we call loamy clay,” says Phil. “Loamy clay has water-holding capacity. Now, all the farms over in the Central Valley, it’s all sand. Water just goes right through, so that’s why they have to water so often. A farmer years ago that was visiting over here [from the Central Valley] asked me how often I watered. I said, ‘Well, about every 30 days.’ ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘our place over there, we have to water every seven days.’ Because that soil doesn’t hold the water. We’ve found over the years that the more water you give fruit, the less flavor you have.”

THE NEXT, NEXT GENERATION

Megan Alpert, an agricultural communications expert who wrote her SJSU thesis on the shift in how farming in Santa Clara County has been portrayed in the media over the last century—and who also grew up on a local farm family—says there’s a reason that small farms like J&P Cosentino are growing in popularity in urban areas like San Jose.

“I think that there’s something about purchasing food locally that really appeals to people. There’s also an element of storytelling, and getting to know the stories of the people that are involved in producing our foods,” she says. “Storytelling is so ingrained in us as humans, and we connect that way.”

Phil, obviously, has all the stories, and he’s still very active at both the stand and the orchard—just ask the sisters, who are regularly trying to keep him off ladders and tractors. But as he steps aside, they will be called on more and more to share their own stories, and to find new ways to connect with local customers.

One thing they’ve done already is bring in yet another generation of the family, Janine’s son Jason Cosentino, a former chef who has been creating products like jams, syrups, granola and more using the farm’s fruit.

Like the generations before him, Jason had to come around to understanding the farm’s importance.

“I started at a young age working at the farm,” he says. “I was probably around 11, 12, when my grandfather gave me a pitchfork and I was shoveling manure. So probably at the time I didn’t appreciate it like I do now, as I’m older and looking back. But now I get to learn from my grandfather, who has tons of knowledge in growing produce, selling produce, and then also the culinary side as well.”

Jason says he’s found fans of the fruit stand have plenty of ideas about what they want.

“Customers say ‘Oh, are you going to make a strawberry jam? Are you going to make olallieberry?’ They’ll give us feedback on what they’re looking for,” he says. “I want to give them something that is really down-to-earth good that they know. But I also want to be innovative and different. Like candy kumquats, that was one of our first items. That’s not something new, but I infuse it with bourbon. So, you know, kind of putting some tweaks in different flavor profiles, and being mindful of not overpowering the pure ingredient.”

Because that fruit at the heart of each of his creations, says Jason, is the show.

“The produce we grow is just so phenomenal. I want to transform it so if it’s pickled or it’s jammed or canned, they can have it throughout any season, and still enjoy the same experience as if it was summer. Our fruit makes my job a lot easier, because when I’m making these products, jams or whatnot, I don’t need to sweeten them up with other ingredients. There’s already tons of flavor. So it’s very minimal ingredients—my jam has less than five ingredients.”

Janine is proud to have him involved. “He’s got the creativity that probably I wouldn’t have,” she says. “And so do Kari and Mary—I kind of say they’re the creativity of the orchard, and I’m the workhorse. You know, just tell me what you want me to do.”

Kari says what Jason is bringing to the business is one example of how it can expand in the future.

“I’d like to see us build out, and have people be able to appreciate having an urban farm in their neighborhood—being able to experience it more than just buying our fruit. I want them to learn how to prune. I want them to learn how to plant a tree. I want them to learn how to cook with persimmons from Jason. I want them to come here for an apple-tasting event. It’s one thing to have something like this, and you drive past and you might stop and buy something. It’s another thing to say, ‘I had an experience there,’” she says. “And I think that’s what we haven’t done.”

As he looks out over the orchard he has nurtured for 50 years, Phil seems confident that these two acres will never suffer the fate that befell the tens of thousands of acreage that once made Santa Clara County the largest producer of fruit in the state. After years of being underappreciated, his land has new generations of family members to care for it—and new generations of customers to discover the importance of the best dirt in the world.

J&P Cosentino Family Farm is open year-round at 4977 Carter Avenue in San Jose. They update what varieties are for sale at their stand regularly at facebook.com/CosentinoFamilyFarm.

Four basketball courts in Campbell Park became hallowed ground for Isaac Farfan during the summer of 2020, as the smooth, blue surface—its basketball hoops removed as a precaution in the earliest, panicked days of Covid—was the perfect place to take his roller skates for a spin. 

Off Campbell Avenue and down the grassy knoll, the 49-year-old laced up his black boots as boomboxes pumped out smooth rhythms and funky melodies—think Ginuwine’s 1996 classic “Pony” or “When A Fire Starts To Burn” by Disclosure—into the wide open suburban space, where he joined up to 200 other skaters spinning, bouncing, turning, dipping, gliding and slow-walking during events organized by Campbell Rollers and Skate N Chill. 

The second-generation San Jose native had just renewed his childhood passion for roller skating in November of 2019—in the knick of time for the quad wheels to become en vogue during the isolation of the pandemic. 

Farfan, a hairdresser-turned-skate-instructor, made it his mission to bring home Sunday school skating lessons he learned from Richard Humphrey, a living legend in the Bay Area who coined the choreographic style of “roller dance.”

“I feel like I’m teaching a lot of pandemic skaters how to roller dance—people don’t know the culture yet in the South Bay, but it’s getting bigger,” says Farfan, who also teaches at Aloha Roller Rink in East San Jose. “It gives me hope, but we just need to continue to build community.”

However, as Santa Clara County gradually shed public health restrictions, the 49-year-old waved the newfound Campbell community and classroom goodbye in April. The hoops were re-installed, and pick-up games took over once again.

“We had someone scoping out the basketball courts, because once those hoops went up, we knew we were going to lose our space,” says Farfan. 

Different cities have different styles, traditions and cultural centers of skating—Chicago flaunts intricate footwork inspired by James Brown’s over-the-top moves, and elaborate group routines and cross-floor slides emulate figure skating inside Detroit’s rinks. There’s also the fast backwards skills popular in Philly and Jersey circles, while the YEEK skating (Your Energetic Explosive Klimax) found in Atlanta delivers the exact raunchy energy its name promises.

While Oakland has Lake Merritt and San Francisco boasts both Golden Gate Park and the Church of 8 Wheels as local centers of skate culture, the Bay Area still overarchingly lacks its own unique sense of style. Some skaters chalk that up to the area’s cost of living and housing instability, especially compared to regions where decades of culture is built up over time through generations of community and institutional knowledge. 

The South Bay, specifically, has relatively slim pickings when it comes to finding slick surfaces to ride or its own homegrown skating legends. That is, aside from the cowboy hat-clad Bill Chew—whose roller skates, legend has it, accumulated 300,000 miles on San Jose’s sidewalks.

Skaters looking to pump their wheels around bowls and ramps in Silicon Valley often contend with dirty, derogatory or already “claimed” space. Folks itching to trek street terrains or smooth public lots have been getting the boot and even threatened with fines, and trail rides sometimes elicit glares from bikers and inline skaters. 

But Farfan is one of a dozen skaters working, organizing and skating to keep the community alive in the South Bay, creating and crafting a hub and culture of their own as they go. 

“I almost feel like crying, it’s so powerful and important to me,” Farfan says. “I love the regional skate communities, how different they are from each other. A lot of us organizers feel like we need to keep the vibe going and keep it alive here.”

CULTURE INFLUENCER

“Skating culture” is really just a catch-all term linking a number of different subcultures populated by people with wheels attached to their feet. Akin to Forrest Gump’s views on the versatility of shrimp, there are artistic skaters, rhythm skaters, street skaters, derby skaters, speed skaters and once-a-year birthday party skaters. Each of these subgenres exists within Silicon Valley. As folks continually see the same people each week, a sort of skate “family” often emerges as older O.G. skaters connect with and support newbies in their community. 

Most skaters also reject monolithic framings of roller skating within one-off “pop” moments—whether Xanadu-era roller discos at Brooklyn’s Empire Rollerdrome in the 1970s, hardcore roller derby brusers making laps in Whip It or even Team Pup and Suds’ sick street tricks from the 1998 Disney Channel Original Movie Brink!.

So, what exactly is the South Bay’s skate culture?

“I’ve been trying to ask myself that question for a while,” says DJ GA, a skater based in Oakland who has become a familiar face supporting the South Bay scene throughout the pandemic. “It seems as if a lot of people that have been here have been constantly moved in and out. There were a lot of skating rinks in the Bay Area back in the day—15 years ago.”

As venues closed, skaters either stopped or spread out to the sparse rinks still hanging on nearby, with years of hyperlocal skate traditions being lost in the process. 

“Because of that big ol’ mix and match,” GA says, “the culture of what used to be started to mix, mingle and not really be very specific, especially in the sense that it went from around five rinks in all the Bay Area to dang near only about three.”

When the pandemic began, GA says skating provided an out for depression. Wanting to help others’ mental health, too, he dove headfirst into organizing adult skate nights, where folks could wind, grind and sway to the music, as opposed to snooze-fest evenings spent looping in circles to whatever soundtrack a rink piped through speakers in the background. 

GA’s name and likeness-turned-logo have since appeared on countless event flyers around the Bay Area, taking advantage of Instagram’s window into their colorful, energetic nights. When the money earned from these events eventually surpassed a 9-to-5 income, he pushed his grassroots business even harder online and on skates.

“The main goal for me is just to influence as many people as possible in the Bay Area to build up skate culture here,” he says, adding that he’s referring primarily to authentic rhythm skating, which embodies the very notes, riffs and beats of music in every limb—whether House, funk, R&B or something in between. “That’s something that has been built up through generations from the African American perspective, but there’s no one type; It’s almost like calling it hip hop, and then having a bunch of different sub genres.”

DO YOUR HOMEWORK

Rinks in the South Bay used to help keep the community together, especially as a safe and sober place for kids instead of being out in the streets. All but a handful of rinks have closed in San Jose, and those long-shuttered spaces are missing out on skating’s renewed popularity and continued growth. 

Cal Skate in Milpitas became a local favorite during its 34 years of business, as dozens of skaters weaved together on the glistening wooden rink nightly underneath disco balls and neon lights. The spot even hosted the roller skating events of the first World Games in 1981, featuring events like artistic pairs compulsory dance, the 5,000 meter roller speed skater race and roller hockey. 

Born and raised in San Jose, 22-year-old Joy Hackett waxes poetic about the energy forged between roller skaters in spaces like Cal Skate—an environment not always replicable in “real” life.

“Everybody’s sweaty, everybody’s learning, everybody’s falling, and it’s fine because you all come back up, and you feel the music together,” Hackett says with a laugh. “It’s centered around Black music—Cardi B, Drake, Beyonce—but we skate to whatever really, as long as it has a good beat. Even if the tempo doesn’t fit, the DJ will remix it a little slower, a little faster.”

When owners Chris and Trace St. Germain ultimately closed Cal Skate’s doors in August of 2011, the loss was huge. There were 18 rinks in the Bay Area when the rink opened in 1977. Only five rinks remained after its closure.

By the end of May 2014, the South Bay’s last remaining roller skating rink at the time—San Jose Skate—couldn’t stave off closure, either, as demand declined since the 1980s. Formerly known as Golden State Roller Palace and Aloha Roller Palace, Liz Ruiz has since revived the name and worked to maintain the original rink’s legacy. She purchased its entire fleet of skates and negotiated moving into a dedicated space inside the Eastridge Center. The space caters to all ages and styles, especially newcomers looking to try out a pair of neon orange rentals before committing to spending hundreds of dollars on skates. 

However, a hole is still missing in San Jose for skaters seeking spaces like Cal Skate that were historically kept alive by Black people and Black music—a culture masterfully captured in the documentary “United Skates,” including segregated “soul nights” and the strains of keeping hubs alive despite rising rents. 

“[Cal Skate] was the place people from Oakland would go skate, people from the Bay would go there, people from San Jose would go there—that was the Bay Area hub,” Hackett says. “That was a place that was upholding the Black rink skate culture, specifically.”

Some dedicated South Bay skaters now opt to trek thousands of miles to destinations like L.A. and Sacramento—seeking out the music, dances, physicality, fashion and vulnerability that comes from being surrounded by like-minded skaters.

Hackett says all the money and time spent on commutes, equipment, lodging and food are worth it; she can’t find those experiences anywhere else. 

“There’s music I haven’t heard, people I’ve never met and skating that I haven’t seen before,” she says. “It’s physical, gives you those endorphins, you look good—even when you’re sore—it’s just so worth it.”

Having grown up in San Jose, Hackett tries not to bash on the city too much. While she doesn’t think there’s been enough time or interest for the South Bay community to have carved out its own skating style and culture, she remains hopeful about the possibility of cultivating local spaces and culture as the years go on. 

But she says learning the decades of history behind roller skating must be vital to that growth, especially when folks are able to gain traction online as “influencers” without paying their dues or even unknowingly ripping moves off of legendary skaters in the community—an easier feat given skating’s quasi-oral tradition, despite troves of vintage skating videos available online. 

“While I can’t name off a bunch of moves—it’s harder to track because it’s completely visual—I think it’s just important to be aware,” Hackett says, “Recognize that there are people who have been doing this for a long time and also deserve to be heard. Just because they are not as good at using Instagram, just because they are not as pretty or appealing in the current market of visuals, doesn’t mean that they didn’t put in the work.”

SKATES WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE

Beto “Mooncricket” Lopez, who first donned skates along Oakland’s sidewalks as a child in 1979, is one of several seasoned skaters who have dedicated their lives to keeping roller skating alive and visible. When he’s not teaching classes or hosting events in places like Campbell, San Jose and Oakland, he’s skating across the state, the country and even across international borders—Covid restrictions willing.

The 47-year-old Blaxican filmmaker has documented hundreds of hours of this history since he first hit record on his parents’ video camera in 1992. However, he increasingly found himself alone or alongside a small group of his peers skating down at Lake Merritt. 

“Before the pandemic, we would get a little sad wondering, ‘Where is the new generation?’” Lopez says. “It was just the OGs all the time. Who was going to take over and continue the tradition?” 

But once the pandemic started turning life upside down in March 2020, Lopez said that answer quickly materialized with a “bang.”

An activity once steadily declining in the United States—comparing nearly 20 million participants in 2006 down to 11.5 million in 2016—roller skating thrived as an outdoor, distanced activity after the start of the pandemic. The surge was so high—and the supply chain so backlogged—that sold out inventories continue to plague newcomers. 

Minnesota-based Riedell, one of the nation’s largest manufacturers, outsold its capacity when workers resumed production in May 2020, overshooting by about 50,000 units. One inline skate company’s sales increased more than 300 percent by July, and experienced its largest shipping month in the past 20 years.

Before TikTok, Instagram or YouTube, the website SkateGroove.com was a gateway into local events and fellow skaters. While the format may be different, Lopez is thrilled to see more bodies strapping on skates, as long as newcomers understand the craft never died—social media simply expanded its reach.

“The way I see it, it’s not a comeback, it’s just another new wave of skaters,” Lopez says, countering innumerable articles from NBC News and Buzzfeed, framing the attention as trendy lockdown resurgence. “People are paying attention now. We see that the good thing we see is a good thing because that means it’s not going to die, it’s not going to disappear.”

SKATING IN CIRCLES

Roller skates have already withstood the test of centuries. 

According to “The History of Roller Skating,” John Joseph Merlin invented the first wheeled skate in London in the 1760s. The common two-by-two configuration arrived by 1863, courtesy of a New York City furniture maker, and the United States’ first dedicated “rink” was constructed in Rhode Island a few years later. 

Popularity surged as skating morphed to meet different cultural demands—a stress reliever during World War II, the hottest buzz music amid the 1970’s disco fever, a fluid venue for hip-hop DJs the decade after. 

Yet, skaters still find themselves spinning their wheels trying to find a forever home in San Jose’s public spaces. 

San Jose Roll Call organizer Lucy Chavez says it can be exhausting fighting for their own haven like Lake Merritt or Golden Gate Park—most recently through holding space at City Hall’s Rotunda—as their efforts have failed to gain much traction.  

“If you live in San Jose, you don’t get that real estate—that feeling of a community,” Chavez says. “[Downtown] is a good space to have it every Thursday, and we’re gonna continue to have it here.”

While co-organizer Justin Triano frames their “rebellious” work demanding public places to skate as their own modern-day “Footloose,” ​​he says at its core, skating culture thrives when it provides a sense of sanctuary—specifically an atmosphere not dependent on alcohol or drug—that is welcoming to all. 

“San Jose doesn’t have that space—manufactured or organically. There’s no space for skating to thrive or gain culture, and people will lose it,” Triano says. “It’s really easy not to have anything in San Jose, because Oakland, San Francisco and Santa Cruz are all right there. We should have a much stronger culture, because it’s flat and warm year round. But we don’t ever really invest in ourselves, because it’s more work to do that than just going somewhere else.”

Farfan is holding onto his seeds of hope for the South Bay’s roller skating future, especially providing a sense of belonging regardless of income, location or ability. 

“I get this emotional high thinking about it, and being [15 years] sober, this is what I thrive on these days,” Farfan says. “To do something like roller dancing, where it’s physical and we’re exhausted by the end of the day, but we’re all smiling—we need a space to do this publicly. We are building community, we feel like we’ve helped save lives during the pandemic, and it feels like this is just the start for us.”

Two weeks ago, in a nondescript stretch of pavement in industrial San Jose, 2,000 hardcore fans gathered for one of the most unexpected music events to hit the South Bay in years: RBS (Real Bay Shit).

“It was legendary,” says Bailey Lupo, bassist of show-opener Scowl. “We soundchecked at 4pm, two hours before it started. We played one measure, and people were already running to the front and moshing.”

The packed, completely word-of-mouth event (see page 17 for full coverage) showed why San Jose is, in KQED’s words, “quickly becoming the epicenter of the country’s hardcore scene.” It also proved there is a pent-up hunger for live music in the South Bay. That’s good, because what few live music venues San Jose had before the pandemic are still reeling from it’s effects.

In 2020, the live entertainment industry lost an estimated $30 billion due to Covid-related cancellations and closures. By January 2021, nearly 90 clubs around the country had closed as a result of the pandemic, nine in California alone (the hardest hit state after Texas). After working with a color-tier rating system which ranked communal Covid spread from Purple (Widespread) to Yellow (Minimal), California ended all social distancing measures and announced it was “Fully Re-Open” on June 15 with an email press release starring some Minions.

After the devastation of the pandemic and its resulting shutdowns, no one would yet describe the South Bay’s music scene as “fully re-open.” But events like RBS and booked dates for several local venues signal the kind of robust return that local music fans have been hoping for since March of last year. 

Down Time

Due to its body-fluid-drenching nature, live music was an industry uniquely poised to be slammed by COVID restrictions. With social distancing measures and ventilation requirements in place, as well as restrictions on singing and instrumentation, the options available to venues had until very recently been shut down, shift to a different business entirely, or go outside or online.

Sadly, The Ritz was forced into the first category.

“It’s been a tough year,” says owner Corey O’Brien. “It’s been rough.”

In a regular year, the Ritz is downtown San Jose’s main full-time connection to independent touring music. One Direction and Kanye West may play the SAP Center, but when locals want to see young touring musicians on the rise, or established musicians working outside the mainstream, they often find themselves at the downtown club.

However, as an indoor venue without a kitchen, the 530-capacity venue was left with no choice but to close. When the county issued its shelter-in-place order in March, O’Brien turned off the lights and sent his employees home, and the Ritz has been shuttered ever since.

“It’s been tough to keep the business going financially,” O’Brien says.

The U.S. first attempted to address the dire situation for venue owners back in July of 2020, with the introduction of the Save Our Stages (SOS) Act, administered by the Small Business Association (SBA), which secured $12 billion in grants for small venues and theaters closed during the pandemic. The SOS Act passed back in January, and in April the government unveiled a website to allow operators to apply for a Shuttered Venue Operators Grant (SVOG), worth “up to 45% of their 2019 gross earned revenue or $10 million, whichever is less.”

The website quickly crashed, and application dates were twice pushed back. Some venues were told they couldn’t apply at all, for example if they didn’t have fixed seating, a requirement under the Economic Aid Act, or, if they had applied for a PPP after Dec 27, 2020 (later it was decided to simply deduct prior PPP loans from SVOG money, rather than exclude venues for them).

In early June, reports circulated that less than 1% of the 11,600+ venues around the US who had applied had received funding. By the end of June, that number had slowly climbed to around 13%.

“I don’t know what their deal is, but the SBA is really dropping the ball on this thing,” O’Brien says. “It’s screwing us over really bad.”

Though the Ritz did receive Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans, also through the SBA— “as many as we could”—O’Brien confirms that by mid-June, they had still received nothing in SVOG funds.

“We should have gotten it four to five months ago. We’ve just been waiting,” he says. “When we get that, we can try and start to get our building back in order.”

The Ritz is scheduled to return to live events on Aug. 8, with a wrestling night from the great UGWA, followed by the return of the Emo Night Tour and 90s Nite. On Sept 1, live music returns with zany “Danger! High Voltage” rockers Electric Six, followed by a string of bookings that currently stretches to stoner-rock band Fu Manchu on Nov. 18.

In the meantime, O’Brien and company are scrambling to prepare; a bar that’s been sitting unused for more than a year requires a lot of TLC.

“Everything’s screwed up right now,” he says. “Payroll is turned off. Our insurance is different now because we don’t have any staff. We have at least a month worth of stuff to do, but we haven’t been able to start on that because this grant has been taking so long.”

Over on Second and San Carlos, 3Below Theatres, which regularly stages live productions, has also been sitting in limbo for months, waiting for SVOG money.

“There should have been a steadier stream of support for small businesses. It was very challenging,” says Shannon Guggenheim, 3Below’s VP.

Though the venue did receive PPP funding, it was “very temporary.” Since the start of the pandemic, they’ve lost three employees.

“It’s hard enough to live in this area with a good-paying job, let alone a mediocre-paying job, and then to not even have one at all,” Guggenheim says. “A lot of our colleagues, they moved home to be with family, or moved to less expensive areas. It’ll be interesting to see how that affects the live theatre industry, since some of those jobs are so niche.”

3Below finally opened back up for regular movie screenings this April, and expects live events to return in the fall. In the meantime, they’re just hoping they can get the funding in time to stay in business.

“Our business right now is at a point where if we don’t see this federal funding come through from the SVOG, it’s just going to be really difficult, and I don’t know if we’ll survive it.”

Business As Usual

Before their Grand Reopening last weekend, it had been well over a year since there had been any laughter at the Improv. Over the pandemic, the downtown comedy club furloughed most of its staff, and for months General Manager David Williams transitioned to guarding the building from break-ins. The venue did, however, have a few things working in its favor.  

“We feed up to 450 people at a time, so we have a full-on industrial-sized kitchen,” Williams says.

As part of comedy agency Levity Live, the Improv also had a skeleton crew of colleagues at venues around the country to collaborate with throughout the pandemic.

Back in 2020, Williams went to a drive-in show at a partnering club in Southern California and took note of the venue’s new ghost kitchen. After some brainstorming by the company’s head chef, two new restaurants soon began operating out of the Improv, offering take-out and delivery from 11-9: Poultrygram and Resident Taco.

“Definitely the Poultrygram became a thing,” Williams says. “Every day there were people taking pictures of their food. I can’t tell you how many … what’s the term? Influencers? I can’t tell you how many influencers we had. We had a couple fly in just to come to the club to try the food.”

Still, even with a mob of online influencers spreading the word, there was no way that Poultrygram and Resident Taco could ever add up to the Improv’s normal income. On a good week prior to Covid, the club brought in a six-figure revenue. On a good week in the pandemic, running two new unadvertised restaurants during a respiratory pandemic, it has brought in around $7,000.

“We were able to pay off a few bills,” Williams says.

The idea, however, was more about staying on people’s radar. In that respect, Williams says it worked “for a lot of different reasons”—if not all financial.

“We were getting people back in the building, getting our name back in the community, showing we’re still here, not going anywhere, stay tuned.”

Last weekend, the Improv quickly sold out of its Grand Reopening night with “2036 Presidential Candidate” Sammy Obeid, which it followed up with a weekend of shows from the “King of the Kings of Comedy,” D.L. Hughley. The return was emotional.

“This last 16 months has been extremely difficult,” Williams says. “I really want to convey how much I’ve missed all the staff being in the building, having fun together and doing what we do best.”

Streamin’ Is Free

Over on Race St., the 150-capacity Art Boutiki also began offering takeout, although with more of a ballpark flavor.

“We were doing a Takeout Tuesday where we’d sell hotdogs and a beer to go,” says owner Dan Vado.

Since long before the pandemic, Art Boutiki have been doing things their own way. Half-comic shop, half-venue, the versatile space off the Alameda is unique in the South Bay, artfully lit and comfortably spaced out. Since opening its current location in 2015, the venue has presented select acts about three nights a week, including recent visits from contemporary jazz greats Kneebody and psychedelic skateboarder Tommy Guerrero.

Slinging dogs and beer like an Oracle Park vendor wasn’t Art Boutiki’s only creative attempt at revenue during the pandemic. Vado started a Patreon account, sold new merch designs monthly, opened a beer garden on its patio, and even sold off long-held Pokemon cards. All the while, he kept checking the mailbox for that SVOG money.

“A lot of people in our industry hung on solely on the promise of getting this grant,” Vado says. “If we don’t get the SVOG, I’m not quite sure what we’re going to do.”

Like 3Below and the Ritz, Art Boutiki received one round of PPP funding, which lasted roughly a month. Early on, Art Boutiki decided that their best option was to take the show online.

Shortly after the initial lockdown, Vado and crew invested in film and audio equipment for livestreaming. In August, the venue premiered their new series with an inspired performance by San Jose avant-R&B musician Joy Hackett. After the first song, Hackett revealed that the trio had practiced together for the first time in more than six months that morning.

These days, Art Boutiki productions include a five-camera rig with three live operators, professional sound and video mixing, and a director.

ON ICE: Corey O’Brien, owner of the Ritz, was one of the first to close his venue last year as Covid hit. The club returns to live shows in August. Photo by Greg Ramar

“I stopped saying ‘livestream’ to describe them and started using the term ‘online concert,’” Vado says. “One of our goals was to not just be a bunch of stationary cameras in the audience. We needed to make it as if you were watching SNL or a late-night show’s musical segment.”

During a recent performance by the Jon Dryden Trio, shots bleed from close-ups on Dryden bouncing in his seat at the piano to drummer Scott Amendola’s hi-hat bouncing to the beat, back to a lush wide-angle view of the stage, framed by house plants. The film is crisp, and the audio notably well recorded and mixed.

“We have kind of a reputation for having great sound,” Vado says.

By the start of 2021, Art Boutiki had documented over 60 hours of live music performed in San Jose during the Covid era. Halfway through 2021, they’ve already recorded more than triple that number. Unlike concerts filmed at SJ Jazz’s new pop-up space, the Break Room, past performances at Art Boutiki now live free of charge on the venue’s YouTube page.

The venue had hoped to begin transitioning to holding paid events online, but that never really took root. Even with all staff working on a volunteer basis, and a note in video descriptions stating that donations are “kindly demanded,” streaming concerts online never raised much money for the venue.

Fifteen months after California’s first shelter-in-place order, Vado says the only reason that Art Boutiki exists at all is because of their landlords. As early as April 2020, he began telling them the venue would not be able to make rent. They agreed to work it out.

“The family that built this building are the family that still own it,” he says. “These are real people, they’re not developers.”

Today, the venue is still hanging on in that arrangement. Though it is now open for limited capacity, Vado says the earliest he expects to return to profitability is 2022.

In the meantime, they wait for the SVOG.

“We did pay rent as we could, but we’re still pretty far behind,” he says. “To the family’s credit, no one has come to me and said, ‘What’s going on?’ They’re being patient. But to what extent they’re going to continue to be patient, I don’t know.”

Municipal Melodies

Outside of commercial venues and DIY spaces in San Jose, live music often is presented either in city-owned spaces like San Jose Civic, or through city-supported nonprofits like SJ Jazz or the San Jose Downtown Association, a business improvement district-funded organization.

The long-running Music in the Park festival in Plaza de Cesar Chavez is an example of the latter. Organized by the Downtown Association since 1989, Music in the Park is one of the city’s flagship events, and has brought some marquee musicians to the Plaza, including Los Lobos, Cracker, Los Lonely Boys, Toots and the Maytals, Eek-a-Mouse, War and many others.

“We canceled up to four Music in the Parks [in 2020],” says Downtown Association Communications Director Rick Jensen. “We also canceled our ice rink, Downtown Ice. We didn’t do any outdoor movies either. And we had a beer tasting event that was also canceled.”

After a year of cancelations, the good news is that Music in the Park is officially set to return this August, with a headliner to be announced. The scope of this year’s festival will be significantly smaller than in years past, with a schedule pared down from four days to one. 

The Downtown Association is also poised to bring back its Starlight Cinemas series to St. James Park, a free outdoor movie screening that usually draws crowds of around 200-400 people.

Though half of its main events in 2020 were canceled, Jensen says the Downtown Association made it through the pandemic relatively unscathed. The SJDA has a yearly contract with the city to the tune of a half-million dollars, and receives regular payments from member businesses.

“We did not take an overall big hit on our finances, but we did take some hits through our loss of sponsorship and the little bit of revenue that we make with our ice rink and Music in the Park,” Jensen says.

San Jose’s Office of Cultural Affairs likewise weathered the storm, and in fact now appears flush with cash. If recommendations from Mayor Liccardo’s June budget message go through, the office is currently positioned to have an estimated $6.1 million in funding for 2021-2022.

That would be the highest funding the office has ever had, topping its previous high of $5.9 million in 2019-2020.

Hanging On

As 2,000 kids moshing in a Monterey Highway parking lot recently showed, there is clearly still a desire for live music in the South Bay. Slowly but surely, the city’s venues are returning to life. Art Boutiki now allows a limited capacity audience at shows, the Glasshouse recently hosted Trish Toledo inside and LVL Up just hosted Sunami on their patio, fresh off their RBS victory lap.

The Mountain Winery in Saratoga is also reopening, with a 2021 season that begins July 31 with country group Little Big Town, and features the return of legacy artists like Billy Idol (Aug. 19), Gogol Bordello (Aug. 31), Boyz II Men (Sept. 26), and David Lynch muse Chris Isaak (Sept. 28) among its dozens of scheduled events.

But local promoters and venues are far from out of the shadow of 2020.

“Without painting too grim a picture, I think a lot of people assume that because we’re here still, we’re ok. But that’s not the truth,” says Art Boutiki’s Vado. “There are certain segments of business that are going to take a long time to recover. Places like ours, venues and bars, that have been closed for a long time, where do you make that revenue up from?”

With live events returning in August, the Ritz is also now limping towards the finish line. In the meantime, O’Brien asks that local music fans keep the club in mind—along with everywhere else music has taken root here—and to come out for a drink or three when the doors finally reopen.

“I hope people know to support all the bars and nightclubs around here, because we’re hurting really bad,” O’Brien says. “We’re just trying to survive.” 

It was June 28, 1992, and my friends and I were at the nightclub One Step Beyond in Santa Clara, where the foul odor of booze and vomit wafted through the muggy, pressure-cooked air. We’d danced through four bands already, including a young, awkward, and poorly dressed Cherry Poppin’ Daddies. Now it was time for the headliner. We stood by the stage, sweaty and shaking, willing the heavy theatre curtains to open. 

The wait felt unbearably long. Finally, the lights went dim; everyone hushed. The buzz of the opening bass line rang out and the curtains whooshed apart to reveal San Jose ska band Skankin’ Pickle, a group of six misfits staring defiantly out into the crowd. The bass line continued to build slowly, each instrument joining in until the walls reverberated with eerie upbeats. Chills ran up my neck. The song reached peak volume and winded back down, each instrument dropping out one by one. The crowd roared.

Skankin’ Pickle went right into their next song. The tall Korean American sax player sang about missing the bus to work. He wore a karate uniform and jump kicked between each line. The song ended with the sing-along: “I love Three’s Company, but that’s no excuse for missing the bus.”

The remaining horn section pulled my focus away. They occupied the stage like two drunk frat guys. The slide trombonist lurched back and forth, pausing between blats to wave his arms like a windmill; he grabbed some devil sticks and did a short one-minute performance, while the valve trombonist leapt up and down with his arms glued to his side. He grabbed the mic and yelled, “pick it up pick it up pick it up,” and glided into an ear-splitting ’70s metal scream.

At the end of the song, the bass player approached the front of the stage. He pushed his bushy blonde hair from his face and turned to the side, posing like Jessica Rabbit. An obviously fake ass of cartoonish proportions bulged under his Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts. Scattered applause from the audience. He pranced back and forth with a shit-eating grin.

Once he had our full regard, he said in a lousy talk-show voice, “Not only am I the president of the hair club for men…but I’m also a client.” He pushed off all his hair—a wig!—and slapped his bass right into a punky ska song twice as fast as the previous tune. It inspired a raging mosh pit. A friend and I leapt in, possessed by brutal punk rock demons. Our limbs flailed like broken marionettes as we ran in circles. The few lyrics I understood cracked me up. There was one line where he took an aggressive stance against blow dryers.

At last, the song ended and I caught my breath. Sweat dripped off me in rivulets. I’d never had this kind of fun at a live show before. I looked up just as the now-bald bass player mounted a unicycle and haphazardly pedaled across the stage. He dangled a moment precariously over the crowd but stumbled off and landed on his feet like a trained circus performer. Everyone cheered. An older, hairy, shirtless guy patted me on the back. “They rule!” he shouted. I threw my hand up and slapped his hand. We were brothers for life.

The sax player took the mic back and ordered all the Asians in the audience to join him on stage. He looked out and pointed at a guy near the back and said, “Get up here.” A few other Asian people followed suit.

A bald, not-Asian guy shouted, “Albinos too?”

The sax player laughed and motioned him up. “Come on up before I change my mind.” He ran up and paced around with the others, arms raised like he’d won the lottery. The sax player looked back at the drummer, a stone-faced classic rocker with long stringy hair, and nodded. “This song is called ‘Asian Man,’” the sax player said. The drummer counted off and broke into speed metal. The on-stage crew went ballistic.

Fifteen seconds in, and suddenly the song pulled back into a mid-tempo hip-hop beat. The spiky haired guitarist hung her tongue out the side of her mouth like a dopey dog and hopped up and down on the off-beats. The sax player slipped into a mock rap pose and began: “I’m sick of people always telling me that dogs shouldn’t be eaten as a delicacy. Yo, it tastes good, as a sandwich meat. Heck, I like it and it’s low in calories!”

The newly anointed stage dancers did their best wannabe rapper impressions. We all did. After the first verse, the sax player dove headfirst into the audience, flipping around mid-air. The albino guy screamed and followed after him. They floated on the crowd’s hands, returning to the stage in time for verse two.

I danced hard. Everyone around me danced just as hard. Punks with red mohawks, guys in loose-fitting suits, girls in polka dot dresses, long-haired hippies with tie-dye peace symbols, nerds with tucked in Atari sweaters, goths with painted black lipstick, metalheads draped in oversized Danzig shirts, and plain, old, fashion-free dorks like me. We were all dissimilar. Yet here we were, all moving together as one giant, heaving beast.

When I thought I’d pass out, the mood slowed into a down-tempo reggae song. The guitarist stepped forward to sing: “We live in a racist world/Where the colors of the land/Won’t keep us hand in hand.” People embraced each other, swayed back and forth, and sang along.

As I watched Skankin’ Pickle from a sea of mismatched people, I felt a deep comfort. They were bizarre and flaunting it. And if they could, so could we.

Later that night I wrote the band a long, bizarre fan letter. I made it extra weird to get their attention. It worked. The Korean American saxophonist turned out to be Mike Park, who would found the hugely successful Monte Sereno-based indie label Asian Man Records in 1996; he sent me an orange peel and told me to call him. I became friends with the band, toured with them as a roadie, and had my band Flat Planet open for them.

I’d found my music. And it changed everything.

Ode to Taco Bravo

But believe it or not, there was a time when being in a ska band was considered embarrassing. I know, crazy, huh? You should’ve heard the wild accusations people made: Every song sounds the same! Out of tune marching band horns over pop-punk riffs! Nothing but silly songs about food!

Ok, that last one is sort of true, at least for Flat Planet. We had a song that was an ode to cheese, but sung in Spanish. (“Queso en el dia, Queso en el Noche! Queso! Queso! Dame Mas!”)

We also had a song about Taco Bravo, our favorite late-night dive in San Jose. It was the go-to place for bands of every genre. And jocks. And just plain ol’ drunks. Many fights ensued alongside absurdly heaping Super Nachos and refried bean-stuffed Taco Delights. The Taco Bravo staff served everything with a superabundance of cheese and treated you like garbage, which was a major part of the appeal. Whenever Flat Planet showed up after a gig or band practice, the late-night manager would shake his head and say, “You guys again…don’t you have lives?” “No,” we’d proclaim, shoving crumpled dollar bills in the tip jar, asking for even more cheese, as the ashes from the staff’s cigarettes fell into the beans. We were so obsessed with Taco Bravo—and always talking about it—my mom decided to go there to see what all the hubbub was. She ordered a decaf coffee with her meal. When they handed it to her, she confirmed, “This is decaf, right?” The guy told her, “Yes…it’s coffee.” She couldn’t sleep that night, wired from having caffeine for the first time in a decade. 

Our songs were influenced by the general silliness that defined a lot of the ’90s ska scene, which I know people hate. Let’s defend “ska silliness” for a minute and describe what it was like to be in a ’90s ska band.

In 1993, our local San Jose music scene consisted of bands playing grunge, dreary alt-rock and, worse, rap-metal. There were maybe three ska bands in the whole city. This scene took itself seriously. Too seriously. I can’t tell you how many times some shitty rock band was on stage at the local eighteen-and-older venue Cactus Club, acting like disaffected rock stars to a crowd of 20 people who cared more about their ice-cold beer than the cool poses of random local bands.

For us, getting on stage and giving our set a considerable dose of silliness was a fuck you to the self-indulgent, pretentious rock star bullshit we saw at the Cactus Club and on MTV. When we played in front of 20 people, we weren’t trying to be cool or get signed. We wanted to make everyone in the venue smile despite themselves. Yes, it was also an outlet for all our crazy, awkward energy, but we were trying to get people to join us and have a fun night, not admire our cool threads and perfectly disheveled hairdos.

Ashamed To Be Ska

In the early ’90s, most ska bands weren’t riding the silly-train. The priority was to play danceable music with creative hooks and unique song structures that kept things interesting. People in this era liked the clothing, the dancing and usually understood basic ska history, like how 2 Tone was born from British punks and Caribbean immigrants combining forces to make an exciting new musical style with a strong anti-racist message.

The Pacers formed in 1990 and built an impressive scene in Milwaukee, their hometown, and later Minneapolis, where they would relocate, as well as several nearby Midwest cities where they regularly gigged. They weren’t Milwaukee’s first ska band. Bands that predated them were International Jet Set, Invaders, Wild Kingdom, all of whom started in the late ’80s. These were popular local bands, but the Pacers applied some business smarts by pushing shows to be all-ages. They went to the Unicorn, a local twenty-one-and-older club, and told the venue owner if they let them play an all-ages show, they would draw three-hundred kids. The club owner agreed to it reluctantly. It was a success, but due to some disagreements, the relationship didn’t last. The Pacers took the same deal over to Peter Jest at the Shank Hall, and that started a three-to-four year run of really packed, successful shows. It was a captive and consistent audience. The band was making a couple thousand dollars a show just because they recognized how eager kids were to go out and dance.

“We never wanted to be a group where everybody showed up in Fred Perrys. We also weren’t skate punks either. We wanted to be popular with kids our age,” Pacers bassist Andy Noble says. The Pacers didn’t play punky sounding ska songs or dress in wacky costumes. They were closer to a 2 Tone sound, with mid-tempo upbeats and Specials’ style grooves that were mixed with subtle rock and soul beats and some New Wave melodies influencing the group’s intricate sound.

By the mid-90s, the Pacers were witnessing a shift happen as younger bands joined the scene. It wasn’t a shift they liked.

“We were extremely ashamed to be a ska band,” Noble says. “When we started, we were really proud of it. We thought we were the only motherfuckers on to that stuff. We had this pride of ownership. By the time we were done, we perceived the music to be jazz band nerds wearing mismatched suits, recruited by one guy who realized he could have a popular group.”

They weren’t too stoked by the growing number of ska bands in the Midwest, either. Or how those bands were making the genre look like nothing but a bunch of kids spazzing out at Chuck E. Cheese on a permanent sugar high.

“The first time we saw Skankin’ Pickle, we all thought it was really funny. Two years later, it was like every ska band was a joke novelty band. We were not proud to be part of that scene anymore. We thought it was nerdy,” Noble says. By 1994, because of this and some other internal band factors, the band lost steam and broke up. 

Ska had a moment in the mainstream a few years later, which softened the “nerd” vibe temporarily. It also validated the wackiness. Suddenly, bands on TV were wearing colorful shirts, checkered shorts, and pork pie hats. The Mighty Mighty Bosstones showed off their plaid suits in Clueless; Reel Big Fish sported cabbie hats and colorful, tucked-in button-up shirts in BASEketball. Save Ferris represented the rainbow’s full spectrum with their members’ bold single-color t-shirts and laid-back skater shorts in their “Come On Eileen” video. When ska fell out of its short-lived favor, all those offbeat checkered V-neck sweaters and bowling suspenders were as mortifying as MC Hammer parachute pants.

The Lamest Guys Around

James Rickman of Santa Cruz band Slow Gherkin, tells me about his experience living through the peculiar era of ska during the late ’90s.

“We felt like we were just the lamest guys around all of a sudden,” he says.

Slow Gherkin formed in 1993 and were an underrated band that never reached a large audience outside of their hometown, where they would sell out the largest venues. On tour, they’d draw anywhere between 50-150 people. Not bad, but not enough to give them the satisfaction of quitting their day jobs. As they pushed forward, they were handicapped by ska’s rise and fall in the mainstream.

In 1998, they released their brilliant Squeeze-meets-Nick Lowe-infused, peppy, rock-ska sophomore album, Shed Some Skin. It still holds up as a unique record during a year when one thousand ska records were released. They’d gone on multiple tours that year and were rehearsing daily to make something happen.

Mike Park, of Asian Man Records, the label that released Gherkin’s first album and already agreed to release its second, was already feeling ska trepidation by early 1998 as Slow Gherkin was recording Shed Some Skin. It was clear to Park the ska boom was not going to last much longer. But the band was already set to record in the lovely twenty-four-track studio SoundTek and had a thick twenty-four-page booklet planned for the album release. Rickman tells me that Park would show up in the studio as they were recording, pace back and forth and say, “No one is going to buy this record” and then leave.

Park’s nervous foresight turned out to be correct. The album sold less than the band’s debut record. The tides were changing in pop culture, and Slow Gherkin looked on, suffering a band identity crisis. By the end of the century, post-Shed Some Skin, they were writing songs deliberately lacking upbeats, as if to signal to the world they, too, were no longer part of that horrid ska scene. Other bands did the same. Orange County ska band the Hippos released their major label debut Heads Are Gonna Roll in 1999, now as a ska-free, synth-rock band, with an album cover fabricated to look like a hip ’60s rock ’n’ roll group, a la the Kinks. In subsequent years, the Hippos singer/guitarist Ariel Rechtshaid furthered his cold-hearted ska abandonment by carving out a hipster producer career, working with artists like Vampire Weekend, HAIM, Adele, and Charli XCX

“We did what so many other ska bands did, which was suddenly get totally self-conscious. That was the real sell out moment, I think. All ska bands got mocked all of a sudden, and we were like, ‘Abandon ship!’” Rickman says. “I like Run Screaming [the band’s third album]. We wrote great songs, but it’s not a ska album. It’s a pretty chicken shit move. On one hand, we were getting to be a better band, but we were having a total identity meltdown right in the middle of that.”

Ska may have dropped in popularity, but trying to pretend you never were a ska band only brought on greater ridicule. 2002’s Run Screaming was Slow Gherkin’s lowest-selling album. Only 2,000 copies were pressed, and not all of them sold.

Ska’s never been as hated as it was in the early 2000s, but since then it’s never lost its stigma. Even now if you tell people you like ska, you must do so with a big fat asterisk, acknowledging all the bad, bad ska bands out there before admitting to the ones you like. Ska seems more than any other genre to be defined by its worst bands and least creative tendencies.

The problem with ska in the ’90s is only a few bands reached mainstream audiences, so the general music-loving population never received proper exposure to the genre. Trying to explain to the average music listener why ska is one of the most diverse musical styles out there requires a couple of pie charts, a lengthy powerpoint presentation, and a history lesson that spans several decades. To most people, all ska sounds the same.

“I hope at our best we shined through that [third wave] and sounded different,” Noble says, reflecting on his time in the ska scene with the Pacers. “Now the huge bulk of what people think of as ’90s ska is background music for Food Network shows. We did not want to sound like that. That’s for sure. But we probably did sometimes.”

It’s so entrenched in culture to make fun of ska as wacky nerd music that no one questions why nerdy music is such a bad thing. Are we also throwing They Might Be Giants, Weird Al, and Devo under the bus, because last time I checked, they were some of the best artists to come out in the past 40 years. Besides, if I had to choose between some douchebag rock star flexing his muscles on stage while playing an uninspired guitar solo to woo groupies to his hotel room later that night, or some silly kids who spent hours discussing the pentatonic scale and all the tacos they want to eat after the show, I say long live band nerds and pass me a taco.

Excerpted from Aaron Carnes’ new book ‘In Defense of Ska,’ published May 4 by Clash Books. Carnes will be signing copies of In Defense of Ska at Streetlight Records, 980 S Bascom Ave., San Jose on Saturday, May 8, from 1pm-3pm.

Last July, as the local economy scrambled to survive the third month of the coronavirus pandemic, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek took to Twitter with some economic figures of his own.

“Excited to announce our Q2 numbers showing strong growth across the board,” Ek tweeted on July 29, 2020.

Linked in the tweet was an infographic touting the company’s 299 million monthly listeners, recent expansion to Russia, and exclusive podcasts with former First Lady Michelle Obama and bro-losopher Joe Rogan.

Published elsewhere were the company’s staggering earnings for the second quarter of 2020: roughly $2.22 billion.

That same day, in an interview with UK-based Music Ally, Ek, fresh from his financial fluffing, set about addressing a certain “narrative fallacy” he claimed to have observed in musicians: “You can’t record music once every three or four years and think that’s going to be enough,” the billionaire decreed.

The same month, a company right here in the Bay Area issued a very different message to its users. In an article titled, “Support Musicians Impacted by the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Bandcamp co-founder Ethan Diamond touted some of his own company’s recent accomplishments.

“On March 20, 2020, we waived our revenue share in order to help artists and labels impacted by the pandemic,” Diamond wrote. The amount paid out to musicians on that day alone: $4.3 million. “On May 1, 2020, we did it again,” he continued, “and fans paid artists $7.1 million–amazing!”

Throughout 2020, Bandcamp held nine of these Bandcamp Days, in which for 24 hours they waived their standard cut of 15 percent on all music sales, and 10 percent on all merch. In just nine days, the company paid their musician users a reported $40 million.

For listeners and investors, Spotify offers that eternal promise of capitalism: infinite growth for one low, low price. For musicians, it offers something else entirely: a gamed system that favors that already successful. Thankfully, in 2020 Bandcamp was there to funnel some money back into musicians’ pockets. But in the face of an increasingly dominant streaming industry, is it enough?

Rich Band, Poor Band

When discussing Spotify, there is always an elephant in the room: the company’s royalty rate. As famously low as it is famously hard to pin down, Spotify’s payouts have provoked public complaint not just from indie artists, but huge industry players as well. In 2014, Taylor Swift pulled her music from the service over the issue, stating in an op-ed that “valuable things should be paid for.” When she came back three years later, it was the result of a years-long pressure campaign from Ek himself–the CEO personally traveled to Nashville several times to convince Swift to return.

Each year, David Lowery of Santa Cruz’s pioneering indie rock band Camper Van Beethoven, and later the alt-hitmaker Cracker, publishes his annual Streaming Price Bible, which uses his own band’s streaming data to help break down royalty rates across the industry’s top 30 streaming services. By his estimation, Spotify’s current rate equates to roughly $0.00348 per song.

“In other words, Spotify is paying out about $3,300 – $3,500 per million plays,” Lowery wrote.

However, that number isn’t entirely accurate. The reason why everyone seems to disagree on what exactly Spotify’s royalty rate is, is because the company doesn’t actually pay musicians per stream at all.

“What Spotify does is decide the total sum overall that they’re paying out in royalties, then your payment as an artist depends on the percentage of the total streams you are in all of Spotify,” says entertainment lawyer Cameron Collins.

Collins regularly teaches a course on the music industry at Seattle University, and is an adjunct professor at Seattle University School of Law. He makes the point that ten thousand streams on Spotify doesn’t actually equate to ten thousand royalty payments.

“If there are one billion plays and you only get ten thousand, you actually only get a very small percentage of the whole. So the large artists, the Macklemores of the world, are going to get paid a ton of money, and your local indie band is not going to get very much.”

Worse still, as reported by Rolling Stone this September, the top 1 percent of artists on Spotify make up for 90 percent of the platform’s streams. A blue badge affixed to Macklemore’s Spotify page shows he is currently the number 291 artist in the world. Collins, then, is likely correct: the system is working comparatively well for Macklemore (and, it must be said, even better for Taylor Swift, the platform’s number 10 artist).

New Models

In 2015, Lowery filed a class action lawsuit against Spotify, alleging at least $150 million in unpaid mechanical royalties to artists. Twice, the streaming behemoth made moves to dismiss, but Lowery’s suit was soon combined with three similar, concurrent lawsuits against the company (including one from the estate of Weather Report bassist Jaco Pastorius), and, in 2017, Spotify agreed to allocate $43.5 million to the creation of a new fund for artists and publishers “whose compositions the service used without paying mechanical royalties,” a functional admission of the charge Lowery and others had levied against them.

Tired of the system not working for him, David Lowery has been developing a new model for releasing his music. On New Years Eve, he released his fourth solo album Leaving Key Member Clause via his own label Pitch-a-Tent Records, which also released Camper’s first albums in the ’80s. Though the album is currently for sale on Bandcamp, Lowery says that under his new model, that platform would normally come second.

“I modeled it on the movie business, how they treat demand,” he tells me. “First I have the theatrical window, which is to sell the album at shows–we didn’t have that this time. Then, we have the DVD or video on-demand window, which is Bandcamp or direct website sales and shipping them through the mail.”

Only at the very end, after the tour is done and the Bandcamp orders have been shipped, does Lowery put his music onto the major streaming services like Spotify, Pandora, or YouTube–the latter two of which actually pay even lower royalties (Pandora: $0.00203; YouTube: $0.00154).

“It’s not that there isn’t a place for streaming, it just needs to be farther down the road after a record is out,” Lowery says. “They’re basically just designed to suck all the value out of everything.”

In 2018, the Music Modernization Act was passed and signed into law. Though the MMA made some strides towards addressing long-festering music industry problems (such as the fact that virtually every song written before the year 1972 was out of copyright) and even created a government body to manage the distribution of royalties (the MLC), it had no effect on Spotify’s pool royalty system.

Busting The Stream Syndicate

It’s worth noting that Spotify had one intended goal upon founding, and it was not to bring people music (or, for that matter, podcasts). It was to combat piracy.

“I realized that you can never legislate away from piracy,” Ek told the Daily Telegraph in 2010. “The only way to solve the problem was to create a service that was better than piracy, and at the same time compensates the music industry. That gave us Spotify.”

In Ek’s own words, compensating the music industry was somewhat incidental to Spotify’s primary goal of combating piracy–the former, apparently, an effect of the latter. (Importantly, Ek doesn’t even mention the musicians themselves).

Bandcamp, on the other hand, set out with a very different goal in mind. In a 2016 interview with Marketplace’s Kai Ryssdal, Bandcamp founder Ethan Diamond described the landscape of online music hosting in the MySpace era as akin to “sharecropping:”

“You gave them your content and then it was their logos, their advertising — it was their URL, it was their traffic. It was their entire identity,” Diamond said.

Inspired by the simplicity of blogging platforms like WordPress and Blogger, Diamond set out to correct what he saw as a lack in the available online resources for musicians.

“We built Bandcamp to address that problem,” he told Marketplace.

Since premiering in 2008, Bandcamp has been steadily growing, and has evolved into a robust nexus for music lovers of all stripes.

The company’s true strength, however, has been its resistance to the Silicon Valley myth of scaling. Still privately owned, Bandcamp has managed to turn a profit while giving 80 percent to 90 percent of their revenue to artists every year since 2012.

Bandcamp appears to be the rare music industry player informed first and foremost by the musicians. In interviews, Diamond regularly uses words like “responsibility,” and insists that the company’s “core metric” is the money it pays out to its musicians.

“It can’t be that music is a commodity, or content to use to sell advertising or a subscription plan. Artists have to come first,” he told the Guardian in June.

One lesson the company seems to have learned from musicians is that there is power in staying small.

Bandcamp’s 37 million visitors in December 2020 (according to analytic website Websimilar) may be a speck next to Spotify’s reported 286 million monthly users, but the company has managed to grow on its own terms–and entirely through the sale of music–every year since 2008.

While Spotify has found market success with its “good, predictive algorithms” (according to CFO Barry MacCarthy), and is currently making an aggressive push to become the top dog in podcasts, Bandcamp hinges on the bet that maybe, just maybe, you actually care about music.

Gulch.

Lost in the Algorithm

The song that originally exposed Spotify’s paltry royalty rate was far from a smash hit. “Tugboat,” by the Boston shoegaze band Galaxie 500 is a dreamy little dinghy of a song, a sassy snippet of a melody floating in a sea of reverb, hinging on the lyric “I don’t want to vote for your president / I just want to be your tugboat captain.”

Galaxie 500 only existed for 3 years, but their dour, ramshackle earnestness had a palpable influence on the shape of ’90s indie rock. Originally released as a 7″ in 1988, “Tugboat” became an indie rock flashpoint by passing through the underground via word of mouth and mixtape. Uploaded to Spotify in the 2010s, it became more fodder for the endless churn of the algorithm.

In an article published by Pitchfork in 2012, Damon Krukowski, the band’s drummer, broke down the royalties “Tugboat” had earned in the first quarter of the year. Streamed 5,960 times, the song had earned the band $1.05. By his calculations, in order to make the same money as one physical album sale to one fan, the band would need 47,690 plays on Spotify.

“Here’s yet another way to look at it,” Krukowski wrote. “Pressing 1,000 singles in 1988 gave us the earning potential of more than 13 million streams in 2012. (And people say the internet is a bonanza for young bands…)”

On the one hand, Krukowski’s anecdote about “Tugboat” plays right into Daniel Ek’s narrative about musicians’ unrealistic expectations: surely, no one can expect to live in 2020 on the profits of a single indie rock song from 1988, right? But even for active bands with sizable fanbases and critical acclaim, the algorithm manages to turn thousands into pennies.

Hardcore Reality

Last summer, San Jose hardcore band Gulch ran a wall of death on heavy music fans with the release of the punishing Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress, the “hardest album of this shit year 2020,” according to one Bandcamp reviewer.

Closed Casket Activities, the band’s record label, owns the digital rights to Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress, so the band only gets a portion of that album’s streams. But ever since releasing that album in July, their earlier, self-released EP Burning Desire to Draw Last Breath has also experienced a significant bump in listens. According to Gulch guitarist Cole Kakimoto, in the last three months Burning Desire has been streamed on Spotify more than more than 150,000 times. The revenue for those hundreds of thousands of streams?

“Around $700,” he says. “The amount that we make in three months streaming we probably make in a couple days of face-to-face interactions.”

Santa Cruz hardcore band Drain are in a similar situation. Though their label, Revelation Records, owns the digital rights to 2020’s thrash-y and exhilarating California Cursed, the band still owns their back catalog, including 2016 EP Over Thinking. Looking back through the figures, singer Sam Ciaramitaro says that after four years and hundreds of thousands of streams, that album has brought in roughly $3,200 through Spotify–divided up, $200 per band member per year.

“Not a ton of money haha,” he texts me.

As for Gulch, Kakimoto says that they’re lucky: they all have full-time jobs. Gulch play hardcore for the love of it, not because they’re trying to survive on it.

Days later, it dawns on me how messed up the streaming era has to be for a musician to feel lucky to have a full-time job.

The Swindle Continues

When UCSC History of Consciousness professor Eric Porter was researching his book What Is This Thing Called Jazz? he had the opportunity to examine bassist Charles Mingus’s papers at the Library of Congress.

“I was blown away looking at them to see how little money he actually made from some of these classic recordings,” Porter says.

If there was ever a counterexample to Daniel Ek’s chimerical musician-who-only-works-once-every-three-or-four-years, it was Charles Mingus. Between the years 1956 and 1966, Mingus recorded almost 30 albums, virtually all of which have made vital, transformative contributions to the sound of American music. Yet, for almost his entire life, Mingus struggled. The deck was stacked against him.

“History is rich with examples where working-class musicians, Black musicians, were cheated out of what is owed them,” Porter says.

Notoriously, the contract drawn up for Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” netted him only $50; long before the Kingsmen covered it, Richard Berry got paid only $175 for writing what is arguably the most famous rock song of all time: “Louie, Louie.” Like Mingus, their songs were singular in shaping the sound & tenor of American music. Yet, for decades, they received next to nothing for their contributions. The deck was stacked against them, too.

“Because of their lack of power in the industry and their own needs to survive, musicians end up selling their songs at less than market value, through a transaction that seems open–and the terms are followed through on–but there still isn’t fair compensation given the amount of money that’s made on their labor,” Porter says.

In the chaos of 2020, when musicians were most in need, Bandcamp proved itself an anchor for the workers who are its lifeblood. But the harsh truth is that in the era of (approximately) $0.00348 royalties, Bandcamp alone isn’t enough to support working musicians.

“As far as sales go, Bandcamp is really not that significant yet,” David Lowery says. “But I like the model, so I’m supporting it.”

Cole Kakimoto similarly says that Gulch’s sales on Bandcamp are nothing like the band’s true bread and butter: selling merch in person at shows.

“It’s not even comparable,” he says.

Certainly, musicians have expressed their frustration even with the comparatively artist-friendly Bandcamp. This December, the exuberant ska musician JER of We Are the Union and Ska Tune Network, raised some hackles when they tweeted: “I deadass make more money from streaming revenue than people buying my music…”

They went on to post a receipt from Bandcamp showing a $2.00 sale. After revenue share (-$0.20), payment processing fee (-$0.15), and an “applied to your revenue share balance” deduction (-$1.60), the total amount JER earned from the sale of their song: $0.05.

As for Spotify–currently valued at $60.8 billion–in November, the corporation announced a new service, soon to be unveiled, and summed up in a Guardian headline: “Spotify to Let Artists Promote Music for Cut in Royalty Rate.”

Maybe we’ll eat beans and
emit noxious gases

Maybe we’ll start taking a bunch of online classes

Maybe we’ll drink lemonade every day at 5

And listen to the folk singers
on the Facebook Live

—Dan Bern
“Til The Quarantine Is Thru”

It was a bit of head-scratcher when ABC’s Good Morning America declared this the “Golden Age of Quaranstreaming” in a story this month. Since the phenomenon began just two months ago or so, this is technically the only age of quaranstreaming.

But it’s easy to see what they were getting at. Though Facebook Live launched in 2016—and had already claimed 8.5 billion broadcasts by this year—musicians, comedians and other performers around the world have taken to the platform in unprecedented numbers during the coronavirus pandemic (to a lesser extent, they have also been broadcasting on other platforms such as Instagram Live, Twitch, and YouTube Live) as their tours and other gigs were cancelled.

And audiences are tuning in; Facebook reports that the number of Facebook Live viewers in the U.S. rose by 50% from February to March alone.

So something never before seen in pop culture is indeed emerging—even if, as Santa Cruz-based singer-songwriter Dan Bern alluded to in one of his livestreams recently, the details are still a bit fuzzy.

“It’s going to be a historic night,” said Bern as he launched into a wild set on May 13 that was part of the “In the Meantime” livestreamed music series from HopMonk Tavern in Novato. “I don’t know how yet. That’s what we’re here to find out.”

A couple of days later, Bern tells me that one-hour set wasn’t the only livestream he did that night.

“After I did that one, I did an hour on Instagram Live, and then I did probably four hours on Facebook Live,” he says. “Usually I’ve been announcing them, but I just thought, ‘It’s late, what the hell.’”

Around the time California’s shelter-in-place order was handed down by Gov. Gavin Newsom in March, Bern began performing on Facebook Live five nights a week, sometimes three or four hours at a time. Though he’s scaled that back somewhat, it’s not by much. Far from burning out on them, Bern is finding that these virtual shows—long considered an extremely poor substitute for performing in front of a live audience—have a certain thrill of their own.

“It’s exhilarating,” he says. “It’s hugely dependent on the interaction, as it always is at a live show. These are live shows, but the interaction now is not people yelling or walking around or making funny faces, it’s the things they type. And you can read their thoughts in almost real time, which in some ways is even more immediately interactive. It’s funny, people will come up to me after shows and say ‘I wish you had played blah blah blah.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, I’ll play it tomorrow night. But I’ll be 300 miles away. You should come!’ But here it’s like you’re reading their minds in real time. They type, ‘Black Tornado,’ and you can play it. Without that, I would play for like 45 minutes. But it just kind of goes and goes and goes, and somebody says something, and somebody else has an idea and that triggers something, and it’s great.”

Bern’s livestreams even inspired what may be the very first album to come out of the pandemic, Quarantine Me. (It was released March 31, a month and a half before Charlie XCX’s How I’m Feeling Right Now, which was erroneously declared “the first quarantine album” by some media outlets when it was released on May 15.)

“That album was I’d say 90% facilitated by the fact that I started doing these shows right away,” says Bern of Quarantine Me. “The songs just kept coming for the first two or three weeks of this, examining different sides of the thing. I don’t think I would have bothered making an album of them, except people seemed to want to hear them, like ‘How can I get these?’”

There have been plenty of huge music-biz names performing live for a virtual audience during the pandemic; for instance, the “One World: Together at Home” event last month curated by Lady Gaga and featuring musicians like Lizzo, Billie Eilish, Elton John, Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder. Benefitting the World Health Organization’s Covid-19 Solidarity Response Fund, it was streamed not only on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and Facebook, but also on traditional broadcasters like CBS, ABC, and NBC.

While such star-studded benefits represent a number of noble causes, many working-class musicians are relying on the money they can raise during their shows—usually in the form of donations or tips via PayPal or Venmo—to get them through the pandemic in a world where some experts believe we won’t see a return to bigger live shows until 2021 (or until there’s a vaccine—whichever comes first). Several of the musicians I spoke to used the word “generous” to describe viewers’ contributions during their shows.

But in the world of quaranstreams, the once-gaudy production values of the superstar shows now look a whole lot more like everyone else’s.

“It is totally the Wild West. And it’s a real leveler of the playing field,” Bern says. “There’s no gatekeepers. Famous people, obscure people, they’re all on the same platform. We’re all busking, and whether somebody’s going to throw in a quarter or not depends on the value of what we’re doing.”

Festivals Go Virtual

For William “Goodwil” Rowan, quaranstreaming has also meant the eradication of the physical boundaries that normally separate artists in different parts of the world. Best known in the South Bay at the founder of the Pacific Art Collective in the early part of the 2000s, Rowan has brought the same multi-disciplinary approach that fueled PAC’s shows to his weekly quaranstream show Pacdemic (which returns Saturday, May 30 at 6pm). Each livestream features as many as 30 musicians, DJs, poets, comedians, visual artists, and more, and is a fundraiser for Rowan’s nonprofit Humanigrow, which is based in the Bay Area but has a global approach that includes pioneering the “Keep Cambodia Clean” campaign in 2017.

Rowan remembers how PAC sought to unify artists and musical genres in San Jose at its events in a way that hadn’t previously been done. “That wasn’t happening back then,” he says. “Everything was, ‘Are you into hip-hop? Are you into poetry? Are you into visual arts?’ I was like, ‘Why don’t we just do a show where we’re all grooving together.’”

Though PAC is now defunct, the name “Pacdemic” is clearly a sly nod to the group, and indeed, Rowan wants to capture the same spirit—but it also adds a new global angle that has artists from around the world performing in various time slots, while most of the crew for the show operates in the Bay Area. The May 30 show, for instance, will feature artists from the U.S., U.K., Australia and Thailand—where Rowan found himself stranded during the pandemic after international flights were cut off, though he says he certainly doesn’t mind. (“It’s not ‘Waah, I’m trapped in Thailand,” he says. “Who would say that?”)

Organizing artists from around the world has definitely had its challenges.

“Sometimes, I’m like, ‘Do you prefer to stay up late and do a 3am set, or get up early and do a 7am set?’” he says of scheduling. “This is something that never would have been possible in a physical concept.”

Also rather ingenuous has been Pacdemic’s use of Zoom for its livestreams. Instead of emphasizing Zoom’s ability to spotlight one performer at a time, Rowan went the opposite way, featuring windows of all of the various performances, and allowing viewers to click on the ones they want to see.

It was kind of a revolutionary concept.

“We pretty much taught Zoom how to use their own platform in the art world,” he says.

But there were plenty of pitfalls, too. In its second show, Pacdemic was “zoombombed” by a large group of people unleashing racist and homophobic tirades.

“It was pandemonium,” says Rowan. “I had one of my producers in the Bay Area saying, ‘Cut the feed! Cut the feed!’ And I was thinking, ‘What kind of people would do something like this?’ It was heartbreaking.”

They did cut the feed, and when they returned for a third show, they had put safeguards in place to avoid that kind of attack.

But Pacdemic shows haven’t lost their loose, wild feel, which Rowan savors.

“It’s insane,” he says. “It’s so fun.”

One feature San Jose’s SoFA Music Festival, which hosts a virtual festival every Saturday, has added to increase its own interactivity is a “virtual hang” that allows musicians and fans to socialize after the shows.

“It’s kind of cool that this has rewritten how we connect with people,” says Santa Cruz musician Lindsey Wall, who performed at a SoFA festival this month.

While the low-fi quality of the livestreaming format was once a source of ridicule among live music fans,  Wall thinks it’s actually one of the best thing about them, especially for musicians who were once intimidated to play for the webcam.

“I feel like it’s kind of taken the pressure off a little, and given artists more of a platform to try out what we’re working on right now. It’s a little more raw and organic,” she says. “I’ve been so inspired by all the musicians putting themselves out there and playing things not-so-perfectly.”

Variety Hours

The most compelling and watchable recurring quaranstream out there right now may be the weekly Family Quarantine Hour broadcast by Illinois musician Ike Reilly and his “Holy Family House Band” (a joke based on his song “Ex-Americans”). Since Reilly’s band was social distancing, he decided to use his three late-teen-to-twentysomething sons and one son-in-law—all of whom were staying in the same house as he and his wife (or a couple of doors down), like a demented Brady Bunch—for shows. He hadn’t raised any of his sons to follow in his footsteps as a musician; in fact, he’d advised them against it. So none of them had had lessons of any kind, although 25-year-old Shane Reilly had already begun writing songs, which he now performs with his father as part of the sets.

“They’ve just been immersed—it’s like going to basic training,” he says of his sons on the shows. “They’ve gone from not really knowing how to harmonize at all to being able to sing, harmonize, take lead on songs and perform on what’s kind of like live TV. Granted, there isn’t the same pressure, but there is pressure. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t think that they had soul. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t think they were good.”

Besides the songs, the best things about the Reilly livestreams are the crazy but all-too-relatable family dynamics. A quintessential example came last week: As Reilly intensely performed one of the most emotionally devastating lines from “Born on Fire,” a song he had written for his son Kevin—“I can’t leave you no money/I can’t leave you no land/I can’t leave you no faith/I lost the little I had”—all three sons came out and began dancing ridiculously behind him.

That’s his livestream in a nutshell, I tell him.

“You know what, it is,” he agrees. “It’s a total lack of respect, total disregard for any kind of decorum.” Then he starts cracking up. “Actually, you know, I have to say, they know every song. They’re very interested in what I do.”

Reilly says his shows (which return on Saturday, May 30) have been getting between 1,200 and 1,900 viewers live, and then more than 25,000 views in the following 48 hours that he leaves them up. He’s been getting a lot of feedback from fans, including this text from David Lowery, founder of the legendary Santa Cruz band Camper Van Beethoven (who Reilly often tours with, in addition to Lowery’s other band Cracker): “You and your family basically need your own variety TV show. It’s like a fucked-up Partridge family, while remaining family-friendly. You have the best livestream going.”

A Laughable Format

While a lot of musicians can at least see an upside to livestreaming, even as they acknowledge the awful context of the pandemic that made quaranstreaming necessary in the first place, comedians are a different story entirely. Comedy sets rely on the immediate reaction of a live audience—hearing laughter makes a joke seem more funny, while anyone who’s seen a late-night talk show in the coronavirus era knows that not hearing it can make one seem decidedly less funny. Santa Cruz comedian DNA is facing this conundrum with his own online comedy.

“What do I have to rest on? Where are my laurels? I don’t have these songs,” he says, comparing music livestreams to his own. “I watch my friends, a lot of the guys in the NorCal scene, that broadcast daily or at least once a week, and I love the songs. It’s the best. My buddy Tim Bluhm from the Mother Hips, he does it on this boat in Sausalito, and it’s so nice to watch. But nobody wants to hear about how airplanes are weird right now. That doesn’t work. I mean, what works? So I’ve got a new kind of what I call ‘quarmedy.’ It’s not comedy. I’m leaning into this kind of Kaczynski-Unabomber-on-his-third-manifesto persona.”

He has to deal with that issue in an even bigger way after having turned his Santa Cruz comedy club DNA’s Comedy Lab into a virtual studio that broadcasts ticketed shows featuring comedy sets from comedians in their homes several nights a week.

“Rarely is anyone standing up,” he says. “Matt [Lieb] and Fran [Fiorentini] stood up, but usually it’s not even stand-up comedy. We’re sitting down. I’m in my house. You’re in your house. It’s very intimate. And I find that it’s almost impossible to ignore that we’re in a quarantine. It’s such a big elephant, it has to be addressed. So my comedy over the last eight weeks has evolved into somewhere between a therapist and a host. I will get kind of emotional sometimes. I just start talking about how it’s hard, because it is hard. You see some of the headliners that we have address it. I think the Puterbaugh sisters ended with ‘Hey, it’s going to be okay.’ Little messages of hope.”

What he’s realized, as some musicians also told me, is that the very business he’s in has changed.

“It’s like I’m a TV studio now, and I’m producing a TV show. Zoom, Zooming, none of those words make any sense to me, you know? This is a TV show. And some people do stream it to their TV. That freaked me out, when I realized some people are watching this on a big screen.”

One thing is the same with musicians and comedians alike—the importance of the interactive element.

“All the comedians can see the chat room, and the audience is extremely vocal in there. I mean, they’re heckling, they’re asking questions,” DNA says. “And that can never happen at a real stand-up comedy show. You don’t want the audience that engaged. But now we want them as engaged as possible. So if you’re a comedy fan and you can see whoever your favorite comedian is that we have, and you can talk to them? I think that’s a really neat feature for an audience member that you can never get at any other stand-up comedy show.”

Where to Find These Livestreams

Dan Bern: facebook.com/danbern

Pacdemic: facebook.com/pacdemic

SoFa Saturdays: sofamusicfestival.com

Lindsey Wall: facebook.com/lindsey.wall.376

Ike Reilly: facebook.com/ikereilly

DNA’s Comedy Lab: dnascomedylab.com

“I’m a nobody,” Jeff Larsen says with a laugh. Most weekdays, the West San Jose resident works as a real estate agent. On weekends, he spends time with his family and friends. On occasion, he boards a commercial aircraft for some of the world’s most dangerous conflict zones, where he dons a long-haired wig with bangs, a leopard-print shirt, tight jeans and a blazer and belts out “Don’t Stop Believin’” for a crowd of American and allied troops.

On days like these, Larson isn’t entirely himself. He is Perry Stevens—frontman for Journey Unauthorized, a tribute to one of the biggest bands to ever come out of the Bay Area.

Aside from playing the normal tribute band gigs—casinos, private parties and fairs (his band plays the Santa Clara County Fair on Aug. 4)—Larson has forged a relationship with a booking agent handling overseas entertainment for service members.

“We’re his favorite Journey tribute band,” Larson says. “He just works with us.”

It’s not exactly a normal gig for a tribute group, Larson says, but it is definitely exciting and the pay is pretty good. Plus, when he and his band aren’t playing in regions where they have to worry about enemy fire, they get to do some sightseeing. Six months back Journey Unauthorized played at a base in Jordan, and he and the guys took a trip to Israel.

“It’s a rush,” he says, “especially for a guy who never made it. This is icing on the cake.”

Since the earliest days of the Elvis Presley impersonator, tribute bands have found a place in the music scene as a way for audiences to hear their favorite songs from their favorite artists in a more accessible setting. Tribute bands also allow casual music fans to attend a concert and know exactly what they are getting for their ticket.

While tribute bands have long been seen as a niche in music, they’ve exploded in popularity in the last 20 years as classic rock icons have retired or passed on. Now, for many fans, venues and musicians, tribute bands have increasingly become the bread and butter in the live music business.

In the South Bay, venues both large and small regularly turn to tribute acts to draw crowds. The Ritz in downtown San Jose has two tribute shows scheduled for the second half of July alone. This Charming Band, a Smiths and Morrissey act, plays the club on Jul. 20; Temptation, which specializes in New Order, headlines the following weekend, Jul. 20.

Just last week a group called Brit Floyd played at the Mountain Winery, bringing spot-on Pink Floyd covers and a serious light show to the Saratoga open-air theater.

While Brit Floyd is based out of the UK and regularly tours the world, many tribute acts keep things local. Aside from the armed forces shows, Journey Unauthorized tends to stay on the West Coast. The same goes for The Killer Queens (Queen), Maroon Vibes (Maroon 5), Petty Theft (Tom Petty), Zeparella (Led Zeppelin) and the Sun Kings (The Beatles)—all of whom are based locally.

DIFFERENT STROKES

“I saw The Cure in 1989,” says Mark Sharp, bassist for This Charming Band as well as Bloodflowers, a tribute to The Cure. He remembers that show—and the time he saw Morrissey, in 1992—fondly. When he first began playing his own music, he was attempting to emulate groups like The Smiths and U2. “That’s what shaped me as a musician.”

He’s worked in many bands, including The Trims, that write original material, and has always enjoyed that process. But, he says, playing in a tribute band is something entirely different. “The appeal for me is trying to recapture what those shows meant to me and what those records meant to me so many years ago.”

As for Morgan Hill resident Joe Urbano, his striking resemblance to Maroon 5 singer Adam Levine led him to front Maroon Vibes.

A family man with a career in the semiconductor industry, on weekends Urban slips on nylon tattoo sleeves and runs through the Maroon 5 catalog with his band at parties and community events. They’ll be playing the Gilroy Garlic Festival at the end of July.

Urbano, who has always written and performed his own music, says playing in a tribute is a way for him to keep up with a hobby that he loves while making a little cash on the side.

“I never thought I’d be in a tribute band, honestly,” he shrugs. “But if you just love music and performing, why not?”

For Nina Noir, a big part of the appeal is the energy and appreciation she feels when she is on stage. The San Jose native fronts the Killer Queens, an all female Queen tribute.

While she’s written and continues to write original tunes, she says her own music has never taken her far. “It’s very difficult to be a female rock vocalist,” she says. “Bands typically want men”—especially in the genres that she’s always gravitated toward, namely hard rock and metal.

In the Killer Queens she doesn’t worry about those kinds of politics. “Freddie Mercury is probably the perfect front person to gender-bend,” she says. And judging by her success, she’s got a point.

The Killer Queens have a packed summer schedule that takes them up and down the West Coast, to Las Vegas and even to Miami. They’ll be playing the Santa Clara County Fair on Aug. 2 and they have a few Facebook corporate parties on in their datebook as well.

Looking back, Noir doesn’t regret going this route. “This opened a lot of doors for me,” she says.

HERO WORSHIP

Veteran hard-rock drummer Clementine first fell in love with Led Zeppelin as a youngster listening to KMET radio in Southern California, and when she began to hit the skins herself, she realized just how much influence Zeppelin drummer John Bonham had on her musical aspirations.

In 2004, Clementine was looking to better learn those Zeppelin songs and the drum parts she loved. She hooked up with guitarist Gretchen Menn, who admired Jimmy Page as much as Clementine admired Bonham, and the two formed the Bay Area’s all-female tribute band Zepparella.

“When we started it, we looked at it being a practice project,” says Clementine. “Shortly after, we started talking about, ‘Why not do it onstage?’”

For Clementine, it was and still is all about the music.

“I wanted to get better as a drummer, and why not go to the source of how I got into playing drums?” she says. “I feel like I came into this through the back way. It wasn’t that I set out to start a tribute band; it was that I wanted to learn this stuff and see what happens.”

Even 15 years into the band, Clementine notes that she’s still learning from Bonham. “We just keep going forward because it’s so musically exciting,” she says. “Led Zeppelin is maybe the only band that I could continue to play for 15 years, and a lot of that is because we take parts of the songs and develop them through improvisation onstage, and Led Zeppelin gives us that freedom because they were so improvisational in the way they presented the music. It enables us to create new parts of songs, new ways to approach songs. It’s always changing.”

In addition to the musical explorations afforded to her in Zepparella, Clementine appreciates that the band can act as a steady source of income and help her develop an audience for her other singer-songwriter projects.

“The creative process as far as being able to write something from scratch with other musicians is a beautiful thing, and I have that in the other projects I do,” she says. “I value it all. I feel like one feeds the other, what I learn from Zeppelin is what I take to my original writing, and parts of my original writing I put into the drumming with Zepparella.”

This year, Zepparella is offering fans a way to learn the songs themselves, with the newly launched Zepparella Learning Channel on YouTube, a series of videos in which the members teach the audiences their parts to a Led Zeppelin tune. So far, the series has featured “When the Levee Breaks” and “Immigrant Song.”

“It’s been a remarkable learning experience for us to teach these songs,” says Clementine. “For 15 years we’ve been learning all these little things that you learn playing this music onstage, and to be able to share that freely with people, it feels like we’re able to give a little back from what we’ve gained playing the music.”

Obviously, Led Zeppelin will never play together in concert again. And even if classic rock acts like the Rolling Stones or AC/DC are still touring, they’re not playing in venues with four walls; they’re in stadiums that often don’t offer the intimacy that a club can provide. Clementine sees Zepparella as a way for audiences to experience the classic rock of yesterday in an intimate setting. “To be able to get swallowed up by theses songs in a smaller venue is where the power is,” she says.

Zepparella continues to thrive because of the power of those Led Zeppelin songs, and Clementine says the tribute band has lasted so long because of the musicians she’s been able to share that power with. “I value the people I’ve played with in the past and now,” she says. “It’s a great experience. I wouldn’t trade it.”

CREATIVE LICENSE

Tribute bands come in many forms. Not to be confused with cover bands, which play a variety of different songs by well known pop artists, tribute acts tend stick exclusively to a single group’s repertoire. Some make an effort to approximate the look and feel of the bands to which they are paying homage. Others go all out, springing for custom costumes, special effects and even purchasing the same gear used by the bands they are aping. It’s practically like a Broadway show.

In fact, while it’s hard to pinpoint the origin of the tribute act as a distinct type of live musical entertainment, some point to Beatlemania, the Broadway musical revue, as the start of it all. Debuting in 1977 and running through 1979, the show was billed as “Not the Beatles, but an incredible simulation.”

Monroe Grisman, the guitarist and vocalist for the Marin- and San Francisco-based Petty Theft, says he’s seen some very convincing simulations in his day. “I just saw a Genesis tribute band with set designs and period-specific gear,” Grisman says. “And there’s certain value for that, like for me that was the closest thing I’ll ever get to seeing Peter Gabriel-era Genesis in 1973.”

Forgoing the costumes themselves, Petty Theft focuses on performing the music and honoring the sound, while also adding their own flourishes and taking liberties that keep the concerts fresh for fans.

“I think it’s why we’ve built up a pretty amazing following now: People like that we are not trying to be Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers; rather, we always pay tribute and we always give it up to the real deal.”

And the real deal has given it up back at them, with Heartbreakers drummer Steve Ferrone meeting the band through a mutual friend and sitting in with Petty Theft three times over the years. “It’s been an amazing honor,” says Grisman.

Noir has also earned the blessing of original Queen members Roger Taylor and Brian May. Taylor gave her the OK in person, when she and her band attended the premiere of the recent Queen biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody, at the Castro Theater in San Francisco.

“They 100 percent thought it was wonderful.”

ROCK DOCTRINE

Things don’t always go so well for tribute acts.

Paul B. Ungar, Esq. is a New Jersey-based entertainment lawyer concentrating in intellectual property and contracts. He has advised Noir on how to best avoid legal blowback with her Killer Queens endeavor.

It’s not the performance of any given song or string of songs that is the issue, Ungar explains. If a tribute band is playing at a club that is on the up-and-up—that is, a venue that is in good standing with the major music licensing organizations BMI, ASCAP and SESAC—the tribute act is covered.

However, things get trickier as a tribute band gets larger, begins to market itself, creates promotional material featuring its own performances of other artists’ material and endeavors to take on the likeness of a celebrity.

The kind of satire and parody that a show like Saturday Night Live engages in is recognized as free speech and is protected. But when someone is using an artist’s likeness and performing their music in the way that tribute acts do, the waters are far murkier.

“It really comes down to how the famous band reacts,” Ungar says. “Technically, it is violating all sorts of laws.”

In the past, Ungar says, Apple Corps—The Beatles’ recording label—has gone after successful Beatles tribute acts and won. And the late Prince was known for having a serious distaste for tribute acts that sought to profit from his catalog and image. In 2008, the Purple One sued a group of Norwegian artists who had recorded an album of covers intended to honor the artist for his 50th birthday.

Still, most of the bands interviewed for this story weren’t too concerned with getting slapped with a lawsuit—even Larson, who says he has dealt with “cease and desist” letters from Journey in the past.

“They came after us in the beginning,” Larson recalls, adding that there are now so many Journey tribute bands that it’s probably hard for the band’s label and lawyers to keep up. “I’m just not on their radar anymore.”

Practically speaking, Ungar says, even though the tribute acts often “don’t have a leg to stand on,” the original bands simply allow them to do their thing. As Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich learned in the aftermath of Napster, it never looks good when a massive band goes after the little guy.

Plus, Ungar adds, “What happens in real life is that some bands are more than happy to let tribute bands  co-exist. That just increases the value of their brand.”

It’s hard to blame Rory Koff for feeling a little boastful. What musician wouldn’t brim with pride upon receiving a platinum record? “I gotta brag a little,” he texts me, not long after we finish speaking on the phone. “Look what I just got.”

Attached to the message is a photo. In it, Koff stands in his living room holding his framed metallic disc. In the bottom left of the frame is another photograph: one of Koff from 20 years earlier along with his band, No Use For a Name. As of 2017, No Use For a Name has sold more than a million records—an incredible threshold for any artist, let alone a band from San Jose.

The scrappy group started in San Jose in 1988, when Koff was just a sophomore in high school. It didn’t take long for the four-piece to hit upon a then-novel sound—mixing classic rock and ’60s AM radio melodies with punchy, precise metal riffs, and refracting it all through the prism of punk. In just a few years they were signed to San Francisco label Fat Wreck Chords. Soon after that, they were known worldwide.

Palo Alto’s all-female band The Donnas began when its members were in high school in the ’90s. They went on to land a contract with Atlantic and move to Southern California. Even as music distribution has moved to Silicon Valley with the advent of iTunes, Pandora and Google Play, the lack of a feeder system and support infrastructure often mandates a trip down Interstate 5 to make it on to the Bay Area’s digital music streaming servers.

While a number of South Bay-spawned acts—like Antwon and Giraffage—have relocated to Los Angeles in recent years, with the aim of building a following and making vital industry connections, Koff credits the start of his band’s career to a show at San Jose’s now-defunct all-ages venue the Cactus Club.

“We were so excited,” he says, recalling the anticipation preceding the show. That night he and his bandmates were opening for Southern California punk group Agent Orange. At the time, Agent Orange were both influential and squarely in their prime. Knowing that this was their shot at making inroads with an active and relevant band of their genre, Koff had a bit of the pre-show jitters. Fortunately for him and the band, they made an impression:

“In just a year, or a year and a half, we recorded a demo and put out an album. Then [Agent Orange] invited us on tour. It steamrolled pretty quickly from there.”

It was that one show at the Cactus, a 16-and-up club that occupied the space now filled by Club Miami in San Jose’s SoFA District, that kick-started No Use For a Name’s platinum-selling career.

Opened in 1988, the Cactus Club was San Jose’s connection to the national music scene. Nirvana played there (check out the bootleg). Rage Against the Machine, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Weezer and No Doubt all rocked the midsize venue when they were still up-and-comers.

In recent years, any number of San Jose bands could have been the next No Use For a Name, were it not for one thing: the Cactus Club shut down in 2002. And in the 15 years since, San Jose, the self-styled “Capital of Silicon Valley,” hasn’t had a single consistent venue available to its young musicians. That’s a problem for everyone.

The absence of an all ages rock, pop and hip-hop venue—like the former Cactus Club—hurts Silicon Valley’s music scene. Photo by Greg Ramar

SHOTS & LADDERS
The Ritz—San Jose’s premier full-time club venue for national rock, pop and hip-hop acts—sits just across the street from where the Cactus used to be. While the establishment has found success bringing exciting and relevant live acts to San Jose in recent years, there’s a catch. Unlike the former Cactus Club, The Ritz allows only patrons 21 years of age or older. The same goes for BackBar SoFa, which occupies the space directly behind the former Cactus.

The fact of the matter is that for venues, the money is in alcohol sales. The dependency has become more acute as the live music industry competes with new forms of digital entertainment and bands must rely on performance revenues rather than the sale of recorded media. For operators, it’s not even about making a killing at the bar: alcohol sales are often the only thing keeping the lights on. That means that any venue owner with an eye on his or her bottom line needs to sell booze. As a result, shows with cheap tickets catering to an underage crowd are rarely a good idea from a business perspective—something Dan Vado learned the hard way.

“When kids were coming to see their friends play, they weren’t buying comics,” says Vado, owner of SLG Art Boutiki—a comic book shop, cafe and live music venue located on Race Street. For the past three years, Art Boutiki has been hosting shows and events in its 150-capacity room.

When a live music establishment sells alcohol—especially spirits—it makes it significantly harder for that business to allow minors through the doors. Vado has beer and wine at Art Boutiki, but crucially he also sells pizza, snacks and comics. By offering food along with lower-ABV drinks, Vado can allow younger patrons in while giving adults a place where they can enjoy a few grown-up beverages. From a business perspective, though, he’s decided to largely steer clear of shows for the underage crowd.

“A dollar for a bottle of water was even too much for some of these people to pay,” Vado says referring to teens. “It was very difficult to justify using the time.”

The Cactus Club’s demise can be attributed in part to its failure to sell enough pizza. It was licensed to open as a pizza restaurant and its failure to comply with use permit technicalities proved a convenient way to force it out of business amidst the city’s police crackdown on clubs and the SoFA District’s gentrification.

For its entire 14-year existence, the Cactus Club had operated under a Type 47 liquor license—essentially a full-service restaurant license. This meant that the club could sell alcohol (including spirits) even with minors in the building, provided that a majority of its sales came from food. When the hammer fell on the club, food sales dipping below the 51 percent threshold were one of the nails in its coffin.

Cafe Stritch has a full bar, but it also has a full kitchen. That means it can allow anyone inside, so long as servers are diligent about carding. But Stritch focuses almost exclusively on jazz. Every once in a blue moon the venue will host a rock or hip-hop show, but even calling those rare is an overstatement.

For his part, owner Corey O’Brien doesn’t want to serve food at The Ritz, and therefore won’t be going all ages. That’s never been his thing, neither here, nor at his previous venue, the Blank Club (now LVL 44 on South Almaden near the former Greyhound station), which served up punk rock, cheap beer, stiff drinks and little else.

“We have a 48 license, so it’s 21-and-over all the time. There’s no way around it,” O’Brien says. A Type 48 license (“on sale general public premises”) is a bar license and specifically designates the club as 21 and over. There are no exceptions.

Even though he isn’t able to offer up his club for the cause, O’Brien still cares about the city’s dearth of spaces for young musicians and their fans. “We need all-ages venues here,” he says. “It’s part of the whole ladder system.”

What O’Brien calls the “ladder system” is the heart of the issue. All-ages spaces don’t just help specific musicians like Koff and No Use For a Name. They establish a network between venues, musicians and residents, putting them all on the same ladder. Dedicated musicians and their fans are a lot like smokers: most start young.

With a functioning ladder system, budding musicians can start out playing smaller rooms—all-ages spaces that tend to be easier to book than a big club. Underage fans can attend and an underage band can stay and schmooze instead of having to leave immediately after their performance, as they would in an 21-plus venue. From there they climb the ladder, with the goal of one day reaching one of the higher rungs. There they can connect with national touring acts, which in turn can connect them to the world stage.

This system isn’t just about the musicians and the fans. It’s also about training an entire generation to appreciate live music, which keeps clubs in business and gives bands a reason to make a city with a strong scene a destination on tour.

This is the system in place in just about every major city around the world. But in San Jose, it’s been cut out at the root.

Dan Vado states the problem clearly:

“It always felt like younger people weren’t going to shows because for the most part they can’t.” Simply put, there’s nowhere for them to go.

Even though Art Boutiki holds occasional shows for local bands, the venue only hosts around 10 concerts each month. It also has no connections to national booking agencies, which means that local shows are always just that: local. Besides, most shows are booked with the 30-and-over set in mind. Art Boutiki neither is, nor wants to be, the kind of place that the area’s youth need.

And though things have been going well for The Ritz, O’Brien knows its continued existence hinges on people in the South Bay both seeing and playing live music. Alcohol sales may pay the bills, but if there’s no permanent culture of live music there will be no one to buy that alcohol at clubs like The Ritz down the road.

“We need different size clubs,” says O’Brien. “We need all-ages clubs, we need 21-and-over, and we just don’t have it all here. That’s why the scene lacks here.”

NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND
Of course, just because there are no dedicated, above-the-board venues for young local bands doesn’t mean young local bands aren’t playing shows. They’re just being held in the types of places minors have always congregated—basements, practice spaces and (in one case) the back of a porn shop.

“Most of the shows I would go to when I was younger were at peoples’ houses,” remembers Erfan Moradi.

Moradi heads local cassette tape label Fourth Row Records, and first attended a show in San Jose at the age of 14. With nowhere else to book, the show was held at a friend’s grandmother’s house.

“There’s no formal all-ages spaces that I can think of,” Moradi says of San Jose. “We just completely lack spaces where we can put on shows safely without the worry of them getting shut down.”

Now 20 and attending UC Berkeley, Moradi says local shows aren’t just about seeing bands—they’re about community, and acceptance, and are critical for personal development.

“Having DIY spaces was really formative for me,” Moradi says. “It allowed me to find folks that were like-minded and eager to build a space that was accessible, comfortable, inclusive, accepting. All stuff that a 14-, 16-year-old who is having a hard time needs.”

“That statement is very accurate,” says Matthew Martinez.

Matthew is 17 and plays in Sunday Drive, an exciting and talented young group from San Jose. He and his bandmates are part of a generation that has never had an accessible place to play in their city, or the greater South Bay. But that hasn’t stopped them from playing anyway.

“To me, live performances are everything,” Martinez writes in an email. “Finding places to host shows can be very difficult, but as a band we’ve always had the DIY mindset. If there aren’t venues available, make one.”

For 15 years now, this is exactly what San Jose’s youth have been doing: making their own venues out of houses, DIY spots and warehouse space. Places like Trash House, House of the Dead Rat, Kitty Castle, Casa Chikimalas, Texas Toast House, Gingerbread House, Playback Studios, The Dojo, The Cuddle Space, and Arrows to Eden—the back-of-a-porn-shop venue mentioned above.

In lieu of real venues, places like these have often become the only option available for musicians in the area. But houses and DIY spots are like a Band-Aid on a gaping wound. None of these makeshift venues can openly advertise their shows or their locations. This makes them all but inaccessible to anyone not already in the know, cutting off potential fans before they even have a chance.

Spots like these are also, by necessity, transitory. People move, get priced out, and, increasingly after last year’s Ghost Ship fire in Oakland, get shut down by the police. In fact, as of the time of writing, seven of the 10 DIY venues listed with this story no longer exist. At the outset of 2018, the pool of spaces available for young musicians in San Jose is smaller than ever.

All ages shows live on in the South Bay, they’ve just been pushed underground—sometimes literally, as was the case with basement concerts at The House of the Dead Rat. Photo by Murray Bowles

PUNK GOES PUBLIC
Halfway through its second decade without a real all-ages venue, the city and surrounding region has lost a lot of momentum and will need to play catch-up if it ever hopes to build a truly self-sustaining music scene, according to Tommy Aguilar.

“We’re losing generations,” says Aguilar, a cultural producer and artist in San Jose. “How do you foster a very deep, culturally vibrant city? You gotta get the young.”

For almost a decade Aguilar worked at MACLA—Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana—a Latino-oriented arts nonprofit headquartered in the SoFA District. While there, he booked all-ages shows featuring young punk, metal and hip-hop groups.

“I never really turned anyone away,” he says, emphasizing the important role all-ages venues play for both young artists and their fans. Playing on a real stage with a real sound system in a dedicated venue gives budding musicians a chance to learn the ropes while showing their following the value of live performance. “I’m all for the romantic idea of the garage party, the house party. But you need to be on a stage, plugged in with a sound engineer. You need to learn the ways.”

These days Aguilar works solidly in the 21-and-over space with DJ collective Sonido Clash and event promoter Universal Grammar. Still, he believes something needs to be done to foster an all-ages scene—and he says nonprofits, like MACLA, will have to play a role.

A little over a decade ago, local record label owner and musician Mike Park went the nonprofit route. In fact, he went 1,200 miles down that route.

During the summer of 2005, the Asian Man Records founder and a number of musicians (including current Blink-182 guitarist Matt Skiba), bicycled the entire West Coast—from Seattle to San Diego—all to raise money for a nonprofit all-ages space in San Jose. It took a full month for the musicians to travel the distance. By the end, they had raised $80,000. Notably, none of the major tech companies in the area donated to the cause.

After completing the ride, Park and his nonprofit began looking at what they could do in San Jose with the money.

“There wasn’t much,” he says. “Even if we got a space, after paying deposits, insurance, getting the zoning, we would’ve lasted three months and all that would have been gone.”

In order to make that $80,000 work for the area’s youth, Park’s dream venue needed city involvement, which was sorely lacking, he says. Park describes his experience dealing with San Jose officials as “a lot of unanswered emails and a lot of apathy.”

Unfortunately, that apathy still seems to be the norm. When reached for comment on the historic lack of these spaces, the city’s cultural affairs director, Kerry Adams-Hapner, declined to speak on the issue, sidestepping it entirely by bluntly stating that it was not in the “purview of the office” of cultural affairs.

For his part, Aguilar would also like to see more action from City Hall. “The city has to step up,” he says. “We don’t have anybody championing music on that city level.”

That may be changing, however. Silicon Valley Creates has proposed a Japantown space for artists, a “model for supporting arts and creativity in the 21st century.” Crucially, though, current plans do not include any kind of venue space. Instead, the plan seems to double down on the city’s ill-considered decision to view artists of all stripes as “creative entrepreneurs,” rather than address the specific needs of the city’s young musicians (in this case, a place to play).

Despite the cultural affairs department’s boilerplate non-answer on the subject of all-ages spaces, San Jose clearly has a related problem on its hands: blight. In November, the City Council voted to create a pilot program to address the issue of the countless blighted buildings downtown. The program creates a registry of empty storefronts and levies fines against property owners who let them sit unnecessarily empty, in the hopes that it will push them to start renting.

While ostensibly unrelated to the city’s lack of all-ages venues, this initiative might just create some meaningful action. If this program leads to the creation of even one semi-permanent all-ages venue downtown, it could finally break the curse that has held the city for the last 15 years.

In the meantime, see you at the house show. DM a punk for the address.