This weekend local music promotion company PinUp Productions marks 20 years of booking shows—punk, hardcore, metal, hip hop and everything in between—in Santa Cruz and throughout the Bay Area and California.

To celebrate, they’re putting on an all-out, 18-band extravaganza in the main room at the downtown Santa Cruz Vets Hall on Oct. 19. But for anyone trying to buy a ticket, secondhand is the only option as the show sold out in less than a week.

“It’s insane,” PinUp co-owner Joel Haston says. “I feel like we really built a special lineup because we have new and old bands primarily from the 40831 [San Jose and Santa Cruz] but also the greater Bay Area and beyond.”

Wait, new and old bands?

Be prepared to take plenty of ibuprofen because PinUp was able to reunite not just one but three favorites that were a huge part of local metalcore scene in the early to mid 2000s: So Help Me God, Redfall, and the original Arsonists Get All The Girls (AGATG) lineup.

“You never know with these comebacks if people will be interested,” AGATG guitarist Arthur Alvarez comments. Having the show sell out “was really surprising.”

The night ends with a set by Orange County’s quintessential metalcore group, Bleeding Through.

“They’re one of my top three metalcore bands of all time,” Haston admits. “Plus they’ll be playing a record that also recently celebrated its 20th anniversary [2003’s seminal This Is Love, This Is Murderous].”

“Arsonists even played a show with Bleeding Through at the Vets Hall a long time ago, so this is a full-circle moment,” Alvarez states.

LET IT BLEED

Although the first incarnation of AGATG lasted only eight years from 2005 to 2013, the Santa Cruz band had a huge impact on the metalcore scene. During that time they released five albums and toured with some of the biggest names in the genre—Bleeding Through, Normal Jean and more. During their height of popularity, fans could buy their shirts from Hot Topic in malls across the country.

“[AGATG] are one of the three bands why I’m into music,” Nick Crivelli admits over the phone. One of PinUp Productions current stage managers for events all over the Bay, 27-year-old Crivelli  grew up in the local punk scene.

He started going to local shows in 2011. His first show? Arsonists Get All The Girls at the Catalyst Atrium.

“I can’t believe I finally get to see them again,” he laughs. “And now I’m super old!”

Crivelli joined PinUp Productions in 2019 when prog group Polyphia played the Catalyst.

“I was very curious about it and hungry to learn,” he remembers. “So I bothered this one [PinUp Productions] employee forever until he said, ‘Fine! Fine!’”

It’s this loyalty and dedication to the community that sets PinUp apart from their competition.

“I do whatever I can to put the scene first,” Haston decisively states.

Despite being the face of his company, Haston almost never was a part of PinUp Productions. Longtime local scene kids of all ages might remember his original company, Arsenic Productions.

“Santa Cruz was a unique spot during the MySpace boom of metalcore,” he says. “A lot of bands that wanted to tour the world got their first West Coast show, or first time playing out of their hometowns, here.”

In those days Arsenic Productions booked bands and venues throughout Santa Cruz and Monterey counties, while a different version of PinUp booked shows in Santa Clara County. The two entities began collaborating with each other at the end of  2006 after a misunderstanding between headliners and openers led to both of them accidentally booking the same Horse The Band tour.

“The two companies—I don’t even want to call them companies—the two families of people merged and we kept the PinUp name,” Haston recalls.

“Horse The Band was one of [AGATG] top three influences,” Alvarez says. “That Nintendocore sound was pretty much what we wanted to do: incorporate keyboards with our love for video games and make weird sounds.”

RECONNECTION

Today, PinUp Productions is a testament to the power of the DIY mentality. Along with owners Haston, Erik Jones, Casey Gerlach and David Forster, PinUp employees 20 dedicated employees that book—and run—shows from throughout the state.

While the show will be a celebration of the local scene, it will also be an important time to remember and reflect on the past and loved ones who are no longer with us.

In 2007 bassist and AGATG founding member Patrick Mason—who also came up with the band’s name—died of alcohol poisoning the day after his 21st birthday. Growing up in a small community, Alvarez, Haston and Mason were all high school friends and Mason’s death ripped open a wound that will never fully heal.

Haston and Alvarez both believe the upcoming PinUp Productions 20th Anniversary show will be a way to reconnect with the spirit of their friend, especially considering the concert is only days before his birthday.

“We’re gonna do an honor to him,” Haston says. “You only have one life. Live it the way you want and don’t let anyone—the government or society—tell you who to be.”

Info: Saturday, Oct. 19, 2pm, Vets Hall, 846 Front St., Santa Cruz. 831-454-0478.

“Santa Cruz was a unique spot during the MySpace boom of metalcore.” —Joel Haston

“Santa Cruz was a unique spot during the MySpace boom of metalcore. A lot of bands that wanted to tour the world got their first West Coast show, or first time playing out of their hometowns, here.”  —Joel Haston

Ireland’s Thomas Walsh makes original music that rivals the best work by two of his heroes: Electric Light Orchestra’s Jeff Lynne and Andy Partridge of XTC. Echoes of the Beatles and the Kinks’ Ray Davies crop up in his distinctive songs as well.

And while the Dublin-based musician is nowhere as well known as those artists, on his own and with his group Pugwash, Walsh has released a string of superb albums featuring an impossibly high tunefulness quotient; ear candy melodies seem to come out of him effortlessly.

Of course that’s not the case; Walsh says that for him, the process of songwriting is real work. “I fight every aspect,” he says, only half-joking. “There’s always a better option than spending the next hour going through pain and anguish over a rhyme or a chord. And the older I get, the less I want to do of that.” He describes himself as lazy, a characterization reinforced by the fact that during our Zoom interview, he’s lying prone on a couch, the camera positioned directly above him.

Walsh rhapsodizes about all the wonderful programming on Netflix, and the distractions of social media. “And then I’m thinking, ‘Oh, I should be writing a song!’ But that’s the last thing my creative body wants to do.” But happily for him and his dedicated fans, the song usually wins.

Even tossing aside those unsatisfactory tunes, Walsh consistently comes up with a bounty of supremely fetching songs. As Pugwash—the name used for solo and band releases for nearly 20 years—Walsh released nearly a dozen albums. 2012’s The Olympus Sound was nominated for the Meteor Choice Awards’ Irish Album of the Year.

Retiring the Pugwash name last year, Walsh began releasing music under his own name with The Rest Is History. The name may have changed but the story’s the same: Walsh’s trademark hook-filled music continues to strike a perfect balance between melancholia, wistfulness, power pop energy and heartfelt, intelligent lyricism.

On The Rest is History, Walsh does nearly everything: writing, singing, guitar, keyboards, production. But he brings in pals to help at key points. Neil Hannon is his band mate in another project, the Duckworth Lewis Method; Walsh and Hannon co-wrote “A Good Day for Me,” the infectious album opener. Indie auteur Michael Penn co-wrote “Take Your Time,” another standout track on the new record. Other guests on The Rest Is History include pals Joe Elliott (Def Leppard) and former XTC guitarist Dave Gregory; the latter contributes a sublime string arrangement on “We Knew.”

Part of Walsh’ motive for retiring Pugwash was the impracticality of keeping a touring band together, especially when attempting to mount tours to North America. What concertgoers on his October run of West Coast dates will encounter, instead, is “a very oddly-shaped man sitting on a chair playing an acoustic guitar for a couple of hours,” Walsh says with a chuckle.

For the tour, Walsh has put together something very special, an item that will be available only to those who attend his current U.S. dates. “I’m doing up 50 copies of a CD,” he says. “A lot of people who’ve never heard of me turn up at shows, so I thought, ‘Why don’t I just put all my singles on a CD, do a funny cover and bring those?’”

The playfully titled Pugwash Singles Club features 14 studio tracks plus a live cut featuring the full-band lineup from a 2015 gig in Austin, Texas. Walsh concedes that while interested parties can always go listen on Spotify, a physical CD is “a nice, cool thing. And I love doing the artwork.”

An Irishman through and through, Walsh nonetheless demonstrates a deep and abiding love for America and its people. He sums up the differences between the two nations in his customarily droll manner, one that applies equally well to the music he makes: “America’s so big, it’s hard to control the madness,” he says. “Ireland is mad, too, but it’s very small…and a controlled madness.”

Thomas Walsh plays at 6pm on Tue., Oct. 22 at Sante Adairius Santa Cruz Portal, 1315 Water St., Santa Cruz. Facebook.com