The last time I interviewed Patrick Simmons of the Doobie Brothers, he told me he was a little fed up with everyone assuming that Bay Area music began and ended in San Francisco around the Summer of Love. Most of the longtime Doobies, for instance, got their start in San Jose or Santa Cruz. And even the San Francisco bands drew on talent from around the Bay Area—as did the biggest bands from around the country and beyond. John McFee, the current guitarist and multi-instrumentalist who has been with the Doobie Brothers for the better part of 40 years, was born and raised in Santa Cruz, and has played on everything from the Grateful Dead’s From the Mars Hotel to Van Morrison’s Tupelo Honey to Elvis Costello’s My Aim in True.
Simmons goes so far back with Carlos Santana at this point that he told me didn’t even remember exactly when they first met, or even when the Doobies started playing shows with his band Santana. But there’s so much history with these two bands—including Santa Cruz history—that it’s great to still see them playing together more than four decades later. They’re doing a huge show at Mountain View’s Shoreline on Wednesday, June 26, and in this issue both Simmons and Santana himself talk about the history and legacy of their careers. Rock on!
Experts can agree that people are forced to live on the streets due to lack of affordable housing and stagnant wages. Increased rent prices have to lead to the rise of the homelessness population, especially in California’s expensive areas (Zillow, 2017). Federal housing vouchers, which are considered to be a solution, are not sufficient enough because only a quarter of homeless individuals receive it nationwide. $20 billion worth of vouchers are available per year, but only $1 billion vouchers are utilized (Zillow, 2017). It costs taxpayers a tremendous amount of money to leave people on the street. The homeless crisis could improve with the implementation of tiny home communities. Six states in the U.S. have had success stories (2018, Washington Post). In Austin, Texas, a program was implemented called Community First! Village. This program initiated a 51-acre development. It provides affordable, permanent housing as well as a supportive community for the chronically disabled homeless in central Texas. Community First! Village has become the largest community-based model in the country and exists to help and serve homeless neighbors who have been living on the streets (Mobile Loaves and Fishes, 2015). Other states that are using tiny houses to help the homeless include Kansas City, Missouri, Detroit, Nashville, Newfield, New York, and Seattle.
Tiny homes of 200-400 square feet could rent for $1 per foot per month, which is a much more affordable option for homeless individuals, with or without housing authority assistance. Permanent residences for the homeless is the first step to helping this population live healthier, quality lives.
Ashlyn Vargas, Khushboo Asija and Samantha Wildman
Santa Cruz
Poor Priorities
We spend millions on fruitless Russia probes and research on climate change, and billions have been spent subduing the cannabis industry. To what end? Are our lives any better? Of course not, and all the while the most vulnerable, the addicted and homeless suffer because of ineffective policies and poor financial planning. Why is it when citizens owe money to the government or you fail to show up for court, immediate action is employed and consequences ensue, yet when our very own suffer opioid addiction or homelessness the timeline to resolution is so prolonged?
Public schools should be beautiful, the weak, aged and disabled should be protected and have basic human needs, and no person should ever, ever be left sleeping on the street.
If we can’t at least shelter our own citizens (because no one in their right mind would choose this), then what good is government really? If government works with the people we can achieve great things. We need serious people to run on these issues and then we can indulge our relative curiosities via research.
A. Anderson
Santa Cruz
Re: Recall Effort
Right-wingers? Really, Nuz? Your accommodating arrogance puts you firmly in the running for Krohn’s next candidate recruitment, since Justin Cummings turned out to be so disappointingly independent. And to think just yesterday I was telling someone that GT’s journalism was superior to the Sentinel (a low bar, I know). I guess we all have our blind spots.
8,000 signatures will be a snap.
— Mark
Re: Microfibers
GT pointed out that the microfiber filter is a good solution “for those that can afford them.” Why doesn’t the County (and for that matter the City) of Santa Cruz and/or the water agencies offer a rebate on the filters, like for compost bins? This is a super important issue, especially for our seaside region. The filters will probably also save money in terms of wastewater filtration in the long run (since they appear to filter out other things as well).
— Julie
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GOOD IDEA
A new report that says Santa Cruzans see the City Council’s antics as “dysfunctional,” “theatrical,” “childish,” “disrespectful,” and “embarrassing.” The study comes from a collaborative and consensus-oriented California State University Sacramento program, which was studying how to proceed with a possible taskforce on rental housing. The consultant’s recommendation? Don’t bother; the discourse is too toxic right now. The report could provide a needed wake up call for city councilmembers. Chances are they’ll sleep through it.
GOOD WORK
Immediately after GT covered the environmental microplastic disaster last week (“World Piece,” 6/2/2019), two new studies detailed findings about just how prevalent these ocean contaminants are. A study from Monterey Bay Aquarium researchers laid out frightening levels of microplastics swirling through our region, sometimes in concentrations greater than the surface of the infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch. A separate study published in Environmental Science and Technology found that humans may be consuming anywhere from 39,000-52,000 microplastic particles per year.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“If someone thinks that peace and love are just a cliché that must have been left behind in the ’60s, that’s a problem. Peace and love are eternal.”
In February of 2017, Robbie Schoen, one of the most tireless advocates for the Santa Cruz visual-arts community, experienced a massive stroke that left him paralyzed on his left side.
Now, more than two years later, Schoen wants the arts community that supported him in the aftermath to know that he’s still very much involved in creative endeavors.
“I am healing,” says Schoen in a phone interview. “That’s the truth. I’m really starting to function again.”
On Friday, June 14, Schoen will mark his 61st birthday with a public celebration at the Felix Kulpa Gallery, the Santa Cruz art space that he managed and curated for more than a decade.
The event (5-9 p.m.), will feature barbecue, live music and plenty of good cheer to Schoen, who will be on hand with all the past and current directors of the Kulpa, including Robert Fallon, Michael Leeds and Mary Kopp.
Besides managing the Kulpa, Schoen was exhibit designer at the Museum of Art & History in Santa Cruz. And he was a working artist as well—in his heyday as a conceptual artist, he would often fashion guitars from a wide variety of found objects, including toilet seats and satellite dishes.
The stroke, which struck the right side of his brain, was devastating, and he was sedated for weeks afterwards. At first, the extent of the neurological damage was unclear. With intense speech and physical therapy, Schoen gradually began to regain language and memory function.
“He needed caregivers around the clock for quite some time,” says his uncle Ralph Meyberg. “But as he’s improved and his physical motor function has improved, he’s been able to cut back a bit on his caregiving.”
Though his left side remains paralyzed, Schoen has made progress in re-learning to stand and walk with a cane. “Every step is literally a step forward in his progress,” says Meyberg.
As for the future, Schoen says he’s focused on regaining even more motor skills, and picking up his artistic pursuits, which now include writing and making small art works from photographs. He would also love to contribute again at the MAH.
“I plan on keeping busy,” he says. “But I have to get able-bodied. There are still parts (of my body) I’m waiting to work again. But it is nice to be back.”
Robbie Schoen’s 61st birthday will be celebrated at 5 p.m. on Friday, June 14 at Felix Kulpa Gallery in Santa Cruz. Featuring live guitar music by Fixion Music. Free.
Though he no longer lives in the Bay Area, Carlos Santana holds fond memories of his time here—including living in Aptos, where he moved with his first wife in the early ’70s.
“It was time to start a family,” says Santana, who now lives in Las Vegas, via phone. “And that house in Aptos became like a nest.” The couple’s first of three children, Salvador, was born during their time there. “I’m very grateful and very clear about what each place that I have lived has given us,” he says.
The band to which Santana lent his last name—first as the Santana Blues Band in the late ’60s, then as simply Santana—is primarily linked to one place: San Francisco, where it rose out of the local music scene. Even once the group broke through to international success after its performance at Woodstock in 1969, the guitarist’s connection to the Bay Area has endured. He brings Santana back to NorCal on June 26, teaming up for a concert at Shoreline Amphitheatre with the Doobie Brothers, another classic band with an interesting connection to Santa Cruz.
When Santana lived in Aptos, he was a follower of the Indian spiritual leader Sri Chinmoy, and his band’s music has always had a somewhat mystical quality.
“Santana’s music is very spiritual and sensual,” he says of his band. He discovered the effect it had on audiences before he even landed a record deal, back when he and his crew brought their music to clubs and on campuses around the Bay Area. “The first thing we noticed is that the women move differently.”
While today’s pop freely blends global musical textures with traditional American forms—from rock to R&B to blues—it is worth remembering that Santana’s self-titled debut sounded nothing like its contemporaries.
From his earliest days as a bandleader, Santana has mixed guitar-led jamming with percussion rooted in Caribbean and African traditions. By combining high gain amplifiers and improvisational instrumentals with a repetitive Nigerian chant by Babatunde Olatunji and Latin flourishes, Santana’s 1969 lead single “Jingo” introduced a new kind of fusion, and in doing so, influenced a generation of musicians.
DOORS OF PERCUSSION
“I was learning how to do this alchemy between blues and African rhythms,” Santana says, explaining how he came to piece together all of the various musical idioms that form his distinctive sound. “We were learning from Willie Bobo, Jack McDuff and anyone who had congas and timbales. We put electric guitar with that, and something changed.”
The term world music may trace back to the early ’60s, but it wouldn’t come into wide use until the 1980s. By that time, Santana had been making music that drew from styles outside the European tradition for well over a decade.
His Mexican heritage—Santana was born in 1947 in the city of Autlán, and spent much of his youth in Tijuana—has always informed his music. Other early influences, like Hungarian jazz guitarist Gábor Szabó, broadened his horizons. From an early age, Santana’s interests included folk and, notably, blues guitarists B.B. King and John Lee Hooker.
But there was always something about African musical rhythms that moved him. In both raw form and filtered through Latin and Afro-Caribbean traditions, they would come to be a key part of the Santana sound. “Since the beginning of the Santana band, this has been a global consciousness music,” he says.
This year’s tour will feature as its opening act another deeply rooted Northern California rock ‘n’ roll institution—the Doobie Brothers. Started in San Jose in 1970, the Santa Cruz history of the Doobies is less well-known: their regular gigs at the legendary biker bar Chateau Liberté in the Santa Cruz Mountains earned them hardcore fans in the 1970s among the Hell’s Angels and other biker gangs. Multi-instrumentalist John McFee, still one of the core group members today after joining the Doobie Brothers in 1979, was born and raised in Santa Cruz.
Doobies guitarist Pat Simmons says the group has played with Santana a number of times over the years, including a 2017 swing through Australia and Japan. “We’re complementary musically and historically,” he says. “It’s always been a good show.”
BROTHERLY LOVEDoobie Brothers guitarist Pat Simmons says the Bay Area band has always been musically complementary to another longtime local, Carlos Santana.
“It’s always been great for us to play with other bands—Journey, Chicago, Eagles,” Simmons says. The Sep. 20 concert with the Eagles at San Francisco’s AT&T Park in front of 40,000 fans was one of last year’s big shows.
“We’ve been around for a long time, and any time we get a chance to play in front of new fans, it’s good for us,” he says. “You make your fans one at a time.”
Both bands are still creating new material. “We just cut five tracks,” Simmons says of recent recordings with producer John Shanks, set for release next spring, most likely as an EP. “Everything winds up online anyway,” he says, a realization that the industry’s changed a lot in half a century. “For a band like ours, it’s more about just letting people know we’re still working. I’m not sure it makes any sense to make a full album.”
He also reveals that the Doobie Brothers will perform a special show of 1973’s The Captain and Me at The Masonic in San Francisco this September. It’s a follow-up to their performance of that album and its 1972 predecessor Toulouse Street at New York’s Beacon Theater, which will soon be released as a live album.
Santana’s latest effort is Africa Speaks (out Jun. 7 on Concord Records). The album is full of the trademark Santana guitar style, but the rhythms are even more pronounced and upfront than on much of the band’s previous material.
“Everything that I ever learned came from Africa. Coltrane, Chuck Berry and Cream got it from Robert Johnson; Robert Johnson got it from Charlie Patton. Charlie Patton got it from Timbuktu in Africa,” Santana says. “No matter how you slice it or you shuffle it, you’re still playing African music. When I say this, I say it in a very divine way: it’s all the same. It’s still African language.”
And the guitarist comes by his African emphasis honestly. “Santana is one of the few bands that goes global, to each of the four corners of the world,” he says. “And we’re not tourists. We’re part of the family.”
Mallorcan singer and artist Buika takes the lead vocal on the album, much of which is sung in her native tongue, Spanish. Produced by Rick Rubin, the sessions for Africa Speaks yielded almost 40 songs, and dozens ended up on the cutting room floor, or as Santana puts it, “They’re in incubation.”
Name-dropping some of the top-tier artists he counts as friends—Mick Jagger, Lenny Kravitz and Sting—he teases the potential of the unreleased tracks. “Eventually, maybe I’ll find artists that can come in and sing on them.”
LOCAL NATIVES
As he chronicles in his 2014 memoir The Universal Tone, the Santana Blues Band formed in 1966, after the guitarist’s family moved from Tijuana to San Francisco. Once settled in the Bay Area, he became fully immersed in its burgeoning culture.
That same year, promoter Bill Graham started booking Santana’s band for local gigs. Graham, who started as a waiter in the Catskills and went on to invent the modern concert promotion industry, comes up whenever Santana is asked about his early days in the Bay Area music scene. “He was a supreme maitre’d,” Santana says. “Like my father and mother, he instilled in me how to present myself in a way that I wasn’t going to self-destruct. He would say, ‘The water is pure, the flowers are fresh, the apron is clean, the food is delicious. I hope you’re hungry; It’s my pleasure to serve you.’ That was his narrative.”
As Santana’s band grew in popularity, the group became a regular fixture at Graham’s Fillmore West. Before the release of the band’s debut album, Santana also played all over the Bay Area, including dates at the Dream Bowl in Vallejo, San Francisco’s Avalon Ballroom and Winterland.
WOODSTOCK NOTION
Prior to the release of Africa Speaks, the most recent Santana record was 2013’s Santana IV. That album marked the long overdue (if temporary) reunion of nearly all members of Santana’s early 1970s lineup, the band responsible for hits including “Jingo,” “Evil Ways, “Black Magic Woman,” “Oye Como Va,” “Everybody’s Everything,” and “No One to Depend On.” Each of those first three Santana albums reached the Top 10 on the Billboard charts, and the singles would all become staples of progressive radio, then AOR playlists, and finally classic rock radio.
That celebrated lineup is also the one that played the Woodstock Music & Art Fair on the afternoon of Saturday, Aug. 16, 1969. Sandwiched between a set by Country Joe McDonald and an impromptu performance by former Lovin’ Spoonful guitarist John Sebastian, Santana wowed the crowd at Max Yasgur’s farm with a 45-minute set that featured an incendiary reading of Olatunji’s “Jin-go-lo-ba” (today better known as “Jingo”) and an original, “Soul Sacrifice.” The band’s debut album wouldn’t hit record store shelves for another two weeks.
In his memoir, Santana says that he was high on mescaline at Woodstock; he writes that his memory of the set is “a blur.” But the festival’s overall vibe stayed with him. “What I remember is energy,” he says of the watershed cultural moment that marks its 50th anniversary this year. “The energy of people for three days sharing granola and good vibes: all the stuff that annoys the arrogant, cynical, slave people. It scares them to see that unity and harmony can actually happen before your eyes; people can not have needs for weapons or religion or politics, and we can actually share each other’s hope and celebrate each other. Woodstock really, really affected the rest of my life, my consciousness.”
CELEBRATION DAY
Though Santana has scored numerous awards on his own and with his band—including 10 Grammys and three Latin Grammys—and sold more than 100 million records across the globe, his commercial popularity has traversed many long and dry valleys between peaks.
Santana was in the midst of a particularly parched valley in the late 1990s; it looked as if his salad days were behind him. That perspective was underscored by his winning a kind of lifetime achievement award in 1998, induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “Usually,” he says with a laugh, “when they give you that award, it’s over for you.”
Not long after the ceremony, the guitarist was approached by industry mogul Clive Davis. The executive—then the head of Arista Records—suggested that Santana collaborate with a range of current hot artists. The result was the juggernaut album Supernatural, featuring “Smooth” (sung by Matchbox 20 vocalist Rob Thomas) at its center.
The seemingly unlikely roster of artists who worked with Santana on Supernatural reads like a who’s who of 20th-century fin de siècle: in addition to Thomas, Supernatural pulls in Dave Matthews, Everlast, Lauryn Hill, CeeLo Green, and Eagle-Eye Cherry. The album even included a nod to rock history by way of a collaboration with Santana’s musical peer, guitarist Eric Clapton.
Santana’s principal vocalist during the Supernatural period, Tony Lindsay, has been an anchor of the South Bay’s jazz, soul and R&B community for the past four decades. He ended his 25-year run with Santana four years ago and hasn’t seen the new lineup, saying he cherishes the memories of bandmates he performed with. Still, he says, “I might just go” when Santana plays Shoreline on June 26. “Since it’s so close, I’ll probably be there,” the Peninsula resident says.
With Supernatural’s 20th anniversary this month, it would seem that a victory lap in the form of a retrospective tour would be in order. Instead, the creatively restless Santana is observing the ’99 album within the context of a tour that presents his newest material as well. Both “Candomble Cumbele” and “Breaking Down the Door” from Africa Speaks show up often in the band’s current set.
PASSION PROJECTS
One of the enduring qualities that ties together every project in which Carlos Santana has engaged is intention. At the height of Santana’s successful run of albums (Santana, Abraxas and Santana III), he shifted gears and made 1972’s decidedly uncommercial Caravanserai. That album brought in new players and explored Santana’s growing interest in improvisational jazz.
For Santana—who has also made collaborative albums with virtuoso guitarist John McLaughlin, Alice Coltrane and his brother Jorge—all of his work fits together. He brings the same commitment to projects that aren’t destined for the charts as he does to hit singles like “Smooth.”
“The connection between any album that I’ve ever done and will do is passion, emotion and feelings,” he says. A deeply spiritual man, Santana says that his music “is assigned and designed to take you out of your misery. It’s a frequency of certain elements that makes people feel at home.”
While he can freely quote the great philosophers, Santana instead chooses words from the Godfather of Soul to make his point: “As James Brown said, ‘Jump back and kiss yourself.’” When one does that—literally or metaphorically—“you’re actually validating your light,” Santana says. “You’re celebrating your spirit. That’s what we were born to do. And the only way to uplift someone is to help them be aware of their own light, their own magnificence.”
PEACE, LOVE & MUSIC
At press time, Santana was on the bill to perform at Woodstock 50, a half-century to the day after the band’s original set there. The modern-day event’s future is in serious doubt, and it’s not at all clear if Woodstock 50 will even happen—this week, the event lost its venue when Watkins Glen International decided not to host it, and then saw (as of press time) two of its producers walk away. True to form, Carlos Santana brings a mixture of mindfulness and intention to the question of whether a revival of the iconic festival is even a good idea.
“It depends on the consciousness of the artists,” he says. “Why are you coming to play? Are you coming to sell more records? Are you coming to sell Mountain Dew or tacos or marijuana? Or are you just coming here to celebrate the good qualities of humans?”
Santana says that those who came to the first Woodstock with the right intentions are still here: “We’re singing the same songs, differently. We reinvent ourselves, but the song is unity and harmony and healing and coming together and doing away, eventually, with patriotism, which is prehistoric. Anything that has to do with walls and patriotism and arrogance about, ‘We’re number one,’ that’s a division between ego and spirit. With spirit, we’re all one.
“Woodstock—the real Woodstock—is the opposite of fear and greed,” Santana says. And if that makes him sound like a hippie, he doesn’t mind. “Not a fake hippie with fake mustaches, fake wigs and phony values,” he says. “Not that hippie; the real hippie.” To him, that includes figures who “care for the environment, who want equality, fairness, and justice. Dolores Huerta, Cesar Chavez, the Black Panthers; those kind of hippies.”
For Santana, making music with intention is part of that mix, a vehicle to achieve those hippie goals. “It’s an art,” he says. “We do this so we can do that.”
Dan Pulcrano and Nick Veronin contributed to this story.
Santana and the Doobie Brothers perform at Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, June 26. $35 and up. livenation.com.
It was just about five years ago when a small Santa Cruz software startup operating in the vague realm of “business intelligence” moved a couple dozen employees into the top corner of downtown’s stately E.C. Rittenhouse building.
Last week, Google paid $2.6 billion to acquire that now-not-so-little company, data analytics provider Looker.
“My gut reaction was, ‘Wow, this is huge news for Santa Cruz and for Looker,’” says Sara Isenberg, founder of the Santa Cruz Tech Beat news site.
Isenberg has seen past tech booms spawn local outposts for companies like Netflix, Seagate, Intel and Cisco, but a familiar migration pattern over Highway 17 to Silicon Valley has lent Santa Cruz a reputation as a place for tech companies to set up shop and have fun before they leave and get serious.
Though the terms of Looker’s new deal with Google are still being finalized, the company founded by local entrepreneur Lloyd Tabb in 2012 plans to keep its headquarters in Santa Cruz, a spokesperson tells GT.
“This is not, by any means, the end for Looker, but simply the closing of our first chapter,” Looker President and CEO Frank Bien wrote in a blog post announcing the deal last Thursday. Though Silicon Valley’s biggest companies have something of a reputation for smothering promising startups—a “kill-zone,” as The Economist put it—Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian wrote in his own blog post that the Looker acquisition “builds on an existing partnership” between the two companies, which share 350 joint customers like Buzzfeed, Hearst and Yahoo.
The Central Coast tech industry has seen a flurry of activity in recent years as local officials and business leaders aim to branch out from the area’s entrenched mix of long commutes and low-paying jobs in fields like hospitality. In addition to Looker’s success (it raised $280 million from investors), smaller startups in fields like genomics have been launched by researchers emerging from UCSC. Robust agriculture industries in Salinas and Watsonville have also fueled startups focused on next-generation farming or water efficiency. Still, Looker’s 10-figure deal with Google is far and away the biggest in recent memory.
On the day the acquisition was announced, Looker listed 102 open jobs on LinkedIn in locations from Tokyo to Dublin to New York. About two-thirds of all hiring was for positions in the greater Bay Area, including around 30 jobs in San Francisco and three dozen new positions in Santa Cruz in sales, finance, engineering and other corporate roles.
The company has come a long way since it first set up shop on the top floor of the Rittenhouse building in 2014.
“They started off with using half a floor, then the whole floor. At the time they had no idea how big it would be,” says Matt Shelton, a real estate broker with J.R. Parrish who has since helped Looker expand its downtown headquarters to almost the entire four-story building. “Nothing’s ever happened like this in downtown.”
Amid Looker’s growth spurt, Santa Cruz has also been forced to reckon with the region’s changing connection to high-value tech companies. In addition to homegrown startups like Looker, new outposts for big names like Amazon and growing legions of freelancers—plus the many local residents who ride private tech shuttles over Highway 17 each day—the influx of more affluent white collar workers has put pressure on the local housing market and notoriously anti-growth cities.
Looker’s new parent company is already expanding in all directions in the Bay Area, including Google’s planned 25,000-person office in downtown San Jose. If and how Santa Cruz could figure into those plans remains to be seen.
“Santa Cruz is one of the few corners of the San Francisco Bay Area that Google doesn’t own a big chunk of,” CNBC wrote in an article about the Looker deal. “Should Google decide it wants to expand in the area, it could have political capital with Looker’s Santa Cruz-native leaders.”
IN THE CLOUDS
Founded at the height of the “Big Data” craze, Looker describes itself as a company “dedicated to empowering humans through the smarter use of data.” Google Cloud’s Kurian praised the “unified platform for business intelligence, data applications, and embedded analytics.”
In human speak, Looker sells businesses software to better manage information that could help increase sales, save money or otherwise improve operations. Like other data-centric companies, that puts Looker at the center of the fast-evolving conversation about privacy in the digital economy. Late last year, the company hired a chief privacy and data ethics officer, tech industry veteran Barbara Lawler.
To compete for experienced corporate executives and highly-sought-after engineers, Looker has waded deeper into the world of Silicon Valley employee perks. In 2014, Carolyn Hughes, Looker’s vice president of talent and culture, told me as a reporter for the Silicon Valley Business Journal that the startup was recruiting workers from other parts of the Bay Area by offering relocation bonuses worth 15% of annual salaries and renting rooms at Hotel Paradox for those who still chose to live elsewhere.
Though large tech buyouts often result in vastly different payouts for employees with varying levels of seniority, an influx of new money could exacerbate tension in a community already grappling with mounting anxiety about income inequality. The pressure is particularly acute for the region’s low-wage workers, but it’s also felt by other would-be founders.
“I think the cost of housing is an issue for startups,” Isenberg says. “The fact is that’s a California problem. That’s not going to be fixed if they go to Silicon Valley.”
Santa Cruz County had a total of about 5,000 local tech jobs and 10,000 tech commuters as of early last year, according to a report by Christopher Thornberg of Beacon Economics. Though six-figure jobs at area tech companies are getting more common, he said that “growth depends on land use” and adding more housing, according to a write-up in the Sentinel.
There are also logistical issues like office space to contend with. Between Looker, Kaiser Permanente and other growing companies like Warrior Media, Shelton says the city is approaching capacity for large office space. “It’s gonna be difficult for the next big company,” he says.
It’s one thing to operate a yoga studio, and another to operate a beacon of wellness. Phoenix Artemisia falls under the latter category with Watsonville Yoga.
The studio, located on Main Street in the heart of downtown Watsonville, is a space for yoga, capoeira, ballet, pilates, African dance, massage, acupuncture, salsa rueda, belly dance, hypnotherapy, and more. It’s a former bank building—as evidenced by the vault door near the massage room that opened in 2016—now operated with the local community in mind.
“For years now, people who have the money can go out and drink and eat, but what else is there?” Artemisia says. “Sometimes there are activities in the plaza here, but post-work and weekend evening activities are often lacking. So we are trying to have more opportunities for folks who want to do something else.”
Watsonville Yoga was one of the first studios in the area to offer bilingual classes, catering to Spanish-speakers who want to go to yoga and dance classes. “I think we are one of the only places outside of San Francisco that offers classes for monolingual Spanish speakers,” Artemisia says, leading the way to the larger of two studios, the Sol room, a 1,000-square-foot studio for classes including heated yoga and dance.
“Our intention and approach is inclusivity, bringing people who are curious about yoga together from all walks of life,” she says. “Sometimes there is shyness between people due to the language barrier in this community. I want to create an atmosphere where people can mingle and bond.”
In the past, the studio offered a yoga class for farm workers, though Artemisia says they currently aren’t offering it because of the teacher commitment and low attendance. Aside from yoga and wellness, the business also prides itself on local artwork and community events.
“We are juggling a lot of pieces to make it accessible, like we have discounted class prices at night to get more people to come out for the evening classes,” Artemisia says, noting that the morning classes are some of the most popular.
Most of the teachers at Watsonville Yoga are locals, specializing in specific practices like Tai Chi or healing arts. While the majority of the classes are yoga-centric, Artemisia says they want to offer something for everyone. The studio has collaborated with the Mount Madonna Institute, local schools and Arts Council Santa Cruz to bring yoga and wellness to the broader community. They offer weekly community acupuncture for $25 in hopes of making alternative medicine and wellness more affordable—a big perk when acupuncture often costs triple that amount.
“The response to what we are doing here has been good, but it’s taken a lot longer than it would have if we were in Santa Cruz or Los Gatos,” she says. “The concept that we have here has a lot of integrity, but being in downtown Watsonville was hard at first because it is under-occupied by businesses and was not in and of itself a destination of sorts. People use Main Street to be on their way somewhere, and for many years it hasn’t been a regular place to hangout or spend time. But I think that’s changing.”
Artemisia is particularly excited about the potential downsizing of Main Street from four to two lanes, which she hopes will bring an intimate, community feel back to downtown Watsonville.
“All of this traffic is a major problem for us. It’s dangerous for the public and pedestrians and bad for the local businesses,” she says. “This is a beautiful, old, historic place that, before the earthquake, people used to enjoy walking around and socializing.”
Artemisia says she’s noticed more people spending time downtown in recent years. “I think that newer businesses here, including Watsonville Yoga, are making it intriguing for people to come here to rediscover the really special attributes of downtown Watsonville while enjoying exciting and healthy cultural and social activities.”
With tensions in the Middle East escalating and threats of war between the U.S. and Iran grabbing headlines, now would be an appropriate moment to reflect on a gesture of peace that happened at the height of a hostage crisis that had the two countries locked in an international stand-off nearly 40 years ago.
A new BBC documentary explores a historic, yet little-known, American peace delegation that landed in Tehran in February of 1980, right in the middle of the crisis.
Fifty American peace activists risked their lives to engage in a dialogue of reconciliation with a group of Iranian students who had invited them to Iran, while the newly empowered revolutionary Islamic regime was holding 52 American diplomats and U.S. Embassy staff hostage. The documentary A Call From The Hostage Takers will air June 15 on BBC World News.
Paul Johnston, now 68, was a 28-year old labor organizer in San Francisco in 1979 when he joined the delegation. A longtime Santa Cruz resident, Johnston is now a retired sociology professor. Producers interviewed him in his Eastside home, where he recounted the hopes of the delegation, their interactions with the Iranian students and his retrospective on the impacts of Iranian hostage crisis.
In 1980, President Jimmy Carter was running for re-election against Ronald Reagan while the hostage crisis dominated media coverage. The hostages were ultimately held for 444 days and finally released the day that Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as president in January of 1981.
We now know, as depicted in the 2012 movie Argo, that the delegation landed one week after the CIA executed a bizarre-but-successful undercover operation in Tehran. Posing as a film producer scouting locations for a science fiction movie, CIA operative Toni Mendez (portrayed in the film by Ben Affleck) rescued six embassy staff from Tehran who would have otherwise been added to the list of hostages.
A group of revolutionary Iranian students extended the invitation to a faith-based, mostly anti-war organization called Clergy and Laity Concerned. The delegation included rabbis and priests, as well as African American, Native American, Chicano, and women’s rights leaders. Johnston represented the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
Leading the delegation was Kansas University social welfare professor Norman Forer, an anti-war activist. With no official diplomatic capacity, the delegation’s primary goals were “to listen, and to learn,” Johnston says.
IN A FLASH
In Johnston’s living room, before the taping of the interview begins, the BBC producers chat about how they secured some excellent footage of the delegation. They mention that interviews with other delegation members have gone well.
“Just relax and tell us what you remember, Paul,” BBC co-producer Mark Williams coaches Johnston before the interview, “And don’t worry if you fumble or say something you may want to correct—we aren’t live.” Williams begins by asking about the delegation’s overall mission and Johnston’s relationship with Forer.
“The thing about Norm I remember the most,” Johnston says, “was his deep conviction in the power of compassion and dialogue—and holding back criticism of any adversary … He taught me about the power of apologizing.”
Apologizing for the American government’s support of the torture and mass murder at the direction of the Shah of Iran, who was finally overthrown in early 1979, was one of the Supreme Revolutionary Council’s demands for the release of the hostages.
The peace delegation and the students, Johnston explains, were “pawns in a very complicated game.” There was no small measure of “naïve hope,” he said, on both the part of the delegation and the students who had invited them to Iran.
Both sides hoped that by working together they could “temper the edge” of the right-wing reactionism in their respective countries. The students, who Johnston describes as incredibly hospitable, regarded Americans as “great and decent people,” unaware of the torture and killing by the Shah’s secret police, which had received American and Israeli training and support for decades, Johnston says.
The students hoped that after learning of the human rights abuses, Americans would protest their government’s complicity, recognize the legitimacy of the revolution and begin some kind of “truth and reconciliation” process to get past the bloody history.
The reasons this hope did not lead to more tangible results are complicated, Johnston says. As the hostage crisis dragged on and tensions escalated, right-wing factions on both sides gained ground. Military and intelligence agencies in the U.S. were pounding the drums to retaliate against an American-held hostage. Meanwhile, Islamic theocrats on the Supreme Revolutionary Council were gaining more support and influence with the increasing threat of American military intervention.
Johnston recalls that members of the peace delegation tried to hone their message to the Iranian people around three key points. The first was acknowledging that the U.S. government was indeed complicit in the Shah’s crimes, and the second affirming that the American people needed to know about the bloodshed.
Lastly, they tried to make clear that holding hostages was making these goals increasingly difficult to achieve—impeding hopes for a peaceful reconciliation, Johnston says.
PAST IS PROLOGUE
Johnston sees the Iranian hostage crisis as a “hinge of history,” a fulcrum with powerful forces teetering on either side in Washington, D.C., and in Tehran. Johnston believes the Reagan administration later used the crisis to justify covert CIA activity around the world, particularly in Nicaragua.
Johnston takes a long pause when thinking about America’s relationship with Iran now, after the Trump administration pulled out of the Iran Nuclear Deal and recent military buildup in the Persian Gulf. He fears that Trump could use war in the Middle East to help fuel his 2020 reelection bid.
“So now we’re slouching toward yet another confrontation with Iran,” Johnston says. “I am very afraid the worst could happen.”
‘A Call From the Hostage Takers’ will air at 2:10 p.m. on Saturday, June 15, on BBC World News Channel.
Aloft circus group never intended to be an all-female and non-binary troupe. That’s just the way it happened. “It just felt right to us,” Aloft artistic director Shayna Swanson says. “It came through the process. It wasn’t an advance decision.”
But Swanson admits that since the group itself is pretty feminist, the gender breakdown isn’t really a surprise.
“In some circus acts, the men are strong and the women are pining after him and things like that,” she says. “These very stereotypical plays between men and women in circuses are frequently represented, and it’s so boring. I’m so tired of it.”
A contemporary do-it-yourself circus group based in Chicago, Aloft is visiting Santa Cruz next week to perform their Brave Space show incorporating aerial arts, hoops and silks, and acrobatics.
This summer seems to be the time of the circus in Santa Cruz. With the Venardos Circus just wrapped up in San Lorenzo Park, and Flynn Creek Circus visiting Scotts Valley next month, Santa Cruz is being been overrun by big tops. But Swanson wants to be clear that their circus is no Ringling Brothers—while there are some traditional acts, there is also much more beyond old-school entertainment. The show’s title is a twist on the idea of “safe space.”
“People, especially white people and people with a lot of privilege, can use this term ‘safe space’ to shield themselves from any responsibility,” Swanson says. “Anytime you bring up a controversy or something that they have done wrong, it’s like, ‘Oh my gosh this is supposed to be a safe space, I’m not supposed to be challenged here.’ And so we are encouraging people to embrace the term “brave space” to mean that each person should be brave enough to take responsibility for their own actions.”
With a cast of only eight, the show will be intimate, tactile and interactive—meaning the majority of the audience will be participating. The audience helps to build a blanket fort akin to that of a kids’ rainbow playground parachute activity: everyone holds the edges of the large tarp and run under as they lift. The show takes place under the self-made tent, a tiny world where anything can happen. Built on trust, the idea is that the performers and audience members will coexist and rely on each other as strangers to ask for help and be willing to lend a hand.
“The things that we do in the circus can be used metaphorically in the real world to encourage people to be more brave in their daily lives, and to put themselves on the line for members of other marginalized communities,” Swanson says. “To actually look outside yourself at people around you that need help, and to help them or to ask for help if you need it.”
Attendees will have some idea of what they will be doing in advance, the cast makes abundantly clear. They can accommodate people that do not wish to participate and folks with accessibility issues, since there is a lot of movement required of the audience.
“We trust complete strangers with our safety in a really physical way. We have strangers hold our equipment in the air for us when we perform,” Swanson says. “These are people we do not know, but we have decided to operate under this idea that people generally have the best intentions at heart. We want to let people know what it’s like to be trusted, because we don’t always have that in this world.”
‘Brave Space’ will be in Santa Cruz for one night only at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, June 19. Radical Movement Factory, 2801 Mission St. Ext, Santa Cruz. aloftcircusarts.com. $25/$35.
ARIES (March 21-April 19): We may not have to travel to other planets to find alien life. Instead of launching expensive missions to other planets, we could look for exotic creatures here on Earth. Astrobiologist Mary Beth Wilhelm is doing just that. Her search has taken her to Chile’s Atacama Desert, where the terrain has resemblances to Mars. She’s looking for organisms like those that might have once thrived on the Red Planet. In accordance with astrological omens, I invite you to use this idea as a metaphor for your own life. Consider the possibility that you’ve been looking far and wide for an answer or resource that is actually close at hand.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Philosopher Martin Buber believed that some stories have the power to heal. That’s why he said we should actively seek out stories that have the power to heal. Buber’s disabled grandfather once told him a story about an adored teacher who loved to dance. As the grandfather told the story, he got so excited that he rose from his chair to imitate the teacher, and suddenly began to hop and dance around in the way his teacher did. From that time on, the grandfather was cured of his disability. What I wish for you in the coming weeks is that you will find stories like that.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): In the 1960s, Gemini musician Brian Wilson began writing and recording best-selling songs with his band the Beach Boys. A seminal moment in his development happened while he was listening to his car radio in August 1963. A tune he had never heard before came on: “Be My Baby” by the Ronettes. Wilson was so excited that he pulled over onto the shoulder of the road and stopped driving so he could devote his full attention to what he considered a shockingly beautiful work of art. “I started analyzing all the guitars, pianos, bass, drums, and percussion,” he told The New York Times. “Once I got all those learned, I knew how to produce records.” I suspect a pivotal moment like this could unfold for you in the coming weeks, Gemini. Be alert!
CANCER (June 21-July 22): My dear Cancerian, your soul is so rich and complicated, so many-splendored and mysterious, so fertile and generous. I’m amazed you can hold all the poignant marvels you contain. Isn’t it sometimes a struggle for you to avoid spilling over? Like a river at high tide during heavy rains? And yet every so often, there come moments when you go blank—when your dense, luxuriant wonders go missing. That’s OK! It’s all part of the Great Mystery. You need these fallow phases. And I suspect that the present time might be such a time. If so, here’s a fragment of a poem by Cecilia Woloch to temporarily use as your motto: “I have nothing to offer you now save my own wild emptiness.”
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): America’s premier eventologist is Leo-born Adrienne Sioux Koopersmith. When she was going through a hard time in 1991, she resolved to buoy her spirits by creating cheerful, splashy new holidays. Since then she has filled the calendar with over 1,900 new occasions to celebrate. What a perfect way to express her radiant Leo energy! National Splurge Day on June 18 is one of Adrienne’s favorites: a time for revelers to be extra kind and generous to themselves. That’s a happy coincidence, because my analysis of the astrological omens suggests that this is a perfect activity for you to emphasize during the coming weeks.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): “Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.” Virgo poet Mary Oliver made that statement. It was perfectly reasonable for her, given her occupation, although a similar declaration might sound outlandish coming from a non-poet. Nonetheless, I’ll counsel you to inhabit that frame of mind at least part-time for the next two weeks. I think you’ll benefit in numerous ways from ingesting more than your minimum daily dose of beauty, wonder, enchantment, and astonishment.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Libran philosopher Michel Foucault articulated a unique definition of “criticism.” He said that it doesn’t dish out judgments or hand down sentences. Rather, it invigorates things by encouraging them, by identifying dormant potentials and hidden beauty. Paraphrasing and quoting Foucault, I’ll tell you that this alternate type of criticism ignites useful fires and sings to the grass as it grows. It looks for the lightning of possible storms, and coaxes codes from the sea foam. I hope you’ll practice this kind of “criticism” in the coming weeks, Libra—a criticism that doesn’t squelch enthusiasm and punish mistakes, but instead champions the life spirit and helps it ripen.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Help may be hovering nearby, but in an unrecognizable guise. Rumpled but rich opportunities will appear at the peripheries, though you may not immediately recognize their value. A mess that you might prefer to avoid looking at could be harboring a very healthy kind of trouble. My advice to you, therefore, is to drop your expectations. Be receptive to possibilities that have not been on your radar. Be willing to learn lessons you have neglected or disdained in the past.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): As much as I love logic and champion rational thinking, I’m granting you a temporary exemption from their supremacy. To understand what’s transpiring in the coming weeks, and to respond with intelligence, you will have to transcend logic and reason. They will simply not be sufficient guides as you wrestle and dance with the Great Riddle that will be visiting. You will need to unleash the full power of your intuition. You must harness the wisdom of your body, and the information it reveals to you via physical sensations. You will benefit from remembering at least some of your nightly dreams, and inviting them to play on your consciousness throughout the day.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): For the sake of your emotional and spiritual health, you may need to temporarily withdraw or retreat from one or more of your alliances. But I recommend that you don’t do anything drastic or dramatic. Refrain from harsh words and sudden breaks. For now, seal yourself away from influences that are stirring up confusion so you can concentrate on reconnecting with your own deepest truths. Once you’ve done that for a while, you’ll be primed to find helpful clues about where to go next in managing your alliances.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): I’ve got a list of dos and don’ts for you. Do play and have fun more than usual. But don’t indulge in naïve assumptions and infantile emotions that interfere with your ability to see the world as it really is. Do take aggressive action to heal any sense of abandonment you’re still carrying from the old days. But don’t poison yourself with feelings of blame toward the people who abandoned you. Do unleash wild flights of fantasy and marvelous speculations about seemingly impossible futures that maybe aren’t so impossible. But don’t get so fixated on wild fantasies and marvelous speculations that you neglect to embrace the subtle joys that are actually available to you right now.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): “At times, so many memories trample my heart that it becomes impossible to know just what I’m feeling and why,” writes Piscean poet Mark Nepo. While that experience is familiar to everyone, it’s especially common for you Pisceans. That’s the bad news. But here’s the good news: in the coming weeks, your heart is unlikely to be trampled by your memories. Hence, you will have an excellent chance to know exactly what you’re feeling and why. The weight of the past will at least partially dissolve, and you’ll be freer than usual to understand what’s true for you right now, without having to sort through confusing signals about who you used to be.
Homework: Tell how you have sometimes been able transform liabilities into assets. Testify at freewillastrology.com.
Sunday is Father’s Day. We recognize, praise and celebrate all fathers, including mothers fulfilling the role of fathers. Fathers are the masculine presence and principle in our world, radiating strength, discipline, structure and the rule of law that all kingdoms need.
Monday is the June full moon, the Gemini solar Festival of Humanity. It is also called World Invocation Day. During this festival and all during Gemini, the Forces of Reconstruction stream into the Earth, restoring humanity’s values, virtues, morals and ethics. The Gemini festival is celebrated for three days, each day a different keynote or sound. Day one is love (not sentimental, emotional or personal) that understands, acts with strength and decision, and works for all of humanity. Day two is resurrection, so that we may have “life more abundant.” Day three is contact. The statement “contact releases love” signifies the third day.
The hierarchy (inner spiritual world government working directly with the Forces of Light) invites all of us to participate using our imagination while reciting the Great Invocation. Gradually, in all centers and lands, this ceremony will be externalized. We are all asked to do our part—not as onlookers or visitors, but as disciples and pilgrims. One more thing: we are to guard against overstimulation during this festival, be wise with our energy on behalf of humanity.
ARIES: Have your desires and aspirations for further creative work increased? Are you searching for how to better enjoy yourself? Is your self-expression becoming more creative, passionate and entertaining? Is this how you’re to be in the world now? Careful. Others may compete with your brilliance and brightness. Just let them win. You know you will always be the first in all that you do. Keep initiating, keep creating and keep playing.
TAURUS: Your constant work focus reflects deep morals, ethics and values. You attempt to resolve financial problems and make a secure future for everyone. You remind everyone, “It’s the food and water we must safeguard.” And that is right. You know we must tend to the lives of many generations to come, beginning now. Of all the signs, you are the most composed, stable, constant, and prepared. Rest more. Be aware that you’re communicating dual realities.
GEMINI: The Gemini Sun is illuminating you from within. A golden light emanates from your eyes and heart, and carries itself out into the world in the words you speak. The potential for radiating love/wisdom rests in your heart. During this time, allow it to emerge. Many are puzzled when around you. How are you different, they wonder? Your personality light is dimming as your soul light shines forth. You are the twins. Study, draw and gaze at Castor and Pollux.
CANCER: Working with your finances and resources becomes exciting when you decide to use all that you have to create a future that is sustainable and ecological for you and family. It then becomes a template for others. Many will look to you for information when more future changes begin. Ideas fill your mind as you work with others, maintaining right resources and most of all saving seeds. Everyone has specific gifts. Nurture yours.
LEO: You must be busy with this and that, here and there, and even some over there somewhere. It’s good to project yourself everywhere, participate in various activities so others can recognize and appreciate you. This helps develop a newer self-identity, and it’s also good if you facilitate meetings, group discussions and community matters. You always have leadership qualities, but now they are truly seen and your ideas applied. Through it all you remain humble.
VIRGO: While life is moving slowly forward alongside your past and future, your mind is constantly figuring out what goals, plans and achievements you want to accomplish in the coming months. You are busy working behind the scenes—doing research, perhaps, or tending the ill and weary, or reading books on religion. Or perhaps you are seeking respite and seclusion in a water garden. Plant love in a mist (the seeds are edible), borage again (for tea) and spearmint for teas.
LIBRA: The Sun is beginning to highlight your house of travel, and so often you are out of town, somewhere far away. I hope wherever you are there is art and culture, warm waters to bathe in, beauty to see, and towns in the shape of roses. Hopefully you have access to a spa, because you need care and tending and time away from work because you push yourself beyond limits. Prepare yourself to have what you want and need. This requires a focus on self-definition.
SCORPIO: You will be called to assume more responsibilities with your work and in the world. This will include a new type of recognition of your gifts and abilities. There is a kindness to what will occur between the world and you. It’s a culmination of your ambitions and achievements. As more work is required of you in the public, step forward with confidence and grace. These above all will be recognized by others. Grace and equanimity and Right Speech are the gifts you offer.
SAGITTARIUS: Work has been very busy with you being very disciplined. It called for all your creative abilities and endeavors. Now you begin to tend to resources, money and how you’ve used them in the past. This will be very revealing. Are you thinking of faraway places, people, things, events? Is there a longing for something from the past that held you in loving care? What new adventures, combining past, present and future, lie ahead? You’ll assess and then decide the best journey ahead. Remember, you’re not a visitor. You are a pilgrim.
CAPRICORN: You are aware of the passage of time, and thus have the intention to be closer and kinder to family and friends and everyone you meet along the way. Many benefits emerge from this. Always with contact, more and more love is released. This is nourishing for you, and you need nourishment now—not just from food, but from the love around you. When we give love, it is always returned. Not perhaps as we expect. But as we need. The garden loves you. Do you have a fig tree?
AQUARIUS: The sun is illuminating your house of fun, pleasure, love affairs, children, and creativity. If an artist, you should be in your studio creating inspired works. You are creative in all that you do. Bringing ideas from the future, placing them in present time. It’s important to balance both creativity and pleasures. Be discerning, too. Do not allow anyone to take advantage of you. Many seek your attention, needing you to love them, especially children and the animal kingdom. It’s a very good time for you. You will use it well.
PISCES: You’re finding yourself back in time, doing things and interacting with people from the past. You are fulfilling certain tasks, dharmic in nature. While performing daily work, maintain a calm interior, practice mantrams (Ohm Mani Padme Hum). Know you must continue till the work that is yours to do is complete. It has taken years to come to this place. Your personality at times resists. But your soul brought you to where you are now. It’s a good place to be.
Nearly a decade ago, L.A.-based indie group Inner Wave played an early show at a tire shop in South Central. The other bands on the bill played punk. Inner Wave, on the other hand, brought an experimental bedroom-pop sound.
It may not sound like a great match, but in those early days, there weren’t a lot of other choices for the group’s members, who grew up in the primarily Latinx Inglewood neighborhood where DIY and backyard shows were (and are) plentiful, but bands tend to play heavier, higher-energy music.
“No bands sounded like us,” says Inner Wave bassist Jean Pierre Narvaez. “We would always be playing with a very punk band or a very ska band. Or maybe even an even heavier band. We would be the only band playing indie songs. I wouldn’t say we were actually part of the scene, but we definitely rubbed shoulders with everybody. We were very friendly with people.”
The five-piece group is now on its first headlining tour, and plays Santa Cruz on June 14. Some of the shows on the month-long tour tour sold out; others have been shy by 20-30 tickets. Without a local scene to really help build a following, the band found an audience online.
Narvaez recalls in 2010, when Inner Wave first uploaded music to Bandcamp, and people began discovering it almost immediately. There’s an audience on Bandcamp for bands that play weirdo, offbeat, lo-fi indie-pop. Inner Wave falls in the category comfortably.
“Bandcamp has a very nice index of artists,” Narvaez says. “People can keep going into this Bandcamp black hole. At some point, they landed on us.”
After putting out several singles, EPs and albums, the musicians wanted to challenge themselves and make what would be their first serious opus of a record as a young indie band. It took nearly two years to write, and a year to record in a garage. They whittled down 30 songs to 18, and the resulting hour-long album, Underwater Pipe Dreams, was released in August of 2017.
It’s a chilled out collection of odd, guitar-centric dream-pop that also experiments with other instruments, like keys, vocal processors and drum machines, and builds some incredible soundscapes over the lo-fi hooky tunes. A lot of bands that play indie bedroom-pop are almost dramatically serious, but while Inner Wave takes its craft seriously, and sing lyrics that are important to the band members, the songs still manage to feel fun and playful, like a musical roller coaster ride that goes from surreal ballads to dissonant noise-rock tunes to almost silly-sounding spontaneous jams.
The album is also marked by imperfections.
“There’s little dinks and mess-ups that have their own charm. These little weird things make it sound unique. We definitely enjoy that kind of stuff,” Narvaez says. “We were trying to take ourselves a little more seriously and really perfect our craft.”
Since releasing the album, the band has put out some stand-alone singles, like the hypnotic doo-wop tune “Lullaby,” plus several cuts that didn’t make Underwater Pipe Dreams. The song “2031” was a voice memo taken off one of an iPhone that guitarist/lead singer Pablo Sotelo sang over and mixed in Ableton.
Now that the group is at headliner level, it has an advantage over a lot of bedroom-pop artists that get a sudden bit of attention online: Inner Wave has been a live band for a decade. Going forward, the goal is to add performance value with lighting and other elements.
“I feel like the actual playing of instruments live, that’s very old news. We’re just trying to make the experience a lot better,” Narvaez says. “Like Tame Impala, Travis Scott. Those scenes have crazy productions. We would love to be able to have those kinds of resources to make our show that beautiful.”
Inner Wave performs at 9 p.m. on Friday, June 14, at the Catalyst, 1011 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz. $15 adv/$18 door. 423-1338.
