“‘Surf Rider’ seems like it’s going to be a happy song,” says Roby Behrens with a straight face and a mischievous glint. “It’s about a guy who kills his wife then gets eaten by sharks.”
Happy or not, it certainly fits in nicely with the rest of the Jolly Llamas catalogue. Since 2009, guitarists Behrens and Marc Cavigli have written tales of terror, sorrow and ghoulish delight set to addictive, pop melodies with a folk flair. This is the music Weezer would be writing if Rivers Cuomo was raised on Americana and H.P. Lovecraft.
The Jolly Llamas began as a duo when they were in college studying filmmaking, and they both now run local studio Lucid Sound and Picture. As their video production has expanded, the band has grown into a quartet, with Jordan Jones on bass and Lucas Aton on drums.
In 2015, the Llamas released a five-track EP, Story Rock, and they’re currently working on a music video for the album’s first track, “Llama Sun.” The guys have also been hard at work writing new material for another EP, to be announced later this year. Of course, they’re doing it in true Llama fashion.
“One of our newer songs is about a girl who cuts people up,” Behrens says with a laugh.
“But she’s in medical school,” interjects Cavigli.
“She’s in medical school, but she also loves doing it,” replies Behrens.
The Jolly Llamas will be playing the Crepe Place this Saturday with local act Bananarchy and San Franciscan rockers, We Arsons.
INFO: 9 p.m. Saturday, April 29. Crepe Place, 1134 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz. $8. 429-6994.
Attention live music fans: the Santa Cruz American Music Festival is back with a stellar lineup for 2017. Building on the foundation of the Santa Cruz Blues Festival, this Memorial Day Weekend fest is one of the musical treasures of the area, attracting top blues, rock, country and soul artists from around the country. This year’s lineup includes the Rides, comprising Stephen Stills, Kenny Wayne Shepherd and Barry Goldberg, the mighty Mavis Staples (above), rocker Melissa Etheridge doing a Memphis rock and soul review, Santa Cruz favorite the Devil Makes Three, and more.
INFO: 11 a.m. Saturday & Sunday May 27 & 28. Aptos Village Park, 100 Aptos Creek Rd. Aptos, $65-$190. 454-7900. WANT TO GO? Go to santacruz.com/giveaways before 11 a.m. on Wednesday, May 17 to find out how you could win a pair of tickets to the festival.
Three years ago, when Nicole Keadle faced two drug-related felonies, she was released from Santa Cruz Main Jail into a drug rehab program. Keadle took her probation and sobriety seriously, getting and staying clean. With the help of attorney Cassie Licker from the Santa Cruz County Public Defender’s Office, Keadle was able to get one of the felonies reduced to a misdemeanor—and then, last June, got her entire criminal record cleared.
“I can’t tell you how great a burden was lifted when the judge decided my entire record was to be cleared,” says Keadle, now 28. “I felt I was finally being judged for how my life is now, rather than the mistakes I made in the past.”
The Public Defender’s Office is rolling out the Clean Slate Program to help ex-offenders like Keadle clear or reduce the severity of their criminal records. The program aims to give qualified ex-offenders a second chance at building productive lives after successfully completing all terms of probation and showing evidence of getting their lives on track—by legally allowing less damning answers to questions about criminal background on applications for employment, housing, financial aid for school, and many public services.
Licker emphasizes that criminal records must be looked at on a case-by-case basis. Different regulations apply to different sentences, making the process like “putting together a puzzle.” When a judge has signed off to clear or reduce someone’s criminal history, some clearances are mandatory if the filing is done properly, while others allow judicial discretion to decide if the proposed changes are appropriate. The law, for example, does not allow anyone to clear their record of most sex offenses.
Licker says that once all convictions are dismissed or expunged from a record, an ex-offender can legally report they have no criminal history, but there are a few catches. For careers involving a state Department of Justice, where jobs usually require fingerprinting, the background check report comes back with the conviction record, along with notation of judicial dismissal. The ex-offender is then usually rejected because it appears false statements were made on the application, Licker says, although the applicant was legally entitled to report no criminal history.
Licker says many ex-offenders throughout the county do not know they may qualify for a judicial review of their rap sheet that could clear or reduce prior convictions. The program does have some key qualifiers: successful completion of probation, as well as no new charges pending and letters of support from employers, counselors and probation officers.
The local Community Corrections Partnership (CCP)—created by the state legislature a few years ago in every county in California—has hosted workshops to spread the word about Clean Slate. Sarah Emmert, Director of Community Organizing for the United Way of Santa Cruz County, coordinates the CCP and its Community Education and Engagement Workgroup. This group—including staff from the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office, Probation Department and Watsonville Law Center—is doing outreach.
“If we fail to address the barriers that prevent a certain segment of our community from having a true second chance and a shot at success,” says Emmert, “that impacts every other member of the community. We are trying to fill the gaps and reduce the barriers to productive lives, which ultimately benefits the entire community and helps it thrive.”
Emmert says the legal process of clearing criminal records is complicated, and has changed with newly approved state propositions, including Prop 64, which legalized the commercial sale of marijuana in California. Prop 64 includes provisions for “retroactivity” in clearing some convictions for marijuana possession that are now no longer considered criminal. “It’s a complex process, and we are still figuring out how new regulations for clearance of some offenses are to be implemented,” says Emmert.
The law also doesn’t allow convicts to have most rulings that result in state prison time dismissed or expunged. But with positive letters of support showing the ex-offender has turned things around, the court can award a Certificate of Rehabilitation, Licker explains, which goes a long way toward putting a criminal history in the past.
The Community Corrections Partnership originally began as a local coordinating committee for the implementation of AB 109—the Public Safety Realignment Act of 2011—which required county jails and probation departments to shoulder the burden of reducing the inmate population of state prisons. AB 109 included funding for county programs to improve probation practices and reduce recidivism.
The “collateral consequences” of a criminal record are often overwhelming, says Licker, and can be a major barrier to leaving a criminal background in the past. “There’s a lot of fear around it. Once you get a record, there’s this fear that you will be defined by your rap sheet for the rest of your life,” Licker says. “That you are your rap sheet, and a fresh start seems impossible.”
For more information about the Clean Slate Program, contact the Public Defenders office at 429-1311.
Hamoon “Moony” Mehran, who’s finishing up his economics degree at UCSC, will never forget the first time he tried taking a computer science class.
Instead of starting small and working his way up, he began with an advanced upper-division course called “assembly language and computer architecture.” He would end up learning actual computer languages—not programming ones like Python—where everything’s written in ones and zeros. Mehran, who’s now in the process of launching a social media app, can’t really remember why such a leap seemed like a good idea, but he vividly recalls walking up to a teacher’s assistant after the first day of class to ask a simple question.
“Listen,” the TA, an Apple employee, responded. “If you ever want to be an engineer, you can’t ask me anything. You have to figure it out by yourself.”
At the time, Mehran thought the guy was just a jerk, but he has since heeded the advice of his non-mentor. “It turns out he was just trying to be an encouraging asshole,” Mehran says.
Mehran planned to call his new social media app—now in its beta stage, although customers can already download it—“Alt Cult.” But he says that a certain presidential candidate ruined the word “alt” by cozying up to the alt-right movement while his chief counselor spews about “alternative facts.”
“I don’t want to be associated with that shit,” he says.
Mehran, a self-described nerd, has renamed his project Happy Medium, and wants the app to be a space for subcultures to congregate online—and maybe intermingle a little, too. Chatting on the University Town Center’s patio overlooking downtown, Mehran wears a Star Wars shirt with a stormtrooper writing, “These are not the droids we’re looking for” over and over on a chalkboard. Mehran says he’s not partial to any particular subculture, although he thinks of himself as “very new-agey.” He likes meditation, yoga and thinking about energy fields.
Mehran pulls his phone out of his pocket and opens the app—its logo a yellow-and-orange icon with an ancient Chinese symbol. “This guy’s head is like a yin-yang symbol, just some positive energy, or something like that,” explains Mehran, who comes from a family of mechanical engineers, most of whom teasingly look down on his software hobby.
The app, he says, will be image-heavy, with lots of discussion forums, and he wants to infuse it with a “human feel” that he says is missing from similar apps. He also wants to prioritize events on Happy Medium to encourage users to be more social. “I have a final point in mind that I’m trying to get to,” he says.
But even if it takes off, he will always find tweaks to make. It’s hard for him to articulate what that final point is, and even harder to guess when he’ll reach it.
“Typically, it’s never,” he says. “There’s also always a million changes you have to do.”
It’s complicated to review a movie like The Promise, straddling as it does the separate worlds of fact and fiction. On one hand, there’s the heartbreaking factual story it tells about the war of extermination waged by the Turks against the entire race of Armenians within its borders as the mighty Ottoman-Turk Empire crumbled to an end circa 1915.
But then there’s the fictional story that director Terry George and co-screenwriter Robin Swicord concoct to center the movie while the tragedy of the Armenian Genocide plays out. It’s not a bad story, in an old-timey Hollywood way, a love triangle between a poor Armenian medical student, a sophisticated Armenian girl raised in Paris, and a dashing American photojournalist. But shifting focus away from history to follow the exploits of these fictive characters has the effect of reducing the Armenian tragedy to background material for a less compelling, more conventional romantic drama.
In 1914, Mikael Boghosian (Oscar Isaac), is a young apothecary in a small Armenian village with a talent for healing. His father arranges a marriage for Mikael and Maral (Angela Sarafyan), a local girl whose wealthy father dowries her with a sack of gold coins to send Mikael to medical school in Constantinople. There, he’s taken in by his aunt and uncle, a prosperous shopkeeper, and their young daughters.
The girls’ beautiful, Armenian-born tutor, Ana (Charlotte Le Bon), was raised in Paris with her ballerina mother. Mikael falls for Ana, but she has a boyfriend: American Chris Myers (Christian Bale), a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press, based in Constantinople. Chris is also an old pal of Mikael’s friend and fellow student, Emre (Marwan Kenzari), whose wealthy Turkish father gave him the option of going to med school or joining the army.
Emre invites the others to a party at his family estate, where hard-drinking Chris mouths off to some German brass who are in the area to persuade the Turks to join them against the Allies as World War I ramps up. Chris soon becomes persona non grata among the Turks when he uncovers and starts reporting the story of how the Turkish government is carrying out a covert campaign to destroy entire Armenian villages within its borders and marching the survivors into the Syrian desert without resources to die.
Filmmaker George (who dramatized another story of violent cultural purging in Hotel Rwanda) makes an admirable attempt to tell this shameful story from many perspectives: poor but culturally rich Armenians facing extermination, a political young Turk dragged into the conflict by his nationalist father, an investigative reporter determined to reveal the truth. Various characters’ experiences include a forced labor camp, a Turkish prison, an orphanage, a refugee march, an ad hoc bastion of guerrilla resistance in the mountains, and a firing squad.
And it’s a story worth telling, particularly since (according to the film’s epilogue) the Turkish government continues to insist to this day that the Armenian Genocide never happened. (One official in the story tries to persuade Chris that the Armenians are merely being “evacuated to a safer region.”) But in another scene, a Turkish official points out to an outraged U.S. ambassador (a cameo by James Cromwell) that insurance premiums secured by Armenians from overseas companies revert to the Turkish state if the policyholders and their heirs and families all die. (A conversation which must be for our benefit, since it’s unlikely a state official would admit this in a diplomatic situation.)
But while all this is going on in the background, the fictional drama up front never earns our investment. Isaac’s ever-earnest Mikael evolves from dutiful son to passionate lover to dismayed witness to horror. Le Bon is poised and lovely, but not taxed to do much else. Bale, stuck with a hopeless thatch of chin fur, plays Chris as a gruff malcontent, with a deep, dissonant Yank accent, and a beady-eyed stare. His calculating demeanor feels off in scenes when Chris’ emotions are supposed to be genuine.
Their fictional drama, imposed on the template of history, distracts from more than enhances the story the filmmakers want to tell.
THE PROMISE
**1/2 (out of four)
With Oscar Isaac, Christian Bale, Charlotte Le Bon, and Angela Sarafyan. Written byTerry George and Robin Swicord. Directed byTerry George. An Open Road Films release. Rated PG-13. 132 minutes.
Dr. Wells Shoemaker, a local physician you may remember from a recent Wellness column about the relationship between alcohol and health, says he was feeling glum about the potential Obamacare repeal. “But now that it’s here to stay, we’ve dodged a near-Earth asteroid,” says Shoemaker.
In the wake of last month’s failed repeal, Shoemaker is relieved that the Affordable Care Act will remain—at least for the foreseeable future. “Prior to Obamacare, 40 percent of personal bankruptcies in this country related to an inability to pay medical bills,” he says. “Many people lived in fear that the other shoe would drop, and all it would take is one minor health care problem to create a disaster.”
But even though Obamacare survived legislative death row, the Trump administration might try to deal it a crippling blow by withholding billions of dollars in federal subsidies known as cost-sharing reductions, which help make health care affordable to the masses. “It’s very important money,” says Shoemaker. “It’s not just poor people. Many middle-class people were unable to afford or even qualify for health insurance because of pre-existing conditions.”
Even though the future of health care seems murky at best, and terrifying at worst, the good news is that, “Santa Cruz County already has high-quality medical care, and is one of the top three or four counties in the nation in terms of health care efficiency,” says Shoemaker.
Santa Cruz County is also one of only three counties in the state with a nonprofit organization called HIP (Health Improvement Partnership), which founding co-chair Shoemaker calls “a consortium of a wide variety of health care entities that tries to make health care reform live up to its promises. The fundamental thing is to take organizations that either compete or operate in different silos and get them to work together to gang-tackle problems that are unsolvable by any one organization.”
The group is dealing with several “knotty” problems, he says, including behavioral health. “It’s silly to think that physical and mental health is treated differently, so it’s a perfect softball for HIP,” he says. Another issue he says is ripe for HIP intervention is homelessness. “It involves law enforcement, public health, housing and nutrition. No one agency can deal with all of it. HIP creates an environment where it’s safe to bring everybody that has a role in it together,” he says.
But even with strong local health care and Obamacare staying afloat federally, a haunting sense of uncertainty is pervasive both locally and nationally.
“It affects everyone involved,” says Shoemaker. “It stymies our country from making health care changes that would bring us into the top 20 in the world … If cuts are made—and there will be cuts—corpses won’t line the streets, but people’s lives will be shortened. It’s not like a nuclear bomb, but it will poison our children.”
One way to channel health care anxiety into positive action is to take personal responsibility for individual health care, something Shoemaker says many local residents are already adept at.
“If you’re unhappy with the care you receive, let the doctor know. There are many accountability channels, and agencies that advocate for the individual health care consumer.”
He also notes an evolution in the way doctors and patients interact. “I’ve seen a half century of changes,” he says. “Doctors used to be the boss and ‘doctor’s orders’ was the post-World War II attitude. But now the doctor/patient relationship is looked at like a partnership.”
Kiss Catering has successfully served the Santa Cruz area for 18 years. Last year, they were even awarded the Business of the Year award in Aptos by the Aptos Chamber of Commerce. But husband-and-wife owners Scott and Sandy Dexel did something else of note last year: they opened Kiss Café. It’s actually a cafeteria for Fox Shox in Scotts Valley, but it’s open to the public. Scott talked to us about their new spot.
You’ve been doing catering for 18 years. Why’d you open the café?
SCOTT DEXEL: It wasn’t originally going to be open to the public—we just needed a much larger kitchen for the catering. Fox Shox approached us to open a cafeteria for them. Being that it’s a cafeteria, it’s a strange animal. It’s completely different than running a restaurant. We have a really killer salad bar, burgers, stuff like that. There are a lot of pastries, desserts. When I went to the city to find out about zoning, I was required to pay all the dues as though it was a restaurant. So that’s why the café. The previous owner of the business had opened it to the public, and that’s sort of how the café started.
Does this change the catering business?
No. We just outgrew our old kitchen. The dish room here is two feet larger than our old kitchen was. It’s made it so we don’t have to work so much. We’d still do large events out of our old kitchen, but they’d be hauled in with ice chests to keep fresh. Now I have a walk-in freezer. It saves a lot of time for me. It was a lot of time wasted. The café itself seats 130 people, and it has a patio that seats about 70. We use the venue for events outside of hours.
What kind of food do you serve at the café?
Right now we offer five different sandwiches. We do a tri-tip sandwich, which is a grilled tri-tip with caper mayo and roasted red peppers. It’s the number one [item] we’ve used for the catering for a long time. We also do a grilled eggplant sandwich, which is grilled eggplant with roasted red peppers, caramelized onions, a white basil aioli and provolone cheese. We have a great burger. It’s a half pound angus grass-fed burger. We do sweet potato fries which are savory, as opposed to your typical sweet potato fry. I put garlic salt on them. We also have the gourmet peanut brittle that we sell out of here. We do Italian chili, sea salt, curry, bacon. We need a way to make it in larger quantity. We’re trying to find a process that doesn’t blow my shoulders out.
Fortino Winery’s well-made wine is the main reason to head to their welcoming tasting room, but they also have lots of fun stuff to buy. As you’re enjoying one of their flights, take a gander around the gift shop at nifty corkscrews, bottle openers, and Fortino’s delicious spreads, such as the Garlic Sauvignon Blanc Mayonnaise.
Fortino makes close to two dozen different wines, including their newly released 2014 Cabernet Sauvignon ($30), which is a good enough reason alone to head to their winery. Talented winemaker Gino Fortino says that their estate-grown Cab is the last to ripen and the last to be harvested, resulting in a voluptuous and bursting-with-flavor wine that’s laden with deliciously ripe fruit. Aromas of blackcurrant and flavors of spice, bell pepper and a hint of vanilla—with just the right amount of char and smoke from its aging in French oak—round out this well-crafted Cab.
Do not miss tasting Fortino’s estate-grown Charbono, one of the rarest varietals grown in California, and their tasty fruit wines such as Pomegranate and Raspberry. They also make terrific sparkling wines—try the Almond Champagne with its fragrant marzipan aroma. And if you really want something special, their dessert wines are outstanding, especially the 1991 Montonico Reserve.
In the summer, the winery hosts Music in the Vineyard events—the first one coming up on June 23. Check the website for more info. Fortino Winery, 4525 Hecker Pass Hwy., Gilroy. 408-842-3305, fortinowinery.com.
Cork and Fork Capitola
Cathy Bentley has taken over It’s Wine Tyme in Capitola Village and renamed it Cork and Fork Capitola. The grand opening will be held on Saturday, April 29—with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Thursday, April 27. Bentley has been involved in the wine industry for years, so she is now happy to have her own place to showcase her knowledge and serve up some good wine. Cork and Fork is a cozy spot, and it also comes with a lovely outdoor patio area.
Elliot Wright felt a serious pain in his neck before his group Eliquate hit the stage at the Catalyst during the Santa Cruz Music Festival in October of 2015. But he wasn’t going to let it stop him from going out to perform for the nearly packed club.
After all, this was it. After tonight, Eliquate, the high-energy Santa Cruz alt-hip-hop band would be no more. In its place, Wright would return to his roots as Eliquate, the thoughtful, indie solo rapper—a move that both excited and terrified him.
The pain didn’t start at Eliquate’s final show. Wright had been living with chronic neck pain since he was 18, when he suffered a hockey injury. But regardless of how much it hurt before any given performance, the showman in him took over once the music started. He dominated the stage with a rapid-fire and brainy flow, like an Aesop Rock who’s borderline shouting. He’d dance with total abandon, head-bang like a metalhead and mosh in the crowd with rowdy kids five to 10 years younger than him. Adrenaline was his best friend, and his worst enemy. He paid for it when he wasn’t on stage.
But that night, as he was leaving the Catalyst Atrium stage, saying his final farewells to a band he’d spent the past six years putting his all into, a thought crossed his mind: This pain is different.
It took a little while before the full extent of the injury revealed itself. He stood up two days later, tried to adjust his neck, and felt an intense tingling sensation run down his arm, then his entire body. He collapsed, unable to get up for a few minutes. When he could get himself to a hospital, they handed him a bottle of pills and told him to stretch more. Wright knew this was no ordinary neck injury. He called his dad, who drove down from Novato and took Wright to see two doctors up there. The second doctor told Wright that if he didn’t get surgery soon, he’d lose the use of his right arm.
In two days, Wright was in surgery.
“It was the probably the most terrifying experience I ever had,” Wright says. “It was the worst pain. I was terrified something could go wrong.”
Fortunately, the surgery was a success. Since then, Wright has been living at his parents’ Novato home, the same house in which he spent his high school years. He’s been trying to recover, while simultaneously rebuilding his music career as a solo artist. Last week, he finally released his long-awaited album, Me and My TV, which he’s worked on for the past year and a half. The album documents this difficult period, in which he wasn’t just recovering from a life-threatening physical injury. He was also taking an honest inventory of who he was, and facing a demon he’d kept hidden from most people in his life up to that point: His addiction to drugs.
SIGN OF THINGS TO COME
Wright sits with me at a Starbucks in Novato, just a quick drive from his parents’ house. He’s dressed casually, sports a bushy beard and seems at peace, though at one point he tells me that he’s still in chronic pain, even right now.
His energy is a bit scattered, though he speaks in clear, thoughtful sentences. He spends the duration of the interview fiddling with a small gadget he tells me is specifically designed for people to focus excess energy on. (“It keeps this half of the brain busy, while the other half of the brain tries to think of cool shit to say.”). Going back to his injury, he explains the gadget’s other purpose: to help rehabilitate his muscles.
Few Eliquate fans are familiar with Wright’s roots as a solo artist. By the time he’d recorded his first album, Eliquate was already a duo with Jamie Schnetzler. By the following album, Eliquate was a full band, regularly packing Santa Cruz clubs, and touring the West Coast, and eventually the entire country.
He tells me a story to explain the kind of person he was when he first moved to Santa Cruz in 2009, still relatively new to the identity of Eliquate, the rapper. He would stand on Pacific Avenue holding a sign that read “World’s Best Rapper” along with a stack of CDs he’d sell for a buck a piece. People got the irony; they’d laugh, but sometimes they’d buy a CD, too.
His approach to gigging back then was similarly cocky. He would show up to parties uninvited, with an iPod and an amp, and tell whoever was in charge that he’d do a live hip-hop show if they wanted one. Many took him up on the offer.
“I was just an arrogant 19-year-old. I’m so glad I did that then, because there’s no way I’d be arrogant enough to do that now. It’s like, ‘I’m young, so this is ok,’” Wright says.
JUMP SCHOOL Eliquate’s live performances have always been high-energy shows. PHOTO: BRIAN CRABTREE
He is much more self-conscious now, as he presents the new solo Eliquate to the world. The album’s been mostly finished for a while, but since it’s so personal, he’d been procrastinating putting the final touches on it. The longer he waited, the more he felt pressure to make it something fans would like.
“I didn’t know if it was going to be worth it or not. I wasn’t sure, ’cause I’m a pretty insecure dude underneath it all. I just thought it’s going to be shit, and all it’s going to do is disappoint people,” Wright says.
The album expresses not only a whole new level of vulnerability for Wright, but also self-examination. The injury wasn’t his low point—that came later as he spent months in his parents’ house, doing little besides taking opioids and reflecting on all the mistakes he’d made with his band, and how he’d let his drug addiction escalate.
“I was just so disappointed in myself. I failed all my fans. I failed the band. I failed my family. I failed my 13-year-old self that was really counting on me doing this. I didn’t care, and I would rather escape into the oblivion of an opiate high than deal with that pain and disappointment,” Wright says.
The injury and subsequent surgery certainly warranted that Wright take painkillers. The problem was that Wright had a long, mostly secretive history with pills that he hadn’t properly addressed. Leading up to the injury, it had gotten worse. When his neck pain flared up, he’d get a pill prescription and go on a “neck vacation,” as he puts it, for a while. His routine also included a regular weed habit—and near the end of his time in Santa Cruz, cocaine.
He never drank much alcohol, which became his biggest justification. How could he be an addict if he didn’t drink? Now he laughs at this thought, which he says is typical addict thinking.
One of the people that helped him get sober was friend Brendan Powers, the rapper known as Pure Powers, who is himself six and a half years sober. He’d support Wright, check in with him, and let him vent or just talk whenever he needed. Before Wright confessed his addiction to Powers, Powers was unaware of what was going on.
“I was really taken aback. When someone’s addicted to opiates, sometimes you can’t tell. You can’t smell it on them. Sometimes you see them nodding out—I never saw Elliot doing that. He was usually in good spirits. It’s definitively going to take some people by surprise,” Powers says.
These days, Wright feels like he’s adjusting to life in Novato. He has a desk job in San Francisco, which he enjoys, and he works on music and plays shows when he can. He’s getting ready to move, but Santa Cruz is not likely going to be his new home.
“Santa Cruz does have a way of sucking people in, and not letting them out,” Wright says. “I needed something major to happen to wake me up and get me out of that destructive routine. Next thing I would have known, I would have been 40 and living in a borderline flophouse, working at a restaurant, and just feeling like I let myself down.”
LIVING LIVE
The biggest adjustment for Wright now is in his live performance. He’s no longer backed by a band, and he is doing his best to take the health of his neck into consideration when on stage. So far, he feels happy with the somewhat more low-key version of Eliquate.
WHITE HOUSE PARTY Eliquate in its full-band incarnation.
His performances back in Santa Cruz were infamous for being off the hook. Wright’s manager Thomas Dawson tells a story about one young fan who wrote them a letter saying that he was so amazed by Wright’s performance, he vowed to start working out.
“There’s nobody that performs like Elliot. He is one of the best performers I’ve ever seen. It doesn’t matter how big the show is, or the crowd,” says Dawson. “He’s a punk rock kid. He knows what it’s like to be a viewer of music. He knows what he likes to see from an artist.”
Before Eliquate’s dominance as a local live act, it was just—much like this past year—Wright spitting rhymes in his room. Music to him was therapy, and lyrics were everything.
But it was other people’s music, even before he wrote his own songs, that meant so much to him. He obsessively listened to music as a means of coping with a home life that included a mom with an extreme case of bipolar disorder. “She would have these fits of rage. And it was terrifying. I wouldn’t know what to do. I’d run into my room and grab my headphones and push them into my ears. It sounds corny, but I’d just escape into music,” Wright says.
Wright grew up listening to punk rock and hip-hop, elements clearly found in his own music. But more than any specific genre, it was the way music made him feel safe and less weird that inspired him as an artist. He would dream about being that for someone else.
“There was a vulnerability there that I connected to. It was almost like this Trojan horse effect where you’d get people to listen to your music because it’s fun, it’s got this beat and there’s this energy to it. While they’re not paying attention, they’re actually being exposed to someone’s inner demons. All of a sudden, whether they know it or not, they got to know a complete stranger through the way they expressed themselves,” Wright says.
His raps were mostly something he did in secrecy as a high schooler. As a senior, Wright turned in a history assignment in which he created a rap about Abraham Lincoln and slavery. His teacher loved it, and told him she would play it to all her subsequent classes. Her positive response shocked him.
Building the Band
He went to Santa Rosa Junior College the following year, and started to play live at parties. By the time he transferred to UCSC as a junior, he felt confident showing off his rap skills, even though he wasn’t wild about his own beats, which he flippantly calls “trash.”
Eliquate, the band, evolved quickly. He first teamed up with guitarist/beat maker Jamie Schnetzler. As a duo, Schnetzler produced the music, and Wright wrote all of the words. (“It was like peanut butter and jelly,” Wright says.) The duo released the philosophical hip-hop record Arc Rhythm in 2009, Eliquate’s debut.
Soon more members joined: drums, bass, guitar, keys. It was unwieldy at first, with the band improvising jams while Wright rapped over it. The group eventually settled on more solid, pre-written beats. The next album, the genre-hopping, funky-indie-rock-influenced Chalkboard’s War Against Erasers was released in 2013. It featured the whole band.
The group did several small tours, but it was on a three-month tour they did in 2014 that everything felt like it was really coming together, and that they were set to explode on a national scale. All the responses they were getting were overwhelmingly positive. Wright says with mixed emotions that had Eliquate returned to these same towns a year later, they would have drawn twice the people.
“I assume I’m pretty bad at everything, and nobody likes me. But I couldn’t deny the reactions we were getting. People were coming up, like ‘What the hell. I thought you guys were going to suck. That was awesome,’” Wright says.
But after that tour, things just stalled. On one hand, Wright felt conflicted about taking the leadership role to get them where they needed to be. But on a much deeper level, Wright was conflicted about the presence of the live band. On the web bio written during this time, Schnetzler is quoted as saying that Eliquate plays “party music with a purpose.” But the party element to Wright felt like it was overshadowing the purpose.
“That was blood, sweat and tears for me, writing those lyrics. For people to be just shit-faced dancing, and not know that there’s something actually going on there, it hurt and it was kind of discouraging,” Wright says. “Now they come up and they’re like, ‘Hey I wanted to ask you about that one song.’ I’m like, ‘You guys are actually catching that now. Weird.’”
He sat the band down and told them that in order to go forward as an artist, he needed to be solo again. The band understood. Everyone agreed to make the SCMF show their last.
In retrospect, Wright wonders if that show really would have been the final band performance had he not injured himself. He wanted to get away from playing party music, but he wasn’t quite ready to stop partying.
I TO I
Despite his initial reservations, Wright recently started to feel excited about releasing his new album. Once he’d finished his parts a few months ago, and he handed the tracks over to a producer to fine tune and master everything, he felt liberated. He was able to take a step back from his own expectations, his perceived expectations from fans, and feel proud for creating something so honest and self-reflective.
“It’s not about me looking at the world,” he says. “It’s about me looking at me. The other ones were my opinions on things, and this is more about me in direct situations, relationships, getting sober, dealing with my demons.”
The title Me and My TV is a reference to being alone in his room, away from everything this past year. It’s about escaping, not fighting yourself, and just facing it all head-on, he explains.
The record documents directly and indirectly many of the challenges he’s faced since the accident, which include being diagnosed with bipolar disorder. (“I was feeling so anxious and terrified, like I was about to go fight a grizzly bear, but I was just sitting there. Or the depression, which wasn’t ‘I feel bad,’ it was ‘I don’t feel anything,’” he says.)
His quest for sobriety isn’t dealt with much on the record. The next one, he says will be about that. The album is about self-acceptance, and taking an honest inventory of who he is. He talks about dealing with his bipolar disorder (“David Cronenberg”), trying to not give up on himself (“Not Be So Sure”), realizing that he’s not as good or bad as he thought he was (“Man-Wolf”), and dealing with the uncomfortable feeling of liking a girl, then realizing she has a boyfriend (“Not Subtle”). The beats are surreal, more left-of-center than anything he’d released before. When he raps, it sounds less like shouting, more conversational. He even occasionally goes into a sing-song style of rapping.
As Wright talks about his sobriety, he speaks very tentatively. It’s all new to him, and he’s still learning the full impact of making this decision to change his life. He tells me at one point that had we interviewed last year, he probably would have lied about everything.
“Being sober is about being accountable for your life. That’s where I’m still struggling. You can be not doing drugs and still not be recovering,” Wright says. “I’ve got a long road ahead of me as far as getting clean and staying clean. It’s going to be something I deal with the rest of my life.”
Underneath everything—the new record, playing live as a solo artist, examining himself so closely—it all brings him back to the essence of why he wanted to make music in the first place, and likewise the reason he chose to break up the band in 2015. He wanted to affect other people in the same way that he’s been—still is—affected by music.
He says he used to hold this romantic notion that being a real artist meant being a self-hating, drugged-up mess. Now he realized that he can do more to help others, and can dig deeper into himself if he stays clean and loves himself.
It surprises him, the level of satisfaction he feels, considering that he’s working full-time at a desk job and working his music in around this work schedule. Drugs, he says, used to give him a cheat to feel like he’d accomplished something, when he hadn’t. Removing that from his life motivates him to find happiness through creating music and expressing himself.
“I’m being who I am now, and being OK with that,” Wright says. “It’s hearing from people that feel weird and displaced and uncomfortable, and they can listen to my music and it makes them feel not so bad. Fuck everything else. That’s what it’s about. I was that kid. I still am. Still to this day.”
On the news and in the papers, the hum has been impossible to ignore.
Whether because of cell phone cameras, new technology for cops or increased interest, talk of law enforcement tactics has been on the rise, with every person who has a Twitter account sharing their perspective. One man who knows what it’s like to walk a beat, former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper, says that when it comes to law enforcement, it’s time to put communities in the driver’s seat.
“Policing is the public’s business, and the public has the full right and responsibility to work collaboratively with local law enforcement,” says Stamper, who will be speaking this weekend at both the Resource Center for Nonviolence and the Nickelodeon.
Stamper will discuss community policing and what he sees as the increasing militarization of law enforcement in America. In the days after, he will meet both the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office and the Santa Cruz Police Department (SCPD) on Monday, with the same topics in mind.
Stamper says that too often in the U.S., civilians are treated as enemy combatants. Less than three years ago, officers were patrolling the streets of Ferguson, Missouri with sniper rifles behind ambush-resistant vehicles, sending snarling police dogs after crowds of nonviolent protesters marching in response to the shooting of Michael Brown. This past fall, law enforcement at Standing Rock, North Dakota tear-gassed and sprayed freezing water on protesters during sub-zero temperatures.
“It’s outrageous to see that kind of symbolism that speaks out to other parts of the world, where the military are the police,” says Stamper, who has authored two books about policing, including To Protect and Serve: How to Fix America’s Police, which came out last June.
Stamper himself resigned from the Seattle force in early 2000, after his department’s swift and powerful response to the massive World Trade Organization protests a few months earlier that yielded more than 100 protests and prompted international outcry.
Four months into 2017, there have been 308 people fatally shot by police in the United States. More than half of the victims are either black or Hispanic, and about 20 percent of the people killed had a mental illness, according to the Washington Post. Last year, the number was 963, including two deaths in Santa Cruz County—15-year-old Luke Smith was shot by a sheriff’s deputy in November, and mentally ill 32-year-old Sean Arlt by a Santa Cruz police officer in October.
Both deaths could have been prevented, says Lee Brokaw, who put together Stamper’s Santa Cruz visit and sits on the board of directors for the local branch of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The Santa Cruz County District Attorney’s Office has already investigated both incidents, announcing that it would not be charging either of the involved officers, although Arlt’s family announced this month that it was filing suit against SCPD.
Citizen review boards are the most effective way to shift from the aggressive policing culture to one that is more in-line with community values, says Stamper.
“All instances of force should be reviewed by the citizens who are being protected and served by their police department,” says Stamper. “Americans have to demand a seat at the table if an invitation isn’t sent. Police in America belong to the people, not the other way around.”
Police leaders should hear community voices on recruitment efforts, supervision, leadership, program development, crisis management and dealing with protests, he argues.
SCPD had a seven-member citizen review board for nearly a decade starting in 1994, but the Santa Cruz City Council opted to disband it after determining it to be ineffective and costly, says SCPD Chief Kevin Vogel. A police auditor model has been in place since the early 2000s, where an auditor reviews all internal affairs investigations and inquiries made by the public, and then reports to the city manager and city council’s public safety committee. Outside of the auditor and the public safety committee, made up of three councilmembers, all other levels of review are done internally.
Vogel says he would have no problem with the city creating a new citizen review board. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the public getting involved, we have nothing to hide here,” he says.
Within the next month, the department’s newly established Chief’s Advisory Committee—which is different from a citizen’s review board—will start meeting for the first time to provide input and comments to the department on city law enforcement policies. The committee of 15 includes representatives from groups like the Homeless Services Center, Take Back Santa Cruz, National Alliance on Mental Illness and the ACLU. Its first major focus will be on policies surrounding the use of body cameras, which the SCPD plans to start using by the end of the year.
The sheriff’s department has already begun using body cameras, and has had a community advisory team providing input for three years now, but similarly doesn’t have a permanent review board. After the shooting of Smith, Sheriff Jim Hart announced the formation of a Serious Incident Review Board to determine if the department could improve its response to critical incidents. This group, made up of three community members and three use-of-force instructors, submitted its findings and recommendations in February. In response, Hart directed his staff to implement all of the recommendations, including one that says the use of a patrol rifle should be monitored by a supervisor.
“We’re trying to break down the walls between police and the community,” says Santa Cruz Chief Deputy Craig Wilson. “Policing is something you do with a community, not to a community.”
Stamper will speak at the at the Resource Center for Nonviolence on Ocean Street from 1:30-3:30 p.m. on Saturday, April 29 for an event called ‘Forum on Community Police Relations.’ Other panelists include attorney Samara Marion from the San Francisco Department of Police Accountability, Santa Cruz City Councilmember Sandy Brown and journalist John Malkin.
The Nickelodeon on Lincoln Street will screen ‘Do Not Resist’ at 11 a.m. on Sunday, April 30, as part of the Reel Work Film Festival. The film will be followed by a conversation with Stamper.
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