From January to Oscar night, the movies are in the doldrums. The last few Oscar contenders are trickling into neighborhood theaters, along with a few lumbering misfits that are not now, nor have they ever been, worthy of any kind of awards push. But it’s a very fertile time for horror movies, the traditional antidote to feel-good holiday fare, and the gnarlier, the better.
So you don’t expect much from a movie called The Witch (or, to be true to the advertising campaign, The VVitch). Its early colonial America setting suggests the Salem witch trials, satanic rites, vintage Hammer horror films. But this movie is nothing quite so cheesy, nor as gory, as you might expect; it’s an often squirmingly intense psychological drama of hysteria and religious fanaticism.
It’s still plenty scary (at least, very, very creepy), but it’s fearful anticipation that propels the narrative, not in-your-face violence. Like the best horror/suspense movies (think of the original The Haunting, from 1963), The Witch plays mercilessly on our dread of what might be lurking in the shadows, rather than actually showing much onscreen—and is all the more effective because of it. Oh, yes, there’s blood, but not so much of the usual fx gore-mongering.
Set in New England, ca. 1630—60 years before the famed Salem witch trials—The Witch is rich in period detail, meticulously researched by rookie writer-director Robert Eggers. (Historically correct stitching in the costumes, appropriate period objects and tools, etc.) The Puritan elders of a settlement called the “plantation,” are denouncing one of its members, William (Ralph Ineson), for the sin of pride. William, his anxious wife Katherine (Kate Dickie), and their five children are cast out of the community to homestead on a distant, isolated tract of land at the edge of a sinister wood.
Theirs is the first generation of settlers to come directly from England in search of freedom to worship their wrathful, demanding god. We don’t know the nature of William’s supposed “sin,” but the family spends every waking moment praying and repenting for their “corrupt nature,” while attending to the hard labor of running their farm. But their corn rots, their hen’s eggs are full of blood, and William decides it’s a punishment from God—leading to more praying and fasting.
At the center of the tale is eldest daughter, Thomasin (lovely Anya Taylor-Joy), dutiful and uncomplaining. Through no fault of her own, her pubescent body has begun to attract the covert attention of her kid brother, Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw). But when a mishap occurs to one of the younger children while under Thomasin’s care, a psychic firestorm begins brewing around her that gradually engulfs the entire family.
OK, no spoilers here. But the hysteria and paranoia levels rise to a fever pitch, even as the movie’s visual focus becomes ever smaller, more claustrophobic and intense. The action is staged in cramped quarters by flickering firelight, a shadowy barn, or deep in the dense, dark woods. As family members alternately suspect, blame, and rage at each other, excessive piety toward their unresponsive god fails to produce good results, and the Devil is blamed for everything else. It’s no wonder everyone goes a little nuts, as Eggers suggests the most volatile “corruption” comes from inside the mind.
Eggers amps up the atmosphere: musical passages rise to alarming crescendos, even when nothing is happening onscreen. Twigs snap, and unseen predators rumble in the woods. Eggers shoots everything from the same close, realistic point-of-view, so if something weird does appear onscreen, we’re never sure if it’s meant to be a dream, the result of someone’s overstimulated imagination, or “real.”
This is the kind of eerie dynamic between reality and fantasy that was handled so well in Pan’s Labyrinth. Subtitled A New England Folk Tale, the film conjures classic images from fairy tales and folklore: a bloody apple; a red-cloaked figure glimpsed in the wood. Whether or not The Devil is loose among this family, or they’re preyed on by devils of their own making, Eggers leaves it up to the viewer to decide.
THE WITCH: A NEW ENGLAND FOLK TALE
***(out of four)
With Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie, Harvey Scrimshaw. Written and directed by Robert Eggers. An A24 release. Rated R. 92 minutes.
Spanish vocalist Concha Buika, better known as Buika, has been compared to some of the most powerful vocalists of all time: Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Edith Piaf and Cesaria Evora. But Buika is an immense talent in her own right. Pairing Spanish coplas and American torch songs with pulsing Latin rhythms, she has established herself as a player on the international music stage. Buika has worked with an all-star roster of artists from different genres, including Pat Metheny, Chick Corea, Chucho Valdés, and Anoushka Shankar, and she took home a Latin Grammy for El Último Trago, her 2010 collaboration with Valdés. Her latest album, Vivir Sin Miedo, is her first with English lyrics.
INFO: 7:30 p.m. Sunday, March 20. Rio Theatre, 1205 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz. $35/gen, $50/gold. 423-8209. WANT TO GO? Go to santacruz.com/giveaways before 11 a.m. on Friday, March 11 to find out how you could win a pair of tickets to the show.
Michael Martyn has been gigging locally as “Michael Martyn Good Medicine” since 1979. For a while, he was playing five nights a week, maybe more, and has played every venue in town. He’s a local legend, kind of.
“I’m one of the most well-known unknown musicians in Santa Cruz,” Martyn jokes. “I’ve been playing all around Santa Cruz forever. I’ve been on KPIG radio. I’ve hosted a ton of open mics, but since a lot of the venues are gone for solo or duo acoustic music, there’s not a lot. I’m persistent. I’m going to do it till I can’t play anymore.”
When Martyn does play these days, it’s usually a stripped-down Americana type thing, with influences ranging from Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and the Byrds. However, his 66th birthday bash show Thursday at Don Quixote’s will offer a rare glimpse of what he sounds like backed by a full electric band.
“I can’t afford my band. They’re like the top A-team of Santa Cruz,” Martyn says. “Everybody thinks I’m going to play country because I wear a cowboy hat. No, I do rock. It’s folk-rock, blues-based psychedelic rock. This show will be Americana rocked up.”
Through the years, as the lineups have changed, Martyn has considered changing his band name, but the more he thought about it, the more he knows it would set him back.
“I learned it from Willie Nelson. He said once that if you keep changing your name, no one is going to know who you are. If you keep the same name, they’re always going to know who you are.”
INFO: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, March 10 at Don Quixote’s, 6275 Hwy. 9, Felton. $10. 335-2800.
Americans eat more bananas than any other fruit—more than 25 pounds per person per year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“We go through six to eight 40-pound boxes a day,” says Jeremiah Bennight, produce manager at New Leaf Community Market in Capitola. “It’s definitely a staple fruit. We can’t go without it.”
But the question now is if they may have to, as an aggressive fungal disease threatens to wreak havoc on the worldwide production of this quintessential higher primate food.
Known as Fusarium wilt, the fungus has appeared in Africa, Asia and Australia. Although it poses no threat to humans, it is easily spread and many experts think that it’s only a matter of time before the disease crosses the pond into the Americas, which could be a crippling blow to worldwide banana production. The world’s top exporting farms are in Latin America, which is where Bennight says all of New Leaf’s bananas are sourced.
Why is one fungus outbreak threatening the whole world’s production? Because the vast majority of commercially available bananas are all one cloned variety, or cultivar, known as the Cavendish. This type of growing, known as monoculture farming, is cost-effective and consistent on a large scale, but the lack of genetic diversity leaves entire populations of the plants extremely susceptible to disease.
Peeling back the history of the banana reveals that this has happened before. During the middle of the last century, a similar strain of fungal disease sickened plants all over the world, and by the 1960s the world’s previous top banana—Gros Michel, which was larger and more flavorful than the Cavendish—was all but wiped out. Thanks to the rise of the Cavendish, the demise of the Gros Michel didn’t ultimately ruin the worldwide banana market (data from the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization actually show a five-fold increase since 1961), the current situation has a major difference: if the Cavendish is wiped out, there is not another variety waiting in the wings.
There are actually more than 1,000 types of bananas worldwide, but most are either too perishable or unpalatable to be commercially viable. And no type of banana is commercially grown in the U.S., which means that for Americans there is no such thing as a locally sourced banana. But we are the largest buyer in what is estimated to be a more than $7 billion dollar export market.
It’s remarkable that despite their long, complex exportation process, bananas remain one of the cheapest fresh fruits in the supermarket. Don’t they leave a gorilla-sized carbon footprint? Not necessarily, says Bennight.
“It’s not as big of a carbon footprint as you would think because they’re shipped by boat in large quantities instead of on planes or trucks,” he says.
They are the cause of another environmental concern, however: discarded banana peels are a source of environmental methane, a greenhouse gas over 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, and one that contributes significantly to global warming.
Why do we stick with them, despite their complications? Because bananas foster good health in many ways. A great source of nutrition, they are low in calories and rich in fiber, potassium, and vitamins C and B-6. They also contain compounds called fructooligosaccharides, which promote healthy gut bacteria and could lead to better nutrient absorption and overall gastrointestinal health. Bananas are also a natural antacid, and could help alleviate heartburn. And they even contain some tryptophan, a chemical building block for serotonin, the brain’s “feel good” neurotransmitter.
Even the peels offer health and nutrition benefits (and we can digest them, as long as they are cooked). They can also be rubbed on rashes like poison ivy, psoriasis, and bug bites, and may reduce itch, inflammation, and promote healing.
When it comes to the issue of organic vs. non-organic, there is no split among banana aficionados. “I’ve heard that bananas are one of the fruits that people will not sacrifice eating conventional over organic,” says Bennight. Even chimpanzees agree. They will eat only the fruit of a non-organic banana, but give them an organic one and they’ll eat the entire thing, peel and all.
Picking grapes. I was just this young hippie at the time trying to put some money together, thinking I could do it. Halfway down one row I had cut myself 14 times.
I’m addicted to the sauce. I blame my friends, who pushed me toward an attractive stranger and told me to stick out my hand. I warily obliged, and she dispensed a drop on the pad of my index finger, thick and red as blood. I put it to my mouth, and flavor bloomed, followed by a rising heat. Everything changed. I needed more. Burn Hot Sauce has ruined me for all other hot sauces. Vibrantly hued, the four “flavors” are heirloom pepper varieties, so one can really taste the nuances of the pepper and the land on which it was grown—the terroir, if you will, of the Thai bird, Hungarian cyklon, serrano and cayenne. The heat blossoms slowly, and is intensely flavorful, never aggressive or overwhelming (unless you’re slathering it on everything in sight, like yours truly). Each single-origin sauce is made from organic, California-grown peppers, water and sea salt, and fermented raw for three to six months before being blended and packaged into medicinal dropper bottles. As someone who has an entire shelf in her fridge devoted to spicy condiments, this stroke of genius blew my mind. The dropper not only allows the consumer to control how much sauce they put on their pizza, eggs or tacos, it completely eliminates the dreaded crusty hot sauce rim. Burn is the brainchild of partners Amanda Pargh and Chase Atkins, who live in Felton and ferment and package their sauce at the El Pajaro Commercial Kitchen Incubator in Watsonville. In 2014, the day before Pargh was set to begin working in the kitchen at Manresa (after stints at Yountville’s prestigious Ad Hoc and Los Angeles’ Animal), the Michelin-starred restaurant caught fire. Having recently relocated from Sonoma, she and partner Chase Atkins began farming and teaching at Love Apple Farms while waiting for the remodel. Surrounded by produce and fermenting anything she could get her hands on, a windfall of serrano peppers inspired Pargh to make hot sauce and give it to friends. “People were calling us up, saying ‘What was that! I’ve never had anything like it. I need more! My eggs aren’t the same!’” says Pargh. “Chase said, ‘I think we’re on to something.’” Having left the restaurant world to focus on Burn for the time being, the couple says they’re thrilled at how well their product has been received. “We were expecting demand, but we’re getting such positive feedback that our only real concern this year is running out,” says Pargh.
Burn Hot Sauce is available at the New Leaf Market in Felton, the downtown Farmers Market starting March 16 and on etsy.com. burnhotsauce.com
Back in the 1960s and prior, steelhead trout fishing was tremendously popular in Santa Cruz. Research scientist Nate Mantua says that by one account the steelhead fishery was the second biggest tourist draw to Santa Cruz after local beaches.
“Forty years ago, people were lined up shoulder to shoulder down in the lagoon area [of the San Lorenzo River], fishing for steelhead every winter. They’d come from all over the state,” says Mantua, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA).
In 1965, California’s Department of Fish and Game reported a return of roughly 19,000 steelhead in the San Lorenzo River, though Mantua notes that it’s not a formal estimate, but one based on the expert opinions of local wardens and biologists.
Today, in a good year, the river supports about 2,000 fish, says Mathers Rowley, executive director of the Monterey Bay Salmon and Trout Project (MBSTP), and in a more typical year about 1,000. Recently, numbers of steelhead have dropped even below that, with an estimated 525 steelhead in the San Lorenzo for 2012-14, based on the coastal monitoring plan data set, and very low water levels due to drought are a likely culprit in the low numbers.
The steep decline in steelhead numbers—and indeed for coho salmon and chinook or king salmon (see GT’s “On the Run” 2/3) is largely attributed to habitat loss. In the case of steelhead, urbanization of the San Lorenzo Valley as well as increased water use for gardens and lawns, fine sediment from road and driveway runoff, and logjam removal—logjams actually create a healthier ecosystem for steelhead by providing cover and allowing gravel to build up, which the fish need to lay their eggs in—are the biggest factors.
In 1976, a group of local fishermen concerned about the decline of native fish populations got together to form MBSTP. Over the last 40 years, the volunteer-run group has worked to raise awareness and revive the numbers of steelhead trout, chinook salmon, and coho salmon—all once abundant in the area, and the latter of which MBSTP is most recently credited for bringing back from the brink of extinction with its hatchery work at Scotts Creek, just north of Davenport.
In 1982, MBSTP began spawning, rearing and releasing steelhead into the San Lorenzo River as part of their Steelhead Supplementation Project, which Rowley likens to an “insurance policy” for the native population of steelhead, federally listed as a “threatened” species. Last year, MBSTP released about 24,000 steelhead smolts into the river, says Chuck Backman, a board member for MBSTP who got involved after he discovered the organization’s 20-foot tank in the San Lorenzo River near his home in Paradise Park. The tank rears up to 5,000 steelhead each year, and releases them after about nine months in the tank. The rest of the smolts are spawned at the Big Creek hatchery.
“Every year varies depending on returns and what the state allows us to do,” Backman says. “We would love to get back into the 30-40,000 range for the total number of steelhead released per year.”
But this March, the MBSTP won’t be releasing a single steelhead, as the state recently put a hold on recovery efforts across the state, and is now requiring groups like the MBSTP to get permits to continue working with federally threatened or endangered species.
With the steelhead education and recovery programs on hiatus, MBSTP is focusing on raising the funds needed to secure the permit. The first step is to draft a hatchery and genetic management plan, which is a costly endeavor. “We don’t have a scientist on our staff or volunteers with scientific expertise that have time to do this, so we had to hire out really good scientists at like 100 bucks an hour,” Rowley explains.
But Rowley is confident that they should be able to restart a program similar to the one they’ve been running, which takes careful measures to ensure genetic variation by spawning only non-hatchery fish. To ensure that hatchery fish are not spawned, MBSTP takes a fin clipping of the smolt before releasing them into the river—a measure that the state hatcheries don’t necessarily take, says Backman.
The pending permitting process also means that MBSTP’s three-decade-running steelhead education program is on hold. The program, which taught 130 classrooms and about 3,000 school kids from Santa Cruz, San Mateo, Santa Clara and Monterey counties about the lifecycle and natural habitat of steelhead, involved incubating native steelhead eggs in classrooms, followed by field trips to release smolts into native streams.
The state has produced its own educational program, a scant two-page curriculum that incubates reproductively sterile, genetically engineered fish, Rowley says.
“And they can only [be released] into habitats that are sequestered from the wild, like stormwater retention ponds where the fish have a low probability of getting into the natural habitat,” says Rowley, of the state-proposed curriculum which ultimately has little to do with the actual native populations of steelhead in the wild. “And for the people in our program it’s just such a disconnect, it flies in the face of what we’re trying to do.”
The whole point, Rowley says, is to get young people out in the natural habitat to develop a love for the river and the creatures in it—and when you see a live steelhead salmon, he says, you really get it. “They are just such beautiful creatures, full of vitality and energy,” he says. He hopes that with the new permitting, MBSTP can get its school program up and running again if it can also get its volunteers fired up.
“I think we can restart it,” he says. “The problem is the hiatus—you can’t leave a black hole in a teacher’s curriculum, they will find something else to fill it with.”
Hatch It Job
Another program MBSTP hopes to restart is its chinook salmon enhancement net pen project, which, until last year, had released young chinook salmon into the ocean from the Santa Cruz Yacht Harbor for 12 years, as a way to support California’s precarious salmon fishery. (See GT, “On the Run,” 2/3)
When the salmon released by MBSTP became adults, they swarmed back into the harbor rather than back to a Central Valley hatchery where they were born. It wasn’t long before people began showing up with their fishing rods—many of whom would not have had money to spend on a charter boat.
“You think about how wonderful it is for an 8-year-old of a farmworker family that doesn’t have that much food to catch a 35-pound chinook salmon, and provide for her family, I mean that’s a life-changing experience,” says Rowley.
It also posted successful numbers. “It worked incredibly well,” says John McManus, director of the Golden Gate Salmon Association. “The survival on those fish was about 400 percent higher than the fish that are released at the hatchery site, or probably about 300 percent higher than even the fish that are driven down in a hatchery truck to be released into the bay.”
Rowley says MBSTP is in negotiation with the Harbor and hopes to resume the program in 2017 with half as many fish—120,000—as in prior years. Last year, MBSTP pulled the plug and set up in Moss Landing instead.
“We’d always been able to bring 240,000 [fish]. The Santa Cruz Harbor started to view these fish as a liability and not as an asset, and some of our board members took that as an insult,” says Mike Baxter, board member for MBSTP. “I do love the Santa Cruz harbor and their cooperation and support. In their defense there have been negative effects of bringing the fish into the harbor. I would personally like sports people and recreational fishermen to be good stewards of the fishery and of the environment.”
MBSTP has offered to step up support services like trash receptors and potentially hire security personnel to manage the influx of people, and the litter that a few bad apples left behind. But another problem in past years was an increase in sea lions, port director Lisa Ekers says, although she ultimately supports the net-pen project.
“The last year that we had a large influx of salmon, the harbor was overrun by adult sea lions, and they were creating hazards for the boaters and presenting a danger to the public,” says Ekers. “It’s a little alarming. You look outside and see a mom with young kids and they’ll just walk up to the animals and want to touch them, so we’ve had our staff trying to keep people away. The adults range anywhere up to 4 or 500 pounds, and they do move fast.”
To find out about volunteer opportunities or to donate to MBSTP, visit mbstp.org.
On a Tuesday evening last week I climbed the stairs to the atmospherically funky back bar of 515 Kitchen & Cocktails, to remind myself of life after wine. My writer/existentialist colleague Mari had urged me to join her for some wonder drink involving my all-time favorite libation, My writer/existentialist colleague Mari had urged me to join her for some wonder drink involving my all-time favorite libation, Fernet-Branca. Armed with a plate of truffle fries as big as Bernie Sanders’ fanbase, we considered the cocktail menu. Something involving grapefruit vodka? Always a good idea. But I wanted to drink outside the box, as it were. Basil? Perhaps. But when I spied something mysteriously named Cantina Band (the name remains a mystery), I let out a discreet yell and got the barkeep’s attention. All of my favorite sophisticated food groups are represented in this stunningly fresh elixir. In addition to the herb-intensive bitters (Fernet-Branca is a favorite digestif in both France and Italy), the drink offers cucumber, the botanically forward St. George Terroir Gin, lime juice, ginger beer, and simple syrup, which I asked for “restretto.” Shaken and poured into a tall highball glass with ice, lime and a straw, it was like a sorcerer’s home brew that had been double distilled, with gorgeous angular flavors that raced between bittersweet, citrus and vegetal. If I weren’t guarding my remaining neural synapses I would have ordered a second one, so refreshing was this complex creation ($10). I plan on another encounter with the upper floor of 515. Next time I will try that amazing Garden Still, a glowing green concoction awash with two gins, absinthe, Cynar, basil, and lemon. No liqueur is weirder than Cynar (distilled artichoke), so that’s my next order.
Wine of the Week
The “Grizzly” from Big Basin Vineyards 2011, a bold, Rubensesque Grenache/Syrah/Mourvedre blend ($11 glass) that made a perfect partner for the equally bold lamb tenderloin kebabs with saffron rice, sauteed squashes and piquant chutneys—dinner at Laili. While I’m on it, I must praise the tumescent aushak appetizer ($8) at Laili. Lovely leek dumplings arrive on a bed of lentils and chard, and topped with yogurt. These delicious starters end up providing a welcome kick—a great way to begin a meal at what has become one of my very favorite dinner spots in the area. lailiRestaurant.com
Route 1 Dinners
Last summer I spent a memorable afternoon—a long one, that stretched sensuously into twilight—sitting with dozens of others at a long table spread out in the Rancho del Oso fields across from Waddell Beach. The land is one of Route 1 Farms’ fabled acres, and the meal was one of only three wine and harvest dinners that take place al fresco. This Route One dinner series begins on July 17, with Chef Brad Briske of La Balena (and formerly of Gabriella Cafe and Main Street Garden) teaming with winemaker Barry Jackson of Equinox. On Aug. 14, join Chef Damani Thomas of Oswald, who will cook at the Rancho del Oso property, with Michael and Lois Sones of Sones Cellars as featured winemakers. The Route 1 dinners wrap up on Sept. 25 at the Ocean Street Extension fields, with foods from Assembly’s Carlos Espinas and Kendra Baker, and wines from Odonata’s Denis Hoey. This justly famous dinner series will sell outvery quickly so jump on your tickets right now. $95 for Route 1 CSA shareholders, general public tickets are $120 each (still a major bargain). The price is all inclusive, and there are vegetarian options available. If you haven’t yet pampered yourself with one of these dinners created, served and consumed out in the fields, you owe it to yourself to do it. At least once. Purchase tickets at route1farms.csa.com/store.
A Santa Cruz singer/songwriter with wild hair and a brown beard is sitting in front of a blockade of CDs 10 feet high with his eyes closed. He is plunking away on his banjo, singing a new tune. Thumb-tacked pictures of Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Robert Earl Keen, and marijuana blanket the walls and ceiling of KPIG Radio’s Watsonville studio, affectionately dubbed “the Sty.” Just moments ago, today’s singer, Joe Kaplow, was trading playful jabs on the air with radio personality “Sleepy” John Sandidge, the host of “Please Stand By,” the live-music show which celebrates its 1,000th episode Sunday, March 13 at 10 a.m. It’s the same radio show that has welcomed four acts every week for over 15 years, including Kenny Loggins, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Robert Earl Keen, Greg Brown, Guy Clark, and Todd Snider. Like many disk jockeys at KPIG, Sandidge doesn’t have the typical booming register honed by years of voiceover training, and he jokes that he found his radio voice “in the bargain bin of a hardware store.” As Kaplow serenades audiences on 107.5 FM, Sandidge leans forward, listening attentively, and sound engineer Geoff Childers watches the levels on the microphones. Danny Paisley and the Southern Grass, the morning’s previous act, is in the next room packing up and getting ready for an afternoon performance at Don Quixote’s, and then a flight back to Maryland. Paisley, a 56-year-old with a warm, crooked smile, says he loved performing their first-ever set on “Please Stand By.” “There’s nothing better than live music of any kind for me. Right away, you get that energy and that warmth, I call it, of live music, and you can’t capture that in digital recordings,” Paisley says in an Appalachian drawl. “You can capture the fun in great music, but live music—there’s just nothing better. It can change everyday variations on the same song you’ve played for 20 years. Every day, you can play it slightly different.”
HOG CALLING
“Please Stand By” will stray away from its one-artist-per-half-hour format—and from the Sty—Sunday for show number 1,000. Airing live from Kuumbwa Jazz Center, the broadcast will showcase 18 different acts—16 of them local artists—with each getting five to 15 minutes.
One time, local multi-instrumentalist Bruce Wandmayer came out of the bathroom shirtless with his bass slung low. When Sandidge realized Wandmayer also wasn’t wearing any pants, the two seasoned performers began bantering with one another on air, with Sandidge telling him, “I see you’re using the small guitar today. A mandolin would have worked.”
Also on board will be the show’s recurring guest hosts, who fill in whenever Sandidge travels: comedian Richard Stockton, Santa Cruz Sentinel columnist Wallace Baine, and Good Times editor Steve Palopoli. Sandidge is also featuring the music of the show’s volunteers, who have been helping out every week—some of them for more than a decade. Sandidge, also a live music booker and the owner of Snazzy Productions, admits that he’s the only one on the radio show without much musical ability to speak of. “None,” he says. “But I’m OK at putting people together and getting places to play.” Some notable guests this week include the Carolyn Sills Combo, Sherry Austin and Hen House, and the Desert Dream Raqs Band, a belly-dancing troupe featuring Childers on drums. Obviously, live radio sounds like an odd venue for belly dancing, but KPIG’s show actually has a history of broadcasting visual-oriented acts and shenanigans on air—often to a hilarious extreme. Austin and her partner Dave Gordon, who provides microphones for “Please Stand By,” say their all-time favorite act on the show was a touring 13-piece vaudevillian group with a herald trumpet called Circus Contraption. The troupe came to the Sty a few times and had to perform in the parking lot because they were so massive. Circus Contraption featured a lot of aerial work and even played “Hava Nagila” on glass bottles. Another time, “Please Stand By” welcomed a baton twirler to the studio, prompting Sandidge and his fellow co-hosts to provide a play-by-play for listeners at home, announcing every move like it was a basketball game. Now and again, something more unpredictable unfolds. One time, local multi-instrumentalist Bruce Wandmayer came out of the bathroom shirtless with his bass slung low. When Sandidge realized Wandmayer also wasn’t wearing any pants, the two seasoned performers began bantering with one another on air, with Sandidge telling him, “I see you’re using the small guitar today. A mandolin would have worked.” “Those are perfect for me, because when I work, the best is playing off of what somebody else is doing, rather than knowing jokes or telling stories,” Sandidge adds. “I don’t do that at all. Whenever I’m doing interviews, it’s pretty much off the cuff.” When Sandidge talks about Sunday as his 1,000th “Please Stand By” show, he’s also counting the 200 live music shows he did previously at KUSP and, prior to that, at KHIP. Shortly after the show launched at KHIP in the 1980s, Jerry Kay, a local feed store owner, offered to move it to his shop, and the show became the “General Feed and Seed Live Music Show.” Kay bought the microphones and broadcasting equipment. He got an upright piano and built a large stage for audiences to come and listen. People sat on stacks of hay, old pews and bags of dog food. “We did a lot of innovation. We had a lot of spontaneity too,” Kay says. “I liked radio, because you could be anywhere. You can listen to it in your car or the garden. It’s not like watching TV or reading a book or sitting in a movie theater. Radio is more than background music, and live radio is even better than that, because it’s not canned, and you never know what’s going to happen.” Often Kay would write skits for the musical acts to perform and let them rehearse just before they went on. On his typewriter, he drafted up a story called “Robert Earl Keen’s Nightmare,” in which the Austin singer-songwriter dreams what it would be like if he ever became famous. POINT OF NO RETURN Bay Area singer-songwriter Sam Chase in the studio with host ‘Sleepy’ John Sandidge during a live broadcast of ‘Please Stand By’. PHOTO: KEANA PARKER “This was before he became famous,” says Kay of Keen, who gladly took part in the skit. “Anything we wanted to do, they were up for it, and that’s what I was trying to create.” Eventually, the “General Feed and Seed Live Music Show” switched over to KUSP and after episode 200, Sandidge said he wanted to take a break to go for a long drive around the country with his dog. After he moved back to town, he helped KPIG launch “Please Stand By” on Sunday mornings.
BACK TO THE GOLDEN AGE
Michael Keith, an associate professor at Boston College and the author of The Quieted Voice: The Rise and Demise of Localism in American Radio, says live weekly shows like “Please Stand By” are nearly impossible to find outside of college radio stations these days. Such shows, reminiscent of “the golden era of radio,” might appear on a public station or possibly even an AM station, Keith says, but almost never on a commercial FM station. “That’s a super rarity. They may be the only ones in the country doing such a thing. Who knows? It would be hard to find that out conclusively because you’d have to be in touch with 4,000 other for-profit radio stations,” says Keith. “But let’s just put it this way, it’s extremely rare and unusual.” “Please Stand By” is one of several elements that makes KPIG an anomaly in today’s commercial radio world, with a long list of local advertisers and live DJs almost 24 hours a day, who choose their songs one at a time. Keith says that as young listeners turn away from radio in favor of streaming and downloading, stations that want to survive should be doing what KPIG does, providing community benefits and doing what it can to hold onto its listeners over the age of 25. “Please Stand By” has provided a launch pad for dozens of artists trying to get their careers started or just share songs with the community. (Sandidge has even let me come on the air so I could play guitar and sing songs about Santa Cruz, girls and dive bars.) Some are world-class, some are just fine, and some don’t have any chops at all. He knows full well that when he treats a lousy singer like they’ve just given a Grammy-winning performance, it sounds to the listener like he doesn’t know the difference between a good song and an atrocious one, but he believes in staying positive. “That happens, and I always try to keep a stiff upper lip and say, ‘Well, thanks a lot! That was great,’ because I can’t say ‘That really sucked.’ I’ve got to keep the façade up. And you don’t want to make people feel bad,“ he says. He’s aired child performers, including actors from Kids on Broadway, and many groups who might not normally get played on KPIG, from jazz musicians to Tuvan throat singers. “My favorite part of the show is getting world music acts in here,” Childers says. “Especially, every once in a while, we get a musician playing an instrument that I’ve never even seen before, and it’s like, ‘Can you make some noise on that thing, so I know what it sounds like?’”
NO STOPPING
At the Sty, the show is over for the day. Childers and volunteer sound technician Eric Parson are unplugging microphones and putting them in cases, while Sandidge picks out songs on the KPIG computer to play. The three men are chiding one another, with Childers suggesting the show would work better from midnight to 2 a.m. rather than 10 in the morning. “That’s musicians’ time,” he says. Childers, a fan of harder rock music, doesn’t stop there, teasing Sandidge about his taste in music, and suggesting that the show would be improved with metal versions of bluegrass songs—although he admits that he’d settle for “bluegrass versions of metal songs.” “The way God intended it,” Sandidge responds. There has been chatter around the Sty that Sandidge might hang it all up soon, but the longtime host says he doesn’t plan to slow down anytime soon. “I talked to everyone about it. I said, here’s a place if we want to stop, it’s a good place to stop: 1,000 shows. And everybody said, ‘no.’ Unanimous,” Sandidge says. “I’m fine doing it. I have a great time, but I just wanted to make sure everyone was still up for it. So, we’ll do 1,002 shows, and then—.“ Sandidge crosses his hands as if to indicate nada. Leaning back in his DJ station chair, he folds his arms, gazes across the room at Childers—who’s walking out through the door—and laughs heartily. Then, the host spins around in his chair and starts looking for his next song.
KPIG’s “Please Stand By”: 1000th Anniversary Show will air live on 107.5 FM at 10 a.m. Sunday, March 13, going until about 1 p.m. The show will broadcast from Kuumbwa Jazz Center at 320 Cedar St., Santa Cruz. Tickets for the free show are all gone.
There are a million reasons to love the rain. It fills our reservoirs, replenishes our soil and allows all of us to breathe just a little easier when thinking about the future of our ecosystems. But forget all that high-minded stuff—around here we’re just happy to be able to put out a Home & Garden Magazine that isn’t about the drought.
Rain, people! Give us a torrent of it; we’ll happily splash through a thousand puddles, soaking wet (because we pretty much forgot what umbrellas and galoshes are even for) to get this issue out.
But with great showers comes great responsibility. That’s why our first story is about rainwater collection, and what we can all do to hold on to some of this precious precipitation while we have it.
The rain is good news for the subject of our second story, too: Mesa Verde Gardens, and their effort to bring vegetable gardens to low-income Pajaro Valley neighborhoods. It’s an innovative way to bring organic produce to a community.
If the rain is keeping you indoors, you might start thinking about redecorating. If so, we have two stories about home decor in this issue that you’ll want to read first. One is about the growing popularity of sustainable furniture, and where to find it in Santa Cruz; the other is about Agency, the second store opened by Artisans’ Linnaea Holgers James and Peter James, and their own unorthodox furniture line Telegenic California. Finally, as we race into spring, you’ll want to know about local flowers; let Carra Duggan of Flowers By Carra tell you everything you’ll need to know.
Until next time, don’t stay dry!
STEVE PALOPOLI, EDITOR Click to download a PDF of Home & Garden Magazine
Picking grapes. I was just this young hippie at the time trying to put some money together, thinking I could do it. Halfway down one row I had cut myself 14 times. Mo Moscovitz, Santa Cruz, Teacher Parenting is the hardest thing I have done, and it’s still hard. But it’s...
There are a million reasons to love the rain. It fills our reservoirs, replenishes our soil and allows all of us to breathe just a little easier when thinking about the future of our ecosystems. But forget all that high-minded stuff—around here we're just happy to be able to put out a Home & Garden Magazine that isn't about...
Picking grapes. I was just this young hippie at the time trying to put some money together, thinking I could do it. Halfway down one row I had cut myself 14 times.
There are a million reasons to love the rain. It fills our reservoirs, replenishes our soil and allows all of us to breathe just a little easier when thinking about the future of our ecosystems. But forget all that high-minded stuff—around here we’re just happy to be able to put out a Home & Garden Magazine that isn’t about the drought.
