The fact that there’s a local gathering celebrating tequila, tacos and music may be enough to get you over to San Lorenzo Park to partake. If you need more, here goes: there will be top-shelf tequila sampling, gourmet tacos with all the fixings, plenty of margaritas to go around, craft beers, art vendors and live music from Third Sol, Patrón Latin Rhythms, Metalachi Band, Extra Large, and SambaDá. Sound good? We think so, too.
INFO: 11 a.m. Saturday and Sunday, Aug.27 and 28. San Lorenzo Park, 137 Dakota St., Santa Cruz. WANT TO GO? Go to santacruz.com/giveaways before 11 a.m. on Thursday, Aug. 25 to find out how you could win a pair of tickets to Saturday’s festivities.
Day of Mangos is a creative, moody synth-pop record layered with lots of strange sounds and infectious hooks. Local three-piece Dead Recipe recorded it last year, but it’s not really the band you’ll get if you see them live right now. For one thing, they recorded it when they were only a two-piece (Austin natives Kyle Albrecht and Camille Lewis). When they performed these songs live initially, they tried to recreate it as accurately as possible, which meant relying heavily on backing tracks. “We were interested in seeing how much sound we could produce with just the two of us. We were singing over big sample sections of our songs. Then this year, we just tried to strip everything down,” says Lewis. Part of that change-over is the addition of third member, Tom Clary. They are starting over, in a sense. Rather than try to get every layer of electronics into their set, they start with just guitar, drums and keyboards, and build up from there. One of their biggest influences for this new direction is early Talking Heads, which was minimalistic at its core, while still being incredibly experimental. Is Dead Recipe a New Wave band now? Kind of, but even that definition doesn’t totally define them. They are more like pop experimentalists that are using whatever means they have to express themselves. “We’re still using electronics. It’s a little less karaoke. It breathes a little more. If we had an electronic malfunction, we wanted that to not be the death of us,” says Albrecht.
INFO: 9 p.m. Friday, Aug. 19. Crepe Place, 1134 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz. $8. 429-6994.
Something that’s really perfectly awkward is, in essence, perfect. Florence Foster Jenkins is Stephen Frears’ biopic of a show-business legend who deserves her place next to the Shaggs and Ed Wood. Meryl Streep certainly sentimentalizes this deluded woman’s life, but she also honors it. Frears is crafty, not letting the cat out of the bag until the right time. It was fun to watch FFJ in a theater full of people not acquainted with the legend of Jenkins, an opera singer whose reach truly exceeded her grasp. And, as per the Browning verse, Frears sends this provocative singer to heaven. We open at the Verdi Club in Manhattan in 1944, where the well-off Ms. Jenkins is entertaining the big city culture vultures. Her husband, St. Clair Bayfield (Hugh Grant), a former actor, massacres a little Hamlet as an entr’acte before his wife and patroness Florence Foster Jenkins (Streep) assumes the stage. The hefty lady is the center of a playlet about the winged Angel of Inspiration visiting Stephen Foster, to bestow “Oh, Susanna!” upon him. (Happily, this was a real thing—Jenkins’ penchant for wearing angel wings on stage was due to her appearance as the star in this tableau.) The night is a success, though Florence is not a healthy woman and has to go to bed early. St. Clair leaves to go spend the night elsewhere. Jenkins is a patron of the conductor Toscanini (Christian McKay) who’d rather look the other way when Florence tries to get practice as a mezzo-soprano. She hires an accompanist, Cosme McMoon (Simon Helberg of The Big Bang Theory, the movie’s real standout); he little realizes he will be playing for a singer who is so cataclysmically off-key. Jenkins’ career soars, greased with the help of her own money. She trades small practice rooms for the largest stages in New York, and her rise is contrasted with McMoon’s terror. There used to be an expression, “all his features were working,” to describe someone barely able to conceal their emotions. The explosively funny Helberg recalls such masters of working-features comedy as Eddie Bracken and Gene Wilder. The handsome digitized recreations of midtown New York are charming. Frears speeds it along with wipes, one scene elbowing another to the side. Passages of effective farce emerge—Grant hiding his mistress from an unscheduled visit from his wife, while McMoon, half-dressed and walloped by his first hangover, tries to endure the surprise. But FFJ also contains the kind of farce that doesn’t snap—some labored business of St. Clair trying to hide all the newspapers containing a scathing review of Florence’s recital, written by a reporter who will become a big-name gossip columnist, Earl Wilson (John Cavanagh). The film suggests that only disease could explain this remarkably strange career. And the serious turn of Nicholas Martin’s script is, ultimately, payback for the funny parts. Despite her reputation and her Oscars, Streep has greater gifts for comedy than tragedy—she’s most watchable when thwarted or fogbound or fatuous, with her gaga pussycat smile revealing pearly little teeth. She dresses for this part in a Mad Carlotta mantilla or a turban worthy of the one the Three Stooges’ Joe de Rita wore when impersonating a sultan. Streep does have a keen tragic moment—a pitiful phobia that shakes her suddenly, cracking her grande-dame composure. Jenkins came from a time when high culture wasn’t overwhelmed by pop music. Her perfect awfulness may have been a keener joke, back before the budget cuts that humble the Toscaninis of today. I’ve heard it said that opera singers really can’t hear themselves sing. Jenkins had no excuse: she made recordings. She remains a mystery. This is an often hilarious film, but it flattens out. Despite this, and the French-made pastiche of Jenkins’ life Margaret released earlier this year, the glorious enigma of Jenkins stands, defiant, ready to be cracked by a defter movie.
FLORENCE FOSTER JENKINS With John Cavanagh, Hugh Grant, Simon Helberg, Christian McKay, and Meryl Streep. Written by Nicholas Martin. Directed by Stephen Frears. PG-13, 110 Mins.
I interviewed local indie-rocker Henry Chadwick back in March for GT’s “Love Your Local Band” column. He was putting the final touches on his debut solo EP, and was excited to shake his reputation as a one-trick-pony pop-punker with local punk band My Stupid Brother, a group he’d been in since before high school. I found him to be a nice guy. Humble, unassuming, and now, at 25, anxious to show off a new side of himself. I also immediately liked his new music, influenced in equal parts by ’60s and ’90s rock ’n’ roll, but with infectious hooks that stood up to multiple listens. I didn’t think much about Chadwick after that until June, when I was shocked to discover that Rolling Stone magazine had declared his song “Guest At Home,” the title track off his solo EP, one of the best pop songs of 2016. This wasn’t an article highlighting the best up-and-coming indie singles—Chadwick was suddenly being put in the same conversation as Pitbull, Garbage, Enrique Iglesias, and Tegan and Sara. It’s not that his song didn’t deserve the attention, but how did Chadwick, an indie musician almost completely unknown outside of Santa Cruz, suddenly crack the top-pop list in the biggest music magazine in the country? A week later, Time Magazine also named “Guest At Home” one of the best songs of 2016, this time placing him in the company of artists like Kanye West, Brandy Clark, Flo Rida and Miguel. And that was just the beginning of an avalanche of press; to date, Chadwick’s Guest At Home EP has garnered write-ups in more than 50 publications. Some have focused mainly on the title track, others on the song “Alright”—which has actually gotten more listens on Chadwick’s Soundcloud than “Guest At Home”—and others on the entire EP. The Santa Cruz artist is a bona fide sensation, but with all of this publicity coming seemingly out of nowhere, none of the national publications writing about Chadwick know much about him. Rolling Stone even mistakenly said he was a “San Diego solo artist.” Meanwhile, Chadwick, a longtime fixture on the Santa Cruz scene, still doesn’t know how it all happened. “I stumbled across the Rolling Stone thing, and I was like ‘what the hell?’ It was very surprising. It was bizarre. I didn’t really know what to think,” Chadwick tells me over beers at Harlow’s Nightclub in Sacramento, where the Coffis Brothers—who he drums for—will be playing that night. “It’s weird to me that people heard that song and thought of it as something worth sharing and putting alongside other cool songs.” What’s even stranger is that these publications consistently refer to his breezy, Beatles-influenced garage-rock sound as “pop music.” In reality, he’s a rocker who happens to write catchy hooks. “I was confused by that as well, but I’m not complaining,” Chadwick says. “I like pop, and I think there’s some pop sensibilities in my songwriting. Maybe pop is just a big umbrella.”
CURSE OF THE LOCAL BAND
Maybe it was no coincidence that Rolling Stone thought Chadwick was from somewhere else, as it’s rare for Santa Cruz musicians to break out regionally, let alone nationally. The local music scene here, while thriving, is extremely insular. Ska band Slow Gherkin sold out the Catalyst multiple times in the ’90s, but struggled to draw crowds elsewhere. Only a handful of bands from here have gained popularity nationally, and even those that have—Camper Van Beethoven, Good Riddance, and the Devil Makes Three, for instance—tend to be thought of either as cult bands or popular solely within a niche genre. Meanwhile, the Santa Cruz band that almost made it big is a tradition that stretches all the way back to ’60s rockers Snail. RECORD SETTER Rolling Stone called the title track from Chadwick’s debut solo EP one of the best pop songs of 2016. So Chadwick seems to be on his way to beating the odds. And though this sudden rush of attention is a total shock to him, I can see barely any trace of excitement exuding from his face. Chadwick is a short man wearing a Beastie Boys T-shirt and sporting a Beatles moptop circa 1964. He speaks quietly, and takes measured sips of his beer as he explains that it doesn’t exactly surprise him that he’s gotten so much publicity. That was, after all, his plan. What surprises him is that it actually worked. Chadwick is a talented multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, singer and recording engineer. As such, he was able to record Guest At Home at his father’s home studio for virtually nothing, and used the majority of his recording budget to hire a publicist. He wanted to “get his music out there,” but didn’t have too lofty an idea of what exactly that meant. “I wanted to be Google-searchable. That was my goal with it all. I really lucked out that this person hustled,” he says of his publicist. Probably the biggest score was getting featured on music blog Indie Shuffle, where he was the No. 1 artist for a week. As a result of the attention he got from that, two of his songs were featured on Spotify’s “Fresh Finds: Six Strings” playlist. He was also approached by a small label, and even scored a manager. The Indie Shuffle highlight is also likely what led to the Rolling Stone and Time magazine features, since his publicist didn’t reach out to those particular publications.
TREBLE IN THE DETAILS
Chadwick’s new EP is short and sweet, with five songs, three of which Chadwick has released videos for. Each song stands on its own in terms of sound, with influences all over the board—including ’60s rock ’n’ roll, surreal psych-folk, electro-rock, surf-pop and ’90s alt-rock. What connects the songs is Chadwick’s approach to infectious hooks and overall production quality. The songs are similar enough to occupy the same record, and different enough to keep the EP from getting boring. “I wanted each song to have its own identity,” Chadwick says. “It’s more rewarding when you hear a band and there’s some punk stuff, surfy stuff, some Beach Boys-y stuff, some Beatles influence and some electronic stuff mixed in. It feels more authentic to just incorporate all of them, at least for me, because I like a lot of stuff.” Though the result is a quick, easy listen, Chadwick worked on the EP for nearly a year, in between touring with local band the Coffis Brothers, and recording other bands at his studio. During the interview he repeatedly refers to himself as “obsessive” and “OCD,” qualities that are in no way apparent to me as I sit across from him. His worry-free, go-with-the-flow demeanor reveals no obsessive characteristics. “It’s kind of a paradox,” Aidan Collins tells me over the phone. Collins plays bass in the Coffis Brothers, and in Battlesnake, Chadwick’s backing band. “He’s really easygoing, but he’s definitely detail oriented. He doesn’t get hung up on the little things. He can be pretty open to change. He’s pretty democratic with ideas.” Perhaps Chadwick’s secret weapon is his remarkable recording skills, which have roots in his childhood. His father was a recording engineer in Hollywood in the ’80s, and moved up to the Bay Area in 1988 when Chadwick’s older brother George was born. In the ’90s, the Chadwicks moved to Ben Lomond. There, Chadwick’s dad built his own studio using leftover equipment he saved from his Hollywood days. Chadwick’s father dubbed the studio Hale Kua (Hawaiian for “House in the Back”), and it’s where Chadwick recorded Guest At Home. By the time he recorded his solo album, he was a seasoned engineer. His dad helped him record My Stupid Brother, a band Henry and George formed in 2002—before they were old enough to drive themselves to gigs. The first record in 2007 was self-titled, and Chadwick’s father recorded it for them. The second, 2009’s What You Need, was an engineering collaboration between Henry and his dad. The final record, 2014’s Welcome To My Head, Henry engineered and produced entirely on his own. He spent a lot of time on it, tweaking every little detail he could imagine, and sometimes overdoing it, he says now. By the time Chadwick was in high school, he was also recording friends’ bands, and this has continued in more recent years. Some of the bands he’s recorded include Subpar, Jesse Daniel and the Slow Learners, McCoy Tyler, and the Leftovers. He records bands at Hale Kua, and another studio, the Compound. “He’s really professional. He has a really good ear for things on the production end of it that I wouldn’t necessarily think of. I’ve had a lot of people compliment the sound,” says Jesse Daniel. Chadwick recorded Daniel’s country-rock American Unknown EP last year. The two have been friends since childhood, and Daniel also plays drums in Battlesnake. “He’s meticulous. If something’s a little bit off, he’ll tweak out on that, and obsess about it. It’ll be a good thing. It’ll end up sounding perfect, exactly the way you want it.”
“It’s more rewarding when you hear a band and there’s some punk stuff, surfy stuff, some Beach Boys-y stuff, some Beatles influence and some electronic stuff mixed in.” – HENRY CHADWICK
All of the time Chadwick devoted to poring over the final My Stupid Brother album, as well as the hours he’s devoted to friends’ bands, paid off on Guest At Home. It’s an incredibly fresh, professionally produced batch of songs that manage to steer clear of the over-polished radio sheen, but also doesn’t sound like the work of a DIY artist with no label affiliation who played virtually every instrument himself. The balance of instruments and vocals is exceptional. Certainly, if Rolling Stone had heard the music of a completely unknown artist without a flair for production, it’s unlikely they’d even consider featuring him alongside Pitbull and Enrique Iglesias. As far as I can tell, it’s this high level of production value that has Chadwick pinned as a pop artist by so many music writers. When I mention this theory, Chadwick agrees. “Some of my songs at their core are garage-rock songs. Maybe they’re pop songs. I just mask them in fuzz and stuff. If it was more drowned in reverb, it could have been straight up indie or garage,” he says.
FEELING ‘AT HOME’
The recording process for Guest At Home was a liberating experience for Chadwick. Up until recording these songs, his primary creative outlet had been My Stupid Brother—he’s played drums for the Coffis Brothers since 2010, but when he played with his brother, he was the primary singer-songwriter. From the beginning, My Stupid Brother was a pop-punk band, an identity they kept intact more-or-less until their final album. It was on that last album that Chadwick felt himself wanting to write different types of songs. Some of it ended up being pop-punk, some of it steered into indie and garage-rock territory. The band was changing anyway. Chadwick’s brother George moved to New York to get his master’s degree before the album was released. The band continued on a little bit. Between playing without George, and Chadwick wanting to move away from strictly pop-punk, it started to just not feel right continuing to play as My Stupid Brother. All of these other musical influences, that up until then had to take a back seat to pop-punk, were not new for Chadwick. He’d always had eclectic musical tastes. The first band that ever had an impact on Chadwick was the Beatles, a group he’s been in love with since he was in diapers. “It was everything—all albums, all videos, all movies, all books,” George tells me over the phone, regarding his brother’s Beatles fetish. “He knew the words. He could sing the melodies. I remember him knowing the names of songs and knowing the names of stuff before I did. At one point, he was able to make his face look like every one of the Beatles. He could do a John Lennon impression, a Ringo Starr impression. He was like 8 years old. They were really pretty good.” My Stupid Brother never broke up, but the group hasn’t played much over the past several years. Meanwhile, Chadwick had all these unused demos. When he started recording the songs, he wasn’t sure what it would be for, or if it would be a full album or an EP. Ultimately, he settled on the five songs, since they were so fully developed. As for the name of the project, it just clicked in his head to go solo, which helped him to go anywhere he wanted genre-wise. “I’m always going to be Henry Chadwick. I’m always going to be able to get behind my name. I can’t really break myself up,” Chadwick says. “There are solo artists that do something different every album, like Beck or David Bowie. They can just kind of reinvent themselves at any point and it doesn’t shun fans away.” As press continues to roll in for Guest At Home, Chadwick takes it all in stride, unsure what it all means for his future. One thing that’s changed is that he’s working with people on his solo music—a manager, label, publicist—and they’re all in discussion about what he should do next: releases, tours, etc. “It’s weird having a little team built around me now. That’s never something I’ve had before,” he says with reluctant enthusiasm. After we finish the interview, he heads off to join the Coffis Brothers on stage. In this role, he’s completely unassuming—for half of the set I can barely even see him, hidden behind one of the lead singers. As I watch, it suddenly strikes me that no one in this club would ever guess that that guy is poised to be a genuine rock star. They certainly won’t hear it from him. Henry Chadwick and Battlesnake with Jackie Zealous perform at 9 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 9 at the Crepe Place, 1134 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz. $8. 429-6994.
At last week’s meeting of the California Coastal Commission, Commissioner Martha McClure ranted against the City of Santa Cruz’s controversial new law banning recreational vehicles from parking overnight. She has begun to feel exasperated, she tried to explain, with cities that make criminals out of the poor and homeless. Just then, a shout reverberated through the hotel meeting room. “Good, because Santa Cruz won’t have to host all of them, so thank you for your consistency!” someone blurted out from the sparsely populated room on the second floor of the Hilton Santa Cruz. It was City Councilmember Richelle Noroyan, yelling from the seventh row. Three other women sitting with Noroyan began yelling along, as a back-and-forth erupted between Noroyan and Coastal Commission Chair Steve Kinsey. “Excuse me. You’re an elected official—you should know better,” a frustrated Kinsey barked back at Noroyan, eliciting gasps from the crowd. Looking back on the encounter, Noroyan, who was ultimately ejected from that Aug. 10 meeting, says that her anger toward the California Coastal Commission had been festering for weeks. She believes the commission has singled out the City of Santa Cruz’s law despite the fact that it’s similar to measures 21 other coastal cities have enacted without so much as a peep from the commission. The laws passed by those other cities, she believes, have forced more RV-driving transients toward Santa Cruz. However, she says the experience has humbled her. “I beat myself up for doing that, because I am critical of those who do this at council,” says Noroyan. The City of Santa Cruz’s meeting rules, last updated two years ago, allow the council to indefinitely bar anyone who becomes too “boisterous.” “Moving forward, I will be less judgmental of people who do that,” Noroyan adds, “because sometimes your emotions and frustrations get the best of you.” Ultimately, the commission voted 11-1 to uphold an appeal that claimed Santa Cruz’s rule cuts back on critical coastal access. The lone dissenting voice in support of the law came from Kinsey, who had just thrown Noroyan out. Commissioners also directed staff to investigate the issue further. Robert Norse, the homeless advocate gadfly who filed the Coastal Commission appeal against the city, admits that even he was surprised by the outcome. The City Council originally passed its oversized vehicle rule at a May 24 meeting, during which Noroyan proposed a motion to enact the ban without the support of the Coastal Commission, which had called city staffers about the matter at the 11th hour, the day of the meeting. Her motion failed. Noroyan, a vocal supporter of the RV crackdown, says complaints from locals prompted the rule, with many residents expressing anger at large vehicles parking for long periods on city streets, taking up multiple spots and often leaving trash behind. Noroyan and Deputy City Manager Scott Collins mentioned such complaints at the Coastal Commission meeting, arguing that the city’s plan ensures public safety. Local residents have found discarded needles in areas where RVers are known to stay, Collins told the commission, and bike thefts also spiked in these neighborhoods. The city has also had problems with RV campers dumping waste onto the streets, he added. But in lecturing Noroyan and Collins, coastal commissioners sounded unconvinced and unimpressed by the city’s presentation. Commissioner Effie Turnbull-Sanders said that, anecdotes aside, the city did not prove a connection between RV users and crime—a point which McClure also emphasized. “I’m getting very frustrated with communities that have this tendency to identify anyone who is homeless as a chronic drug user or chronic thief or somebody who is not on the right side of the law,” McClure said. City staffers had suggested that RVs could possibly park at local businesses or in church parking lots, but admitted they did not know of specific churches or businesses willing to offer their lots. “It seems like they want us to demonstrate that there will be parking spaces, so we’ll have to look at that,” Collins said after the vote. Collins says the city will not enforce the rule—which would have still allowed RV drivers to purchase overnight parking permits—until the matter gets sorted. Santa Cruz City Attorney Tony Condotti says the Coastal Commission’s appeal process is lengthy and involved, adding that it would probably cause “several months of delay” in the city’s ability to implement the ordinance. At the same meeting, protesters showed up with signs criticizing a sand-mining operation in Marina that the Coastal Commission has been trying to shut down. The commission also got an update on the search for a replacement of popular Executive Director Charles Lester, who was fired in a controversial vote this past winter. Jack Ainsworth, the senior deputy director, has served as interim executive director since March, and a recruiting firm will begin its search for a permanent replacement this month. When it comes to the RV rule, Noroyan asserts that the city’s way of handling homeless issues is “not within the purview of the Coastal Commission.” “The RV issue is important, but how we were being treated by the Coastal Commission became even bigger,” she says. “It’s an unequal application of standards.” It isn’t the first time someone has made such claims. The Coastal Commission heard a loud public outcry in Santa Cruz when it denied approval of both the Arana Gulch Multi-Use Trail in 2010 and the La Bahia hotel project in 2011—both of which were approved in later years. Commissioner Wendy Mitchell concedes that the commission needs to develop a policy on coastal access and RV ordinances, rather than tackle these matters on a city-by-city basis. In the meantime, McClure asked the enforcement division to look at the RV ordinances of the 21 other coastal cities in California that have enacted similar bans. Other commissioners reminded everyone that the principal charge of the commission is to ensure that the public is able to access the beach. “From our perspective,” Commissioner Mark Vargas said, “we need to be careful about how this impacts people of all economic spectrums’ ability to access the coast.”
Toni Riley was packing up snacks for a bonfire late last month when her cell phone rang. She answered, and it was Stephen Baxter, a reporter from the Santa Cruz Sentinel, working on a story about the one-year anniversary of the slaying of 8-year-old Tannery resident Maddy Middleton, who was a family friend of Riley. At the beginning of what would be a strange series of events, Riley says she told Baxter that if Laura Jordan—Middleton’s mom—wanted to comment, she would let him know and hung up the phone. When Baxter called back immediately after, Riley let it go to voicemail and Baxter left her a message. “I just wanted to let you know that you’re a terrible person,” he said in the message, which Riley says left her completely shocked when she listened to it on the way to the bonfire. “You’re an awful person, and I have heard so much between last year and this year about the things that you’ve done.” Baxter made a few accusations in his message—that Riley’s family was involved in a fight outside Middleton’s memorial, that she may have had something to do with a mismanaged fundraiser, and that she has enabled a close friend’s supposed “drinking problem”—all of which Riley denies. Riley says, for instance, that she’s sober. “How am I enabling someone if I don’t even drink?” she asks. A recording of the voicemail, left on July 26, has made the rounds on social media, and Baxter has since resigned from the Sentinel. Though he declined to address the specifics of his accusations, he says the voicemail came out of his frustration and anger with a lack of cooperation from community members as he covered the story. “I’m not shy to controversy and I’m always working in the public interest. I’ve been fair, accurate and professional in my reporting,” says Baxter, a five-time California Newspaper Publishers Association award-winning reporter. “I’m also human.” The voicemail post has garnered more than 4,000 views and 100 shares on Facebook. Baxter says he had already been thinking about leaving the paper and looking for other jobs for about a year. “In this case, Mr. Baxter himself acknowledged that it was inappropriate what he did, and we would never encourage anyone to lose their objectivity in a case,” says Santa Cruz Sentinel Editor Don Miller, who stresses that it was Baxter’s decision to step down. “I think Stephen was a good reporter here, and it was an unfortunate incident, but he chose to resign,” Miller says. As they sat around the bonfire that night, Riley says that she played the voicemail for her friends, and everyone there was “appalled.” “We got that there was going to be a story, and people want to know what happened. But there is a right way and a wrong way,” says Riley. “This isn’t a black-and-white issue—it’s super gray, and you have to have a bit of finesse to go into a place where something horrible happened and people are picking up the broken pieces of their life.” In addition, says Riley, “there’s another level to this story. My father shot himself while I was at the bonfire that day.” Baxter notes that he apologized four days later, although he says Riley didn’t feel his apology sounded sincere. Riley and one of her friends also criticized Baxter’s reporting and the Santa Cruz Sentinel more generally, especially for how they handled the tragedy at the Tannery Arts Center. “Santa Cruz can do better. We can do better if we demand more of the people who are serving us and giving us our news. You have to demand more of that,” says Facebook user Raggedy Andey, who posted the video and performs as a slam poet under the same name. “You aren’t allowed to create more pain in the wake of pain. We can demand better as a community, as a people, as a whole.” Andey, who hoped to shine a more public light on what she sees as Baxter’s transgressions in the public eye, has asked us not to use her real name. Andey and Riley make numerous claims about Baxter’s reporting, including that he is loose with his facts. In his coverage of the Middleton tragedy, Baxter did misreport the exact date of Middleton’s death, although the Sentinel article has since been corrected. In his most recent story on the series, he reported that defendant Adrian Gonzalez’s preliminary hearing will be Feb. 28, although it’s actually scheduled for Feb. 21, and that Middleton went missing July 25. She was, in fact, last seen the afternoon of July 26. “We ran 25 stories, or something, on the murder, so, on one of them it had the day of the murder wrong then it got corrected,” Baxter says, who adds that there’s no excuse for wrong dates and that people should expect accuracy from reporters. “But is that the one thing I did? OK, I’ll take it. There are thousands of facts in there, so, if I had one date of one thing wrong, I’ll accept that.” Now that he’s left the Sentinel, Baxter says he hopes to freelance and work on stories outside of the Santa Cruz area. He also hopes to write about his experiences as a reporter, and the “moral quandaries” reporters face, like weighing what to do with off-the-record information and the struggle of trying to write a long slate of well-rounded stories in a tight turnaround. “The amount of work you do and the extent you go to to get interviews and get ahold of people, just to get someone on the phone or in person, all of the reporting that goes into the two or three stories that I am writing per day … It’s never enough,” Baxter says. “No matter what you do.”
KUSP, the community radio station that recently stopped broadcasting, has now filed for bankruptcy. “It’s really a shame. I wish it could have been different,” Board Secretary Cathie Royer says of the debt-ridden roller coaster ride of the beloved station. “It’s really tough to summarize.” Chapter 7 bankruptcy, the route the board chose, will force the station to liquidate its assets. Perhaps, some board members have suggested, things could have been different if the station had had more time—or leaders had begun their overhaul and last-ditch fundraising efforts sooner. Royer says the board plans to post a Frequently Asked Questions page on KUSP.org this week.
CONCRETE IDEA
The city of Santa Cruz is gearing up for a big shebang to celebrate 150 years of our quirky town by the sea. The festivities, which run from Sept. 1 through Oct. 1, include a public art tour, an exploration of the wharf and a beach party. The celebration kicks off at 4 p.m. on Sept. 1 with a time capsule sealing at Santa Cruz City Hall. The city manager’s office is looking for ideas to include in the historical vault, which will be opened in 100 years. Submissions are due by Wednesday, Sept. 24. Here is GT’s list of suggestions, which we turned in this week: -Robert Norse’s teddy bear -Blueprints of desal plant -Jill Stein 2016 pin -Receipt for a Five Guys burger -Eviction notice for unpaid sky-high rent -Pamphlet on freeganism -Pre-legalization nugget from the “medicinal” pot era -Micah Posner’s soft ear hairs -CD recording of Richelle Noroyan yelling -Instructions on how to listen to a CD -Great Morgani costume -Keys to a drive-it-yourself automobile -T-shirt that says “This was supposed to be the future. Where is my jetpack?” -Bag of syringes -Mike Rotkin -This issue of GT Submit your suggestions for the time capsule at www.cityofsantacruz.com/150anniversary. Or leave your ideas in the comments of the online version of this story, and we’ll submit them for you.
At the end of Amigo Road in Soquel, near the top of a trail that heads down into the trees, there’s a little clearing with a bench and a redwood tree. It’s part of the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods, and in many ways it’s a perfect symbol of the experience that husband-and-wife Wellstone co-founders Steve Kettmann and Sarah Ringler try to create for writers. Not only because it offers a gorgeous view of the natural world, but also, more importantly, because it’s quiet. Wellstone is a place where silence is revered, a retreat in the truest sense of the word. And the fellowships, resident internships and other opportunities writers get to create and explore their process on the grounds comes with a strong encouragement to digitally detox. While Wellstone has Wi-Fi, and there are certain areas where Internet and cellphones are allowed, there are others where they’re prohibited. In another way, that same clearing at the end of Amigo Road also symbolizes just how hard Wellstone’s push against our culture’s ever-growing obsession with connectivity can be. That’s because the redwood by the bench was planted in honor of Kettmann’s sister, who died of cancer. She visited the Wellstone Center only a couple of times in her life, but the mandatory offline policy didn’t sit well with her. “She was an educator. A great, generous person who totally understood what we were up to,” says Kettmann. “But she came and visited us, and had it in her mind that she wanted to go online to, I don’t know, check in for Southwest Airlines or something. And we told her no, please don’t do that here, and she just couldn’t process the information. It became a little bit of a conflict, and it bothered her—later, she mentioned ‘Well, they’re a little bit pushy about that!’ And my sister almost never said anything like that.” The thing is, his sister’s view was not unusual; in fact, it’s the societal norm. “People feel like it’s really their entitlement to be connected at any point, without stopping to understand how dangerous that is—that there is no ‘no,’ it’s always ‘yes,’” he says. “So it was a pretty jarring lesson for me. We have to keep trying, even though we run into things like that all the time.” The payoff comes when they get to work with writers like Ethel Rohan, the Irish-born, San Francisco-based author who was awarded the Wellstone Center’s first Plumeri Fellowship—named for Joe Plumeri, a New York-based philanthropist whose son Christian developed anorexia in his early teenage years, which led to treatment facilities, drug problems, and ultimately Christian’s tragic death before he was 40 years old. Plumeri wrote about the painful loss in his book, The Power of Being Yourself, which was co-authored by Kettmann. “We were thinking of [Christian], wanting it all to mean something, to try to turn it into something tangible,” says Kettmann. “Twice a year, we have a Plumeri Fellow who is an established writer pursuing a book project at the intersection of food and health. The idea is it should be fiction or creative nonfiction, not journalism or academic writing. It should have a personal component.” During her month-long fellowship in June, Rohan worked on her first novel, The Weight of Him, which will be published in February by St. Martin’s Press. In announcing the Plumeri Fellowship on her website, Rohan said she was “thrilled and grateful,” and looking forward to the “solace and inspiration of nature.” Wellstone is now accepting applications for the second Plumeri Fellowship, which are due Aug. 22. The fellowship comes with a $5,000 stipend. There is also another month-long residency on the property, the WCR Fellowship, for which applications are due Aug. 20. It’s awarded four times a year, and provides for a writer to stay in the property’s rustic Library House, which epitomizes the digital detox experience—“no electricity, no running water, really nothing except a nice bed, books and an amazing view,” says Kettmann. The couple—who just a few days ago welcomed their second child into the world—bring a sort of intersection of passions to their work at the Wellstone Center. Kettmann, who was born in San Jose, is a former sports writer for the San Francisco Chronicle and a contributor over the years to everything from the New Republic to the New York Times. He has written or co-written several best-selling books, including the groundbreaking and highly controversial 2005 autobiography by Jose Canseco, Juiced, which was one of the key works in the mid-part of that decade that brought awareness of rampant steroid use in professional sports to the mainstream. Ringler, who earned her master’s degree in international relations in Berlin, comes from the world of nonprofits. They had been living in Berlin for 10 years when they discovered their Soquel property on a trip to the Bay Area. “We came here and were just so wowed by the place, the location,” says Ringler. “We felt like we wanted to bring people here and engage their creativity.” While Kettmann has the writing fame, Ringler is in many ways the face of the Wellstone Center—literally, even, since her face is on the landing page of their website, along with a diary that is part of the very personal connection she considers essential to the Wellstone experience. “We don’t have that very often anymore in our world,” she says. “We feel like we have 100 friends on Facebook, but what we really want is personal connection.” There is also a publishing arm of the Wellstone Center, Wellstone Books, that has already put out an eclectic array of works, like A Book of Walks by San Francisco Giants manager Bruce Bochy, and the “Music That Changed My Life” series. “We look to do personal writing that’s not afraid to inspire,” says Kettmann. “It’s not self-help, it’s not overtly inspirational. But why not do stuff that has positive energy and might make people feel good?” Though their goals are ambitious, and their vision finely tuned, they don’t see the Wellstone Center as their home, exactly. “We see ourselves as the custodians of it,” says Kettmann. “The custodians of quiet.”
For more information on the Wellstone Center and the deadline for fellowship applications, go to wellstoneredwoods.org.
In 1989, Mike Schermer was working a job he hated as a housekeeper at UCSC and playing blues guitar on the side. One day on his lunch break he got a call from Bay Area bluesman Andy Santana about a potential gig that night. Schermer would miss the gig if he went back to campus, so—in what would become a defining moment—he ditched work and played the gig. He and Santana then formed a blues group called the Soul Drivers, and Schermer never worked another day job again. “We were pretty much immediately working five or six nights a week,” Schermer says. “I was making $50 or $60 a night and I was paying $200 a month for rent. It didn’t get much better than that.” Now widely known as Mighty Mike, Schermer has become a celebrated blues sideman. He’s performed with an all-star roster of blues heavyweights, including Bonnie Raitt, Elvin Bishop, and Charlie Musselwhite, and he’s lead guitarist for swamp-boogie pianist and singer Marcia Ball. Schermer has wholeheartedly embraced the role of sideman. He leads his own band, the Mighty Mike Schermer Band, and he writes his own material, but he thoroughly enjoys playing other people’s music. “I think every frontperson should be a sideperson at one time in their career, just to see what it’s like,” he says. “And vice versa. I’ve worked with a lot of sidemen that complain about this and complain about that, and they have no idea how hard it is to be a frontperson … It would be a good experience for every drummer and bass player to experience that in their life.” Originally from Los Alamos, New Mexico, Schermer experimented with different styles of music while a student at UCSC. His musical trajectory was forever altered, however, when he saw blues legend Albert Collins perform at Kresge Town Hall. “It changed everything for me,” he says. “From that first note he hit, I knew what I wanted to do.” Collins still provides considerable influence and inspiration, even after all these years. Schermer describes his life before and after seeing the legendary artist as one door closing behind him and another opening. Talking with him is a quick study in blues appreciation. He delights in explaining how all American music has its roots in the blues; that the blues is one of the original improvisational styles; that there are countless sub-genres within the genre; and that its chordal confines enable vast creative expression. “It’s pretty much three chords with a few substitutions here and there—twelve bars with a few variations there,” he says. “But by boxing it in, it opens it up. There’s a lot more you can do inside of that.” An energetic and passionate performer who has a reputation for playing his ass off every night, Schermer now calls Austin, Texas home. He moved there at the invitation of Ball to be her guitarist. He describes Santa Cruz as a hard place to leave, but the move has been great for his career. He doesn’t, however, advise moving there as a guitarist looking for work. “It’s just not a town that you move to as a guitar player unless you already have a gig,” he says. “The guy serving your pizza can probably play circles around you.” On Thursday, Schermer celebrates his 50th birthday with a performance at the Kuumbwa. He’s bringing his ace band and enlisting the help of local collaborators, including Tammi Brown, Lara Price, and members of the Soul Drivers. The evening promises to be a musical trip down memory lane for longtime fans, as well as a showcase of Schermer’s extraordinary talents and love of being on-stage. “I try to put the thoughts away when I perform,” he says. “It’s really just about having a good time … Let’s forget about everything and just have fun from the first note to the last note. We can solve the world’s problems later.”
Mighty Mike Schermer will perform at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Aug. 19 at Kuumbwa Jazz, 320-2 Cedar St., Santa Cruz. $18/adv, $23/door. 427-2227.
With the release of his debut solo EP ‘Guest at Home,’ local rocker Henry Chadwick is getting national attention—and beating the curse of the Santa Cruz musician
