Thousands of fans and mourners poured into the UC Santa Cruz Quarry Amphitheater on Saturday, July 25th for Oliver Tree’s Celebration of Life. The three-hour event was bittersweet as Tree’s family and friends celebrated the life of the 32-year-old Santa Cruz artist and musician, who died June 14 in a helicopter accident in Brazil.
Fans came from across the country to pay their respects. Friends Vesper Cliff and Jico May who drove over 20 hours from Colorado to attend and were the very first two in line for entry.
“I didn’t want to miss this,” Cliff said. “Oliver has been so special to me for so long.”
Prior to the Celebration of Life, Cliff and May went to Tree’s newly installed headstone at Evergreen Cemetery where Cliff left a bumper sticker of a drawing of Tree she had made.
“Something about him scratches my brain just right so I draw him all the time,” explained Cliff. “He’s inspired me through not giving a fuck about what others think have to think about you. Just be you, authentically you. I really admired that about him.”
Billed as “A Night to Remember. A Legend Forever” the event was set up as a quasi-roast with friends and family coming out to share memories—and jokes–about the Santa Cruz native along with video footage and live music. Many of the props from throughout Tree’s career surrounded the stage like the fake bull from his Cowboys Don’t Cry era to the original fake trees used at his very first concert at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center on May 3rd, 2014.
“He’s been a big part of Santa Cruz,” said local fan Bennett Swinnerton who was waiting in line since 3:30pm, three hours before doors opened. “He did so much for his community with his music so I wanted to come out to support both him and his family.”
Prior to its start, Tree’s early work from his debut album Branching Out and EP Demons played over the speakers, giving the audience a sense of where he started prior to becoming the international superstar he became.
The tone for the night was set when a video of Ron Johnson Van Swanson–the satirical AI created President of Tree’s label Alien Boy Records–came on the screen to let audiences know this wasn’t going to be a normal celebration of life. Nothing Tree ever did was normal so why start now?
However, even without the video, audiences knew it would be different just by looking around. At the foot of the stage, three wooden prop caskets were set up, each containing a life-size doll representing one of the characters Tree portrayed over the years: Turbo, the “ugly Justin Bieber”; his cowboy persona, Shawney Bravo; and Cornelius Cummings, the fashion designer.
“Looking back now, I’m thinking he may have had multiple personality disorder and I didn’t get him the help he needed,” his mother Christine Nickell jokingly told the crowd.
Celebrities from across Oliver Tree’s life and career came to pay their respects from influencers such as Logan Paul to longtime collaborators and friends like DJs Getter and Whethan.
“I was lucky enough to be a part of the whole, entire process of almost every single album up until the last one, which he did entirely himself,” Whethan told the crowd. He explained while he was still in high school, Tree was attending college at the California Institute of the Arts. They connected online and wrote many of the early Oliver Tree songs in Tree’s dorm room, walk-in closet.
“Oliver was a one-man band,” he continued. “He really could write, produce, arrange. He really understood how to put the whole, bigger picture together, at least much more than I could at least. He loved collaborating, built teams and made each person the best version of themselves.”
Born Oliver Tree Nickell on June 29th 1993, the local musician showed musical talent and a penchant for creating characters and hamming it up for the camera—in family videos—from an early age. He attended Harbor High School where he created humorous stunt videos with friends, a precursor to the hundreds, if not thousands, of videos he would later release online as one of his many personas.
In 2011 under the moniker Kryph, he made heavy-bass driven dubstep music and earned a name for himself opening for some of the world’s biggest DJ acts at the time like Skrillex and Zedd. Within two years he was writing less pop-driven, more artistic and experimental music as Tree and in 2013 he hit another milestone when Thom Yorke gave him permission to record and release an inimitable version of Radiohead’s “Karma Police.” Tree was only 19 at the time.
In 2016 while attending CalArts, Tree collaborated with Getter on a music video for their song “Forget It,” where Tree first donned his signature bowl haircut–the same haircut he had as a child. It was at this time that he also began working on his first of many characters named Turbo, a scooter-riding “ugly Justin Bieber.” Despite his early achievements, Tree learned that in the internet age talent alone doesn’t suffice to take artists to the next level and used his Turbo moniker to make himself into a meme. The plan worked and Tree soon had millions of followers. Prior to graduating from CalArts in 2017 he was already signed to Atlantic Records.
Over the course of his career as Oliver Tree he released three albums with three characters: 2020’s Ugly Is Beautiful as Turbo, 2022’s Cowboys Don’t Cry as cowboy Shawney Bravo and 2023’s Alone In A Crowd as fashion mogul Cornelius Cummings. Earlier this year Tree announced his latest album, Love You Madly, Hate You Badly–which he recorded entirely himself as he traveled every continent on the planet (yes, even Antarctica)—was finished and set to be released. When Tree died in the June 14 midair collision over Rio de Janeiro, he had just begun his “World’s First World Tour,” during which he planned to become the first artist to perform on every continent.
Which was so very Oliver Tree.
An innovator and visionary, Tree didn’t seek permission to do anything (like the time he tricked Atlantic Records into giving him $1 million fora music video) and held several world records such as building the world’s largest scooter and largest scooter kick. Disillusioned with the music industry, Love You Madly was recorded out of his fake Gucci bag in locations around the world that made him the first musician to ever record music at such as the ancient city of Petra in Jordan, with the Maasai Tribe in Kenya (who made him an honorary Maasai Warrior), Machu Picchu in Peru and yes, Antarctica.
During his closing remarks at Saturday’s event, Getter told the audience some of the best advice Tree ever gave him was when Getter was struggling being alone after a breakup.
“Eventually he said, ‘I used to get that same feeling but nowadays I travel the whole world by myself without worrying about being alone, because I’m actually traveling with my best friend,’” stated Getter. “I’ve grown to absolutely love myself. It’s such a great feeling knowing I’ll always be happy wherever I am.’”
According to his final wishes and will, all of Tree’s money went to founding the Dr. Oliver Tree’s Extremely Epic Grant for Baby Geniuses—a non-profit fund to help young musicians—as well as a to-be-determined future museum to showcase his many costumes, art and life’s work.
