Downsizing

The other day as I was driving through Fremont, California, on my way home from Oakland, I turned on the radio and heard the words “Fremont California” in a story about Tesla, and then when I got home the words “Fremont California” jumped out at me in a Facebook post for a house concert there. So I thought, well, that must mean it was meant to be, and bought a ticket for it.

I wasn’t quite sure who Eric Bachmann was but I did remember his old band the Archers of Loaf: an early 90s indie band on Merge with a Pavement vibe and a college radio presence. To be honest, though, I was more attracted to the idea of a house concert in Fremont. 

A house concert is one at a person’s home, where the money goes directly to the artist. Usually they are in hipster places like city lofts or craftsman mansions: having a house party in Fremont seems almost antithetical to the concept. Fremont is a place where art cannot exist. Back when I was little, my parents used to take us there on Sundays sometimes, in order to visit the model home open houses that so many of the housing developments were putting up. My parents didn’t want to buy a model home, however. My dad was an architect, and I now realize that going to see these abominable homes was the equivalent of when I go see Def Leppard play an Indian Bingo Parlor. He went there to mock them.

A half century later those developments are still there, and if anything, uglier. But when I was a rock critter, I had a mandate to go to the weirdest shows possible. So come Friday night I crossed the Bay on the Dumbarton Bridge to experience the full Fremont effect.

Fremont’s geographical setting isn’t naturally ugly – it’s nestled between the Bay and some golden velvet hills – but once you leave the freeway, you will only see one of two things: high beige stucco walls surrounding hideous subdivisions, or industrial parks and strip malls mostly taken up with storage units. There are so many storage units that its hard not to think about what awful things must be packed inside them. As I drove towards the street that house concert was on (appropriately called “Grimmer”) I passed every possible low-end box store you can name, a bunch of Chipotles, and something called “Unitek College.” I don’t believe that Unitek College is really a college, do you?

In short, Fremont still reminds me of those ten story buildings in Seoul and Beijing that are crammed to the brim with T shirts and handbags and knockoffs of everything. When capitalism comes to an end, all that stuff will be the cause of it, but in the meantime, I drove on and on down Grimmer lane, and presently, I came to the location I sought, which was not a house at all, but a brew pub in a storage unit called Das Brew.

The concert was not in the brewpub, though, it was in the back storage unit where the vats where they brew the brew were. A nice woman named Priscilla, whom I discovered was the owner of the brew pub, ushered me back there and for a few terrifying minutes, I was alone, sitting on a couch surrounded by a few beat up folding chairs. Priscilla served me a beer and handed me a bowl of broken pretzels.

So I sat. For a little while, the only people there were me, Priscilla, her husband Jan, and Eric Bachmann himself, but presently, we were joined by exactly 16 other patrons. It was extremely intimate, and also a little bit spooky. Suffice to say, sitting on a battered old couch surrounded by beer vats in the back of a storage unit in some industrial park in Fremont – that isn’t a place I’d envisioned myself being. Ever. But that was also the beauty of it. And then Eric Bachmann began playing, and the beauty part intensified.

In case you missed it, Bachmann’s work in the Archers was jumpy, tuneful, verbose, poppy. Songs like “Web In Front” and “Revenge” are essentially band driven compositions that beg for drums and bass and remind you of hopping up and down in a sweaty club in a college town: they are the embodiment of a sound that suffused the youths of a very, very few of us. By contrast, his solo work, often recorded under the named Crooked Fingers (and more recently under his own name), is more contemplative, even folky. It features intricate fingerings and long drawn out chords, and sometimes is played on banjo, and the lyrics are more like short stories, rather than the fleet, sonic emotions that get caught and solidified into a chorus and then shot back at you the way a great indie rock song does. Bachmann’s solo work like “Mercy” and “Carolina” are in a wholly different mood than that stuff; a different key of life. At Das Brew, he played both types, on acoustic guitar and on banjo, and they all sounded just great.

Of course they sounded great. He was so close to our faces that we could watch the chord changes, and check out where the capo was, and see exactly what craft goes into that kind of very intense musicality. And I was reminded, as he played, of the healing effect that music has: any music, any notes, any chromatic rendering of sound waves, can actually go into your heart and mend it. It can mend you, and it can mend places as well. For that evening, it mended Fremont, and instead of seeming like a wasteland, I was able to see it as it really is beneath the buildings, as the Costanoan Indians saw it. Green, warm, charming…a place where the light is very lovely in the evening. And I saw more than that. I saw into the future, when all the empty Walmarts and Best Buys that the coming apocalypse will create will become warm little spaces where small bands of likeminded people will gather to listen to music, and artists like Bachmann will be paid a living wage.

Because here’s the thing. There were nineteen people in that room, including myself and the owners, and for ten of them, huge Bachmann fans already, this was the greatest night of their life. Not only were the songs beautifully performed (and the sound in storage lockers turns out to be excellent) but Bachmann took requests, answered questions, exchanged quips, told everyone how he wrote each song, and even, at one point, left the room to get his little dog Lupe, who was cooped up in the van.

A long time ago, I wrote a column in which I mused on why the least expensive concerts are often the best, and this was a case in point. I know a lot of people who have paid four figures to see Bruce Springsteen play Broadway this year, and while I definitely get that, it’s hard to compare it to this concert, which cost $30, but you got to write the set list and pet the artist’s dog. Surely there is no comparison. 

All you had to do was know about it. The two men sitting next to me were from my neck of the woods. They were on a platonic boy date (ie wives left home) and I asked them how they got into Eric Bachmann. One said, he’d heard the song “Rotting Strip” somewhere and had immediately bought all his records. When Bachmann played that song upon his request, I had to look away so as not to witness his emotional collapse. 

As for the other audience members, for them the whole show was a revelation. “But…how did you even find out about him?” asked the people behind me, who were Priscilla and Jan’s next door neighbors. “Why isn’t he better known?” They bought every one of his CDs. Another concert goer, Don, who was in his 60s and had to share the couch with me because his back hurt, told me he listens obsessively to college radio. Remember those days, before the media got detached from time and space by the internet, when you used to wait breathlessly for a special time to turn on the TV or radio? Don still lives in that world. “Listen to KKUP tomorrow from 3 to 6,” he told me. “That’s the very best show out there!”

As for Priscilla and Jan, they told me they first heard of Eric Bachmann when their son played a Crooked Fingers record on a cross country journey they took in their van. I am not sure what the leap between loving that record and booking him for a house concert at their brew pub in a storage locker in Fremont was, but I salute the spirit that made that happen, and the forces at work that are doing it. Watching Eric Bachmann play utterly artisanal music at an artisanal brew pub made me wonder if we’re all on the wrong tack these days, with our data mining and our google analytics and our obsession with followers... Instead of looking for the widest possible audience, from now on I want to look for the smallest one. I want to look into my reader’s eyes, and write for them one by one.