Bluegrass Sprouts in Urban Landscape
Cafe's open-mike night encourages novice players
Sam Whiting, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, April 29, 1999
©1999 San Francisco Chronicle
URL:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1999/04/29/DD88506.DTL&type=music
Early this evening, a bunch of urban hillbillies will bang their battered mandolin and
guitar cases through the double doors into the Atlas Cafe. They'll tune up, then turn
and fill the room with the twang of bluegrass and old-timey string music.
This is open-mike bluegrass, which once a month turns this hipster cafe in the Mission
into a broken-down palace for country boys and girls lost in the big city. Anybody can
play, either onstage or out in the crowd, picking their mandolins and bowing their
fiddles in what amounts to bluegrass surround-sound.
"Some people don't want to come up and take a solo, face the spotlight, so they just
play in their seats,'' says Pam Brandon, a regular. "It works really well.''
A house band opens with "Cripple Creek.'' JimBo Trout high-notes the vocal.
"Yeehaw,'' yells a man who might be taken for a skateboard thrash punk. The floor
starts moving with toe-tapping. Those who want to move some more get up and dance
energetically in the aisle between the bar and the bathroom.
After a few traditionals, Trout asks if anyone wants to sing. Three hands go up.
David Ray, a bold first-timer from Mill Valley, introduces himself and pours his heart
into the lyric "I'm shiftless, I'm homeless, I'm a total disgrace/ Cuz I spent all my
money at the rye whiskey place.'' The melody hits a few spots lower than that lyric,
but Ray is no disgrace at all. A dog barks on the back patio, but there are no
catcalls among the humans.
Ray sings a few songs, then plays guitar for a few more. Suddenly he's one of the boys
in the band.
"Some are professionals, some are not,'' says Ray, a software engineer. "You don't get
favored if you are a professional.
"Everybody gets the same shot, which is good because there are shy people who are good
and bold people who aren't so good.''
Going into its second year, the Atlas bluegrass concept is simple: "Every month we
just show up and hack,'' says Brandon, who hacked her way from London. She trades her
accent for a slow drawl as she sings "I'm Just Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail.''
"Various people come with various instruments, and we trade off in a friendly way,''
says Trout, whose job is to subtly signal a player when his time is up. It is not
always easy. When rookies get their first taste of audience appreciation, many don't
want to give it up.
"Some people have no idea what they are doing, and they get up there and these guys
can make them play decent,'' says Kyle Smith, who came from Georgia with a mandolin
and blues harp. Bluegrass is social music. The strings and voices need company to
sound right. "In the city, there is no other place for people learning how to play
bluegrass to get up there and sing and play,'' Smith says.
A few months ago the Thursday- night rattle worked a tacked-up poster loose from the
wall. It swung down, dangling from the bottom tack, and was left that way until
someone got up off the couch and retacked it, upside down. The Atlas fits the loose
ambience of bluegrass.
Half of the Thursday crowd looks as if it just blew in from the Dust Bowl, and the
other half looks as if it came directly from a Grateful Dead show. There are members
of eight or 10 local bands.
At the bar is a rockabilly bassist with ducktail hair, letter jacket and rolled-up
jeans. In back talking on a cell phone is the bassist for Tribe 8, the lesbian punk
band.
"People have exhausted the blues scene and the rock scene and the punk scene,'' Smith
says. "It's another form of music that people are getting turned on to.''
Trout says he gets a half-dozen new players every time. Novices sit at tables and
mimic the fretwork. It isn't far from the back to the front, though en route a few
stop to drink some courage, laying their mandolins across the bar.
"You can not know more than three chords and get up and sit in,'' says Brandon,
daughter of the editor of the U.K. Northwest Bluegrass News.
A few months ago, a woman who must have been in her 80s pulled herself up off the
couch to show these kids how to pluck a mandolin.
By night's end, they are down to paper cups for the draft beer. People dance in line
in front of the unisex bathroom, next to the band. Brandon is known to improvise the
lyric "Somebody bring me a Sierra Nevada'' until somebody does. There might be 20
musicians, shoulder to shoulder.
Tatsuya Suzuki, just in from Japan, knows little English, but he knows the language of
a Scruggs- style five-string banjo. He's front and center all night, as if he'd
reached the stage of the Grand Ol' Opry.
"It's very good,'' he says of his one-night band. "Excellent.''
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BLUEGRASS OPEN MIKE
BLUEGRASS AND OLD-TIMEY MUSIC JAM SESSION takes place at 7:30-10 tonight and on the
last Thursday of every month at Atlas Cafe, 3049 20th St. (at Alabama), San Francisco.
No cover. Call (415) 648-1047.
