While your hippie Uncle Orion and Auntie Ganja were busy waiting for Jerry Garcia outside San Francisco’s Avalon Ballroom during the Summer of Love, another group of weirdos found their own scene around a half hour east of The City, out along the Carquinez Strait.
There, outsider artists founded galleries and happenings of real import, from the Port Costa studio where Roy De Forest centered his Nut Art Movement, to the “mad doctor’s laboratory” (otherwise known as the First Psychoceramic Church or the World of Wonders Museum) founded by Clayton Bailey in an old café in Crockett.
They were hardly the first to find inspiration in these dusty, rusty hills—and they certainly won’t be the last.
Carquinez Strait(Courtesy of @crockett_portcosta)
Today, there’s a very specific music scene growing in this northernmost outcropping of Contra Costa County. Rather than inheriting the avant-garde spirit of Nut Art and its related movements, it reaches farther back in time, recalling the freewheeling, Victorian-era spirit of the Bay Area’s founding. At a time when so many artists and musicians have had little choice but to flee San Francisco, this particular community is cautiously optimistic about its future.
Bernal Heights-born Pete Fields (Slow Motion Cowboys, Trainwreck Riders) loves his city, but he began noticing disturbing trends many years ago. “It felt like [San Francisco] was all about this gross amount of money, this gross amount of misogyny, displacement, gentrification… I remember booking [other bands] through San Francisco,” he recalls, “and no one was showing up… it was, like, a dead stop on the tour.”
It’s a common refrain among many Bay Area musicians who, whether for financial reasons or otherwise, have found their home increasingly inhospitable.
San Mateo-born musician and filmmaker Brian Woods also hungered to find a viable creative community in the Bay. Looking to open up his own music studio, the longtime California College of the Arts employee and former construction worker found that the only place he could afford was a curious property located steps from the C&H Sugar Company’s headquarters, which has dominated the area since its founding as a company town in 1906. By chance, it proved to be the very property once owned by Bailey himself—a studio that lay empty since the artist’s death in 2020.
Bubudzuki Studios in Crockett(Courtesy of @bubudzuki)
After two years spent retrofitting the space by hand, Woods opened Bubudzuki Studios (325 Rolph Ave.) in February 2024. In doing so, he tapped into something special, attracting the likes of Shannon Shaw (of Shannon & the Clams) and Berkeley’s Katsy Pline. Even Cowboy and the Sometimes Blues Band, long regulars at the presently endangered Eli’s Mile High Club (3629 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Oakland), recorded for the first time at Woods’ studio.
It’s a short walk up the hill from Bubudzuki’s to Toot’s Tavern (627 2nd Ave., Crockett), a well-worn, wood-paneled Victorian dive dating back to 1901 which hosts Mama Tried, a monthly country music showcase curated by Noelle Fiore of Noelle & the Deserters.
Toot’s is nothing if not a convivial scene: Woods serves as sound engineer, and Lisa Pezzino, co-founder of the music label and recording studio The Long Road Society, who set up shop in Crockett after their once-flourishing operation in Oakland turned sour, is also on hand and is quick to boast about her new home. In San Francisco and Oakland, she notes, “the only way you can make money is if you're playing in someone's backyard.” At Toot’s, on the other hand, “you can party on the bar side, catch up with friends, and still have an attentive audience on the venue side. Plus, the owners [siblings Matthew and Laura Easterling offer musicians] a really great deal… it’s really artist-forward.”
Toots in Crockett(Courtesy of @tairbolt)
“It just feels like people are elevating their game in Crockett,” Woods says. “You’re able to get weird… San Francisco used to be the place to get dirty, but that stopped.” In Crockett, he adds, “there’s better music, there is better food, and, and people are just interested in making things out here.”
It’s a scene that has been in the making for some time.
Just ask Sarah Rose Janko, a singer-songwriter from Marin County (and Long Road Society recording artist) better known by her nom de chanter, Dawn Riding, who found something special about this part of the Bay several years ago while enjoying a Sunday motorcycle ride through the East Bay Hills with her then-boyfriend, Gus. The pair took a quick detour at Port Costa’s Warehouse Cafe (5 Canyon Lake Dr.).
“There were hundreds of motorcycles in the parking lot, and there was a wild rockabilly band playing,” she recalls of her first visit. Sensing her surprise, a local proudly informed her that the towering, pompadoured frontman she was listening to was also Port Costa’s mayor. “I was like, ‘you mean he knows everyone?’”
No, the actual mayor.
Musician and former co-mayor of Port Costa, Mitch Polzak(Courtesy of Mitch Polzak)
Well, co-mayor—and a former one at that—as Mitch Polzak is quick to note. Having been raised in California by way of Wisconsin from a family of “circus folk and outlaws,” Polzak first landed in Port Costa back in 2010, and it was a natural fit. “I’m an analog man in a digital world. I seek out places that feel a little behind the times technologically.”
Though he continues to tour and play shows locally, from San Francisco’s The Saloon (1232 Grant Ave., North Beach) to Berkeley’s Ashkenaz (1317 San Pablo Ave.), Polzak is quite happy to stick around Port Costa, even serving as an amateur historian of sorts while stressing its important role in the context of California’s music history.
“This was like the Barbary Coast of the east of Contra Costa County from the late 1800s until probably the 1920s… there were bars, whorehouses, a lot of music… [much later] Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen would play and party here like nobody’s business,” he says. “Harry McClintock, the guy who wrote ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain’? He also wrote ‘Hallelujah, I'm a Bum’ [in Port Costa].”
Polzak makes a point to channel that specific Port Costa energy whenever possible—whether writing songs along the train tracks, playing impromptu backyard shows with local fiddler Tom List, or leading his annual New Year show at the Warehouse. These crowds might be more inclined to spontaneously break into dance than what he’s used to in San Francisco, demanding a different set of songs, a different approach.
The Warehouse Cafe in Port Costa(Courtesy of @thewarehousecafeattheport)
“I love the fact that my Port Costa shows have a wide demographic of ages, lifestyles, and people, because the music is the common ground… you’ve made a choice to come all the way out here, so it’s, like, participate and contribute to the fun.”
Contra Costa may not compete with, say, New Orleans in terms of musical heritage—though Polzak has plenty to say about the Cajun and Creole influence in and around the California Delta—but that doesn’t mean there’s no promise of continued growth.
“I think what makes New Orleans [such a great musical city can be viewed] as a template,” he says. “And I really think people are hungry for things that show them where they're from and that can show them a way to express themselves in an organic, interesting, and challenging way.”
For those contributing to this growing musical community, hopefully that can keep happening out along the Carquinez Strait.
Upcoming Shows Worth Catching in Contra Costa
Mitch Polzak & the Royal Deuces put on a great show.
(Courtesy of @mitchpolzak)
Sugar Town Festival: July 20, Downtown Crockett (11am)
Sugar Candy Mountain, Kit Center, and Noelle & the Deserters: August 17, Toot’s Tavern (5pm)
Mitch Polzak and the Royal Deuces: September 14, Warehouse Cafe (1:30pm)
