.Lost in Danville

The place is buzzing with kids wandering in and out. No one looks older than sixteen. Awesome.

Now let’s get one thing straight: There’s nothing wrong with Oakland. Sometimes it’s nice when things are a little rough around the edges. Sometimes it’s nice to go to a show at the Stork Club and stand outside smoking a cigarette and getting accosted by the local women of the night. It’s nice to hang out in warehouses with no heat, afraid the cops are gonna come and shut the whole thing down. Hell, it’s nice just walking down the street here, through the sirens and the noise and the fights and the drug deals. It’s nice having crackheads for neighbors. It’s nice when your days are soundtracked by the BUD-DUBPHPHP of overclocked subwoofers, when gunshots lull you to sleep at night, when the police helicopter, or “ghetto bird,” shines its spotlight through your window while you’re reading.

But there’s more to the East Bay than that, right? Right?

What about Fremont and Newark? What about Dublin and Livermore? What about Danville, California, huh? Does anything happen there? Is it just some yuppie ghost town where rich people wear sweaters and talk about hedge funds? Do they listen to music in Danville, or do they just have a speaker system wired up in the downtown area that plays New Age pianist Jim Brickman all day? Perhaps it was time to find out. There must be more to the East Bay music scene than freezing warehouses and the Stork Club. And hell, for those of us who’re single and proud, let’s do this on Valentine’s Day — a field trip to Danville on Valentine’s Day to seek out that city’s thriving underground music scene. This is gonna be fun; maybe I’ll even meet my future wife there, perhaps fall into something new and exciting and …

Nah. Fuck that. This was gonna suck.The 24 freeway was built many decades ago to provide wealthy San Francisco workers with an expressway that would cozily shoot them to their houses in the hills without having to drive through Oakland’s ghettos. Today it still serves the same function.

A quiet burg of just over 40,000 people, Danville combines all the sheen of an affluent suburb with buttloads of that quaint, small-town charm that George W. really wants us to fear the loss of. On Main Street, a store called “Swings & Things” lies just down the way from another called “This and That.” As the sun dipped over the nearby hills, the smell of fresh-baked bread gently wafted through the downtown streets (no shit) as husbands holding flowers and balloons scuttled home in time to give their wives a happy Valentine’s before the kids returned from soccer practice.

But we weren’t here to buy Valentine gifts. We were here to find out where the kids hang out, and luckily Ross Grant was available for some pointers. Surely you know him as the guitarist and vocalist for Interscope recording artists Pseudopod, and he was born and raised in Danville.

“It was actually kind of cool when I was growing up there,” he said, speaking by phone from his home in Los Angeles. “They used to put on shows at the Veterans Hall. Every Friday you’d pay like $4 and they’d have a couple of punk bands playing and I remember thinking that was like the coolest thing when I was thirteen, because it was close and you could walk there and it was all ages. I think now they have them at this other place called the Grange Hall.”

As it happened, there was a show at the Grange Hall that night. But what about some other places to check out?

“There weren’t very many places other than that,” Grant said. “There was Taco Bell — I remember people hung out there a lot. And there were like big open fields where people would have keggers out in the middle of nowhere. There was a lot of hanging out in parks or random parking lots. Like Oak Hill Park or Sycamore Park. I remember when I was in high school, people would congregate there and try to figure out where a party was. We’d just hang out in our cars and smoke cigarettes and be cool.”

Hmmmm. This is starting to sound awfully familiar. Punk bands at the local community center, trolling for keggers on a Friday night, hanging out at godforsaken places like Taco Bell because there’s simply nothing else to do — wait a second, this was my childhood! This was everyone’s childhood! Who wants to relive that? That shit sucked. I was skinny and awkward. I wore glasses and had zits. I was an indie-rockin’, ska-loving, mom’scar-driving dork. I’m not gonna …

But wait a second, I thought. I’m an older guy now. Yeah. The “mysterious outsider,” like James Dean or something. Maybe I can hang with the younger kids now and, you know, teach ’em a thing or two, about life: “Wear protection, kids.” Ha! This was gonna be so cool. This will not be the loneliest Valentine’s Day ever. No sir; quite the contrary. Making new friends, being the cool guy, the city boy, the urban type. Been around the block, I have. So much to tell them. Gather round, kids, this is gonna be good.

But first, a drink.

Make that four drinks. Four pints from a brightly lit and very crowded family-friendly eatery in downtown Danville. Glug, glug. Happy Valentine’s Day! And happy Valentine’s Day to all these people enjoying themselves all around: Here’s to you, my chubby tie-wearing friend, with your half-hearted chuckle and your stories about shipping and receiving; and to you, Normal Family, with the kid eating chicken tenders and the mom wearing a perfectly adorable pink, red, and white checkered angora; and to you, cute waitress, with your football-playing boyfriend who begged you to get tonight off. Here’s to all us normal people enjoying ourselves in Danville, where the closest thing you get to a drive-by is the job description for paper boy; where, according to the city’s Web site, they get three hundred days of sunshine a year.

“Would you like something else?” says the waitress, in a friendly, casual tone that implies that she may actually be thinking something other than: “What a loser. Alone on Valentine’s Day and already three sheets to the wind.”


A short ways down the road from Main Street, situated amid miles of tract housing and a very dark sky, is the Grange Hall. At just before eight o’clock, the place is buzzing with kids wandering in and out of the building. No one looks older than sixteen. Awesome.

Inside the hall the fluorescent lights bathe everything in ugly, bland whiteness. The opening band has just finished its set and now the kids are scurrying back and forth from one clique to another, screaming punch lines peppered with “dudes” and “hellas.” They are wearing band T-shirts: Dashboard Confessional, Nine Inch Nails, Lookout Records, the Aquabats, Andrew WK, Anti-Flag, Weezer, Bob Marley, Less than Jake, Green Day, Bouncing Souls. And, of course, they are all drinking bottled water.

In Oakland and San Francisco, you get used to walking into a local show where everyone is checking everyone else out. Whether they’re on the make or just plain curious, the folks in the city are always watching one another, keeping score perhaps. But not here. At this show, you’re invisible. Even the girl at the door avoids eye contact, as does everyone else in the joint. At first I figure it’s because no one knows who I am. But then I realize: It’s because I’m the cool older dude. Yeah, that’s right. The onetime suburban scenester who has returned to his old stamping ground to share his wisdom. They’re intimidated, alright.

The second act is a band from San Francisco called Charmless. As soon as they start playing, the kids are jumping around and rocking out — unlike at so many shows round these parts — and it really doesn’t matter that Charmless sounds almost exactly like the Foo Fighters. It’s amazing how fun live music can be if you just stop listening to it.

When Charmless finishes its set, everyone is amped. The promoters had set up a makeshift photo booth where, for fifty cents, you could have a Polaroid taken in front of some low-budget red-and-white Valentine’s hearts. Feeling like I was sixteen again, I decided I would throw myself into the mix, take a picture or two, and maybe even ask some girls if they’d jump in it with me.

“Sure,” say two girls, nervously, because I am so cool.

CLICK. FLASH. SNAP. Instant souvenir. Thanks, ladies.

Now the next band is going on, the Flipsides, also from San Francisco. Fronted by guitarist and vocalist Sabrina Stewart, this band is also a barrel of fun, provided, once again, that you ignore the fact that it’s pretty unoriginal. As the band plows through a set of three-chord power-pop, the boys in the audience keep pulling up their shirts to show Stewart their breasts. Is this some new thing? I make a mental note to find out.

“Thanks,” says the singer to the enamored fifteen-year-olds. And it’s pretty sweet. The band is fun, the crowd is fun, everyone’s smiling and having a good time. Golly, it sure is great to be a ki–

“Excuse me, sir?” says a late-teenage security guard (a football player?) as he taps me on the shoulder.

“Yeah?” I say.

“We’ve been getting a lot of complaints about you,” he says.

“Excuse me?”

“People are coming up to us saying there’s a guy with a messenger bag who’s acting weird. Did you harass two girls a few minutes ago?”

“Well, yeah — I mean, no. I’m doing this article — and you guys — the kids — so cool –” But it’s no use. He has made his point. I’m the sorry-ass pederast hanging out at an underage rock show asking thirteen-year-olds to take pictures with me so I can “put them in this newspaper I work for.” Jesus Christ. I’m the furthest thing from cool. I’m the narc. Great Caesar’s ghost.


“I still go back there a lot, actually,” Grant says. “It doesn’t seem that different. I still see all the punk-type kids hanging out downtown, only now they hang out at Starbucks, which is kind of weird.”

But they weren’t there that night. There was only a twentysomething counterperson and a couple drinking tea and wearing sweaters. There were no punks or kids of any kind, although the bored expression on the counterperson’s face indicated that this was an especially slow night. Perhaps it’s because there was a big game at the local high school (San Ramon Valley High: “Go Wolves!”). Or maybe there was a kegger out in a field somewhere. In any case, the kids were scarce, except for the ones at the show, and unless I wanted to get arrested I wasn’t be going back there any time soon.

“From what I can tell, [Danville] hasn’t changed that much,” adds Grant. “If anything, it’s gotten better for music. There’s more venues that have live music now, like Meenar’s and the Crown and Anchor.”

Time to try the Crown and Anchor. The bar was dimly lit and smelled like stale beer. Couples in their mid-thirties were sitting around, some of them laughing, other trying to think of something to talk about. And yeah, there was live music. Smooth jazz. Then there were us Valentine’s Day guys, sitting there with a beer, listening to a bastardized version of “That’s the Way (I Like It),” longing for gunshots and ghetto birds in Danville and thinking that this is exactly what we deserve.

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