Bassist Drew Stoeckel is sitting on the front porch of the Crystal Palace. The yellow house on Blackburn Street was home to James Rabbit, one of Santa Cruz’s more innovative rock bands, for seven years before housing code violations got the building shut down.
“This is the only Santa Cruz I know,” Stoeckel says. “It’s a big part of why I moved here. It’s as good a reason as any to leave.”
Paying about $400 monthly per person, members of James Rabbit recorded 15 albums while in living the Crystal Palace, under the leadership of guitarist Tyler Martin. Most of them were made in Martin’s bedroom, which shook as the band sang and danced. The room’s door, having come off its hinges, leaned lazily in the doorway, and ivy climbed the Palace’s front wall so thickly, the whole home probably would have collapsed after a clean trim. But it was home.
“A lot of artists don’t have a place to come like this,” says Jonny Fontana, a friend of the band. Fontana, a load-in manager for the Catalyst, is sitting on the porch across from Stoeckel. “People that are creative walk into it and see it as a beautiful place. More and more of these places are disappearing from Santa Cruz.”
A half hour later, James Rabbit is filming a musical video project, in which their rat-infested abode launches into space, where it discovers musical harmony and avoids heavy bulldozers looking to tear it down. Later that night, the band records backup vocals for their upcoming album, Marvels, finishing around 3am. It’s a normal night for them— the band drumming on their chests and rear ends for percussion, Martin rattling off odd jokes and the five perfectionists trying take after take of nearly identical vocal tracks.
Martin will most likely release Marvels for free on James Rabbit’s Bandcamp.com page, and on CD in September. The bandmates hope to stay together, but they played their last show for the foreseeable future last week, when they opened for nerd rock extraordinaires Harry and the Potters in San Francisco.
At the end of last month, Stoeckel moved in with his parents in Fresno, where he’ll mix and master Marvels, though he plans to move again soon. Multi-instrumentalist Nessie Wheatley also moved out of town. Rhythm guitarist Brett Hydeman and keyboardist Max Bennett will stay in Santa Cruz, although Bennett is thinking about moving to the East Bay “because that seems to be the thing to do.”
Martin will move into a family house in Salinas and commute to work on Laurel Street while he looks for his next place. At 30 years old, he has most of the group’s next two albums already written. It could go on with or without the other current members—even without him, he believes. James Rabbit is more of an idea than a band anyway.
“It’s a thing we do sometimes,” Martin says. “It’s an outlet. Most of the ideas start with me, but I don’t have final say. It becomes a thing of the group.”
The end of the Crystal Palace, which served as an unofficial downtown concert venue, also means change for folk trio Matador, says Palace housemate and violinist Dorota Szuta. Matador just got back from its last tour three weeks ago.
“It feels like the final time for everything,” Szuta says. “We’re losing our recording and practice space.”
Jamie Burkart, one of the original James Rabbit members, lived in the Crystal Palace when it got its name in 2006. Now living in Brooklyn, he flew to California last month to direct the band’s film and see his old home before it got torn down to make way for condominiums.
Burkart is a Crystal Palace historian and visionary. Wearing green soccer shorts and a pink tie-die sweatshirt, he directed the band through playing with paint, a kitchen dance scene and stacking four-foot panes of glass into precarious configurations. Not to worry.
“We’re covered by the Open House Auto Insurance,” Burkart explains, “which covers you and all your hopes and dreams for all eternity.”
