Musical marathon

In mid-April, I found myself sitting in the nearly empty barroom of the Tackle Box Bar & Grill in south Chico, half awake and filling my rumbling stomach with hot scrambled eggs and hash browns, my eyelids pried open by an endless supply of coffee that came courtesy of an industrial-size, wall-mounted robot-like coffee machine. Six o’clock and a cold beer weren’t far off my radar as I listened to the sweet sounds of a classical guitarist strumming through what he introduced as “French parlor music from the 17th century.” There is no chance I’ll ever remember the name of the composer.

I could be found at the Tackle Box most mornings that month and also the first few days of May, making the drive down from my farm in Los Molinos in support of a strange quest to hold the world’s longest multi-artist concert as certified by Guinness World Records, a month-long marathon attempt dubbed Chico Breaks the Record.

The music began on the evening of April 1, and didn’t stop until the afternoon of May 5—35 straight days. During that time, hundreds of local, regional and national touring acts stepped onto the Tackle Box stage to perform almost every conceivable style of music, and event volunteers, organizers, musicians and the bar’s staff dealt with absentee acts, scheduling snafus, occasional fisticuffs, and two separate power outages. On its surface, the event was about breaking a record few people ever imagined existed, but for me and many others involved, it became something more. Every person in the south Chico barroom and restaurant became united toward a common goal. It’s been more than a month since the clock stopped, and I’m still struggling to make sense of it all.

If you had told me before April that I would’ve been involved in this attempt, I probably would have looked at you like you were insane. Getting into the Guinness Book of World Records was something my friends and I dreamed about when we were in elementary school. Like childhood dreams of winning an Olympic gold medal or being a motorcycle daredevil à la Evel Knievel, that dream had flickered out and been forgotten. An outdated copy of the record book at a thrift store might warrant a few flips of the page and some nostalgic giggles, but that was about it.

However, I found myself engaged in an uncharacteristic effort to help see this thing through, piloting my pick-up down Highway 99 at times I used to consider the middle of the night. I ended up logging dozens of hours, mostly in the early mornings, performing when asked to, but otherwise simply watching and listening to a portion of the array of artists who graced the Tackle Box stage. I generally would arrive at the bar around 5:30 a.m. and remain until around 10 a.m., when the late-morning/early-lunch crowd started rolling in.

I likely wouldn’t have gotten involved at all if my wife, Trish, hadn’t booked the debut performance of a new band we’d started, the Ever After Party, at the Tackle Box on April 3. At practice, Trish explained the rules and I shrugged my shoulders.

Guinness sets forth a number of technical rules to make the record official: Bands must be set up and playing within five minutes of the prior act; once a band or musician starts, there can be a gap of no more than 30 seconds in between songs; songs must be at least two minutes long; and every song must have a discernible melody somewhere within it. The event had to be ticketed, so customers coming into the Tackle Box were asked to pay a dollar, then given a coupon for a dollar off of food or drink purchases.

The rules also state that there must be at least 10 people present in the audience at all times. This may seem like no big deal at 4:30 on a Saturday afternoon, but it became an entirely different story at 5:30 a.m. on a Tuesday.

The day of the show, as Ever After Party hacked our way through a passable set of songs we’d stretched out to fill up the slotted hour, I realized the scene inside the Tackle Box was unlike any other I’ve ever been involved in. The audience was a complete mishmash of music lovers—some of our friends, people from the community who were there to support the record-breaking attempt, regular Tackle Box patrons. These were people who otherwise might never have set foot in the same room, but there they were, together and supporting a single cause. The crowd was as appreciative an audience as you could ever hope to play for, and when we were done, the next band took to the stage and the music continued.

After that, I was hooked. I “caught the fever,” and I wasn’t the only one. As I interviewed people who were involved in the effort, many confessed they’d been similarly afflicted. To better understand how it started, I spoke with Julian Ruck, the man who dreamed the whole thing up.

Contrary to what his laid-back demeanor and boyish grin might suggest, Ruck is a man on a mission: He’s hellbent on pushing the Chico music scene into the national spotlight and dragging the rest of us along with him, kicking and screaming if he has to. Chico Breaks the Record was his first objective in a constantly evolving master plan.

I spoke with Ruck regularly during the attempt—it seemed like he always was at the Tackle Box. After the event ended, he and partner/co-organizer Emily Rose agreed to sit down and reflect on the effort over some homemade wine.

Ruck explained that, in other cities where the record was set, it was done by a handful of musicians—singer-guitarists or hired bands—who all knew the rules and could play for long stretches at a time. But Ruck decided to take an entirely different path by opening participation to any and all comers.

“It came from a want to brand Chico as the live music town we all know it is,” Ruck explained, “but to people outside of Chico.”

Ruck said Chico was ideally suited for the challenge: “We’re the right size. We’re not so small that we have no music scene at all, and we’re not so big that our music scenes are cliques. Because of our size, we’re forced to integrate genres and personality types. That makes us fertile for a big community project like this.”

Ruck realizes his populist approach helped bolster the effort, while sticking with a few hand-picked players may have had the opposite effect: “The entire town would hate me!” he said with a smile.

Though he’s admittedly ambitious, Ruck set aside his own ego and rolled with the figurative punches—and one-time literal fisticuffs when a performer lost his patience over playing by Guinness’ rules—during the event. I’ve seen my share of vampires and narcissists during my decades of involvement in an industry rife with personality disorders, and when questioning motivations I’ve always found it helpful to hang on to a healthy amount of cynicism. It became apparent to me early on that Ruck and Rose put this thing together for the right reasons: It was a genuine, community-based effort intended to create something that was much larger than the sum of its parts.

As per Guinness’ requirements, everything was documented, down to the number of people in the audience at 3:30 a.m. on any given morning. Every second of musical performance was captured with video and audio recordings, and logs were kept of each performer, along with the title and duration of every song played.

It’s a monumental amount of evidence, and Ruck and Rose made a cross-country trip to deliver more than 10 terabytes of digital recordings and reams of paperwork to Guinness’ New York City headquarters. They called it their “Evidence Across America” excursion. Guinness officials said it will take at least 12 weeks to review the evidence and confirm the record has been broken.

The record attempt got off to a creaky start on a Wednesday evening, as Ruck and Rose scheduled acts on the fly and volunteers still needed training. The number of audience members waned dramatically in the early morning hours and there were massive holes in the performance calendar. Each day appeared as though it could be the last.

Guinness rules required that two official witnesses be on duty at all times. Emma Jessee served as one of the primary witness coordinators: “I had a feeling that once it got rolling it would be fine,” Jessee said. “What I was worried about was getting it started from the beginning … that is a huge endeavor.”

As the first weekend rolled around, things started going smoother. Volunteers filling the crucial roles, such as running the shot clock, working the door and coordinating witnesses, were getting up to speed. Word of the effort spread and bands began to sign up in earnest.

“Before this started, I didn’t feel like I had any time to do anything,” said Bitz Haley, a trainer/coordinator/volunteer extraordinaire and sometime performer who seemingly was omnipresent at the Tackle Box during the attempt. “But after it started, that’s all I could do. I couldn’t leave. When I wasn’t there, I wanted to be there. The momentum, it started slowly, and then it picked up, and it picked up, and I got swept into it.”

But, just as things were starting to run smoothly, potential disaster struck.

At around 8 a.m on April 6, a Monday, Butte County was darkened by a massive power outage that spanned Redding to Sacramento. I was at the Tackle Box then, and though everyone there shared a wide-eyed, what-the-hell-is-going-on moment, the music never faltered. The Sons of Jefferson were onstage at the time and never skipped a beat, the crowd started clapping and stomping to drive the band onward in lieu of electricity, and astute audience members and volunteers pulled out their cellphones to capture the required video documentation. (The venue was prepared when a second blackout struck May 1).

If you are ever in a situation where the proverbial shit hits the fan, the Tackle Box is a good place to be—the business’ official slogan is “Beer, Food, and Guns.” Within minutes, Richard Peeples, co-owner of the operation, had generators fired up and power flowing, but the P.A. system was too much for the generators, and one ended up blowing. Unfazed, Peeples ran out and bought another one. This establishment was fully vested in this challenge.

Still, the blackout caused a momentary interruption in the log of video and audio evidence. Ruck was forced to make a tough decision—carry on and assume that Guinness would accept the evidence of the first 4 1/2 days, or reset the clock and start from scratch? After deliberating, Ruck chose the latter.

“It was sort of a blessing in disguise,” he confided shortly thereafter. He explained there was a steep learning curve the first few days, and the reset afforded the group a chance to start fresh with the knowledge they’d quickly accumulated. The power outage turned out to be a singularly defining and galvanizing moment.

“Losing power gave us strength,” said volunteer Haley. “It became more intense after that. People rallied, the town rallied. After that happened, there was a big increase in interest and support from the community.”

Sound-tech Harrison Pratt recalled hearing about the outage on local radio station ZROCK: “I don’t remember which rock jock it was, but they were like, ‘Power is out from Redding to Sacramento,’ but then he holds his cellphone up and [says], ‘Check it out, the Tackle Box is still streaming.’”

Bolstered with new momentum, the record attempt seemed to hum along under its own power for a few days. Volunteers were trained and performers started to better understand the gig, but this was a marathon, and so far still in an early leg.

Longtime music promoter Syb Blythe made it a point to come down during the crucial early morning hours and serve as an audience member: “By the fourth or fifth day you could see that people were really getting a clue that they couldn’t stay up more than three days straight,” she said. “People were looking a little gray around the gills.”

Pratt was a workhorse behind the soundboard, but sound quality was challenging for a number of reasons. First, the sound system was a cobbled-together arsenal of loaned equipment, with components constantly shuffled in and out as speakers blew, monitors fizzled and mains imploded. Second, there was an incredibly eclectic lineup of performers—an acoustic singer-songwriter playing a mic’d nylon-string guitar might be followed by a five-piece metal band, which might then be followed by a horn-driven funk ensemble. Sometimes the sound techs would have no clue what was coming next and, even if they did, the third major impediment to nailing the sound was the Guinness rule allowing for only five minutes between acts.

Early on, some performers complained about the sound quality on stage, but as time wore on, most people caught on to the concept that this event was not about the individual performers. It wasn’t about big names or draw or the fact that your band has been on tour or put out so many albums. It didn’t matter if you were the most accomplished player in Chico or a beginning student guitarist, a developmentally disabled adult singing in the 7th Street Choir or Coolio (who stopped in to play an early Sunday morning set after his Lost on Main appearance on April 18).

“This isn’t about the musicians; it’s about the event,” jazz vocalist Holly Taylor said. “The egos are taken out of it because you have these other rules to follow.”

What mattered was that the music never stopped. Unlike a “normal” gig, Chico Breaks the Record had no hierarchy or separation between the performers, the volunteers and the audience members. Because a 10-person audience was required at all times, the person sitting in the quiet corner of the barroom at 5 a.m. was every bit as important as the person on stage with the guitar. We became an organism; a single entity, composed of many, joined in the same mission.

During the late afternoon of Tuesday, May 5, the jam band playing a ramshackle version of “We Are the Champions” finally melted down and the music stopped. It had been a long haul, both mentally and physically, and there was a shared sense of satisfaction and relief among the many who’d become vested in the effort.

But now, a couple of weeks on, I am missing the weird early morning space.

In the middle of April and the record-breaking attempt, Trish, my wife, had surgery at a hospital in San Francisco. I went down with her and saw her in the recovery room, but farm life being what it is, I had to head back home to feed animals and water plants while she remained hospitalized for the better part of a week. During that time, I did a whole lot of fretting. The Tackle Box became my safe harbor, a place I could head to in the middle of the night or the afternoon, whenever my mind raced with worry and guilt. I saw familiar faces and got to know the other people involved—especially the volunteers, because they were always there. These people became a family for me. Talking to others after some time has passed, I’ve found my experience was a shared one.

Erin Haley, a singer and guitarist who performed almost daily during the event, described what she felt was “an umbilical cord that led back to the Tackle Box.”

Exploits and achievements from the event were posted on a regularly updated Facebook page and a live Internet-based broadcast of the event was carried on the website uStream.com. Even when people couldn’t be at the Tackle Box, they could tune in and follow the music on their cellphones or computers. The stream did more than just inform people already physically involved, but also drew people in and gave them something to be a part of.

In a recent Facebook post, Lisa Ann Sunday described how the Tackle Box and Chico Breaks the Record became a place of refuge during a challenging time: “For the first two weeks I followed closely on Facebook, envious of everyone down there but lacking the confidence to go alone. Then, about halfway into it, I drove by after work and decided to stop. I found myself heading to Chico at 1, 2 even 3 in the morning to help keep the crowd above 10. Basically, what CBTR did for me was give me a sense of belonging somewhere.”

Rob Gage, a fly-fishing guide who became a regular witness, elaborated. “Everyone lives in their phones and their computers these days, and so the personal connection is getting lost,” he surmised. “To have a forum online, where people could watch and then go, ‘Wait a minute, I can go in there and physically be a part of it,’ I think that is super attractive to a lot of people.”

A large and heavy stone has been lofted into our oftentimes calm little pond. It has splashed down and sunk to the bottom, but the ripples and reverberations are only beginning. The potential for expanding and unifying the scene, for cross-pollination, for audience outreach and appreciation, artist collaboration and erosion of genre, is tremendous. The longing for community has been clearly demonstrated. Now it is up to us, music lovers and performers alike, to seize the moment and to act.

Some mornings lately, when it’s 4 a.m. and I can’t sleep, I have an inkling to get in the truck and head south to Chico, but there is no music playing now. I think of something Nick Sharpless, an employee of the Tackle Box, opined when remembering the record attempt: “It’s really weird that it’s so quiet now.”