What The Catalyst means to Santa Cruz’s music scene, its culture and its sense of itself

Come with me back in time to the mid-1990s. Yes, I have a mullet, and yes, there’s a single stud earring in my left ear. A lot of guys looked like me then. Don’t judge.

I’m taking a lunch-break stroll on a sunny weekday down Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz, a respite from my duties as the entertainment reporter and editor for the Santa Cruz Sentinel. 

About a block away, I notice a knot of people standing outside The Catalyst’s front entrance. Wait, actually, it’s a queue, stretching down the block past Union Grove Music and … does it continue around the corner?

It’s part of my job to know who’s playing at The Catalyst on any given day, and I’m pretty certain that there’s nothing special going on there today. But that certainty is evaporating with every step. 

I approach a bearded guy near the front of the line, “Uh, what’s going on?” The guy grins big and says, “Pearl Jam.”

Wait, WHAT? Did I hear that correctly? He can’t possibly mean the Pearl Jam that is playing an already sold-out show in a few days at the 7,000-seat arena over in San Jose, the Pearl Jam that this very week is on the cover of Time magazine. (Note to younger readers: As cringe as it sounds, such a thing was a widely recognized sign of seismic fame and relevance in those days.) 

Another guy in line then pipes in, “Yeah, Neil Young’s going to show up, too.”

I have to grab the street sign for support. Back in the time before social media and the iPhone, this kind of news had to depend solely on word of mouth and the traditional media. The biggest Santa Cruz concert news of the decade and there’s not a word about in the local daily. And that’s on me. I gotta get back to the office.

It turned out that the Neil Young rumor was false, but at the time, it made perfect sense. For one thing, though they were of different generations, Young had a relationship with the Pearl Jam guys, and would eventually record an album with them. And Young, who lived up in La Honda at the time, had already perfected this “stealth” concert thing at The Catalyst, dropping in several times over the years for a last-minute surprise show purposely kept from media schmucks like me.

Storied past, uncertain future

The Pearl Jam show – as well as the many Neil Young appearances dating back to his time with the infamous local band The Ducks in the 1970s – is only a small thread in the vast fabric that makes up the mystique of The Catalyst. Music fans from all over the county, the region, the West Coast and beyond have stories about memorable shows or unforgettable experiences at The Catalyst. 

Since the 1960s, The Catalyst has been an integral part of Santa Cruz’s cultural perception of itself. From its earliest days as a folkie coffeehouse and meeting place to its status today as a vital stop on the California music circuit with an absurdly diverse offering of shows, from country to hip-hop, The Catalyst has not only reflected the cultural interests of its hometown, it has shaped them as well. 

This matters now because, in late November, a proposal was submitted to the city to demolish the building at 1011 Pacific Ave. that houses The Catalyst and replace it with yet another apartment building. This news doesn’t necessarily mean the end of The Catalyst as we know it. The plan, in fact, includes a ground-floor remodel of the famous club. And what was filed in November is a pre-application, the first step in a monthslong process that might or might not result in a finished building, several years from now.

The plan’s developer is pursuing an agreement to purchase the building from the estate of the late Randall Kane, the Catalyst’s longtime owner. If the proposal moves beyond the pre-application stage and toward approval from the city’s planning department, real questions will have to be addressed about how a music club that keeps late hours is going to work on the ground floor of an apartment building. The Catalyst has a history of battling noise complaints from neighbors not sharing the same building. Will The Catalyst become a different kind of establishment, a daytime cafe perhaps with some acoustic or folk acts? That would be a throwback to the club’s original orientation when it first emerged after the establishment of UC Santa Cruz. Or will it move to a different location in or outside of downtown?

If the proposal does not come to pass, then there are other questions about a building built in the Great Depression and the fate of a club whose lease runs only to 2028.

Either way, the new proposal marks an opportunity to remind the community of the centrality of The Catalyst to the Santa Cruz story, at least when it comes to music. For the past 50 years, Santa Cruz has been home to a glorious patchwork of musical subcultures – reggae, punk, jazz, hip-hop, folk, you name it. And The Catalyst has remained a vital support system for many of those subcultures – not the only one, but perhaps the most prominent one. 

A who’s-who across genres

At its most basic level, The Catalyst has allowed local audiences access to many of the greatest musicians in the world, going back decades. At a capacity of about 800, it was never the ideal place for big-name arena acts, notwithstanding Neil Young and Pearl Jam. But there were a lucky few who caught such acts as Nirvana, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Snoop Dogg and R.E.M. before they became cultural supernovas. It was the common platform for the epic punk of Dead Kennedys, the New Orleans soul of The Neville Brothers, the earnest folk of The Indigo Girls, the blues of Buddy Guy, and the rockin’-down-the-highway groove of The Doobie Brothers. It opened its doors to any number of bizarro novelty acts from Buck Naked & the Bare Bottom Boys to Kool Keith to Buckethead, a guitar god who literally wore a KFC bucket on his head. Performers who are now legendary in their respective genres – Lee “Scratch” Perry, Iggy Pop, Leo Kottke, Lucinda Williams – have played The Catalyst stage.

The Catalyst has also, for decades, provided artists with a continuing platform to develop devout local followings, bands that played again and again at the club because their audiences returned every time, from the brilliant multi-instrumentalist David Lindley to the rapper Tech N9ne to the zany glam rockers The Tubes to the brash and the brash, fun-loving party band Superbooty. 

On top of that, The Catalyst in years past opened its stages to new bands, local or otherwise, through its famous Dollar Night, allowing young musicians to play the same stage that Neil Young played.

Santa Cruz percussionist and bandleader Rick Walker played The Catalyst countless times, mostly through his bands Tao Chemical and Tao Rhythmical. Walker said that Dollar Night at The Catalyst often served as a kind of central meeting place for Santa Cruz’s music culture. 

“Before social media and before cellphones,” he said, “people would congregate so young people could meet each other. And The Catalyst was ground zero for that kind of social interaction.”

Enter Randall Kane

The Catalyst was first opened in the mid-1960s on the ground floor of the old St. George Hotel near the present-day location of Bookshop Santa Cruz. It was a coffeehouse, deli, bar and a hangout for students, bohemians, counterculture types and UCSC faculty. A few years later, a former art student named Randall Kane purchased the business and moved it a few blocks down Pacific Avenue, to an abandoned bowling alley. 

Kane, who died in 2009, is one of Santa Cruz’s most unforgettable downtown creatures. With his Buddy Holly eyeglasses, his shock of white hair and his rainbow suspenders, he was spotted almost every day on his bicycle, often with bundles of cash from the previous night’s show in his backpack. He was famously cantankerous and often had confrontations with city officials, the police, artists, agents and the media. But he was also loyal to his employees, and he understood what touring musicians needed. 

“As weird as Randall Kane was,” said Walker, “he had this notion of family. You couldn’t really get fired from The Catalyst. He’d fire people one week, then he’d hire them back the next. Under his tutelage, The Catalyst became this renaissance club. I liken him to Bill Graham. Graham was a tough guy, and he pissed lots of people off, but he also had a vision, and he really created something in San Francisco. Randall was like that.”

Much like the Kuumbwa Jazz Center, The Catalyst, under Kane and his booker Gary Tighe, took full advantage of Santa Cruz’s convenient location between San Francisco and Los Angeles to pick off a few touring acts on the way from one of those cities to the other. 

“It was a gravy gig for people between L.A. and the Bay Area,” said photographer Michele Benson. “They were driving right past us. So why not stop here and pick up the gig?”

Benson produced and directed a documentary on The Catalyst, released in 2011. Her 6-feet-by-4-feet photograph of a mini-skirted Tina Turner in mid-performance on The Catalyst stage was a familiar touchstone for the club’s visitors for years.

“If there were an EGOT or lifetime achievement award,” said Benson, “for art and music and community and pride of place, especially in Santa Cruz, Randall should get it. If he liked you and you needed help with something in your personal life, he’d be there for you.”

When Kane was running The Catalyst, the place reflected his own eccentric taste in art and decor. The front room was a sunny open space where locals could grab a lunch or hang out listening to happy-hour acts. 

Kane sold the club to a group of investors in 2003, though he maintained ownership of the building. In the years since, The Catalyst has maintained a spirit of diversity in the breadth of the artists that its hosts.

“I would talk to major artists all the time, and they’d say, ‘Yeah, we want to come back to Santa Cruz,” said Benson, who has heard Catalyst stories from people in far-flung spots around the world. “They came to The Catalyst specifically because of the crew, the sound in the building, the adoration of the audience, and the experience.”

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