I am late for the City Council study session on water because I am reviewing the voluminous packet of letters regarding tonight’s later item about a Downtown Cap or a moratorium on office space.

I want to chime in, via this post, as a letter to Council and I will try to read this aloud, during my 3 minutes, that a specific type of retail that has been displaced is live music.

Here is a photo of a flyer for a concert series I produced, in 2004, at an art gallery, on the corner of Hamilton and Alma.

The series featured, it says here, Papa Mali, doing a Jerry Garcia Tribute, Claire Daly, Alexis Harte and Ethan Iverson, among others. Esbjorn Svensson appeared there, was later on the cover of Downbeat and sadly died in a scuba accident a year or two later, in his native Sweden.

The art gallery is now office space. For a real estate firm.

Mark Weiss
Earthwise Productions of Palo Alto

P.S. There are probably ten or more places downtown that hosted hard-ticket small and medium sized concerts between 1968 and 2004 or so, but I am hard-pressed to think of anything in the last 10 years.

edit to add: I did speak, based on this post, to Palo Alto City Council on Monday, March 23, 2015 around 8:30. I added the fact that I moderated a panel about the history of jazz here, and that the defunct venues came up there. I added the anecdote about Papa Mali, Malcolm Welbourne later meeting Billy Kreutzman (a Palo Altan, and founder of the Dead) later and forming 7 Walkers –I claimed that this humble series was like an incubator for new music, in this case, played a role. Here is Billy, Mali and others doing “Friend of the Devil”:

andand, the next day: The Examiner, probably based on CBS/KPIX had a cold-case story about Jerry Garcia losing a briefcase full of lyrics, in 1985, today and that spurred me to send the above to an archivist at UC Santa Cruz Nicholas Meriwether (and I also had a panic attack about whether I had mis-identified Papa Mali by confusing his name with that of the ubiquitous writer of pseudo-social-science.