by Mark McDermott
Jeremy Buck had a California dream. It was 2000, and he was getting out of Indiana. He wrote a song called “Going to California,” packed his guitar and drums into his ‘89 Honda Accord, and drove west. He pulled into the South Bay and soon thereafter started a rock ‘n roll band.
Jeremy Buck & the Bang would do some national touring but their bread and butter were always local gigs. Buck reigned for many years as the unofficial king of the local music scene — winning several Best of the Beach awards for best local band — ubiquitous with his spiked mohawk hair, happy rocker sensibility. Nobody gigged more locally than Buck over the last two decades, including nights that Buck called “doubleheaders.”
“We’d play Lighthouse from 4 to 8 p.m., then I’d pack up my stuff and cruise over and do a solo show from 9 to 2 a.m. at Hennessey’s,” Buck said. “I remember one time, a Memorial Day weekend, we did five shows in 24 hours. My voice was shredded. But man, we did it. We were troubadours of that world, and it was rough, but also, I wouldn’t trade it. The fact is that really, the South Bay has a beautiful music community.”
Buck has a family now and remains a working musician, with gigs ranging from Jimmy Kimmel to the Manhattan Beach State of the City (for which he composed a song), and he is grateful for two decades of living a musical life at the beach. That dream will reach a culmination of sorts on May 14, when he is among more than a dozen local musicians who will perform at the BeachLife Festival in Redondo Beach’s King Harbor, sharing the bill with the likes of the Steve Miller Band, Weezer, and The Smashing Pumpkins.
“It’s literally in my backyard and it really does encompass the life that I’ve been living for the last 20 years,” Buck said. “I’ve been lucky — music and the beach and Southern California. Some of these bands that were playing were musical influences to me, and now we are sharing time and space, so to speak, right on this globe.”
BeachLife launched two years ago, and from the outset earned praise from music industry standards like Rolling Stone magazine to national news outlets such as Entertainment Weekly as a special kind of festival. Despite the proliferation of festivals nationwide, nothing quite like BeachLife had existed — an ambitious boutique festival located in the midst of a working harbor (with one stage actually located in a lagoon) astride one of surfing’s original epicenters. It lost its second year to the pandemic but came roaring back last September. Among its many unique features has been the fact that alongside a robust lineup of musical superstars — including Willie Nelson, Jane’s Addiction, the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, and the Marley family — each iteration of the festival featured a constellation of local talent.
Jim Lindberg, the lead singer of Pennywise who serves as BeachLife’s director of brand and creative content, said that holding up the South Bay’s own diverse and vibrant musical banner has been an important aspect of the festival.
“We have been such a fertile breeding ground for great music over the years, going all the way back to the Lighthouse Cafe and then through the whole surf music scene started by the Beach Boys — them growing up at the beach and learning to surf in the South Bay was a big part of that. They rivaled the Beatles at that time. Then, all the way through to punk rock with Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, and The Descendents, you had such an amazing variety of music to come out of this area. And we’re really trying to represent that by having all different kinds of genres.”
Lindberg curates SpeakEasy, one of the festival’s four stages. It began as a stage intended to bring some punk roots to the festival, albeit acoustically, but has grown increasingly diverse, and more local with each festival. This year SpeakEasy keeps its punk cred alive with Everclear’s Art Alexakis and Lagwagon’s Joey Cape. But it also includes Dan Kelly, of Fortunate Youth and Tomorrows Bad Seeds, both reggae bands who formed locally and have become national and international touring acts, Beach Cities stalwarts Latch Key Kid and Too Rude, and up-and-coming young singers Jamisen Jarvis and Charlotte Sabina.
“This year, we’ve got reggae, we’ve got singer-songwriters, we have alternative pop, everything,” Lindberg said. “We are just trying to represent that variety that we’ve had here for years in the South Bay, and also shining a light on some really amazing local musicians as well.”
Lindberg said his unofficial marketing and curation team are his family, friends, and neighbors.
“The cool part about this is that’s how I heard about all these bands,” Lindberg said. “I heard about Tomorrows Bad Seeds from my niece. Fortunate Youth played a party around the block from my house, Charlotte Sabina went to high school with my daughters, and was also in a movie with Hudson Ritchie, who’s an old family friend of mine. So it’s hyper-local. These are all people who started out in the South Bay, and now are going on to amazing music careers. So I think we’re really trying to reflect that incredible legacy the South Bay has, and put them on an acoustic stage, which is a really more personal, intimate setting, where you can really have a direct audience.”
Jamisen Jarvis first played a festival stage12 years ago. She was missing a few teeth at the time, but Donovon Frankenreiter brought her on stage to sing along at the Spyderfest on Hermosa Beach’s Pier Plaza. Jarvis was eight years old.
“What a kind guy, letting an eight-year-old, tone-deaf girl on stage,” Jarvis recalled, laughing.
Jarvis has beach life in her blood. Her dad is Dennis Jarvis, the former pro surfer and the founder of Spyder Surf. Now Jamisen has grown up into a promising young pop star with a buoyantly natural musicality. She attended the festival last year, and though she was blown away by the performances — especially Cage the Elephant’s astonishing show — one thought kept running through her head.
“Dang,” Jarvis remembers thinking. “I really want to play here.”
Her dream is coming true. She’s about to play the biggest event of her life.
“I can’t really put into words how it feels,” Jarvis said. “The fact that I’m able to play, and I think the SpeakEasy is so cool. It’s like a hidden little gem. I’m just excited, and I am really honored, as well. It just means a lot because I love the South Bay. It’s my home, where I grew up, so it’s really cool to continue to play these events the older I get, and also the bigger that these events become. It’s really crazy to have grown with the South Bay.”
Charlotte Sabina was barely a teenager when she sang in front of a few thousand people at the Manhattan Beach holiday tree lighting ceremony. She has since become something of a movie star for her role in Age of Summer, a surfer coming of age story shot locally, and played in theaters nationally. She’s currently a college student in Santa Barbara and could not be more stoked to be returning home in May to play BeachLife.
“I mean, it’s like a gift from the universe, or Jim Lindberg,” Sabina said. “It really is such an honor. I haven’t played a show since before COVID, and it’s so wild for me…It made me feel like sometimes your community believes in you more than you believe in yourself, and that’s what brings people together, and how people become successful. It’s never just one person vouching for you. When you have a community behind you, that is something that is really powerful.”
Like most of the musicians who came from here, Sabina has lived the beach life. She was a star surfer for the Mira Costa surf team, and her music draws from the ocean.
“The ocean forces you to listen to yourself, even when it’s hard, even when you don’t want to, and even when it’s a faint story that your mind is trying to tell you, and you can barely hear it, but the ocean is like, ‘Listen!’” Sabina said. “The ocean brings out parts of me that I am often afraid to confront by myself, and it gives me the power to feel capable. I mean, it challenges you, man. You are out there on a big day, in way over your head, and you are like, ‘Why the hell did I paddle out here?’ Now I need to get a wave in, but I don’t want to. It forces you to face yourself.”
Moises Juarez, the lead singer for Tomorrows Bad Seeds, has likewise found music flowing from his experience in the ocean. In fact, performing at BeachLife its first year felt something like riding a wave to shore.
“I mean, it just feels like home,” Juarez said. “It’s everything you dreamed of growing up around here. You know, you sit in the water surfing, or you’re playing sports or hanging out with your friends just kind of daydreaming about the future, and what you love to do, which at least for me I always wanted to sing, and play music and surf…So I’d be surfing a lot at the Breakwall [outside King Harbor], waiting for the waves to come in, thinking, ‘It’d be sick to have a festival here in our town.’ And then along comes Allen Sanford.”
Sanford is BeachLife’s co-founder and chief visionary. His vision for the festival was to distill what made the South Bay special, in musical festival form. Where others saw a fading harbor, Sanford saw a place where the community could come together and celebrate itself. And ultimately, this is exactly what BeachLife accomplishes.
Gavin Heaney, the lead singer of Latch Key Kid, recalled a moment at last year’s festival. He was on stage, and looking out he saw his son, Matich, dancing with his wife Kimmy, and his parents and friends all together, enjoying a moment of music in the sun. It reminded him of why he wanted to do music in the first place.
“Seeing my friends, and family come together, and having a good time, and being able to kind of provide the background for that and entertaining people, whether they are dancing or just kicking back — adding to that atmosphere, that gathering of friends, it’s the best,” Heaney said. “It’s what we all kind of live for.”
Heaney had a song, “Good Times,” that was heard by literally millions of people around the world a decade ago when it was featured in a Coca-Cola Super Bowl commercial. He’s flirted a few times with that kind of big audience musical success. But he’s found a smaller, simpler way to make a life in music, and the core of the reason he still has a guitar in his hands was clear on that BeachLife afternoon.
“Seeing my son dancing always tickles me, just seeing friends and family and how they are just stoked to come to BeachLife and reunite at such a hometown kind of thing,” Heaney said. “You also get a couple slaps on the back, saying like, ‘Hey man, you really stuck to this.’ It has taken a long time to establish and get settled into the strange career that is music. But it’s so rewarding when people are like, ‘You saw this through. That’s great.’”
It’s also a feather in the cap for Heaney, and other local musicians to share a bill with people they grew up listening to. Heaney says the day the lineup poster comes out is always a special day. “My phone just blows up,” he said.
In the end, it’s all about people coming together, and connecting, something that has taken on even more resonance as we slowly emerge from the pandemic. Buck had an experience during the pandemic that resulted in an epiphany, and then a song. His baby boy Lennon was refusing to sleep one night, and Buck had an important event the next day. He was about to get frustrated when he recalled the first 34 days of Lennon’s life. Early in the pandemic, his son was born very prematurely, isolated in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. It was touch and go, but he made it. Everything after, Buck realized, are good times. And so on Saturday at BeachLife in May, Buck will take the stage, and sing this song. Family from Indiana will be in the audience, and his wife, and who knows, maybe his son will dance a few of his first steps. Buck has had a long journey through the music industry, but on that day, during that moment, it will have all been worth it.
“It’s the little things that keep you going, and you never know how it’s going to turn out,” Buck said. “But as long as you keep the journey moving forward, you can get surprised by things like this, like BeachLife, a really cool experience I get to be a part of all because I packed my bags and loaded up my ‘89 Honda Accord with nothing more than a dream and a pocket full of songs.”
BeachLife takes place from May 13 to 15. See BeachLifeFestival.com for more information. ER
