Outsider Folk: All are welcome

PHOTO by MEGHAN GRAY

I first met Matthew Gray at the final show my old punk band played before we went on hiatus in 2006. We were at the original {open}, and I had just told an offensive joke that previously cleared half our crowd in Santa Cruz. Earlier in the year, I had picked up the banjo and written some songs. Matthew heard these songs and asked if I would like to play the first in a series of shows he hoped to start. I not only played, I agreed to help book and run the shows, too. This became Outsider Folk.

There’s a lot of folk music in Long Beach, to the point where there are sub-genres within the genre itself. (This could very well be due to the difficulty in affording the time, space and gear it takes to get a loud band together.) Undoubtedly, there’s a strong and established coffee-house folk music scene here, which, while at times enjoyable, is very inoffensive and seldom presents anything new. Matthew didn’t fit in with it—and he didn’t want to, either.

As Matthew understood, quite possibly the only thing more thrilling and rewarding than writing your own original music is establishing your own original community—especially when it really flourishes. This city can be great for such communities because there are so many people who—even if they don’t connect with your ideas—can admire and relate to your convictions. But good ideas and strong convictions also easily become big frustrations—with few dividends—when your surroundings lack the infrastructure to support them, as Matthew and I learned once we decided to keep our Outsider Folk events all ages.

There’s really no real all-ages venue in Long Beach. And several times we considered moving Outsider Folk’s operational base to Los Angeles—but that would be the easy way out. LA has an established system of venues and booking—venues with shows every night. And to play along wouldn’t be establishing a new community—just taking up the time of another one. We realized it was important to both us and the city to host events here so everyone could attend.

The ethos of Outsider Folk is this: Anyone can pick up a guitar, and so long as you are truly driven by originality, we’ll book you. Our shows are free and all ages, and the audience often fully participates in the performers’ set as an impromptu percussion orchestra.

For over two years, Zephyr Vegetarian restaurant has graciously hosted the majority of our shows for absolutely free. However, it isn’t a real venue—and with this in mind, we’re like nomads coming in out of the rain when we put on a show there.

But the feeling of newness and constant struggle has helped to attract important acts that otherwise might not play in Long Beach. We’ve made friends with incredible people touring through town, like Jherek Bischoff from Seattle, Jordaan Mason from Canada, Cabinet of Natural Curiosities from New York and so many more. These people come and lose money just to be involved in this exciting revival of Long Beach’s more risky concert side.

Long Beach also has a great amount of local artists we were unaware of, until recently. They are equally passionate about creating a new approach to an old form of music. Foot Foot, a regular at our shows, has been at it longer than we’ve been doing this. And Long Beach kids like Avi Buffalo are now involved, as well as veterans like Gabe Hart and Elijah Forrest’s project, Terrors.

It’s clear Outsider Folk is growing. But our heart remains here in Long Beach—where something so young belongs.

Tags: foot foot, Long Beach, Music, outsider folk, zephyr