COVID concert:
Chapel offers intimate performance while ensuring social distance in S.F. parking lot
S.F. club offers socially distanced performance in parking lot.
It was a scene both wonderfully familiar and woefully foreign. In a parking lot on Valencia Street, in the midst of a heat wave, Marc Capelle told a crowd of about 40 what they should expect from San Francisco’s first ticketed concert in the age of COVID19.
“We are planning to be both safe and psychedelic,” he announced.
Conceived as a benefit concert for the Independent Venue Alliance, the performance featured Capelle’s local Red Room Orchestra paying homage to the music of David Lynch. It’s a show the band — itself named for a scene from Lynch’s “Twin Peaks” series — has been performing since 2017, but never quite like this.
On Saturday, Aug. 15, Capelle was joined by Red Room regulars Allyson Baker, Tom Ayres, Pete Straus, Larry Carr and special guest Kelley Stoltz. All wore masks to help slow the spread of the coronavirus, but none gave the impression of being muzzled by the legally mandated fabric strapped to their faces. It probably helped that every piece of music they played was instrumental, meaning the logistics of safely incorporating a vocalist into the equation were not a factor.
Together, the band also accounted for roughly 13% of the total capacity admitted for the show. It’s strange to watch musicians play largely to empty space; to watch them work in such an intimate fashion yet be unable to dance or even beam a smile was downright bizarre.
Designed as a sitdown dining experience, the event placed guests at socially distanced tables where they were served fixedprice options from the Chapel’s restaurant Curio. With tickets priced at $250 to $450 for tables of two to four guests, it was not surprising to see the demographics of the crowd lean heavily toward white, middleaged couples.
That price also reflected the nature of the event: a benefit for the Chapel and other small to midsize Bay Area music halls now partnered as the Independent Venue Alliance in hopes of bringing attention and resources to a struggling music scene that has become more fragile during the pandemic.
Vail Reese, 56, of San Francisco used to see several concerts a month before the pandemic restricted large public gatherings. He said Saturday night’s concert represented his first chance to see a show since “the music died.”
The last concert he attended before city officials enforced a shelterinplace order five months ago had been steps away, inside the Chapel, where he saw Robyn Hitchcock on March 3. But a doctor himself, Reese expressed confidence in the protocols adopted by the Chapel, Curio, and promoter FolkYeah in putting Saturday’s event together.
“It’s so sad to think that now we have to worry about dying from a disease to see a show,” Reese said, “but I’m a physician, and masks make a big difference.”
To that point, guests appeared to take their safety quite seriously throughout the night. Despite access to cocktails and the familiar allure of live music crackling through an amplifier, the severity of the pandemic wasn’t ignored in what was, on the whole, a beautiful glimpse into how live inperson concerts might move forward.
The promise isn’t lost on Capelle, who both lamented the newfound limitations of concerts during the pandemic but also seemed genuinely giddy about how everything had gone by evening’s end.
“It’s a success in the sense that now there are expectations for how we can rise out of the water without
getting the bends,” Capelle told The Chronicle.
That was more or less what brought Jane Muir, 52, also of San Francisco, to take in the show with her partner. Though they have largely been selfisolating since COVID19 struck, the show felt like “a way for us to dip our toes in the water” to the major David Lynch fans.
“It was awesome to be at a live event again with people,” Muir said after the show. “Surreal, certainly, but very David Lynchian.”
Capelle concurred, connecting the nature of Lynch’s art with the tenor of the world at the moment.
“There’s this notion of a purgatorial existence that we have to make the best of,” he said. “Everyone is pretty much eating hospital food, like live streams, these days, so we’re all seeking a few analog pellets of existence.”
It was certainly quite the unique slice of existence on display Saturday night.
Once it got dark enough, there was a liquid light show by Mad Alchemy projected onto a parking lot wall. Some guests had bottles of hand sanitizer sitting next to their cocktails. At one point, a neighbor from a home behind the lot stepped onto his porch to take in a few songs and wave to the crowd.
It was exciting and stressful. It felt both mirage and miracle. It was the only concert in San Francisco on a scorching hot August night. What a trip.