Will Down Home Music Keep its Home in El Cerrito?
Building to hit real estate market on Oct. 11, 2024
The Down Home Music store at 10341 San Pablo Ave. Photo by Dave Weinstein
For close to 50 years serious albeit fun-loving fans of stomping, honking, swinging rhythm and blues music, traditional jazz, bluegrass and honky tonk, early rock ‘n roll, Mexican conjunto music, and, yes, polkas, have trekked from around the globe to an otherwise innocuous storefront in El Cerrito to visit Down Home Music, a record store with a mission.
It has been a mission shared with other occupants of the building at 10341 San Pablo Avenue -- a pioneering folk, blues, country and world music record label, Arhoolie Records, run by the late Chris Strachwitz (1931-2023), who also owned the store, and a separate filmmaking studio, Flower Films, now Les Blank Films, that has focused largely on traditional cultures and their music and foods – with excursions touching on such subjects as the outré film director Werner Herzog.
The owner of the property, a trust made up of Strachwitz’s heirs, plans to sell the building, according to filmmaker and art car artist Harrod Blank, son of Les Blank (1935-2013), who runs Les Blank Films. Harrod has right of first refusal to buy the property at market value, he says, thanks to a provision in Chris Strachwitz’s will.
Harrod says the appraised value is $2.4 million, and that he might be able to put up close to half that amount. The deadline is coming up, he says: October 11, 2024, when the building will hit the market.
The current occupants of the property – Down Home, a for-profit store, and two non-profits, Les Blank Films and the Arhoolie Foundation, the successor to Arhoolie Records – also hope to preserve their current home, which they persuasively argue is both historic and of contemporary cultural importance.
Harrod is working with Adam Machado, president of the Arhoolie Foundation and with Down Home co-managers J.C. Garrett and John McCord, to buy the building. Harrod says the purchase would be through a non-profit organization. He hopes to find donors or investors to join the effort.
Cathedral of culture
Machado, whose foundation’s mission is to preserve and celebrate “tradition-based styles of music,” calls the building a “cathedral of culture.” The building, he says, has always been “ground zero” in efforts to rediscover, record, film, and otherwise promote exciting yet endangered music and other folkways.
“In a way,” Machado says, “there’s a real deep zip line connection between El Cerrito and Lafayette, Louisiana, Houston, Texas,” and other centers of blues, Zydeco, Tex-Mex and other forms of roots music.
The building plus the former Abbey Carpet store next door, which is also for sale, could be replaced by a residential project of the sort that has been filling the avenue as of late.
The Down Home property is actually two buildings: the store built in the 1920s or ‘30s, and a two-story 1920s home that has been attached to the store. Because of the El Cerrito’s odd city borders, the store itself, like many businesses on the west side of the avenue, is in the city of Richmond; the sidewalk is in El Cerrito.
Garrett says their efforts have won the moral support of city leaders. “I have been in contact for quite a long time now, since all this started happening, with both the El Cerrito Chamber of Commerce and the city of El Cerrito,” he says. “And you can imagine, neither of them want to lose us as an asset to the community because we’re probably one of the most well-known things in the community of El Cerrito at this point.”
The late Chris Strachwitz, founder of Arhoolie Records. Les Blank Films photo
From the mid-1970s, Strachwitz ran Arhoolie Records, which he founded in 1960, from this building. Strachwitz rediscovered long lost, now classic 78 rpm records, and recorded musicians at such exotic locales as a “low-rent Third Ward beer joint called Pop’s Place” in Houston, according to Smithsonian magazine, and St. Mark’s Hall in Richmond. Strachwitz produced a catalog so historically important it is now owned by the Smithsonian Institution and distributed by Smithsonian Folkways.
Some musicians whose works today are revered might still be forgotten were it not for Strachwitz, who helped renew their careers through reissues, new recordings and concert and festival performances.
Les Blank, who often collaborated with Strachwitz on film and music projects, is of equal historic importance, with films as varied as “The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins,” “Garlic is as Good at 10 Mothers,” “Burden of Dreams” and “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.”
The remains of that shoe, which Herzog ate on the stage of Berkeley’s UC Theatre after losing a bet, still reside in the building.
Harrod, who has been restoring his dad’s films and overseeing screenings worldwide, has also produced his own movies in the Down Home building, including “Wild Wheels” from 1992, a defining moment in the rise of the art car movement. (Harrod also has an art car museum in Douglas, Arizona.)
Les Blank (left) and Chris Strachwitz in the backyard of the Down Home-Arhoolie building. Les Blank Films photo
When Harrod, J.C. Garrett, Adam Machado and John McCord discuss the future of the Down Home complex, the M word often comes up.
“It’s like a vernacular museum,” Machado says of the store, which is the public face of the community of artists and archivists that has grown up there. Garrett has worked at the store since 2003, McCord since the early 1980s. “I’m not a clerk,” Garrett jokes. “I’m a docent.”
“Everyone who loves Down Home Music knows that you walk in there and you are immediately struck by what’s on the walls, what you’re hearing in the air,” Machado says.
“What the clerks know about music has always been astonishing. Everybody in there is so deeply informed and educated and knowledgeable and able to talk about every aspect of American roots music, American music in general and also international music, world music.”
Down Home has hosted many performances over the decades, most public, others at private parties, featuring Johnny Otis, Taj Mahal, Peter Rowan and many others.
The legendary performer Taj Mahal recently performed for a private party at Down Home. “He played for at least two and a half, three hours,” Harrod Blank says. Courtesy of Harrod Blank
Tish Hinojosa performed at Down Home Music in 2017 while fans browsed the racks. Photo by Dave Weinstein
The Arhoolie Foundation preserves materials owned by Strachwitz that were not donated to the Smithsonian, Machado says.
“(Strachwitz) was always interested in preservation, in history, even (with) what he was presenting commercially,” Machado says. “He was deeply involved with that, and with a commitment to communities.”
“The music came out of that, and that’s what the foundation is built around. It’s an extension of Chris’s soul work, his hard work, his life’s work,” Machado says.
The archive, much of which is being made available online, includes Strachwitz’s life’s work of research, collections … the history that he amassed through his papers and his research. Audio recordings that weren’t Arhoolie masters, videos that he shot.
“He was a very active documenter, with his still camera and his video camera,” Machado says. “We have behind the scenes videos of house parties and recording occasions and things all over where he traveled.
“And then also other collections of other people,” Machado continues. “Bob Stone is a folklorist in Florida who documented the Sacred Steel (guitar) tradition. He’s given us his photographs and audio recordings that he used in his research, and he wrote a book about Sacred Steel.
“It’s always been in this building,” Machado added, emphasizing how Blank’s studio, Arhoolie records, and the store functioned as a community with a united aim.
Les Blank’s film studio remains very special, Machado says. “It’s an incredible realization of a person’s mind and creative spirit. And there are also things in there, like the Werner Herzog shoe.”
“The studio is really like an exhibit of Les’s brain and the walls are covered with images and objects that he liked. We have kept everything the same other than cleaning,” Harrod says.
“Chris and Les made films together about musicians Chris was documenting with his tape recorder,” Machado said. “And so their work was deeply entwined. The store was something that Chris created in the mid-1970s, as a place where you could find this music at a time when there weren’t so many places.”
It’s not clear how efforts to preserve this unique cultural center will evolve. Harrod sees two options: the foundation or Blank films buying the property as a non-profit, or an angel investor buying the property and leasing it to the current occupants.
Harrod, Machado and Garrett say that even if the building is lost to them, their businesses will continue. Garrett expects the store will find another, smaller location. He hopes the store can acquire the “Down Home” name from the trust.
And if the store stays in place and does become more of a museum? “We would obviously have to expand in terms of our outreach to the community, and that would be having events, which we have some of right now,” Garrett says.
“But expanding that idea, maybe having schools involved or who knows? I mean, it could be musicians doing presentations, not just performing.”
But still, there is the threat.
“The building actually may just get torn down. And, you know, that doesn’t make me feel very good,” Harrod says. He adds: “I’m proud of what these institutions have done for the community. I really feel like they provide culture and diversity and pleasure. Happiness, too.”
By Dave Weinstein
If you would like to learn more about the future of Down Home, the Arhoolie Foundation and Les Blank films, or help in the effort to preserve their headquarters, contact Les Blank Films, lesblankfilmsinc@gmail.com, or the Arhoolie Foundation, adam@arhoolie.org.