What are we doing up in the sky here?
The setup is a shared, no-frills affair: a couple of reasonable amps and a compact PA hanging out behind a tatted-up public bench. We’re up on the southwest corner of the I-80 pedestrian bridge, and the sun is stalling over the bay. People follow their long shadows up the Berkeley Marina’s curved walkway entrance.
Sutros is about to play. Behind them, the Port of Oakland’s cranes hold still, a jutting bay jetty peters out, the marsh keeps marshing, and San Francisco’s skyline starts to fall into silhouette. Interstate traffic finds its own cranky rhythms below us. Usually on weekends, people in their cars scan the pedestrian overpass for agitated tips like No Kings and Free Palestine and G☭P. Today, no signs, just a blunt, vibrant mess of people wearing big sunglasses and smiles as they press into a loose pack, semicircling the band.
Sutros play noisy, arty punk—fun, funny, scraggly, jittery. Guys this buff don’t usually wear their guitars up so high on the chest, but he may as well be brushing his teeth. The drummer wears a toddler’s nightgown scaled up for a grown man. The whole thing is so charming and effortless that sometimes you think they aren’t even musicians, as reeds and fronds dance on the McLaughlin Eastshore Park meadow behind them. Paradise found, wetlands waning, footholds lost, sticker burrs holding onto shoelaces and dog paws. Nothing is quite right, and everything falls into place.
What are we doing up in the sky here? Taking in the last of summer at the feral end of a chainlink display case, watching the sky and the shadows and the breeze trick out our t-shirts. The sun’s finally ducking out behind the city for real, and the sky goes all wet and gummy. It’s the kind of soft moment you should forever have a cigarette on reserve for.
The next band, Wife, is about to play, and the singer captures and names the combination of magic and reverence and reality: “Seems like the world is ending. Not today though. Lot of beauty out here. Drink it up. Drink it up.”
No horseshoe crowds here during their set. People really get loose, shout along. Joggers hang around to enjoy the show, stretching their lower calf muscles. Cyclists take a break too, and now we get stretchy suits and helmets mingling with the thrifted, patched, and layered.
When night falls on us, the Bay Bridge headlights snap to attention. An impish breeze cuts across the bridge, chilling an upturned box of Trumer Pils that holds steady in between someone's smudged white Adidas Evolutions.
Somebody switches on a single bulb for the next band, Gumby’s Junk. The hard light falls on them sharp and uneven as they play, joining a hodgepodge of other bright dots poking through the landscape. It draws the whole scene into a miniature; a basement corner that’s been lifted up and hung over the highway. It all suddenly feels small and cozy, even though it implies something bigger and longer than the night. A petite portal to some lavish well of capacity. The tendrils that stretch both bridge directions away from our wedged huddle—west, east, over a marsh, through a condo, into a University Ave motel wall.
Sutros ended up posting a music video with a lot of loose footage from the show. Even through the sharp editing and post production flourishes, it still looks effortless—the music, the space, the atmosphere, the weather, the kindness and creativity. Like it's all just the easiest, and the most obvious thing in the world to do, or to want to do, with our time here.
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Jessalyn Aaland