Born out of the pandemic and decades of musical influences from Ohio to San Francisco and beyond, Back pOrchEstra plays acoustic-style, original and vintage Americana, country blues, cajun and Western swing. If you’re wondering, you pronounce “porch” normally and then “estra,” as in “orchestra.”
Ahead of their set this Saturday, July 5th at the New Farm, co-hosted by Bay Beats (San Francisco Public Library) and White Crate, we heard from the bandleader Tim Eschliman about his move to the Bay in the 60s, some of his favorite 45s, and what he thinks about sharing a bill with a punk band. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
How did you form Back pOrchEstra?
Tim Eschliman: It started during the pandemic. None of my bands could get together because at least one person was not going to leave their house. So we did a live stream, and the first thing I noticed that was really interesting was I would look at comments and likes, and people that I knew from different parts of my life were interacting with each other. I grew up in the Midwest, but I’ve been in the Bay Area since 1970. So a lot of my Mill Valley or Petaluma friends were interacting with my Ohio friends, and they didn’t even know each other. That’s weird. I didn’t even think that was going to happen. But we had a good time.
We did five songs or so, and I wanted to do it again, but I wanted to try working on the songs a little more and getting a soloist that could do some intros and outros so there’d be a foil to bounce off of. I’d been wanting to audition this violinist for a while for this other band, and I sort of chickened out doing it. I found out she lived out on the coast, and I thought, oh, she’s not going to come all the way over here for our stuff. But then during the pandemic, I realized that none of the musicians had any work whatsoever or anything to do unless they had home studios. So I called her up and I go, “you don’t know me, but I am aware of you because of some other bands you play in and we have mutual friends, and if I give you a hundred bucks, would you come over to my house with me and my drummer and play like six songs?” She goes, sure.
Then a friend of mine that books a club up in Sonoma saw that live stream of the three of us, and he goes, “Hey, you guys want to come over and play at the Irish pub?” We’re like, sure. And then I go, oh, geez, now we need two hours of stuff. I had a resonator guitar. I had a violinist. I had a drummer. And all they could allow were three musicians at this stage because it’s not a huge area. That’s all the city would allow. We were stuck with that for a while. And I thought, well, what fits that is American roots music, like country blues, Western swing, Cajun music, folk, singer-songwriter stuff. So we thought, okay, we’ll do some of that, which are sort of the building blocks to how we even got interested in music in the first place.
How about the band name?
The violinist comes over that first time to my house, and she pulls her violin out and tuning up. I hear that sound of a violin and I look around. There’s only three of us in the room. I go, “well, there’s the whole orchestra.” Like a joke. And then I thought, wait a minute, that’s good. An orchestra, a miniature orchestra, a back porch orchestra.
So I looked on Spotify. Every band in the world has tried to put something on Spotify, so if you look for band names there, you’ll find them. If there’s anybody with that name, it’s going to be on. Well, there were four bands with “back porch orchestra” already. I thought, what about back “porchestra”? Of course nobody had that.
I think people remember it more because they stumble over it. They like, “how do you say that?” Usually when people introduce the band, they’ll say something like “Pork Extra” like it’s a meat product or something.
Where did you grow up? And tell us about your move to the Bay.
I grew up in a college town in Ohio where Antioch College is. Antioch is really far to the left. It sort of had a nickname of Berkeley, Midwest. It had a lot of students from Berkeley, but mostly from New York. So there was a lot of influence from the Village. A lot of parents would ship their maybe-somewhat-troubled children off to Ohio to go to this college.
I came out to San Francisco State to go to college but I didn’t really want to go to college. I wanted to pursue music more full on. In 1970, there weren’t school of rock type places. You couldn’t go learn popular music or rock and roll or even blues or anything. It was jazz a little bit. And of course classical.
I just wanted to leave college. Came back home after a year at SF State. I’d already told San Francisco State I was withdrawing. So I ended up going to the college of my hometown. I ended up taking some music courses there and I ended up starting a band there. But a good friend of mine – the guy that I was going to start a band with after we both saw The Beatles on Ed Sullivan when we were 12 years old – had moved to Mill Valley because his brother was a drummer in a band out of Antioch called Mad River. He had gone to Berkeley in ’65 during that big explosion of psychedelic music. And they managed pretty quickly to get on a lot of Bill Graham’s shows. He had a pretty good career, and he ended up in Mill Valley working with Marty Balin at one point. He had contacted my buddy (his brother) to come and help and maybe play a little harmonica with the guys. Then he starts writing me too. So I finally made it out just to visit.
I came to Mill Valley in September 1972. One of the great secrets of California is how great the weather is in the fall. People will come out in July on vacation and it’s freezing ass cold in San Francisco. Being from Ohio, you think of California as the “Promised Land.” That’s what Chuck Berry called it. I mean, it’s got all this incredible stuff. But when I first moved to San Francisco, I was in a dorm at SF State for one semester, and then we got a house in the Avenues another semester, which was overcast and foggy the whole time. I went back to Ohio thinking, “I don’t know, California wasn’t that great.”
But September in Mill Valley, the weather was just gorgeous. It was beautiful and serene and sunny. I was staying in a house that opened up in the back patio doors to all these redwood trees by the creek, and this little dust would come filtering down and the sun would be shining on the little creek. I swore I saw leprechauns. It was a very enchanted kind of place. A little old redwood cabin. I immediately fell in love with Mill Valley right there. It took me a couple of tries to end up living there full time, but that’s what kind of started it.
Describe some of your early connections to music.
In Antioch, there was a guy named Clean Gene – who didn’t look clean at all – and he was like our own personal Wolfman Jack. He grew up, I think in the DC area, so he was very well aware of urban music and blues and R&B, and he was playing these records that we weren’t hearing on the radio in Ohio. We had a good soul station and a bunch of top 40 stations, but he was playing like rockabilly. He was playing James Brown. I remember one particular dance I went to at the college: He was playing records and he played “Mockingbird,” the original by Charlie and Inez Foxx, which is a sister-brother team out of North Carolina, Black siblings. And it’s very funky and it’s very suggestive, the rhythms.
I was a teenager, a lot of us teenagers were townies, we weren’t college students, but we’d go crash the campus when he’d be playing records and stuff. The word was out about how great he was when he played that record. The way that students danced really tripped me out at 16-years-old. These students were 18 to 22 years old. It was very eye-opening.
In the summer at that college, there were beer dances on Wednesday nights all summer long where he would play records outdoors in front of the student union building and there’d be a keg of beer. And we figured out if you act like you own the place but don’t act stupid, they’ll think you’re a freshman or a sophomore. So we all kind of got hip to how to go over there. We just wanted to hear these songs he was playing.
Eventually I was going off to San Francisco State to go to college, but all of a sudden I realized I wasn’t going to be able to hear him play records anymore. So I said, “Gene man, can I come over to your house and tape some of these?” He goes, “sure.” So I brought over a reel-to-reel tape deck in 1970, and he had a turntable and all his records in these beer boxes for the returnable beer bottles. He could put a divider in the middle and it’d be perfect for two rows of 45.
I go in there and these boxes and boxes are sitting in there, and I just went through ’em. I go, “Where’s that one? The Lion Sleeps Tonight? The Tokens? Yeah, where’s that one?” “Where’s the, where’s that Lee Dorsey song I love so much? Where’s that?” He was the first guy to play me Dr. John. He played “Mama Roux” by Dr. John, which is the weirdest sounding thing you’ve ever heard. So I got all those and we put them on his turntable one by one. We taped them on this reel-to-reel, which was about three hours worth of music. I eventually made cassettes out of those so I could play ’em anywhere and everywhere.
Why do you make music?
In the beginning? I was attracted to it because you hear a world that’s not part of your world. When you’re growing up with your parents and they’re playing their music and you’re watching TV, you’re only exposed to certain things. And then you’d hear things on the radio or people would tell you about something they heard about. At that era, the San Francisco music scene was just exploding with a wide variety of music. There were jazz rock groups and psychedelic rock groups and folk rock groups. I remember when I first was driving around, soon after I had come out, and on the radio they played the Sons of Champlin. And I freaked out. I’m like, oh my God, any part of the country that is playing something like the Sons of Champlin. It happened another time. I was up at Humboldt, and they played this weird rap thing where they’d taken Dan Rather’s snippets and they put it over some kind of EDM music and it was all this political thing, very well done. And then after that, they played Gil Scott-Heron “free the Watergate 500” (Ed. note: That’s a lyric from “H2Ogate Blues” by Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson from the album Winter in America). Any community that’s got this going on…
Part of it is the allure or the enchantment of music from somewhere else. But also once you start trying to play, it takes a while but if you get good at it enough that an audience responds to it in a positive way, then this thing happens where you get the whole picture. You realize, oh, that’s as big a part of it as what we are doing – the dancing and the movement and everything is just as important as the interaction between the musicians. I respect it, but I’m not as interested in concert type performances as I am in festive community gatherings where there’s a rhythm going on and everybody’s caught up in it.
Are there any local artist-centered communities you love?
I came to realize a couple of years after the pandemic started that it’s the smaller communities in the Bay Area that have the magic. I spent a lot of time in the North Bay. I used to live mostly there, but Fairfax, Cotati, Sebastopol, and the town of Sonoma have really vibrant and fun music communities where they come out and they support the music constantly. And they would come out during the pandemic and somehow make it work.
I lived in Santa Rosa for a while with the family when our daughter was going to high school and it’s a big, big, big giant city. It has nine freeway exits, but it’s very spread out. There’s not much height downtown. It’s not many tall buildings. It’s just spread out. It’s like they took a big southern California city and they plopped it down up there. it has none of that cohesive community really. I mean, there’s bits of it, but it’s nothing like these other little towns.
We also discovered it in Benicia and Martinez as well. There’s a group of music aficionados in Martinez called the Martinez Music Mafia, and they have a Facebook group, and there was a competition as to who has the most complete list of music in the area.
And you know what? We found a song by Big Al Anderson from NRBQ that apparently was written for George Jones called “I Ain’t Ever Slowing Down.” It’s got great lyrics and really fits him. A lot of times if we’re doing a show and the community’s really there doing it with us, we’ll close the night with that and I’ll dedicate it to everybody there. I’ll say, “you guys, you’re not giving up.” This is an older crowd. A lot of ’em too, they’re like 50, 60, 70, 80-year-olds out there still dancing to swing or Cajun or Zydeco or rock and roll. I think the Baby Boomers refuse to give up.
For the Bay Beats show on Saturday, you get to play with punk rock band Neutrals and world fusion group Makrú! Have you ever played on a bill with a punk band before?
I’ve written a couple of punkish songs. I was in a band a while back with a couple of fellows that ended up having an album produced by Nick Lowe. We went over to London and he produced it. I used to play albums by X, I used to love those. “I’m coming over, I’m coming over…” Just songs you would make up in a second right when you walked out of the shower. I love that impulsive kind of writing.
Bill Graham, that was his big gift: blending genres. Luckily for me, my year in college was when the Fillmore West was still open. When we had that house out in the Sunset, I could take a street car for 25 cents down to Market Street, go to the Fillmore West, and spend all my food budget on that place. There’d be three bands completely unrelated. There’d be like an old kind of beer-soaked polka blues band out of Ohio. Then there’d be a psychedelic rock band. And then it’d be like a jazz rock group or something from the South Bay. Totally different things, but they were all good. He curated it.
Congratulations on the acceptance of your album Voices In My Head (Genre Whiplash) into the Bay Beats catalog! Do you have any upcoming new releases we should know about?
We’ve put out a couple singles since that album. So I have a second album coming out and I’m not sure when it’ll get done. It’s almost done. We’re very close.
