NEVADA CITY, Calif. - In the toy-strewn living room of his small bungalow a few miles outside this former mining town, Aaron Ross is singing a song. It's a hard, weird ballad that draws on the young man's love affair with punk rock and Bob Dylan and the Sierra Nevada foothills. Ross's voice is brawny and tender. He sings with his eyes closed, and with his 2-year-old daughter on the sofa at his side. Ross is riveted, and riveting. The baby is asleep in another room. His wife is at work. The phone is ringing off the hook.
"That is why I started a label here," says Marc Snegg, standing in Ross's driveway a few minutes later, pointing at the house. "He needs to be supported. And people need to hear those songs."
With a population of 3,000, a tourism-based economy, and no college in sight, the perfectly preserved Gold Rush town of Nevada City seems an unlikely place for a record company. San Francisco is 165 miles to the southwest. Quaint stores and tidy restaurants catering to day-trippers line the picturesque main street, as do New Age variations of the region's hippie past: crystal shops, Thai massage, and a Jungian Sandplay therapist.
But there's music in these hills, good music, and much of it is being made by lifelong friends who grew up together in this close-knit community - among them Snegg, a 27-year-old bass player and entrepreneur who last year founded the Grass Roots Record Co., which hosts a label showcase tonight at P.A.'s Lounge in Somerville.
Harpist Joanna Newsom, darling of the avant folk scene, is Nevada City's breakout artist. Snegg's first gig was at Newsom's 12th birthday party. Alela Diane, Newsom's classmate at Nevada Union High School, is following in her footsteps. Diane's best friend, Mariee Sioux - both girls picked up guitars after seeing Ross play a local teen show - lived a few blocks away. Grass Roots just released Sioux's "Faces in the Rocks," a haunting debut drenched in Native American sounds and lore.
Tonight's show at P.A.'s will feature Sioux, Ross, Lee Bob Watson (the town's resident country-soul man), and Lindsay Clark, a Nevada City native who now lives in Jamaica Plain. Next week the California trio heads to New York for a handful of Grass Roots showcases at the CMJ music festival.
Grass Roots feels like an extreme version of a community project, partly because of Nevada City's small size and isolated location. While Snegg looked north for inspiration, to regional indie labels like Seattle's Sub Pop and Olympia, Wash.'s Kill Rock Stars, Grass Roots is more like a budding Saddle Creek, the noted Omaha label founded by a few friends in the '90s to put out records by a collective of local musicians - among them Bright Eyes - who record and perform together.
But there is no Nevada City sound. Bands here include noise-rockers Hella, indie-popsters Golden Shoulders, dream weavers Kings & Queens, alt-country outfit El Capitan, melancholy sibling duo the Moore Brothers (who are moving from San Francisco to Nevada City), and a fistful of new-folk troubadours. Grass Roots' flagship release is a compilation of songs from 17 area artists, many of whom play in one another's bands, aptly titled "Family Album."
Last week Snegg, who graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in fine art before moving back to his native Nevada City, took a visitor with him on his morning rounds. He dropped off CDs at the local radio station KVMR, where the music director gave the fledgling label executive a crash course in pledge drives. Then it was on to After the Gold Rush, Nevada City's record store, where we gathered around proprietor Mat Riley's computer watching a clip of Devendra Banhart on the Conan O'Brien show last week. Banhart's band included many Nevada City players, including Joanna Newsom's brother Pete wearing a T-shirt plugging his local group, Casual Fog. Banhart's producer and guitarist, Noah Georgeson, recently released his solo debut, which he recorded here in his home studio.
Next stop was a meeting with Tahiti Pehrson, Grass Roots' art director, who lives in Jonathan Richman's old house, and then a quick swing by Snegg's place, overlooking Deer Creek. The whole tour was conducted on foot.
But the communal vibe here isn't just a function of close quarters. Nevada City's family spirit, and not a little musical talent, has been handed down by the musicians' mothers and fathers - artists and flower children and freethinkers who escaped to this wooded haven in the '60s and '70s. Snegg's father moved from Pasadena to Nevada City in 1969 to live in a teepee at the Ananda meditation colony and open a health-food store. He now runs a real estate company and is a primary investor in Grass Roots Record Co., which uses the same hand-drawn logo as Grass Roots Realty.
The back-to-the-land movement also lured Sioux's father, Gary Sobonya, a mandolinist who plays on his daughter's recordings, and Diane's parents, both bluegrass musicians. Diane's early tapes were made in the home studio built by her dad, who now concentrates his energies on his Grateful Dead cover band. Folk singer Utah Phillips and original Supertramp frontman Roger Hodgson also live here; so do minimalist composer Terry Riley and poet Gary Snyder.
"My parents are working-class hippies who came in '71," says Jesse Locks, who runs Grass Roots' day-to-day operations with Snegg. "We weren't raised to think about making money and buying a big house. We were raised to seek creative satisfaction and have close-knit families. They and the other parents here gave their kids the freedom to become artists."
All well and good, but a generation (and a cultural divide) later, young adults are no longer moving here to raise their children. Schools are shutting down, and the population of Nevada City is aging. The town is in dire need of an industry to keep, and lure, a younger generation of Nevada City residents. Snegg thinks that Grass Roots can help fill the vacuum.
"Joanna's success was an eye-opener," says Snegg. Newsom declined to be interviewed for this story, and several people in Nevada City noted that her sudden fame has complicated her relationship with the local music community. "She's formulated her own program for dealing with it, which means not really talking about it," Snegg notes. "We don't have the same opinion on the subject, but it serves her."
Meanwhile, says Snegg, "there's this really unique and deep talent pool of musicians here, and one by one they were getting signed to a label, taking off, bringing their business elsewhere, making some dollars which could be directed toward this community, which needs it. If all we need to do is build the infrastructure and get the records out, let's do it."
Snegg's vision - to cultivate modest-sized, sustainable careers, not pop stars - makes sense in an industry in turmoil. Technology for recording, distributing, and marketing music has made it possible to operate a fully functioning record company in a bucolic mountain town. There are now 10 live music venues in Nevada City. Snegg persuaded engineer and producer Dana Gumbiner to move his Sacramento recording studio here; Grass Roots now has a house studio, Station to Station. Snegg has hired a consultant, LA-based industry veteran Keith Holzman, who praises Snegg's business acumen but cautions that "this business trades in culture, and that's subject to public whim. They've got interesting, distinctive artists, and if they operate lean and mean, they can show decent profits."
Alela Diane, one of the artists who left her hometown a few years ago for San Francisco and then Portland, Ore., released her critically lauded debut on Portland's Holocene Music. This summer the 24-year-old singer-songwriter (who starts an international tour tomorrow) moved back to Nevada City. She's finishing the follow-up to "The Pirate's Gospel" in her father's home studio.
"There's something to be said for that old-fashioned life where you run into your fourth-grade teacher at the grocery store," says Diane. "Instead of hanging out at bars you have dinner at your friends' houses, and go to the river, and take pictures, and make beaded earrings. I have time to sit and play my guitar. It's a beautiful town with a great community. And I'm part of it."
Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com. For more on music, visit boston.com/ae/ music/blog.
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.
