Freestone Fermentation Festival

THE HUBBUB CLUB

4:00 - 5:00pm

Voted Best Grassroots Radical Guerrilla Marching Band
- North Bay Bohemian's Best of the North Bay 2009

For the longest time, I could not figure out what type of band rehearsal I was hearing through the hills every time I visited Graton. They had horns, but they weren't a ska band. They had drum cadences, but they weren't a military band. It was like some sort of subversive, renegade hooligan band playing demonic, jazzy Eastern European melodies. Just who were these people?

Months later at the Handcar Regatta, a cluster of semi-uniformed revelers called the Hubbub Club Marching Band turned up surreptitiously, marching through the crowd in guerrilla ranks, and the sound was immediately recognizable. This was the band! A drum majorette, a glockenspiel, plenty of brass, woodwinds, drums, an accordion and a sousaphone made a joyful noise unto the Railroad Square skies. Heads turned, hands clapped and small children, as if reenacting some lost episode of The Andy Griffith Show, queued up behind the band to march along in exuberant imitation.

The 30-member Hubbub Club Marching Band is grassroots, radical and loads of fun. Founder Jesse Olsen, grandson of author Tillie Olsen, describes it as "a marching band that's open to all—mixed-level, mixed-age, mixed-background—that's specifically about playing in such a way that supports our community and causes that we believe in." Hence, they've showed up and honked away at bicycle races, art shows and, in their most public display of political support, a huge Santa Rosa march against Proposition 8.

"People tend to be shocked, in a really positive way," says Olsen of the general reaction. Usually, the surprise gives way to thrill among the general populace; most of the negative reactions come from police, who have cited all sorts of obscure ordinances to get the band to shut up. (The HCMB shares members with the Jungle Love Orchestra, who are currently collecting signatures to overturn some of those ordinances.) The band's repertoire—"Watermelon Man," "Moliendo Cafe," "Down by the Riverside," "Theme from 8 1/2, " to name a few—is chosen by consensus, as the band has no official leader; they even take turns conducting.

Next month, the Hubbub Club Marching Band heads up to Seattle for Honkfest, a three-day convention of radical grassroots marching bands. They've also come to an agreement to appear in Sebastopol's Apple Blossom parade, which, given the band's customarily unconventional venues, seems downright normal. Olsen, who confirms that the band doesn't know anything by John Philip Sousa, seems nervous about joining an organized civic parade. "There's always a feeling in those kinds of situations," he observes, "that we just don't quite fit in."

Visit the Hubbub Club on MySpace.