Café Verona serves bands, not coffee

Music is the realm in a backstreet Oakland house for college kids

Story and Photos by Mick Stinelli

From left: Sam Treber, Alex Martin and Mark Kowalczyk stand atop the roof of Cafe Verona, relaxing before they had to prepare a soundcheck.

During a particularly raucous show at Café Verona – the Oakland rental house that doubles as a concert venue – police arrived to deal with a noise complaint.

Justin Boytim, worried that the party would be shut down, was surprised when the police delivered a different message.

“We don’t wanna stop the show,” the police told him. He said they only wanted people in the street to quiet down.

“I think one of them literally said ‘Rock on’ while they were leaving,” he recalled.

Café Verona is a house where walls are covered in graffiti, shoddy soundproofing hangs from the ceiling and music fans crowd the basement to listen to bands on the DIY circuit. On a busy night, dozens of people pack in to the house to watch bands, argue about music and share jokes.

The crowd at Cafe Verona sharing Shumaker's bag of gummy worms following his review of the product

“Before we lived, here, there were people that lived here for two years that also did shows,” Sam Treber, who lives in the house and organizes the shows, said. “So we just carried the torch, basically.”

The incident that Boytim recollected happened under the house’s previous tenants. He and Treber described the house’s “former life” as rowdier and louder, but altogether unsustainable. Treber realized it wouldn’t have been possible to continue hosting shows if the cops showed up at the house every week, so Treber made an effort to legitimize Café Verona as a dependable and conscientious venue.

Fans walk in the back door, through the kitchen and down the stairs to the basement. There they’ll find an assortment of mismatched furniture and musical equipment stacked in various areas of the room. Before the show and between acts, the crowd gathers around the couches to argue about bands, saying things like, “Hobo Johnson is just 21 Pilots for people who like the Front Bottoms.” The discussions can be cryptic for somebody who doesn’t have the proper reference points.

Scribbled on the wall are a number of phrases, like “Smash the fash,” “Goodnight alt-right.” Strung alongside the performance area of the room are construction paper letters spelling “Support your friends, destroy the government.” Despite being a rental, it has clearly been made into a home for its residents and performers.

“I wrote those words on the wall,” Boytim said, pointing at the infamous graffiti that reads “Dinosaurs died for yr gas!” The words and the accompanying drawing of a dinosaur on the basement’s pink wall have become one of the enduring images amongst the graffiti in the basement. It is now even featured on a koozie as a part of Café Verona’s merch table, which the occupants had begun selling to pay for a plumber.

“At one point, it was to benefit the repair of their upstairs bathroom, in which an unruly show-goer stuffed – I think it was bananas?” Boytim said.

“It was like a belt buckle and a banana,” Treber said. The merch sold so well that Treber continued to sell it even after the bathroom was repaired.

Though the doors opened at seven, the basement was mostly empty until around eight at night. Boytim assured this was a normal occurrence. “We’re on punk time,” he said. “It’s a lot of hurry up and wait.”

(From left): Willow Hawks, Jake Stephens, Eric Heald and Jimmy Wilkens perform as Sonder Bombs.

When attendees did begin to show up, they were greeted at the bottom of the stairs by Boytim and his cooler, which he uses to store donations. He said sometimes people don’t donate at all, but sometimes they donate more than they need to. It’s clear, he said, when people who come to the venue are college kids who don’t have a dime to spare, but some just try to slip in and avoid paying.

The first act to play on this night, Baseball Dad, is a solo project by Haley McDonough. Originally from Ocean City, Md., McDonough moved to Pittsburgh to join the city’s DIY scene. “I came up just to visit my friend that lives here. I went to a house show, met a lot of really great people and really loved the music scene in the area.” McDonough figured she could play more shows in Pittsburgh than in Ocean City, so when it turned out a friend of hers needed a roommate, she moved to Pittsburgh in August of 2017.

Baseball Dad, real name Haley McDonough, during a sound check

Her set was quiet and restrained. The audience responded accordingly, keeping conversations to a distant hush while she played. It was a stark contrast to the second performance: a “live snack review” by Brett Shumaker. While eating gummy worms, potato chips and mustard sandwiched between saltine crackers, the crowd laughed and whooped. When headliner Sonder Bombs performed, the crowd engaged in hushed excitement as the band tuned their instruments. When they began playing, the music was loud, and the crowd reacted accordingly.

Despite belts in toilets and attendees trying to slip by without paying, Treber insisted that these instances were rarely a problem. “Most of the people are more respectful than you would think them to be,” he said. “People that come to these [shows] are way cooler than, like, the party crowd. They’re here for the music.”

Mick Stinelli is a student journalist at Point Park University. He is a writer and editor for The Globe and has a weekly radio show, “Mick’s Tapes,” on WPPJ.