Catalyst Club owner told to pull the plug on backyard shows

Joel Nelson wanted to make his neighbor smile.

So, the Bay Area musician — who owns the Catalyst Club in Santa Cruz and runs the entertainment company Joel Nelson Productions — began performing socially distanced live music shows at his house in Los Gatos.

“I started in March of last year when one of my neighbors said she missed music and loved hearing my music through the trees and could I play her a song for their anniversary,” Nelson says. “I did my first show then and the wind was right so hundreds of homes could hear it.”

The shows became a weekly thing, delighting many local fans who had been missing live music during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, Nelson says officials of the town of Los Gatos are telling him to pull the plug on these shows — even though the events have raised tens of thousands of dollars for charity.

“My first fundraiser show was for Second Harvest Food Bank,” Nelson says. “I raised $6,500 for that one and continued to do other fundraisers throughout the year. I raised over $22,000 for local charities.”

Nelson says the feedback from the shows was overwhelmingly positive.

“All of the neighborhood loved it,” Nelson says. “Every Wednesday there were people with chairs and drinks up and down the streets distancing but listening.”

Nelson put a ton of effort into these shows, spending hours learning new material to play for listeners.

“I started playing the typical piano songs that I do for my dueling piano shows and other shows,” he says. “I was getting a lot of the same requests so I spent 20-30 Hours a week learning new ‘old’ songs starting with 1956. Next week 1957, next 1958. Soon it was taking three week to get through one year cause the songs were so great.”

Yet, apparently not everyone the music. There were some who didn’t dig the tunes — and they let Los Gatos town officials hear about.

“Last year people complained,” Nelson says. “But the city gave me the ability to play even though they were getting complaints.”

Still, Nelson took a break from putting on the concerts for a period. But then he started back again three weeks ago. And the complaints followed as well.

“The police came and tell me to turn it down that week,” he says. “The next week I did it at a friends house to see what would happen but didn’t get stopped.”

So, he tried it again at his home.

“The third week I did the show for my deck I got a letter the next day from the city attorney telling me that I can no longer do my shows unless it was 62DB or lower — 62 DB is about the DB of human conversation,” he says.

Note: This newspaper reached out to Los Gatos town officials about this story, but have yet to receive their comments. This story will be updated once we receive those comments.