A Beloved SF Grocery Store Brings ‘Tiny Desk’-Style Concerts to the Produce Aisle
The venue for tonight’s concert is the produce aisle at the local supermarket. The power pop trio Now’s drummer, who’s set his kit up just in front of the onions and the artichokes, taps out a four count with his sticks. Then the mop-haired guitar player breaks into the opening chords of The Clash’s “Lost in the Supermarket” — a winking lead-in to the first song of their set. A single shiny apple sits on top of his guitar amp.
Behold the first edition of Under the Rainbow, Rainbow Grocery’s answer to NPR’s popular Tiny Desk concert series. Aldo de la Cruz-Falcon, a member of the collective-owned Mission District staple’s PR team, says the plan is to post these short concert videos — all filmed on site in the market’s produce section — on social media every other week. The idea is to highlight Bay Area indie bands while also showing a different side to your friendly neighborhood grocery store.
“Something about Rainbow that’s different from other grocers is that we’re part of the community,” de la Cruz-Falcon says. “We’re a co-op; we’re not owned by billionaires. We like to do things for the community.”
De la Cruz-Falcon, who also works in Rainbow’s bulk foods department, says he was first inspired to put the project together after seeing a similar concert series at Fiesta Fresh Market, a Latino grocery in Delaware, go viral earlier this year. He teamed up with coworkers Britta Leijonflycht (vitamins) and Nico DeEulio (herbs), both avid musicians themselves, to organize the first edition of Under the Rainbow, reaching out to local bands to come to the store for an unconventional recording session.
On a Saturday night in August, four bands showed up ready to rock: the aforementioned Now, the shoegaze-inflected indie pop collective April Magazine, gothic cumbia crooner Edgar and folk punk singer Ryan Modee. Now’s set is the only video that Rainbow Grocery has posted so far. It will release the others every other Wednesday morning.
Under the Rainbow does differ from the Tiny Desk series (which in recent months has featured everyone from Shaboozey to “Weird Al” Yankovic), in a few important ways. Most notably, at least for now, the musicians won’t be playing in front of a live audience, other than a handful of grocery store workers and the other bands in attendance. The logistics of doing a live show inside the supermarket during business hours felt too daunting, de la Cruz-Falcon explains — especially not knowing how unsuspecting customers might respond, and not wanting to make any other workers’ jobs more difficult.
For the time being, the project will mostly consist of videos shared on Rainbow Grocery’s YouTube and Instagram accounts. For the first session, the four bands — plus sound engineer Dylan Edrich — arrived at the supermarket shortly after its 9 p.m. closing time. By the time each band finished playing and recording its three-song set, it was around 2 a.m.
William Smith, guitar player and singer for Now, says the idea of performing inside a grocery store was immediately appealing and a natural fit for his band’s DIY aesthetic — they’d done previous shows on highway overpasses and inside vintage clothing stores. (Coincidentally, drummer Oliver Lipton’s father had worked at Rainbow Grocery in the ’80s, so there was a nostalgic personal connection as well.)
“I love pop art, and I thought, what could be more pop art than having our band play in a grocery store?” Smith explains.
For Smith, the whole experience felt like a dream. “It was surreal, like it was such an odd place to be wheeling my amp into,” he says. But everyone was so professional and kind — and the snacks, of course, were second to none.
“I ate a really good apple,” he recalls.
For viewers watching the final product on YouTube, the surprising contrast between the vibe of the performance and its homey, lo-fi, out-of-the-studio setting is exactly what makes it so appealing. And the response, already, has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic.
Within a couple of days, more than 3,000 people liked the initial trailer for the series that Rainbow Grocery posted; nearly 75,000 viewed the video. (“It’s probably some of the best exposure we’ve gotten,” Smith says.)
De la Cruz-Falcon says one of the other exciting things about the project is that so many of the worker-owners at Rainbow Grocery are talented musicians, many of whom have their own bands. He hopes some of those bands will play at future Under the Rainbow recording sessions.
The next one will happen sometime in October, and the store is in the process of putting an application link up on its website. “Everybody’s welcome to submit,” de la Cruz-Falcon says. “We would love to have all kinds of music.”
Rainbow Grocery will release new Under the Rainbow videos every other Wednesday morning — full sets on YouTube and clips on Instagram. The next edition, featuring April Magazine, will come out on Sept. 16.