A POMONA STORY

Written By Maria Lovejones

Photographs By Ryan Gomez

Writer Maria Lovejones shares the story of The Haven, a legendary independent music venue in Pomona, California. Maria takes us through the history of the venue and its relationship to the city of the Pomona, talks about when musician Beck would hold open mic nights there, and how it’s always been a place where up and coming creatives could express their art.

Pomona, USA

There is something surrealist about Pomona. It manifests in the humility of the architecture, in the vacancy of the streets, in the ferocity of the wind. The horizon is contoured by mountain ranges, descending in every direction, severe and unforgiving like eaves of a casket. Los Angeles lies just thirty minutes West, and pervades Pomona with its providence and smog. It ripples through the city, churning reality into a milky blur.

In the beginning, these were Tongva lands. They were a custodial people who took pride in prospering amidst the sand and the sage. “Tovaangar,” they called it. The world. When the Spanish Crown came to acquire the country through sanguinary conquest, they extended parcels of it to retired soldiers as incentive to cultivate a barren land. The Spaniards tried to make this alien place feel like home—to tame it with vineyards and ranchos and cathedrals—but still found it inhospitable and indefatigably wild. The succeeding Mexican government had similar ambitions and succumbed to similar woes, but the Mexican-American War was a more absolute proselytization. This land was American now. And with America came industry; so, in broad strokes, the foothills were flush with orchards and cul-de-sacs and one-stop department stores. The industry withered and so did most of the comforts it had conceived. But Pomona remained, historic and arcane.

Before there were twilight promenades off Route 66 and midsummer music festivals in the arid valley. When the land was still supple and blithe. When Californian country was no more than a cluster of dairy farms and citrus groves. Before there was a country, there was Pomona. And The Haven is a Pomona story.

Like everything in Pomona, The Haven’s facade is unassuming. There is butcher paper applied in great swathes to the windows and fairy lights parsed through the lattice of the veranda.

A banner strung on the palisade reads in a technicolor typeface, “The Haven: Where Music Is Made.”

It’s a saccharine and Californian sentiment. The musical tradition of California is a romantic one: a tapestry of plucky folk heroes and flamboyant pop idols. Every genre and niche can find some magnitude of success here with the right sound and everyone can find immortality here with the right ambition. And thus, the degrees of separation between a Californian and an aspiring musician are sparse. They are disciples of that Californian sentiment, seeking salvation through grit and a reverb guitar. They come to California with dreams in portmanteau or otherwise inherit them from some wayward ancestor. They come to let their dreams trickle away with youth, storing them in hallway closets to mold with winter coats. They come to let their dreams soar unbridled, hoping that one day they will meet fruition.

The dream and the fruition of The Haven first sprouted from Ed Tessier. Tessier, who had lived through many of Pomona’s torsions, lingered on the toytown of his youth. A quainter Pomona with a Buffums for cashmere sweaters and taffeta gowns, a Scott Brothers for milk and eggs, a Coronet for soda pops and comic books. When Libbey Glass and General Dynamics still held operations in the city. When the citrus still dominated the landscape. All of that was gone and had been gone for quite some time. In its place were badlands. Derelict buildings whistling in the winds. “Jesus Saves” posters sneering from storefront churches. Dapplings of citrus enduring in the sand as an omen and an oath. To pass the time, a young Tessier made a playground of this purgatory: cutting teeth on boutique ruins, kicking up tepid thrills on dilapidated roofs, cruising bowling balls down empty and glorious streets. Yet beyond this pandemonium, Tessier deigned that those boarded up shops were not yet artifacts, but still viable with form and function.

Tessier had been one of those sentimental Californians with a predicated dream. His father, Victor Tessier, hearkening from an agrarian hamlet in Minnesota, had deposited his own affections in Pomona. An attorney at law, Victor Tessier roosted his practice (and most of his properties) in Pomona’s Downtown from its heyday to its decline. When there were no more luxuries to be lavished and profits to be milled, most Pomonan patricians abandoned their enterprises or otherwise managed them remotely. The writing on the wall was clear: Pomona was a desolate land. But Victor Tessier remained undaunted and naturally, instilled this same devotion for the city into his children.

So, when Ed Tessier assumed his father’s properties in 1991, he was steadfast in his vision of a renascent Pomona and resolved to erect it on the skeleton of Downtown. He was enchanted by the marooners of the city—a sundry collection of post-graduate artists burrowing in deserted Downtown lofts. They were first drawn to Pomona from the Claremont Colleges in the late 70’s by way of a federal mural commission. When the grant was all spent and austere politicians were all adamant that it would not be replenished, the artists did not retreat to Claremont’s ivory towers, but instead pledged their faculties and their passions to the enigmatic city. They transformed the abandoned spaces into speakeasies, concealing happenings and poetry slams behind trompe l’oeil murals of decadent “FINAL SALE” displays. And they, themselves, transformed into partisans, evading code and law enforcement through their wit and wiles. Tessier enticed them with the prospect of low rent, a verdant community, and a revenant Downtown. Invigorated, they brought forth barber shops and art galleries and antiquity parlors. And at the acropolis, Tessier brought forth The Haven.

In its nativity, The Haven was an eclectic live music café boasting local art on the walls, serving up euphonia and mocha java into the waning hours of the night. With founding partners, Ken Bencomo and Jim Carlson, Tessier forged a hearth for the local arts community where the music was corollary to the sanctuary. The Haven was for the marginalia of Pomona—igniting camaraderie, inspiration, and sovereignty from the ashes of obscurity. And, as luck would have it, The Haven also ignited a captive audience for nascent musicians.

The coffeehouse attracted all manner of creatives with one of the most prolific being Los Angeles native and Grammy-winner, Beck. Gangly, awkward, and infectiously charming, Beck meandered through California like a psychedelic Aeneas. He managed The Haven’s open mic nights in those early days, sprinkling in his own kaleidoscopic serenades between sets. On one radiant night, Tessier recalled finding a gauntlet of about four to five hundred people spilling from The Haven into the street. Inside, Beck sheepishly explained, “Sorry, dude. That’s my fault. My song, ‘Loser,’ is blowing up right now.”

As the decade tapered off, The Haven saw a cascade of victories. And the Haveners were the heralds of these triumphs; they ascended from playing open mics to playing the Grammys, from organizing gigs to organizing festivals, from convening protests to convening city councils. And in the end, the city’s initial hostility for the sundry artists ceded to geniality and the city rechristened the Downtown as the Pomona Arts Colony. Yet, among The Haven’s founding trinity—Bencomo, Carlson, and Tessier—a curious metamorphosis occurred. They accumulated careers, a desire for domesticity, and most harrowing of all, they accumulated age. And with it came the summation that midnight ragers and post-punk revelries were no longer so alluring. So, in 1998, with a new crop of live music venues already embellishing the Colony, The Haven closed its doors.

Two decades and a carousel of owners later, The Haven’s resurrection would come from Tessier’s son, Victor Rosilles-Tessier. In its posterity, the space maintained some aspect of live music. “The music community demanded access to the space,” Tessier remarked. “Even after The Haven closed, the music kept going.” It was the COVID-19 pandemic that threatened this heritage, devastating cities and extinguishing small businesses in one fell swoop. And because the restaurant could not withstand the pandemic neither could the music. It was here, in 2021, that Rosilles-Tessier intervened. He recognized the sanctity of the space, not as a fish taco bar or a pizzeria or a café, but as an alcove for music in the foothills. With a staff of tenderfoot high school and college students, Rosilles-Tessier reconstituted the space as a music venue and brought The Haven to fruition once more.

Rosilles-Tessier had little difficulty booking artists for The Haven’s shows. In part because Rosilles-Tessier was an indisputable wunderkind. He had devoted a considerable amount of his adolescence to volunteering at or interning for local music venues and by fourteen, he was booking bands for shows. In 2019, Rosilles-Tessier facilitated some of the first Californian shows of Utah’s The National Parks, The Backseat Lovers, and The Moss all at Pomona’s Fox Theater. Rosilles-Tessier rendered the same design for The Haven’s both in convention and ambiance.

For all its convention, The Haven’s ambiance bursts with a Pomonan mystique. It whispers through the ornamental cornice of the ceiling, the murals in the corridor and the backstage, and it practically screams through the gallery of broken instruments on the westside wall. An electric keyboard. A rust-eaten guitar. A translucent cimbal. Signatures are scrawled across their glossy fragments and of the dozens of names on each instrument, none of them bear any celebrity. Celebrity is for The Haven’s neighboring venues—The Fox Theater and The Glass House. So as before, The Haven is for the obscure.

The nucleus of California’s indie rock circuit lies somewhere between the velveteen cabarets of Los Angeles and the backyard jubilees of San Diego. But in the foothills, music is made from The Haven. Even in this prosaic land, there is art. And it is this doctrine that has permeated in the minds of Inland youth, who are no less idealistic than their coastal counterparts. They too fantasize about lush days on the beach and rosewater rhapsodies. Where troubles don’t carry past the advent of a perfect wave. Where hardships are no more than parables to be resolved. The proverbial California promised to them in old rock n’ roll records. In the inlands, there are no beach tides, no parables, no oblivion, but there is rock n’ roll—visceral and raw. And that’s enough. So, they make the weekly pilgrimage to The Haven, with scrupulously teased hair and gothically-lined eyes. In sagging cargos and crisp brogues, they stand on the wall and simmer. Rosy-cheeked and starry-eyed. Waiting for the first band to play.

Tonight, Amaryllis is it.

Amaryllis is a fresh band who emerged at the beginning of the year. They are one of innumerable local artists who sprung from the pandemic. In somnolence, there is artistry and in the Inland Empire, the bands are as convalescent as the citrus. Effervescing by the twos, the threes, the fours. Every month, every week, every hour. Adopting a reverent pastiche of shoegaze and britpop or metal and goth rock. More often than not, they integrate surf rock as well—trickling in plucky guitar riffs, upbeat scales, and lyrics about Graces made of seafoam and heartstrings. But almost always, they favor some carnation of a coarse, alternative sound. This is all true of Amaryllis—a sonic amalgam of groove, goth, and surf rock, with a strong bossa nova influence for good measure. They’ve played their first, second, and now third show at The Haven. Their overture is a cover of “This Monkey’s Gone to Heaven” by the Pixies. Something melodramatic, provocative, and an apt precursor for their set. “Numb,” their second song is a tender melody about heartache and juxtaposed by their third song, the exuberant “Puppy Monkey Baby.” They punctuate the set with “I Know It’s Over”, a contemplative ballad sequined with esoteric harmonies and a weeping guitar.

Rell Sol, the interim manager of The Haven and the erstwhile companion of Rosilles-Tessier, is the lead guitarist of Amaryllis. The pair are alumni of the School of Arts and Enterprise, a burgeoning charter school in Downtown Pomona just two blocks shy of The Haven. Many of The Haven’s employees and patrons are SAE-bred. Moony laureates who graduate to be sculptors or auteurs or maestros. They run The Haven. Behind ticket booths, behind technician boards, behind cameras, behind guitars.

Sol’s mother, Jill Carol, is here tonight, too. She was one of those prescient artists from the Colony’s early years who saw the land as a canvas and not a curse. As an artist and a photographer, Carol’s primary subjects are the lurid contenders of Pomona’s lucha libre tournaments. Tonight, she’s made an exception, orbiting the stage, taking snapshots of Amaryllis throughout each song. About halfway through the finale, Carol hands Sol a lighter and an incense stick. He wedges the stick to the truss of his guitar, raises the lighter to the end, and it licks the flame once, twice, three times. Crowned by tendrils of smoke, Sol takes his solo to the rapture of the audience.

“He meant essential oils, I think,” Carol laughs afterwards. “But he said incense, so we made it work.”

The next band to play is the Velcro Wallets, who are from Rancho Cucamonga and are frequent acolytes of The Haven. Their sound is soft rock and bedroom pop, overlaid with jazzy synth and syncopation. They have a small, but zealous fanbase evidenced by the coterie of teens in the audience who squeal as the band mounts the stage. The Velcro Wallets are something of an Inland motif, popping up around the basin in resin stickers and pin-back buttons. Their songs are fast and vociferous. Their parliament is rough and absurdist. When they take the stage, the bassist barks at the crowd, “You can mosh, just don’t be a dick about it.” With that commencement, they blaze through their singles, “Bitcoin” and “Countless,” closing out with a cover of Los Retros’ “Loop of Love.” The Velcro Wallets are a lodestone, picking up names and admiration wherever they go, a magnetism they owe to their mesmeric stage presence. The bassist is the pinnacle, brisking about his plot on the stage as if he hasn’t left the mosh pit himself. The guitarist glides through the scales of “Bitcoin” and “Countless” while sporting a Daliesque clock dial mask (a talisman he is rarely seen without). The pianist is the most expressive, albeit, the most stationary (save for the drummer, of course) and punctuates each chord with charismatic jolts. They perform with a symmetry contradictory, but not incompatible, to the protean nature of their music. This sort of flamboyance is another penchant of Inland bands, playing not only to be heard, but to be remembered.

And the bands in the Inland Empire inspire each other. One band plays and galvanizes the next. The next band plays and rouses the other. All life here is this way, always swelling and waning and swelling again. The bands are no different. They share an urgency metabolic to all Inland rock; scoring this terrain with their aptitude and their hunger. In her acclaimed essay, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream”, Joan Didion once said of this land that “every voice seems a scream”, but for the Haveners, every voice is a song. Not the sylvans of the old country, nor the cosmopolitans of the new, but something bold, singular, and surreal.