KQED News

Families are gradually moving into newly built homes in Altadena after the Eaton fire, which largely turned the Los Angeles community into ashes in early 2025. 

While dirt lots still dominate Altadena’s west side, live music shows and throngs of teenagers flocking to see them have been filling the void. 

“People like having something to do, somewhere to go,” said 16-year-old Elise Lamond, a guitarist in the Altadena-based quintet Last Friday.

On one recent summer night, Lamond watched Persona Non Grata, a young, multi-ethnic seven-member music collective influenced by funk and Afrobeat.

The mood was celebratory. A few dozen kids crowded the stage — a freshly painted back porch. 

“The shows were a little smaller in the beginning, and then slowly more and more people started to become aware of them,” said Lamond, who’s been involved in the scene from the start.

Within weeks after the Eaton Fire, local music promoter Matt Chait and his colleague Sandra Denver were scouting for stages amid the scorched lots of Altadena. Now, shows are popping up a few times a month in backyards, parking lots, at a local veterans’ hall and other unconventional venues. 

The upstart music scene is a confluence of different initiatives meant to help fire survivors and musicians. 

First, nonprofit Altadena Musicians formed to get musical instruments back in the hands of artists who lost gear. While volunteering with that organization, Chait and Denver launched Backyard Party. The aim was to give teenage musicians opportunities to perform, be creative and have a place to socialize after the disaster.

“If they want to talk about [the fire], they absolutely should,” Chait said. “If they want to write songs about it, they absolutely should.” 

But because many of the young musicians directly impacted by the fire say they do not want to be identified as “victims” or otherwise be defined by it, Chait said the music space is for the young musicians to grow in whichever ways they choose.

“The families and parents are already still dealing with it,” he said. 

“If they want to move past it and just sing about cars or boys or whatever the hell they want to sing about, they should do that.”

Fourteen-year-old Sadie Denver of the Altadena band Last Friday said the early backyard shows raised thousands of dollars for fire-impacted kids and their families, including three of her own bandmates.

“We wanted to do fundraisers for it because we knew so many people who were affected. Everyone was affected,” Denver said.

On a recent weekday night, the band’s five members crowded into a small, one-room backyard studio to rehearse at the home of 17-year-old drummer Charlie Bohlman.

As each member slowly develops songwriting chops, for now they lean on covers by contemporary punk and alt-rock bands like Wet Leg, Dream Nails and South Pasadena’s Linda Lindas. Tonight they’re also running through PJ Harvey’s ‘90s indie rock classic, “50ft Queenie.” 

Denver’s father, Nate, is a local fire chief and veteran noise punk musician. Her mom, Sandra, is also a Los Angeles indie music scene veteran and co-founder of Backyard Party.

“My focus really is the teenagers and trying to help them create the scene and get to know each other,” she said. Other teenagers help them run the shows. 

“They run the door, they’re even the bouncers,” Denver said, laughing.

While Sandra Denver sometimes collects the $5 or $10 admission at the door, the adults mostly keep their distance at these all-ages shows, while the kids, depending on the band, crowd up against the makeshift stage.

When the retro garage rock band The Lawnchairs played in a backyard in Los Angeles’ Highland Park neighborhood, kids busted out in song and kicked up a gentle, slow-moving mosh pit on the grass. 

Fifteen-year-old Ynez Brice, Last Friday’s lead guitarist, said the backyard shows are a place to put away your phones, make new connections and feel part of something bigger. 

“People that don’t know each other, I see them coming together and talking with each other,” Brice said. 

She said the shows foster the feeling that teens can “talk with someone … no matter what.”

When Matt Chait launched Backyard Party, his expectations were modest. Over the last year, it’s grown into a donor-supported nonprofit with a newly launched summer program, offering kids and parents tips on music gear, songwriting and the music business.

“When there’s a music scene that’s being built, the bands are generally the center of it. But they don’t really run it,” said Chait, adding that the organization does promotion so bands can earn up to several hundred bucks a show. 

Beyond the graphic design and booking services, Chait said they provide a bigger service to the kids. 

“There’s such an incredible amount of social education that goes on with something as simple as a punk show.” 

Despite being in multiple bands and formally educating themselves in music, some of the young musicians are noncommittal about pursuing a career in music. 

“If at some point I can get to the point where we’re like ‘Oh, we can have normal gigs, and we can get paid sometimes,’ I would like that,” Ynez Brice said.

“But I’d [also] rather have a job. I know I love music, but there’s also other things I like.”

Drummer Charlie Bohlman said he’s eager to get in a van and hit the road with Last Friday, or with the metallic hardcore band he also drums for called Love at First Fight. 

“Dude, I would love to have a career in music. I have a backup plan too — to just leave and travel the world,” Bohlman said.

Backyard Party-sponsored shows will continue throughout the summer and well into the school year.

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Some of the young Altadena area musicians have moved back after the fire; others have left the burn scar behind. Right now, they’re more concerned with the usual teenage challenges — crushes, fashion and school — and that next live show.

Listen to this and more in-depth storytelling by subscribing to The California Report Magazine podcast. 

For over a century, dams have blocked the Eel River’s natural flow of water in Northern California. Now, tribes, environmentalists and utility companies have come up with a plan to tear down the dams, as part of the “Two Basin Solution.” Reporter Sam Anderson found out what a free-running Eel River would mean for local Round Valley Indian Tribes, industry and wildlife.

After the 2025 Eaton Fire destroyed thousands of homes in Los Angeles, music lovers organized fundraisers to reconnect artists with instruments lost in the fire. Now live music shows in Altadena’s vacant lots and backyards have sprouted a new scene, where teenage punk and indie bands draw audiences from across Southern California. Reporter Steven Cuevas has the story.

Pinnacles National Park doesn’t have the name recognition as Yosemite or Joshua Tree, but it stokes just as much wonder. For our Hidden Gems series, KQED outdoors reporter Sarah Wright traveled to this small park just an hour east of Monterey to find out why it’s worth a summer getaway.

During the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, PG&E was conducting a routine inspection of a hydroelectric dam on Northern Mendocino’s Eel River — when it discovered a problem.

A key component in their power generation system needed a pricey fix — one that could cost the utility up to $15 million. 

The power company already knew that the Potter Valley Project, which included two dams on the Eel River, didn’t balance economically. It barely powered 750 homes and was expensive to operate. So when no buyers came forward to offload the 100-year-old hydroelectric system, PG&E submitted an application to the federal government to decommission the project — in other words, take down the dams for good.

“ PG&E likes dams, right? I mean, we are a hydro generating company,” said Janet Walther, director of hydro licensing and compliance for the company. “However, there are times, as Potter Valley is one of those, where a dam may no longer make sense.” 

The reasons for the proposed dam removals may seem mundane and practical, but the change would be existential for the local industry, wildlife and people. If the dam removals do happen, the Eel River would be transformed into the longest free-flowing river in California. But the planned removals, which wouldn’t take place until the 2030s, are vulnerable to political whims and bureaucratic obstacles.

“We need our free-flowing water,” said Nicole Whipple, member of the Round Valley Indian Tribes based in Covelo, a remote section of Northern Mendocino County. She said that for centuries, her people were “very wealthy in their food and resources” because of the Eel River, which provided them with salmon, Pacific lamprey, freshwater clams, steelhead and trout. 

But when settlers came, the damming of the river cut off her community’s ability to provide food for themselves. The prospect of taking the dams down means being able to reclaim their ancestral relationship to the land. 

“It’s really important for our indigenous people to be connected to our culture. And so for us to be well and to be supported, we need our culture back,” Whipple said.

The Eel River stretches nearly 200 miles north, from its headwaters in the rugged forests of Mendocino National Forest to Humboldt Bay, where it empties into the Pacific Ocean. 

Two dams near its headwaters restrict the flow, forming Lake Pillsbury and the Van Arsdale Reservoir. For over 100 years, these dams have generated electricity via the Potter Valley Project. 

After PG&E announced they would not be renewing their license to operate the Potter Valley Project, a multi-year debate ensued, with government agencies, county water boards, environmental organizations and Native American Tribes vying for a seat at the table to decide what would happen next.

Conservation groups like California Trout and Friends of the Eel River pushed for unobstructed flows to benefit local fish like native Coho, Chinook salmon and Steelhead trout.

Salmon populations on the Eel have declined 95% from pre-Gold Rush levels, where annual salmon runs once numbered in the millions. 

After more than five years of debate about the prospect of removing the dams, a collection of government agencies, environmental groups, tribes and the power company PG&E reached a compromise: the Two Basin Solution. 

Under this agreement, the dams would come down, local fish would gain access to hundreds of miles of new habitat in the headwaters, and some water diversions would continue. A new management agency was created: The Eel Russian Project Authority (ERPA). 

Alicia Hamann, Friends of the Eel River’s executive director, called the agreement a “really big deal” because so many different interests settled on it, and because an undammed river would increase native fish habitat by hundreds of miles. 

Round Valley Indian Tribes have a seat on ERPA’s five-member board, alongside Sonoma Water, the County of Sonoma and the Mendocino County Inland Water and Power Commission.

“We finally get to play the lead role on our land, the place where our ancestors came from,” Round Valley Tribal President Joseph Parker said, adding that they have been advocating for dam removal since the 1970s. 

Under the plan, the local industry’s needs are also taken into consideration. South of the Eel River basin in Sonoma County, local winegrowers and farmers have long relied on water diversions from the Eel River into the Russian River in order to water their crops. 

As part of the new agreement, ERPA would lease a portion of the river water from the Round Valley Indian Tribes, who would receive a fee for continued water diversions into the Russian River. A new pump station would be built to facilitate the new diversions. ERPA would determine the amount of water diverted from the Eel to the Russian based on seasonal water levels and state and federal laws. 

Round Valley Indian Tribes’ attorney Erica Costa said that the tribes already hold federal water rights to the Eel River. What’s changing is that state-based water rights currently controlled by PG&E would transfer back to them.

“For over a century, this water has left the Eel River basin and gone somewhere else at the expense of the tribes,” Costa said. “So one of the main goals for the tribe and the water diversion agreement is switching that paradigm.”

When the Potter Valley Project was constructed in the early 1900s, its hydroelectric power supply was needed for the growing nearby city of Ukiah, the county seat of Mendocino. 

Even though the power plant was taken offline in 2021, the physical dam removal is still a long way off, remaining vulnerable to political whims.

In April 2026, the President Trump-appointed Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, announced a plan that would have derailed the dam removal, saying that a Southern California water district wanted to buy the Potter Valley Project. But the plan was ultimately rejected by federal regulators.

In the summer of 2025, PG&E submitted its application to surrender and decommission the Potter Valley Project to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. That application is currently under review, a process that will take several years. According to PG&E, there is currently an open National Environmental Policy Act comment period, which ends on Sept. 18, 2026 (comments can be submitted online). 

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If the physical dam removals on the Eel River go according to plan, California’s Eel River will be among the U.S.’s longest free-flowing rivers.