The walls of 10341 San Pablo Ave. in El Cerrito are coated in decades of music history. Nearly 50 years ago, musician and archivist Chris Strachwitz bought the modest building and began filling it. He had spent decades recording musicians across the U.S. creating songs specific to their culture and traditions: tejano, zydeco, cajun, blues. At the front of his new building, he opened a record store, selling primarily his collection of roots music, but later jazz, country, folk, zydeco, cajun, gospel and more.
Strachwitz invited his friend, Les Blank, to set up a film studio in an empty office upstairs, and they became frequent collaborators. The annexed back of the building, invisible from the outside but massive on the inside, became Strachwitz’s workspace for his burgeoning record label, Arhoolie Records.
“There was a lot of love in them, for their subjects and their collaborators and the people they documented and the culture that they documented,” said Clarke Noone, an archivist who worked with Strachwitz in the final years of his life. “That animates how we are entering this next chapter.”
For decades, the store, the film studio and the record label existed in harmony, paying cheap rent to Strachwitz and attracting fans from around the world. The store would sell the label’s music, and conversations with musicians would spin off into documentaries. Strachwitz sold Arhoolie Records to the Smithsonian in 2016, but he formed the Arhoolie Foundation to document and celebrate roots music, often collaborating with Les Blank Films. The foundation hired Noone in 2022 to catalog Strachwitz’s life and work.
But Strachwitz died in May 2023, leaving the building on San Pablo Avenue to his extended family and the future of its shared tenants in flux. The record store, film nonprofit and music foundation worried about how they would afford to pay rising rents if the building was sold to a new landlord. They worried, too, about preserving the decades of memories on the walls.
In the record store, the walls are collaged with tour posters and LP covers. And in the archiving area, CDs are stacked in neat shelves, and rows of 78s are piled, alphabetized and carefully tucked into shelves behind thin silver chains, which protect them from tumbling to the ground during an earthquake. Upstairs, the walls of Les Blank’s former studio are tacked with postcards and photos, leaving almost no white space. Oddities from his movies—a toy car puppet dangling from the ceiling, a shoe encased in resin—create a sense of inspired chaos.
“The synergy of all the organizations working together, that would be impossible to recreate, I think,” Noone said. “If that breaks, it’s like glass. You can’t put that back together.”
After months of negotiations, the building’s tenants struck a deal with its new owners to purchase 10341 San Pablo Ave. Harrod Blank, Les Blank’s son, who took over Les Blank Films after his father died, put a down payment on the building in November 2024. By April, Blank had to raise more than $2 million to fulfill the market-rate purchase agreement.
With the help of donors, the three organizations succeeded in keeping their space, Blank said. Much of the funding came from one individual, though Blank declined to give that person’s name or the amount they contributed. “I almost fell on the floor,” he noted.
The Arhoolie Foundation and Les Blank Films are now co-owners of the building, with Down Home Music as a tenant. But much of Down Home Music’s inventory was left to Strachwitz’s heirs. After it was appraised for an “astronomical value,” according to Blank, the store is still in the process of deciding whether to purchase it back.
A GoFundMe set up by Blank raised $67,000 to be split between the Arhoolie Foundation, Les Blank Films and Down Home Music. Some of that will go toward purchasing new inventory for the store, and Down Home will ask for donations as well.
But Blank and Noone, along with Down Home Music co-manager JC Garrett and Arhoolie Foundation executive director Adam Machado, have an ambitious vision for remaking the entire space. Noone and Blank wanted to keep the three organizations together to preserve the legacies of Strachwitz and Les Blank, and the culture of collaboration they modeled in their work. Now, they are hoping to extend that out to the community that supported them in their time of need.
“It’s clear for all three of us that we wanna be together, so it’s sort of a marriage of the three entities,” Harrod Blank said. “And we are going up our game, we all agree.”
Blank recalled his first meaningful memories of the building, when he was in his 20s and making a documentary on art cars called Wild Wheels.
“Chris would work late till about three in the morning doing the Arhoolie stuff, and then I would keep working until sunrise,” Blank said. “I did that for two years, so I grew up in that building, and I watched how much good work was created in that building and what it represents culturally. It’s a triumvirate of these entities that do so much.”
Each of the three entities has a vision. Noone, with the Arhoolie Foundation, wants to create more educational opportunities around the practice of archiving. Noone, Machado and Blank also want to convert a segment of Strachwitz’s former property into a space where an artist or performer could live and work in collaboration with the foundation and film studio.
Though the record store’s inventory is still in flux, the art that adorns its walls belongs to Down Home Music. A 2018 exhibit in the San Francisco Airport highlighted the work of Arhoolie and Down Home Music, and one of the SFO curators recreated the exhibit on the store’s walls.
“The people that work here, they are all like docents of this museum,” Blank said. “You can ask them any question you want about the music that’s in that store, and they know all the answers.”
But Garrett, Down Home Music’s co-manager, wants more for the space.
“I don’t want to be just a museum, a collection of oddities,” Garrett said. “I’d like to have it be more vibrant and living.”
The building’s tenants agreed that the Down Home Music space needs more room for performers and live events, so they plan to reorganize the store space. Long term, Garrett wants to invite a rotating crew of vinyl collectors or sellers to the space. He is inspired by Crossroads Music in Portland, where 35 collectors hawk their merchandise in a shared space.
Blank wants to string lights up in Down Home Music’s parking lot and screen films on the building’s blank walls, setting up food trucks and chairs in the parking lot for impromptu festivals. The area is primed for it, Machado said.
“There’s a little bit of a corridor kind of opening up where our building is, across the street,” Machado said, pointing to pop-up music events at nearby businesses Banter Wine Bar and Little Hill Lounge. “There’s a little bit of a buzz happening. As we tell people that we’re gonna add another piece to that, there’s just excitement already there in the air.”
“Just getting a building was step one. We’re now on step two,” Blank said. “We have a long way to go, but we have the security that we now control our destinies in it.”
