There’s something quietly radical about a Sunday afternoon rock show. Especially one that summons the greatest, locally-produced hits of Bay Area rock and puts them through an orchestral music machine.
That’s the spirit animating the Renegade Orchestra’s return Jan. 11, when the ensemble fills the Fairfax Pavilion with a 15-piece surge of strings, rhythm and Bay Area memory.
“This is the big group—15 people on stage all at once—and it’s everybody’s favorite songs,” says Rebecca Roudman, the orchestra’s cellist and organizing force behind the project.
If that sounds unwieldy, it’s because it is. Renegade Orchestra is the largest and most ambitious of several interlocking projects Roudman and her husband, arranger and conductor Jason Eckl, have built over years of relentless gigging and creative restlessness. Their best-known outfit, Dirty Cello, may be the gateway drug, but Renegade is the maximalist expression of their instrumental endeavors—string players “rocking their butts off,” as Roudman puts it—backed by a full rhythm section.
“It’s the opposite of a sleepy candlelit music concert,” she jokes. “We’re not pleasant. We are fun, and we’re backed by a rock band.”
The Fairfax Pavilion itself is part of the point. Built in 1920 and perched just uphill from downtown Fairfax, the hall carries its own ghosts—Jefferson Airplane among them. “‘Somebody to Love’ was played there,” Eckl notes, referring to an audience fave in the orchestra’s repertoire. “We have a bunch of songs that have some kind of connection to that area—including Janis Joplin songs that she played there.”
That historical tether is central to Renegade Orchestra’s current playlist, which leans hard into Bay Area lineage. Eckl approaches the material with a mix of scholarship and showmanship. “There’s the history research to make sure I’m getting the pieces that were supposed to be in there,” he says. “I try to understand what the artist was trying to get out of it, and then put our own stamp on it.”
This philosophy is evident in the group’s reinvention of Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes-Benz,” transformed from an a cappella plea into a full-bodied bluegrass-inflected arrangement. “Sometimes me and Jason would be talking, and I’d say, ‘I would love to see this as a bluegrass song,’” Roudman recalls. “And then Jason goes, ‘All right, let me see what I can do.’”
The result isn’t parody or novelty; it’s a pitch-perfect translation. Eckl knows when it’s working by watching the room. “I look out at the audience and see if their spirit is going back to when they heard it originally,” he says. “When folks come up and say, ‘In 1963, I heard this live,’ I know we’ve done it right.”
Tickets are $28.52 for the Jan. 11 show, which runs from 2 to 3:30pm at the Fairfax Pavilion, 142 Bolinas Rd.
