Addison Sartino ‘Pulled it Together,’ Creating a Memorable Show For Fans, Despite Illness, a Broken Trailer, and a New Drummer

We walked into the police station, and the only other person there had a curly blonde mullet, blue vest, and septum. 

“Hey, were you just at the Greeting Committee concert?”

The guy said yeah, that he had come by himself from San Jose to see her. We asked if his window had been smashed too, and he said it was gonna be a cold drive home. We exchanged sympathies, and it got quiet.

“It was a great fucking concert though.”

The police – one with a mullet, and the other more pregnant than I knew it was safe to be – called us over, saying it was time to file a report. We didn’t see that guy again, but he was right. It was a good fucking concert. The night ended with dumpster diving in the Tenderloin, but I would do the whole thing over again if it meant another Greeting Committee concert.

But we’re not at the end yet.

The night started at four pm. I was a little more than two hours away from going home. It was at that point in an eight-hour retail shift when the real world starts to feel impossibly far away, you’re convinced you’ll be trapped forever in between the candles and t-shirts, and your coworker starts an extended monologue about her long-distance boyfriend. My phone buzzed and I ran, dropping the merch I had been folding to check the message. It said that my friend’s partner had dropped, and asked if I wanted to go see the Greeting Committee in the city. I didn’t know the band that well, but I responded “YES PLEASE DEAR GOD.”

Two hours later, I counted out the cash register and slammed the safe door shut, forgetting half my stuff and running out the door, where a car and a sandwich was waiting for me. Five of us piled in, and we went, over the Bay Bridge and into the city.

When the concert started, my friends pulled me, pushing and shoving in front of me while I stepped on toes and apologized sheepishly, until we got ten feet from the stage. That close, we could see the sweat dripping out of the guitarists beanie, and the bass drum reverberated all the way down my diaphragm. Everyone around us was jumping and screaming- the kind of GA pit where you’re not sure if you’re gonna mosh or make out with someone. When lead singer, Addison Sartino, started air guitaring, everyone collectively lost their shit.

Addison Sartino is hands-down one of the best performers I’ve seen live. She led the crowd in one of those concerts where hazy pictures and videos fail to communicate what it was like to be there, one of those concerts that makes people fall in love with what music can do. She sang, and she brought everyone through the rush of falling in love for the first time and then the crashing when the world is ending and finally that contentedness when nothing else matters but jumping and screaming until your feet bleed and your voice goes raw. Addison Sartino had that whole venue ready to make out with her, kill for her, or follow her anywhere.

The friends I was with had gone to their concert last year, and came home saying that none of us could possibly understand the religious experience they’d just had. This time, both of them knew all of the words, living and dying on every song. At separate points, Sartino stared directly at both of them and sang with them. I am not a lesbian, but even I understand that there are some lesbians who have simply ascended, left this world to become saints, or Jesus himself, in leather crop tops. The way both of my friends collapsed when she looked away – I think I know what it must look like at the gates of Heaven.

The other band members had their own moments, too. At one point, Pierce Turcotte, bassist and original member, bent over and spun in a circle while shredding, hair whipping everywhere and the crowd going crazy. Sartino announced that they were gonna do a jazzy number, and Brandon Yangmi pulled out a saxophone and started riffing, to the wild enthusiasm of everyone there.

The Greeting Committee is one of those bands that got its start in high school talent shows, teenage hormones, dreams, and the type of friendship that can only be formed when you’re fourteen and in the middle of Missouri. They’ve been performing for ten years, with ups and downs. At one point, Sartino said that they’d been having one of the hardest years since they started. Their trailer broke, their drummer left and nine years later, they were wondering what  they were still doing. But they don’t perform tired,or worn down. Sartino called all Greeting Committee fans “cheeseballs.” I think it’s because they perform like they did when they were teenagers– like they still have everything to bring to the world, like they believe in the love songs and the heartbreak, like they know they’re ridiculous but would want it no other way.

Towards the end of the concert, Sartino gestured for us all to come closer. She stopped singing, and the band took over, playing louder and faster than they had all night. She got us all to raise our hands, and then she just jumped, straight into the crowd, right under the NO STAGE DIVING sign.

She came back to the stage- all of us panting and shaking, and they sang two more songs, one of them slow, just Sartino and the Turcotte, and the last one one of their early breakouts. Then they were done, gone, and the lights turned on to illuminate my friends, who all looked like they couldn’t process what was happening. Lizzo started playing, and we took it as our queue to walk out of the venue.

We got to our car, and the window was smashed in, our wallets, jackets, and laptop gone. Still shaking from the concert, we started laughing maniacally, and shivering in the cold. My keys have an AirTag on them, so vaguely delusional, we followed the location to a dumpster where we thought they might’ve been thrown in. There was a bit of an adventure featuring a large black dog, a full karaoke bar, and a spooked security guard,but there ended up just being two of us, climbing a fence to look through some random apartment building’s dumpster. We didn’t find our stuff, and weren’t willing to look that hard, so we drove back home over the Bay Bridge, our hair whipping in the wind.

My keys, apparently, weren’t in that dumpster. Since that, they’ve been moving around: to Ocean Beach, Golden Gate Park, and all over the Tenderloin. I don’t know who took them, and I’m not that invested in finding out. So until they end up in a dumpster, they’ll keep up on their adventures around San Francisco – the city where dumb East Bay kids go to get their windows broken, have religious experiences, and realize one of their new favorite bands. 

Article by Cole Haddock

Photos by Eliza Scheer