Russell Mark’s Neighborhood Rock Opera

In Pasadena, where civic life moves at a leisurely clip and even the city planners sometimes seem to speak in lowercase, musician Russell Mark has decided to attempt something nobody asked for but everyone, he suspects, might secretly want: a rock opera built from the daily hellos of the people who live here.

The project exists thanks to a City of Pasadena arts grant—a fortunate discovery that Mark describes not as an artistic epiphany but as “finding out there was an arts grant in Pasadena and thinking, well… what could I do?”

Mark, a genial presence with the unfazed demeanor of a former summer-camp counselor/music director guy (because he is one), first encountered the grant while poking around online after performing at ArtNight, the city’s sprawling semiannual arts crawl. A mini-grant came with that gig, and a real grant, he learned, required workshops, paperwork, and—small detail—an idea.

“It had to be something I’d never done before,” he says. “I’ve never written a rock opera. I’ve never written for string quartet. So, naturally, I decided to write a rock opera for a string quartet.”

The quartet is non-negotiable: his wife, Mika, is a cellist devoted to chamber music. Their own band, the Nextdoors, plays all over Pasadena. But the rock opera should be a kind of hybrid creature—sort of like Pete Townshend meets Debussy at Vroman’s Bookstore—that Mark is shaping into something like “Tommy’ for the 626.”

Its theme, knowingly modest, is the simplest of human exchanges: “Hey, how’s it going?” This is not the Pasadena of Rose Queens and Caltech and parades. This is the Pasadena of checkout lines, gym parking lots, and neighbors collecting Amazon packages in their slippers—a snapshot of the times.

To begin, Mark did what any self-respecting artist facing a deadline does: he wrote the opening number. “You just have to start,” he says, invoking the detective from Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, who takes action before knowing why. “The fourth person who walked by? That was my song.”

Now he is out in the world again, talking to the fourth person—and the fifth, and the fortieth. He has set up a booth at local events, including the recent Doo Dah Party, leaning on an intuition formed in those summer-camp years: that people will tell you more than you expect if you simply ask. Upcoming months will bring appearances at the Pasadena Heritage Christmas Party and pop-ups with local civic notables. He’s gathering stories about how people are doing in the first truly bewildering year of the post-everything era, 2025.

Participation is remarkably analog: conversation, cake, curiosity. But for structure, there’s a website — www.russellmarkmusic.com/pasadena — where residents can hear the first prelude, take a survey, or offer support. “If you keep the summer-camp mentality,” Mark says, “you’re in a good place.”