MARTINEZ, CA (MPG) - Recorded music played on while more than 40 years of accumulated memorabilia, art and plants were removed from Armando’s last Sunday. Roy Jeans, and long-time friend Eloise Cotton closed the Marina Vista location that became a local legend for live Bay Area band performances, February 10.         

Armando’s featured “jazz, blues, bluegrass, folk and everything in between, everything except over-played typical bar rock and roll.” 

The final performances were fully booked, with lines of nostalgic music fans extending down the block.  “Yesterday was a big love-fest. It’s amazing. So many people have a close connection,”  Cotton observed. “I guess we don’t realize how much something means to us until it is gone.” 

However, the show may not over. Jeans is looking at locations in or near Martinez, and nearly 900 Facebook followers are watching for where to go when he finds one.

 “I can’t talk about it right now,” he said. “I’ve already had calls from the Empress in Vallejo and the Presidio Yacht Club in Sausalito for shows there.”

Wherever they go, their music sensibility is bound to be contagious. 

“Armando’s” was named for Jeans’ Italian grandfather who owned a Martinez restaurant by the same name when Jeans was a boy, with the same middle name. 

“My grandfather was the chef. He would cook the meal and then come out of the kitchen, serve the food and sing,” Jeans recalled. Without a plan to do so, Jeans carried on that tradition.

While working as a house painter, he started a frame shop and gallery business where musicians and friends gathered for parties. “The police came and said, ‘You can’t keep doing this. You have to get a liquor license.’” 

He did, and Armando’s gradually morphed into the place to be for live music in Contra Costa County.

“Every kid wants to build a fort. Maybe that is what I did,” Jeans pondered about building a business with music and naming it after his grandfather.

Jeans credits Cotton with having a better ear for music and being able to make quick decisions about the sound of a band, while he listens more closely to the lyrics. 

Regardless of the process, they have developed their talent for spotting talent. The two met in college at Chico State. They became friends because of their mutual interest in bands of the early 1970s. “We used to talk about how we could do it better. Where we would put the stage or improve the sound,” Cotton commented. 

Although they pursued separate paths after graduation, each eventually returned to the Bay Area music scene. 

Jeans talks about the high points and great music. “There are times when the band is hitting on all cylinders, and no one is talking. It is impossible to be blasé about that,” he remarked. “The bands love to come here. It’s the sound quality, and they like people listening.”

Jeans said he hopes to find a place that can accommodate a stage about twice as big as the one at the old location recreate a better Armando's. "It will have the same name," he remarked.

While loading up a bright red pickup truck with Armando's notoriously mismatched chairs, Roy Jeans’ son Hazel said, “The fate of Armando’s is not over. The show is not over. We are looking forward to a new and better Armando’s.”