Burning Uke, Man

BY JIM D’VILLE | FROM THE SUMMER 2025 ISSUE OF UKULELE MAGAZINE

The pilgrimage to Nevada’s Black Rock Desert for the hedonistic counter-culture confab known as Burning Man started innocently on Baker Beach in San Francisco. On the summer solstice in 1986, members of the San Francisco Cacophony Society burned a wooden effigy of a man on the beach—thus creating an annual event that now attracts up to 90,000 free spirits to the Nevada desert each Labor Day weekend.

Seventeen years later at a 2003 music camp gathering of Ukulele Club of Santa Cruz members over Thanksgiving weekend, group co-founder Andy Andrews raised the idea of a late-summer ukulele campout on the rugged Pacific Ocean shoreline near Big Sur, about two hours south of the site of the first Burning Man gathering in San Francisco. In a scene culled right from the paranormal annals of the classic television show One Step Beyond, club member Patrick Fullan had a foreshadowing dream: a giant ukulele effigy consumed by flames. This was just after the Santa Cruz club’s co-founder Peter Thomas had told him about his experience at that year’s Burning Man festival. The die was cast for Burning Uke.

Andrews went right to work on the ukulele effigy. According to Thomas, “Andy located scale-model plans for a Martin uke, and under the leadership of cabinetmaker Geno Galli, he and other club members built a 12-foot-tall ukulele to burn at the campout.”

The following year, the club hosted the largest ukulele festival in the world, 2004’s Uke Fest West. Seven hundred ukulele enthusiasts showed up for the weekend, far exceeding any attendance expectations. Watching over the entire weekend’s festivities was another giant ukulele, which was also burned. The incendiary timeline continued for several years. “In 2005 Geno and crew built a giant Kamaka pineapple ukulele that we burned, and in 2006 we burned a replica of a Maccaferri Carnival plastic uke,” says Thomas.

There’s a reason Santa Cruz is the epicenter of the West Coast ukulele scene. Not only are there several hundred ukulele players strumming around the area, but it also boasts some crackerjack luthiers. One of them, Tony Graziano, has been making ukuleles for nearly 40 years. As they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and the Burning Uke crew set their sights on Graziano.

“In 2007, Geno and crew made a giant Graziano ukulele (for Burning Uke),” says Thomas. “But, due to the extended drought, the California State Park Service banned all fires at the site.” The giant Graziano was spared, and the Burning Uke experience was extinguished. Galli, the ringleader of the giant uke builders, died of cancer in 2008. Today, his last ukulele stands on display in the lobby of the Rio Theatre in Santa Cruz as a memorial.

Burning Uke would continue in 2009 with a smaller footprint, as a standard-size concert ukulele was burned. The following year saw the arrival of a reusable effigy with club member Jay Holiday’s construction of the Iron Uke. “The Iron Uke was fabricated from metal rods bent into the shape of a ukulele,” says Thomas. “Glass rope was attached to the framework with wire, and the whole thing was doused with a combination of accelerants that would burn for 10-15 minutes.”

The Iron Uke was burned again in 2012–14 at the Burning Uke site in the hamlet of Boulder Creek in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Following a series of non-burn years, the Burning Ukelegacy ended in 2019 when Holiday’s Iron Uke was resurrected and burned one final time.

In 2010, however, a new musical gathering had emerged. Smoldering Uke, a weekend retreat in the Carmel Valley, took shape for those wanting an early spring non-camping event. Ukulele magazine contributor and longtime Santa Cruz club member Sandor Nagyszalanczy co-organizes the event, which took place in March and is now in its 14th year. “Some club members suggested that we create another event that would be roughly six months away from Burning Uke each year,” says Nagyszalanczy. “Since it would take place in late winter, it was clear that this wouldn’t be a campout, but rather an indoor event.” Hence the “Smoldering.”

This year the Ukulele Club of Santa Cruz is resurrecting Burning Uke with a new variation of the iconic campout party to be held the weekend of August 8–10 in Watsonville, California.