Aaron Seeman still smells like propane. Right now, he is reclining in a Union Square Starbucks, but thirty minutes ago, he lit his head on fire.

"It's been a while since I played on the streets," he says, strapping on his accordion in front of the cable car turnaround on Powell Street in San Francisco. At his feet is a gym bag stuffed with three Donald Duck hats, the kind with the squeaky rubber bills you can get at Disneyland. One of them is hooked up to a propane tank.

He needs a lighter to get things started, so he approaches two tough-looking city kids hanging out next to the glow of a storefront window display. "Hey, do you guys have a lighter?" he asks. They nod, and one of them digs into his pocket. He bows down a little and has them light the bulky wick protruding from the top of the hat.

Whoosh.

"Oh SHIT!" they yelp, and scramble out of the way as the hat shoots out a vertical flame. Unfazed, Seeman stands upright, turns around, and begins wailing away on his instrument as passersby snap camera phone photos.

After years of being maligned as an ugly and undesirable instrument, the accordion is creeping back into modern music, albeit in some very weird ways. It is hard to say where and when the accordion started to gather steam after many years of languishing in Lawrence Welk's shadow. An educated guess might link it to the much-heralded, but ultimately ephemeral 'gypsy punk' movement of 2007, or to folky indie acts like The Decemberists coming up from the underground. Whatever the scene's origins, the accordion is shifting from a harbinger of celibacy to a fringe fetish.

The cult appeal of the instrument was on display at the San Francisco stop of the Monsters of Accordion tour this year. At the end of August, aficionados and intrigued locals alike packed the house at Slim's to marvel at the all-accordion lineup.

Spearheaded by Jason Webley, Seattle's patron saint of accordion madness and veritable godfather of the new scene, Monsters of Accordion is a tour that has showcased the new wave of performers for the last three years. This year, there was Eric Stern, a mustachioed gentleman from Portland, and Geoff Berner, whose most popular number has a chorus that the audience delightedly sings along to: "Oh the dead, dead children were worth it..." Seeman makes a brief appearance as his alter-ego, Duckmandu, and Stevhen Iancu dims the lights for his set, skulking around the stage in near darkness. The big finish is Webley himself, who whips his fans into a frenzy. His performance, as usual, is so intense that he loses his hat within the first few songs, and he and his audience sweat profusely. He howls his way through his set and claws at his instrument, stomping around and instructing his onlookers in complicated call-and-response rituals.

There is something vaguely punk rock about the whole thing. There is an intensity to the entire night, an element of surprise-attack, and the feeling that the accordion is a weapon; a defense. It feels safe inside Slim's, insulated from an outside world that might judge.

"I don't know any punk bands that are using accordions, but something about the energy of the music and the do it yourself approach to the whole music business was always very appealing to me," says Webley later. 'Energy' is one word for Webley's performance ethic. Berner's instrument is propped up behind him on a table in the dressing room. "I recently told him I go through about one accordion a year because I end up ripping the bellows apart. Ever since then, he's seemed genuinely nervous any time I've touched his accordion."

Much of the growing scene seems to have stemmed from the early days of punk, and if the movement can be given a name at all, it is most commonly referred to as 'punk rock accordion'. Seeman is an accordion teacher by trade, and performs under the name Duckmandu by choice. "I get more gigs these days as a bad accordion player than a trained pianist," he says with a smirk. He is most famous for translating the classic Dead Kennedys album Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables entirely into accordion music. "It's such a musically singular piece of work," he rhapsodizes at a corner table in the Union Square Starbucks, his accordion and bag of hats by his side. "I was attracted to the challenge. I wanted to do something of musical value that no one else was doing." Though he holds a master's in music and is a classically-trained pianist, his Dead Kennedys project has ended up defining him. "The response was overwhelming," he says, suppressing a sigh. "It's kind of what I'm known for now."

"I guess I'm really just capitalizing on the 'astonishing' aspect of it," he says. "It's still an exotic instrument here in America, especially on the West Coast. I think the reaction I get is unique to where we are in the world."

Locally, Skyler Fell carries the banner for the Bay Area accordion scene, as small as it is. Out of a warehouse in Bayview come the sounds of three untrained accordion players on a Saturday afternoon, driving the dogs in the building crazy.

Her repair shop and store, Accordion Apocalypse, has emerged as the hub of the new accordion culture in the Bay Area. "It's been described as an accordion oasis," she says, skipping into the showroom in her chunky boots. "I've kind of become the biggest proponent of the accordion around here. I feel it's my duty to provide accordions to people, and fix 'em when they get broken." The presence of her shop is announced only by an ornate gate, decorated by Fell herself, on the side of a slate-gray building. The surrounding neighborhood is warehouses and loading docks and old train tracks to nowhere. Other than on game days at nearby Candlestick Park, it is completely and totally deserted.

After seeing an accordion-centric punk band at famed music club 924 Gilman in her youth, she fell in with Vince Cirelli, an old-world accordion builder formerly of Colombo and Sons, one of eight accordion shops that once operated in San Francisco. Because of the mix of cultures moving in to the city in the early twentieth century, San Francisco was once the accordion epicenter of America. To this day, the accordion is San Francisco's official instrument.

"A lot of the older generations of players are very old now, and getting ill, even dying," says Fell. "A lot of the old folk songs are fading away, and unfortunately, dying with them. There's been this big push lately to get young people to pick up the instrument and start playing."

People of all kinds are picking it up again, but in ways the older generation could have never predicted. On a Saturday night, Fell is scurrying around her shop, looking for more chairs. As an unusual amount of cars pull up outside the gate and more people filter in, Seeman is preparing to teach ten accordionists of varying skill "Smells Like Teen Spirit".

It is a good cross-section of people at his "Grunge Workshop" -- about ten of them; a big commitment for a Saturday evening. "This is great," says a friend of the shop, who has dropped by for a visit with her dog. "What a huge turnout."

There are friends, studious folks, and single women seated in the showroom waiting for Seeman to get things going. There is a mother and her pre-teen son in the corner warming up with a duet they have no doubt rehearsed before. Someone taps out the famous introduction to Europe's "The Final Countdown" as a lark. A laugh rises from the crowd.

"Here, let me just play it through once," Seeman says. He acts like he has never played the song before, but he quickly drops into a trancelike state, playing it note for note, his tattooed hands flying up and down the keyboard. It does not quite sound like the version modern-rock radio is used to, but it begins to make more sense as the lyrics sync up.

For all of the silliness and the theatrics that cloud his career, Seeman is a skilled player and instructor. He is wearing one of his Donald Duck hats for the duration of the evening, but after a while it becomes the last thing you notice about him. He is approachable and articulate, and has managed to break the song down into more parts than Kurt Cobain may have ever been aware of, assigning movements to each attendee based on their proficiency.

There is little to no introduction to the final result. "One, two, three, four..." Seeman counts off, and suddenly it just sounds right. Everyone pipes up at once, and it sounds like you would expect it to. It is heavy, and whiny, and a little clumsy, but that is the sound of San Francisco ferociously taking back its official instrument, and that is what the new accordion sounds like: unapologetically weird. [X]