An accomplished accordion player, Campanella regularly performs at the center, just as he has been doing for years. But that's not his first exposure with the tenants and shoppers there—Campanella also owns his own window-washing business and has taken care of many of the businesses there. He began working on the Coffee Society's windows the day it opened—the same coffeehouse where he now entertains the patrons with his music.

"I really do like a Continental sound—mostly French and Italian music. I know some Russian, too," Campanella says. "I spent years looking for the right accordion. The typical accordion—it's like a Yugo."

He plays with a bayan accordion, which is a special variety from the Basque region of Spain that features buttons down the side instead of piano keys. The buttons provide more of a tonal range than the typical accordion, which is exactly what Campanella likes. "I feel like I can give it a good name," he says. "One guy came up to me recently and said that I made the instrument breathe."

Campanella began taking accordion lessons when he was in the fourth grade in his home state of New Jersey, but after a few years, gave up the instrument to maintain a cool image. "The accordion didn't really fit in with the psychedelic era," he says. It was a long time before he picked it up again.

After studying math and physics in college, he moved to Aspen, Colo., where he began washing windows for a living. It was there he met and married his wife, Karen, and the two moved to Lafayette, Ind., where Campanella intended on going back to school at Purdue University to become an engineer. But when it came time to enroll, he decided to stick with the window washing.

"It's a nice, simple business. It's similar to why I love math—there's a clear-cut, definite answer," he says. "My father worked for the Port Authority [of New York and New Jersey], and I didn't think I'd like something like that." He and his wife moved to San Jose in 1985, partially because Karen grew up in the South Bay and partially so Campanella could wash windows all year round.

His interest in music came creeping back, however, and he began working for synthesizer companies on the side. Campanella programmed sounds for a number of different companies for more than a decade, but eventually found the synthesizer limiting.

"There's just not much feeling in a keyboard," he says. "If someone came up and asked you to play a song, it's embarrassing! There's nothing there."

Several years ago, Campanella picked up his accordion again, but found himself similarly uninspired by the types of accordions manufactured in the United States. "The accordion is a wind instrument—all the dynamics come from the bellows—but the piano keys are so limited," he says. But an encounter with a Basque accordion player passing through San Francisco changed Campanella's outlook, and he made it his mission to find his own bayan accordion, one with a more mellifluous sound.

"I asked him if I could switch to something like that, and he said it would take work, but that it was possible," he says. The type of accordion he was looking for isn't widely produced, so he turned to a company in Italy. After trying to make arrangements to pick up the bayan, the whole deal fell through. "It was a crazy process. The only thing that was as hard as that was buying my house," he says. Campanella finally turned to the French firm called Cavagnolo, which made the instrument he plays today. "It's made of wood like a grand piano, and other accordions are made of plastic," he says. "A Cavagnolo is twice as expensive."

The search for just the right instrument took Campanella about two years, and he's now finally getting back to playing on a regular basis. He used to play in the courtyard outside Cafe Quinn, but now that the cafe and the courtyard are closed, he's been playing more and more at Coffee Society. "The other night, there were lots of little kids there, and they were saying that it's an awesome instrument," he says. "Throughout my whole life, maybe my mom and my aunt liked it. It's nice to change the image."

He gets a lot of queries about teaching the accordion, but prefers to stick with his window washing. In addition to Coffee Society, Campanella services a number of businesses around the Bay Area, including P W Super Markets and Peet's Coffee & Tea.

"I just want to play something that turns the trigger on," he says. "There's such a small percentage of people who choose to play music that it's almost selfish not to do it as much as you can."