How Marin’s live music survived in 2020
Marin saw float-in concerts, backyard sessions and driveway shows
When I realized that this column would be coming out on New Year’s Day, I thought it would be perfect timing for my annual year-end review of some of the columns I wrote about the Marin music scene over the past 12 months. At the same time, though, since the music business has been among the hardest hit by the pandemic, I wondered if anyone really wants to look back at the worst year in memory.
Still, at the end of the day, I came to the conclusion that 2020, crap show that it was, brought out the resiliency, creativity and indomitable spirit of Marin’s musicians and music fans. And that’s something all of us can feel good about as we march — masked and socially distanced — into the new year with a COVID-19 vaccine on the way and hope in our hearts that we may rock again in 2021.
Musical float-ins
In the dark days of March, when the world as we knew it ended with the lockdown, I wrote a column, “No gigs, no tours, no money,” in which I quoted singer Maria Muldaur. The Mill Valley resident summed up the dire dilemma,
saying, “Bringing people together in social gatherings — that’s what we do. Well, so much for that!”
Well, not quite. In Sausalito, the waterfront community came up with a brilliant idea: floating concerts. During the balmy days of summer, musicians played on a houseboat dock in Waldo Point Harbor for socially distanced audiences
in kayaks, rowboats, dinghies, skiffs, paddleboards — anything that floats. Some people brought along their kids and dogs.
“A lot of our local musicians didn’t have a venue anymore and wanted to play,” houseboat owner Rusty Hendley told me during a show. “We’re just giving them an opportunity to entertain.” Her husband, Tony
Williams, called it “a real win for everybody.”
And it was.
Backyard tunes
Live music also made a comeback in a Marin backyard. John Olmstead, a 51-year- old software engineer and musician, spent the summer and fall producing a
livestreamed concert series he called “The Backyard Sessions,” turning his San Anselmo home into a sophisticated production studio. Top local bands played on a stage Olmstead built in his backyard. As many as 1,000 music fans a show tuned in on Facebook and YouTube.
“Since all my friends are musicians, I felt bad watching the bar scene basically fall apart and watching venues go up for sale,” he said the night I took in a show by San Rafael’s Danny Click and his band, the Hell Yeahs! “That’s why I started this.”
After the gig, his first in five months, Click called it “the best therapy ever.”
Home delivered
The indefatigable impresario KC Turner and singer-songwriter Megan Slankard figured if people starved for live music can’t go see their favorite performers, then why not bring their favorite performers to them? And just like that, the Driveway Concert Series was born.
Throughout the fall, they brought shows to driveways and backyards across the Bay Area featuring Slankard, singersongwriters Steve Poltz and Tim Bluhm, and the newgrass band Poor Man’s Whiskey.
Turner let me know that the series was so successful that he’ll be restarting it in the spring with even more performers, including John Doe, Todd Sheaffer and others.
It’s curbside delivery, just like DoorDash,” Turner says. “We’re bringing the show to you.”
Save our stages
Mill Valley’s Sweetwater Music Hall, Terrapin Crossroads in San Rafael and other Marin venues suffering during the pandemic are looking for relief from the Save Our
Stages Act, part of the federal government’s justpassed COVID relief package. Some $15 billion is expected to go toward grants for live music venues, independent movie theaters and other cultural institutions.
That will come nonetoo-soon for Sweetwater, which recently achieved nonprofit status, allowing people to make tax- deductible donations (sweetwatermusichall.org) to keep one of the county’s most beloved nightclubs open until indoor shows can return.
General manager Madison Flach and others in the live music industry don’t expect that to happen until next summer.
But she told me she’s confident that Sweetwater will survive.
“We’ll be back,” she says.
Sweetwater made a brief attempt at solo performers in a tiki bar in its smallish patio and did some livestreams from the club before the latest lockdown. But because it’s right in downtown Mill Valley, Sweetwater didn’t have the outdoor space that allowed Terrapin Crossroads to stage 28 shows in its Beach Park from late September until
shutting down this month when the state’s COVID cases spiked, necessitating another stay-at-home order. Otherwise, “We’d still be doing it,” says Nica Orlick-Roy, Terrapin’s director of operations and special events.
Terrapin was able to hold the shows under strict COVID protocols. It had to be safe enough for Terrapin owner and former Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh, who’s 80 and has preexisting health conditions. The venue marked out 44 socially distanced squares with a table in each square seating two people. Tables cost $170, which included a boxed gluten-free vegan dinner. Shows, most of which sold out, followed such themes as the Band’s “The Last Waltz” and “Hop on the Bus, Gus,” a tribute to Paul Simon. Many of the Terrapin regulars were on the bills, including Stu Allen, Grahame Lesh, Jason Crosby, Barry Sless and Elliott Peck.
Several shows featuring Lesh himself were priced at $225 and sold out instantly with no advertising or advance publicity.
“People are starved for this,” Orlick-Roy says. “The pandemic is still not over, but we’re trying to keep alive. The stimulus will
help and hopefully we can just eke along until our case numbers go down, vaccines go up and the weather gets warmer. Until then, it’s gonna be good to get this year behind us.”
Chill gets hot
With so much fear, anxiety and isolation affecting so many of us, it wasn’t surprising that new age music enjoyed a revival as the pandemic dragged on and we looked for soothing sounds to calm our frayed nerves. Spotify reported that its users were adding more “chill” tracks to their playlists — meditative music that’s mostly acoustic, improvisational and laid-back.
I wrote about a number of Marin’s new age musicians who are part of this wellness trend, most notably Grammy-nominated Jai Uttal of Fairfax, who released his first all-instrumental album, “Gauri’s Lullaby: Music for Healing and Other Joys,” four improvisational acoustic guitar meditations he described as “sonic medicine to calm hearts, relax minds and bodies and help find ease during this intense period of timeout.”
Lockdown blues
The pandemic may have wiped out all their gigs, but it hasn’t prevented Marin musicians from putting out new music. From his home in the San Geronimo Valley, blues icon and rock hall of famer Elvin Bishop sent me the video for his new song, “Lockdown,” a delightfully clever tune inspired by, in his words, “that damn
old virus.” It’s been called the most creative response to the pandemic from the music world yet. It’s certainly the funniest.
“This is one of those half- empty or half-full deals,” Bishop says. “You can laugh or you can cry. I choose to laugh.”
Another San Geronimo Valley musician, Woodacre singer-songwriter Jeremy D’Antonio ( jeremydantonio.com), turned me onto his new six-song EP, “Spinnin’ Wheels,” a collection of country ballads with members of Merle Haggard and Buck Owens’ old bands. The title track, with a moodily romantic video shot entirely in West Marin, expresses something a lot of us are experiencing 10 months into this seemingly never- ending crisis: the feeling of wanting to hop into an old pickup truck and drive away from it all, as D’Antonio does in the video, singing, “We can roll till we can’t roll no more.”
Bye, ‘Mr. President’
In September, Kana Mota, a reggae band featuring Marin couple Monroe and April Grisman, released “Mr. President,” a song and video that bounces along on a buoyant rasta beat while namechecking celebrated champions of peace and social justice, both past and present, from Bob Marley, Mother Teresa, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi to Frederick Douglass, Malala Yousafzai and Nelson Mandela.
At the same time, it chides our soon-to-be expresident for not being more like them. Not that he ever could be. In a truly grand finale, more than 100 friends, family and
fans contributed to a stunning photo montage that closes the video in a warm glow of candlelight.
“We realized this song made a statement that wasn’t just about the president,” says April, the lead vocalist. “It’s about remembering our great leaders, our ancestors, who they were and how they fought for justice for everyday human beings.
That was part of the message of the song. With the election coming up, we wanted to make sure the video complimented that.”
Judging by the way the election turned out, it looks like it worked.
‘Something to do’
After Novato singersongwriter and guitarist Greg Loiacono (gregloiacono.com/music) and his band, the Mother Hips, had to cancel their 12th annual Hipnic, a weekend music festival in Big Sur that had been set for May, and other tours and gigs were also gone with the ill wind, he decided to make the most of the unexpected time on his hands. He released a new solo album, “Mystic Traces,” an 11-song collection on Blue Rose Music, an artist collective that donates a portion of its revenues to preschool scholarships for financially disadvantaged children.
“I definitely have mixed emotions putting an album out in a pandemic,” he says. “Not being able to tour is a new thing, and a challenge. But this is also something to promote, something to do, something to feel good about.”
Happy New Year, everyone! Let’s hope we can feel good about 2021.