By Nate Seltenrich

What is your role in planning the Petaluma Music Festival?

It's a year-round process to run the festival. I'm the person who kind of makes sure all the various parts and pieces work together. So I literally am involved in every aspect of the festival, just making sure that everything's coordinated and works together. And then there's certain parts of the festival that I do completely myself without any help, really. There's the marketing of the festival that I do, and overall the booking of the bands and the coordination of all the vendors. So there's a lot of moving parts there, and it’s become a second job, basically. It's not a full-time job, but it's definitely a part-time job. And then in the summer, it becomes a full-time job.

Tell me about the style and aesthetics of the festival, as far as the bands you choose or the genres you highlight – how are those decisions made?

You just kind of go after the groups you think would be a good fit for the festival. You know, we've kind of changed directions. We used to be a complete jam band type of festival, and we found that the audience for that type of music is shrinking, and that we weren't drawing enough people to make the festival profitable. And as a matter of fact, we even lost money the last time we tried to do a jam band type of format. So we decided that we needed to move away from that. We started looking at bands that people actually recognize the name of, and maybe they've had one or two hits, maybe five or six hits, and that would be a good fit for our area. We’re trying to be kind of rock, but not necessarily overly commercial rock. 

The underlying goal is to raise money for music programs in local schools. How does that work?

When we make a donation to a school, we just basically try to donate to the music program, but we don't specifically say, "Hey, this has to be spent in a particular way,” other than spend it on your music program in some way, shape, or form. And so we leave it up to the individual schools to decide what their needs are. It could go to funding their music teacher, so that they can have a music program, or it could go to maybe purchasing instruments or repairing instruments, or maybe purchasing music. 

There's a lot of variables involved with what kind of music program each school offers, and so we don't try to dictate to them how to best spend the money. We feel they're going to be the best judge of that. We just are trying to support the music and encourage the schools to continue to offer it, and doing our best to keep them afloat financially.

What's it like when the big day finally arrives? 

There's never a dull moment at the music festival. I do work the entire day. I usually get there at 6:30 in the morning, and I don't leave until about 1 a.m. So it's a very long day for me, and I average about 30,000 steps, which works out to about 18 miles walking around the festival, along with several other board members. There's always things that pop up that you can never really predict or prepare for or whatever, and you're just going around and trying to smooth everything out and then help with this situation or as we say, put that fire out.

Having 4,000 people present creates a lot of things that happen. So you can never predict but there's always something interesting happening. For the most part, the crowd is incredibly mellow and very easy. It just seems like they're just so easygoing, and everybody's just having a great time out there enjoying the music, and that's what we're obviously always hoping for. But there’s all kinds of little issues that happen.

My favorite times are when I recognize the song the band is playing, and I can enjoy it as I'm walking towards the next spot that I'm going to, and I'll even maybe stop for five seconds and just watch for a little bit. But my favorite moment in the night usually is right around when the headliner is about a third of the way into their set, because at that point the festival slows down. Everybody seems to be all focused on the headline band that's playing the last set, and then I can actually kind of stop and relax and watch a little bit, too. It's a good moment at that point.

Finally, we heard you may be retiring from teaching high school and junior high band soon. Is that true? And what’s something else that people may not know about you?

Should we out me on this one? Yes, I plan on retiring at the end of this next school year. So I’ll be retired as of June 2027. And I do plan on doing the festival in retirement, but it will be nice to have only one job as opposed to two, and actually have some time for other things. 

One thing most people probably don’t know is that I’m a huge fan of old movie theaters and old movies. As a result of that I’m a big fan of anything art deco, really, whether it be decor or artwork or whatever the case might be. But yeah, I do like my movies from the ‘40s and ‘50s, and I like really old movie theaters that were built back in the ‘30s and ‘40s. 

I don’t know what attracted me to that, but I guess I just connect with the older movies. I get that they’re cheesy and corny and dated, but for whatever reason I really enjoy them. I think maybe it’s a result of studying a lot of music history and enjoying that era of music, especially with regard to jazz and popular music of the ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s. 

I have a couple of favorite theaters. If people have never been to the Oakland Paramount, that is an amazing art deco movie palace and is definitely worth going to, even if you’re not interested in who’s playing. It’s really an impressive building. That’s probably my favorite in the local area, and then the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood is an amazing building as well. 

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and readability.