Year in review: A look at Marin’s memorable music scene
This last column of the year propitiously comes out right around Christmastime, which gives me an opportunity to say happy holidays to all our readers as well as a special thanks to the extraordinary people I had the pleasure of writing about in 2025. Here’s a look back at some of my columns from the Marin music scene and beyond over the past year.
2025 began with a bittersweet tribute concert for Austin “Audie” de Lone, one of Marin’s most respected and beloved musicians, at his hometown club, Sweetwater Music Hall in Mill Valley. Suffering from a fatal lung disease, he produced the evening himself as his way of saying goodbye, inviting his many musician friends from across the country to join him for what he modestly billed as a “toast and roast.” Sadly, he died, at 78, two days before the show, which went on just as he’d planned it.
“Audie wanted this to be a party,” his widow, Lesley de Lone, told the sold-out crowd, adding a good-natured admonition against anyone shedding a tear.
But there was hardly a dry eye in the house when his daughter, singer-songwriter Caroline de Lone, sang “Thoughts of You,” a poignant ballad her dad wrote. She was backed by his prerecorded accompaniment on piano in a heart-wrenching, posthumous duet.
We also said goodbye to Donna Jean Godchaux-Mackay, “the first lady of the Grateful Dead,” who sang with the band throughout the creative and turbulent 1970s. She died of cancer in November, also at 78, in Nashville. I didn’t know her during her Marin years, but we connected by phone from her hometown in Florence, Alabama, in 2021, when I interviewed her about a song, “Shelter,” that she co-wrote during the Iraq War and rereleased during the pandemic. In an impassioned vocal, she sings about shelter from the heat and cold, from storms and floods, but also from hate and fear, deceit and greed, always ending with the need for “shelter for the soul.”
In 2023, out of the blue, I got a text from her saying, in part, “I just listened to my song ‘Shelter’ that you and I talked about years ago. It is even more pertinent and even more prophetic than when I wrote it.”
Amen.
In the category of hometown girl makes good, I interviewed actor Monica Barbaro about her Academy Award-nominated portrayal of folk icon Joan Baez in the Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown.” After she was cast, the 34-year-old star, who grew up in Mill Valley, graduated from Tam High and studied to be a dancer, had to learn to play guitar and sing in a few months. She also had to overcome a case of “imposter syndrome” in trying to approximate Baez’s famous soprano. When Barbaro got up the courage to call her idol on the phone, the 84-year-old folk legend eased her fears.
“I felt emotional hearing her voice because I had been studying it in her 20s so intensely,” she said.
As a friend of Baez, I asked her hat she thought of the young actor’s portrayal of her.
“I love what she did in the film,” she told me from her home in Woodside, adding, “I thought the music was fantastic. I may be blocking my feelings, but it’s an amusing movie. It was fun.”
Sweetwater Music Hall highlighted its fall fundraising drive with a sold-out benefit concert in November with the talented singer-songwriter Nathaniel Rateliff. The intimate evening gave executive director Maria Hoppe a chance to remind everyone that the historic Mill Valley club is a nonprofit arts organization and that that it’s not owned by Bob Weir, as many people think, so music fans are encouraged to do their part and become members of the Sweetwater family, keeping the famed venue vital and vibrant for another 50 years.
More music movies: The Mill Valley Film Festival hosted the West Coast premiere of “Metallica Saved My Life,” a documentary that makes a case for the Marin heavy metal icons as headshrinkers as well as headbangers. Swedish director Jonas Akerlund focused on fans from around the world who embrace Metallica’s hard rock anthems and bombastic concerts as a kind of group therapy, an adrenaline-fueled communal experience that gives many of them a reason to live.
The Mill Valley Film Festival also screened “I Need You: 53 Years of the Band America,” which follows the two surviving members, former Marin resident Dewey Bunnell and partner Gerry Beckley, on their last tour together in 2023. Directors David Breschel and Dustin Elm reverentially revisit the band’s heyday of hits in the ’70s and early ’80s: “A Horse with No Name,” “I Need You,” “Ventura Highway,” “Sister Golden Hair,” “Tin Man,” “Lonely People” and “You Can Do Magic.”
After the film was done, Bunnell decided to continue touring on his own, saying: “People have said to me since the beginning, ‘How can you get up there and do ‘Horse with No Name’ every night?’” he said. “On paper, it looks like you could do it in your sleep. But there’s a whole other element of having a live audience and a different sound every night in a different hall with a different atmosphere.”
Democratic Rep. Jared Huffman strapped on his acoustic guitar and led a placard-carrying crowd in a defiant rendition of “I Won’t Back Down,” a Tom Petty song that’s a strong candidate to become an anthem of the anti-Trump resistance movement, at the huge “Hands Off” protest at the Marin Civic Center in April. It was a rousing moment that brought everyone together in one large, loud voice.
“My wife had the idea to do ‘I Won’t Back Down,’” Huffman told me afterward. “It’s such a perfect protest song, and I’ve never heard it done that way. I was pleased that people instantly recognized it. They looked up the lyrics on their iPhones and were singing along.”
It was a good year for cool books from local authors. West Marin’s David Sheff gave us the softer side of the much-maligned Yoko Ono, his longtime friend and confidante, in a new biography, “Yoko,” which the New York Times says is “closest to an authorized one the world will get.”
Grateful Dead historian Dennis McNally drilled down to the origins of the counterculture in “The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties.” Part of that creativity was San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury, which McNally called “the world’s first psychedelic neighborhood.”
The estate of the late Jim Marshall, dean of rock photographers, collected 200 black-and-white and color photos in the coffee table book “The Grateful Dead by Jim Marshall: Photos and Stories from the Formative Years, 1966-1977,” published by Chronicle Books. In her introduction, Amelia Davis, Marshall’s longtime assistant and heir, wrote: “Jim was there through the ups and downs, the on-again, off-again friendships, the breakups, makeups, girlfriends, wives, daughters and sons; the drug busts, losses and changes; the quiet moments and the explosive moments. The challenges of family. The Grateful Dead was family.”
Videographer Len Dell’Amico reflected on his experiences working with the Grateful Dead’s revered paterfamilias Jerry Garcia in “Friend of the Devil: My Wild Ride with Jerry Garcia and Grateful Dead.”
“He’s not a Christian,” Dell’Amico said of Garcia, “but he follows the guidelines of Jesus.”
In a sequel to his 2014 novel “Face the Music,” Former Zero drummer Greg Anton, a lawyer as well as a musician, conjured up the Marin music vibe of the 1970s and ’80s in “It’s About Time,” his new novel about a couple of rock musicians locked in a bitter courtroom battle over writing credit for a hit song. Peter Coyote hailed it as “a crackerjack book about the music business, so much truer, funnier and wackier than any of the stories that are starting to peep through the mulch of Netflix.”
Sausalito houseboat luminary Joe Tate, 84, chronicled the adventures of his notorious waterfront band the Redlegs in “Last Voyage of the Redlegs,” a story of rock and rebellion dedicated to “the victims and survivors” of the Sausalito houseboat wars of the 1970s.
“It was kick-ass,” Tate said of the storied conflict. “It was no game.”
Two of Marin’s octogenarian rock elders released exceptional new albums in 2025. Long before her six Grammy nominations and her signature 1973 hit “Midnight at the Oasis,” a young Maria Muldaur was befriended by a pioneering blues singer-songwriter named Victoria Spivey. With the 44th album of her distinguished career, the 83-year-old Mill Valley singer honored her mentor and friend with “One Hour Mama: The Blues of Victoria Spivey,” a 12-song collection that includes duets with Elvin Bishop and Taj Mahal.
“I wanted to shine a light on her because she’s so unique and cool,” Muldaur said.
Dave Getz, the Rock Hall of Fame drummer for Big Brother and the Holding Company, has never been content to rest on his legacy band laurels. At 85, he released one of the best albums I’ve heard in years, “Anthems, Themes & Little Stories,” a 13-track instrumental masterwork of genre-defying original compositions featuring his Fairfax neighbor, guitarist Tom Finch.
“I’m kind of a late bloomer,” Getz told me. “Ridiculously late.”
Sound Summit celebrated its 10th anniversary with a stellar tribute to Sly and the Family Stone in the Mountain Theater on Mount Tamalpais. The show featured original Family Stone drummer Greg Errico, Marin drummer and Grammy-winning record producer Narada Michael Walden and 83-year-old Taj Mahal, who remembered hearing Sly for the first time at a long-ago show in New York City. “I got this feeling in my knees that I hadn’t felt since I was a teenager going to a dance and hearing the music and getting excited. The kind of music they played was adventurous and adventuresome.”
I enjoyed profiling Dan Durkin, lead singer of the Tom Petty tribute band Petty Theft, who was able to realize a lifelong dream, cutting loose his longtime day job as a supermarket clerk to pursue a career as the king of the cover bands. Durkin is also a founding member of the Illeagles, an Eagles tribute band as well as Revolver, a group that covers Beatles songs. To me, he’s one of the best of the many devoted local musicians who tirelessly rock audiences night after night in local bars and clubs.
“He’s one of the hardest-working musicians in show business around here that I know of,” said Monroe Grisman, a bandmate in Petty Theft. “He delivers every night.”
Former Talking Head Jerry Harrison interrupted his national tour hosting screenings of “Stop Making Sense,” Jonathan Demme’s 1984 Talking Heads concert film, to return to Mill Valley to receive his hometown’s Milley Award for achievement in the arts.
“I’ve lived here longer than I’ve lived anywhere else, so I think it’s well deserved,” the 76-year-old musician and producer said. “I kind of feel it’s being awarded by your peers, by the people around you. So yeah, it’s a special thing.”
Friends and fans of the late jazz drummer Michael Aragon launched the Aragon Foundation in his memory to help fund music and art education for foster kids and other underserved young people. Go to thearagonfoundation.com.
They also dedicated a memorial public bench in Sausalito’s Gabrielson Park across the street from the No Name Bar, where Aragon played with his band for 36 years. Inscribed under his name is a quote from him that says a lot about who he was as a musician and as a person, and it sounds to me like a fitting mantra as we head into the new year: “It’s all about the love, baby.”
Contact Paul Liberatore at p.liberatore@comcast.net