Main Street

Musical questions
Why is the summer music so bad this year? That’s the question I keep hearing and I’m not alone. Kent Mitchell, chair of the city’s Parks & Recreation Commission, hears complaints about the music so often that he summoned the city’s ‘Tuesdays in the Plaza’ event manager, along with music promoter Dan Zastrow, to a P&R meeting this month.
You guessed it – a lot of it comes down to money. Healdsburg has less than $20,000 to put on a 14-show series, and many of the bands you hear in the middle of the summer are only getting paid $500 to lug their stuff to Healdsburg, set up and play for two hours.
The bigger bands, like Roy Rogers, who open and close the series get paid more, but it leaves diddly for the small bands and you get what you pay for.
Some of it is luck. Healdsburg has operated with this budget for years, and we often have quirky and interesting bands on Tuesday night. This year there have been more than the usual duds.
Healdsburg is often compared to Windsor. “Why can’t we have big acts like Windsor?” is a common complaint.
The short answer is that big acts don’t work well in our little Plaza. The Windsor Town Green is massive, four acres at least. I often joke that you can’t see one end of the Town Green from the other due to the curvature of the earth. Our Plaza in Healdsburg is just under an acre and it’s packed with big trees.
There’s a taste factor as well. Dan doesn’t like to book cover bands. No Beatles tributes, no 80s bands, no Wonderbread 5, no Rolling Stones impersonators. We may not always like the up and coming bands that write and perform original music, but you could argue that Healdsburg is more of a music experience than a dance-til-you-drop experience.
Back to the budget – Windsor spends almost $60,000 to put on a concert series with fewer acts, and about $45,000 of that comes from community and business sponsors.
We could also embrace the booze aspect – Cloverdale has great bands, and a lot of it is paid for by beer and wine sales at the Friday night events. We could do that, too.
So, if you want “better” music – and I don’t know how we define that – be ready to pay for it. Stay tuned for more.
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Tucked away between a business park, a rural neighbrohood and a subdivision, the old air base in western Santa Rosa was built in World War II as an auxiliary to the Alameda naval base. It had an airstrip, which functioned for a few years after the base closed in the 1950s and it’s languished until recently, when artisans began leasing space. Healdsburg artist Batja Cates is part of ArtFlare, a gallery located in the old barracks and former Healdsburg Literary Laureate, Vilma Ginzberg, will be part of a poetry night there on Aug. 14. Other literary and visual art events are ongoing. Visit www.artflare.net for more details.
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Who remembers when Elizabeth Candelario used to push little Cody around town in a stroller? I do. He’s all grown up now and just got famous by winning the Cutthroat Kitchen competition on TV. Cody got interested in food as a lad, working here in Healdsburg at Mateo Granados’ food truck (Who remembers when Mateo had a food truck and cooked heavenly huevos rancheros at the farmers’ market?)
After busing tables, waitering and other work-your-way-up-the-ladder jobs, Cody enrolled in Niagara University and is summering in Bellagio, Italy, cooking and traveling. His habit of posting photos of his food creations online caught the attention of a Food Network scout and off he went to fame.
Ray Holley will never be famous for his food, not even his special meatloaf.